IM2 | OQP

As a developer, I’ve always been a little shy of depending on 3rd party services other then for a few experiments but on the other hand, I truly believe (or at the very least, I really want to believe) in the small bits loosely joined, semantic web, microformats and all that jazz. For me, they’re a natural expansion of the free software I’ve been working with and developping for the last 15 year or so. Yet running software you don’t control, well… that’s a departure from free software but it obviously has its merits.

So the paradox, or dilemna, if you prefer, is should I find a service that does what I want or should I code it myself, releasing it as free software for others to deploy as well? And what of the data? There’s this little thing called traceability which is an important factor in trust…

A third leg to this problem is client side processing, generally with Javascript, but you could do it with Java or Flash or even Inferno, I guess. For the universal redirect revealer, I had this idea to let the client do the redirect in the background and compare that with the result currently in my database, thereby letting the clients themselves feed the database, leaving the server to simply collect the information and provide it for known URLs. I called it subversive, and so did the people that integrated Javascript into browsers: it doesn’t work. Security, what a bummer. So you can’t fetch data from other domains, but you can still parse and mangle data at will and that might come in handy if you can get enough traffic.

Now the forth leg (yeah, this one cought me by surprise too) is human processing. Think of all those tasks where a human, even a 10 year old, can beat any amount of raw silicon processing power. We’ve seen this already with the ESP game where humans compete to tag images and more recently reCaptcha by the same team, where badly OCRed books are cut in words and shown as captcha challenges. Or more directly, all the tagging that’s going on, be it on personal blogs, bookmark sites, video directories, etc.

It’s a great world out there, with the merger of the desktop and the internet (or the cloud as it’s called when you sprinkle a bit of glue code on top of it) closing in on us and more importantly, breathing out to mobile devices of all sorts. I want a pen I can use to write a song name, do a simple gesture and have it played directly through the pen or on the nearest media player. I’m not asking for much!