2008-05-24

Friendfeed Awesomeness

Friendfeed is getting a lot of attention. I find the site quite interesting, but actually using it bores me to tears. Maybe I'm using it wrong, not using the "hide" feature enough or simply having the wrong friends. Although the site is innovative, there is a lot of work to be done to bring parts of it up to par with other sites, namely the commenting system and categorization. It is not too much to ask for threaded discussion that allows line breaks. Grouping the discussions in some way would reduce repetition. But few are too worried about these minor annoyances which will be amended soon enough. Bare bones functionality is fine for now, with fine-tuning on the way.

The Staff
They're freaking ex-Googlers. What could possibly stop these rockstar developers? The designer of Friendfeed was behind Gmail and Google Reader. The simplicity of the interface just puts me at ease. Plus, there's knowledge of scaling and search. Friendfeed is the envy of Google, the social network they pine after with the Friend Connect initiative. I wouldn't be surprised if an acquisition happens. Wouldn't it be strange to get bought buy your former employer?

Competition

Some see it as the Twitter-killer, or at least want it to be. Sure, why not? Twitter was important historically because it opened our eyes to an on-demand worldwide conversation but it did not invent status updates nor could it expect to have a lock on them. Friendfeed is sneaky, because its gaining popularity from indirect posts makes it an increasingly attractive place to post on directly.

Digg-killer?
Digg is one of those silly sites that requires the extra step of submitting a link, completely ignoring the marvel of feeds in a hope to get better quality content. It doesn't work, because people race to manually submit every story from the major sources. Friendfeed is much more passive, even throwing out the CAPTCHA. Minding their own business around the web, Friendfeed users are streaming all of their links and posts effortlessly. Laziness is king.

Clones
With the web turning to soup, clones and parasites are sure to emerge. I don't know if Friendfeed can fend them off long enough to reach a state of dominance. Foreign-language clones are always a stickler. But if Friendfeed is open enough, with their API, feeds and widgets, potential competitors would be more inclined to work with it rather than actually compete.

Summary
Friendfeed is awesome. The development team has done most everything right, yielding a clean, efficient experience. Friendfeed takes up where Twitter left off in aggregating a global conversation. It is looking more and more like the end-all social network, at least for this week.

2008-05-13

the web is turning to soup

I am finally starting to see the mesh of innovative web sites that are allowing data to slosh around freely and expose people to more conversation. I must admit that I'm a little late getting onto the RSS bandwagon, but this is still a vital part of the equation not only for humans but for machines. There are a number of efforts to allow you to use the same profile on different sites, allowing you to connect with friends you may not have even known used these other sites. APIs allow third-party applications and other sites to send and receive messages and multimedia from not just computers, but also mobile devices. And these services will begin to truly become efficient as add the ability to push data (XMPP) in addition to pulling data (HTTP, RSS).

As many have pointed out, the noise level becomes a problem with so much text sloshing around. Duplicates are pretty easy to filter. The solution here is the same as personalized news. You rate items based on their relevance to you, and some algorithm figures out similarities between items you rated highly. There are several factors that could potentially be important to this kind of algorithm: keywords, length, author or originating source, ratings by users with similar tastes. That last one is enormously powerful. In fact, Netflix is running a contest to see who can do it the best.

I don't know if it will ever be possible to have completely synchronized discussions. But there are various hacks for now, such as tracking keywords on Twitter.

2008-05-08

2008-05-03

custom domain possibilities for Vortices

AppJet just added the option to use custom domains. I am cheap, so I will just use sub-domains
of vezquex.com. I want to have two for Vortices. The full one, vortices.vezquex.com, and the short one, v.vezquex.com.

I went into my domain registrar's control panel and pointed vortices.vezquex.com to 589766781.hosted.engine.appjet.net with a CNAME record, as per AppJet's instructions from the publishing tab of the IDE. So that domain should be working within a day or two.

Now the interesting part is the second sub-domain. One approach is to do the same for v.vezquex.com. Another may be to alias or redirect v.vezquex.com to vortices.vezquex.com. Theoretically, these seem equally valid, but I don't know for sure.

I'm trying the former approach to start.

2008-05-01

China will be more powerful ($$$) than the United States in 7 years

This is the kind of thing you know in the back of your mind, but when you read it you are nonetheless shocked. The Beijing Olympics are a metaphor for China's regained dominance. Well, it was a fun ride for the U.S. while it lasted.

FTA:

Angus Maddison's forecast (which uses purchasing power parity) isn't built on outlandish assumptions. He assumes China's growth will slow way down year by year, and America's will average about 2.6% annually, which seems reasonable. But because China has grown so stupendously during the past decade, it should still be able to take the crown in just seven more years.

If that happens, America will close out a 125-year run as the No. 1 economy. We assumed the title in 1890 from - guess who. Britain? France? No. The world's largest economy until 1890 was China's. That's why Maddison says he expects China to "resume its natural role as the world's largest economy by 2015." That scenario makes sense.



Browser Extensions

In this small patch alone, I see evidence of three Firefox extensions or user styles:


The "k" on the upper-left corner of that gray box is from Adblock. It actually reads "Block" when it is not cut off. This is for blocking flash elements if you desire. I don't recall ever using this feature.

The little icon just southeast of that I thought was from the user style (using the Stylish extension) that inserts icons on links to different types of files. Upon further inspection it turned out to be part the Adblock thing.

All of those "Buy" links look messed up because of a user style I became aware of on news.ycombinator.com, which itself uses nofollow links extensively. You can make the style do anything you want; the selector is the important part. I just happened to settle on inserting a tilda in front of it by adding the :before pseudo selector.

/*highlight nofollow links*/
a[rel~="nofollow"] {
background: red;
}

/*denote nofollow links*/
a[rel~="nofollow"]:before {
content: '~'
}