Disqus - Friends of alexlines

Re: 1st Thursdays DUMBO Gallery Walk (01Oct2009)

epcostello — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 12:27:54 -0000

Ah, but you forget, newspapers define their reality to only include “professional” media outlets.

I stopped reading the Brooklyn Paper when it became part of the Newscorp Reality Distortion Field.

Re: Dear Twitter: It’s Not You, It’s Me

epcostello — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 17:09:38 -0000

I think the geo stuff is promising. I'm not jazzed about the retweeting API.

I think that if they could find a way to reopen the Jabber/XMPP interface to general users, that could lead to some interesting stuff (reënable track via XMPP for example, which was much better than where their integrated Summize/Search is now).

Change Control would be a big thing. Make changes boring and predictable. Version the API.

"Change" is not a bad thing, absolutely freezing the API would be terrible. But today it's sort of like building a house of cards, on top of what you *thought* was a stable card table with some thing folded up levelling off one leg, only to discover that in reality you're building your house of cards twitter app atop a house of Jenga sticks, and you can't ever quite be certain that where you're building your app will be around next month.

Stability, predictability. I know they're under assault by spammers and bots and the whacko DDOS guys and they'll have to do what they have to do to protect "twitter", but "twitter" is more than the web site (and I think many would argue: “No twitter apps, no twitter”). They need to find a balance in protecting "twitter" without cutting off the developers who've built of the cool functionality that people thinks makes twitter twitter.

Re: Playing Foursquare

epcostello — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 17:45:18 -0000

Was thinking today that you should talk to Danoo, which seems to be popping up LCD displays in a lot of the delis and casual restaurants in the area.

Re: Flickr adds direct-to-Twitter publishing

epcostello — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 18:09:49 -0000

Also see this comment from a flickr developer: http://laughingmeme.org/2009/07/01/flickr-twitt...

Re: Path Mapping - Career Guidance Powered by Path 101 - How to use LinkedIn as part of your job search: Networking and getting a job with LinkedIn

epcostello — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 16:15:09 -0000

I receive about ten invites a week from people I don't know, who aren't in my network, who have little information in their profile, and who don't even bother to take a couple of minutes to change the default "Because you’re a person I trust…” message from LinkedIn.

I don’t reject them all necessarily out of hand, but what else do I have to go on if the profile is empty and the person hasn’t bothered to even introduce himself? My read is that if it wasn’t worth the time to write a personal introduction then the person is just trying to build a network, literally, and not actually connect to people.

What value am I going to get out of adding someone I don’t know to my network? There’s potential value, sure, but I need something in your profile and introductory note to get that. If there’s nothing for me to go on to assess the value to me, it ends up being a cost in my time (no, I’m not going to Google everyone who sends me an invite link, it’s not the best use of my time especially since that means the person didn’t take the time to tell me why they want me to add them to my network).

Re: Profile Pictures and Online Identity

epcostello — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 19:28:52 -0000

Related: see Dan Benjamin's take on avatar's today: http://hivelogic.com/articles/2009/02/why-your-...

Re: Your own body: An entrepreneur's most valuable asset

epcostello — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 19:44:38 -0000

I will add one more thing: I heartily recommend midday power naps, especially if you’re working a typical 10 hour day. 20-30 minutes max, close the door or put on some headphones. It's incredibly refreshing.

Only caveat is that your office/cube mates may find snoring distracting during the day.

Re: Your own body: An entrepreneur's most valuable asset

epcostello — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 18:32:34 -0000

The kick has been slow to get off the ground but is continuing. A bunch of stupid youth injuries have resurfaced which has not helped things.

Re: Nate '08 and the Future of the NY Tech Meetup

epcostello — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 20:27:26 -0000

Nate: seize the moment. Really.

This is a bit corny, but quoting from “The Dish (2000)”: “Failure is never quite so frightening as regret”.

Re: Help me prove that my blog readers are just better people than TechCrunch readers... shouldn't be hard.

epcostello — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 17:46:25 -0000

Gah, now I feel like an idiot, they're using AJAXy stuff to add the projects to a cart but that wasn't obvious when I was first trying it out.

This is why I'm prohibited from practicing user experience in 49 states and the District of Columbia.

Re: An experiment: Who's really out there and how do you measure influence?

epcostello — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 15:16:23 -0000

dugg, facebook'd, deliciousificated, geo:tag'd in outside.in

Weird bug when I hit the facebook link, initially it submitted the previous article (about gas prices).

Re: 10 Things You're Not Allowed to Say in the Echo Chamber

epcostello — Wed, 07 May 2008 10:32:28 -0000

Uh, aren't we all piling into your kayak?

In principle, OpenID is cool because of the single password and potential lowering the barrier to registering somewhere. In practice, it's just as potentially insecure (since you can get spoofed, and your password potentially travels in the clear) and most sites offering OpenID still require a cumbersome signup process. I thought that with AOL and Yahoo! acting as OpenID providers that there'd be more adoption, but both of them have a whitelisting process you have to go through in order for their services to provide OpenID to your generic web service, replacing one set of obstacles with another.

Re: Cleaning House - Step One

epcostello — Sun, 27 Apr 2008 15:52:24 -0000

Loading the site while watching the HTTP headers go by shows that a lot of the items are either set to be non-cacheable, or have very short expiration times…which is just stupid, it makes the client, the server, and the network work harder all in the fear of losing a little bit of data.

Another observation: there seem to be a number of objects served by third parties which send more data in the HTTP headers than in the object itself, like the FM adserver which sends back a 1009 byte header for a 43 byte GIF image.

I don’t know how much optimization you can really do when the sites which really need tuning are outside your control, other than to drop them.

Re: Hitting The Reset Button

epcostello — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 19:44:51 -0000

I know it's not the same as being there, but have some beach dog therapy: http://flickr.com/photos/epc/393342512/in/set-42169/