Disqus - Latest Comments for indiekid

Re: louisgray.com: Twitter Chokes Unauthenticated API Requests, Sites Gasp for Air

indiekid — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 14:37:03 -0000

So I'd just like to chime in as an API user. While Socialthing! uses the authenticated API and we're not at all affected by this, we have similar restrictions at other sites. Up until now, Twitter had really been an anomaly when it comes to how their API is served up (in both authenticated and unauthenticated calls. First off, almost every single other site out there with a popular API has rate limiting on the IP level. Yeah, it sucks, but there's really not many other ways of doing it until push comes to pass. Gnip is a solution for sure, but those same API providers need to plug into Gnip for it to happen.

Twitter is just coming to a point where they're realizing that they can't easily sustain their previous models. Anyone that is currently using unauthenticated calls will soon be able to pull from Gnip to be able to optimize their calls (and likely, be more accurate than they were before).

APIs are a tough game...both on the consumer and the producer level. Twitter understands that their developers are their lifeblood, that's why they're working hard to improve the service for all. I think it's safe to say that the reason they're bumping up the auth'ed calls, and down the unauth'ed calls is because more people actually interact with services that are authenticated. Think Twhirl, Twitterrific, Socialthing!, etc. Now, the non-authenticated services are probably pulling far more data at a much larger detriment to Twitter, but most of the activity isn't going on with those places. This move is a very positive thing for the API as a whole, and you can rest assured that they will likely have other solutions for folks that simply can't auth the API going forward.

Great post, Louis

Re: Hahlo or Twitterific To Follow Summize Acquisition

indiekid — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 14:34:54 -0000

I'm not totally certain that this would be a smart move for them. Search made complete sense, but bringing a client in house doesn't to me. This is because they thrive on their developer program. If all of the sudden, there's an app that's in-house, it will get downloaded WAY more often than anything else, and effectively kill the other solutions. You see this all the time when Mac OS X builds a feature that had been a program for years.

Summize made total sense because they were already picking up a lot of slack and had made by far the best search program based off of the Twitter platform. Of course this will kill tweetscan and the like, but that's nothing like killing desktop or mobile apps for sure.

Re: Swurl and Second Brain: Feeding your past into the present

indiekid — Sun, 13 Jul 2008 16:53:38 -0000

Basically for now you can just scroll down. Maybe in the future we can implement something where we provide a list of dates that you can pop back to...that might be cool...

Re: Swurl and Second Brain: Feeding your past into the present

indiekid — Sun, 13 Jul 2008 16:39:51 -0000

Just to clarify, Socialthing! does go historical with profiles.

My profile goes all the way back to May 2005 with my very first comment on Digg.

Thanks for the mention, though!

Re: Google Just Bought Jaiku

indiekid — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 16:37:30 -0000

Don't know if you knew this happened last year...

http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/10/09/google-buy...

Re: louisgray.com: Dealing With Capacity Overload and "Laying Off" Features

indiekid — Sat, 14 Jun 2008 03:04:30 -0000

Andy, thanks for the comment for sure!

Louis, just thought I'd let you know that 2.0 is up and running, so why don't you come on back and check it out...much more stable, put some old services back in and tossed a few new features in there while we were at it. Check out the blog post describing everything here:

http://blog.socialthing.com/2008/06/12/whats-ne...

Re: SocialThing upgrades to 2.0 ads Digg and YouTube support

indiekid — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 21:43:26 -0000

The key about the update notification is that they're new updates that you haven't seen yet. By clicking on "See them" we return you to the Home tab and load in the new updates...

That help? Hope you're enjoying 2.0!

Re: Lis311 - Tumblr Tags, Anyone?

indiekid — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 17:45:28 -0000

You should try out http://lijit.com - they add on search for you!

