Mashable: Latest 8 News Updates - including “Lenovo: Apple is Missing a Huge Opportunity in China”

Lenovo: Apple is Missing a Huge Opportunity in China
22 Essential Social Media Resources You May Have Missed
Wikipedia Is Down [Updated]
HOW TO: Create a Pixel Fireworks Animation Using JavaScript
Google’s Rube Goldberg Logo Celebrates the 4th of July
20 Spectacular 4th of July Fireworks Displays on Flickr [PHOTOS]
YouTube Hacked, Justin Bieber Gets the Worst of It
iTunes Accounts Hacked [WARNING]
The 10 Founding Fathers of the Web

Lenovo: Apple is Missing a Huge Opportunity in China

Posted: 05 Jul 2010 03:18 AM PDT

Is Apple doing enough to reach Chinese customers? Not even close – if you ask Lenovo. According to Financial Times, Lenovo's founder Liu Chuanzhi said Lenovo is "lucky that Steve Jobs has such a bad temper and doesn't care about China. If Apple were to spend the same effort on the Chinese consumer as we do, we would be in trouble."

It’s a bit odd for a company chairman to speak about competition in that way, and a Lenovo spokesman later said the remarks were uttered during a “relaxed” moment during a dinner interview. But is Chuanzhi right?

It’s true that it took several years for the iPhone to finally reach China (although the phone is actually manufactured there), and Apple only has a handful of stores in China, with the first one being opened only recently, in 2008. Furthermore, a lot of what Apple has to offer lies within its brand, and Chinese customers are all about value which, compared with the price of its products, is not one of Apple’s strengths.

Still, when your competitors claim you’re missing an opportunity to take away a piece of the market from them, it might be time to do something about it. Apple didn’t provide a direct answer, instead pointing out it’s opening a new store in Shanghai, with plans to have 25 retail outlets in the country by the end of next year. Slowly but surely, Apple is extending its reach in Asia; in its Q2 2010 financial report, Apple reported a 184% year-over-year revenue increase for the Asia Pacific region. If Apple’s revenues in Asia keep on growing that way, the folks at Lenovo might one day yearn for the days of Apple’s “neglect” of China.

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22 Essential Social Media Resources You May Have Missed

Posted: 04 Jul 2010 11:21 PM PDT

Before you throw another firework on the grill — or whatever July 4th tradition you abide — take a few minutes to peruse this week’s batch of social, tech, and business resources that may have gone unnoticed during a busy week.

Below, find some gorgeous social media infographics, a reassessment of the traditional location-based strategy, and some great tips for business networking.

Not enough to quench your thirst for Inter-knowledge? You can delve into our big list every weekend for more.

P.S.: We don’t really recommend throwing fireworks on the grill…

Social Media

Why Social Experience is the Future of Online Content
While some proclaim that “content is king,” the overwhelming amount of it on the web is pushing more users toward well-packaged social experiences.
The Rise of Comedy on Twitter
Is Twitter humor different from “traditional” humor? We spoke with some hilarious tweeters to get their take on what it means to get a laugh in the digital age.
HOW TO: Rescue Your Blog From Social Isolation
Let’s face it: You never really leave high school. The Internet realm is no different.
How the Gulf Coast Benefit is Using Social Media to Rally Support
On July 1st, the Gulf Coast Benefit presented a series of fundraising concerts in more than 65 different venues across the U.S. Social media is a major player in the campaign.
Beyond the Checkin: Where Location-Based Social Networks Should Go Next
Simply checking-in is not enough to keep users engaged. Location networks have to move from creating services that are location-based to those that are “location-enhanced.”
10 Beautiful Social Media Infographics
Infographics help communicate information in a digestible manner as they creatively present data in an understandable and engaging format. Here are 10 infographics that prove as beautiful as they are interesting.
How Social Media is Changing the Way Government Does Business
The traditional methods of obtaining and maintaining government contracts are full of red tape. Here are three ways social media is changing that.

For more social media news and resources, you can follow Mashable’s social media channel on Twitter and become a fan on Facebook.

