Devin Anderson › Comments

http://www.insidetransit.com - Allen Stern

this won't direct me to stalkdaily dot com will it? ;-) - Anthony Farrior

lol no :) it's my transit site - Allen Stern

I have you queued up on my blog. I like the idea, would you like to say a few extra words about it? solacetech at gmail dot com - Anthony Farrior

WAIT!!! send it to me via the Friendfeed "direct message" thingy - Anthony Farrior

cant i haven't used the ff beta yet - Allen Stern

nah Mohomed :) but thanks for the tip - Allen Stern

wow that was fast ...geesh! - Susan Beebe

ok...can I promo the site? - Anthony Farrior

promo the site? - Allen Stern

What post is the spam on? - Devin Anderson

oh i get spam all over - the site was in drupal with mollom - now wordpress with akismet - it's just amazing - what it means is that even when the site was in drupal, the spam bots were hitting it as if it was in wp too! - Allen Stern

I knew it was a drupal port! Those clean lines looked very familiar...And yes, as I said, I like your site and the idea of city transit info. Just figured I get your blessing to talk about the site on my site :) Maybe this is the wrong place for this....Nevermind I'll just showcase http://www.insidetransit.com/ anyway :) - Anthony Farrior

thanks Anthony - my hope is to one day really build out the site - i just haven't had the time - i would love to make a site that provides transit info for tourists and locals in all of the major cities in the world - including a video blog, etc. i've built guides for about 7 cities so far and the feedback has been positive so far - any feedback you have is very much appreciated! - Allen Stern

I really liked those pics of the old Soviet trains - Devin Anderson

thanks - I try to find various funky stuff - combining a fun transit blog plus travel info - check out the pics of cookie monster playing the piano in the subway :) - Allen Stern

Oh yeah - rub it in! Some of us dream of getting even spam comments :) - WoH: Minding her Steves

Allen, very nice blog, check the Pelham post, the video has been removed from YouTube. - Majento

thanks Majento - fixed it with a new HD trailer - not sure if ya'all know but they actually took an old train car, and redid the whole thing to look like the newtech cars - pretty amazing - has to do with the car moving - the newtech cars must move in sets, the old cars can move individually - Allen Stern

That's a quick DNS update. - Jack&Cleo

no dns to change - Allen Stern

She looks so devious in the second one! And like she's totally pulled something over on you in the last one! :) - Jandy

She is so mobile and getting into everything. If only this cube would hold her! :) - Louis Gray

cute!! smart girl!! - Susan Beebe

You help make some pretty kids! - Clare Dibble

Where can I get those cubes? - Devin Anderson

The "play squares" were from Wal*Mart. They are supposed to be used as floor mats, but we use them as barriers mostly. The cube was just a fun idea to give the kids something to tell the psychiatrist about later. - Louis Gray

Check out http://ping.fm It lets you update all your social networks (with one notable exception of Friendfeed). If you need an invite, use the code: pingofpings - Mark Trapp

We need a tool to let you update all your statuses at once - I'd like to see one to manage my profile photos as well - anyone built something like that? - Craig Thomler

Ping.fm does the statuses, and Gravatar (http://en.gravatar.com/) does global avatar sharing. Gravatar doesn't have too much adoption outside of blogging platforms, though. - Mark Trapp

i also like to use hellotxt.com as it does this job quite well and they are actively seeking a SMS interface as well an IM interface. - Nathan Eckenrode

thanks for the info mark, I was wondering if there was something like this out there. - Devin Anderson from fftogo

Same dilemma a while ago. I decided to do it like this: Update status in Skype Mood, which is connected with "AutoTwitter" which is connected with Facebook and Friendfeed. Hm.. Gmail missing? - ※Fu※

use hellotxt.com for this. problem is you have to go back to all the sites where you set up aggregation or you get tons of double postings - Mark Schulz

Damn ... 1000 pages ?? I have pre-ordered it on Amazon ... not coming out until Sept. though :( - Clarence Chiang

advanced copy eh? i guess the rest of us will have to wait until September. - Carlos Ayala

Leo still 'reads'? ;) - Michael W. May from twhirl

How the heck do you find time to read a book? I need to be on your plan of work/life balance. -Eric - Eric - Feed of Dreams

Where did you get a copy? It's not out until Sept according to AMZN? - David Rowley

gotta make that my next book...er, when it comes out - Hal Rottenberg from twhirl

