DISQUS

Interesting post. I agree with you on the points about the Docs, Standard Library and Packaging.

falicon, I'm not 100% sure, but I think there are blog systems such as you describe / wish for. I say this because in the recent past I remember getting email notifications about *all* comments on some blog post(s) I had commented upon (not just email notifications about replies to my own comments). If I can find the name / URL of those blog(s), will post them here. Of course that might not meet your need completely, since I think you also want to get to see all comments from certain posts you like and want to follow, whether or not you commented on them at all (which I'm not sure the systems I saw, can do).

Wow, great idea and implementation. Like the clean layout and plain black text on white, same as your blog. Very clear and easy to read. Good for grepping too :-) to find specific topics of interest.

Interesting post. I too am getting more traffic from Twitter these days, since I started using it more. As of now I mainly use it to tweet interesting links, to tweet about my new blog posts, and to communicate with friends (not much of that last, still mainly use email and IM for that).

Also, BTW, you said in an earlier post (a while back) that more traffic tends to come from referring sites, than from direct or other means. After reading that I monitored that point on my own site and blog and found it was the same for me.

Excellent advice in general, and specifically about the staff mistakes and Terms of Service as well ... web site users would do well to keep in mind these points you mention, in their own interest.

- Vasudev

Very interesting history ...

Like many, I'm also one of the people who signed up early for Twitter but didn't really use it much until sometime later. But now I find it a good and interesting tool, with lots of possibilities.

Thanks for creating it - to the whole Twitter team.

- Vasudev

I agree :-) Had just noticed this myself; also, it's a fun and creative exercise to do that compression. Also, nice example with the strikeout.

Sounds like a potentially good idea - though of course details mentioned in the GigaOm post are thin as of now. I guess more details will be given by Yahoo! later.

BTW, the idea of using mail servers programmatically is not new - the mailing list servers LISTSERV and majordomo (which may even pre-date Web 1.0, i.e. pre-1990 or so) are proof of that. (Briefly: when a mail is sent to them, it doesn't get read by a human; it gets read by a computer program (either LISTSERV or majordomo); and those programs then interpret the (structured) contents of the mail as commands related to the mailing list, and then act upon them - doing things like subscribing a user to a list, posting a message to the list, etc.).

I had been thinking about this topic recently - programmable mail servers and how they can be used (for other than the existing uses such as running mailing lists). Ditto for programmable web servers. I may write more on this second topic later (on my blog on the topic of software innovation at http://jugad2.blogspot.com), but for now, a hint - check out the programmable web servers WEBrick and Mongrel (both are related to, and programmable in, Ruby) and Python's BaseHTTPServer (which is programmable in Python). I'm sure there are other web servers that are programmable in other languages. Any developer will be able to see how powerful such programmable servers are.

Also, this question on the Google Group comp.lang.ruby:

http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.ruby/b...

by a developer, and my answer to it, describe some of the steps involved in programming a web server like the ones mentioned above.

Basically, the power of these programmable tools comes from the fact that they can be programmed to do anything, and do it in the context of a mail server (i.e. receiving and sending email), or in the context of a web server (receiving HTTP requests and sending HTTP responses), respectively. Which makes them very powerful tools ...

I tried the standard signup first (without an invite) and got a message saying it may take some time. After seeing this post I applied at http://www.boxee.tv/fredwilson. Hope to get it soon. Will give feedback after trying it out for some time.

Thanks,
Vasudev

P.S. I love the web too :-)

Interesting, thanks - will check Clicky out.
I have noticed myself that in some places in its UI, Google Analytics takes more clicks than seems needed.

- Vasudev

Good one ...

- Vasudev

Sorry, that should have read "After I started writing this comment", not "After I started writing this post" :-)

- V

Looks like a very good idea.
Congratulations ... (Heroku is very good too.)

Having the same interface for local and remote is cool too.

A thought - not directly related to rush, but to the idea of shells in general, and specifically to the new process invocation overhead associated with invoking commands like rm and cp from the shell:

If we had operating systems like Oberon (created by Niklaus Wirth who also created the Pascal and Modula languages, among other things), that process invocation overhead would go away.

After I started writing this post, I browsed around for some related links (on Prof. Wirth and Oberon) - here they are:

http://www.oberon.ethz.ch/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niklaus_Wirth

http://www.eptacom.net/pubblicazioni/pub_eng/wi...

That last link - "A Few Words with Niklaus Wirth" - is rather thought-provoking ...