Tech & Mobile

What Twitter Places Means for the Future of Location
The roll out of Twitter Places for all users has key implications for the future of location-based networking, and could finally bring the concept mainstream.
15 Awesome Android Accessories
To celebrate all that is Android we’ve pulled together a cool collection of Android-themed accessories from around the web.
5 Unusual Ways to Use Apple's iPad [VIDEOS]
To celebrate the many diverse uses of the Apple tablet we’ve pulled together five fun clips that show people utilizing the iPad in extraordinary ways.
5 Companies Reinventing the Way We Think About Mobile
This post focuses on five companies that are changing mobile that you may not know by name, but certainly benefit from their continued innovation.
Free Music Monday: 10 Free Tracks Are All Yours
10 free tracks in honor of the #musicmonday tradition on Twitter.
5 Fun Ways to Help Your Kids Learn Math Online
Math doesn’t have to be a dull subject when it’s taught with music, games, and iPhone apps. Check out these 5 ways to keep your kids’ summer educational and fun.
6 Brilliantly Designed Mobile Sites
Here are six examples of brilliantly designed mobile websites, chosen from six different verticals.
7 Hackathons Around the World and on the Web
Do 48 straight hours of hardcore programming sound like a good time? Maybe in concept alone, which is why you should just read about these events in this post.
10 Fun iPod Speakers for Listening in Style
An iPod is only as good as its speakers, even if what matters to you is “cool factor” more than audio fidelity. This list will help you crank the volume in style.
How an iOS-Based Apple TV Could Change the Battle for the Living Room
Apple may be planning to introduce a television product with iOS embedded into it, offering an out-of-the-box connected experience.

For more tech news and resources, you can follow Mashable’s tech channel on Twitter and become a fan on Facebook.

Business

How Real Estate Pros are Using Social Media for Real Results
Whether they are sharing videos, listings or advice with prospective buyers or sellers, real estate pros are using social media for real results.
HOW TO: Better Serve the Social Media Customer
Here’s a look at how each department can blend traditional and social media to drive business goals and collaborate on a seamless customer experience.
6 Ways to Manage International Relationships Online
Sometimes the hardest part of having international clients is finding a way to connect with them, despite different time zones, languages and customs.
6 Challenges to Managing a Brand on the Social Web
From the tools you use today to the ones you’ll need tomorrow, six social media experts tackle challenges to managing your brand on the social web.
5 Rules for Professional Social Networking Success
Social media has opened up fantastic new ways to make and keep professional connections. Here are five best practices for tapping in.

For more business news and resources, you can follow Mashable’s business channel on Twitter and become a fan on Facebook.

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, alengo, and Add to Design

Reviews: Android, Facebook, Mashable, Twitter, iStockphoto

More About: business, facebook, Features Week In Review, List, Lists, Mobile 2.0, small business, social media, tech, trending, twitter, youtube

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Wikipedia Is Down [Updated]

Posted: 04 Jul 2010 07:20 PM PDT

Twitter is pumping out reports that Wikipedia has been down worldwide for nearly an hour, and if you travel to wikipedia.org or another Wikimedia property, you’ll get confirmation in the form of a message saying, “Sorry! This site is experiencing technical difficulties.”

This is just a few hours after both the iTunes Store and YouTube were hacked, so it would seem that in addition to Independence Day for the United States, today is Disaster Day for the Internet.

Wikipedia last experienced a major bout of downtime this March. That outage occurred when a European datacenter overheated, forcing Wikimedia to use backups in Florida. Unfortunately, the transition process caused a DNS resolution problem that made all of the organization’s websites inaccessible — including Wikipedia.

As for this outage, we haven’t seen any explanation from Wikimedia as to why the sites are down today, but we’ll keep you posted if one is given, or when the sites return to normal operation. So far the organization has simply tweeted, “We’re aware that the site isn’t working as usual and we’re figuring out the problem now. We’ll let you know more soon!”

UPDATE: The Wikipedia Twitter account was just updated with this message: “Thanks for being patient, everyone. We’ve figured out the problem: power outage in our Florida data center. Slowly coming back online!”

