Today, the Gizbuzz team had the opportunity to interview Dave Hoff, the co-founder of IMified - a new service that’s taking the internet world by storm. The premise is simple; take popular web applications (Remember The Milk, Basecamp, Salesforce, etc.) and break them down so they can be used through popular instant message networks.

We spoke with Dave about all sorts of things: what IMified is, the challenges faced, the instant messaging interface, APIs, and more. It’s a great service with a lot of potential and we got an interesting look into the early stages of what may well become a very influential startup.

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You may notice that a while back, I did a post on adding Gizbuzz to your Firefox/IE7 search box. You might have wondered how I actually got that to work.

Well, I’m actually going to write a quick tutorial on how you make OpenSearch plugins (which is what that Gizbuzz one was). Normally, my tutorials are the realm of Gizbuzz’s sister site FOSSwire, but since this one has quite a lot of relevance to the web in general (not just free/open source software), I thought I’d put it on Gizbuzz.

OpenSearch is a standard being pushed by Amazon’s research arm, A9.com. To create a search plugin, you simply need to write a really short XML file containing instructions to the web browser on how to perform the search. The search plugins currently are supported in both Firefox 2.0.x and Internet Explorer 7. Unfortunately, Microsoft’s implementation is sadly incomplete, so to retain full cross-browser support you can’t use all features of OpenSearch.

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Google have just posted on their official blog about ‘improving their privacy practices’.

One of these things involves so-called ‘anonymising’ their logs, which apparently involves:

We will change some of the bits in the IP address in the logs as well as change the cookie
information. We’re still developing the precise technical methods and approach to this, but we
believe these changes will be a significant addition to protecting user privacy.

Up until now, Google have just kept their logs for as long as they wanted - and in fact that isn’t going to change here. What will change is that 18-24 months afterwards, they will remove bits of the IP address and cookie information such that data won’t necessarily be tracable to one user any more.

Our engineers are already busy working out the technical details, and we hope to implement this new data policy over the coming months (and within a year’s time). We’ll communicate more as we work out these details, but for now, we wanted you to know that we’re working on this additional step to strengthen your privacy.

You can read a bit more in-depth about exactly what this anonymsing step is and involves in this PDF document.

So what is this? A PR stunt by Google to try and shake off some of the ‘evilness’ they’ve acquired in people’s minds (Google.cn, anyone?) or is a genuine attempt to try and protect Google’s users.

I think it’s mostly the latter. Google have been stubborn in the face of subpoenas before and this move would mean that it would be more difficult for legal processes to get their hands on data, but the time restriction also means that Google can do what they want with the data (and it’s also a compromise).

In fact, in a sense it kind of doubles as a PR stunt as well. If Google are subject to some kind of legal process that compells them to reveal data, they can turn around and say “well, we do this”.

Whatever it is, I’m all for Google being more transparent about how they operate. To me, this seems like a ‘good thing’.

RSS is one of the cylinders firing the juggernaut that is Web 2.0. For the uninitiated, RSS is the technology which allows you to take a feed of news from a given website and display it in another place, usually in an ‘aggregator’ which displays a number of feeds in the same place. RSS has always been intended for delivering pieces of information which belong in chronological order, like blog posts, twitters or the latest items on the Digg homepage. It does an exceptionally good job of that, ensuring that I always have the latest posts sitting in my Google Reader account, and that I don’t miss anything I don’t want to.

The problem is, not all data on the web that we might want to syndicate conforms to the template which RSS is designed for of chronological snippets of information. For example, RSS would be inadequate for delivering a music chart to me. In a music chart, it is not the chronology which determines the order, but the popularity of a given song. RSS is therefore not the right tool for the job, as when delivered via RSS the information would make little sense, with a series of songs appearing in my aggregator in a seemingly random order.

This wouldn’t matter if snippets of information in chronological order were the only things which it would be useful to syndicate. I think it would be quite nice to input a feed URL into Google Reader and be able to see, at any time, music charts. Or maybe the new Digg Top Ten list (look on the right sidebar), which isn’t based on the chronology of the stories but on the activity surrounding them. Maybe RSS isn’t the best format to syndicate conventional web search results in. I genuinely think it would be useful to be able to syndicate things like this, and this is currently not possible to any meaningful extent under the current situation where the only technologies around are RSS and Atom.

Before I continue, I think its probably a good idea to say that I am by no means an expert in syndication technologies (and neither am I a developer of any quality), and so if I’ve made a technical mistake feel free to set me straight. Nevertheless, I’m going to get ideas above my station, and tentatively suggest what the answer might be.

It would seem impractical to have a multitude of new syndication standards, with one for charts, one for web searches and to have to develop a new standard everytime someone thinks of a different type of information they would like to push around. Instead, a standard XML document could be used, with a common set of tags such as <title> and <description>, and the ability to invent new ones (as one can currently with the RSS namespace idea). What would be new is that instructions on how the information contained in the tags should be used should be contained within the XML document itself, obviously in a machine readable format. This would be far more flexible, and enable all sorts of uses that I haven’t thought of.

