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<img class="alignright size-full wp-image-13913" title="iPhone" src="http://www.website-monitoring.eu/wp-content/plugins/wp-o-matic/cache/32f28_iphone1stgen.jpeg” alt=”iPhone” width=”150″ height=”142″ />There’s no doubt that when the first iPhone was launched in 2007, it revolutionized not only the mobile phone industry, but the tech industry at large.

But what we have discovered is that, at least in terms of the guiding principles behind the iPhone’s raison d’être, Apple has been thinking about this for a long time.

What we’re about to reveal originates in a document dated 1979, in which Jef Raskin, then Manager of Publications at Apple, laid out many guiding principles behind the Macintosh computer’s design.

It’s almost spooky how applicable it is to the modern Apple and its thinking especially behind the iPhone.

The origin of the thinking behind the iPhone

In this document, Raskin referred to the Macintosh as “a communications device,” something that arguably would have been rare back then. He clearly saw that the Macintosh, to be able to reach its full potential, needed to be connected to other Mac computers and devices.

One part of Raskin’s text, in particular, seems to paint an accurate picture of present-day Apple. Remember that this is written over 30 years ago.

If you replace “the telephone network” with “the Internet,” could that not be a part of Steve Jobs’ keynote address in 2007 when he introduced the iPhone?

But, wait, there’s more.

The origin of apps

For Raskin, a guiding principle behind the Macintosh computer was to answer the question of “What do you do with this?” He wrote that it was a question that haunted the personal computer industry at the time.

Sure, a personal computer was good for many things, like balancing checkbooks, writing letters, and playing chess. But for many users, the computer was still just a piece of technology without any real use. It was cool, perhaps, but people couldn’t really see how it would fit in, especially in their personal lives.

He then made a leap in thinking from what computers were known for at the time, to what he saw them as becoming in the future.

“It is clear that one answer to the question ‘What do you do with it?’ will probably be: ‘I use it to send birthday greetings to Aunt Tillie,’” Raskin wrote.

Now, whether it’s actually sending a birthday greeting to Aunt Tillie or not, it’s easy to follow Raskin’s thinking, because this sounds just like what we call apps today.

In fact, he mentioned a number of ideas for apps that could be created for the Macintosh, including:

• News
• Stock Market
• Weather Travel Info
• Local, area or national business directory
• Library of Congress card catalog
• Program exchange
• Educational courses and testing
• Computer dating
• Banking
• Access to large data storage for individual needs
• Market research
• Purchasing information
• Dictionary and Encyclopedia searches

Doesn’t that just sound like many of the icons you now have on your iPhone or other smartphone?

Back to the future

Unless you’re Marty McFly, it’s probably rare to be struck by such a back to the future sensation as we were when we read Jef Raskin’s text from that long ago. It seemed to fit in so exactly with Apple even of today, that it sent a chill down our spines.

Of course, it’s not the case that Apple was actually thinking about the iPhone in 1979. But it certainly seems like some of the fundamental guiding principles that Apple applied when developing the iPhone can be traced back to the early days of the company’s history.

Perhaps that’s one of the real strengths of Apple, that it has managed to stay true to such principles.

About Jef Raskin

<img class="alignright size-full wp-image-13747" title="Jef Raskin" src="http://www.website-monitoring.eu/wp-content/plugins/wp-o-matic/cache/8a8e9_raskin.jpeg” alt=”Jef Raskin” width=”200″ height=”267″ />Raskin joined Apple in 1978 and served as Manager of Publications, and started lobbying for the company to develop a new computer. This new computer, what would later become the Macintosh, should be designed, from the start, to be easy to use.

In 1979, Raskin started the Macintosh project to implement some of his ideas. As it turns out, he laid out many of the guiding principles for the design of Apple’s products, that we see implemented today, over 30 years later.

Sadly, Jef Raskin passed away in 2005.

The photo of Jef Raskin appears courtesy of Cea.

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<img class="alignright size-full wp-image-13874" title="CERN" src="http://www.website-monitoring.eu/wp-content/plugins/wp-o-matic/cache/d26b2_cern-stamp-icon.jpg” alt=”CERN” width=”150″ height=”150″ />We’ve noted many successful open source projects and products before on this blog, and the Web is arguably the biggest one of them all.

