DISQUS

Isn't Twitter's WordPress... WordPress? Slap the Prologue Theme (http://prologuetheme.org) on a WordPress install and you have a basic Twitter clone.

Registered! Awesome Tim, thanks! I've been hanging out for this movie for a while now!

Hopefully I'll see you before the movie starts perhaps, because I've got an 8+ hour Krav Maga grading the next day so I need my sleep afterwards!

Congratulations Alex and team! This is great news for you, and for us, because it allows you to keep on producing tools like Glue (which I've been beta testing, and am enjoying!)

Seriously Gary, if half of the entrepreneurs out there had the passion that you had, and the vision to only be using that passion on something that they were actually passionate about, the world would be a much better place. Keep it up.

On the flip side, perhaps the university of the future (the pure educational kind, not the entrepreneurial kind) will work more like Y Combinator.

Imagine a university where you apply, and are granted permission based on an expected level of future performance. You don't pay any fees to attend this university. Instead, for the rest of your life, 1% (or .5%, whatever) of your income goes back to the University.

With the price of education in the US at least, this almost becomes a good deal.

Great post Jackie, and very true. I'm from Australia but now live in San Francisco and it never ceases to amaze me how people's perception of reality gets entirely warped in the world that is Silicon Valley.

If you travel around the country (or, heaven forbid, around the world!) you find that San Francisco in particular (as a physical region) has a bizarrely abnormal ratio of Mac laptops to PC laptops, embraces general openness (e.g. "Camp" style conferences, data portability, open source code, etc) more than anywhere else, tools like Twitter, FriendFeed, Upcoming, Flickr and even blogging at a staggering rate, and generally exists entirely in a bubble of its own. Stepping beyond that physical boundary is the online echo chamber, which manages to loop in some people from other locations, but is just as narrowly-focused on a global scale.

If companies can't get beyond the echo chamber to see how "real" people interact with their computers and the internet, then good luck hitting that target market (unless you're intentionally focusing on the incredibly fickle, hard-to-monetize crowd that lives in the echo chamber, in which case - good luck :)

And in addition to that, I (Mashable's Lead Developer/WordPress guy) will be available at some point during the day on the "WordPress Genius Bar" to help out and offer some tips/advice if you're in need of help.

http://foolswisdom.com/geniuses-for-wordcamp-sf...

Imagine this combined with fabricated-on-demand computer systems/electronics and we start getting to the point that anyone can have an idea about a new tech gadget and start building prototypes immediately.

The possibilities are indeed endless (and perhaps a little scary, but I'll leave that for the tin-hat folks :).

Tim, I applaud you for taking this stance, and for directing the "following" you have to a good cause. As suggested, I've signed up for the Obama group and contacted my senators.

When I was in college, I studied electronic governance and legislation and the topic of ECHELON (check Wikipedia) came up. This bill sounds like an attempt to finally authorize and extend the powers of the network "legitimately".

The points Dan raised about extensive surveillance turning America into an autocracy or dictatorship are frighteningly prescient, and regardless of who ends up in power here, will be the likely outcome. Who will be able to resist using information when their "security brief" includes personal information that would never have been available before, but which is now "common knowledge" to the intelligence agencies due to wide-ranging surveillance?

For anyone interested, my paper on the subject (written 5 years ago, so this isn't something new) is linked from my name.

Beau

A lot of people claim that they'd do this and they'd do that, but all too often, they really just won't when it comes time to put their money on the table.

Expecting a 50% donation rate (even of only a dollar) is *way* too high in my opinion. Maybe I'm too conservative, but I'd expect it to be more like around 5% if you were lucky. Now maybe Twitter is in a special position because due to its nature, it gets a lot of regular use, but still.

Renting out the background/theme of an existing web property is something I first saw in the Adult Industry a number of years ago. The extremely popular bulletin board (definitely NSFW) "GFY" - http://www.gfy.com/ (which stands for Go F Yourself) rents out the theme of the entire site (background, colors, etc) to interested parties and I believe that's one of their biggest money-makers.

Interesting to see yet another marketing technique that perhaps started in the adult space making it mainstream :)

Twitter is really shooting themselves in the foot here by not riding their own success. Obviously scaling is no cakewalk, but as is being noted here - they're failing to the extent that dedicated, passionate users are walking away. Not good.

So I guess they're just formalizing the ECHELON network finally so that they can publicly siphon billions (more) into it?

http://fly.hiwaay.net/~pspoole/echelon.html

Wow, interesting sounding project!

I have actually been considering something quite similar by the sounds of it, which I was planning on basing on a modified version of the Sandbox theme (http://www.plaintxt.org/themes/sandbox/ -- which includes some layout options via CSS), then layering on some options for re-organizing the content, and then layering CSS on top of that for pure presentation stuff.

Good luck with Cheescake, and I'll keep an eye on it - sounds like a potentially very powerful system!

If you've got your own server and want to install something on there (which gives you quick access to all the text-based files on your server), then you could also install something like webpad - http://dentedreality.com.au/webpad/

Disclaimer: I wrote it :)

Mark, thanks for the write-up, and a couple of extra points for those who are interested:

- for now, the focus is on directly uploading photos to the site (as part of a very streamlined "posting" process), but we're going to be adding the ability to import from other sources etc

- we're also making every attempt at using EXIF data from uploaded photos to guess at the date you'd like to put against a post/photo. This means that things will hopefully show up in real time-based order, not just when you posted it.

- video is definitely something we're interested in integrating

- the site is actually based on a heavily modified installation of WordPress MU (we're going to be releasing a bunch of plugins for other people to use once they're cleaned up and modularized a bit more

- the site has a forums area, which is running bbPress (and is deeply integrated with the main site for user accounts etc).

Thanks again, and I look forward to hearing from people with some feedback!

Happy Birthday Robert!

And just FYI: The guys who do the Xbox song (Tripod) are an *excellent* comic trio, who used to do a weekly segment on the radio station JJJ in Australia. Their segment was called "A Song In An Hour" and was on "The Breakfast Show".

Basically the deal was that the 2 hosts of TBS would give them a number of topics (normally between 3 and 7 or so) and then Tripod would have an hour to come up with a song and perform it live on radio. They came up with some absolute stunners like "The Gospel According To Britney (Spears)", "The Naked Chef" (then I found out why he's not tackle out, why he's not in the buff, when he's cooking his stuff") and "Hot Girl in the Comic Shop" ("my competition was a kid with pimples and a guy in a wheelchair, so I knew I had to act fast").

Absolute GOLD.

Have a good one,

Beau

In the Google video you linked here, what they're actually doing is a French-originated sport called 'Le Parkour' or 'Free Running', where the person doing it (the 'traceur') aims to move fluidly through an urban environment, using their surroundings in a series of connected, flowing actions or moves. It's got somewhat of a martial arts/gymnastics feel to it, and it's exploding in popularity.

Check out http://www.urbanfreeflow.co.uk/ for a lot more info (and videos) if you liked that one :)