I was lucky enough to get an advance copy. So far it's completely different from anything he's ever written. It's challenging, yet very satisfying. Might be his best ever. (Disclaimer: I was not a fan of the Baroque Cycle but adored Cryptonomicon and Snowcrash.) - Leo Laporte

Evernote all the way. - Stelian Iancu

I can't get into Evernote. Reason - my life is centralized with Google. - Steve Rubel

selective photographic memory. Strangely, I can never find my keys - Robert Seidman

OneNote at work and when I'm in Vista. - Pete Gilbert

textedit on the mac. KISS (keep it simple stupid) and link to things on web - NoahDavidSimon

Notepad. - Mike Lewis

I mainly use Google Docs for my notes, which is extremely handy. - Rishabh Mishra (p248)

Switched to Evernote for note-taking on my mac last year and never looked back. It's really an incredible app. Would love to see them take the image-recognition capability to the next level though and actually add the ability to output text from images AS text. (Right now you can only search terms that appear in business card snaps etc.) - Daniel Smith from twhirl

Textpad, simple text files, and dtSearch or Examine32 to instantly find and retrieve old notes. - Sean McBride

Seriously, pads of graph paper then xfer to OneNote if it's critical - Cheryl Allin

I use evernote as well. I like how I can sync with my phone. - Devin Anderson from fftogo

Tinderbox for general note taking. MindManager for brainstorming and meeting notes. Evernote for collecting things from other sources. - Jack Baty

This is how Twitter started... only with a few more features. This is day 2. - Bwana ☠

Yeah, I get it as a driver for the source code, which is good in terms of distributed microblogging. I'd just like to see something original versus a copycat launched before it's fully feature-ized. - Jennifer Leggio

Hasn't been working well for me and many others. Had to post through ping.fm earlier. But yes it's still very new. - Devin Anderson from fftogo

Bwana - Maybe it's my enterprise tech snobbery but I always find it baffling how in the consumer world it's OK to put out something half-baked and it can be adopted but you can nary pull that off when servicing businesses. - Jennifer Leggio

I wouldn't even consider identi.ca part of the consumer world. It's in the early early early early adopter phase. It's going to be half baked, half done, half featured, and broken. - Bwana ☠

Well, I'm not one to jump on a bandwagon so I'll watch from afar and see what comes of it, mostly in seeing what companies do with the code when there are more available features. Half the people around here can barely sit down since they are too busy running from one shiny object to another. - Jennifer Leggio

I can't speak for anyone else, but for me, I don't have a problem trying these services, analyzing them, reporting my findings, then moving on. It's a hobby of mine. I love testing software. - Bwana ☠

check out what @corvida wrote about it http://shegeeks.net/ - expect all those features and more... they're doing pretty well for day 2. :) - Lucretia Pruitt

Not a thing wrong with that. Your insight is always great and balanced. It's the jumping up and down and waving of the arms and the screams of "look! I am an early adopter!" that are kind of pesky. :) - Jennifer Leggio

Identi.ca needs search for sure...still, it's easier to use then Plurk in some ways... - Tom

Not sure if this would be a good or bad idea on friendfeed. Plurk has a karma system but I haven't really found a use for it yet. - Devin Anderson from fftogo

I wonder if one could be created with a greasemonkey script? - Devin Anderson from fftogo

I tried it out yesterday. Good features, UI is a little rough. - Mack D. Male

Kwippy is nice and the devs are quick to fix issues... http://www.kwippy.com/czar - Czar

Louis, this is one of two you know of coming soon, right? If you're there and interacting with the devs - word of advice - tell them to just go ahead set aside Scobleizer and avoid all that that involves. - Vince DeGeorge

Kwippy's feature list looks like FriendFeed applied to Twitter. - Rishabh Mishra (p248)

Good advice for all social startups Vince! - Devin Anderson from fftogo

I'm releasing one soon. without any code. free. opensource. :) - directeur from NoiseRiver

Nope. Still not going to work. Not much difference between them and Twitter other than switching Python/Django for Ruby. Next? - Cyndy

directeur, is it going to be on Google App Engine? - Dewald Pretorius

I predict Q3 will see 3-6 more clones. The next 2 will get a 5-10K user test drive like indentica is getting. The rest won't. Twitter stability will increase, XMPP and track will come back online. Google will launch Jaiku 2.0 or fold enough features into gtalk to make it a reasonable substitute. Twitter/Google will battle while the remaining effort congeals into an XMPP OSS architecture/ref imp. FF will learn to group by URL rather than tagger, improve their comment sys, and become the common dashboard. - Ken Sheppardson

