Whatever the frogans you make or browse, it’s always going to be a frogans. You can be sure of that because Frogans technology development has always been guided by a set of fundamental principals, self-imposed by STG Interactive. The aim of these principals is to help assure a high level of user-friendliness and usability in a frogans, whatever the frogans that frogans may be.

In a sense, Frogans technology is open on one end, and closed on the other. It’s open with respect to the use of FSDL. Under the FSDL perpetual license it will always be free to use for creating frogans, and even for creating frogans authoring tools. If a software company decides to create the equivalent of Dreamweaver for frogans, that’s fine. There’s no obligation to STG Interactive.

On the other hand, if someone wants to make an alternative to the Frogans Player - say one that accepts larger images, or can detect the date and time on your system - forget it. Why? Because frogans don’t do that.

I can’t say it enough: Frogans are not widgets. I should add: Widgets are not frogans. Oh no. They should be so lucky.

Here’s a short list of annoying things that will tell you that something is not a frogans:

• If it doesn’t have a frogans address, then it’s not a frogans.
• If it opens up without you intending it to, then it’s not a frogans.
• If you can’t rescale it immediately to the size you like, or hide it, then it’s not a frogans.
• If it slows down the performance of your computer, then it’s not a frogans.
• If it doesn’t function and display identically regardless of your operating system, then it’s not a frogans.
• If it animates without your input, then it’s not a frogans.
• If it passes behind another application, or application window, then it’s not a frogans.
• If it downloads to your hard disk, then it’s not a frogans.

And here’s a list of things that will annoy your computer that a frogans won’t do:

• If it opens up an application unexpectedly, then it’s not a frogans.
• If it contains HTML, JavaScript or Flash, then it’s not a frogans.
• If it interferes with the functioning of other applications, then it’s not a frogans.
• If it depends on the functioning of software other than the Frogans Player, then it’s not a frogans.
• If it puts a wiggle in your walk, then it could be frogans, or it could be what you had with your cereal this morning.

Frogans do not use cookies per se. For storing a frogans’ session information after a frogans has been closed it may be written to an end-user’s system drive as a “session identifier”.

You can think of a session identifier as kind of a smart cookie. By default, a frogans’ session identifier disappears when that frogans is closed. However, if the end-user adds a frogans to their “frogans favorites”, sort of like a list of frogans bookmarks, its session identifier may remain persistent, available on disk for that frogans to consult the next time it is opened. (When you add a frogans to your frogans favorites, a dialog box appears informing you that in doing so, you enable session identifiers to be written to your local drive).

For example, the frogans that you’re browsing contains a chess game which you’re playing against a server app. Each time you make a move the slide refreshes, sending to the server a session identifier describing the state of the game so that the server can compose the chessboard accordingly on the refreshed slide.

It’s 3am and you have to shut down the computer before the game ends. A good night’s sleep will help you rethink your strategy anyway. If this frogans is not designated as a “favorite” the state of your game will vaporize the moment you close it.

Fortunately, you had already added it to your frogans favorites. At 5am, when you open it up again, it has the same size and placement on your screen as it did at 3am, plus it displays the last slide you were visiting before you closed it.

And what’s more, it will remember the state of your chess game, thanks to its session identifier.

“Frogans favorites” is more than just a list of bookmarked frogans addresses. By default a frogans always opens to its homeslide, at full-size, in the middle of the screen. Adding a frogans to your frogans favorites 1) puts that frogans in your frogans favorites submenu for easy access, 2) sets your Frogans Player to remember the slide, the placement on your screen and the size of that frogans from when it was last viewed and 3) allows the last session identifier to remain on your disk, like a persistent cookie.

The Frogans Player’s default manner for opening frogans helps assure that frogans be accessible without being imposing. Keep in mind that, when opened, frogans are loaded into active memory only. So there is no need to cache frogans resource files on the end-user’s local drive. This helps keep your system insulated from potentially malicious documents, and besides, why clutter up your hard drive with unnecessary files?

With the end-user choosing to list a frogans in their frogans favorites, it puts power to decide if session data is written back into their own hands.

Before investing time, energy and maybe money into developing a frogans, you might look for comparable models existing on the Web. And you’re going to look at Web widgets.

(You might look at desktop widgets also, but I’m not going to discuss them here. While they may look more like frogans, they’re even less interactive than Web widgets. Functionally they have less in common with frogans.)