Two such products we’ve failed to recognize, however, are the very first web browser and server, simply called World Wide Web, developed by Tim Berners-Lee.

Today is especially important in the history of the web since on April 30, 1993, CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, released World Wide Web into the public domain.

<img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-13881" title="CERN WorldWideWeb" src="http://www.website-monitoring.eu/wp-content/plugins/wp-o-matic/cache/b1d7f_cern1.jpg” alt=”CERN WorldWideWeb” width=”250″ height=”315″ />

In the document making the release official, W. Hoogland, Director of Research, and H. Weber, Director of Administration, referred to World Wide Web, or W3 for short, as “a global computer networked information system.” It further stated that “CERN’s intention in this is to further compatibility, common practices, and standards in networking and computer supported collaboration.” (page 1, page 2)

Just four years before open sourcing W3, Tim Berners-Lee had written a proposal for World Wide Web, which by 1991 had turned into a product that was spreading around the world. We should be thankful that Berners-Lee’s boss noted on the proposal “vague, but exciting,” because it allowed him to continue with the work.

With browsers being widely available for free today, it’s interesting to note that the early versions of W3 were not free. The World Wide Web browser was available for NeXT workstations and Apple Macintosh computers for 50 Euros per computer. Source code could be purchased for 50 Euros per site.

World Wide Web is still available

If you want to lay your hands on this important piece of history, it’s still available at evolt.org.

Worth noting is that since it was an application for NeXTSTEP, it does still appear as an application in today’s Mac OS X, although it can’t be executed. But if you right-click on the icon, and select Show Package Contents, you can explore the original web software.

The original W3 may not be of much practical use today, but it’s a piece of tech history of immeasurable importance.

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<img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-13855" title="IKEA Knäppa" src="http://www.website-monitoring.eu/wp-content/plugins/wp-o-matic/cache/cc58e_knappa.png” alt=”IKEA Knäppa” width=”580″ height=”225″ />

Knäppa is a recyclable camera just introduced by IKEA. It is complete with zoom (move your arms in and out) and image stabilization (rest your arms on something).

Clearly, Knäppa is super simple, made out of one sheet of cardboard that folds up, one button, two plastic screws, two batteries, and a USB port. The company wants customers to use the camera to take pictures of their homes to share with others through the IKEA website.

But what may be the most amazing thing about the Knäppa camera is that its manual comes in 29 languages. Here’s the English page from the manual:

<img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-13856" title="IKEA Knäppa manual" src="http://www.website-monitoring.eu/wp-content/plugins/wp-o-matic/cache/8456a_ikea-knappa.png” alt=”IKEA Knäppa manual” width=”580″ height=”402″ />

That it’s IKEA that’s delivering 29 languages in a camera manual is not a big surprise. After all, the infamous IKEA catalog is available in 27 languages and printed in almost 200 million copies annually.

But do you know of any manual, for a camera or some other piece of technology, that is made in more languages than the one for Knäppa?

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<img src="http://www.website-monitoring.eu/wp-content/plugins/wp-o-matic/cache/77eba_big-brother-200px.png” alt=”Big Brother watches you” title=”Big Brother watches you” width=”200″ height=”200″ class=”alignright size-full wp-image-13812″ />George Orwell’s arguably most famous novel, the dystopian Nineteen Eighty-Four, coined a number of phrases that are in widespread use today. One of them was “Big Brother,” an authority figure who watches every move you make, everywhere. The term has become synonymous with mass surveillance. As you can imagine, the book is easily as relevant today as it was back in 1949 when it was first published. (It’s a great read, btw.)

The usual complaints about modern-era Big Brothers – aside from that annoying reality show – tend to be targeted at initiatives to place more surveillance cameras in various locations (e.g. the camera-riddled London). Then of course there is the monitoring of our activities on the Internet by governments, ISPs and organizations with their own agendas.

Today, however, something completely different is happening, and surprisingly few red flags have been raised. We, the collective, are providing the raw surveillance data. We, not some dystopian state, are becoming the ones who monitor.

