Apathy Sketchpad

On my brother’s wall is a map of Earth with the South Pole at the top. It uses an equal-area projection to show the true relative sizes of, say, Africa and Greenland. It aims to make a point about the more common North-up, Mercator projection. Mercator projection maps enlarge areas near the poles so that shapes are preserved. I like the sentiment but I think switching to an equal area projection and printing it upside-down is a little unimaginative. So I created this:

This is a map of Earth created using a Mercator projection, but with the magnified poles moved to the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. I created it using the Blue Marble map from Wikipedia. The dashed lines are the conventional latitude and longitude lines. You get a much better feel for the shape of Antarctica than normal Mercator maps give you, instead exaggerating Kamchatka.

Because, the Mercator projection doesn’t need to make Africa small and Greenland big. It can do anything you want it to. So for example, here is my little rebellion against Mercator’s underplaying of Africa’s troubles: a Mercator map in which the continent is infinite in area:

I’ve cropped the image here. In principle a Mercator projection can be continued infinitely in the vertical direction, and in this case the ‘north’ pole is in Africa, so the map would be Africa all the way up. The level of detail would, source image notwithstanding, get bigger and bigger until eventually sub-atomic particles started to appear. Theoretically, you could exploit this to produce a map where Britain opened out as Africa has at the top, and extend the map up to include a road map of England, including  a large-scale street map of Manchester, eventually opening out to provide a floor-plan of one particular building, then room, and eventually the layout of one table. This, however, seems like it would be very difficult so I haven’t bothered.

Here’s another Mercator map, this time with the poles near Australia and Africa again:

And here’s one with poles in Asia and South America, creating a world with one central ocean:

Here’s the maths in case you want to make some maps yourself. Feel free to stop reading here if you wrongly find maths boring. I haven’t worried about sign conventions or being especially rigorous, though. It’s just enough to make some nice pictures. I treated the Earth as a sphere of unit radius centred at the origin.

Converting between (x, y) and (latitude, longitude) is fairly trivial if you read Wikipedia, although I did have to kludge the formula a bit for ‘negative’ (south) latitudes. To reorient the map, I converted the latitudes φ and longitudes λ to three-dimensional Cartesian coordinates using the following formulae:

x = cos φ × cos λ
y = cos φ × sin λ
z = sin φ

I’d planned to rotate these and then convert them back into spherical coordinates, but in the event I found it easier to go directly into rotated spherical coordinates. They’re defined by two points, called North Pole N and Greenwich G, each chosen at random from the surface of the sphere, and described by a set of (x, y, z) coordinates. So the new latitude and longitude are given as follows:

φ′ = ½π − cos⁻¹ P⋅N
 = ½π − cos⁻¹ (x x_N + y y_N + z z_N)
λ′ = tan⁻¹ (P⋅G′ ÷ P⋅G″)

where G′ = N × G ÷ |N × G| and G″ = N × G′. Using the cross product this way generates two points on the new equator separated by 90°. In fact the conversion to new-longitude is more complex than this, because you have to mess around with quadrants, but I used the atan2 function to do that for me so I’ve not bothered working out all the steps.

I don’t know if this is the best way of doing this but welcome to stream-of-conciousness mathematics.

Since it’s now a bit more than three months since the election and the BBC still haven’t got round to replying to my email about the coverage, here it is in isolation:

Thank you for your impartial coverage of the general election which focussed on the important parts rather than frivolous nonsense.

This was exemplified by your coverage of the two high-profile Liberal Democrat losses, Dr Evan Harris and Lembit Opik. While large photos of each outgoing MP were on the screen, you rightly ignored Dr Harris’ place on the Science and Technology Subcommittee. You rightly paid no heed to his campaigning against religious interference in abortion law. You wisely didn’t mention his campaigning against NHS spending on unproven and disproven forms of alternative medicine. His work on the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act was surely dismissed, as was his outspoken opposition to the sacking of Professor Nutt. I thought you might have been taken in by his campaigning to reform our absurdly draconian libel laws, but no. Not you. With your superhuman wit and journalistic integrity you cut straight through all that tedious bullshit and reported the far more important fact that Mr Opik might have had sex with a minor pop star.

