It seems that 130+ bases/chars and it returns this weird list of videos. Anything less, it doesn't return anything. - Ricardo Vidal
The maximum word length in Google appears to be 128 bytes (looks like they increased it after the llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch debacle). But I do wonder why there is this list of 10 videos that is returned for all queries that consist of words that are too long! - Eric Jain
it might, if part of the movie coding has segments of the sequence in it. - PauloNuin
Maybe it assumes that if someone just mashed the keyboard randomly and typed some very long strings, they are bored, so why not give them some videos to watch ? - Andrew Perry
I checked, any sequence of random chars, 130+ renders that list of videos. The same videos :) - Ricardo Vidal
Hidden DNA sequences in a Snoop Dogg video? We may be on to something BIG here :-) But note that any term that is too long appears to result in the same list of videos. Also, while Google may now be extracting text from Flash content, I don't think they process Flash video. - Eric Jain
Talk about an easter egg. Question is how did you chance upon this wonderful discovery? What sequence did you put into the GOOG? - Deepak
It's a sequence from a Part from the partsregistry.org and we wanted to see if Google was indexing the sequences. Seems it isn't and what happens is the weird videos :) - Ricardo Vidal
Imagine if Google did index sequences. Proteomics researchers could abandon Mascot and identify their peptides via Google :) - Neil Saunders
Enabling! I'm so done with doing research right now. Too slow, too frustrating. It's fun now that I'm writing up my thesis, but every chapter was two years of work and I was unhappy and stressed and suppressed 99% of my time at the bench. - Eva
doing research. But mother Nature said "NOOOOO!!!!, the bench is not a safe place for Science when you're using your pipetman" :-) - Pierre
enabling. I like the variety of challenges that brings as opposed to the microfocus of research - Daniel Swan via twhirl
Doing it, definitely. I've been a patch clamper a long time now, but I still get a thrill when I see currents up on the screen. There's nothing like it. - NatBlair
I loved doing research myself, but as a career, definitely the latter. - Deepak
Enabling: adding value to anything which helps the scientific method. Always different, emerging and interesting. - Matt Wood
Enabling it. I have the same feeling as Eva and Matt. - PauloNuin
both, but like to walk on the computational side - Attila Csordas
occasional bench research + running lab as a PI + teaching students - 2/3 of the current hellish grant burden = perfect - Maureen
enabling. greater variety, plus I still get to do all the original thinking I want to. Also I was a danger with P32. - Simon Cockell
I love doing research, but I hate writing it up. I enjoy writing well-crafted Ruby code to answer scientific questions, but I'm utterly useless at communicating the results. - Michael Barton
Haven't had much experience enabling yet, but I have the feeling I'd enjoy enabling research more consistently than doing research. But doing research does give a thrill if it goes well and you can keep the interest alive. - Shirley Wu
I do lots of "research" -- on the internets... - Eric Jain
Enabling & Connecting Minds. In doing my focus seems to move towards empirical work, statistics, anything in highly complex macro-systems. Ah, science in industry is cool. - dekay
It used to be research but then it got to a point where there were no tools available that could meet my needs, so now it has turned to enabling and trying to develop those tools. - Paul Bacchus
maybe I'm on the enabling side? Well fact is I've developed my share of computational methodologies and software so far, and it was fun!, but when it comes to thinking about the biological theories/hypotheses/paper writing from the data the software spit out, I kind of hate it. So I guess I'm no into "doing research", but more for hacking the heck out of it... - Ntino
I just don't know. I'm having a really hard time with that exact question right now. I'm nearing my use-by date as a postdoc and not sure I really want to try to scramble up the faculty food chain. - Bill Hooker
I *thought* you were that Maureen! Yes, we should definitely have coffee. I'm super late for work right now, but once I get my day sorted out I'll send you email. - Bill Hooker
Rafael says he would like some feedback on what we most dislike about Sciencedirect, Scopus, etc. Let me be the first to mention the 255+ character URLs in science direct(which breaks Connotea's bookmarking) and the lack of a "this article's entry on pubmed" link on the article pages. Anything else? - Mr. Gunn
