Since it has been announced publicly, I can finally say– I’m writing a book! It’s titled The Ektron Users Guide: Building an Ektron Powered Website and I’m writing it along with Aniel Sud. It’ll be published by WROX Press later this year, so sign up on Amazon for alerts about the book and information about it as it becomes available. Here’s a early draft of the description:

In the Ektron User Guide, developers work through detailed steps as if building a comprehensive site for an fictional software company. Upon completion, developers will have a complete website for use as a template for other projects. Each technical section implements a specific facet of the site using the Ektron Framework and includes an in-depth explanation of the technology. The content requires no prior knowledge of the Ektron platform, however, developers already familiar with Ektron can use the book as a reference guide. Topics of interest include:

Google extends HTTP

Google is hoping to make Web pages download up to twice as quickly using SPDY, a new application-layer protocol it’s experimenting with, the company said in a blog post.

… and 0wns dns:

Today, as part of our ongoing effort to make the web faster, we’re launching our own public DNS resolver called Google Public DNS, and we invite you to try it out.

From my estimation, there’s not much outcry over this. Imagine if it were Microsoft? Heck, Microsoft is currently being bashed for releasing a version of Bing Maps that requires Silverlight.

Zawinski’s law states:

Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can.

I propose this corollary:

Every program attempts to expand until it can read Twitter. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can.

See FeedDemon (RSS Reader) and Trillian (IM Client). Any other good examples?

I just announced over on the DevCenter blog something that’s been cooking for the past couple– I have taken on a new role at Ektron as Chief Evangelist! What’s an evangelist? Glad you asked …

The term “Twitter List” is trending on Twitter today, looks like the feature has been opened up to everyone. I was included in an early release wave and have been playing with it for a bit now. Generally I like it and think it’s a very useful feature, but it’s more interesting to note what was not included in it.

The ultimate value of Twitter Lists is for converting potential ties (people you don’t know yet) into weak or strong ties (see Granovetter’s Theory of the Strength of Weak Ties).

Delicious does this well. On Delicious, each person has their own local tagspace (all bookmarks tagged by that individual), but contributes to a global pool of bookmarks visible to everyone. For example, I can subscribe to the bookmarks tagged “openid” by Jon Udell by visiting his stream here http://delicious.com/judell/openid, and see the global pool of all bookmarks tagged “openid” here http://delicious.com/tag/openid.

When I access Jon’s local tagspace, I do so knowing that there will be fewer but typically higher quality bookmarks. When I access the global tagspace, I recognize there will be more to sift through, but I can use it to discover new people interested in “openid”.

Translating this to Twitter, the Lists feature provides a “local tagspace” and there is no notion of a “global tagspace”. While the signal-to-noise ratio of the local list is greater, it decreases the opportunity for further discovering other users and other lists. This hole opens the door for a third part to step in to categorize and aggregate Lists across users (updated: Listorious launches attempting to do just this).

In a nutshell, I like the local List concept. I imagine the notion of a global List was left out because of the ability for spammers to abuse it. Ultimately, Bing and Google see the holy grail for Lists being a service that automatically pulls in the best tweets for a given category or term. I can see value in that. But I think Delicious style community curation is a powerful discovery mechanism relevant to Twitter and, I would argue, is lacking in the current implementation of Twitter Lists.

Dear lazyweb, i would like an extensible twitter client by christmas please. Think FireFox for Twitter. Seesmic and TweetDeck have an opportunity here to gain significant adoption by creating a developer ecosystem around its client, making it possible for developers to build niche plugins w/o burdening the core product with cruft. Not only that, but think of all the applications currently in development that will have some type of “activity stream” — without an open client, we’ll see a flood of new clients repeating the same functionality over and over. It’s only a matter of time before we see an open client, but lazyweb, it would make a nice present for christmas.

I’ve been spending a fair amount of time over the past couple weeks designing UIs in Balsamiq Mockup and am enjoying it. Gadgetopia has a decent review that I mostly agree with. To summarize: it’s super simple, easy to use, and provides a lot of common interface elements.

The part I disagreed with:

The only drawback of Balsamiq Mockups is that you run the risk of getting a little cutesy. Everything in it is of this “sketch” style, which might get old after a while.

This is actually something I particularly like about Balsamiq – the “handwritten” informal look of the lines & letters says something about the fidelity of the mockup. I remember reading a UX blog post that resonated with me (can’t find it now, will keep looking) which recommended using overlapping lines for edges to indicate that the screen shouldn’t be taken as a final design but something needing input and refinement. The hand drawn buttons / text / edges in Balsmiq convey this pretty nicely.

I discovered this just in time for Christmas! The PS3’s latest firmware update for the PS3 (2.53) comes with support for full-screen Flash movies. For someone who has tried and failed to get Pandora running on the PS3, you can read that as: Pandora support! I’m creating a customized Christmas internet radio station in my living room as I write. Very cool.

As someone who fancies minimalism I dig Twitter’s concise feature set, tho I knew it was only a matter of time before an uber-twitter showed itself. @cmswire heralded it’s arrival in a post about a feature rich microblogging site called Yonkley. It let’s you:

• * create a microblogging site around any subject area (a twitter vertical).
• * customize, brand, theme
• * add adverts
• * increase the character limit to above twitter’s 140 characters

Is the answer for twitter to bulk up on features? In some areas, YES! Hey Twitter, get people search working! Beyond that, no. Twitter just needs to start better promoting the many sites out there built on their APIs. My favorite, qwitter.

discovered via @cmswire Yonkly: The Next Twitter Killer?

I wonder how many of these will be lost. I have a hard time just finding my keys.

Scientists from UC Berkeley have developed a cloak of metamaterial that creates a negative refraction of light rendering objects invisible, a technology with both military and medical potential. @ livescience

[update] Check out this demo of “DIY cloaking technology” on YouTube — don’t miss the comments:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FL18dgzdnvI