Hey kids. Would you like to experiment? With frogans? I thought as much. That’s why I’ve put this little tutorial together. It’ll blow your mind.

Should I be getting paranoid about a frogans wiring my desktop to the Internet? In my last entry I talked about how a frogans can become a permanent window from your desktop to the Net, and how this can be a means by which Internet publishers can strengthen their ties with end-users. Is this not just another way for Big Brother to infringe on our privacy?

I’ve been talking about a frogans as a permanent desktop browsing tool, but I think I need to expand a little bit about what is meant by “browsing”.

Perhaps the moniker “browser” is misleading. Back in the old days when browsing applied only to physical activities that you do in bookstores, record stores, libraries, and mail-order catalogues, you never had to consider the idea that an invisible entity was browsing back at you. Okay, there’s the occasional clerk eyeing the customers, watching to see if that Hot Tuna LP is going to move, or if that kid’s paid for everything that’s in his backpack. But at least that clerk was a person with whom you could make eye contact.

Today it’s a different scene. Instead of walking in into a building, or a room, to feed our eyes, ears, stomachs and brains, we exchange digits through an enticing mysterious black box. The vast majority know little of how the thing works by itself, and even less of how it interacts with that maze of bigger boxes on the other end of the line. Yet we light the thing up, make it an integral part of our lives, fill it up with all sorts of personal, professional and financial information, and then go and use it to browse through other black boxes that are not fundamentally different from our own.

Talk about blind trust. It sounds like leaving your entire wallet at the door as a right of passage.

Alright, not completely so. That’s because the perceived risk of becoming a victim of fraud or the invasion of privacy has been, up until now, acceptable to most people. But who’s to say if the perception, or reality, of these risks will be kept in check? And for how long?

Can you trust that frogans, that window-less window, wide-open day and night – can you trust it to keep the mosquitos, burglers and peeping toms at bay and out of your hair? The reality is that trust can never be imposed. It can only be earned. The ultimate profusion of Frogans technology will depend on its reputation for assuring the end-user’s security and privacy.

One-way window, mirrored sunglasses, and all that

Frogans technology implements security measures that, until now, have been unheard of in Internet navigation.

While a frogans is the navigational interface that you see on your screen, it is the Frogans Player that displays it and manages its connection to the Internet. Unlike a desktop widget, for example, a frogans is not an application, but rather an interactive rendering of images and content written in FSDL that the Frogans Player has located on the Internet and displays on your screen. Frogans Technology architecture assures that it is only the Frogans Player that will ever be capable of doing this, guaranteeing that a frogans, regardless of its author, will always carry with it the privacy and security measures provided by the Frogans Player.

For instance:

• The Frogans Player will never allow any content from a frogans to be written to the end-user’s hard drive. This is a huge step away from the conventions accepted for web browsers. Frogans content is loaded only into active memory, protecting the end-user from any possible corrupted or malicious content (should it get past the parsing process, which is highly improbable).
• The Frogans Player will never transmit information concerning the end-user, be it their operating system, system fonts, applications installed, or other content. The Frogans Player may transmit session information concerning a frogans to a server, but this information is temporary and completely anonymous with respect to the end-user.

All that is to say that a frogans, if it is intended to be a window overlooking the Internet, is a one-way window. It’s part of the deal. If there are any other Internet technologies out there that can assure the same level of consideration the end-user, I hope that someone will say so by hitting me with some comments.

Why indeed… continued

A particular challenge for Frogans technology is in getting end-users to establish one or several frogans as permanent or semi-permanent elements on their desktops. That’s my challenge as a frogans blogger/evangelist. But it’s also a new challenge for anybody who uses the Internet to reinforce their contact with their public.

Eight-stringed example

Let’s say I’m organizing events for my mandolin orchestra… Don’t laugh! I used to play in one. Anyway, between the rehearsals, recording and constant touring, I’m having a heck of a time keeping the mandolinists, mandolists, mandocellists and bass mandolinists informed about what’s going on. So I publish a frogans at my new frogans address “frogans*bigbadmandolin.schedule” and make it really cool-looking, like a Gibson F-9. I throw in a little PHP so that it requires a password. That way only my orchestra members have access to it.