Twice.

Sirs, I salute you.

NHS Scotland are advertising a job for a ’specialty doctor in homeopathy’, which pays up to £68,638. They are also letting go of hundreds of other staff who have actual jobs. Obviously this is fucking stupid, and so several bloggers have applied for it already, and obviously so have I. You can read their supporting statements at the following URLs, and you can read mine below those links.

• http://xtaldave.wordpress.com/2010/08/14/in-which-i-apply-for-a-job-as-a-homeopath/
• http://sciencedigestive.blogspot.com/2010/08/my-application-for-job-as-homeopath.html
• http://www.dcscience.net/?p=3339
• http://www.realityismyreligion.com/alternative-medicine/i-applied-to-be-a-homeopath

Update: there’s no point us both maintaining a list, so here’s Zeno’s.

Statement in Support of Application – please tell us your personal qualities, skills and attributes, experience and any major achievements and show how they match those needed for this job.

Obviously I’ve got this post pretty well sewn up, but in case I am unavailable you might want to apply here.

You may remember I was fairly unimpressed with the claim that

At exactly 06 mins and 07 seconds after 5 o’clock on Aug 9th 2010, it will be 05:06:07 08/09/10. This won’t happen again until the year 3010.

Well. I’ve just been told

AN INTERESTING FACT ABOUT AUGUST 2010. This August has 5 Sundays, 5 Mondays, 5 Tuesdays, all in one month. It happens once in 823 years.

And while the first claim was mostly unimpressive and only slightly false, this one is just false. Massive, shovel-loads of false. Honestly, this may be the falsest (earnest) statement I’ve read all year.

August contained five Sundays, five Mondays and five Tuesdays in 1999. It will happen again in 2021. Okay, so that’s still quite a while, but I can’t imagine how anyone arrived at the figure of 823 years. August is 31 days long. It necessarily has five of three days of the week in it. Why on Earth would it be these three so rarely? How can people not see how implausible that is? Quite aside from anything else, the calendar loops every 400 years. Nothing could possibly happen every 823 years any more than Wednesday could happen every nine days.

It fascinates me how these stories come around. It’s everywhere. This may be my favourite example, for this paragraph:

In 1187, or 823 years ago, the Gregorian calendar hadn’t existed yet (it was introduced in 1582) so there was no ado about this strange happenstance.

And it’s not just this year. August 2009 (which started on a Saturday) was just as special. It’s beginning to look like 816/823 years just don’t have an August. And look, here’s a version with the ridiculous 05:06:07 08/09/10 ‘fact’ glued onto the bottom. This version (quite aside from trying to credit God with the whole thing)

August 2009 is a unique month which has 5 Sundays and 5 Saturdays.  Experts says to see another month with 5 Sundays and 5 Saturdays, we need to live another 823 years. We are blessed to go through and experience this unique month.  Now we have to wait for generations to see another month with 5 Sundays and 5 Saturdays. Let us thank God for allowing us to see this unique month.

even ignores the Mondays, so this amazing, once-in-823-years freak of nature actually rolls round after only five years. In fact it doesn’t even specify that the month must be August, by which standard it happened again the following January. I especially like the use of the word “experts”, in this case to mean “people who own calendar software”, as if somehow predicting what dates will occur in the future is some kind of complex science that us mere mortals can’t be expected to follow. It’s nice to see that in many of the discussion threads someone eventually does bother to sit in front of Google Calendar and click through checking.

I keep being told people aren’t interested in maths. Clearly they are. This stuff is pure mathematics, and it’s capturing people’s imaginations.

Just a shame it’s total bullshit.

The very worst joke I have ever heard from a professional stand-up comedian is (roughly) as follows:

I don’t trust Barack Obama. Call me paranoid, but the last time a black man with an imperialist agenda had that much military power, it was Darth Vader.