This is just an idea that I’m putting out there; perhaps its not possible, or maybe it isn’t necessary. Someone might have even done it already. It just seems to me like a logical next step if we want to make what is already an incredibly useful idea even more useful. Thoughts?

ComputerWorld is running a story about the future of laptops. Apparently, both Apple and LG are planning to release laptops using flash memory devices instead of hard drives.

Flash memory is already in heavy usage in a lot of consumer electronics devices, like digital cameras, MP3 players, mobile phones and similar devices but until relatively recently they have had much smaller capacity than hard drives and so haven’t been used for computers.

Dropping prices and increasing capacity are changing the game, however, and while we haven’t seen many high-profile companies releasing flash-based and hybrid flash and hard drive portable computers.

Call me sceptical, but I don’t think this is quite ready to happen yet, and I see one major issue here.

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As promised yesterday, I want to take a look at Twitter, a fairly new web application from Evan William’s Obvious company (who also developed podcasting directory Odeo).

The essential concept of Twitter has been called ‘nano blogging’; it allows you to answer the question ‘what are you doing’ in 140 characters or less and recieve updates on how your friends answered that question via the web interface, instant messenger (IM) or your phone. It acts as a constant status message, and unashamedly advocates the ‘what I had for breakfast this morning’ style of blogging, which is so vehemently shunned by the tech blogosphere normally.

When Twitter first emerged some months ago, I dismissed it out of hand as a stupid idea which would never get traction. I doubted that anyone would choose to use an inferior blog interface to publish updates of incredibly restricted length, making use of a basic friends system, when depending on their needs they already had the choice of anything from their own installation of Wordpress, to Vox, to Facebook and MySpace.

I was obviously proved wrong. What I failed to take into account were two factors. Firstly, the ease at which one can recieve updates. If I chose to, I could have Twitter updates follow me everywhere I go, and every time one of my friends posts an update, I have a reminder to use the service. So all I need is one friend on Twitter who is posting regularly, and I have an incentive to respond, either directly to their ‘tweet’ or by posting one of my own. I do not have to remember to visit the Twitter site every so often to check for updates - they come to me. It is surprisingly addictive.

Secondly, Twitter fills an important niche for many of the tech bloggers among whom it is so popular. Take Robert Scoble. He is a ‘web celeb’, whose blog is essential reading for many wanting to understand new media and Web 2.0. He posts many times a day, usually with his thoughts on a particular trend, person, blog or product, often with personal anecdotes to support his arguments. Through these glimpses into Scoble’s life, people have come to be very interested in what he is up to, but his blog does not exist to tell his readers what he had for breakfast this morning. That’s a good thing, because most of his blog readers really couldn’t care less, but there are many who could care, and for them Twitter provides this. In return, Scoble gets the ego trip of having 100s (about 700 at time of writing) of followers who do care what he had for breakfast. He must be doing something right!

Expect Twitter to carry on growing. Twitter will never reach beyond the tech crowd. I tried to explain what it was and why it was addictive to a non-techy friend only yesterday, to be met only by scorn. However, the ‘early adopter’ market will continue to grow, and so Twitter stands every chance of remaining healthy (at least in terms of user numbers) in the coming years.

IMified, an instant messenging bot which allows you to easily control various different third party web services through their APIs (see explainer post) has risen to popularity over the past couple of weeks.

It’s easy to see why - with IMified you can currently post to Wordpress, Blogger, Livejournal, Moveable Type and Typepad blog, keep yourself organised with Remember the Milk, Google or 30boxes calendar and Backpack and collaborate with Basecamp. That’s on top of their own Todo, Reminder and Notes apps, all of which work very nicely.

The three services I’m making use of are IMified’s own Reminders and Todo list functions, as well as using it to post to my personal blog. At first I was a little sceptical as to whether it was a gimmick or a genuinely useful product, but I have actually found it the latter.

IMified represents one of the good things about Web 2.0 - open architecture. It would be brilliant if this could be expanded so that over my IM I can have notifications of new email, updates on selected feeds and maybe even TV listings.

I’m particularly keen to see IMified and Twitter integration. A post about Twitter, a ‘nano blogging’ service which allows you to answer the question ‘what are you doing?’ in 140 characters or less and recieve updates from your friends via IM, text message and web interface, is coming soon on Gizbuzz. Despite the fact that Twitter already uses IM, it would be nice to be able to use it from one bot which does everything.

Over time I would hope that more and more services would be added. At the moment, services must be added by the IMified team, and so perhaps they should look at developing an IMified API that would allow third party developers to integrate their systems into IMified without any help from IMified.

IMified is a service I’m really excited about, and I think it could do extremely well in time. On a sidenote, as far as I can tell, IMified is a side project for its developers and unfunded. I think it’s an excellent example of how far a good idea can come without needing to enter the private equity game.