It looks like their favorite instrument, so they’re more than happy to shrink it to button-size and make it a permanent part of their desktop environment. (It has no access to their system resources, so there’s no paranoia factor.) And I’ve set it up so that if I’ve made a change in the schedule, or if I have an important announcement, an exclamation point will show up on it. That way, the members of my orchestra know to zoom-up my frogans and see what I have to say. Maybe that will mean browsing for more information on the frogans, or hopping on to the orchestra’s website, or even getting back to me by email.

Going global

Now let’s say that the mandolin orchestra starts arousing an international fan base. I publish a freely accessible frogans and make it look like of the logo of everybody’s favorite mandolin orchestra. The fans will be more than happy to have it permanently hang out on their desktops. I chock this frogans full of breaking news, as well as the latest gossip from the mandolin orchestra circuit. I even throw in useful links, and some of which are paid, helping to finance the project. I’m now reaching a select worldwide audience in the blink of an eye, and I’ve only just started thinking about getting a fan-club database going.

The key element here is that the frogans has become a permanent element on the end-users’ desktops. I’m not saying that for a frogans to be effective it has to always be open, but it is its potential to be active and visible and wired, without interfering with all the other activities that computers were built to do, that allows a frogans to be an open window rather than an enclosed corridor to the Internet.

Now let’s say that I want to share my thoughts, photos, favorite links with a select set of friends.

Now let’s say I want to valorise my Web site. A frogans can be an awesome nav-bar.

Now let’s say that my product has cult status potential and a really cool logo.

Now let’s say that someone else continue this list…

It started with a play on a word invented at STG Interactive by Laura Whiteman, which is froganize. According to froganslore (a word that I just now invented for the purpose of getting through this paragraph), you can froganize your Web site by integrating it with one or many frogans. For instance, you might include a link to a frogans on your page, or inversely, link from a frogans to your site. Anyway, as catchy a word as froganize is, froganeyes seemed to say much the same thing, but with an added visual aspect.

Before long I tumbled on this photo by Jan Pietruszka on iStockphoto of this Agalychnis callidryas (or Red-eyed Tree Frog) sat atop a halved kiwi, which I integrated into the head area of this blog site. As it turns out, the Red-eyed Tree Frog, if we are to trust what’s said about it in Wikipedia, lends itself to comparisons with frogans.

For instance, the Red-eyed Tree Frog is native to the rainforests of Costa Rica and Central America, and stays near the water so that it can reproduce. Frogans technology was conceived in France, but makes its habitat on the Internet, and a frogans will reproduce anywhere where there’s an Internet connection.

The Red-eyed Tree Frog is nocturnal. Frogans are 24/7.

The Red-eyed Tree Frog relies heavily on it vision. A frogans is visual, and if you want to make a frogans, it’s always a good idea to do it with vision.

The Red-eyed Tree Frog is also visual. As a tadpole it can change color like a chameleon. As an adult it closes its big red eyes and covers up the blue regions on its sides when it wants to blend in with the green foliage and hide from a predator. Then, if it senses that it’s under attack, it might open its eyes and show its full color range to throw its attacker off guard while it hops to safety. A frogans can catch your eye with its capacity to have different visual aspects, including its shape and colors, but can also blend in with your desktop environment thanks to its zooming ability.

The Red-eyed Tree Frog can pull its big red eyes through the roof of its mouth to help push down food… Okay, okay, we’d all like to see a frogans do that, wouldn’t we?

Here’s a graphic for visualizing Frogans technology. It’s got three basic components which work together to put frogans on your screen. Frogans are authored in FSDL, and are accessed and viewed with the Frogans Player which employs FNSL for handling frogans address lookup and network certification.