It did raise a laugh from some of the audience, but I’m forced to assume they were drunk because the joke makes no sense. It makes no sense because it relies on the audience subscribing to his somewhat contentious views on Obama’s politics, but mostly because Darth Vader is white. He just dresses in black, as has every US president since forever. Basically the uncontroversial similarities he’s found between Obama and Vader are that they’re both in charge of powerful armies and while that’s a fair reason to be wary of them, it’s not funny and I’m not capable of finding something funny if it relies on me selectively ignoring facts.

In The Salmon of Doubt, Douglas Adams makes much the same argument about the joke “if the black box is so indestructible, why don’t they make the whole plane out of the same stuff”, which he described as “the teller and the audience complacently conspiring together to jeer at someone who knew more than they did”.

No, I like my comedy to be smart, and to mock people who, either through dishonesty or ignorance, promote nonsense. So this sounded fairly good to me:

You have a 0.000043% chance of dying during this show. We can’t tell you what you’ll die FROM. It could be heart attack, shark attack, or insertion of a sharp object into an orifice. But we will make sure you at least die laughing.

Stand up mathematician Matt Parker and comedian Timandra Harkness got sick of reading ill-founded stories about how eating this or doing that was going to add six months to your life span, or halve your risk of dying from something or other. So they got a grant from the UK’s biggest biomedical charity, the Wellcome Trust, to do the research and bring you the most definitive comedy show ever about dying.

But then I noticed one detail: Timandra Harkness. I’ve never seen her perform, but it’s a distinctive name and one I knew I recognised, and I just worked out whence: in 2004 she helped publicise ”the formula for the perfect joke” in order to promote her show. The formula was

x = (fl + n^o) ÷ p

where f is “the funniness of the punchline”, l is “the length of the buildup”, p is “the number of puns”, and just in case this seemed a bit too reasonable, n is “the amount someone falls over” and o is “the ouch factor”. Science often throws up unexpected results, and here we learn that because War and Peace has very high values for both l and n, and a very low p value, it is in fact provably hysterical (although my preferred formula x = f doesn’t throw up this anomaly). This is just an advert posing as bullshit posing as maths posing as science.

I wholeheartedly agree that the simplistic “+6 months” reporting of health stories is annoying and I’d love to see a show that poked fun at it in a clever way, but frankly I don’t for a second believe that Timandra Harkness is the person to do it. Partly this is because once you sell your (and science’s) credibility in this way, I think you forfeit your right to “get sick of reading ill-founded stories about [science]“, but mostly it’s because I agree with Nicholas Parsons that

The formula has obviously been thought up by somebody with no sense of humour.

No, I like my comedy to be by people with a sense of humour.

The only difference between something that can go wrong and something that cannot possibly go wrong is that when something that cannot possibly go wrong goes wrong, it is generally impossible to get at or repair.

—Douglas Adams

The above quote is interesting because Douglas Adams was a great evangelist of Apple products, which are the archetypal Thing That Cannot Possibly Go Wrong. They famously “just work”. You open the box, plug the thing in, and away you go, doing things.

So I’m told. I have in my life owned exactly one Apple product, an iPhone 3G, and my experience is that actually you take it out of the box, plug it into your PC, charge it for a few hours, install iTunes, set up an account, sync the phone to the account, and after a bit, away you go, doing things. But yes, thereafter it was a dream to use. Save for a handful of niggles, the UI was incredibly intuitive and user friendly and the screen is gorgeous, and so forth. You don’t get to customise it all that much, but you don’t want to — beyond choosing whether you want to use a 12- or 24-hour clock, customisation is an exercise in blaming the user for poor design anyway. Users want to change things to how they incorrectly believe they’d like them, but if you let them then they will and then they’ll like it less than they do with the set-up designed for them by an expert in how to set things up so people like them. That’s why games with level designers built in aren’t as good as games with loads of good levels built in.

