Disqus - Latest Comments for jsmarr

Re: Home Sous Vide: What the Books Don’t Tell You

Joseph Smarr — Thu, 17 Aug 2017 20:40:13 -0000

One of the cool things about sous vide is that the water is at the target temperature of your food, so if you leave it "too long", it doesn't overheat, it basically just sits there (the texture can change over time, but it's not like a stove/oven/grill which is generally much hotter than the target temperature of the food, and thus more prone to overcooking).

Re: Turns out we still need Plaxo (or something like it)

Joseph Smarr — Wed, 03 Sep 2014 16:45:20 -0000

Good call, added! Spruced up my super old theme while I was at it. :) Lemme know if you have any more suggestions. I'm clearly rusty at this blogging thing. ;)

Re: An Apology To My RSS Readers – But I Had To Do It. (Updated)

Joseph Smarr — Sun, 24 Feb 2013 01:06:32 -0000

Sorry John, I agree with Subramanian, this sucks for your loyal readers (like me) and is at best a temporary treatment of the current symptom, but certainly not a meaningful deterrent in the larger scheme of things (as long as there's value to be had by copying public content, it'll get copied). I think you're dong more to hurt the web by turning off your RSS feed than by helping these guys make some extra money by scraping your content. I do hope you'll reconsider.

You're one of the few tech pundits who genuinely (and compellingly) argues for the Open Web and data portability, so if supporting long-established open standards for your own personal public blog is too much trouble to be worth it, what chance do the rest of us have, and what weight will your words carry?

Re: Who Controls Our Data? A Puzzle.

Joseph Smarr — Mon, 12 Mar 2012 19:05:51 -0000

It's definitely a challenge, but it's ultimately what moves consumer companies to act. I think it will happen when a) users experience more pain resulting from lack of data portability, and b) they recognize it as such and get angry. I'm counting on informed, passionate journalists like you for the latter, and I do see more of the former happening naturally, e.g. SPYW and people asking why they couldn't hook up external data sources, or Facebook shutting off Twitter's friend-finder, and the list goes on...

Re: Who Controls Our Data? A Puzzle.

Joseph Smarr — Mon, 12 Mar 2012 16:24:29 -0000

John-you're framing this problem exactly right. Users are not able to share their own data between companies that don't have deals in place today (due to the Terms of Service attached to API usage); thus they don't "own their own data" in any meaningful sense of the term. And, if you think about it, statistically speaking most users will have their data stored in large services, and most large services aren't talking to much other large services (due to competition), so most users will suffer this pain for most of their data, which will increasingly be stored online behind these APIs.

I previously thought that defining the right open standards would be enough to fix this problem (e.g. if/once OpenID, OAuth, Portable Contacts, Activity Streams, etc. became commonplace, companies would be expected to support them and thus users could mix-and-match data and services as they saw fit), but clearly there hasn't been enough "user demand" (or "vocal protest") to compel companies to follow through by providing API-based access that is not just open in protocol but also non-discriminatory in where the user takes that data. It's ironic that most APIs now use OAuth, yet the social web is not really any more open since each implementation comes with a proprietary TOS that wants to know "who's asking?".

Re: Once Again, RSS Is Dead. But ONLY YOU Can Save It!

Joseph Smarr — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 13:06:05 -0000

I read your stuff every day in Google Reader and love it. Please don't stop providing full RSS feeds, and of course keep up the great blogging! :)

Re: Winning Market Share in the Sharing Market

Joseph Smarr — Sun, 08 Jan 2012 13:41:14 -0000

Yep, definitely a good point. And you'd think that "size of audience" would best correlate with "amount of feedback received", but a) I find it's most important to get "some" feedback (i.e. getting any comments is great, then it tails off as you get more in terms of perceived reward), and b) getting feedback from people you know and care about (like your comment!) is a lot more rewarding than getting feedback from strangers/followers (tho the latter is still nice), so smaller networks may allow more "quality over quantity" of feedback. In this regard, Google+ is my favorite place to share (perhaps not surprising, heh) because I can post some things to close friends/family and get their feedback (high-value, but low quantity), and I can post other things publicly and get a lot of feedback from people I don't know but am glad to hear from topically.

