Virtual Places is a cool map mashup

I like this a lot. Is this mashup a disruption? Is Microsoft's offering Visual Studio Express free for a year a disruption? What's a disruption again?

Yes. Yes. A disruption is something that causes a business to change direction. At least in my mind.

Why do we hate disruptions? More work. ;-)

stupid question, but is it supposed to work in Firefox?

just curious.

I get a blank screen in Firefox.

Soooo slow and so anti-Firefox..

Guys, I am pretty sure they will have Firefox support, real, real, real soon. (2 or 3 days or weeks)

Why not use Google maps instead?

looks like crap in Firefox - I can't believe people even release things that don't work in Firefox. Don't they realize that FF users will likely never go back?

Yup... My thoughts are "sucks in firefox" and "uses virtual earth which also sucks in firefox".

It's off my radar within 8 seconds. Even live.com managed to keep me for about 40 seconds while I dragged some widgets around!

Google Maps pedometer stayed on my radar for a few weeks (I use it every once in a while) and Google Maps Risk looks like it's going to be a lot of fun.

It's just plain lame when you don't support Firefox, dude.

Hahaha.. this is a really lame site. Check out his comments on his blog:

Yes, it doesn't work in Firefox (knew about that). Given the amount of time I had on this, this simply couldn't be a focus or priority. So its IE only - the VML drawing it uses is IE only anyway. I also wanted to use filters and transitions which I haven't yet, that are also IE only.

VML? Why not just use ActiveX?

Don’t they realize that FF users will likely never go back?

Oh, you mean back to IE? That's because there are not enough things that don't work for you. Give them some time.

usually dont say this, but why didnt he/they put some browser sniff'n code in there to at least display a message to non-IE users visiting the site so they know what the hells up?

i just stared at it for a few moments, before hop'n over to IE to check it out.

Oh this makes sense - he's a softie. No wonder he's not using Google Maps like the rest of us would.

:)

And what is so great about Firefox again? I forgot

Firefox has issues, security problems oh wait a minute tab browsing! Oh I will never go back, gimme a break

pat, I don't think that argument needs to be brought up. Tabbed browsing, cleaner browser, tons of themes and extensions, ACTUAL CSS 2 SUPPORT, far less rendering bugs, doesn't allow sites to break Windows. The list goes on and with Firefox 1.5, which comes out shortly, we get lots of bugfixes, better pop-up blocking, sortable tabs, easier upgrading, SVG support, Canvas support, CSS 3 support, XHTML/xforms support.

Don't even bother arguing. There was never a contest between IE and Firefox and there never will be. The IE team is working hard to make IE7 as good as Firefox 1.0 (oh, and wow! special new printing modes) and by the time it's out, we'll likely be on Firefox 2.0. And this to say nothing about Safari/Webkit and Opera, both of whom are at near the same level as Firefox (some argue Opera has exceeded it) and rapidly progressing as well.

IE lovers are blind to features that aren't in IE. They consider them unimportant - until IE implements them, that is! :)

Weird, I got a referral to my site from the app but I can't figure out where it came from?

To be honest with you I wish that I could have the Opera rendering engine, plus the Firefox UI.

Microsoft not stressing Acid @ compatability is a big, huge, enormus mistake.

Scoble: you always speak about Open API's. Standards based this, the XML engine in IE will only accept properly marked code, support the opendoc standars, yet something as trivial as making a browser... to pass one little standards test.... is an enormus task.

This is the wrong behavior in my opinion. I don't know why you aren't yelling at the IE team for publically stating in their blog that they don't even need to be acid 2 test compatible, that it's over rated. that made me angry at them right then and there.

sure firefox and opera aren't 100% yet, but with ever changelog they say they are working on it, so close, a few more revisions. opera is borderline there, and so is firefox. by the time vista is out i dont see a problem with both of them being acid 2 compatable.

IE7... learn from the people who actually hated your browser so much they wrote their own. Because they wouldn't be doing it in the first place if your browser didn't suck so damn hard!

I just noticed a link to a whole crapload of Google maps projects on Digg as well:

http://www.mapki.com/index.php?title=Map_Projects

Stefan: not working on Acid2 is not a big mistake. The Acid2 test has become a holy relic for many people, but I'd rather have practical updates than fulfil a religious obligation. Until the most recent Safari update, Opera 8 handled the Acid2 test the best, but it still had its fair share of CSS2 and strange rendering bugs.

I could look at the Acid2 test piece by piece to highlight things I consider important and things I consider a waste (something I want to do in my blog), but it would take too long. Suffice to say, I don't really care if browsers are able to not render incorrect code correctly. I think that's a ridiculous goal when browsers are having trouble rendering proper code. That's like complaining that doors don't open when you pee on them.

How browsers handle failure is just as important as how they handle well-formed information. The old w3 specs didn't have failure modes, but all of the recent ones (ie: CSS and beyond) have well-defined modes of fallback. It is an equivalent and important part of the standard.

Is there any way we can discuss concept here? As opposed to browser support?

I think this is a cool mashup! Obviously he's working under limitations - the biggest one I think is that these "portable connected components" don't have a depth of extensibility needed to make Virtual Places more of a "context-adjustable" experience.

I do like some of the ideas behind the UI - and I think there may be a way to bring more input into the mix.

Still, I'm hung up on the idea of portability. Virtual Places is temporal - but portability would entail making snapshots of object states, saving objects, moving objects, and creating new relationships between them.

Disruption is great - if more developers engage in disruptive activities, then component providers will be compelled to find ways to enrich that interaction or suffer exclusion.

Any ETA as to when your Steve Gillmor Web 2.0 mashups new-agey outer-spacey brain-flight set to land on actual solid ground?

Yes, it's important. But I'd rather have position:fixed working. I'd rather have the guillotine bug be gone. No more 3 pixel jog. [insert 100s of other bugs here]. I'd rather have those fixed before properly handling when somebody puts a typo into their markup. I think you have your priorities a little backwards if you're suggesting otherwise.

Doesn't work in Safari.

It's becoming increasingly less common for a website to not work in Safari. Lately, the only websites I've seen that appear intentionally broken have been Microsoft's: Microsoft Live, start.com, and now this. I hope more Microsoft developers start heeding your suggestion of a few days ago: Mac numbers are increasing, so there should be more investment on the Mac end.

I agree - let's stop everything until we get firefox compatibility worked out. No more new ideas please. No discussion either. That would be backwards.

Matthew. IE might have 84% market share, but that includes everybody on the web. The people you're targeting -- the people who are using brand new web services -- are using Other Browsers in far greater proportion. Don't get all sardonic on us. It's a serious concern.

Yup. That 84% contains a lot of newbies that still have msn.com as their homepage because they don't know how to change it to google.

The influentials use Firefox, Opera, or Safari.

Disruption!

Sure it's a serious concern, but I'm looking at this from the standpoint of evaluating somebody's little experiment. That's different. We can pull out a laundry list of things that need to be fixed, like CSS2 for starters, but in the end we still need ideas like this to keep the ball moving forward. Otherwise we're dead in the water.

"Oh, you mean back to IE?"


No - I mean back to the website. I also stared at it for a few seconds, wondering if the page was fully loaded - checked the status bar, yup page was loaded. Hmmm - nothing here. Not even something telling me why I don't see anything.

Oh well - another site I'll never go back to.




"Is there any way we can discuss concept here? As opposed to browser support?"



- No ----- not when 5 of the first 10 folks who commented see absolutely nothing on the page because the site doesn't support the browser they were using.