That is, until the iPhone 4 turned up like Hudzen 10 and started pummelling it into obsolescence. iOS4 added spellcheck, app folders and — because I jailbroke it — home screen backgrounds and multitasking. Except… the spellcheck is slow, and the app folders all look virtually identical so it’s no longer clear at a glance where I should jab, and the multitasking only works with apps that specifically update to allow it, which isn’t many or the ones I want it to work with…

And basically, iOS4 doesn’t work. I don’t mean that iOS4 doesn’t live up to what I hoped; I mean it doesn’t work. It actively works less well than iOS3.1.3, and in fact less well than my old £50 handset which couldn’t run Reeder either but at least didn’t charge me £1.79 to find out. You might argue that Reeder’s constant crashes are the fault of developer Silvio Rizzi, but Apple approved it. If they’re going to run the absurdly restrictive app policies they do, they have to accept responsibility for ensuring all the apps work on all the devices they sell them on. (This isn’t related to hacked multitasking support; it even happens when I’ve run nothing else since booting the phone.) Apple have gone to great lengths to ensure the iPhone Cannot Possibly Go Wrong and that means it’s their fault when it inevitably does.

So I suppose I can downgrade to iOS3. I don’t know how to do that, but I’m sure I can find out and do it because I’m a colossal nerd. It’s going to be a pain, though, because Apple are so confident in their new OS that there’s no button in iTunes to downgrade, and indeed the iPhone 3GS and 4 have a digital signing system in place specifically to prevent users from downgrading the OS.

Apple don’t want you downgrading the OS because old versions of iOS have security holes that new ones don’t. These holes allow hackers (by which I mean owners of the phone) to add apps and features Apple haven’t approved. For example, I have a torch app on my iPhone which turns the screen white and sets the backlight to maximum. Apple don’t allow developers to mess with the backlight in this way, so that app can’t be released in the AppStore. Meanwhile the hacked multitasking feature in iOS3 worked with all apps and, if it ran out of memory, crashed background apps rather than the one you were using at the time.

But I think I’m going to have to go through the hassle of downgrading the undowngradable, because a few days ago the telephone app crashed. The fucking telephone! My phone, the most sophisticated mobile phone it was possible to buy just two years ago, suddenly didn’t have enough memory to make a fucking telephone call! Eventually I managed to get it to call through the phonebook app, but apparently the “end call” button is part of the Actually Being A Phone app, so unless I wanted to leave a voicemail of me jabbing at the status bar and yelling “hellbastards” until my credit or battery gave out I had to reboot the phone just to make it hang up. This is not what I expect from a product that Just Works. This is not even what I expect from a product that only just works.

A man more cynical than I might suggest that Apple are attempting to make me upgrade to an iPhone 4 by remotely breaking my 3G. I don’t think that’s the case; I think they’ve just set themselves the clearly impossible task of trying to run the same apps on the same OS on maybe seven different devices with three different screen resolutions, and predictably failed to do it. Not that it makes any difference, because in either case the arrival of a new, more powerful phone was inevitably going to break mine.

Anyway, I’m not going to get an iPhone 4, at least not any time soon. I don’t phone much, so it’s not worth me getting a contract. I buy (or win) myself a nice handset every few years, so as you can imagine one of my criteria is “probably won’t be broken next May by some git in Cupertino who wants to sell me the new model”.

I just read this post on Bad Linguistics about the Queen’s English Society. And I’d like to like them because I can be a stickler for language. I love that their chairman is a woman and they call her the chairman and not the chairperson because it turns out artificial language patches are just patronising. But I am not impressed with the Queen’s English Society, and mostly that’s because of their total failure to live up to their own standards in anything at all. Their website is an affront not only to web design, typographical and technical standards, and any sense of perspective or priorities, but also to the very subject they strive to promote.

I mean, these are people who use two spaces after a full stop, which warrants a place in the first circle of Hell on its own, but since HTML doesn’t render consecutive whitespace they’ve tricked it by using a space followed by a non-breaking space. So not only are there big ugly gaps after sentences, but the indentation is fucked up. The site itself is divided into “Cover Page”, “About”, “Academy”, “Books”, “Contact”, “Join”, “News”, “Page One” and “Site Map” in that order so apparently they’re more keen on alphabetisation than on logic, structure or counting.