How is this happening? The key is your smartphone. Or perhaps we should say, your social use of your smartphone.

Rise of the collective Big Brother

You love your smartphone, right? You love having constant Internet access, your social apps always at hand, a camera, a video camera, and more, all in your pocket. And you use it a lot.

We’re getting used to a life increasingly under public scrutiny, and we’re getting used to sharing. Just a few years ago, none of us were sharing as much about ourselves, or others, as we are today. We, the collective social media user base, are building an enormous database of what is essentially a kind of surveillance data.

<img src="http://www.website-monitoring.eu/wp-content/plugins/wp-o-matic/cache/ef44a_big-brother-movie-580px.jpeg” alt=”1984 movie” title=”1984 movie” width=”580″ height=”261″ class=”alignnone size-full wp-image-13810″ />
Capture from the film version of 1984, via Wikipedia.

Many of us keep taking photos and maybe even videos of friends, ourselves and locations we hang out in or visit. Then we upload them to <a href="http://www.website-monitoring.com/blog/2010/03/17/facebook-facts-and-figures-history-statistics/”>facebook, <a href="http://www.website-monitoring.com/blog/2010/05/04/twitter-facts-and-figures-history-statistics/”>twitter, Instagram, and many other places.

Not only that, all this sharing often comes with attached location information and timestamps. This on top of the dedicated check-ins many do on <a href="http://www.website-monitoring.com/blog/2010/03/17/facebook-facts-and-figures-history-statistics/”>facebook and Foursquare. Then add the various tagging of pictures that is done on sites like <a href="http://www.website-monitoring.com/blog/2010/03/17/facebook-facts-and-figures-history-statistics/”>facebook (you know, tagging friends in photos).

Not all of us are doing this, but enough of us are. Collectively, we are providing the social networks with a wealth of information that can be accessed today via various public APIs. Pictures, videos, status updates, all with attached timestamps and location information.

We, the monitors

Although anyone with a bit of imagination can probably think up a dozen diabolical abuses of the data we provide to social networks, let’s take a couple of more mundane examples of things that are already happening.

For example, when you apply for a job, there is a good chance that your prospective employer <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/04/20/employers-use-<a href="http://www.website-monitoring.com/blog/2010/03/17/facebook-facts-and-figures-history-statistics/”>facebook-to-pre-screen-applicants_n_1441289.html” target=”_blank”>will check you out online, search for pictures of you in various situations, see what people you hang with, etc. Companies have been doing this for years. Not all, but the practice is common enough.

Another example is simply a practical consideration. House burglars can see when you’re not at home if you share your location online. As many as <a href="http://techland.time.com/2011/09/27/burglars-now-using-<a href="http://www.website-monitoring.com/blog/2010/05/04/twitter-facts-and-figures-history-statistics/”>twitter-<a href="http://www.website-monitoring.com/blog/2010/03/17/facebook-facts-and-figures-history-statistics/”>facebook-against-you/” target=”_blank”>4 out of 5 do this already. One of the truly nasty side effects of location sharing.

Then there is <a href="http://www.cultofmac.com/157641/this-creepy-app-isnt-just-stalking-women-without-their-knowledge-its-a-wake-up-call-about-<a href="http://www.website-monitoring.com/blog/2010/03/17/facebook-facts-and-figures-history-statistics/”>facebook-privacy/” target=”_blank”>the infamous Girls Around Me app, which was in creepy league of its own while it existed. The name pretty much speaks for itself.

<img src="http://www.website-monitoring.eu/wp-content/plugins/wp-o-matic/cache/5ffe9_banjo-screenshot-200px.jpeg” alt=”Banjo screenshot” title=”Banjo screenshot” width=”200″ height=”300″ class=”alignright size-full wp-image-13809″ />The Girls Around Me app was yanked from the iOS app store, but there are still apps like Banjo, which also drags in location data from various social networks. People don’t even have to “check in” anywhere, they simply show up based on the location included in their latest status updates or pictures. This is not aggregated, anonymized data; actual individuals populate the app.

There is a vast amount of collective “surveillance” data out there, and we keep adding to it. It is already technically possible to mine much of this shared data as a third party from various social networks via APIs. Apps like Banjo and Girls Like Me make this exceedingly clear.