Re: And Now . . . The Backlash

indiekid — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 14:08:54 -0000

Greg, terribly sorry it's taken us so long to comment on this. I'm one of the founders of Socialthing! and I just want to let you know we're far from dead and gone. We've got a good loyal userbase, but most importantly, for the past two months we've been hard at work on our massively revamped version 2.0. It's now almost done, and it will really change the way people think about our service. I hope once it's out, you get a chance to check it out and let us know what you think...we'd really love to hear what you think!

Re: louisgray.com: Dealing With Capacity Overload and "Laying Off" Features

indiekid — Sun, 01 Jun 2008 15:22:45 -0000

Hey J. Phil and Louis...we had to disable them simply because of the sheer number of calls we were sending them.

We call the services in a very different way than FriendFeed and others, mainly because our goal isn't just to aggregate you and your profiles, but rather, aggregate your friends on that service. The end result is a single dashboard with all of your friends' activity elsewhere.

What this does, is cause a whole lot of extra calls that we have to make to the services. Some of the APIs that we call are prepared for this, and deliver most all of that information in a single, or maybe two calls. However, in the case of del.icio.us, Digg, Last.fm and YouTube, the process was like this:

1 call for your activities
1 call for your friends list
x calls for x friends

In a very short period of time, we might call a service like Digg 102 times in 1 second (let's say, if you had 100 friends).

To remedy this, we've worked with the services to find alternative ways of calling them, as well as have completely re-written our architecture and ways that we call the services from our end. When we launch 2.0, it will reflect this, and all of those services will be added back in immediately. The new infrastructure also allows for us to call RSS based sites and services, as well as opens us up to many other services. We're expecting to launch the 2.0 features very soon (I can't give a specific date, but I can say that we're almost done testing, and pretty much just awaiting deployment now)

I hope that could answer a few of your questions.

Re: The SocialThing/FriendFeed Conundrum

indiekid — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 13:11:06 -0000

Dustin, this is Matt, one of the founders of Socialthing! ...figured I would answer a few of your questions publicly.

1. Being open and available by all is great. We definitely want to get there as soon as possible. If you can recall, FriendFeed was in closed beta for quite a while (just opened in February). But there's more of a reason to do this than just keeping it close down.

The nature of our service means that we're calling a lot of APIs very frequently. Some of our "competitors" don't necessarily have to do that, as they're just using feeds. In our case, we're grabbing things like direct messages, images intended only for you, etc...so that you can get the full experience right from our site. This also puts limitations on things, to some extent, because certain services tell us that we can only call them every so often. We're working on the best way to scale this at the moment, and as soon as that's done and tested, we'll be out...

2. Actually, we already support Facebook and Vimeo, by the way. Additionally, we previously had Del.icio.us, Digg and YouTube (along with Last.fm) support, but got rate-limited (meaning we were calling the services too much) and are working on ways to re-implement these services. Yelp and StumbleUpon are great ideas. We've actually implemented a new tab in our interface, where users will be able to vote on what services we add next, so that we can have a better idea what people really want.

3. We actually already do this for Twitter and Pownce. Your other thoughts are great...

4. Already being done. Any time there's a video that we notice in the stream, there's a play button to play it. When we get MP3 support in there, your idea would work well there too...

5. Another good suggestion. We're thinking of ways to implement "global" notifications, but more on that later.

6. Once we implement our "global friend list" this is totally possible...great suggestion

7. So this is one area that I will have to disagree/clarify. We won't ever have the ability to add another "Socialthing! friend" as a friend. That's because there's no concept of "friend" on our system. When you log in for the first time, we aggregate all of your friends from your sites into one interface, so that you see your Twitter, Flickr, Vimeo, etc. friends in one place. Now, whenever a user signs up for Socialthing!, soon it will aggregate all of their accounts together, and as long as you're friends with them on one service, it will show you the rest of their stuff (provided their privacy is set accordingly).

8. We are limited to what we can do with the APIs. Doesn't mean that there won't be functionality like that in the future, but for now, we can only do so much.

9. You might be seeing this soon ;)

Thanks for the comments, Dustin!