Wayne Pan

Every web developer knows that browsers have a max number of concurrent connections that can be opened to a host at a time. Modern browsers have anywhere from 6-8 per host. You can test this on my simple concurrent connections test page. Open the link and wait ~3 seconds and count the number of boxes you see with content. If you’re in Chrome or Firefox 3+ you’ll see 6 boxes fill up at a time.

Mobile browsers are exactly the same except iOS 4 and Android 2.2 (Froyo) allow 4 concurrent connections. Surprisingly, iPhone OS 3.x allows for 6 (this includes the iPad with 3.2). I’m not exactly sure why Apple decided to drop the max concurrent connections but 2 less connections per device would lessen the load on operator networks (*cough* AT&T).

I don’t have any older Android or iPhone 2.x devices lying around. If anybody has any, feel free to use my concurrent connections test page and post the results in the comments. I’ll update once I get my hands on some more devices next week.

Mozilla released a Firefox Heatmap which provides some insight into how they arrived at some of the Firefox 4.0 UI decisions (such as combining the stop and reload button or making the search button not button-y).

You can also glean some interesting conclusions by comparing users across Windows, OS X, and Linux. For example, the horizontal scrollbar is only used by 20.5% of OS X users vs 44.1% of Windows users. This could be attributed to either Macs coming with wider resolution screens or most Macs coming with mice/trackpads that allow built-in horizontal scrolling.

RSS Icon is clicked on by Linux users 13.8% vs 5.7% for Windows users. Linux users more tech savvy? Definitely.

An interesting signup form for Automattic’s new VaultPress service. Target audience is tech savvy so non-standard form inputs won’t cause confusion.

From Tapulous Blog, founder Bart Decrum:

As part of Disney Interactive Media Group, we’ll develop more games, more quickly and with the resources of the world’s leading entertainment company.

Congrats on the exit, it appears Tapulous went in the right direction after former co-founder Mike Lee left. Lee’s vision of useful apps, (remember FriendBook and Twinkle?), was beat by numerous TTR clones.

I’ve even playing another LBS game called SCVNGR recently and I realized what a genius move Google Ventures made when they invested in the company. Google’s mantra has always been to organize the world’s information. The most unstructured information at the moment is places.

In fact, Google itself has a hard time of returning the right information for local businesses. It crowdsources this on Google maps itself and is in a constant war with user edited data. With a LBS check-in game in it’s portfolio, Google can use the data points from SCVNGR to sanitize this data. Places that have check-in data are legitimate. That local bar all of a sudden stops receiving checkins? They must be closed. New business opens up, not to worry, someone will create a new spot on SCVNGR.

However, that’s only part of the story. One of SCVNGR’s challenges is to take a picture of the place you’re checked in at. Now, imagine, hundreds of photos of the same place from different angles, inside and out. With enough if these, an “indoor” street view is just a map reduce stitch away.