William, thanks for the feedback. Based on your post, I would be interested to find out scientific community's views about accessing ScienceDirect via web services and developing applications that can be shared/used by other subscribers. - Rafael Sidi
Rafael, I'll send you a note on that one offline. You can guess what my view is on this. SD etc are treasure troves of information. By thinking about it as a service, Elsevier can really help the community and hopefully there will be people who will develop some killer apps - Deepak
Maybe SD should change the final name of the PDF that is generated for saving. Sometimes it is fine to edit it by hand before saving, but sometimes something different than sdarticle.pdf would be easier. - PauloNuin
Rafael, CISTI is always keen on using web services - I emailed you with more info. - Richard Akerman
There's another provider that provides "fulltext.pdf" - forget which one. I don't care too much since my PDFs go straight to CiteULike and are renamed, but if they didn't, I'd be annoyed. - Neil Saunders
Elsevier gives the fulltext.pdf, Oxford gives the number of the first page. BMC is the best. - PauloNuin
Improvement for ScienceDirect's PDF naming is on the way. - Rafael Sidi
That's awesome, Rafael. What about rewriting/shortening the URLs and adding links from the sciencedirect page to the article's entry on Pubmed, CiteULike, etc? - Mr. Gunn
William, we'll look into shortening the URL and other links too. Currently we are linking from article page to www.scopus.com and www.2collab.com (yes, they are both Elsevier products) - Rafael Sidi
Why do we need a closed science search? I can't access it unless my clients use it so tend to stick with PubMed and Scholar. I can find science blogs on Google Blogs search. Disease information on Kosmix. What's the extra value in paying for something? - Sally Church
That's exactly what I'm talking about, Rafael. I see that and think, "Oh, they're just linking to their own sites. That's what I would expect from a big corporation." You can't use the "crowd" for your advantage. You have to be a part of it, first, and small startups tend to understand this better, which leads to them innovating more rapidly, which leads to people who spent time creating the content in the first place getting more value from it. - Mr. Gunn
I know Elsevier has lots of competent engineers and more money to throw at this than a little startup, but unless you start with the right ideas first, you'll get nowhere. Elsevier needs something like Yahoo Berkeley http://www.yahooresearchberkel... - Mr. Gunn
i don't like in all of life science search engines absence of citations links: who cited this paper (who, how many times and when...) - it's should be incorporate in the search and freely available - Alexey
I'm leaving soon for couple of weeks, so I leave you something to laugh at :) The idea is possibly stupid, although still after few years I find it attractive and elegant. Any comments or opinions? If you can convince me that it cannot work, I would finally stop thinking about it... - Pawel Szczesny
It sounds vaguely familiar to some of the tools used by Christoph Adami but what I think you are getting at is more on the maths of it not so much on using the models to study biology. In any case, have a good time off. - Pedro Beltrao
Thanks Pedro. It's not really about biology - the basis for this ideas is that majority of proteins fold into their native structure without modifications and chaperones, therefore we may assume that all information of the final structure is encoded in their sequence. Update: Thanks Pedro for hint with Chris Adami - he has interesting projects. - Pawel Szczesny
This problem still stymies structural biologists and bioinformaticians trying to predict structure from sequence. We basically have all the f's if you think of the sequence as the function, and we have a bunch of g's, but so far it hasn't been enough to define function t, though we can get pretty close. If we had every single g corresponding to every f, I think we'd be able to figure out t. But this makes me wonder, are we looking for one universal t, or a set of functions for t? - Shirley Wu
Shirley, f and g are artificial mathematical representation of sequence and structure - I don't correlate them with biological function. And if we keep it like this, finding one universal t allowing for reliable prediction of structure from sequence only would probably mean a Nobel prize or something similar :) My impression would be that we may get lots of different functions for t that have some common component (corresponding to statistical pseudoenergy terms used for model quality assessment). - Pawel Szczesny
