DISQUS

It would be really slick if you could automatically select the appropriate language in the drop-down based on the HTTP header (or does jQuery Translate already do this automatically?) All you would have to do would be to parse the "user-agent" header... example here:

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.0.8) Gecko/2009032609 Firefox/3.0.8 (.NET CLR
3.5.30729)

Once we have parsed out the locale portion ("en-US" in the example above), we could infer which language to automatically select in the drop-down. To take it a step farther, you could actually set the div containing the drop-down to be hidden, and rely on this method, although it might be nice to allow users to manually over-ride the locale sent by their browser - that might be handy for people on shared computers, etc.

To me, the four tenets of SOA (as defined by Don Box in 2004) are an important part of the definition of SOA, although they might be somewhat outdated at this point. They are as follows:

Boundaries are explicit
Services are autonomous
Services share schema and contract, not class
Service compatibility is determined based on policy

I think 'information overload' is a huge emerging problem (especially for those of us in IT), and I personally experience the problem more from blogs/feeds than I do with twitter (probably because I subscribe to about 100 feeds and I follow about 15 people on Twitter). The problem is that I frequently come across feeds I'd like to subscribe to, but I already get more posts coming in than I have time to read, and I don't want to unsubscribe from anything. I guess you could say I want to have my cake and eat it too, but I think technology can largely solve this problem. All I would really need is a way to rank the feeds I subscribe to in terms of their importance to me, in general, and then have something like Google reader show me unread posts in order of feed importance and then date, instead of just by date. This would mean I could just always read whatever is at the top of my list at Google Reader and not worry about how many unread posts are left when I run out of time - # of unread posts would become irrelevant because the technology is helping me balance my priorities. This type of seemingly small change could be revolutionary in the way we take in information, IMO.

As more and more people start blogging, and more and more people get on Twitter (meanwhile the pace of change in the software world continues to hasten), this is going to become more and more of a problem. In the world of software developers, I fear that we will see an increasing dichotomy between the "alpha geeks" who spend just about every waking moment reading feeds/twitter and the "5:01 developers" who just don't bother to read anything. We need a tool for those of who would like to stay in touch with what's going on without dedicating their *ENTIRE* life to it, and I tend to think more and more people will be in this camp as the cost of going to either extreme grows. I think whatever site can help us intelligently filter information in real time will be the next Web 2.0 mega success story.

I can't believe I didn't found about this until after the fact! I live in Santa Rosa and I would have *LOVED* to come. Note to self: follow Scoble on twitter. Doh!

Yours truly,
@patgannon