Life in public is already changing our behavior

Here’s a very relevant anecdote of how our behavior is changing as a direct result of this collective surveillance.

Even if you’re not American you’ve probably heard about Spring Break, usually filled with wild partying, wet t-shirt contests, etc. Here’s the interesting the part: recently, these parties have started to calm down.

Why? Because now that everyone has a smartphone or at least a feature phone with a camera, you can’t go wild and not have it documented and uploaded to the Internet. College students are well aware of this, and don’t want to look bad.

Facial recognition could take things to a new level

<img src="http://www.website-monitoring.eu/wp-content/plugins/wp-o-matic/cache/5ffe9_face-200px.jpeg” alt=”face” title=”face” width=”200″ height=”256″ class=”alignright size-full wp-image-13833″ />There’s also an elephant in the room, facial recognition. The technology already exists and is in limited use in various applications such as iPhoto, Picasa and even <a href="http://www.website-monitoring.com/blog/2010/03/17/facebook-facts-and-figures-history-statistics/”>facebook. Facial recognition applied broadly on social network data would open up a whole new can of worms.

Here is a scenario: Imagine taking a picture in a restaurant or at a party, or even in the street. Now imagine facial recognition being applied to it, coupling everyone in the shot with a database of people. We could get a list of everyone in the shot, even people in the periphery who you don’t know or care about, people unaware they were having their picture taken.

Now imagine this being done routinely on all pictures on <a href="http://www.website-monitoring.com/blog/2010/03/17/facebook-facts-and-figures-history-statistics/”>facebook, where billions of photos are uploaded every month. Then combine it with the timestamps on these photos, and the location information.

Mind. Blown. At least it should be. You could track the activities of basically anyone this way, even if they don’t participate in social networks.

Oh, and then there’s voice recognition…

Conclusion

Privacy is an illusion these days. You don’t have to be a total privacy nut to see that. It also doesn’t take a genius to see that our collective information sharing is only increasing. An abundance of CCTV cameras aren’t necessary, we’re already monitoring ourselves. We provide the data, and many of us are already using it.

The question isn’t if someone will start abusing all this data, but when.

There’s a sticker on a radar screen in the movie Battleship which says, “In God We Trust, Everyone Else We Monitor.” It seemed appropriate to end with that.

Picture credits: Red Big Brother top picture and the Face via Shutterstock.

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Minneapolis, Minnesota – April. 20, 2012 – Dotcom-Monitor, (www.Dotcom-Monitor.com), today announced the immediate availability of BrowserView monitoring™ website speed testing solution testing using Chrome, Firefox, and Internet Explorer browsers from worldwide locations. “The 20th anniversary of Internet World is an ideal launch event for BrowserView monitoring,” said Vadim Mazo, Chief Technical Officer (CTO).  “Obviously, slow [...]
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<img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-13796" title="Ivy Bridge" src="http://www.website-monitoring.eu/wp-content/plugins/wp-o-matic/cache/776e7_ivy-bridge-core.jpeg” alt=”Ivy Bridge” width=”580″ height=”238″ />

This week we thought you would be interested in reading about the latest processors from Intel called Ivy Bridge.

Every Friday we bring you a collection of links to places on the web that we find particularly newsworthy, interesting, entertaining, and topical. We try to focus on some particular area or topic each week, but in general we will cover Internet, web development, networking, performance, security, and other geeky topics.

This week’s suggested reading about Intel’s Ivy Bridge

Intel’s Ivy Bridge: 10 Things You Need to Know :: PCMag

These chips build on a lot of the advancements of last year’s new design, the second-generation Core (AKA “Sandy Bridge”) chips, but introduce some new capabilities and features that might make them worthy of your consideration whether you’re planning on a simple upgrade or are looking at an entirely new PC. Here’s our list of the ten essential pieces of information about Ivy Bridge, one of the releases that will have a major impact on the computers you buy and use throughout 2012 and beyond.

A summary in 10 points.

Intel unveils new Ivy Bridge Core processors :: InfoWorld

Intel will announce new Ivy Bridge chips for ultrabooks and mainstream laptops and desktops in the coming months, he said. The company has 570 PC designs — 270 desktop and all-in-one and 300 laptop designs — in addition to the 100 ultrabook designs for Ivy Bridge already in the works.

