DISQUS

Have you tried Firebug Lite? The Firebug for non-Firefox browsers?

From a business perspective the terms on invoices I send out have gone from Net-30 to Net-15. I've also arranged to have the ability for clients to pay with credit in addition to check.

So you take a reasonable call to action and then go into "USSA" hysterics. Further, both here and the bubblegeneration blog you discredit your rational by implying that those watching the NFL today are somehow willfully ignoring larger issues. Please.

Are there issues with which more people need to be aware of? Of course. Succinctly make the argument, list the concrete call to action items, and refrain from muddying the debate with your own axes to grind. The sooner we get down to real discussion instead of the 24-hour cable news theater the better.

That a great, clever design. I'm glad to see you move this direction, Karl, and welcome you to the weird, wacky world of t-blogger/t-creator - so much so you made the tee comic this week. ;)

http://militantgeek.com/2008/09/12/tee-comic-ka...

Final bit - in short, numbers posted on Mashable show that Twitter usage has actually gone up - http://mashable.com/2008/07/07/twitter-numbers/

The points were:

1) Twitter is not alone in facing outages ( http://moourl.com/a18cs ) or API changes ( http://moourl.com/f9i7o ). Developers who base their living on platforms they have no control over are on extremely shaky ground and should have their expectations set accordingly.
2) Twitter bashing was trendy among self described 'A' listers more than a month ago ( http://moourl.com/w7w3h ). However, Twitter's issues remain only a minor inconvenience to a majority of users. The reason that users have not flocked - en masse - to another service is because there is not enough pain to be bothered to do so. Why is there not enough pain? Because the features reduced or restricted are non-core items affecting the lowest number of people who consume the highest number of resources ( http://moourl.com/moxgq ).

The wringing of hands and gnashing teeth of over twitter often casts the service as an essential public utility. It's as if its downtime is rendering entire cities without water or electricity. There is no doubt that twitter is useful in certain contexts. But not being able to tell me about your latest blog post AT THIS VERY SECOND is not one of them. Perspective is essential.

Those that are attempting to build mission critical applications requiring that kind of utility-like guaranteed uptime ( a commercial version of http://moourl.com/g3rwl perhaps?) would recognized that's not twitter's strength - yet.

Pownce does not support SMS/text support, nor will it ever. Pownce is a file sharing service that goes to great lengths in articulating that they ARE NOT twitter and NEVER wish to be.

http://getsatisfaction.com/pownce/topics/pownce...

Finally, there are two reasons why these other services have not suffered the scalability problems that Twitter has. (1) They've perfected application development or (2) they don't have enough users. Given the niche nature of the service and the audience that seeks it out I'm inclined its more the latter.

Curious - why didn't you just embed the flash version of the entire strip in the webpage? That's one of the chief features of BitStrips...

The problem that Prologue is solving - a password protected twitter 'behind the firewall' for a distinct group of contributors - wouldn't even be an issue if Twitter supported groups (similar to Pownce). The reason Twitter isn't ideal is because when you write your 140 characters its broadcast to everyone - your drinking buddies, your uncomfortable and aggressive acquaintances, your rec league, etc. If Twitter had groups you could create the dedicated 'coworker' channel and only send work related stuff for that and 'viola!' you'd be serving the exact purpose that this custom wordpress theme is trying to solve (only with SMS and IM support).

Matt Mullenweg will be in Salt Lake February 2nd, not February 5th.

So, according to your argument, if you should suddenly come across a pile of money sitting in the street its ok to use it for your own purposes? Who has created the way things are is irrelevant - its what you personally choose to do with the information.

You don't think people will be creeped out that you're fishing their computer's cookies? You've got that Amazon badge that must have picked up my name - that weirded me out enough.

I think you overestimate people's enthusiasm for being always connected, all the time. If it was opt-in when somebody arrives on your page then more power to you. But there's no need to go digging around in my machine to see where else I've been when you don't need to know that. Let's maintain that last fascade of privacy.

Sure, these types of sites are incredibly viral - just the other night my wife called me over and there was our son's head dancing around.