Reviews: Internet, Wikipedia, YouTube

More About: down, downtime, outage, wikimedia, wikipedia

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HOW TO: Create a Pixel Fireworks Animation Using JavaScript

Posted: 04 Jul 2010 05:44 PM PDT

Kelli Shaver is freelance developer and UI designer. You can follow her on Twitter @KelliShaver and on GitHub here.

It’s 4^th of July, and for those of you in the U.S., you know what that means — it’s time to grab a beer, throw a steak on the barbecue, and blow stuff up. Why not get into the spirit of things with a little explosive goodness right on your website or blog?

In this article, we’ll create a simple fireworks effect using jQuery that can be applied to any element on your web page. Use it to add fireworks to photos, backgrounds, or anywhere else you feel like blowing up a few pixels. The result is fairly basic, but it’s still pretty cool and it will provide you with a good primer on JavaScript animation.

Setting Up the Page

To start with, we’ll need a little bit of markup, mostly for demonstration purposes.

This is pretty straightforward. We’re just setting up some basic HTML, and grabbing jQuery from Google’s CDN. We’re also calling fireworks.css and fireworks.js, which we’ll create in a moment. jQuery is my JavaScript framework of choice, so it’s what I’ll be using to create the fireworks. This takes a lot of work out of animating our explosions.

Once the markup is out of the way, we can move on to our CSS. Again, it’s fairly simple. We just need to define a couple of elements, namely the container that will hold the fireworks (‘#photo’ in this case), and a small div we can use as our base particle, which we’ll be using instead of an image, so we can easily change the color.

Let’s start with the container. I grabbed a nice photo of a lake at night from Stock Exchange and plan to use that as my background.

Most of the CSS above is simply for defining the height, width, and position of the photo on the page, but there are a few things to note. We’ve set the overflow to ‘hidden’ so that our fireworks don’t shoot off the photo, and added position:relative, because we will be absolutely positioning our particle elements within the photo. As you can see, there’s no image tag in the HTML for the photo. It’s used as the div background, instead. That way we don’t have to worry about it when manipulating the contents of our photo div.

Next, we need to define the CSS for our base particle. All we need to do is specify a height, width, and tell the browser to use absolute positioning. I’m using a 3px by 3px particle, but if you’re using a larger, or smaller photo, you may want to adjust the particle size.

Now you should have something that looks like this. I added in some CSS for page body as well, but it has no bearing whatsoever on the fireworks.

Creating the Animation

With these out of the way, we’re ready to move on to the meat and potatoes of the project — the JavaScript.

Before we can begin writing our explosion function, though, we’ll need a quick method for duplicating our particles. We could always use jQuery’s built-in clone method, but since we’ll be making a lot of copies, let’s go with something a little more efficient.

Since I’m a big fan of not re-inventing the wheel, I’ll just use a handy little plug-in I found over at jQuery Minute that extends jQuery with a .duplicate() function.

The linked article above has a good explanation of how the plug-in works, so I’ll not elaborate. For now, all we care about is that we can call it on our particle element by using .duplicate(50) for instance, which will give us 50 copies at our disposal.

Alright, now let’s really get down to business and write our explosion function. Before we begin building animations and creating elements, though, we need to define a few variables that get set whenever the function is called.

Let’s go through this step-by-step and take a look at what each of these variables are for.

sky – This is a jQuery object for the element that will contain our fireworks, built by passing the element ID at runtime, like so: explosion('photo').
colors – A simple array of some bright colors to use for our fireworks. We’ll be creating single-color fireworks, and multi-colored ones.
emitter – We create a simple div object and give it the particle class. This will be the base or center of our explosion.
multicolor – A random number from 0-10 used later to determine whether or not to make the firework multi-colored.

Now that we’ve created our emitter object, we need to add a couple of additional CSS properties to it. It’s best to do this before appending it to the DOM, so let’s do that.

Once the emitter is styled, we can append it to our container. While we’re at it, let’s go ahead and make those duplicates, as well.

Whoa! Hang on. What’s with all the math? Don’t worry. We’re just creating random numbers^*. This means that when our firework goes off, it will be randomly placed on the photo.

In this case, the width is a random number between 3 and the width of our photo (400), and the height is a random number between 3 and 100, because we only want fireworks to appear in the top 100px of the photo (the sky). Why 3? No particular reason at all, other than that I wanted to ensure that the explosion is always centered a bit inside the photo’s edge.

