Good piece on Forbes.com about how Microsoft is trying to redefine and expand the search landscape into a battlefield on which it can defeat Google. The newest incarnations of Internet Explorer feature a different approach to search which enables the user to select a single search destination source (e.g., Wikipedia, Amazon, Facebook) for the search to be conducted against.

I predict abysmal failure. How many times do you know up front which destination is likely to have the thing you want to search for? And when you do, wouldn't you just go to that site and conduct your search using their built-in mechanisms? This looks and feels like yet another attempt by Microsoft to guess what users want in terms of search rather than observing and asking us.

The good news is that, according to the Forbes report at least, Microsoft is taking a very hands-off approach, letting destination sites manage their own search process and format results as they wish. One part of the bad news: 27 Web sites have already signed up to use the no-obligation service, greatly complicating the life of a user who might otherwise perhaps be inclined to try a particular search site or destination.

CNET.com's analysis of Joe Biden's record in the Senate bodes ill for consumers battling draconian and Dickensian policies on the part of the entertainment industry. The man who is likely to be the next Vice-President of the United States has a consistent track record of supporting the FBI and industry interests over those of consumers. He recently sponsored an attempt to authorize $1 Billion to study and monitor peer-to-peer networks.

Yikes.

I joined Twitter about a year ago and didn't do much with it. But today, Larry Magid had a piece in the San Jose Mercury-News about it and it made me think I should check it out again. So I did. As you can see by the purple box in the upper right corner of this page, I'm Twittering, at least for now.

It's part of my decision to explore more ways of broadening the reach of my message and influence online. I'm also getting ready to launch a series of podcasts. Brevity will be the hallmark of Twittering (because they force it) and my new podcast (because I'm enforcing it). I'll be interested to see if publishing short pieces creates a better draw than longer thought pieces.

I was trying to track down details of how I as an AT&T Wireless customer (and proud owner of the new 3G iPhone) could get free Wi-Fi access to the Internet at Starbucks. Piece of cake, right?

I go to www.attwireless.com and search for Starbucks

I end up at a page with the URL:

http://www.wireless.att.com/search?q=Starbucks&btnG.x=0&btnG.y=0&btnG=Search&entqr=0&proxycustom=
_3CHOME%2F_3E&sort=date%3AD%3AL%3Ad1&output=xml_no_dtd&ie=UTF-8&lr=lang_en....

(Actually there were three more lines of encoded data.)

The second result appears to be what I am looking for. The abstract says:

"...AT&T Wi-Fi. AT&T now offers iPhone customers free access to AT&T's super fast Wi-Fi service at all Starbucks....

I click that link and I'm taken to:

http://www.wireless.att.com/cell-phone-service/site-map/index.jsp?&dsessionid=pqy... (again eliminating a bunch of unnecessary characters),

which is a Spanish-language site map page.

I return to the earlier search results page and click on "Contact us" and I'm presented with a 404 error.

I can't believe AT&T's Web site could be this screwed up.

Not only that, but now the Web site is convinced I'm a Spanish-speaking customer and I can't get to the English home page.

So one of the largest providers of online services in the known universe can't even maintain a simple Web link. My customers wouldn't put up with that horse puckey for 5 minutes.

There is an apparently widespread outage for gMail customers going on at the moment. It seems, from my perspective, to be cascading and growing larger.

Some people in Silicon Valley report their Google Mail down since last night. Mine worked fine until about 30 minutes ago when it started getting flaky. Now it's not working at all.

One of the risks of living in an interconnected world. I always find myself amused by people (sometimes, though decreasingly frequently myself) who start screaming at Google and throwing around words like "unacceptable" and "stupid" and "lame-ass". I wonder how many of them have servers with 100% uptime.

Email is as important to me as to almost anyone, I suspect, but nobody is dying here. They'll get it fixed. Relax.

Working on a Web project, I've discovered that Safari doesn't support dynamic bookmarking. That is, you cannot implement a script or application that will automatically bookmark a page. Firefox executes our custom JavaScript to handle that task but Safari just sits there when the user clicks on the link to activate the script.

That's lame. Every other browser that we support handles it just fine.

The good news is that since we're working with NOLOH, we don't have to sweat this. We just code our app one way and NOLOH figures out what to do with each browser. In this case, it reminds the user that he has to press Ctrl-D (and who came up with that combination?) to bookmark the page. Like I said, lame.

When Google announced the first release of its 3D virtual world technology Lively last week, they got the predictably huge press play anything from GoogleLand gets (and most often deserves). As it happens, I'm in the midst of a major project involving using such environments to create and conduct business, so I'm keeping a particularly keen eye on the market.

I will probably have more to say about the product itself when I have time to check it out. First, I have to install it on Windows. Yeah, that's right. Google, the folks who would be God of the Internet, still makes some products and technologies that don't work cross-browser or cross-platform. That's just stupid, bordering on unforgivable.

Is it easy to do great Web apps that run in all browsers on all OSes? Of course not. It should be, but it's not. But if anyone can and should be leading the way on that front, it's Google. That they couldn't be bothered to create this tool -- which is already such a Johnny=come-lately to the party that timeliness of delivery was clearly not an issue -- so it runs on Mac and Linux doesn't speak well for the company's understanding of the market.

