Disqus - Latest Comments for nickhalstead

Re: TweetMeme, the precursor to DataSift, closes its doors after 500,000 installs

nickhalstead — Wed, 26 Sep 2012 16:34:24 -0000

TweetMeme was just one product still being run as part of DataSift, Inc. We have not shutdown any part of the company, in fact TweetMeme has not been altered for over 2 years! (other than maintenance.)

So investors who invested in TweetMeme - are in fact incredibly happy as they were early stage investors who now are part of a much bigger company that encompasses DataSift.com + many other things we do.

Re: Twitter Has To Control User Experience: Does It Need To Control The Data, Too?

nickhalstead — Mon, 27 Aug 2012 11:12:49 -0000

On the Big Data front - Twitter already generates considerable revenue from all of the names you mentioned. DataSift is one of the two re-syndication partners and sells data into many of the analytics products you use, and then we pay Twitter revenue for licensing that data.

Re: Self Service vs Sales Oriented Web APIs

nickhalstead — Fri, 08 Jun 2012 18:54:51 -0000

hi Kin,

Really glad you appreciate the approach we have taken. We are taking this to the next level very soon, a new Graphic UI to lower barrier to entry. "Connectors" for many common databases, cloud solutions and BI tools - in which you can just pipe the data without even touching an API (or at least to get a feel for it!)

And soon 'self serve' for access to 2+ years of Historic Data.

Best,

Nick

Re: Marginally Interesting: One does not simply scale into real-time

nickhalstead — Tue, 05 Jun 2012 13:14:29 -0000

Mikio, have you seen our architecture writeup on Highscalability http://highscalability.com/...

We have none of the limitations you get with Storm + others. Our pipeline deals with 400 million items per day and can cope with spikes of 15,000 per second without any issue and scales in a linear fashion.

Storage is not easy at this scale - we havent yet released the details on 'how' but that is likely another High-scalability post for later.

Re: AP Creates New Big Data Approach to its Article Archive

nickhalstead — Tue, 20 Mar 2012 08:11:09 -0000

Millions of articles does not class as 'Big Data'

Re: Why I’m Doubling Down on the Twitter Ecosystem

nickhalstead — Mon, 11 Jul 2011 11:39:45 -0000

Thanks Howard, hopefully catch up again soon.

Re: Why I’m Doubling Down on the Twitter Ecosystem

nickhalstead — Mon, 11 Jul 2011 11:39:04 -0000

Thanks Louis, appreciate your support over the years of my endeavors.

Re: New Target for Random Sample

nickhalstead — Wed, 01 Jun 2011 07:20:20 -0000

for just doing statistical sampling - its perfect as you don't always need every single item.

Re: New Target for Random Sample

nickhalstead — Wed, 01 Jun 2011 06:25:27 -0000

This can also be a fraction - so it could be

interaction.content contains "Apple" and interaction.sample < 0.25

Re: Stupid EU cookie law will hand the advantage to the US, kill our startups stone dead

nickhalstead — Wed, 09 Mar 2011 04:42:22 -0000

Thanks for bringing this to the fore Mike, just because it is not 'enforceable' - we should make people aware that it is still damaging to our economy and that the GOV should be helping not hindering innovation.

As you state these abilities are already in place - if the EU wants better protection put it at the point of use - i.e. the browser - but the fact is even in this space I believe IE used to have lots of warnings about cookies but they have all gone? why - competitiveness - the browser wars are forcing through changes that users WANT way quicker than any government could enforce. If the users want it then they get it.

A privacy focused browser actually got pitched at a Techcrunch event I was at - and everyone dismissed it - because although there are some very loud advocates - they are generally hypocrites who probably still use IE.

Re: Start-Up 100: Why aren't we teaching our kids how to code?

nickhalstead — Thu, 17 Feb 2011 09:16:02 -0000

At age 9 I was programming in Assembler (6502) - fundamentally we do not have hardware (like the good old BBC Micro) - that allows our kids to get engaged at the right level to learn the low level stuff that is so important.

Re: Search Still Sucks

nickhalstead — Sun, 13 Feb 2011 04:08:28 -0000

This may sound odd - but Twitter is what is going to kill Google in search. Not maybe Twitter themselves but what they started in building a graph around people + interests is something a 100x more powerful than some dated 'pagerank' algorithm.

The next generation of search is not search at all, it is auto discovery through self describing a graph of interests that will automatically bring content within view. Quora has started this process in Q&A - but that will be repeated again and again in every vertical.

Arrington nails it when peoples behaviour has changed and that Google is just an index for things we already know.

The change from Schmidt to Larry was pure panic - a realisation that search does not work anymore and we need to start thinking like a startup again else in 5 years we will be dead in the water, so Kudos for reacting (most never even notice!)

I already wrote a piece on it -> http://nickhalstead.com/soc...

Re: Why client APIs are an important part of any real-time service

nickhalstead — Mon, 03 Jan 2011 07:00:15 -0000

I agree a standardised library that will work across all browsers will be useful to our users, but this is just a matter of us improving our Javascript libraries as we have all the required end-points - (or for someone nice in the open source community to work on it) - it does not require our data to go through a 3rd party router to achieve what you have detailed out.