Web widgets are small; frogans are small. You might get your feet wet in the Frogansphere authoring a frogans based on a Facebook widget model (for example).

Above and Beyond the Web

Widgets, like those you see on Facebook, are presented within Web pages, physically and contextually. Web widget visibility is subject to Web browsing behavior, since they are available only as long as the end-user has their page on screen.

Imagine that widgets are on pages in a magazine. Close the magazine - no more widget. Frogans are more like (browsable) pictures on a wall.

So, instead of putting a widget on my Facebook profile page, I could put in a link to a frogans, which can be browsed on the frogans layer at the same time as my profile on the Web. If the end-user goes to another page, or closes their browser altogether, they can still continue to navigate that frogans (up there on the wall).

And the same frogans can be accessed from any kind of Web page, not just a Social Web platform. So, you know that you don’t need to cater to only the 18 – 35 crowd.

More than social

Widgets not made for the Social Web are few and far between. Why is this? It’s because of the Social Web’s viral nature. Widgets are meant to be installed on a maximum number of pages, often by the grace of their fad appeal (I think of them as being pseudo-ads disguised as toys). Rather than pay for their placement like real ads, they proliferate by being fun. Where else but on the Social Web can this idea work?

While a frogans might function very well within a social context, it doesn’t necessarily have to be fun and superficial to get traffic. Frogans have that magic ingredient of persistence which means that they don’t have to play the same game that Widgets, imprisoned in Web pages, must do.

Where to go from here

Now you know that 1) isn’t doomed to being a pure phenomenon of the Social Web, and 2) is persistent beyond the confines of your Web browser. So much for models that don’t apply; what about those that do?

The key to determining a use for a frogans lies in how you tap the strength of its persistence. A successful frogans hangs out on your desktop, being all at once informative, decorative and captivating.

Maybe it’s a slideshow of the greatest National Park photos, containing links for all sorts of information on the subject like the latest news and upcoming events - all this within the same frogans.

Maybe it’s a magazine cover on its frogans home slide, with excerpts from the issue on the inside, complete with links to other frogans (or to Web pages) for supplemental information. At any rate, you think it’s a cool mag, and you like seeing it’s cover on your desktop.

Or maybe it’s your personal frogans for your friends, be they the ones you’ve met in person, or on MySpace. Maybe this is how the Social Frogansphere will operate.

The common thread here is in the end-user’s acceptance of a frogans as something with enough personal relevance and utility to merit an extended stay on their desktop. It’s kind of like that t-shirt sporting the logo of you favorite beer that you wear at barbecues. Or was that a tattoo?

A suggestion

Base your frogans on something people can identify with. It’s kind of a funny idea, but while you can express yourself through your frogans, the end-user also expresses his or herself when they decorate their desktop with it.

…It works perfectly well at the moment.”

That’s a good question that I was asked in a recent exchange, and it inspired me to write this post.

A Swiss Army Knife doesn’t replace a toolkit. But who wants to lug around fifty pounds of wrenches and hammers all day?

Simple + secure + cohesive = captivating

The idea of Frogans technology is not to reinvent the Web, nor to replace it, but to provide end-user with a complimentary way to interact with online content that takes user-friendliness to a new level.

Simple

Two elements omnipresent in Web use encumber the end-user: The browser window and URLs. Frogans don’t employ application windows. Every frogans is its own entity on your screen, each being identified by its single frogans address, each containing a potentially unlimited number of slides. Navigate within a frogans, between different frogans, or between a frogans and other layers of the Internet, such as the Web or email.

Frogans addresses simplify frogans navigation. Rather than being tied to hosting-provided IP addresses and their subdirectories, frogans addresses are singular names chosen by the frogans publisher for each of their frogans. This allows the publisher more flexibility with their hosting options, and the end-user less complexity for navigating.

Secure

FSDL (Frogans Slide Description Language), though compatible with all server-side applications, is the only language in which you may author and develop a frogans, and allows no executable scripts, meaning that the end-user can expect more security against malicious online content.

There is no hard disk cache for frogans resources (FSDL, GIF, JPG and PNG). These are loaded into active memory only, isolating them from your system’s resources.

Frogans addresses are looked up and validated through digital signatures in FNSL (Frogans Network System Language) between the end-user’s Frogans Player and frogans networks.

