I’m pleased to see that Alan will be joining Identity.net and carrying forward some of the ideas we developed at Mergelab.

From Alan’s announcement:

Just over a year ago, Mark and I attended IIW 2007 down in the bay area, which added fuel to a strong interest in emerging standards around user-centric identity - including OpenID, microformats, oAuth, etc. - a trip that helped inform some of the ideas that we explored at Mergelab.

I am happy to announce that I’ve found a way to continue down this path by joining Identity.net, a Bellevue-based startup with an ambitious plan to build on these emerging technologies.

(Those who know me well will understand that it must be an interesting company and an interesting space if I’m willing to commute to the east side for it! :)

The official announcement that hit the wires this morning is here. I am also going to be hiring for a number of positions in development over the next few weeks and months so if you know someone who might be interested, please send them my way!

Google has introduced an Elections video search gadget that allows you to search political speeches, uses an automatic transcript created by speech-to-text technology. You can see all of the matching snippets and jump directly to the relevant section of video.

The speech recognition is not perfect, of course– searching for “ruby” generates mistaken matches again Rudy, for example– but it’s still useful and a very cool proof of concept for things to come.

This post describes some free and low cost ways to help older people browse the web more easily, based on my recent experience helping my grandmother.

Replacing the mouse

For people like my grandmother with shaky hands, it’s hard to hold the mouse still while they click. It’s also confusing to have to pick up the mouse and reset when they reach the edge of the mouse pad.

We replaced the mouse with a trackball, including a built in scroll wheel. We had good luck with the Logitech Trackman Wheel. With one hand my grandmother could point, click, and scroll, with far fewer problems caused by shaky hands.

Pointing was still a bit of a slow process for her. I think a touch screen solution would be ideal, but unfortunately large touch screen still seem to be too expensive for mainstream use. ($500-$1000 for a 17″ screen.) I’m going to keep an eye on prices, there’s a lot of potential there.

Optimizing web browser settings for older people

I recommend Firefox for older users because of its simple UI and configurability. Here’s how we configured it to make it easier to use.

Configuring firefox for large fonts

It’s easy to configure Firefox to use consistently large font sizes. Go to “Tools : Options : Content : Fonts and Colors : Advanced”. Under the Minimum font size drop down, select a large size like 18 or 20.

Bookmark bar

We also configured a bookmark bar with key links on it like her email inbox and online news. This provided a consistent location where she could click for key tasks. Rather than browsing the entire web, my grandmother tended to focus on a few key sites, so it was possible to put every important link there.

Launch the browser on startup

The browser is literally the only program my grandmother uses, so I configured it to run every time the computer starts up. (On Windows, this is done by dragging a shortcut to the Startup folder under programs.)

Disabling ads

My grandmother was confused by web ads. Seeing as she was unlikely to be a good ecommerce customer, I installed Adblock Plus.

Area for future work: Simplifying page layout with Greasemonkey

Some web pages are overloaded with headers and sidebars that are confusing and that work badly with large font sizes.

It would be relatively simple to write a Greasemonkey extension that would rewrite popular pages to be simpler based on directives from a server.

Ending right click confusion

Steve Jobs was right: the right mouse button is a great source of confusion for beginning computer users. Beginners don’t know which button to click, and how to get rid of the context menu that pops up when you hit the wrong button.

To eliminate this confusion, we mapped the right button to a left click, using a nifty free program called Autohotkey and the following script.

;; map the right button to a left click
RButton::
Click
return

Other suggestions?

I am interested in swapping tips with anyone else who has worked with making web browsers more accessible; please post comments if you have ideas.

Our friends over at Urbanspoon were written up in New York Times preview of upcoming iPhone apps:

From David Pogue’s preview:

Yet another [iPhone app], Urbanspoon, is “a cross between a magic
eight ball and a slot machine:” you shake the phone, and it randomly
displays the name of a good restaurant nearby, using the iPhone’s
G.P.S. and motion sensor.

As an iLike employee, and as a music listener who prefers DRM-free music and free full track preview, I’m excited about today’s announcement with Rhapsody.

Here’s an overview of Rhapsody’s initiative:

Rhapsody®, the leading digital music service from RealNetworks®, Inc. (Nasdaq RNWK) and MTV Networks, today launched its “Music Without Limits” initiative. This strategy is designed to turbocharge the digital music industry in three ways, by:

* Accelerating the move away from proprietary Digital Rights Formats by making music from all major labels available in the DRM-free and interoperable MP3 format;

* Empowering music fans to conveniently stream full-length songs, and buy MP3s, anywhere they want including the most popular music sites and social networks on the Web;

* Integrating digital music directly with mobile phones through a deep partnership between Rhapsody and Verizon Wireless.

Rhapsody is proud to be partnering with some of the most innovative companies of our time, including: iLike, Yahoo!, MTV Networks, and Verizon Wireless, to connect consumers with digital music wherever they are and however they want it.”

Beginning today, consumers can purchase MP3 music from Rhapsody and its partners that is free of the digital rights management (DRM) software that restricts how and where people can play their music…

The Rhapsody MP3 catalogue will include more than 5 million songs from all four major music labels—Universal Music Group, Sony BMG Music Entertainment, Warner Music Group, and EMI—and an extensive number of independent labels.

