Hunting Web Bugs

Today I received a very polite (and embarrassing for me) email from David Cancel who is the author of the excellent Ghostery add-on that inspired Ad Hacker. I had copied a handful of his rules for finding web bugs into Ad Hacker for my initial testing, and I had not re-written them yet and they were now running in the wild.

Of course I immediately removed his rules and wrote a new set from scratch, which also gave me a great acid test for the new Ad Hacker Rule Manager

Sooooo... the hunt is on! I've already walked down the top 25 sites in Alexa and found most of the web bugs on their homepages. If you'd like to help I'd really appreciate it :)

To join in (and assuming you use Firefox) download Ad Hacker and visit your favorite sites. On each site click the Ad Hacker "watcher" link, then "Javascript from N servers", then a domain name, then script URL, and then finally "Add rule for this Javascript". This will fire up a web page to edit your new web bug rule. If you'd like your rules to be included in the default package Ad Hacker uses fire me an email at feedback@adhacker.com

Rethinking Mobido

It's been a few years since I stopped hosting Mobido. Some of the cool concepts I explored have now become very popular features of top sites: my social "stock ticker" that mined interesting events in your social graph is now available as the Facebook wall, simple SMS sized messages routed to interested groups of people is very similar to Twitter, and mobile websites which many of us hoped and hoped would take off are... finally taking off.

So I've been thinking about parts of Mobido that should be put in the sun again to see if they can bloom under these new and improved conditions. I have some ideas I'll be bouncing off my usual sounding boards, and Google has been really kind to us with App-Engine so I'll likely do a quick test fire there once some ideas gel.

App-Engine with Java: Great start buts needs a relational database

Over the last few days I built my first "real" Java App-Engine application. Overall I think App-Engine is great, but it is also relatively new and has some growing to do.

First the positives:
- Deploying is dead-simple. I used the Eclipse IDE along with the App-engine plugin and things couldn't be easier: one button press and a log-in later my app is running in the cloud.
- Versioning in the cloud, the ability to test different versions, and roll forward or back with a few button clicks is very nice.
- I'm a big Java fan so another thumbs up here. Perhaps I'm old school or corporate, but the lack of strong typing in the "cool" new languages seems like it should interfere with bigger deeper projects. Of course this has been debated endlessly, but needless to say cranking out an app in Java with strong typing and then being able to break point anywhere and step through is perfect for me.

And my one big negative:
- Lack of a relational database!!!! Yes, JDO/JPA support is convenient but it is really hobbled by the lack of relational features. I fully understand the trade-offs between a highly scalable object store and a relational database, and think that a future version of app-engine should allow the developer to select one. The reality is that for many of the smaller and even mid-size sites, only moderate scaling is necessary and a relational database would make development *much* faster.

Again, I'm really happy with App-Engine and look forward to using it a bunch more.