Re: Only Connect: Facebook, From The Eyes of an Old Newbie

Joseph Smarr — Fri, 28 Oct 2011 22:15:10 -0000

John-extremely thoughtful and perceptive post. You've experienced and captured many of the subtle-but-crucial intuitions that led us to design circles the way we did as the primary form of connections in Google+.

Lots of people feel exactly the same way you do, but most haven't conceptualized it as such. Yet if you probe a bit, they all say the same thing--facebook's symmetric friend model causes "social awkwardness" of several varieties and generally leads to "over friending" and then "under sharing" of more meaningful content. Their recent UI changes have made things a little better, but like you I suspect many/most people have already "dug themselves into a hole" that is hard if not impossible to dig themselves out of (without starting over completely, as you did, but which obviously most people can't or won't). Ironically, while clearly it's a lot of work to "start over" on Google+, a surprising number of users are happy/relieved to be able to do it for exactly the reasons you mention above.

Who knows how things will play out, and lord knows both G+ and Facebook could do a lot more to reflect and respect the richness and nuance of real-world relationships, but you're absolutely right that there's something deep and important here, and I hope you'll keep thinking and writing about it!

Re: We are moving to San Francisco

Joseph Smarr — Tue, 11 Oct 2011 01:31:14 -0000

Welcome back, gotta keep the band together! ;)

Re: Scripting News: Suggestions for Google-Plus

Joseph Smarr — Mon, 18 Jul 2011 00:31:17 -0000

Hey Dave, thanks for the feedback! Here are some quick responses:

1) Not sure why you want an automatic circle for everyone who put you in a circle. Is it because you don't want to add people back one-by-one and you're comfortable seeing posts from everyone that added you to a circle? I'd suggest starting by using your "Incoming" tab to see posts from people who put you in circles (but that you haven't put into your circles yet). Then you can add anyone back that you find interesting, and skip the rest. If you really want an "auto-reciprocate" feature, you'll probably have to wait until you (or someone) can build that via APIs, because I doubt we'd put it in the main product.

2) Totally agree we need a "share-link" bookmarklet. I built one for Plaxo Pulse and used it all the time. What's missing right now is there's probably no way to programmatically expand and pre-fill the sharebox via URL parameters. Lemme see what I can do. ;)

3) Not sure why your posts aren't showing up on your profile. If you'd been posting to private circles, I might not see them when I visit your profile, but AFAIK you should see all your posts. Do you see them in the main stream? Are you sure you didn't end up with two different accounts or something? If you think this is a bug, ping me and I'll have the team look into it.

4) We definitely need rich APIs before we can consider ourselves a complete offering. This is not lost on the team, and if you have specific things you'd like to see from it, please let us know!

5) Totally agree we should support emoticons, and turn ascii versions into images. Again, lemme see what I can do. :)

Thanks! js

Re: http://davemorin.tumblr.com/post/7714838336

Joseph Smarr — Sun, 17 Jul 2011 13:41:25 -0000

Wow (in every way)!! :) Congrats!

Re: http://www.brittanybohnet.com/post/5701980309

Joseph Smarr — Sat, 21 May 2011 16:24:17 -0000

Seems ideal for Google cafes! :)

Re: Onward, to the Plex.

Joseph Smarr — Thu, 21 Apr 2011 16:06:20 -0000

Wow, congrats!! Look forward to seeing you inside the goog, tho I'll miss your plugged-in reporting on the goings on of the social web! ;)

Re: http://davemorin.tumblr.com/post/2962754547

Joseph Smarr — Thu, 27 Jan 2011 15:42:38 -0000

LOL nice. :)

Re: http://davemorin.tumblr.com/post/2614964410

Joseph Smarr — Wed, 05 Jan 2011 23:11:06 -0000

Love the geeky follow-up on the subtle tweaks they made to the Siren during the logo update: http://www.starbucks.com/bl...