Finally, we get the background color by pulling a random color from the array.

^* To create a random number within a range, take the difference of the maximum value minus one less than the minimum value, multiply that by the value from random(), which will be between 0 and 1. Then multiply it by the maximum value. Last, wrap all of that in the floor() function, to convert the result into an integer.

Great! Now we have 51 particles sitting on our canvas in the x,y coordinates we randomly determined above. All we need to do now is give them a little animation and possibly a new coat of paint.

To do this, it means we have to loop through them. That being the case, I really wouldn’t recommend making more than 50 or so particles, because it can get a little resource-intensive on older machines.

jQuery’s .each() function allows us to step through the array of elements, executing the code inside on each of them.

You’ll notice here we’re setting an x offset and a y offset. These determine which direction the particle is going to move in, and by how much. Using the same formula as above, these offsets will be random numbers in the range of -10 to 10 (for up/down and left/right, respectively).

Remember when we generated a random number above for our multicolored variable? Now let’s use it and see if we need to create a multi-colored explosion by changing the color of the current particle. I want multi-colored fireworks a little less than half the time, so I chose to use 5 as my cut-off point. You could change it around however you like.

This should be fairly self-explanatory at this point. If the value of multicolor is greater than 5, change the particle’s background by grabbing another random color from the colors array.

Now let’s put these particles in motion. We’re going to set up an animation sequence, based on the x and y offsets we determined above. To get the total length of each particles animation, we’ll multiply those offsets by 10. This gives us a nice spread between -100x, -100y and 100x, 100y, from the center point, meaning our explosion will have a maximum diameter of 200px. Depending on the size of your photo, you may want to make this larger, or smaller (Hint: If you’re making it larger, use bigger particles for a better effect).

As you can see, we also set the animation speed to 2.5 seconds (2500 milliseconds), which gives us a smooth, uniform expansion of particles out from our center point.

All we have to do now is sort out what to do with the particles once they’ve reached the end of their animation sequence. Well, what do fireworks do after they’re done fireworking? They drop a little and fade away, so we’ll make our particles do just that.

The above animation, executed after the expansion animation has completed, drops the particle by 20px while simultaneously fading it to 10% opacity. We use the “slow” duration preset, so the particles appear to “hang” slightly in the atmosphere.

That’s it! You can now call the explode() function to set off a firework on your photo, either triggering it manually, or calling it automatically when the page loads. In the example, I’m calling it every 3 seconds via setInterval.

Unfortunately, we can’t run the animation here, but you can check out a video demo below:

I hope you enjoyed the tutorial. You can view a live example of the fireworks here, or go straight to the source.

More development and design resources from Mashable:

- Top 10 Resources for Design Inspiration
- HOW TO: Get Up-to-Date on WordPress 3.0
- 7 Hackathons Around the World and the Web
- 10 Web Design Bloggers You Should Follow
- Top 10 Beautiful Minimalist Icon Sets

More About: 4th of july, animation, fireworks, how to, independence day, javascript, jquery, tutorial

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Google’s Rube Goldberg Logo Celebrates the 4th of July

Posted: 04 Jul 2010 03:41 PM PDT

Google has done it again with yet another cleverly executed logo on its home page. This time, it’s in honor of the 4th of July, 2010: a Rube Goldberg machine animation that culminates in fireworks.

Rube Goldberg was an American inventor in the early 20th century. The machines that carry his name execute long mechanical chain reactions to accomplish very simple tasks like lighting a fire cracker.

Yahoo and Bing have honored the United States’ Independence Day with special logos too. Yahoo shows a simpler fireworks animation and pitches a Fireworks Finder tool to users. Bing shows buildings form the U.S. capitol and 4th of July factoids.

Google’s logo will change by tomorrow, so we’ve included a picture below for readers who are going to miss out. A still image obviously doesn’t do it justice, though, so we’ve embedded YouTube user rustybrick’s video of the animation too. Enjoy!

