Overall I can't help but think that Chrome is really hitting at the heart of Firefox nowadays. The early adopter and geeky readership of ReadWriteWeb - bless you all - is often a forerunner of future mainstream trends. And our stats clearly show our readers are moving away from Firefox and largely onto Chrome. How long before the mainstream follows?

I tried to stay with Firefox, I really did. I love the extensions. But I just can't. I can't deal with the sluggish performance. To much pinwheel action... and the memory leaks. Oh, the memory leaks. 500MB of resource sucking rendering on a good day.

The difference between Firefox and Chrome is night and day, and the time spent dealing with Firefox just isn't worth it anymore.

The big thing this week (at least around most of the blogs that I read) was Diaspora, their mention in The New York Times, and the insane amount of funding they've been raising on Kickstarter. They've also been recognized by some industry folks like Leo Laporte and Fred Wilson. 

Basically, these four geeks created a video about how they want to build the next Facebook, and build it on open source principles that make privacy a priority. I completely applaud their effort. The video is kid of funny too—in an awkward sort of way. They look like they should be in an SNL skit.

It might sound like a novel idea, but it's not. There are a dozen other groups out there trying to do the same thing, but none of them were able to generate the buzz these four students have. And all of that buzz is thanks to The New York Times. People say that print media is dead, and yet a mention in the paper is still good for generating $80,000 (and growing) in funding. I wish I had known that. Perhaps I could have sent them some some of sketches I have laying around for something I called "Project S.O.F.A.", which stood for Secure Open Facebook Alternative.

What's I find peculiar though is that these kids have nothing. They haven't written a single line of code. They claim to be programmers, but all I can really see on GitHub is the source for their simple blog. When you look them up on Google, you can barely find anything about them. That makes some sense if they are privacy freaks, but why is everyone suddenly so trusting? Daniel Grippi is the only one who appears to have ever even really used Twitter. How can you build the next Facebook if you never used the first one? The cynic in me wonders if maybe we are all being trolled by four geeks looking to score a cool million and then part ways.

I have a feeling that the reason the Diaspora team is getting so much attention is because people have no clue what they are talking about. Everyone just wants to jump on the "I hate Facebook" bandwagon. I mean, honestly. Would you give someone who's never used an iPhone before money to build the next one? Why is this any different?

That happened a lot faster than I thought it would. It's awesome to see. My next phone isn't even going to be a phone. I'm going to wait until Google rolls Gizmo into Google Voice and then get rid of my cell phone for good and just use my phone over WiFi. And with the $1000 I'll save every year in cell phone service charges I can just buy a new device every year... and still end up saving money. Is it odd that I'm actually excited to get rid of my cell phone? I just don't see the need anymore, really. The only time I can make a clear call is when I'm at home or at work, or at a quiet coffee shop; and all of these places have WiFi.

HTML5 has the potential to capture the online video market from Flash by providing an open standard for web video — but only if everyone can agree on a codec. So far Adobe and Microsoft support H.264 because of the video quality, while Mozilla has been backing Ogg Theora because it's open source. Now it looks like Google might be able to end the squabble by making the VP8 codec it bought from On2 Technologies open source and giving everyone what they want: high-quality encoding that also happens to be open. Sure, Chrome and Firefox will support it. But can Google get Safari and IE on board?

If true, this would be awesome EPIC. I kind of suspected this might happen after the On2 acquisition. I figured that Google probably wanted to get away from the aging VP3 codec that YouTube was built on, and it just didn't make sense to pay the insane licensing costs for VP6—they could just buy On2—and then they did.

And while H.264 is great, it isn't the best for streaming (cost wise), especially when YouTube is serving over a billion videos per day. VP6 is, in many ways, superior. If VP8 is everything that On2 claims it is, it should be no contest.

Great article by Zach Blank over at BBH Labs. I have a feeling that at some point Google is going to get into the creative side of advertising themselves and start applying a lot of their open source philosophies. One thing that worries me though, is this:

So, how can we leverage this power of sharing creativity in our business when we hold our ideas in such high regard and guard them so jealously? There is so much buzz around crowdsourcing at the moment because the ‘power of many’ has been proven. That is simply my argument. We need to adopt this powerful idea and understand how to make it relevant and practical for our work. How does the story behind the larger collaborative efforts fit into our business and make our work better?

I'm not sure I believe crowdsourcing is a practical application of an open source philosophy with respect to creative work—unless the work itself is then creative commons or somehow open source. Otherwise it's just a competition for those who don't quite understand expected value.

Google announced its Flash embrace Tuesday on its Chromium blog, but the company has been agitating for months on a related project to improve the security of browser plug-ins. Google wants the Web to be the foundation for applications, but it doesn't want the security and crash problems plug-ins can bring.

Specifically, Google said it will distribute Flash with Chrome, update it automatically, and eventually put Flash in Chrome's sandbox where its risks can be contained better.

Please, pretty please, let this be the start of an open source Flash runtime. I can't imagine Google just tossing Flash into Chrome when the very essence of Chrome is built around speed.

