fbFund Gives Financial Awards To Facebook Apps

After all, competitors in the hunt for fbFund’s money are being asked to improve their creations.  In a final event that’s much funnier than it sounds, competitors in the Monty Python bit are simply asked to end their own lives.  So, however much the two groups may resemble each other in the beginning, they should be headed in different directions.

According to the Mercury News, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg stated, “We are just looking for innovative and disruptive things.  We don’t think we can build all these applications ourselves.”

That’s a reasonable attitude to take.  Zuckerberg also took a reasonable approach to forming the fbFund; grants provided by it will range in value from $25,000 to $250,000, and will come out of a $10 million pot created by Facebook, Accel Partners, and The Founders Fund.  Accel and The Founders Fund both contributed to Facebook’s success, so the fund is essentially an internal affair.

And from an outside perspective, the whole arrangement tends to create a no-lose situation.  Either we get a bunch of impressive Facebook applications, or we get a lot of apps to laugh at.

However the rest of us would very much like to see the end of that other spam that accumulates on the web.

One major influence in creating all this rubbish was Google with its search view that the number of inlinks to a web page could be a measure of the importance of that web page. Once every one knew that, the name of the game was to create as many other inlinks as you could. Even though this was against the Google Terms of Service, for a time it seemed to work. The view that inlinks are what counts persists and is as strong as ever even though Google has been improving its ability to root out the spam-producers.

Now Matt Cutts, a Googler with some authority on this topic, has written a very clear explanation of what they’re doing about spam. This was triggered by a new service to create “Undetectable” spam. The follow-up to that is well described by Loren Baker in a post, Matt Cutts vs. V7N Links : Matt Wins. Another sign of the times is that Wikipedia seems to have gone the “No Follow” route in adding this tag to all its outlinks. So these will no longer count as inlinks conferring authority in the Google search process.

One would hope that the message will get around and the mindless creation of inlinks or the search for irrelevant reciprocal linking will cease. Unfortunately too many people currently waste too much time and money on these pursuits and spoil the scene for the rest of us.

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Barry Welford, President of SMM Strategic Marketing Montreal works with business owners and senior management on Internet Marketing strategy and action plans to grow their companies. He is a moderator at the Cre8asite Forums and writes on current issues on the Internet and on the Mobile Web in three blogs, BPWrap, StayGoLinks and The Other Bloke’s Blog.

Yahoo! to Serve UP BBC Videos

As part of an agreement with ABC News, Yahoo is beginning to offer BBC News video on its site. Yahoo! users will now have access to approximately 30 video clips of BBC News video each day, including a large assortment of videos pertaining to most major news and entertainment genres.

Nearly a year ago, ABC News signed a deal with the BBC to become the exclusive distributor of the channel’s broadband content throughout North America. Today’s announcement leverages Yahoo! News as the primary platform for BBC News video distribution pursuant to the January agreement.

“The BBC has established itself as an unparalleled global news-gathering organization, and its content will be a tremendous complement to the world class news already available on our site,” said Scott Moore, head of news and information for Yahoo! Media Group.

“The BBC has a cool factor with younger audiences, a natural fit for Yahoo! News users who are generally younger than audiences at other news organizations.”

The videos will be made available for free to Yahoo! News users as part of an ad-supported model.

This announcement, of course, begs an even larger question pertaining to the future of BBC programming and Yahoo!’s online video offerings:

When will Yahoo! offer exclusive episodes of Monty Python’s Flying Circus?

Come on, you know you were thinking it, too. Yahoo! definitely needs to look at the bigger picture when it comes to the virtual goldmine they’re sitting on when it comes to BBC television distribution.

Two facts remain unchallenged here:

This is the kind of score that will give Yahoo! an advantage over Google in the online video marketplace. Who knows, maybe it could spurn a whole trend of bringing cult BBC television to North America for mass distribution.

First Monty Python, then Absolutely Fabulous, the possibilities are virtually endless!

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The final release of Python 2.5 became a reality with its debut, and the notation that it should be suitable for production use.

Several updates and tweaks in Python should improve its speed. Among those highlights were performance enhancing updates that delivered “major speedups in exception handling and string operations.”

Noteworthy Python developer Andrew Kuchling posted to the Python.org site that there have been more than 350 patches and over 450 bugs fixed since the previous Python version, 2.4.

Python’s profile has been gaining among the major Internet players. The language’s creator, Guido van Rossum, joined Google in 2005, and spends part of his time working on Python.