That said I believe for many companies what you are building (and your competitors) is an obvious need for the industry as there is a lot of content that needs to be changed to allow for real-time updates. But you must understand that this kind of technology (and the scaling thereof) is our bread and butter.

Re: It’s Time To Disqus Our Community

nickhalstead — Mon, 30 Aug 2010 22:07:41 -0000

What we need is one of the commenting platforms to take on board some of the ideas from Foursquare / Gowalla - and have 'badges'

So people can mark your comment as 'insightful', 'funny', 'in bad taste', 'boring' etc - and then badges awarded for a certain number of each.

e.g. 10 'borings' in 24 hours = 'Super Snore'

Stackoverflow also has badges awarding users, goes beyond just the 'I answered this many things' - perhaps it can work in comments?

Damn, not enough time for another startup :)

Re: WarbleCamp and the Future of Twitter

nickhalstead — Sun, 09 May 2010 05:36:06 -0000

TweetMeme not TechMeme :)

Re: Twitter Is The King of Social Sharing. Anyone Seen Digg?

nickhalstead — Wed, 31 Mar 2010 16:51:13 -0000

Could have mentioned that TweetMeme is responsible for 99.9% of those Twitter shares :)

Re: The best and worst thing Twitter did in 2009: RT

nickhalstead — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 04:36:10 -0000

I think they should leave the current functionality as it is - and just rename it to 'like' - I do use the new system but I use it when I want to repeat something verbatim which to me is 'liking' something. If they continue to develop it under the 'retweet' name it will just confuse users further.

The fact is that the volume of normal RT's which have been edited has stayed pretty constant and in the case of links (my specialty subject) people clearly use RT's the same as they did - because they need to add commentary to explain why they are sharing the link.

To me there are two distinct use cases

1) Content Sharing - You want to share a link to your followers, in this case you want to be able to definitely want to add commentary.
2) Tweet Repeating - I.e. you see a tweet that is funny/interesting/whatever and you just want to repeat it to your own followers.

The first is 'retweeting' the second is 'liking' - and funnily enough Facebook has been doing it like this since they copied it from FriendFeed.

Re: http://blog.louisgray.com/2009/08/better-retweet-button-is-out-there-via.html

nickhalstead — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 20:02:05 -0000

But this new button is 'totally' tied to bit.ly - we support 12 shortener services, so you are not tied to anyone. I think @jeresig is awesome and a click count button is an interesting idea. I believe myself that 'clicks' is much less valuable as a click doesnt mean someone liked something whereas a retweet is someone specifcally saying they 'like' something.

Of course you are relying upon us a single point of failure - but we server 75 million buttons a day now, and still growing. We arnt going anywhere :)

Look out tomorrow for a massive reason why our button will suddenly bring you a whole new world of engagement.

Re: http://blog.louisgray.com/2009/08/better-retweet-button-is-out-there-via.html

nickhalstead — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 19:50:33 -0000

Can you explain better? We are all for competition with our service, but better is totally inaccurate.

We have the following advantages,

* Customizable shortener service (rather than being fixed to bit.ly)
* Custom @[whoever]
* Logged in retweeting (you will find out why this is important tomorrow)
* RSS / Email support - to embed the button

Lastly a known brand, people press our button because they know what it does.

Re: How to fix URL-shorteners, part II (Scripting News)

nickhalstead — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 19:11:51 -0000

Dave,

Interesting plan, but http://www.adjix.com/ is not doing proper redirects, it currently builds a page with a META REFRESH tag in to do the redirect, which only a browser can follow.

Re: Disqus Forks Into Two Products, Launches Revamped Real-Time Comment System

nickhalstead — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 13:17:21 -0000

is anyone else seeing live updates? I have it on 'newest first' - but havent seen one new comment pop-up?

Re: louisgray.com: ReTweet.com's Rip-off Of TweetMeme Is Embarrassing and Wrong

nickhalstead — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 16:08:56 -0000

definitely not coasting -> http://blog.tweetmeme.com/2...

Re: louisgray.com: ReTweet.com's Rip-off Of TweetMeme Is Embarrassing and Wrong

nickhalstead — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 11:18:20 -0000

John,

TweetMeme was around way before twitturly, if you look at the date of this original coverage for TweetMeme -> http://www.techcrunch.com/2... it launched in January 2008

But it only become popular when we revisited it in February this year, so you can be forgiven for thinking that :)

Re: Coming Soon: Retweetable Comments

nickhalstead — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 13:40:02 -0000

I dont anticipate any outcry, as we are only doing what Digg/Mixx/Reddit do - and allow people to leave comments in reference to a story link, you have to go to the blog/news/image/whatever to read the story, you then come back (if you want) and can leave comments. We purely want to build a community that is active on TweetMeme itself. And by getting further retweets of comments, we then hope that the story itself gets further coverage.

So definitely better for blog owners, as we hope to drive them more traffic. What people do with our API is up to the developers.

Re: Coming Soon: Retweetable Comments

nickhalstead — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 12:59:32 -0000

We are not trying to be a replacement comment system for blogs. The comments occur on TweetMeme. If Disqus or others want to aggregate our comments into their stream of comments like they do for Twitter/Friendfeed more the better. This post is a little miss-leading on our purpose - go read our post here and you will understand http://blog.tweetmeme.com/2...