Disqus - Latest Comments for andrewmccall

Re: Be The VC - What Would You Invest In?

andrewmccall — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 10:45:45 -0000

I don't necessarily think twitter as a platform for an application is a bad thing. Just because they haven't monetized the platform yet, doesn't mean that either they won't or someone else can't. They do have a lot of money in the bank and time is on their side, for now.

On the other hand there seems to be a long and growing list of applications that aren't treating it as a platform but rather the platform - and I think that's wrong.

I wouldn't invest if they ignore that fundamentally you can do everything you can on twitter on facebook, myspace and opensocial sites. But I wouldn't write off something that recognised the platform for what it is and leveraged it to their and more importantly their users' advantage.

Re: Testing the new layout

andrewmccall — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 06:12:49 -0000

Testing new comment.

Re: I’ve made a little JSR303 annotation library

andrewmccall — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 07:34:35 -0000

Hey John, It's a bit rough around the edges. I was wanted to use the JSR 303 stuff on my beans and let Spring annotate them in the front end like I'd been doing with earlier Hibernate Annotations versions. That was pretty much the main goal and it's just about the least amount of code that can easily accomplish it. Then of course there were some validations I wanted, like email addresses, urls and stuff so I pulled them all out into a separate project and I figured that since I'd find it useful someone else might too. So take it and play with it.

I'll eventually get around to adding a licence, but it'll be something like Apache 2.

Got any validation code lying around you want to contribute? I know you've got some phone number stuff. ;)

Re: Hbase for storing Users?

andrewmccall — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 04:15:25 -0000

TIm, That sound interesting, I've not played with Solr but I am creating a lucene index using some of the field in some of the tables - the cluster is running some highly customised nutch jobs based on the code here: http://github.com/andrewmccall/nutchbase. I considered putting the user Ids in a luncene index and using that to find users, but I was a bit reticent to implement it because I felt there was too much I didn't know.

Thinking about it again, I may just look at both implementations in more depth because it may be a better way to go especially as indexes start to pile up.

Re: Hbase for storing Users?

andrewmccall — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 15:58:49 -0000

Thanks for that Jonathan, good to know I'm more or less on the right path. Now that you mention it I remember reading about it in the doc but since forgot. Looked again and saw this:

http://hadoop.apache.org/hbase/docs/current/api...

Which I'll look into and post about if it's useful.

Re: A Message To Twitter Spammers:

andrewhyde — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 23:42:17 -0000

One thing I would add to clarify, each user that decides to go this route of spamming (see Klaus below, who spams twitter) is sending 30,000-60,000 adds, which trigger emails to the users of twitter. Now if the user doesn't add them back, they will be unfollowed and then can get another follower email from the spammer in a matter of time.

That user experience sucks. It needs to be fixed. All the reputation management is gravy on top of that.

Re: A Message To Twitter Spammers:

andrewmccall — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 04:15:09 -0000

I'm not sure they need to go so far as to ban users that do it. As twitter grows communities are going to form around the speakers that have the most to offer. If the people mass following then unfollowing have nothing to say eventually their followers are going to move on.

I don't see an audience on twitter as being any different from an audience anywhere. Any idiot can get one, just walk into a crowded room and start shouting. Keeping them is what matters. An audience that isn't engaged or doesn't care, doesn't matter.

Nothing twitter can do will stop the type of people that only care about the number of people listening to them from caring about that. What might be better is if tools like http://twitter.grader.com gave weight to the longevity of your engagement with a follower and took churn rates into account. These are in my mind more important numbers for the people that want to measure things to pay attention to. In my mind someone who is steadily gaining and keeping followers at the rate of one a day has a far more compelling message than someone getting a thousand and losing half within a week.

Re: I’m loving Zemanta

andrewmccall — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 08:38:56 -0000

I'm using the wordpress plugin, so far the best I've installed yet.