Yes, I sort of understood the abstraction - I say 'sort of' because I was viewing sequence and structure as abstractions from biological function to begin with (not in "real life", just for this set up). I guess it is the difference between "the function f that gives rise to sequence A" and "sequence A" itself. Maybe I'm just not convinced we need to abstract to function f, if there is only one f for each A and only one A from each f? - Shirley Wu
Well, as I think about it, probably I put it in a wrong way. Level of abstraction doesn't really matter as long as there's some tranformation possible between abstracted sequence and abstracted structure. The key is here to stop thinking about atoms. Gap penalties in sequence alignments don't have any biological meaning, so why we insist on predicting structure using physical properties? - Pawel Szczesny
sent a mail to elsevier to get more information about this - Pierre
As Alf Eaton has pointed out if the challenge platform is MarkLogic (XML database used by lots of publishers, implied by Elsevier owning a licence and mentioning XQuery) using the NLM DTD your apps / ideas could be used by other scientific publishers too. Arguably in that case you'd deserve more than $2500 though. ;) - Euan
I've been thinking about biological data visualisation. The question is: can it look nice, be cool and actually help you to understand the data? If we had something like Twistori (http://twistori.com/) or Gapminder (http://www.gapminder.org/) in bioinformatics, would it help us analyse the data or would it be seen as a gimmick - cool, fun but not really useful? When it comes down to it, is the traditional forms interface to a database the most useful tool? Do people have favourite examples of tools for visualising biological data that are both useful and aesthetically pleasing? - Neil Saunders
Though a lot of it is gimmicky, there are probably some gems in Edward Tufte's books on data viz (one of his favorite figures being Minard's depiction of the French Invasion of Russia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I...). Data maps can also be cool to look at (e.g. http://creativeclass.typepad.c...). In terms of biological data viz, it seems to me that most of it follows just a handful of set types (one of the worst being the exploded tangle representing an interaction network)... but I'd be interested to hear of any innovative biological data viz that's been done lately. Incidentally, has anyone experimented with Google's Motion charts or made animated graphs? It sound great in principle for layering on another dimension. - Shirley Wu
I attended a workshop on visualization at Bio-IT World. I don't think there was any doubt that people were looking at new ways of visualizing data, abstracting out the complexity of the underlying statistics from the biologists/chemists, and so on. The other thing that was clear; Spotfire was still king (by a mile and then some) - Deepak
data visualization can help i., understanding the data, can have ii., heuristic value iii., demonstrative value - Attila Csordas
Probably the #1 application, at least in industry, is decision support. A good visualization is key to help a med chemist make a decision on carrying a lead series forward - Deepak
This is more of an application of data visualisation but head-tracking with the wii-mote is something I've been mucking around with (Johnny Lee's work). There is also a plugin for PyMOL to use this (MAC only at this stage - I haven't tried it). - Mitchell J Stanton-Cook
One of my favorites over the last few months has been the CLANS clustering (also highlighted by Pawel a while back). It can be a nice quick way to get a different perspective on a set of BLAST or HMMER hits. The HHomp "whole universe" of beta-barrel membrane proteins ( http://toolkit.tuebingen.mpg.d... ) is a nice example .. seeing it was the first time I got a real sense of the breadth and "relatedness" in sequence space of this class of proteins. - Andrew Perry
Data visualization is nice, but it's so much fun that the basic UI design (e.g. showing data in a table in a useful way) ends up being neglected. The effort required to create a visualization that's actually useful also seems to be underestimated a lot... Book recommendation: Ben Fry's "Visualizing Data". - Eric Jain
