DISQUS

I would disagree, but I can see your point.

Personally, I use the socialthing / ping.fm combo. I actively monitor all the services I broadcast to. Most of my friends most actively use Twitter. But at work, we most actively use Brightkite (we work under a "distributed" model, so it being location based is fantastic).

I do agree that there are too many me-too services in this realm. But I don't think ping.fm, nor socialthing are to blame. Besides, competition is healthy. Eventually these sites will need to monetize, the ones that have strong followings and are able to properly monetize will succeed, and others will fall to the wayside.

As for bringing us together ... I'm starting to think that is just not what the web is for. Sorry, but folks have been saying that ever since the web came into existence. If anything, I'd argue that it's further fragmenting us all. It's extremely easy to set up shop in a silo now. If you want to interact with people, tell your friends to meet you for a beer would be my advice.

Exactly John. You have regular old GMail and you have access to turn it on, yet as a paying customer, I do not. Pretty odd.

Yeah, don't get me wrong, I don't have blinders on about the potential risk. I just personally feel it is something that should be available to the administrators at the least. I don't use my account for business, it's just for my personal email, but that also means I'm the administrator, so I'd be ok with having to turn on features from my admin panel.

Rich -- Not sure what to tell you.

Akash -- I would rather that I as a paying customer, have the ability to turn the features on should I want to. The "feature" they added was the ability to turn those things on should you want them. If I turn it on, and it's broken, then that's my own fault. Not having the ability to turn them on at all is an entirely different point, and was the point that I was making.

Gravatars ftw! woot!

Heh, thanks for the tip. I have been considering getting a slice from slicehost and having it as a big sandbox. So I might have to give what you mention a shot.

I wouldn't sweat it.

As far as the other videos they should have paid attention to, it's easier to write-up condemning articles then it is to actually spend the time to think about things and write real responses to them (would be my guess as to why they ignored them). I probably could have been more articulate in making my point, but I'm tired, so hopefully you get the idea.

Why discuss education when it's easier to give you grief about "x"? (/sarcasm)

So far this is the only method I've seen that worked successfully:

http://alexking.org/blog/2007/07/02/iphone-with...

Basically, you sign up then cancel your contract. You have to activate to get everything working, but once you cancel the service, the WiFi stuff keeps working.

Trying to pinpoint the start of blogging and who it was started by is kind of pointless if you ask me. It has certainly been around since before the late 90's, and you don't even have to reach back to BBS's or "stretch" the definition of a modern blog for that.

I guess I could see if someone wanted to look around for who has been blogging the longest, but that's entirely different then who was blogging first. You're going to constantly be faced with people saying "Yeah, but [so-and-so] was doing [slight-deviation of whatever you just mentioned] a year or two before that!"

I definitely hope that some of it comes true, but I have to admit, it sounds a bit too good to be true. I'm really hoping for iChat and more support for the landscape keyboard.

yeah, I know but I like my gadgets, heh

Oops re: my earlier comment about Google Reader in Camino, it was more user error then anything, I hadn't updated in awhile. Just installed the new version and it's going nicely...

I'm having trouble with FireFox on my MacBook as well and I'm glad to hear I'm not the only one either. It's become pretty painfully lately. It crashes when quitting a fair amount of the time. Every once in awhile it stops responding to refresh requests and new page requests. Not leaving GMail open seems to have helped with the problem of other pages not loading, luckily I looked into the new Google Notifier for Mac and it now supports Premier accounts.

Anyhow, like I said, glad I'm not the only one experiencing this.

I have problems with Camino not loading the Reader interface properly. Not sure what's up with that...

My point was just that while I'm willing to make some generalizations here, php being typically used for quick and dirty applications is not one of them.

Honestly, I think a lot of our problem here is that you're assuming I am taking it personally. The only time I really take it personally is when there is some sort of assertion or implication that I'm being close-minded, which is a personal attack, so responding personally doesn't seem unjust. I remember at some point you mentioned that you would bring up "I found out how to do x in RoR" and I might mention later "I found out how to do x in PHP." I'm not saying it because of some "oh my god I need to show PHP can keep pace with RoR!@#" thought in my head. I'm trying to connect with you on the methodology so we can talk about that, instead of worrying about which language we're both programming in independent of each other.