As for their attempts at English, an example will help. Their news page shows a photo of the Stella Artois advert which says “less glass/less CO2 emissions”, and comments

Should it not read…..Less C02 emission, or better still, FEWER C02 EMISSIONS?

Leaving aside the dismal attempt at an ellipsis, and the almost random application of capitalisation, and generously assuming the author had just finished a Paul Auster book and forgotten what quotation marks are, there is no such thing as ‘a CO2 emission’. “Fewer CO2 emissions” isn’t “better” and in fact doesn’t make any sense. Not only that, but they’ve written the number zero instead of the letter ‘O’. If they’re going to insist I learn the subjunctive, I’m going to have to insist they learn basic science or have the decency to look it up. This is the equivalent of grammar sauntering up to me at a party and saying “what was that subject you used to go out with? Susan?” “Science.” “Whatever. Shall we dance?”

That’s a particularly offensive sentence, but grammatically it’s fairly representative. The site is littered with clumsy, run-on ambiguities like

Today, we have a membership of around one thousand, mostly United Kingdom residents, but interest is growing worldwide.

and Deepwater Horizon punctuation-explosions like

Mrs Williams, (a short profile is available here,) is also a QES English Academy Board member.

or

“mother-tongue”

or

We can raise issues in our journal, QUEST or in our blog pages:- listen to the radio, watch television and read the papers and tell them when they have got it wrong:- form pressure groups (branches of the Society), in the regions and make ourselves known to the Education Authorities, libraries, local newspapers and broadcasters.

Colon dash! What the hell is colon dash? And that’s not even a dash — that’s a hyphen!

These are people who have appointed themselves guardians of the English language, and not only do they not understand its intricacies, they don’t understand the basics. I actually half expect them to spell ‘lose’ with two Os somewhere.

Their slogan, pasted in ugly italic print across every page on the site, is “Good English Matters in Education, in Business, in Life and in the Future”. Surely that should be “…and will matter in the Future”? I mean, I don’t care. I think it’s fine how it is. It’s clear what it means and scans better this way. But that’s because for once I’m not the joyless pedant.

At exactly 06 mins and 07 seconds after 5 o’clock on Aug 9th 2010, it will be 05:06:07 08/09/10. This won’t happen again until the year 3010

Pretty impressive, no?

No. This stuff bugs me. Mostly it annoys me for the spectacularly banal observation that “this won’t happen again until the year 3010″. Well, no. What you’ve done there is to truncate the number of centuries from the date, and announce that it won’t reoccur for a century (and in the event you did even that wrong and said it won’t reoccur for a millennium; in fact there’ll be an 05:06:07 08/09/10 in 2110).

That’s true of any date. That’s just the modulo function. There won’t be another 05:06:07 08/09/10 for a hundred years, but then there won’t be another 16:27:05 06/01/10 for a hundred years either and nobody’s impressed by that. Why? Because 16, 27, 5, 6 ,1, 10 doesn’t look like anything much. There’ll be a date and time as remarkable as 16:27:05 06/01/10 later today, say 17:09:42 06/01/10.

But then, 05:06:07 08/09/10 is only a sequence written one particular way. In this case, it’s relying on a rather obtuse American way of writing the date, and even then it only works if you use two-digit years and write the time, including seconds, before the date.

So when will there next be a date and time that’s at least as impressive as 05:06:07 08/09/10? If we allow British dates to be used then we get another 05:06:07 08/09/10 not in 3010, nor even in 2110, but in September. We’ve cut it down from a millennium to a month already.

Moreover, there’s no reason we have to start at 5. We could start at 8, and then wait for 08/09/10 11:12:13, and cut the wait down to slightly over six hours. Indeed, there’s no reason we have to write down the number of seconds, so we could celebrate at 06:07 08/09/10 and get the wait down to an hour and fifty-two seconds.

Exactly 6 minutes and 7 seconds after 5 o’clock on Aug 9th 2010, it will be 05:06:07 08/09/10. This won’t happen again for about an hour.

Hands up if you’re still impressed.

I have been writing to companies again.

