Embracing Facebook

So, Facebook is still growing to encompass almost the entire world. This can't be ignored when you're a dynamic and hip Internet music outfit like we are here at The Filter, so today we released the MyFilter Facebook app.

Please give it a go. While you're at it, you can install the client (from our Web site) to get you personal charts and recommendations. You can get the client for Windows and OSX, of course. And Nokia phones.

So, that might all sound like a bit of an advert, and I suppose it is. However, we've got some genuinely exciting plans and it's all free, so what have you got to lose? It's time for us all to rediscover our music collections!

Girls, Geeks, Google

Yesterday evening I went to the Google offices by Victoria Station in London for the thirteenth Girl Geek Dinner. This was the first one I've attended at a different venue, and I was interested to see the Google offices. They're in Belgrave House on Buckingham Palace Road - an impressively large building which also houses American Express (I think). The event itself was held in the staff canteen, and Google had laid-on food, booze and so on, as well as some cute promotional stuff. Top marks for all of that.

The first talk was given by Shivauna Raff, who talked about the future of search. She touched on some interesting stuff about vertical searching, and how she thinks the search market will go generally. The next talk was by the Google team behind the mobile version of Google Checkout. They had some interesting tales of the rather painful-sounding world of getting applications to run on phone... not an inconsiderable challenge when you consider the different phones that exist, and the fact that the same phone models can differ when used on different networks!

The way that products are developed within Google provoked some discussion. For the size of the company and number of users, Google use quite small development teams. This surprised some of the audience, but I think Google must have something right! I'll argue about the best way of doing things with them once I've made my own billions...

Sarah recorded the talks - you can find them on Viddler. You can also see Jane Dallaway's photos on Flickr.

Developers Developers Developers!

...so goes the familiar Microsoft rant, as expressed by Steve Ballmer. What he should have added, of course, is "They had better not be too clever if they want to work with us!". A guy called Jamie Cansdale has found this out to his cost by developing his Testdriven.NET plugin for Visual Studio. Basically, Microsoft are going to sue him for using APIs they encouraged people to use, mainly because something he's giving away for free might compete with one of their products. It's worth reading this article on it, including the increasingly threatening emails they are sending him.

Every day I'm glad that I don't have to develop on Windows. Not only would it mean actually using Windows (something that I can avoid completely now, thankfully), but Windows developers have such an overpriced monoculture to deal with when it comes to development, that it pretty much stifles innovation... unless you have piles of cash, of course. There's a pretty good reason why all the best new ideas are coming from non-Windows platforms, and by acting like they are in this story, Microsoft are only going to make the problem worse for themselves.