DISQUS

I did the same kind of thing last fall, and wrote about it as "twitter zero"

http://vielmetti.typepad.com/vacuum/2008/10/twi...

sadly I've backslid and now am back up to following a thousand people, which is harder to do than following zero people.

"allaboutthebookyouwant.com" can be similar to isbn.nu

"We offer a quick way to compare the prices of any in-print and many out-of-print books at over a dozen online bookstores. You can view the results with or without the shipping costs of a single book, and also find the fastest source for a book from ordering to delivery."

Lots of room for innovation in this world, especially if you come from the library (and not bookstore) world and can extend these resources to inter-library loan, netflix-style queued library checkouts, or even locate in a friend's library.

If it was a teletype, Dave -

you wouldn't have to click on anything, just read
the teletype would ding when there was a breaking story
you could read lots of drafts of a breaking story in progress as they went on the wire
there would be periods of inactivity when you could ignore it
when there was news, you could hear that there was news by the sound of the teletype

Dave, I've changed my twitter name (from @edwardvielmetti to @vielmetti) because it made it more possible to have people type in the handle in finite time. It would have been a real drag to start over again from zero.

Thursday was fine here Dave - I had my usual Thursday lunch w/26 people (just like the Thursday breakfast at Saul's) and people seemed to be in a good mood.

good idea dave.

for travel planning I'd expect that you'd want to alert when the train is almost in Berkeley; I don't know what the almost metric is - it would depend on where you are - but knowing that the train is 10 or 15 minutes away so that you can hoof it is perhaps more usable on the street than knowing that it just left.

I have a big collection of links including blog, twitter, radio, television, maps etc here:

http://vielmetti.typepad.com/vacuum/2008/11/san...

thanks

uh, hooray for the echo chamber?

it's deafening in here, between the sound of acorns banging on the roof and the caribou tramping going on.

the only thing I can imagine easier would be a twitter ui for this; e.g.

d twittertise at 8/29/09 8:43am happy birthday mom

however you'd still need the full screen UI for cases where the url was too long and the post was too long to fit.

twas ever thus; lots of people quit Usenet in a huff back in the day, with a grand exit and burning of bridges and retreat to closed networks.

"old age and treachery will overcome youth and skill"

comcastrophe.

don't like it? run your own damn wires. keeping wires working is hard work.

down at 2:31p Eastern.

Chris, I hope you're not saying "be a one trick pony", with some kind of undiluted personal brand that is so strong that people have a hard time seeing that there's a human being (with imperfections and foibles and uncertainties) hiding under that.

Frankly, I find the whole branding exercise to be faintly odious, as if I were being ask to construct myself as a new line of dish detergent ("now with ajax cleaning power"). I'm afraid that you are leading down a path toward manufactured authenticity, of calculated improvisation, of making yourself be easily digested into 140 characters and translated into HTML. I'm sorry, personal identity is a lot more complex than that.

The API you are looking for is Jose Nazario's duckylib:

http://monkey.org/~jose/wiki/doku.php?id=wiki:d...

which has a (real) command line interface and python bindings to a lot of web services.

If you forget a birthday, it's because your automated birthday-reminder systems aren't sufficiently finely tuned!

When Twitter is down, I write down messages on a piece of paper until the urge passes. Most of the time the paper can be discarded.

ah, so the overwhelming assumption here is that you have too many page views and not enough good advertising to fill them, so you have to slot in crappy advertising to fill the holes, and maybe you'd be better off running PSAs or white space or attractive blocks of color or in-house t-shirt ads instead of the crappy ads just to make sure the crappy ones don't crowd out the good ones you really want to sell.

what's a friend worth if they don't click on your ad?

Sean -

I'm always amazed at how organizations don't even listen to the people coming to their own web site (never mind conversations out in the wild). For most groups a steady and regular review of search keywords that bring people to them is an enlightening experience, esp. relative to the rank that they have for that term.

e.g. the manufacturer for whom terms related to "parts" got a substantial amount of traffic, but where their web site was on page 5 for search results for those terms - put two and two together and determine quickly that the relevant discussion is happening elsewhere.

Phil -

The Hadoop implementation of MapReduce has a "Hadoop Streaming" piece that lets you use Unix shell scripts as the mapper and as the reducer in your code. I'm sure you take a performance hit, but as a way to start to think about taking dusty shell scripts and distributing them widely it's very intriguing.

Congratulations Todd!

The fun thing about these patterns are that they are really, really old - I recognize at least a few of these behaviors from 198x Usenet (except of course with a lot more lag in the system).

The "deceptive navigation" pattern is the only worrisome one; what you are asserting is that successful applications consistently have a call to action that violates a user assumption about the nature of the interaction. I suspect that the non-Facebook best equivalent to that is the "click to accept license agreement that I didn't read".

"sorry, your wireless sevice provider does not allow access to Facebook for your device" t-mobile 7100t wtf?

awesome!

Google Adsense just announced a few new options for rounded corners in various forms of roundedness.

You will know that Web 3.0 has arrived when Adsense has a BSG corners option.

arrrr,

Ed

This will only be good for newspapers like the Marquette (MI) Mining Journal who regularly write original local reporting for their area and don't rely on wire service filler copy to pad out their online pages.