- Vasudev
www.dancingbison.com

Cool! :-) And very true - that last line about the beach.

Yes, I agree with the others - these are quite useful tips - should help reduce the firehose effect :).
Thanks,
Vasudev

@ianbetteridge (about Summize): +1

As of now they say on their site that they only do it for Twitter (I think) but also that they're going to do it for other services as well (including blogs and reviews - see links below).

And: they have an API !!

http://summize.com/

http://summize.com/about

http://summize.com/api

The API is available via standard Atom and JSON feeds, they say. And tons of languages have JSON support - see here, somewhat down the page:

http://json.org/

And (a couple more ideas):

1) JSON is native to JavaScript, which opens up possibilities of client-side code (in the browser) that can react to clicks by the user (or just parse the page/DOM) and do stuff with the clicked link or other page content, using Summize API

2) Google's GData API's are in Atom format (also RSS), so opens up even more possibilities of mashups integrating the original page + Summize API + GData-API-enabled content.

GData API overview:

http://code.google.com/apis/gdata/overview.html

Okay, enough ... :)

oops - meant "slightly long post" :)

I don't have a strong opinion either way about the main thrust of Fred's post, since I just saw it and haven't had a chance to think about it - but then saw Fred's comment just above (the one to which I'm replying) and then realized I agree with this:

>I'd like to see who you talk to stuff about
(I'm guessing that means "talk to about stuff")
> Maybe I want to see if they blog or twitter
> And then follow them
>That's the whole point of social media

+1 :)

Some time ago I observed this about myself:

while surfing the Web, whenever I came across some interesting site / post, I would often examine it a bit carefully (instead of just saving it for later use and moving on), and then look for links - on that site / post - to the author of that site / post, and if they had a link to their main site / blog, would check that out, and if they didn't have a blog (or even if they did), would google their name or other things they'd linked to in the first post, to find out more about the person or those things, and this would quite often lead on to finding other interesting stuff they'd written or other interesting software that they'd worked on/with or developed. So after I observed this, I started doing consciously, more often, and have since seen that it has often led on to more discoveries of interesting stuff ... and have made it a bit of a habit to do that nowadays ...

I have a term I use for this phenomenon - I call it "serendipity leads to good stuff" :) - I'm sure lots of other people have discovered this as well, but just sharing ...

Sorry for the slightly post (I would quote Pascal as my excuse :) - and I guess that what I just wrote means that I do (now) have an opinion on the main topic of the post after all :), i.e. that it'd be good if something could be done about it, whether by piggybacking on trackbacks or some other way.

You're welcome.

>You learn something new every day and I am thankful for that fact!

True :)

It means something like "I agree" or "add my vote for that" (refers to preceding comment).
Net slang.
The Jargon File has tons more definitions if you're interested:

http://catb.org/jargon/

> BTW, I recall that Python has excellent XML-RPC support. I wonder if that's enabled in Google's environment?

Yes, Python has. Good question. I hope it is enabled, because XML-RPC is very useful. And thanks for creating it.

Thanks for this post - useful.

- Vasudev

Very interesting post.\n\nI liked the ideas of fuzzy dates and logarithmic time planning mentioned by Jim M and Evan; also, the entire article (How to Think by Ed Boyden) linked to by Evan was pretty interesting too ...\n\n- Vasudev Ram\nwww.dancingbison.com\nQuick and easy PDF creation toolkit:\nwww.dancingbison.com/products.html

Great post.

Agree with the point, "To design great products, we must truly empathize with our users, and understand that if they are having problems using our products, is more likely our fault, not theirs.". Or anyway, if possible, figure out whose "fault" it is (e.g. it could really be the user's - maybe they didn't bother to read the instructions on the screen (talking about the app itself here, not the help docs - things like labels for edit controls), and fix it (if the user's fault, by educating them).

> "the disdainful or patronizing attitudes too often expressed by engineers and other technical people".

+1 on that - seen it in a lot of engineers.

As for your last paragraph, all I can say is, true again, and good generalization / abstraction ! :)

Vasudev Ram
Dancing Bison Enterprises
Software consulting and training
Biz site: http://www.dancingbison.com
Blog (on software innovation): http://jugad.livejournal.com
Quick and easy PDF creation toolkit: http://www.dancingbison.com/products.html

Nice post, thanks. Good to see that some social networking web companies are actually making profits, and not just from ads (though there's nothing wrong with that either).

- Vasudev Ram