About mobile widgets

How to build scalable mobile widgets - good writing from Vodafone

Links from Twitter

Our mashup Links from Twitter has been updated. Lets you pickup links published within any given Twitter circle. Just provide a name for user in Twitter and see links, published by his/her friends.

You can also create a direct link for that mashup. E.g. what does CEO of Twitter @ev read - Evan Williams circle

Technical journalism

Great article about QR codes: Why QR Codes Are Poised to Hit the Mainstream. Sure, they are poised. Except one small thing - there are no QR codes in that article. It is about traditional barcodes ...


P.S. sponsored by QR code maker :-)

Scaling issues for social networks

"If you're willing to tolerate one disk seek, or if your graph has low fan-out (small number of people following any given person), you can de-normalize the data such that the metadata about every piece of activity is propagated to each of the followers of that activity at the time the action occurs. You might think of this as a "push" model. You'd still probably only store one copy of the actual activity data, but you'd push pointers to it (along with whatever other metadata is needed if you're supporting any ranking/filtering) to all the subscribers at the time it is created." - interesting reviews

How to select NoSQL store

* Frequently-written, rarely read statistical data (for example, a web hit counter) should use an in-memory key/value store like Redis, or an update-in-place document store like MongoDB.
* Big Data (like weather stats or business analytics) will work best in a freeform, distributed db system like Hadoop.
* Binary assets (such as MP3s and PDFs) find a good home in a datastore that can serve directly to the user’s browser, like Amazon S3.
* Transient data (like web sessions, locks, or short-term stats) should be kept in a transient datastore like Memcache. (Traditionally we haven’t grouped memcached into the database family, but NoSQL has broadened our thinking on this subject.)
* If you need to be able to replicate your data set to multiple locations (such as syncing a music database between a web app and a mobile device), you’ll want the replication features of CouchDB.
* High availability apps, where minimizing downtime is critical, will find great utility in the automatically clustered, redundant setup of datastores like Casandra and Riak.

from this excellent DZONE article.

Geo Twits: check-in for Twitter

We wrote already about Checkins for Twitter mashup, that lets you share location info in Twitter.

And now we can present also a mobile web application (HTML5), that lets you post location info link to your Twitter stream right from mobile. Mobile site:

http://servletsuite.com/geotwit

you can use also the following QR-code for loading:



/via Geo Messages

Mobile video chat

Video-chat for Android. 30 lines of code for mobile chat roulette :-)

GeoLoco 2010

it look like Twitter widget does not work in blogger again. Hey, Google? Use this:

http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23geoloco

/via Geo Messages

Open source LBS

The majority of all the location and navigation related software developed at Wayfinder Systems, a fully owned Vodafone subsidiary, is made available publicly under a BSD licence. This includes the distributed back-end server, tools to manage the server cluster and map conversion as well as client software for e.g. Android, iPhone and Symbian S60. Technical documentation is available in the wiki and discussions around the software are hosted in the forum. - Wayfinder

Lessons from Apple

Apple Study: 8 easy steps to beat Microsoft (and Google)

View more presentations from Ouriel Ohayon.

Widgets award

Ericsson Widgets Award. The competition is organized by Ericsson in cooperation with Opera Software.

Big map

Our mashup Big map has been updated. Full screen Google maps + social sharing.

Share location

Two interesting products with alternative view to location sharing:

Face 2 Face
Mobimity.com

both LBS applications keep in mind privacy at the first hand: browse for other users in close proximity, search for people any where on the system, and keep up with your friends as well but never announces your exact location.


/via Geo Messages

Mobile websites for restaurants

Interesting product - Mobile websites for restaurants.
But we have another vision for such kind of services. Developing a new concept currently. Should be:

a) more social
b) oriented to the presentation rather than to ordering/reservations

Proxy for stock data

Servlet lets obtain stock data (price) via JSONP. The obvious use case is your own portal/site where you will be able proceed data with JavaScript. This stock servlet plays a role of proxy - you will place Ajax request to your own host.

Mobile Beat 2010

/via Geo Messages

Google + Twitter

Our mashup GoT (Google + Twitter search) has been updated.

HTML5 cache

Cache for HTML5 storage. But this package should/could be extended by the way. If some value is not in the cache than we should transparently request it from the server.

New search leader?

According to cofounder Biz Stone, who spoke yesterday at the Aspen Ideas Festival, Twitter now reaches some 800 million search queries per day. That's over 24 billion searches per month, more than Bing (4.1 billion) and Yahoo (9.4 billion) combined.

While Stone's company is still a long way off from Google, which supports around 88 billion search queries per month, Twitter is quickly catching up. Since last April, Twitter searches are up 33%. To put that in perspective, a study by Nielsen last year concluded that Bing was the fastest-growing search engine in the U.S. after it ballooned over 22%. Now it seems Twitter has taken the title. - from here.

The digits are true of course, but as seems to me most of the requests are coming from applications that use Search API. Look for our own projects for example: Checkin, food from Twitter, London on Twitter etc. - all this technically is Twitter Search.

Geo stream

Mashup Checkins shows in the real time all geo-coded twits in the specific areas. So if any user enabled geo coding for the own account than you will see that twit on the map. So - see yourself, at this moment the only tiny fraction of twits is actually geocoded.

Ajax upload

Custom tag mimics HTML upload and lets you upload files asynchronously - Ajax upload

Gravatar image in JSP (and/or Coldfusion)

Your Gravatar is an image that follows you from site to site appearing beside your name when you do things like comment or post on a blog. Avatars help identify your posts on blogs and web forums, so why not on any site?

And here is a Gravatar taglib that lets you request image right from your JSP (and/or Coldfusion) code.

How to restrict connections

Sessions filter from JSOS lets you restrict the amount of concurrent HTTP sessions on your web site

Location bookmark

Our Location bookmark mashup being reviewed by MakeUseOf.

Life is unfair

/via 9gag

How to share contact info on mobile

Our mobile mashup Address Share has been updated. Yet another practical use case for QR codes. Lets you share contact information right from your mobile - simply copy contact info from any phone to another.

Mashup lets you fill once a form with contact data and get back a mobile web page with QR code corresponds to your data. You can save this mobile page in your mobile browser bookmarks and open it any time you are going to share your contact info. Your partner will be able to scan QR code right from your phone and add contact info with one click to own address book.


Link to mobile mashup is:
http://as.linkstore.ru (it is a mobile site).

You can type also the following short URL:
http://bit.ly/gnOQB

Or use QR code above

P.S. see more info on this topic on our Mecard project.

Performance testing for web sites

"Boomerang is a piece of javascript that you add to your web pages, where it measures the performance of your website from your end user's point of view. It has the ability to send this data back to your server for further analysis. With boomerang, you find out exactly how fast your users think your site is." - Yahoo Boomerang. See also its manual here.

Simply, it is a piece of JavaScript code, added to your web page and calculates time difference for two events: window.onload and window.onunload

P.S. on the server side level check out by the way Profile taglib from Coldbeans.

P.P.S. see here also a great collection for web performance measurement