Cohesive

The three pillars of Frogans technology, FSDL, FNSL and the Frogans Player (for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X), work together in complete harmony with the singular goal optimizing the end-user’s navigating experience.

Captivating

Suddenly the end-user can maintain persistent contact with online content without sacrificing the functionality and security of their computer. User-scaleable frogans blend in with your desktop environment. No model for this kind of interactivity exists on the Web.

In advance of the Frogans Player release STG Interactive is going to produce a free AJAX-driven frogans development utility, called the FSDL Online Validator.

The FSDL Online Validator will allow you to write and edit FSDL 3.0 code, and render it as a frogans slide directly in your Web browser. You can start from templates and code examples, or work from scratch. You can even temporarily upload your own image files to use in your frogans slides. To save your work, copy and paste your code into a text editor document. This way, you get to try your hand at FSDL before the Frogans Player becomes available, and start building your own library of FSDL documents and code samples.

Features in the FSDL Online Validator will include:

• Live button roll-overs: Rendered buttons in your frogans slide will react to your mouse as they will in the Frogans Player
• Two size views: See your slide at its maximum (320 x 240 pixel grid) and minimum (80 x 60 pixel grid) sizes simultaneously
• Resource views: Preview your resources (image files, polygon images, text) separately
• Parsing-error messages: Should there be errors in your code, you will know where, and why
• Multi-language support: Choose the language in your interface, including parsing-error messages
• Frogans Player rendering conformity: Rendering is handled by the rendering engine from the Frogans Player

I should specify that what you create and view in the FSDL Online Validator are not complete frogans, but individual frogans slides. How a slide appears is an important aspect of what makes a frogans. But a frogans comes to life when it’s viewed and navigated. It’s an online desktop experience that’s completely apart from what is possible through a Web browser.

Frogans, with an “s”. For some reason, which nobody seems to remember, “frogans” is always spelled with an “s” at the end, whether we’re talking about one frogans or a whole flock of frogans.

It’s funny how this affects the way we talk about frogans. For instance, I could ambiguously say “Look at the frogans”, but it would have been better had I said “look at that frogans,” or “look at those frogans” and be more precise.

Now if I have a red frogans I can say: ” I sure like my frogans’ color.”

With fifty red frogans I say the exact same thing: “I sure like my frogans’ color.”

It’s impossible to know whether I’m talking about one or more frogans here. It might be better to say “I sure like the color of all my fifty frogans. They’re red, by the way.”

In the absence of any clear explanation of this entomological particularity, let’s just make something up:

There’s more to a frogans than meets the eye. Behind that humble home slide may burrow a plethora of amazingly diverse content just waiting to be explored. “Frogan” is so downright insufficient, you can hardly keep that “s” from ssssssslithering out. So rather than rewriting the laws of physics, we all just call them FROGANS, and the world is a happier place.

There you have it. The mystery is a mystery no more. Go home. Get a good night’s sleep, getting back to that excellent reoccurring dream about the upcoming release of Frogans technology.

We just call it the MFN for short.

My promise of a roadmap is turning up empty for now. Most of my time recently has been in finalizing the customer interface text for the upcoming frogans address registration service at frogans.com.

Background info

Key to Frogans Technology is the creation of frogans networks. The first of these is being put into place by STG Interactive.

The Main Frogans Network, which STG Interactive operates, and which is established on the Internet, is accessible free of charge and without restriction to anybody having an Internet connection, and having the Frogans Player (also free of charge) installed on their computer (Windows, Mac OS X, Linux).

To publish a frogans on the Main Frogans Network, one needs to have registered a frogans address ($12 per year, $20 for two years), and to author their frogans in FSDL, which is free to use and distribute.

On the Web, end-users employ Web browsers for hunting down pages, which are written in HTML, and bringing them up on-screen. Likewise, on the MFN, users employ the Frogans Player to track down frogans, written in FSDL, and bring them up on-screen. The Web and the MFN are both software layers, not to be confused with the Internet itself, which is a physical network.

To better understand how STG Interactive operates the MFN, let’s look at this frogans network in three, bite-sized chunks: its hardware and connectivity, its administrative applications, and its database server.

The hardware and connectivity

Servers used for frogans address lookups are called FNS (Frogans Network System) servers. Those for the MFN are clustered Linux servers hosted in a Telehouse data center facility in Paris, France, which is very convenient seeing that our offices are nearby. These servers are connected to the Internet backbone by two 1-GBps connections, one provided by Verizon Business, the other by Level 3 Communications.

