I've been pretty interested in making Web sites WebSoftwareFriendly for a while, so I'm pretty psyched to see that Yahoo and Microsoft have embraced the Google Sitemaps format. They've started a site for the format, http://www.sitemaps.org/ , which lists out the protocol, which seems to be unmodified from the original Google version.
Sitemaps have been a necessary part of Web sites for years. Netscape -- back when it was a browser -- had an RDF-based sitemap format that had a brief flare of popularity just before Netscape went into its weird late-90s spiral. Then RDF people got really abstract and academic, and decided that sitemaps weren't what RDF was all about, and RDF sitemaps were forgotten. So sitemaps went off the air, and we've had to wait for a standard on the idea until today.
Yahoo lets you submit sitemaps today, as does Google; Microsoft Live supposedly will support it sometime in 2007. One thing that's interesting is a new "ping" protocol, for when the site is updated. I'm not sure how well it works or if it's even implemented, but it's interesting to see it working.
I think the weak part of this whole thing is that site owners have to submit sitemaps to each search engine; it would be nice if there were some sort of discovery, like an HTML <link> element, so that other types of Web software besides the big search engines would benefit.
tags: sitemaps web software friendly yahoo microsoft google
Knowing when to hold 'em
From O'Reilly's wrapup of the Web 2.0 Summit, I got a good link to some other Evan's Knowing When to Hold Em. It's a little discourse on the growth of Web 2.0 sites after they've been acquired.
Evan Williams, the author and the guy who sold Blogger to Google, knows whereof he speaks. He has some graphs that show traffic for various Web 2.0 sites sloping precipitously upwards after their sale to some big company. The implication being, I guess, that the sites would have been more valuable to sell later. He also points out that few of the sites have benefited visibly from being acquired.
I'm not sure the argument makes sense. Traffic is a cost centre as well as a potential source of revenue for companies. Keeping servers up, running, and cogent is hard work. Most small Web sites have been throwing labor and cash into their sites for a while, and the ability to keep such a site going into the Alexa top 100 is beyond most small companies. Paying for a lot of servers, developers, designers, sysadmins and bandwidth for another couple of years may make the site bigger and more desirable for acquisition, but it's a big risk to take.
My favourite part of the discussion is that my friend Kevin Fox shows up at the end with some good points about when and how to invest.
tags: web2con evan williams blogger traffic web 2.0 selling out
Free Software Java
I've been programming in Java off and on since the first beta versions of the VM and JDK in 1995. The language has always had a certain cachet with the Open Source set -- the free-as-in-beer tools, good documentation, and cross-platform compatibility made it an Open Enough system, roughly equivalent to proprietary C compilers shipped with every Unix variant. Its release was roughly synchronous with the growth of the Web, and Java applet support in Netscape made the first round of rich client applications conceivable, if not exactly elegant.
And then Java grew onto the Web server; and into other parts of the network; and then all of a sudden everything had to be Java. The system grew from this nifty little tool to The Enterprise Solution For Your Enterprise. Serious people worked on Java. I worked on Java when I needed to be serious. Java stopped being fun.
Early efforts at getting Open Source Java VMs and development kits working were pretty successful, but they just couldn't catch up with the rapid pace of development on Sun's core product. But inclusion of the language in the Gnu Compiler Collection, the great JBoss J2EE system, the growth of Apache's Jakarta project, and the growing Java Community Process made Java less and less a regular product, built in a silo behind a corporate firewall, and more of an Open-Source-y project.
So I guess it was inevitable that Sun would either Open Source its codebase, or end up irrelevant. They probably squeezed just about all they could out of it without going Free, so that's pretty impressive. I think Free Software advocates are supposed to be grateful about this; my main reaction is: why did you put everyone through all this crap for so long? You've wasted 12 years that could have gone into making Java really incredible.
We'll see what happens. My main interface with the JVM for the last year or so has been through scripting languages like Rhino JavaScript engine (very fun) and Pnuts. Who's got time for Java programming any more?