There is simply no excuse for a Web-based product or tool that doesn't run across those boundaries. None. You could write the bulk of the app in NOLOH and accomplish it without a lot of sweat or thought or effort. It's just annoying when players like Google don't care enough about the need for platform agnosticism because it makes others think it's not a necessary consideration.

Back in the halcyon days of expert systems, one of the reasons a lot of us consultants and commentators found Texas Instruments' technologies to be so interesting was that they actually used their own tools in-house. There are a huge number of advantages to that, not the least of which is that technologies that are relied on by their developers are more often than not maintained and enhanced more frequently and in more useful ways than those that aren't.

That's just one more reason to love NOLOH, the exciting new Web app development environment and SuperFramework I've been using for the past 16 or so months. These guys build their own sites (apps) using NOLOH. And they add their own components to their kit bag using NOLOH "nodules" as well. As a result, they find and fix more bugs more rapidly than virtually all of the other frameworks I've checked out.

Latest example: some time in the next couple of days, the NOLOH Dev Zone will feature a new video tutorial on how to create a non-trivial app that is integrated into the NOLOH Dev Zone (and elsewhere in that app). Their Comment System -- which is a neatly hierarchical comment management component a la Huffington Post -- was written in less than 50 lines of code. The video tutorial actually walks you through how it was done. In the process, they also manage to show off some nifty features of NOLOH. Including how, in two lines of code, you can make any object fade into view on the screen. Sweetness.

All of this without a single line of HTML or JavaScript.

Get into their beta program now before their available slots fill up. Tell 'em I sent you.

During the past 16 or so months, a great many of my friends and colleagues have been asking me what I've been up to. I've had to be vague about details because I've been working with a brand-new Web application development platform that has been under wraps until now.

Beginning Monday, you can not only get a look at this extraordinary framework, you can begin using it as NOLOH officially launches its public beta program to serious developers. Insider Tip: If you pop into that site any time now, you may find that you'll get into the beta game early. They're going to severely limit the number of betas they allow before they close it down, so you want to jump on the bandwagon as soon as you can.

NOLOH is unlike any other Web app framework on the planet. Believe me, I've looked at all of them as I've searched for a tool that met my complex and demanding set of design requirements. NOLOH (an acronym for Not One Line Of HTML) is fully object-oriented from the inside out and the bottom up, Written in PHP, NOLOH has so many features that just listing them would take up a lot more space than I want to devote to this pre-announcement today.

The key features that drew me to NOLOH and caused me to bet my company on an unreleased proprietary framework long before it was finalized for public use include:

1. Cross-Platform Transparency. NOLOH is absolutely the first-ever app framework I've seen that fulfills the original Java Lie of write once, run anywhere. Apps you build with NOLOH run on all major platforms in all major browsers and you never have to give the issue a second thought.
2. AJAX for Free. Other app frameworks I considered supported the AJAX-style UI magic like animations, fades, expand/collapse, and other tricks that make the UI smooth and seamless. NOLOH builds all of this and more into every single component in the environment. No JavaScript files to include, no separate code to write.
3. Outside-World Friendly. Unlike virtually every other framework I evaluated, NOLOH creates apps that are search-engine friendly and bookmarkable. It also supports the browser more completely, including the proper functioning of the browser's Back button that throws most other apps done in other frameworks for a serious loss.
4. Single-Language Programming. No HTML, no JavaScript, no XML, unless you really want or need them. NOLOH supports the use of these last-generation languages and tools, but you can do all of your app development in a superset of PHP that is not taxing even to a fairly junior PHP developer.

There are a lot more. You'll hear about more and more in coming days and weeks.

If, like me, your primary interest or role is building Rich Internet Apps that run in any modern browser, you just can't do any better than NOLOH. And you can get started right away. Sign up for their beta program right now. You'll get a hosted sandbox space on their server, great support, decent and always-growing documentation, and a feeling of power and efficiency in your daily work you probably haven't experienced in a long, long time.

NOLOH is the brainchild of Asher Snyder. He and Philip Ross co-developed the NOLOH kernel. Philip Goetz, a long-time software entrepreneur and manager, herded the cats while Clay Gordon has taken on the role of evangelist, at least officially. He'll get lots of help from me.

I'm going to be blogging a lot more about NOLOH. In fact, I've created a new category for it here but for some ridiculous reason Drupal isn't recognizing the category except for me when I'm logged in.

Along with something in excess of 10 million other people, I downloaded the newly released Firefox 3 last night on my OS X box. (I'll upgrade my Windows XP installation down the road.)

I was immediately struck by how much more comfortable FF3 felt than FF2 ever has. At first, I couldn't figure out why. Then I noticed the buttons and other UI elements are Aqua-fied so that the browser now has a much more Mac-like feel. That is very cool and for some reason, it tickles me.

FF3 does seem faster and I do like the new intelligent browsing from what I've seen so far. The location box has been turned into a search object so that as I start typing a URL I'm not only seeing a list of URLs that start with those characters, but also recently visited pages that match the criteria. For example, if I type "mai", FF3 brings up my gmail link. Over time, this will probably change the way I browse, though it may cause problems for site owners whose users may not be as readily able to identify them from ever-complexifying lists.

Overall, first impression is very good.