Thunderbolt is coming to PCs.

Ivy Bridge Benchmark Surprises :: PCMag

Now that Intel has officially unveiled its 22nm Ivy Bridge processors, I wanted to see how well they would do while running complex spreadsheets. PCMag and others have benchmarks on things like games but I care more about productivity applications. The results were good, and in some cases, surprisingly strong; on some metrics, I saw faster performance on this quad-core chip than on the six-core Sandy Bridge-E chip Intel shipped just a few months ago.

In one word: impressive.

Ivy Bridge Debuts: Intel Core i7-3770K Review :: Kotaku

Since late last year Ivy Bridge seems to be the architecture everyone is waiting for. Although Intel is only anticipating a 10–15% processing performance bump when compared to Sandy Bridge, the big news comes in the form of improved graphics and efficiency, thanks to the move to a 22nm design process using new 3D transistor technology.

Charts and numbers galore.

Intel Core i7-3770K review: Ivy Bridge brings lower power, better performance :: ExtremeTech

Ivy Bridge is a “tick” in Intel’s tick-tock model, but the company is referring to its latest architecture as a “tick+.” The reason for the change is the disparity of improvement between Ivy Bridge’s CPU and GPU components. IVB’s CPU core is a die-shrunk Sandy Bridge (SNB) with a few ultra-low-level efficiency improvements. Performance improvements on the CPU side are in the 5-10% range. Unlike Westmere (Nehalem’s “tick”), which offered 50% more cores, Ivy Bridge keeps Sandy Bridge’s quad-core configuration.

If you have a Sandy Bridge system, no need to look at Ivy Bridge.

Intel’s Ivy Bridge: The Maximum PC Review :: MacimumPC

If you’re ready to write off Ivy Bridge as an incremental chip that you, the enthusiast, doesn’t give a damn about, you’re wrong. There’s a lot more to Ivy Bridge that makes it the default CPU for an enthusiast who doesn’t want to jump into the bigger, pricier LGA2011 socket. Don’t believe us? Read on to find out why you want this CPU instead of Sandy Bridge.

Ivy Bridge is a hell of a chip.

With Ivy Bridge, Intel poses a new threat to Nvidia and other graphics chip makers :: VentureBeat

Intel’s just-unveiled Ivy Bridge processor family promises faster processing power and better graphics, thanks to a massively-enhanced integrated graphics system. The news has prompted some analysts to say that Ivy Bridge could mean doom for manufacturers of dedicated graphics cards, such as Nvidia and AMD, because Ivy Bridge is just that good.

Mobile is where it’s at.

Intel Ivy Bridge Architecture Breakdown :: ITProPortal

As might be expected of a tick development, Ivy Bridge’s improvements aren’t sufficient to make it a compelling upgrade option for those with an existing Sandy Bridge system. The real success of Ivy Bridge will be that Intel has now set itself up well for the future with a successful transition to 22nm and the much improved tri-gate transistors that process uses. Once mobile Ivy Bridge CPUs start making their way into laptops the benefits the update brings will become far more noticeable than on the desktop, where energy efficiency isn’t usually as much of a concern as outright performance.

Mo’ details.

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<img class="alignright size-medium wp-image-4635" src="http://www.website-monitoring.eu/wp-content/plugins/wp-o-matic/cache/0a6bf_office365logo-300×179.jpg” alt=”" width=”300″ height=”179″ />

Office365 is the successor of Microsoft BPOS (Business Productivity Online Standard Suite) and it’s basically an online service allowing organizations’ employees to share information through the Internet. Office 365 consists of several Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) products, such as Exchange Online, Lync Online, and SharePoint online, together with the common Microsoft Office applications, such as Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, these are offered bundled free as Office Web Apps. Office365 allows employees to login with their accounts and then create, share, co-work, and send documents and messages. It is part of Microsoft’s cloud computing solution.

Let’s take a closer look at the components of Office365:

- Office Web Apps – allows you to use the basic features of Office Professional Plus through a simple web browser, all the major browsers are supported.