I’ll be a lot happier when the Frogans Player is out, because then I’ll have an easier time talking about the key perks when browsing with a frogans.

The user experience aspects take the top slots on the perk list. After all, that’s what’s going to make or break the implantation of the technology; to convince Internet creators, developers and publishers to trust the platform with their content, create frogans, put them online, and finally get people to check them out. The principal focus in Frogans technology development has always been (according to Alexis and Amaury – and I tend to believe them) on what works for the end-user.

People scour the Internet for content, but often pay a certain price when they receive it: a cluttered desktop, for instance, is one of those things that we’ve come to live with. You’ve got this, that, and the other thing hogging your screen space, right up to the point that you’re no longer sure which page is open, and which isn’t. You ask yourself where that second and third window or tab came from, and why you simply don’t have what you want there in front of you.

It zooms up and down in real time

Frogans give the end-user new options for viewing on-line content. You might have read the entry I wrote on widgets (and other mini-apps), and how, at first glance, frogans can resemble widgets: relatively small, differently-shaped windowless objects floating on your screen. The real differences between frogans and widgets, in fact, outweigh their similarities.

The first thing that an end-user is likely to notice is that their frogans is never covered up by a window. So you say, “Yikes! It may be small, but it’s in front of MySpace!”

Relax. Take a breath. Click on the edge of your frogans and drag. It zooms up and down in real time. When you zoom down (click on the edge and drag towards the center) the whole thing shrinks – images, buttons, type and all. Since there’s no window around it, it can get really small. At its smallest size (depending on how it’s authored) it might take on a more simplified appearance. At any rate, it’s now no bigger than your typical desktop icon, only it’s still on the top layer of your interface.

Now you can tuck it away somewhere, an edge, a corner of your screen. You can get back to it without the usual mental shuffling; you know: “Spreadsheet -> Web -> Spreadsheet -> Web -> Media Player… where was I?”

I have a hankering to do a Wikipedia entry on frogans. It’s gonna go a little something like this:

Frogans

“Frogans” are windowless desktop environments for navigating the Internet. Access to a frogans requires an Internet connection and the Frogans Player, which is a client-side stand-alone freeware application designed to run on Windows, the Mac OSX, and Linux operating systems.

Among the aspects particular to frogans are 1) their access by means of a frogans address, a simplified addressing method by which they are located on the Internet over frogans networks, 2) their on-screen persistence, which keeps them on top of all other running applications, and 3) their scalability, such that their persistence need not interfere with other tasks.

Frogans, which are sets of “frogans slides”, can contain hyperlinks to other frogans (to be viewed with the Frogans Player), as well as to elements on other layers of the Internet, such as the Web pages (activating the end-user’s default browser), and email (activating the end-user’s email application).

Frogans are authored in the Frogans Slide Description Language (FSDL), which is based on XML. FSDL is free to use, and its specifications are free to obtain. FSDL documents provide the Frogans Player with the text elements, the image file references, and the image and text processing commands from which to render frogans on an end-user’s screen.

The Frogans Player locates frogans home slides on the Internet by means of a frogans address (ex: “frogans*myslides”). Simply put, the user indicates the address of the frogans that they wish to view. The Frogans Player sends a request to a frogans network system (FNS) server. The FNS server responds with the information about that frogans, such as its location and encoding, written in the Frogans Network System Language (FNSL), allowing the Frogans Player to bring it up on screen.

Frogans addresses are obtained from STG Interactive, the company who oversees the main frogans network, and who has developed and maintains the Frogans Player, FSDL, and FNSL.

As a response to a frequent first reaction from people when they first hear about frogans, I wrote a little something on frogans/widgets comparisons.

Okay, “soon” is a bit ambiguous. What’s most important is that with the release of the beta, the world at large, or at least those in the “know”, will have the opportunity to see some frogans doing their thing on-screen. With the concurrent release of FSDL 3.0 it’s likely that a lucky few will get a shot at setting up their own frogans on temporary addresses.