To enable routing through these two different providers STG Interactive became a LIR (Local Internet Registry) at RIPE NCC, running its own Autonomous System (number AS39051).

This is already a heavyweight setup, but to be absolutely certain to be able to provide uninterrupted service world-wide at a high volume (that’s positive thinking!) a second data center location is being planned for 2008.

The administrative applications: frogans.com

Here’s where STG Interactive does business. Frogans.com will soon allow people to register frogans addresses of their choice (on a first come, first served basis), and to manage their accounts, including their address parameters for hosting and publishing their frogans on the Internet. (Every published frogans has its own frogans address.)

For now frogans.com’s front end is going to be in English only, but it has been developed to accommodate its translation into other languages to better address Internet community needs as its activity grows.

The database: FDB server

A scalable, high-volume, high performance database server capable of meeting the MFN’s needs did not exist, so STG Interactive invented the Frogans Database (FDB) server.

The FDB server backs both STG Interactive’s administrative applications and the FNS servers on the MFN, for continuous world-wide frogans address lookup service.

Today STG Interactive is capable of storing and looking-up one hundred million (100,000,000!) frogans addresses on the MFN. For comparison, there exist around 146,000,000 Web domain names worldwide (source: The VeriSign Domain Report).

STG Interactive looks ready to deliver the goods for well past the first growth-spurt of the Frogansphere.

…on the outside, but within these walls, a thunderous roar of activity - making it sometimes difficult to get blog posts up in a timely fashion. I’ve been helping out on the Web pages for registering frogans addresses and for managing Frogans Addressing Service subscriber accounts.

Next week I’ll post a wrap-up of STG Interactive’s roadmap for Frogans Technology and the Main Frogans Network for a frog’s eye view of where we’re at, and where we’re going. Just in time for the holidays!

A frogans can be perfectly adapted for generating consumer activity. FSDL (Frogans Slide Description Language) gives frogans creators tons of leeway for making their frogans appealing, and their compatibility with all server scripting languages (PHP, CGI, ASP…) enables them to serve as the front-ends for server applications.

Advertisement is all about getting you to identify with a product. For instance, if you see Brand A enough times within a short period (watching TV, reading a magazine, trapped in a bus), it becomes a part of your natural habitat. It makes Brand A look better than Brand B the next time you get the munchies.

Advertising in an interactive environment (on the Web, in the Frogansphere) works in additional ways. People interact directly with the media, and can even buy something online without getting out of their seat. Even if they prefer hold onto their change, browsing the Web is a lot like window shopping in front of an army of very observant sales clerks. “Oh look, he tried on the hat,” “Yeah, but he didn’t buy it.” “Sure, but he did buy the gnome.”

A frogans can contain advertising as can a Web site. For that matter, a frogans can be advertising media. And a frogans can advertise in a way that’s entirely new. That’s because, up until now, no one has succeeded in giving purely online media a sustainable presence on the desktop, in harmony with your other activities. In publishing a frogans you have the potential to do that.

Although a frogans can be called from a Web page, it is not dependent on that page remaining open. Your Web browser doesn’t even have to stay running. So when a user brings your gnome frogans up on-screen (for example), and they like what they see (who wouldn’t?), they can leave it there indefinitely, pretending to raise turnips on your desktop.

This is a big change in browsing. Up until now Internet browsing has been a linear, page-by-page experience. Multiple browser windows, tabs and pop-ups haven’t fundamentally changed this reality since the page that you’re on generally covers up the rest, making them as out-of-mind as they are out-of-sight. And as long as your browser is visible enough to function, it hides everything else on your screen.

But your gnome frogans might find a happy virtual home on the desktops of millions of gnome buyers and enthusiasts. A frogans won’t fill up any more than a 320×240 pixel region on your screen, and the end-user can instantly scale it down to whatever size suits them. So even though your gnome frogans stays at the front level of the screen, it won’t get in the way of other activities.

But what really makes the difference is that your gnome frogans can end up spending a lot of time hanging out on end-users’ screens. Load it up with a gnome gallery, gnome trends newsletter, favorite gnome recipes and, of course, gnome sales and auctions. But don’t limit yourself to gnomes. You could branch-off into hats also.