Re: Hackers Embed Spam Into Google Search Listings For Unsuspecting Sites

Joseph Smarr — Tue, 21 Dec 2010 13:44:14 -0000

Sounds very similar to the "pharma hack" that infected lots of hosted wordpress installations (including mine) last year: http://www.pearsonified.com... -- could this be the same thing (or at least by the same people), or is it a copycat using a different set of exploits for a similar effect?

Re: http://www.brittanybohnet.com/post/1314022487

Joseph Smarr — Thu, 14 Oct 2010 15:04:25 -0000

LOL, as soon as I saw the familiar cartoon characters, I knew I was in for a treat, and you did not disappoint! :) Awesome video, very sweet. :) Also, love the title of the video on YT. ;)

Re: http://www.brittanybohnet.com/post/1258649337

Joseph Smarr — Thu, 07 Oct 2010 01:46:23 -0000

Ouch! Harsh but fair (and amusing). And I love the URL-as-commentary aspect. :)

Re: Understanding and cleaning the Pharma hack on WordPress

Joseph Smarr — Wed, 08 Sep 2010 11:01:03 -0000

Super helpful, thanks! I tried and failed previously to get this exploit out of my blog, but the latest exploit scanner plugin pointed to this blog, and sure enough, I had an infected plugin and several bad wp_options rows. I think it's finally cleaned out. Thanks again for posting this!

Re: My Stanford Master’s Thesis

Joseph Smarr — Sun, 11 Apr 2010 13:22:35 -0000

Doing a PhD would take several more years. The reason I was able to complete a BS and MS in 5 years (and some manage to do it in 4) was that Stanford offers several "co-terminal masters degrees" where e.g. you can start taking masters-level CS classes while you're still an undergraduate, so you can overlap the requirements. But a PhD is a way bigger commitment, and you have to do a lot more original research than I had to do for my Masters Thesis, so there's no way I know of to "just sneak a PhD in while you're at it." :) Hope this helps, js

Re: Yahoo Launches Plaxo Feature Eight Years Later, And It's Still A Good Idea

Joseph Smarr — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 20:17:49 -0000

Synergy is very cool (I'm a Pre user and fan myself), but it's not a full solution to the sync / smart address book problem. In particular, once someone changes their info, if they only update it one place, synergy just keeps the new number *and* the old one, so gradually your contact info just gets messier and messier, with no clear pointer as to which is the newer/better contact info. By avoiding the "push edits and deletes back and keep contact history" issues, synergy managed to deliver a lot of the "aggregation and access" benefits, but without the rest, the quality still degrades over time.

As Mike says in the article, this remains a compelling problem that no one has really nailed yet. And that means it's worth everyone who cares about it continuing to fight the good fight!

Re: Implementing PubSubHubbub subscriber support: A step-by-step guide

Joseph Smarr — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 11:06:07 -0000

No, sending hub.verify=sync just means the hub needs to separately ping you to verify the request *before* it returns a response for your subscribe request. So it basically holds the subscribe connection open while separately pinging you back. Not sure why some subscribers would prefer that, but I think async is a simpler and more robust pattern for most people.

Re: Implementing PubSubHubbub subscriber support: A step-by-step guide

Joseph Smarr — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 19:22:14 -0000

Correct-you must subscribe to the rel="self" link, which is the official canonical URL for that feed, and is often different than the original feed URL you find, esp on sites like Blogger. I think LJ does also use self-links, but the rule is to fall back on the feed URL itself if it doesn't have a rel=self link in the feed content.

Re: Implementing PubSubHubbub subscriber support: A step-by-step guide

Joseph Smarr — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 16:42:59 -0000

Julien-I'd ping John McCrea (@johnmccrea or john at plaxo.com) and he can route you appropriately. :)

Re: Sources of inspiration for 2010

Joseph Smarr — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 05:06:45 -0000

I'm very impressed with the quality of netflix streaming. It's almost always HD, and it almost never jitters or shows artifacts, and the initial buffering is also very quick. And given that we don't get HD over cable where I live, ironically netflix is often superior quality to what I can get over real TV! :)