Video

Picture

Reviews: Bing, Google, Yahoo!, YouTube

More About: 4th of july, 4th of july 2010, animation, Google, Holiday, homepage, independence day, logo, rube goldberg, rube goldberg machine

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20 Spectacular 4th of July Fireworks Displays on Flickr [PHOTOS]

Posted: 04 Jul 2010 01:39 PM PDT

For people in the United States, the 4th of July is about family, friends and time-honored traditions. Nothing says “Independence Day” quite like the night sky set ablaze with fireworks. This weekend we hope you’ll have time to relax and enjoy the fireworks displays in your area. If not — or if you just can’t have enough — we’ve found 20 gorgeous photos from celebrations past to feast your eyes upon.

Let us know your favorites in the comments below or tell us about the best fireworks display you’ve seen.

Boston, MA

[img credit: Craig Stevens]

St. Paul, MN

[img credit: Nick Busse]

Greenshores, TX

[img credit: Barry Yanowitz ]

New York City

[img credit: stuck in customs]

Chesterbrook, PA

[img credit: richpompetti]

Ann Arbor, MI

[img credit: jamelah]

Seattle, WA

[img credit: gerardov]

Kenosha, WI

[img credit: mike mertz]

Washington, DC

[img credit: NCReedplayer]

Somerville, MA

[img credit: sandcastlematt]

Bartlett, TN

[img credit: biggertree]

Seattle, WA

[img credit: SaCaSeA]

Lake Tahoe, CA

[img credit: tahoesunsets]

Miami, FL

[img credit: Bob B. Brown]

Rockville, MD

[img credit: vpickering]

Chicago, IL

[img credit: steve rhodes]

Sugar Land, TX

[img credit: Amyn Kassam ]

New Orleans, LA

[img credit: mira (on the wall)]

New York City

[img credit: Barry Yanowitz]

Ames, IA

[img credit: sarah cady]

More About: 4th of july, fireworks, flickr, gallery, Holidays

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YouTube Hacked, Justin Bieber Gets the Worst of It

Posted: 04 Jul 2010 12:13 PM PDT

Today, members of the Internet communities 4chan and other enterprising computer whizzes hacked YouTube using a vulnerability in the site’s comment system. While the hack was used on a variety of videos, striking music videos featuring teen pop idol Justin Bieber was the most popular activity.

Twitter lit up with complaints about the problem, Google support got some concerned posts on its forum, and we received tips in our inbox. The event caused quite a Sunday-morning stir.

The bug allowed users to inject HTML (the code that most websites are built with) that could be executed on the site, whereas HTML within comments is supposed to be restricted. The hackers did everything from force pop-up messages to appear over the site declaring that it had been hacked to redirecting Bieber video pages to sites hosting pornography and malware.

Google disabled comments within an hour of the start of the attack, then corrected the exploited bug within two hours, according to a statement sent to The Next Web.

Internet community 4chan has been waging a small cultural war against Justin Bieber, and its members exploited the bug to target the artist’s videos specifically. Last week they conspired to try and send Bieber to North Korea.

[img credit: Richard Cunningham]

Reviews: Google, Internet, Twitter, justin bieber, the complaints

More About: 4chan, hack, hacked, hacking, justin bieber, malware, music, music videos, porn, video, youtube

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iTunes Accounts Hacked [WARNING]

Posted: 04 Jul 2010 12:09 PM PDT

An unknown number of Apple IDs have apparently been hacked this week, and are being used to buy hundreds of dollars worth of apps in the App Store. It’s not yet clear whether the problem is widespread.

An initial report by blogger Alex Brie highlighted the fact that 40 of the top 50 iPhone apps in the Books category were created by Vietnamese developer “Thuat Nguyen”. A hack of the App Store rankings by a single developer was suspected.

However, Brie later added that numerous Vietnamese book apps were doing suspiciously well in the rankings — Apple responded to the blogger that the issue is being looked into.

Hack Reports on Twitter, App Store Reviews and MacForums

Further reporting revealed more problems: Twitter complaints and a MacRumors forum thread spotted by The Next Web show that a number of iTunes users have had their accounts compromised and used to buy hundreds of dollars of apps. In particular, reviewers of the Vietnamese book apps claim in the app’s reviews section that they never downloaded the apps, and instead had their accounts compromised.