Data visualization is key for any bioinformatics project. No matter how many times you can explain tabular data, the only real wins come from graphically representing your output. Even simple data visualization (e.g. NCBI's graphical BLAST output overview) makes understanding data easier. I wouldn't know what my bosses would do if I didn't show at least one graph/chart with any analysis I've been asked to do. I'm thinking AJAX technologies are the way to go - interactive visualization will always win. - Andreas Matern
For my default test search query, for all of these types of resources, this one has provided me with the best result so far - exactly what I wanted to know, straight away. - Paul Bacchus
Google does attempt to index the "deep web"... e.g. http://www.google.com/search?q... has 4M+ hits -- looks pretty deep to me :-) The federated approach WWS appears to be using has advantages (results are always up to date, simple to maintain) but also drawbacks (slow queries, can't do any meaningful ranking, can't search anyone who isn't collaborating with them). Don't know if they are using OpenSearch to interact with data sources, but that would seem like the way to go! - Eric Jain
check the top country, India, and the longest bar is bioinformatics -- haven't searched the matter, but is there outsourcing of bioinformatics application coding there like with the other types of software ? - Ntino
They changed the scaling algorithms in the new version right ? I cant seam to make a query that results in an upward trend. Maybe buggy ? Alternative .. a lot more people getting online and therefore reducing the relative number of science related queries (its a relative measure). Or just even pople doing a lot more queries in general, most of them just to find a website, etc - Pedro Beltrao
Agree with Stein's writing... it's a tool, even though to do, but will become a field generated by the next stage in the evolution of the biology field... cause biology is becoming more and more data intensive. Do you think in 2012, anybody will be going to the lab to do cultures on Petri dishes and observe colonies changing colors (sorry wet lab people in the room). Sure there'll be labs, but Core labs with the data spitting instruments, like array scanners, sequencers, auto-protein gel scanners etc. - Ntino
... to continue the rambling: all data out of those machines sucked into computers (well we hope for e-lab notebooks, or better for the data in the open) and then that 's where the discovery will be... that's how I see the future of biology, which is currently happening, turning into a data-intensive discipline. - Ntino
Note that the news volume (bottom chart) has actually increased. The search stats tend to be a bit weird (except for very popular search terms, which bioinformatics is not), so I wouldn't use that information for investment advice :-) - Eric Jain
I sense debate brewing :) I think there will always be a place for people looking at things in labs. I like bioinformatics but I don't think it ever has been, is, or will be a field. The sole reason for bioinformatics journals is to give academic bioinformaticians a place to publish: because that's the sole output recognised by academia. Academia doesn't know how to employ tool-builders, or recognise their skills. - Neil Saunders
One reason "bioinformatics" collapsed as an industry was for some of the same reasons listed above. It was never an industry by itself, just got subsumed by the broader scientific process (by and large) - Deepak
To be honest, that was a joke: but what's going on towards the end of 2006? A big spike for Leona and a big corresponding dip in science searches! She _is_ to blame! - Matt Wood
:) I blame twitter, same observation. - Neil Saunders
Did not see this coming, especially the Invtrogen biy. I figured ABI would go solo after the split, or get acquired by someone like Affy. And the price is lower than expected given ABI's status in the industry. - Deepak
That is surprising, the buy, I mean, not necessarily the price. I think it may be a little low, but not extraordinarily. - Mr. Gunn
Everyone is hording attention data regarding papers. There is no easy way to access individual citation information, number of downloads etc. Check out the "conversations" about a paper from Alf (http://scintilla.nature.com/co...). It is probably not fast enough to rank pubmed queries but it looks great for single queries. - Pedro Beltrao
20351 journals in ftp://ftp.ncbi.nih.gov/pubmed/J_Medline.txt . Let's find ~200 volunteers that would find 100 impacts factors and complete a shared list of journals on the web :-) - Pierre
Thank you for the link Lars, I'm going to have a closer look at this site - Pierre