Hi,

I just found the “Meebo Bar” on the website at https://fusefm.co.uk/podcasts and I thought you could give me more information about it. I guess my question is, what the hell is it for?

Possibly I’m outside the target audience. I think I might be a bit too web-savvy to really get the full benefit. Certainly I didn’t find the chat panel useful, because I have an IM client installed to handle that and I wouldn’t normally think to visit a small University radio station’s podcast download page if I want to check if my flatmate will be home for dinner. I suppose that’s just a quirk of how I happen to use the web, and other people might not have an IM client installed, and instead rely on every website they visit to support chat individually. I’m not sure how these people ended up with instant messaging accounts, but I expect they filled in the Windows Messenger sign-up page before their children uninstalled it so they would stop downloading viruses from robots posing as teenaged girls.

I guess the Twitter button is the same. Being a nerd, obviously I have a Twitter account (@Andrew_Taylor – follow me!), so I don’t need a button on every website I visit showing me its latest tweets and would ideally like a button that allowed me to follow them using actual Twitter, but I realise you’re going for a more ‘newbie’ market than that so your solution is probably best. Adding any kind of interaction to the Twitter panel would doubtless only confuse them. They would probably tweet their bank details or something. I imagine people who don’t really know what Twitter is probably click it and think “ah yes, I’ve heard about this on the news, it’s what all the kids are using. And now, so am I! Wow, it looks like a tiny version of the site I was already looking at, but more inane and with little gibberish weblinks all through it. Not really sure what it’s for but I do feel very modern”. I imagine they enjoy that.

The YouTube integration’s the same, isn’t it? You don’t need a button to subscribe to, or even view, their YouTube channel; just show the videos and let them watch a bit of telly in a tiny box at the bottom of a website. Us major web-nerds will be able to find it through the player-integrated menu or a normal link or Google or maybe we can just regexp the whole internet or something.

Presumaby you’ve taken the same attitude with the RSS button. Its purpose, clearly, is to flash up a message saying “Sorry, RSS is not supported in your browser” so that they can feel like they’re engaging with Web 2.0 without having to learn anything. They no longer have to say “I don’t understand” when their colleagues or children mention RSS! Now they can just say “yeah, but my browser doesn’t support it” and when asked what browser they use I imagine they say “Google” or “Dell” or something. Everyone will laugh at them behind their backs, of course, but they know better than to laugh in front of people that ignorant because then they’d have to explain what a browser is and that would be like explaining what a planet is to a crab. The Meebo Bar has granted them an illusion that they understand the modern internet.

Have I got this basically right?

One thing I did like about the Meebo Bar is how you’ve implemented a way to view tweets and RSS updates from a website without having to leave that website. Normally if I want to view all my Twitter updates I have to go to Twitter and read them all there, whereas with Meebo I can simply view every website and blog individually and click the buttons on the Meebo Bar, except for the websites that haven’t got a Meebo Bar which is all of them.

In a similar vein, I use a bookmarklet to share webpages with my friends. Sometimes I use a browser extension or copy-paste the URL, but mostly I use a bookmarklet. Meebo Bar allows me to do it without my bookmarklet, and instead to search each webpage I want to share for an individual button to share that page in whatever services it happens to support. This is clearly far more convenient, and I’m thinking of removing my bookmarklet, but before I do that would it be possible for you to add support for webpages without Meebo Bar (which as I say is all of them) by either having a page on your website listing every page on the internet with a share button for each one, or else some kind of bookmarklet?

Thanks,

Andrew

I hope they appreciate my comments.

Hi there. Thanks for your interest. Some quick answers:

• The idea of placing the bar on a site is so a site visitor can access these features without leaving the site. If there was something on a site you liked, you (and more to the point anyone else, regardless of whether they were using their own computer or had a chat app) could chat to a friend about it without firing up another application.
• The RSS button does not work in Chrome because Chrome does not support RSS. It should work fine in IE or Firefox.
• The Twitter/Facebook Friend/RSS/Youtube button allows the site’s publisher to let site viewers access the site’s Youtube/Facebook Friend/RSS/Twitter feed without leaving the site. The idea is that people who are looking at a site might be interested in seeing more information about the site (for example seeing if the content on the YouTube/Twitter feed is worth subscribing to for them).