Here are more details on what full song playback and MP3 sales will mean for iLike and music discovery on social networks:

Rhapsody and iLike, the leading social music discovery service, have created a new model that will monetize music consumption on the top social networks for labels and artists. To give iLike’s enormous audience a taste of the popular Rhapsody Unlimited subscription service, Rhapsody will power free, full-song playback across iLike.com and iLike’s leading music applications on the Web’s most popular social platforms, including: Facebook, MySpace, hi5, Orkut, and Bebo. Full-song streaming will be available for free to iLike users until a monthly threshold of 25 plays is reached, at which time iLike users can choose to sign up for a Rhapsody account or enjoy 30 second song samples until the end of the month.

Artists and labels will be paid royalties each time their music is played via Rhapsody’s existing agreements. This will be the first widespread implementation of a scalable model to monetize the enormous potential for music consumption across social networks. iLike’s more than 28 million registered users will enjoy free full-length song playback. Additionally, Rhapsody’s MP3 store will also be added as an option to the iLike “buy” button.

“With this announcement, iLike is expanding from being the leading social music discovery service to becoming a powerful social music consumption solution,” said Ali Partovi CEO of iLike. “In collaboration with Rhapsody, we’re empowering artists and labels to make money every time their music is played on iLike and across the Web’s major social networks.”

Are you building a large scale consumer web service? Below are some helpful talks from companies that have done so successfully, using approaches including memory caching, replication, feature based sharding, and horizontal (user) sharding.

Nat Brown, iLike’s CTO, spoke at the Google I/O conference on scaling and analytics techniques , with a particular focus on OpenSocial.

Saran Chari, CTO and co-founder of Flixster, has an overview of the data scaling techniques used at Flixster

I love the guiding principle of “Spirit of the Game” from the Official Rules of Ultimate.

Politics and indeed life would be better if this principle were more widely applied.

Just about everyone knows this already, but I’ll make the official announcement:

I am very pleased to be joining iLike as an engineer.

Some of the things I like about iLike: the team combines smarts with personal integrity and minimal ego; they ship every week and iterate and learn rapidly; they have a small team and flat org structure without excessive overhead for meetings, process, or politics; they’ve built a valuable service with tens of millions of satisfied users (their FB app ranks among the top in terms of user ratings); each developer owns substantial feature areas; and they have interesting problems in scale, data mining, syndication, and user experience. (Several fine developers I’ve worked with in the past are here, including Mark Aiken, Scott Haug, and Ray Fortna.)

iLike has achieved a truly impressive amount of traction in a short time with a small team. They are promoted on the back of every Ticketmaster ticket and have been repeatedly cited by Mark Zuckerberg as an example of a valuable Facebook app.

I can’t talk about the first thing I’m working on yet but will post details here when it ships.

Update: Use ack instead. It’s great.

grep-find is an Emacs function for recursively searching all of the files in the current directory. By default, it recurses into Subversion directories, producing redundant, spurious hits.

Fortunately, it’s easy to fix this. If you add the following lines to your .emacs, grep-find will have the desired behavior of ignoring Subversion’s copies of the base versions of your files.

(custom-set-variables
'(grep-find-command "find . -type f -not -name \"*.svn-base\" -and -not -name \"*.tmp\" -print0 | xargs -0 -e grep -n -s -F "))


For further simplicity, you can do something like the following to add a single-keystroke command for searching an entire project.

(defun grep-project (s)
(interactive "sSearch project for: ")
(grep-find (concat "find /home/philbo/webroot/ -type f -not -name \"*.svn-base\" -and -not -name \"*.tmp\" -and -not -name \"*.log\" -print0 | xargs -0 -e grep -n -s \
-F \"" s "\""))
)

(global-set-key (quote [f4]) (quote grep-project))


I am enjoying OSX and the Macbook Pro, but I was initially finding it difficult to train myself out of familiar Windows keyboard shortcuts like Control-X to cut the clipboard and Alt-D for the location bar in Firefox.

Here I’ll describe the steps I took to add Windows/Linux compatible shortcuts for the clipboard and Firefox to OSX. I also describe how to make Emacs in Terminal.app work better.

To add the the shortcuts, go to “System Preferences : Keyboard and Mouse : Keyboard Shortcuts”

Clipboard shortcuts:
Click the “+” button. Enter “Cut” the menu title and press “Control X” in the keyboard shortcut field. Do the same for “Paste” (Control V) and “Copy” (Control C).

Firefox shortcuts:
Click the “+” button and select “Firefox” for the list of apps. Add a shortcut for “Open Location…” (Alt D) and “New Tab” (Control T).

At this point you can use either the Mac or the Windows keyboard shortcuts and have the right thing happen.

Advanced options: Emacs

If you happen to be an Emacs user, you need to do one additional thing to make sure these shortcuts don’t interfere with Emacs. For example, “Control-V” should paste in every application except terminal, since that would break the Emacs “scroll-down” function.

Once again, click the “+” button and select “Terminal” under application. Enter “Cut” the menu title and press “Command X” in the keyboard shortcut field. This will disable the mapping of Control X in the terminal.

You’ll also want to take these additional steps to ensure that Terminal sends keys through to Emacs:

Under “Terminal : Preferences : Settings : Keyboard”, check “Use Option as Meta key”. Under Keys, remap the Home, End, Page Up, and Page DOwn keys to send these strings to the terminal.

Home = \033[1~
Insert = \033[2~
Remove = \033[3~
End = \033[4~
PageUp = \033[5~
PageDown = \033[6~