- Exchange Online – provides your organization with mailing functionality so your employees can write, send, and receive messages to each other or to outside contractors. With Exchange Online your users can share their free/busy information, arrange meetings, and save notes and tasks. It can be used from all common platforms, such as PC, Mac, Android, iPhone, etc. As part of the Office 365 packet, it is preconfigured to allow its users 25GB of space for each mailbox. All spam and virus filtering, along with backups and security, are the responsibility of Microsoft.

- SharePoint Online – is great for storing files for private access and collaboration. You can store your company’s templates on SharePoint and they will then be securely accessible to anyone working from anywhere. Multiple employees can access the same project files and save their changes.

- Lync Online – integrates with Exchange Online to show free/busy information, offers online communication, video conferencing, and more.

With all these applications hosted in the cloud, you can rest assured that your IT staff will only have the bare minimum of things to do locally. Microsoft signs a Service-level agreement (SLA) that guarantees you get 99.9% uptime for these applications in a secure manner.

With Office365 you get a monthly fee that is based on the number of users and the features they need. Microsoft provides several different plans and you can choose the one that best suits your needs. Here’s a list:

- The P family plan (P1) is designed for small companies with up to 50 users. It includes Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, Lync Online, and Office Web Apps.

- The E family plans (E1, E2, and E3) are designed for large enterprises that need the full features of Office 365.

-          E1 includes Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, and Lync Online.

-          E2 includes all the online services of E1 plus Office Web Apps.

-          E3 includes all the services of E2 plus some advanced features of Exchange Online and SharePoint Online, and Office Pro Plus licenses

- The K family plans (K1 and K2) are designed for users that don’t need the full Exchange and SharePoint capabilities, just a base minimum. These users don’t have a corporate email account, they are just provided access to the resources they need.

-          K1 includes Exchange Kiosk and SharePoint kiosk.

-          K2 includes the K1 features plus Office Web Apps.

Office365 works better for small to medium size businesses (SMB) that don’t have highly qualified IT personnel or very high performance servers. It’s not profitable for them to buy all the licenses for Windows Server, Exchange Server, SharePoint Server, and Office and host all these products on premise on dedicated servers with dedicated support (usually not 24×7). Not to mention the need to secure that infrastructure, provide disaster recovery plans, and perform and test scheduled backups. If you own or administer such a company, find the time to learn more about Office365 and give it a try.

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<img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-13277" title="10 questions about web performance" src="http://www.website-monitoring.eu/wp-content/plugins/wp-o-matic/cache/0372a_10-questions-2.jpg” alt=”10 questions about web performance” width=”580″ height=”160″ />

In this continuing series of interviews about web performance, we now turn to cloud application platform provider Heroku.

James Ward, Principal Developer Evangelist at Heroku, will take us through the current state of web performance, detailing what Heroku is working on, and give some advice, as well.

Pingdom: Why is web performance such a hot topic right now?

Ward: Web performance is a hot topic right now due to five current trends pushing the web in new directions. These trends are:

Globalization:
Web consumption across the globe is exploding. It’s no longer sufficient for a web application to only have low latency in one geographic area. The typical baseline TCP round trip between the east and west coast of the U.S. is around 100 ms. That may not seem like much, but it really adds up as distances and packet sizes increase. Using Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) and doing load testing from many disparate locations is now essential.

The mobile revolution:
The web is the backbone for most mobile apps. But that backbone can be slow, fragile and unpredictable due to inconsistent mobile Internet service. To provide predictable and consistent web performance on this shaky platform, you must optimize service calls for low latency, fast transfer, and reasonable timeouts & retries. Mobile apps that lock up when they are having connectivity issues are frustrating for users. Perhaps your app should cache enough data locally so that it continues to work even when the user can’t connect to your web service.

<img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-13752" title="James Ward, Heroku" src="http://www.website-monitoring.eu/wp-content/plugins/wp-o-matic/cache/56860_james-ward_Snapseed.jpg” alt=”James Ward, Heroku” width=”580″ height=”387″ />

Browser modernization:
Most consumers now have a modern web browser. This has created an opportunity to create more interactive applications that do more on the client-side via JavaScript. But that means more connections are needed to transfer the JSON data, JavaScript, CSS, etc. Each request needs to be optimized, sent in parallel, and handled concurrently.