We appreciate your interest and your comments!

Chris

Oh, good.

Hi Chris,

Thanks for your prompt reply.

The idea of placing the bar on a site is so a site visitor can access these features without leaving the site. If there was something on a site you liked, you (and more to the point anyone else, regardless of whether they were using their own computer or had a chat app) could chat to a friend about it without firing up another application.

Ah! Sorry, I misinterpreted “leaving a site” as “closing the tab”, but thanks to the magic of multi-tasking operating systems I can write a short novel without in that sense leaving a website. Obviously what you meant is that one can share a webpage without deflecting one’s attention or mouse pointer from the webpage for even a nanosecond. Now that you mention it, it does enrage me so when I find a webpage I want to share and have to move my eyes and mouse pointer to my Google Reader bookmarklet or Shareaholic extension button, which can be anywhere up to six pixels away from the webpage. Aside from the sheer Herculean effort of moving my relatively light mouse the extra millimetre required to achieve this, there’s a constant irrational panic that the webpage may be gone when I allow myself to resume my otherwise unremitting stare. I shouldn’t have to put up with this in the twenty-first century.

With the Meebo Bar I can share any webpage I want without any of this danger, provided that I only ever want to share the FuseFM podcast download page.

The RSS button does not work in Chrome because Chrome does not support RSS. It should work fine in IE or Firefox.

Okay, I think I understand this. I’d assumed Chrome didn’t support RSS because it’s a web browser, and a web browser no more needs to support RSS any than it needs to support iCal or zip files or coffee filters but obviously we expect more than that from modern browsers. Meebo’s servers shouldn’t have to read the RSS file, extract the post data and compile it into browser-readable HTML when it can simply sit back and wait for Google to write this code and bundle it into everyone’s browser, any more than you should have to write an entire website when you could just put <website intent="sell the meebo bar" awesome="true">Unfortunately, your browser does not support the 'website' tag yet.</website> and wait for Google to learn how to parse it.

Some would say it’s not Google’s problem, but obviously if Google expected webservers to parse RSS feeds into HTML previews with convenient subscription buttons for popular feed readers they’d have bought FeedBurner or something. Although FeedBurner’s not a good solution because you can’t use it without glancing momentarily away from the webpage whose RSS feed you’re viewing. Some people might suggest that by the time you’re looking at the RSS feed you no longer have any need for the original webpage to be on your screen, but those people will change their tune when they see the Meebo Browser which I assume is the next step in your business model and which I assume will run within the existing Meebo Bar and allow users to view entirely different webpages without “leaving” the FuseFM podcast download page. And the best part is that it will be easy to build because Chrome already supports webpages.

The Twitter/Facebook Friend/RSS/Youtube button allows the site’s publisher to let site viewers access the site’s Youtube/Facebook Friend/RSS/Twitter feed without leaving the site. The idea is that people who are looking at a site might be interested in seeing more information about the site (for example seeing if the content on the YouTube/Twitter feed is worth subscribing to for them)

This is a good feature, to be fair. On my website, presently devoid of a Meebo Bar, Snap Shots, or any other obnoxious JavaScript pop-up books, my Twitter integration is a bit of a kludge: I have a hyperlink to my Twitter page in the navigation bar. Users interested in my Twitter page are expected to click the link and see my tweets in the annoyingly familiar environment of Twitter.com, and if they want to follow me they will have to go through the confusion and hassle of clicking the large “follow” button underneath my name.

When I have installed the Meebo Bar, on the other hand, they will be able to read these tweets in a smaller font in a pop-up layer at the bottom of my website, and if they want to follow me all they’ll have to do is jot down my username, leave my website, navigate manually to Twitter.com/Andrew_Taylor, and click the large “follow” button underneath my name. And they can do all this without leaving my website except for the part where they have to leave my website!

Andrew

Apparently they have stopped appreciating my comments.