A few complaints from the MacRumors forum:

Yesterday my credit union contacted me saying there was suspicious activity on my debit card. Sure enough over 10 transactions in the $40-$50 area all on iTunes equaling to $558. This is definitely a problem, since then I’ve e-mailed MSNBC hoping they’ll pick up the story and investigate this problem. — srslylia

–

A small $1.00-$3.00 charge, then random navigation apps totalling around $190.00. Cancelled the card and now working with credit union to get the charges removed.
I will never use my debit card with Itunes again. –tofublock

–

I also received a receipt via email on my “Purchases” on 7/2/10. I made the mistake of storing my debit card on the itunes store app. I have run into the exact same responses that other users are reporting–only email as a method of contact.
That response was to tell me how to change passwords, etc. – stock answers and to also tell me of no refunds. I was an internet technician for years so the iTunes advise was second nature for me but with little hope for “fixing” the issue since I believe that the breach was on the iTunes server. — beccid63

A Word of Caution

We don’t yet know whether these are isolated cases or part of a wider breach. It could be that blog posts about the Vietnamese book apps have provided an opportunity for others to come forward about unrelated compromises of their accounts. Or it could be that iTunes accounts really are being hacked in much greater numbers this week — in which case, Apple has another PR nightmare on its hands.

For now, we’d suggest iTunes users check their iTunes account for unusual transactions, and report these if found.

Reviews: App Store, Twitter, iTunes

More About: app store, apple, apple id, iphone apps, itunes, trending

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The 10 Founding Fathers of the Web

Posted: 04 Jul 2010 11:17 AM PDT

While the phrase “founding fathers” is often used in conjunction with men like Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson and George Washington, we wanted the think about the phrase on the global level. And what is more global than the world wide web? Thus, this holiday, we’re taking a look at 10 individuals who have been instrumental in helping to shape the world wide web and the culture of the Internet as we know it today.

Check out our round up below to learn about some of the most influential people in the creation and development of the ideas and technologies that have led to today’s web experience. Let us know in the comments if you think we’ve missed anyone!

1. Tim Berners-Lee

Why He Matters: Tim Berners-Lee is credited as the inventor of the World Wide Web. A physicist, Berners-Lee and his team built the world’s very first web browser, WorldWideWeb, the first web server and the HyperText-based markup language HTML.

Berners-Lee founded and is the current director of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), a standards body that oversees the development of the web as a whole. While the Internet itself dates back 1969, it was Berners-Lee who was able to bring together the concept of the Internet and hypertext, which set the foundation for the Internet as we know it today.

Because CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research) didn’t make the World Wide Web proprietary and never charged for dues, its protocols were widely adopted.

2. Marc Andreessen

Why He Matters: Marc Andreessen co-authored Mosaic, the first widely-used web browser and he founded Netscape Communications.

While Mosaic wasn’t the first graphical web browser, it was the first to garner significant attention. It was also the first browser to display images inline with text.

After designing and programing Mosaic, Andreessen went on to co-found Netscape Communications. Netscape’s flagship product, Netscape Navigator, had an enormous impact, by helping to bring the web to mainstream users. In 1998, Netscape released the code base for Netscape Communicator under an open source license. That project, known as Mozilla, became the basis of what we now know as Firefox.

3. Brian Behlendorf

Why He Matters: Brian Behlendorf was the primary developer of the Apache Web Server and one of the founding members of the Apache Group. While working as the webmaster for Wired Magazines’s HotWired web site, Behlendorf found himself making changes and patches to the HTTP server first developed at NCSA at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. After realizing that others were also adding their own patches, he put together an electronic mailing list to help coordinate the work.

By February 1995, the project had been given a name – Apache – and the entire codebase from the original NCSA server was rewritten and re-optimized. The real genius with Apache, other than its free and open source nature, was that it was built to be extensible. That meant that ISPs could easily add their own extensions or plugins to better optimize the server, allowing hundreds of sites to be hosted from just one computer server. Apache remains the most popular web server on the Internet.

4, 5, 6. Rasmus Lerdorf, Andi Gutmans and Zeev Suraski

Why They Matter: Lerdorf, Gutmans and Suraski are all responsible for what we know as PHP, the scripting language that remains one of the most used web languages for creating dynamic web pages. Rasmus Lerdorf first created PHP in 1995 and he was the main developer of the project for its first two versions.

