Blancer.com Tutorials and projects

The future, as William Gibson once said, is already here. It is just unevenly distributed. You can find the future in new technologies and the people who wade into them early on—people like Nick Bilton, the chief blogger for the New York Times. (His official title is lead technology writer because the New York Times doesn’t like to admit it employs bloggers, I guess). Bilton, who previously worked in the R&D department of the New York Times, has a book coming out titled, appropriately enough, I Live In The Future & Here Is How It Works.

Apparently, that future does not include Apple’s iBooks, the digital books Apple sells on the iPad. The book will be available in September in print, digital editions for the Kindle and Barnes & Noble’s eBooks, but not for the iBook. Bilton’s publisher, as a division of Random House, does not make its titles available in Apple’s iBook store. But no matter. There will be an accompanying iPad app, iPhone app, and mobile website.

I caught up with Bilton a couple weeks ago, and he showed me a preview of the mobile website, which he explains in the video above. Each chapter has a 2-D barcode that can be scanned with a camera phone to bring up a corresponding Webpage with all of the links referenced in that chapter, videos, and the ability to comment. In that way, each chapter will become like a blog post with reader comments and discussion. I am not sure you can do any of that stuff with an iBook anyway. In the future, everything is an app.

Part of the book tries to answer the question of what effect the Internet is having on our brains. Unlike another author named Nick (Carr), Bilton does not think the Internet is a making us stupid. I concur (you can watch Carr interviewed on TechCrunchTV by Andrew Keen). When Bilton looks at the brain research, he finds evidence that people can process information just fine when skipping from text to video to links, as long as all the different bits are related.

Fresh off the heels of launching a slew of new products yesterday, Apple this morning debuted Safari 5.0.1, switching the flip on Safari Extensions and formally introducing the Safari Extensions Gallery, a directory of available extensions across categories.

The company had introduced extensions support in Safari 5 last June, giving developers the opportunity to start creating browser add-ons using HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript standards.

Perhaps surprisingly, two fierce Apple competitors were given the opportunity to tout their extensions first and foremost, namely Amazon.com with their Wish List extension and Microsoft with their Bing Extension for Safari. Also featured in the press release: MLB.com, The New York Times and Twitter (eBay also gets featured on the Gallery site).

The new Safari Extensions Gallery is accessible straight from the browser menu or at extensions.apple.com. Users can download and install extensions from the gallery with a single click, and there’s no need to restart the browser (much like Google Chrome, and unlike Firefox).

I did a quick count and came out at above one hundred extensions already.

Add-ons can be automatically updated and are managed within Safari. Users can enable or disable individual extensions, or turn off all extensions with one click.

Every Safari Extension comes signed with a digital certificate from Apple to “prevent tampering” and to verify that updates to the extension are from the original developer. Safari Extensions are also sandboxed, which prevents them from accessing information on a user’s system or communicate with websites aside from those specified by the developer.

As Apple had made clear earlier, Safari Extensions run solely in the browser.

Not so tiny after all: Tinychat, a simple text, video and audio communication platform, is growing by leaps and bounds.

First launched in February 2009 as a simple way to create Web-based chat rooms, Tinychat today is a full-blown chat system with lots of bells and whistles.

And the service is gaining traction, fast.

Founder Dan Blake tells me they’ve reached a point where they’re gaining 10,000 new users on a daily basis (or roughly 300k per month), which is a lot considering registration isn’t even required to use Tinychat, and that they’re seeing 500 million minutes of usage per month.

Blake adds that Tinychat, which won the award for best bootstrapped startup at our most recent Crunchies show, has over 50 servers in production to keep the service up and running 24/7, and that they’re seeing 11% week over week growth in page views these days.

He also stresses that, unlike sites like Chatroulette, there’s a moderation team working around the clock to make sure no nudity, other offensive and illegal content shows up.

To make the service more appealing for users around the world, Tinychat is today introducing a new feature: real-time chat translation. Basically, users can now select in which language they want to read messages, regardless the native tongue of their conversation partner(s). The feature was built using Google’s Translate API, which means dozens of languages are supported and sometimes comprehensible translations are even served up.

In all seriousness, the translations are actually pretty decent, and I think it’s a really cool feature. It reminds me a lot of XIHA Life, a social network that is also banking on real-time chat translations to position itself in a unique way.

Check it out and let us know what you think.