More recently, Microsoft added support for Python to its .NET engine. Earlier in September, the company’s Jim Hugunin reported the 1.0 release of IronPython 1.0, and recounted some of his history with that project:

Python also served as the topic for a recent Google TechTalk. Delivered by O’Reilly Media senior software engineer Ben Bangert, the talk covered “ReUsable Web Components with Python and Future Python Web Development.”

The 51-minute talk may be viewed for free at the Google Video website.

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David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.

I’ve been an IBM fan for quite some time, but even more now that I cover them on occasion on different topics. Their people are smart and enjoyable to chat with on topics like search, and they do very well when it comes to finding third party folks to discuss topics as they do on their developerWorks tutorial series.

The two-part discussion presented by Ian Maurer, Senior Consultant, Brulant, Inc, covers Python in a couple of contexts. First, developers working with the Python-powered Django framework to build web applications can build it in Linux and get to work right away.

Maurer goes through the process of the install in his tutorial, and configuring the admin tool for Django. Then the developer can create a model (Django follows the Model-View-Controller architecture) for the project. From Maurer:

Maurer’s Django example proceeds through the development of a job search application. He makes an important observation about templates in Django: “The Django template language has been designed with limited functional capabilities. This limitation keeps templates simple for non-programmers and keeps programmers from putting business logic where it doesn’t belong, the presentation layer.”

Maurer followed up the Django walkthrough with a tutorial on TurboGears, a Python-built mega-framework. This project focused on building a shopping application.

He called TurboGears a mega-framework because of the components TurboGears brings together:

MochiKit: JavaScript library
Kid: Templating language
CherryPy: Base Web framework
SQLObject: Object-relational mapper (ORM)

After installation, Maurer shows how to get started with a model package called tgcommerce. With this, the developer has a simple shopping cart for the application.

Once the model has been created, developers can use CatWalk from the TurboGears toolbox to quickly create, update, and delete data for their model through a GUI.

Maurer found that the error handling in the controller methods could be better. Refactoring in the controller class can catch a SQLObjectNotFound error and make it a NotFound exception. Instead of the 404 error, that could be written to redirect instead.

He also included an Ajax example that adds an item to the cart; “To make this shopping cart example buzzword compliant,” he wrote.

After going through the tutorial, he compared the Django and TurboGears frameworks. Maurer said both were extracted from existing applications and released as open source. Then he summarized the differences:

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This not only pulls together a lot of useful stuff for python hackers that want to tinker with our APIs, it means I have more good code examples from which to continue my quest to learn Python.

I guess that means we need a Ruby Developer Center next, huh?

Jeremy Zawodny is the author of the popular Jeremy Zawodny’s blog. Jeremy is part of the Yahoo search team and frequently posts in the Yahoo! Search blog as well.

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I figure that Ruby would be easy to learn because of its similarity to Perl (I’m told). But I also figure that Python would be easy to learn because of its simplicity. And when it comes to webby stuff, I can use Rails with Ruby and Django with Python.

I’m currently leaning toward Python and began doing so last week. I started with Mark Pilgrim’s excellent Dive Into Python and made it thru the first 3 chapters pretty quickly. So far it feels pretty good.

Before I really dive in, though, I’m curious to hear what others think about the choice between these two languages.

(On a related note, you might also read Tim Bray’s On Ruby post, since he just started learning Ruby.)

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Jeremy Zawodny is the author of the popular Jeremy Zawodny’s blog. Jeremy is part of the Yahoo search team and frequently posts in the Yahoo! Search blog as well.

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On a higher level, a battle between Python and C# could be seen as Google versus Microsoft, since Python’s creator Guido van Rossum joined Google in December 2005. But legions of C# developers in Redmond may be content to bring over other Python devotees one at a time.

Michal Wallace would be one of those Python followers. He has spent the past several years in Python’s embrace. Judging from a recent post Wallace made, he’s found a knife named C# and is ready to cut himself free from Python, for a few reasons.

“One problem is that python tools suck,” he wrote. Wallace compared the various IDEs and other developer tools available to Microsoft’s freely available Visual Studio Express and called them “toys.”

He also listed a few reasons why C# appeals to him over Python or Java:

•  anonymous functions (delegates)
•  a python-like yield statement
•  a nice type system with generics
•  interfaces
•  properties (Yay!!)

Wallace also cited the “huge number of developers” doing .Net as another reason to switch to C#. “Thanks to Microsoft’s reach, .NET is a much bigger pond than python. I can hire .NET developers anywhere, or if i want, I can get a job as a .NET developer,” he wrote.