But don't people just use these things once, tell a friend, and never return? What's the call to action besides spreading elves? Are there any statistics that show a clear link between interacting with a property and increased sales?

Editorial issues aside (even though that's a good argument why this won't work) there are other things that popped out after reading the announcement. For example take the following phrases:

"There are millions of people who possess useful knowledge that they would love to share, and there are billions of people who can benefit from it. We believe that many do not share that knowledge today simply because it is not easy enough to do that."

...and...

"People will be able to submit comments, questions, edits, additional content, and so on."

Isn't this easy, personalized, publishing technology a 'blog'? And aren't billions all ready benefiting because of Google ability to match results to a search? What problem is Google really trying to solve?

Steve Jobs - 1 : Common Sense - 0

Right, that's understandable. But this isn't your father's Adobe reader we're talking about. Adobe is undergoing a change, of sorts, to a more open, community driven focus. They've open sourced Flex as an experiment. They've launched their labs.adobe.com site to release free stuff back to user communities, get early eyeballs on releases, and act as a petri dish for new ideas. They've been long competitors with Microsoft and have seen Redmond's failings; after seeing their multi-year road maps and talking with their movers and shakers they have no desire to repeat those mistakes.

As Novell has shown, just because a corporation is acting as a steward for a platform doesn't mean the developer community receives jack for benefits.

Right, Dojo is using Flash 'under the covers' in order to gain access to the file system. Google Gears and Firefox 3 will be cool but all they're essentially doing is providing offline database support: your 'application' still is dependent on the browser window and all (memory sharing, potential crashing from badly behaved pdfs etc). And, as I understand it, Gears and Firefox3 won't have filesystem support.

AIR does have an SQLite db under the hood. You can have things like custom chrome (or modal, or always on top), native drag-and-drop to/from the OS and other systems, native clipboard support, native context menus, etc. It truly allows web developers to leverage their skills and build desktop applications - not just an RIA dependent on a browser window.

Not every application needs or should have a desktop presence. But my AIR app clients are amazed at how I'm able to take their brand and information needs and make them work in an offline environment. I think its a great platform (at least the HTML/Javascript development part - I haven't played enough with the Flex 3 part to pass judgment on that).

You mention Google Gears. What are your thoughts on Adobe's AIR or the upcoming file system support in Firefox 3?

Good show - lots of great topics. And thanks for the mutednoise site mention.

Just a couple comments:
I don't think the BlueRay/Next Gen dvd battle will be as straight forward as you might think.
* Microsoft is dead set against a number of the 'bullet points' that BlueRay is claiming. You mention that it has a number of movie studios on board. A big reason for that is that Sony is pitching this format to them as being 'unhackable'. Microsoft knows that is nearly impossible. Bill Gates actually almost got into a fist-fight over this with a high end Sony rep - http://mutednoise.com/phpbb2/viewtopic.php?t=17...

* Cost - BlueRay is going to be uber expensive - both the drives and the media. Microsoft is loving the fact that Sony has had to delay its PS3 next generation console until next year because Sony is committed to seeing that the PS3 has a BlueRay drive. Even when it does come out estimates are placing the PS3 well north of $500...because of the BlueRay. By then the XBox 360 will be ready to drop to $300 and have a year's worth of media behind them. http://money.cnn.com/2006/03/15/news/internatio...

Sorry for the comment on an aging thread - just discovered the site and loving it.

But as far as sites like theadcloud - what's the business model? Sign-up is free and while they can show uber targeted ads on their own site in conjunction with the tagged listings, how does that work if everybody is grabbing a feed via rss? Build up critical mass and then charge for posting ads (not likely because of Craiglist like sites)? Slip sponsored ads in the rss ads between free ones (might dilute focus and if ads are too covert they'll piss people off, if the sponsored ads are overt they could be strip out of the feed before being shown)? Sell the marketing data gathered in the background (because, after all, del.icio.us was bought because of the yummy web usage stats people volunteered)?

Any ideas?