In 1997, Gutmans and Suraski decided to extend PHP, rewriting the parser and creating what became known as PHP 3. The two then went on to rewrite the core of PHP, naming it the Zend Engine, and using that to power PHP 4. Gutmans and Suraski further went on to found Zend Technologies, which continues to do much of the development of PHP.

While Larry Wall’s Perl was one of the first general-purpose scripting languages to really take off on the web, the ease of use and embedability of PHP is what has made it take over as the defacto “P” in the LAMP stack (LAMP being a default set of components on which many web applications are based).

7. Brad Fitzpatrick

Why He Matters: Creator of LiveJournal, in many ways the proto-social network, the original author of memcached and the original authentication protocol for OpenID.

Fitzpatrick created LiveJournal in college, as a way for he and his friends to keep one another up to date with what they were doing. It evolved into a larger blogging community and implemented many features, like Friends Lists, the ability to create user polls, support for blog clients, the ability to send text messages to users, the ability to post by phone, post by e-mail, create group blogs and more that have become a standard part of communities like Facebook, Tumblr, MySpace, WordPress.com and Posterous today.

As LiveJournal grew and started to use more and more resources, Fitzpatrick started the memcached project as a way to speed up dynamic web applications and alleviate database load. It does this by pooling together the free memory from across your web servers and then allocate it out as needed. This makes it easy for large projects to scale. Memcached is in use by Wikipedia, Flickr, Facebook, WordPress, Twitter, Craigslist and more.

8. Brendan Eich

Why He Matters: He created JavaScript and now serves as the CTO of the Mozilla Corporation. Eich created JavaScript while at Netscape, first under the name Mocha, then under the name LiveScript, and finally as JavaScript. JavaScript made its official debut in December of 1995.

JavaScript quickly became one of the most popular web programming languages, even if its use cases in the early days were often visual abominations. However, as time has progressed, the advent of JavaScript libraries and frameworks, coupled with the power of Ajax has made JavaScript an integral part of the standards-based web.

9. John Resig

Why He Matters: John Resig is the creator and lead developer of jQuery, the most popular JavaScript library on the web. While other JavaScript libraries, such as Sam Stephenson’s Protoype, preceded jQuery, jQuery’s goal of being compatible across web browsers is what really sets it apart.

In the last two years especially, the momentum around jQuery has exploded and it is now reportedly in use by 31% of the top 10,000 most visited websites. It’s extensibility and the jQuery UI toolkit has also made it a popular adoption target in enterprise application development. Any JavaScript library that can make the leap from web developers to enterprise app builders is the real deal.

JavaScript continues to be one of the big forces within the standards-based web and jQuery is helping to lead the charge.

10. Jonathan Gay

Why He Matters: He co-founded FutureWave Software and for more than a decade was the main programmer and visionary behind Flash.

While not everyone is a fan of Adobe Flash, it’s important to remember how influential and instrumental the technology has been over the course of the last 15 years. Gay wrote a vector drawing program called SmartSketch back in 1993 for the PenPoint operating system, and after PenPoint was discontinued, the technology in SmartSketch was repurposed as a tool that could create animation that could be played back on web pages.

This product, FutureSplash Animator, was acquired by Macromedia in 1996 and renamed Flash. After the acquisition, Gay became Vice President of Engineering at Macromedia and he led the Flash engineering team. Over the years, his team implemented new elements to Flash, like Actionscript.

However, perhaps Gay’s pinnacle achievement with Flash was in the team he spearheaded to create what was then known as the Flash Communication Server (it’s now the Flash Media Server) which let Flash Player use the RTMP protocol to stream audio and video over the web. In essence, this technology is what allowed YouTube to be, well, YouTube.

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[img credits: European Parliament, Marc Andreessen, Ilya Schurov, chrys/Sebastian Bergmann, crucially, jsconf, badubadu]

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More About: brendan eich, founding fathers, john resig, List, Lists, marc andreessen, rasmus lerdorf, World Wide Web
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Senin, 05 Juli 2010