IBM developer and well-known Apache contributor Sam Ruby suggested diversification is the way to happiness: “My first recommendation aligns with Aristotle’s: diversify. I didn’t do any Perl in the past week, but I did do Python, PHP, Ruby, and JavaScript. In pond size terms, PHP is huge and growing.”

Burningbird blogger Shelley Powers sees some problems with the P section of ONLamp, consisting of Python, Perl, and PHP. Based on her perspective, “in St. Louis, the demand is for .NET (VB or C#) or Java. That’s it. I mean, that’s really it. Most of the other work in PHP or Python or Perl is off-shored.

Microsoft’s Don Dodge blogged about .NET’s strong points for C# developers: Microsoft .Net is now the most popular development platform in the world. It supports lots of different languages, has an awesome IDE, and integrates with slick QA and code management tools. The .Net community provides tons of support, code samples, test cases, and advice.

Now Wallace has arguments for and against the switch.

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Google will be working with a variety of open source, free software, and technology-related groups to identify and fund several hundred projects over a three-month period. The inaugural instance of the program, which took place last summer, brought together 400 students and 40 mentoring organizations from 49 countries. The Python Software Foundation (PSF) will again act as a sponsoring organization in Google’s Summer of Code, matching mentors and projects benefiting Python and Python users.

Projects can include work on the core Python language, programmer utilities, libraries, packages, frameworks related to Python, or other Python implementations like Jython, PyPy, or IronPython. Mentoring instructions are available via this Wiki- Feel free to ask questions on python-dev@python.org. Information From Google on the summer of code project can be found here

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Two of the newest and fastest-growing players when it comes to open source web languages are Python and Ruby. Neither of them were web languages originally – they were normal programming languages – but more and more people are starting to use them to power their websites. So what are they, and how do they work? Let’s take a look.

Python

The Python philosophy demands that code should be simple, explicit, and readable. Where Perl wants there to be “more than one way to do it”, Python wants there to be only one way of doing each thing – and it wants that way to be obvious. This makes Python code easy to work with, whether it was written by you or by someone else.

The downside to Python, though, is that it can be slow – not as slow as Java, but still much slower than most languages. It is also very picky about indentation (the number of spaces or tabs at the start of each line of code), as part of its effort to make code more readable.

So does anyone use Python? It might surprise you to learn that Google uses a lot of Python code, and the popular BitTorrent file-sharing system is written in Python.

Unfortunately, when it comes to actual web programming, Python isn’t quite up to scratch in many ways: it still shows its roots as a programming language for programs instead of one for the web. It’s for this reason that Python on the web is still quite rare – but they’re working on it.

Ruby

Ruby is a relatively new programming language from Japan, and it has a lot of evangelists who simply love it. Why? Well, it lets you do complicated things quickly, easily and readably with very little code: in some ways. It’s powerful but simple. Here’s some sample code, taken from one of the best Ruby books, Why’s Poignant Guide to Ruby (www.poignantguide.net):

['toast', 'cheese', 'wine'].each { |food| print( food.capitalize ) }

What does that do? Well, first, it creates an array with the words ‘toast’, ‘cheese’, and ‘wine’. It then launches into a function, which prints out the name of each food – in capital letters. All that with one line of code. It might not seem like much, but just wait until it comes time to connect to a database, retrieve records, format them the way you want and put them on the screen, all in one easy-to-read line of code.

Now, Ruby is becoming more popular on the web thanks to a web framework that makes developing websites quicker than it’s ever been: Ruby on Rails. Rails is only one year old, but it’s already got lots of support, thanks to its big feature it handles the database end of things automatically. Rails is growing at a crazy speed, because programmers love it – it stops you from having to write database code over and over again, leaving you free to worry about how your web page works instead of writing SQL.

Rails works using the principle of “convention over configuration”: you do things in a standard way instead of spending time setting it up for the way you’ve decided to do things. Using Rails’ scaffolding function, you can be up and running with a simple database page within minutes – then all you have left to do is build the interface.

Watch Out for Web Host Support

One of the biggest disadvantages of using a minority programming language is that you might find trouble finding a web host that has it installed on their server. You’ll pretty much be forced to go with a smaller host: searching for ‘ruby host’ or ‘python host’ will turn up plenty of offers, but they won’t be from anyone you’ve heard of, and they’re likely to be more expensive than you’d expect. That’s the price you pay for using the latest and greatest languages.

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