Evolution of the Social Networking Map

In February 2008, in my What is Web 2.0 blog post I showed the following map about Social Networks, which came from xkcd.

Today, I saw on Le Journal du Geek the 2010 version and it speaks by itself. Notice the rise of FaceBook, YouTube, and Google for example but also the decline of MySpace and some others.


Only two years and an half between the two pictures. Changes are fast on the internet.

Performance Comparison of Major Web Browsers

I just finished reading this article about performance comparison of major web browser by Jacob Gube and wondered if everything was said. Unsurprisingly, Internet Explorer is presented as the worst and slowest browser. By the way, I often consider that people tend to appreciate criticizing when talking about Microsoft products in general.

But in the case were the tests complete ? It talked about speed, CPU, and read access time. But nothing about memory consumption. I jumped on the gun, took a look at my dozen tabs opened on Firefox and opened them as well under Internet Explorer 8 (IE8) and Chrome.

As you can see, Firefox momory consumption is bundled inside a single process while IE8 and Chrome creates several processes with different memory consumption.

But after summing all results, I was astonished to see that Internet Explorer 8 is the best browser concerning memory consumption. The fancy Excel graphic below perfectly illustrate that fact.

There is no doubt that IE 8 requires less memory than Chrome or Firefox.

For the sake of fairness, here are the types of websites I used for the test. All of them are common sites I use on a day-to-day basis:

• iGoogle
• Two bugtrackers: Mantis and Jira
• Two tabs concerned games on Kongregate.com
• A PHPMyAdmin and a MediaWiki pages
• A page on my online game (MMOG): Star Wars Combine
• A web page from the MySQL site, one from an online banking, one from a newspaper with forums, and that blog on sixrevisions.com

In my next post, I will maybe make performance and statistics reports about the number of crashes of each browser. ;)

Ten ways to sink an IT project

During the recent Project Management Institute (PMI) congress from last May, Andre Chrome made an interesting show about ten ways to sink your project. And of course it applies perfectly to any IT project and I modified them sightly for this purpose.

1. Be vague: Do not define any detailed scope that would force you to implement what you promised.


2. Begin the execution ASAP. Why make a planning when you already know lots of changes will happen.


3. Focus solely on your team. Clients will only interfere with your work.


4. Forgot about code documentation and instead prefer mutual trust with your client.


5. Go beyond your client expectations. As clients expect always more and fancy features, you will sign new contracts that will compensate for your losses and bugs.


6. Risk management ? By definition, risk is uncertain. Why bother planning for risk.


7. Quality is only important at the end of the project. The client will only look at the GUI anyway.


8. Avoid bureaucracy. Paperwork is a waste of (your) time.


9. Make sure your team works overtime. As IT project are overdue anyway, put pressure on your team from the start.


10. Throw away paper documents when the project is over. Paper files takes place in your office and none ever read them.

Here is the video of this presentation:

Server Fault: StackOverflow for Servers Issues

Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky have released the public beta of Server Fault. Based on their StackOverflow platform, it contains all existing features that made you love (or hate) StackOverflow.

While StackOverflow is oriented toward programmers, Server Fault aims to bring solutions to System, servers, and network administrators. Let's hope it will work as well. I cannot wait to see my first question answered.

Twenty years of World Wild Web

Happy birthday, Tim. ;)

The Web is indeed wide today ... but no less wild.

Google is the Heir of Sun Tzu

A few days ago I posted a pretty long article about my experience with setting up a SharePoint intranet. Less than twenty-four hours later, I received a LinkedIn invitation from someone working for the same company as I do but located at the other side of the world. That person kindly introduced himself to me, wrote a couple of nice words about my SharePoint article, and asked to be connected to each other. My first reflex was to immediately accept his network invitation - after all we are colleagues - and to thank him for his kind word.

I then started wondering how he had found my SharePoint blog article. My article was not the first one to be written about SharePoint. It is surely not the most detailed or the most complete article about that topic. Additionally my blog is not (yet ?) one of the most read and famous blogs of the world wide web. So how could he find me through that article so quickly ? Not even a day had passed since I had posted it on BlogSpot.

I then remembered that a few hours before getting the LinkedIn invitation, I had received my usual Google Alert digest. For those ignorant of Google Alerts mechanism, Google Alerts are email updates of the latest relevant Google results (web, news, etc.) based on your choice of query or topic. In other words, you enter a keyword or two and Google will bring you the search results right into your mail and when something new it added on the Internet concerning that keyword then a it will appear in your next Google Alert. And on that day, my Google Alert digest tuned for my company name contained my SharePoint article. Needless to say that from there it became as clear as 1 + 1 = 2. All people using Google Alerts with the same keyword had received the link to my blog. This was the right explanation. It could not be otherwise and a few hours later I even received the written confirmation. It was a good guess.

So what is the true meaning of this story ?
Google knows it all. It knows everything available online about you, about your company, about your competitors. It knows what has changed or what is new, and it knows it before you do. As such, Google sets itself in straight line with Sun Tzu so famous principle:

Know thy self, know thy enemy. A thousand battles, a thousand victories.