January 2009
68 posts
OpenTable files for first venture-backed IPO of... →
Great, I love opentable, good to see even in these economic times an IPO is still possible.
Magnolia dies
Magnolia, which is a del.icio.us alternative - just went down hard and admitted they have data corruption that will result in loss of people’s bookmarks.
I’ve never liked magnolia, when I tried them out I asked them to offer a space separated tagging scheme, was rebuffed, so I stayed at del.icio.us.
Like their funky domain name ma.gnolia.com seems to copy del.icio.us, but not really...
China in the economic crisis
China is seen as one of the few growing economies during the current global recession, although the growth has reportedly been at least cut in half as exports die off.
Last year I looked for signs of the growth here in Beijing, you could see huge numbers of buildings rising up, inflation in food prices, and Porshe Cayennes parked outside the many new pricey dance clubs.
This year I’ve been...
Tumblr needs to be a blog reader
I love tumblr’s model of ‘reblogging’ and ‘liking’ - but you can only reblog and like other tumblers posts, not any post from any blog.
This seems like a big oversight on tumblr’s part, why not let me reblog a techcrunch article?
Maybe they are trying to give tumblr a community feeling, I’m really not sure why they wouldn’t let me subscribe to...
Defaults
Good default: China bans free plastic bags, you have to ask to buy one (for a tiny token amount).
Ambigous default: Windows ships with a web browser. It’s a crap one, but without it, how would I download FireFox?
Bad default: Google sticks your ads on Google Adsense by default, because many people don’t understand the huge difference between adsense and adwords.
The case against Candy Land - Boing Boing →
This reminds me of the interesting book ‘the theory of fun’, but from the other side, that book argues improving skills is fun, but why is playing on pure chance fun?
Major Firefox OSX annoyance: whenever I open files from the web like .torrent files or .jnlp (java web start) - I get the files stuck on my desktop.
There seems to be no way to turn off this behavior or tell the files to go somewhere else, my actual download directory is not my desktop, Firefox really just wants to mess up my nice clean computer.
Twitter Raising New Cash At $250 Million Valuation →
What recession? Twitter’s users are valued at $40-100 each.
The other side of mechanical turk
There was a story going around a little while ago about how Belkin paid people via Amazon Mechanical Turk to give them good reviews.
The idea of mechanical turk is that you can programatically access human intelligence through an API.
The thing is though, normal APIs don’t tell everyone what kind of problems they are working on.
This is something that worries us a bit about working with...
Prototype dying?
When I found prototype, I was really happy to find a powerful javascript abstraction library, and so far I’ve written a lot of code using it. Overall I think it’s a great library.
The problem is that a lot of the hype and thus community around ruby on rails and prototype seems to have stopped ro slowed down, and the effects engine (scriptaculous) is way too bloated, slow and annoying...
Microsoft Plans to Cut 5,000 Jobs - NYTimes.com →
Wow, Microsoft definitely does not need 94,000 employees
Twitter Email Search
One problem I have with twitter is that they have no way to see if people are already using the service.
Edit: things have changed since I initially posted: twitter email search is now not as easy as it used to be!
Good news: I have a new solution to finding twitter users by email search!
It does involve some involved legwork to find it however:
If you are serious about wanting to find...
idea for site: wikipedia meets twitter: wiki with only very short entries.
Google AdWords - eleven herbs and spices revealed... →
This is an interesting article on Adwords. It argues that AdWords bids, which are supposedly only used to help control position rank - actually also control impression share.
That is to say, if you are the #2 ad, not only are you shown below the #1 ad, your ad actually appears less often - google will artifically shrink the listed competitors to reward the #1 ad.
The reason I think they do this...
Chinese New Year in Beijing 2009
They started selling fireworks in Beijing today, which does not bode well for my sleep in the upcoming Spring Festival (Chinese New Year) week.
In terms of the volume of fireworks let off in Beijing, think the 4th of July in the US, times 100, for 7 days, 24 hours a day. Also there are no limitations to where people will let off fireworks, so walking around outside on the street is like being in...
Just got my twitter account locked somehow… Can’t login at all - sucks! Must be a bug in twitter, probably something hastily coded up after they had the recent dictionary attacks.
How is company formed
We’ve been doing the corporation setup work for Adylitica and setting up shares and officers and all that boring stuff, it’s all kind of a pain in the butt but stuff that needs to get done.
It’s led me to think about stuff like different classes of shares and the normal startup processes. Normally start-up companies go through a process where they shop their stuff around to vcs,...
BitTorrent For HTTP Failover | Robert Accettura’s... →
Opera supports bittorrent, but it’s not hooked up properly.
The S3 SLA is broken (and how to fix it) →
Idea for a web service: get javascript ‘workers’. let’s say I want to do some seti@home type of distributed computing, except over javascript in people’s web browsers (maybe flash as well?)
One idea for something along these lines: distribute twitter api calls (they limit to 100 per hour).
With flash or java you might even be able to do some bittorrent type bandwidth...
If you haven't yet moved your Feedburner Account...
pratham:
Or risk losing your Feedburner ID as Google does not reserve it for you.
I did not try to move my feed ID feeds.feedburner.com/pratham as late as yesterday, and when I did I found someone else (legit) had already taken it. The Google migration also fails since it doesn’t know what to do with two feeds pointing to the same ID.
So now the URL feeds.feedburner.com/pratham is mine, but...
10 reasons Tumblr is better than Twitter
I use twitter, and I’m trying to like it, but tumblr I love. Both services I originally had a hard time initially understanding - I thought why would I want a log of random crap that I found on the internet? But eventually I came around to thinking oh yeah tumbling is basically the next generation of blogging.