I mean, if you, or Jim, or anyone, were to say RoR is better then PHP. I would step in to defend PHP. But not for personal reasons, but because I think you'd be wrong. I don't think either language is really better then the other, so neither should be placed above the other.

The fact remains, I believe the end-user experience is what really matters. Clients desires, when the client isn't the end-user/visitor, are another facet of an already complex discussion. One that I feel we don't really need to enter into in order to finish, or have, the discussion we're having.

And just because it continues to glare at me even after I've basically finished this comment ...

"PHP is usually used to do quick, dirty applications."

Sorry ... I didn't realize that flickr, facebook, digg, wikipedia, etc were quick and dirty applications.

flickr's working good for me. I'd definitely consider posting in their forums or emailing a more general email address (since it's like to go to a team) instead of just one person.

Paul, sorry that you, too, had a poor experience with 37Signals. I'm not really sure where they get the attitude from. I am not familiar with OnStage, but wish you the best of luck with it.

That's somewhat my point. If we really want to compare Rails to something PHP, then it should be compared against a PHP framework.

... I also kind of think whenever I make a well-founded counterpoint to you, you're saying, "Ok, well let's strip that part away." Comparing Rails to PHP w/ no framework is not a valid comparison. Saying you want to not compare based on the potential of a language is basically the same thing. If we're not going to deal with the fact that PHP has the potential to take advantage of frameworks, then we might as well rip activerecords or some other piece of RoR off. Sure Rails CAN do activerecords, but we're not talking about potential, right?

The quote you pulled and your response only really show that you didn't get my point (either through my lack of explaining it, or you not reading it closely enough). My point was that you're never going to get enough firms to pick up a single language and framework to make the task of taking over existing projects easier. It's the same for PHP or any other language. There will never be so many firms programming in PHP that it would be easy to move an app from one to another. So with Rails, there will never be enough firms doing Rails development for this to really get enough traction to be a worthwhile argument. You'll always be taking over a Java project or a .NET project or a PHP project. Sure you can possibly say, "We'll only work with Rails code" but the chances of that ever being a wise business decision are unlikely.

As for the last remarks, I think the link I gave you for Chris speaks well to that point.

"You need to be quite a bit more of an advanced programmer to get into Rails."

This type of argument always makes me raise an eyebrow. It can be restated as "Our technology is better, and if you were smart enough, you'd agree." If I have to be smarter to use your technology, then your technology sucks.

You may not have been saying I'm not as advanced of a programmer, but you were about as close to it as you can get without saying it.

Yeah, but I don't want to just create feeds of the information, I want it brought into a nice website as well. I might end up finding a way to let Tumblr pull all my information together and then just have this blog syndicate it. That would continue to allow for comments and an easy way for me to change aesthetics of the site still. But we'll see.

Hehe, thanks guys.

At this point I think I might have had better lucky carrying the stuff over there by myself on foot.

There was talk of adding one, we've been staying away from it for now though.

I'm not really familiar with zyb.com to be honest, but if it can sync up to your Mac software (like Calendar and Address Book) then the program I mention called "The Missing Sync" should be able to take you the rest of the way. I'm on a Mac exclusively these days, so in either post of my review when I reference snyc'ing my device, I'm doing it with a MacBook.

Hope that helps somewhat.

Yeah, I had heard that there were some new issues this week with google (this post is actually from a while back). It was just frustrating that it seemed when these problems happened, they would persist for awhile. Other email hosts (yahoo mail, hotmail, etc) periodically might bounce an email here or there, but even if the UI was having availability issues, usually the mail was still being collected and would be there for me when I could finally get in. With gMail it seems like if the UI is down, then delivery is down as well, which is no good, at least if you're relying on your email for anything serious.