This isn't one I was thinking of, but I hear you, Vince. - Louis Gray

Grouping by URL is THE implimentation change I'd love to see. All referents to a given URL should be in one place, filtered by who I subscribe to and what I like. As is ... there's dupe data everywhere. - Alexander Williams from NoiseRiver

Dewald: Not necesserly. It'll be really distributed. free. standard and open :) - directeur from NoiseRiver

I'm willing to bet money that they use a relational database for this. Nobody seems to learn from Twitter's mistakes. (Of course I have no proof) - Eric Florenzano

Here we go. The open source, build a better bridge game. I'm going to keep tally and see if the number of Twitter clones matches the number of Linux distributions. - Bwana ☠

Eric: Kwippy says at Dewald's link "MySQL - a really fast database that can scale, all of us have experience with it hence the default choice." Uh.... yeah... good luck with that. - Ken Sheppardson

Ken, I really like your prediction. Won't be surprised if it turns out to be spot on. - Dewald Pretorius

If they all support the OpenMicroBlogging specification (not that I'm sure that's great, but it's standard) then it's great if there are more open source Twitter clones. - Michael C. Harris

There will be many standards to emerge and none of them will be compatible with each other. When it comes to open sourced projects, I'm a giant pessimist :) - Bwana ☠

Bwana: You're pessimistic about open standards or open source? - Eric Florenzano

directeur, don't waste your time with a Twitter clone. You've got a winner with NoiseRiver. It's scalable, being on G Apps. Ferret out every single requested FriendFeed feature, and build it into NoiseRiver. You won't regret it. - Dewald Pretorius

Dewald: Oh thanks! :) No, Actually what I'm talking about is more a philosophy than a technology. It won't take me more than a week to implement, I humbly think :) - directeur from NoiseRiver

Bwana, then we differ :) - Michael C. Harris

Michael, with OpenMicroBlogging your scalability is not only dependent on your own infrastructure and architecture, but also on the latency of the web connections between your site and other nodes, as well as the infrastructure of those other nodes. - Dewald Pretorius

+1 Dewald. It's like you have one operating system with SLOW (I say SLOWWW) IO operations - directeur from NoiseRiver

Dewald: Totally disagree. Your scalability has nothing to do with the latency of your connection with other OMB-conformant feeds. Maybe your performance, but not your scalability. Anyway, you could say the same thing about RSS, but Google Reader et all do just fine. - Eric Florenzano

Bwana, open source in itself offers no reason to be pessimistic. We're probably talking here on a Linux server. :-) - Dewald Pretorius

Eric, I hear what you say, but if your performance suffers due to too many concurrent slow connections, isn't that a scalability issue? - Dewald Pretorius

Dewald: I see what you're saying too, but IMHO you'll only have a scalability problem if you design your architecture poorly. With any of these types of services, you must rely on asynchronous processes to do the polling. So actually, you shouldn't even have performance problems, just maybe staleness issues, which is pretty orthogonal to scalability. - Eric Florenzano

I like the disclosure of their scaling plans.. But what's with all these clones? They need to bring something extra and different to the table.. - Winston Teo

Eric, the primary scalability challenge with micro-blogging lies in accurately and freshly composing a user's subscribed stream. Unless one does predictive polling (at the risk of redundant bandwidth consumption), I don't see how one can get away from synchronous polling of remote servers. - Dewald Pretorius

Dewald: Do you think that FriendFeed goes and checks all of my friends' services synchronously every time I visit the front page? No way. They've got asynchronous processes (probably distributed among many different nodes) which aggregate all of the relevant information and stores it in their own systems and data storage clusters. This is the same technique that the federated microblogging services could use--and my argument is that this type of system isn't inherently unscalable. - Eric Florenzano

Is it time to create some sort of microblogging technology room to consolidate all these convos? Here? Google group? - Ken Sheppardson

Eric, you're right. The only scalable federated microblogging architecture would be an XMPP PubSub per-user-feed model, with full local replication of the remote "tweets", plus local memcached implementation, so that presenting a user's feed consists only of reading from the cache when the user refreshes their page. - Dewald Pretorius

Dewald: Woohoo! We totally agree :) - Eric Florenzano

OK, who's going to set up the repository? Git? Subversion? - Ken Sheppardson

What if you just use flat file logging for each user+friends feed? You could push items out via SMS and whatnot, but whenver someone requested RSS, Atom, or a web view you wouldn't need to hit a DB, you could just read straight from the filesystem? - Ken Sheppardson