Themes - twitter’s background image and color changes are not really good...
Google analytics annoyance: it doesn’t filter out people from ‘direct traffic’ people who turn referers off.
It does seem like a suprisingly large percentage of people don’t allow referers - maybe 10% don’t send that information along.
Bye del.icio.us →
Clay Shirky dumps del.icio.us, unbelievable, he was a huge supporter. Yes Yahoo has ruined del.icio.us and it’s a tragedy.
twitter mashup idea: twitter achievements. You get various achieivements based on milestones reached on twitter: 100 tweets, 25 followers, etc. Achievements are worth points which can be spent on nothing, but you get a fancy page showing all your twitter achievements.
[Warning] Truth about PPCWebSpy →
So my ‘keyword tool’ search on twitter that was turning up this scammy looking tool being posted non-stop by regular twitterers?
It looks like Twitter is serving as a channel for spreading a big pyramid scheme, where if you get people to sign up under you, you can make some affiliate cash or something.
Using Adwords to Prototype Ideas
One tool we want to build into Adylitica is something to help you to decide how to design your product, by hacking Adwords into a poll.
The way this works is you come up with some ideas for your product, different directions you could take. Let’s say you are going to design a new web service for people to share and listen to music. You will likely have a list of ideas of things you could...
Google Services I Hope They Don't Kill
Google’s been culling products left and right lately. Hey, I think more companies should do this, if things aren’t working sometimes it’s best to call it a day and try something else. But Google please don’t kill these services, even if they don’t make Adwords type money:
Google Analytics: an indispensible tool, although I have some issues with it, namely the lack...
FT.com / Asia-Pacific - China becomes third... →
Living in the 3rd largest economy now. Of course it’s worth noting that Germany has fewer than 100 million people compared to China’s billion plus
Brad Callen from:SteveCockrane - Twitter Search →
Brad Callen’s amazing twitter spam
This guy called Brad Callen has some keyword tool out there.
What’s nuts is the number of people tweeting it, and people with plenty of followers and there is huge variation in what they are saying.
I have no idea what is going on here. This search here on twitter convinces me this is a spam attack on twitter, just very sophisticated.
Search for...
DreamHost Blog » Web Hosting’s Dirty Laundry →
These guys who sell ‘unbiased reviews’ are the top result in my Google search for “web hosting comparison”.
Google seriously needs to get way way better, it’s so easily gamed right now, particularly by these review aggregation sites.
It’s a bad cycle: Google sends more traffic to people who spend more on SEO. This means whoever has the most to gain monetarily...
Twitter marketing
Here’s an idea for people doing marketing on twitter: keep searches open for people who need your stuff.
IE: If I post to twitter ‘arg I hate my colo, anyone know any good ones in the Seattle area?’ - a smart marketer will be running a search for ‘hate colo’ or ‘seattle colo’ and they will get in touch with me directly: targeted marketing. I would be...
Google Search Wiki suggestion: let me edit the ‘snippet’.
When I search for methods, I often want to just know the argument list. I would take the time to edit the search snippet so that I didn’t have to go to the actual page.
Idea for a Mac
shabdar:
alexbosworth:
idea for a mac app: turn web app into cocoa app.
this would work by using embedding webkit in a native app, set up to go to the web app address.
include functionality for changing the dock icon, menu elements, growl notifications.
I don’t know about writing something from scratch, but you can use Fluid (based on webkit) and Prism (based on Firefox) to exactly do what...
idea for a mac app: turn web app into cocoa app.
this would work by using embedding webkit in a native app, set up to go to the web app address.
include functionality for changing the dock icon, menu elements, growl notifications.
Official Google Blog: Powering a Google search →
Google responds and provides information about how many kJ it takes per search. This is surprising, they must really have felt the PR blow, normally Google would never give out this info.
Back of the envelope calculations: Google uses about as much energy every year as 150,000 people metabolize. (this is a weird comparison for them to make - next up, Google Matrix?)
PR pro of the future? Where’s the ROI? →
shabdar:
fluffynotes:
mbooth:
Scott Malish addresses one of the issues we’ve been discussing a lot lately in FirstWord Digital: how to most accurately measure the ROI of our online PR campaigns.
PR pros must live and breathe social media and think up new, unique ways to use it for clients. But at the same time, it is also up to us to be able to measure the impact those social media...
Wordlovers
Idea for a web site: colourlovers except with words. Maintain a collection of phrases or words that are important to you - keep up-to-date on new popular related words (movies -> “gran torino”, beijing -> “spring festival”).
Also see new popular links related to your words set, see people with similar words, twitter conversations related to your words, tagged...
Where are user generated games?
I’d like to see someone make a web RPG that plays in the browser with only JS/Canvas/HTML, maybe Flash would be ok I guess, something that could be played as casually as hitting a web address and made to be played casually for 15-20 minutes on up. One of the things that makes RPGs great is tons and tons of content to make a huge and varied world to explore with lots of story. One of the...
Music Blog Zeitgeist of 2008 / The Hype Machine →
I love Hypemachine, I’ve used it for a long time and it has kept improving.
Idea for a website or Google ‘subscribed links’ or Google One-box:
If I type: “how do you say foo in language bar” - offer a translation right on the Google results page.
Announcing the Congress API - Open Blog -... →
idea for Google: if I search for similar keywords many times in short succession, stop showing me the same results you just showed me before and try showing me some different stuff