Real-time Push:
More web apps are beginning to use real-time push / instant notifications as a core part of the web experience. These connections require more resources on the server than traditional request/response connections. Scaling the server-side of a real-time web application can be a serious challenge. Servers must now utilize techniques like Java NIO to move away from the typical thread-per-connection model which is inherently not able to handle the massive numbers of concurrent connections required by real-time web applications.

Big data:
The amount of data behind our web applications is expanding exponentially. Processing requests that have to dig through mounds of “big data” can cause serious slowdowns. New data stores like MongoDB, Neo4j, and Cassandra are helping us quickly sift through massive amounts of data but moving to these NoSQL systems is a whole new world for those of us who have primarily dealt with relational data stores. Relational data stores won’t be going away because they are great for “relational” data but now we have new tools in our toolbox, so we can avoid trying to make all data fit into a relational model.

Pingdom: There’s a lot of evidence that web users tend to leave a website if it loads slowly. Are users getting more demanding and impatient, or are there other reasons behind this?

Ward: The bar is being raised for website performance because some are doing it so well. If a user has to choose between a slow site and a fast one they will certainly go with the fast one. So, if you want to stay in the game then performance must be a primary feature not an afterthought. There is a variety of techniques for improving performance, but there isn’t a magic “make it faster” button. It will take a significant amount of time from engineering and ops to locate and fix bottlenecks.

Pingdom: Web performance involves a lot of testing and numbers. But at the end of the day, isn’t a user’s experience a personal and subjective experience? How do you reconcile the two?

Ward: It can be easy to get metrics for web performance. Getting the right metrics is the hard part. The emotional reaction a user has when a web site is “snappy” or “sluggish” is hard to translate into empirical tests. Especially since there are so many variations in network connection paths and client-side capabilities. Constantly verify that what is being tested aligns with actual user feedback. Having dev/prod parity also helps developers to experience something similar to what the actual users will experience. And if it’s slow for a developer then they are more likely to find the cause and fix it.

Pingdom: Could, at least part of, the answer to improved web performance for end users be tighter integration between the components involved, like hardware, software, networking, etc?

Ward: Web performance is only as good as it’s weakest link. Performance optimizations require an end-to-end perspective. It makes no sense spending weeks making a database call 50 milliseconds faster if your users are spending 10 seconds doing DNS resolution for the 15 domains your site uses.

A good test is to go to a friend’s house and have them load your site. That experience is hard to replicate on your own machine. If the experience is poor, identify the weakest link. Was it their browser, ISP, operating system, the path they took, something in your app, or something else? This is why cloud application platforms like Heroku are so important. Heroku provides a platform that has been optimized and services like Memcached that can be used to further optimize each piece of a system.

Pingdom: What’s the relationship between web performance and scalability?

Ward: In the past an easy way to improve web performance was by scaling vertically, meaning faster servers and more RAM. Unfortunately that well ran dry as CPU clock speeds topped out and viable memory limits were reached.

Now scalability happens horizontally by adding more CPUs and more servers. But scaling horizontally isn’t viable with the traditional shared state / session replication architectures. Now most developers are moving to a share-nothing / stateless model where the UI state moves to the client and shared state stays in the back-end data stores. This approach makes horizontal scalability simple and elastic enough to pair demand with resource allocation. At Heroku we make it unbelievably simple to scale apps horizontally.

Pingdom: Best practice in mobile web performance isn’t as well established as in other fields like desktop. Are we getting closer to a sort of universal agreement or understanding of performance in the mobile space as well?

Ward: The tools for simulating and testing what the web experience is like for desktop web users are very mature right now and there is a lot to choose from. But how do you test what a mobile web site will do if a user on their phone steps into an elevator half way through loading? The tools for doing these kinds of tests are immature but quickly evolving.

Pingdom: For someone who is going to start working with their web site and performance, where do you suggest they start? What should they do first?

Ward: They’ve already taken the first step by caring enough to read this! The second step is to make performance a real priority. Look at it as a feature that you have to deliver just like the other features. Then begin to identify the weakest links and the biggest problems.