According to Google, it's already party of the dev build. Guess I might as well try it out instead of crying about it.

First, we've created an open source directory for the entire company. This lists all the public software that the engineering teams have created or contributed to. Much of Twitter's success has been enabled by open-source software, and we want to give back. Everyone is welcome to use this software for their own projects, and if the project is Twitter-related, so much the better.

Wow. I knew that Twitter was built on a lot of FOSS, but I didn't realize they contributed to this many projects.

I wish the attitude towards FOSS was different in advertising. It's an incredibly hostile industry that uses open source code constantly but rarely gives back. Most of this has to do with the way the contracts between agencies and clients are written. Most clients don't understand open source. They want to "own" everything so their competition doesn't get a hold of the valuable code, ignorant to the value and PR that would have been created had they decided to license things under an appropriate open source license. If you were really concerned that competitors would copy your concepts, your could license things under the GPL or another license that doesn't allow for proprietary software. At worst, your competitors could improve on your code.

What would happen if you had a digital agency that set out, from day one, to make as much of their work open source as possible? If you could get clients to see the benefits, and sign on to such an agreement, you could elevate the entire industry. Silicon Valley understands this. Why doesn't 5th Avenue?

I wanted to let you know that on April 15, 2010 Microsoft will discontinue Xbox LIVE service for original Xbox consoles and games, including Xbox 1 games playable on Xbox 360. Our first step in this process will be to turn off auto-renewals for those members who only use Xbox LIVE on a v1 Xbox. While I can’t comment on the specifics, this change will allow us to continue evolving the LIVE service with new features and experiences that fully harness the power of Xbox 360 and the Xbox LIVE community. We did not make this decision lightly, but after careful consideration and review we realize that this decision will allow us unprecedented flexibility for future features.

Unfortunately, this is how all closed systems are destined to end. It's sad to see this happen so soon, but expected from a company like Microsoft who integrates this kind of forced consumer upgrade path into the business model. When they want you to upgrade they just decide to stop supporting the older version. If the product has DRM, they just turn off the activation servers and you can never use it again.

This is one of the reasons why I've been so hesitant to ever buy anything on iTunes. It's only recently that I've started downloading episodes of my favorite TV shows. One day iTunes will take their activation servers offline. And when it does the billions of pieces of content that have been downloaded will be rendered useless.

Modern games like EverQuest and World of Warcraft will suffer a similar fate. The companies that run them will turn off the servers one day and all your information will be lost and your software becomes useless. What about massive collection of games you bought through Steam? One day those will likely be rendered useless as well. But in 20 years I'll still be able to play Diablo II over a LAN, and it will still be awesome.

Xbox LIVE, iTunes and Steam are great for their convenience but you always have to remember that you don't really "own" anything you buy from an proprietary service. You just pay for a license to use their content until they either decide they are going to force you to upgrade or they go bankrupt.

Developers have tried to overcome such barriers in the past with client-side enhancements like ActiveX, Netscape Plugins, Java Applets, but each in its own way was flawed and failed to gain mass adoption. It is possible that the Native Client project will change all this, but standardization of such initiatives across the browser landscape is a lengthy endeavor. For the near future the tools that the developer uses to provide a rich user experience remain JavaScript and ActionScript, plug-ins, such as the ones previously mentioned, are significantly limited by the architectural mismatch of performance requirements they place on the CPU.

It would be incredible, truly incredible, if hardware was designed specifically for web browsing. Can you imagine a chip designed specifically for rendering plugins? Imagine if JavaScript, Flash, and Silverlight all ran with hardware acceleration. Everything on the web would be faster, and CPU usage wouldn't be pegged at 100% when you try to watch an HD video in Flash. While I think it's cool that Mozilla is willing to entertain the idea of hardware accelerated JavaScript, I don't really see that happening. JavaScript engines are pretty fast these days. What we could really use is hardware acceleration for Flash and Silverlight (or at least a series of optimized instruction sets), and I don't really see that happening unless the runtimes are made open source.

Even if we get code running natively in the browser through the Native Client project, and HTML5 makes Flash video obsolete, I have a feeling plugins will return. It may well make sense to start engineering them with hardware acceleration in mind.

We're rolling out a new beta test today: the HTML5 player!

What's the HTML5 player, you ask? Simply put, it's an alternative to our current Flash player that looks and works almost exactly the same way.

First YouTube, now Vimeo. It's only January. Mark my words, by the end of the year most of the video on the Internet will be playable without Flash. Two or three years from now we may be looking at an Internet population with a much smaller Flash install base. What will happen to rich media when it no longer has the ability to reach the majority? I don't know, but I kind of like the idea of death to rich media.

The one thing I can envision happening that would add long term viability to Flash is it being open sourced. Maybe then we'll get a Flash runtime on Mac and Linux that doesn't peg CPU utilization at 100% when watching a 480p video. Unfortunately, the codebase for the Flash runtime is probably so piss poor that it isn't even worth the time trying to optimize.