Once the highest priority items have been identified use tools like Blitz, New Relic, and Pingdom Tools to automate the testing of the problem. After you’ve resolved the issue, keep the tests, so you can guard against regressions.

Pingdom: With everyone talking about cloud, it seems to be everywhere. What’s your view on cloud and web performance?

Ward: The cloud enables true horizontal scalability with usage-based pricing. This is a significant change from how we used to have to wait months to increase capacity. With the cloud, capacity is essentially unlimited and can be put into service within seconds. Heroku provides tools and APIs for scaling up and down instantly. For instance, if you want to go from one process handling requests to fifty. You can simply run:
heroku scale web=50

Pingdom: What are we going to see happen in the next few years in terms of web performance?

Ward: Most work right now is around making the basic optimizations like JavaScript minification happen automatically. There is also a significant amount of work happening right now to make real-time / comet / WebSocket communication more scalable on the server side. Things like socket.io for Node.js and Play Framework 2 have significantly enhanced the thread / IO utilization for these types of connections.

Pingdom: Finally, is there something exciting that you or your company is working on in terms of web performance that you can tell us about?

Ward: Heroku has a vibrant ecosystem called Add-ons where innovative service providers are instantly connected with Heroku platform users. Have a look at addons.heroku.com where you will see a giant list of proven and cutting edge service providers that enable you to do everything from performance monitoring to caching to NoSQL data storage. Heroku is constantly evolving, not just through our own work but also through the incredibly innovative work of our Add-on partners.

About James Ward

James Ward is a Principal Developer Evangelist at Heroku.

He focuses on teaching developers how to deploy Java, Play! and Scala apps to the cloud. James frequently presents at conferences around the world such as JavaOne, Devoxx, and many other Java get-togethers. Along with Bruce Eckel, James co-authored First Steps in Flex. He has also published numerous screencasts, blogs, and technical articles. Starting with Pascal and Assembly in the 80′s, James found his passion for writing code. Beginning in the 90′s he began doing web development with HTML, Perl/CGI, then Java. After building a Flex and Java based customer service portal in 2004 for Pillar Data Systems he became a Technical Evangelist for Flex at Adobe.

You can find him on <a href="http://<a href="http://www.website-monitoring.com/blog/2010/05/04/twitter-facts-and-figures-history-statistics/”>twitter.com/_JamesWard”><a href="http://www.website-monitoring.com/blog/2010/05/04/twitter-facts-and-figures-history-statistics/”>twitter, answering questions on Stack Overflow, and posting code at github.com/jamesward.

About the “10 questions about web performance” interview series

We have gathered some of the best and brightest minds in the web and IT industry to a discussion about web performance. Over the next few weeks and months, we’ll be rolling out a series of interviews, bringing together people from web design, mobile and computer hardware, web hosting, software, and other areas. You can find all the interviews in this series on the Royal Pingdom blog.

This was a post from the guys at Pingdom, a site monitoring service that makes sure you’re the first to know when your site is down. Check it out for free.

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In this show, we talk to <a href="http://<a href="http://www.website-monitoring.com/blog/2010/05/04/twitter-facts-and-figures-history-statistics/”>twitter.com/nsolling”>Nicolai Solling, Director of Technology Services at help AG, about security in general and google Drive in particular.

First, we continue on the topic of the Flashback Mac trojan, which continues to haunt the Mac community, even more so than previously thought. And apparently Macs spread malware to Windows PCs at an alarming rate. The main topic of the show is google’s new online storage service <a href="http://drive.google.com”>google Drive, and how you can secure the information you store in your online drive with TrueCrypt.

About the show

Pingdom’s Podcast is a show about Internet, web, security, mobile apps, and lots more. Every week guests from around the world join Pingdom to talk about what concerns and interests them. If you would like to be a guest on the show, <a href="http://<a href="http://www.website-monitoring.com/blog/2010/05/04/twitter-facts-and-figures-history-statistics/”>twitter.com/pingdom”>get in touch.

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This was a post from the guys at Pingdom, a site monitoring service that makes sure you’re the first to know when your site is down. Check it out for free.

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