What about setting up an open project / open data impact factor website? With the growth of content on PubMed and Open Access in general, a joint effort could easily to this... We'd store things as RDF using the just released Bibliographic Ontology... etc. - Egon Willighagen
+1 Egon. Today, I'm currently writing a trivial prototype to sort the papers from a xml-pubmed result, let's discuss this later. At this time I'm about to put a list of journals in mysql (just one table {title,MedAbrr, NCBI-ID, ISSN, impact} ). - Pierre
@Mr. Gunn: PubMed doesn't have a proper API but it has EUtils - Kambiz Kamrani
EUtils was not implemented for (Journals AND xml). It doesn't contain any information about the impact factors (or RSS, editor, etc...) - Pierre
Kambiz - pubmed has eutils, but you can't get impact factor from that. You need to deal with the luddites at ISI for that, ;-) - Mr. Gunn
legal issue: can we build a public database of impact factors ? The list may belong to ISI. - Pierre
I am almost certain that you would be in legal trouble if you were to make a public database of ISI impact factors. To get access to the impact factors in the first place, your institution must sign a contract with Thomson Scientific. I would be extremely surprised if that contract did not forbid you to redistribute the data to third parties. - Lars Juhl Jensen
Lars, that's what I suspected. Whatever, I'm still writing a program to sort a set of papers. - Pierre
Pierre, that's great because you should be able to sort by eigenfactors :-) On their website they explicitly state that "Eigenfactor is completely free and completely searchable". Since their "Article Influence" score correlates well with the impact factor, you should be able to get to get a good sorting this way. - Lars Juhl Jensen
It's a great way to shield themselves from critique, isn't it? Forbidding any sort of published comparison? I say screw 'em and use the eigenfactors instead, or alternatively, reverse-engineer the IF algorithm from public data and use that. - Mr. Gunn
If you rev-eng the IF Thomson will just whine that you got it wrong (while not showing you how they did it "right). I love the idea of being able to sort by impact, but not impact factor -- I'd rather we all just ignore that particular metric. Pierre, these might also be of interest: http://www.scimagojr.com/, http://www.journal-ranking.com... - Bill Hooker
In the end, we need to move this discussion to what is important. Is it the number of views? Is it the download? Is it the number of times the paper has been cited? Is it the number of trackbacks? A hybrid (most likely) We need to rethink and redefine impact and come up with our own score (Eigenfactor is just a start) - Deepak
Perhaps the Biogang has found its first target? A "killer app" to kill the Impact Factor could have an enormous effect. Like it or not, funding=resources<requests so there has to be a way to rank and sort scientists. Better metrics will mean better science getting done. - Bill Hooker
Deepak, I was originally thinking about the number of cites of a paper... that's a basic question I have... given some article, what papers cite that work directly or indirectly (by citing a paper that cites the the query paper directly). But surely we can do better... Another thing we could bring in is the annotation of the citations... does the paper citing the query paper use the method described in the later, does it review that matter, does it contradict that paper, or just as related literature... - Egon Willighagen
Egon, we should start simple, then think about how we can do it better, and in a way that makes things more meaningful. Love your ideas above. and yes, I think this will be a great BioGang project. - Deepak
Is there an industrial impact factor which is based on the patents, products, trials based on the very paper? I would love to take a look on that Technological Impact Factor list, probably quite different from the one based on purely academic merits. - Attila Csordas
Egon, it is very likely that in many cases we could distinguish types of citations by observing how relevant papers are connected (in other words, a paper (paper 3) that cites another paper (paper 2) which is using some method (paper 1) is likely to cite also the original method paper (paper 1)). Your idea would also allow to find subgroups and possibly merge them (in cases where competitors doesn't want to cite each others publications). - Pawel Szczesny
Attila, correct me if I'm wrong, but don't scientific papers and patents contradict? I have somehow impression that a patent is actually something that _works_ :). - Pawel Szczesny
I would agree with trying to stay away anything that tries to apply the journal impact factor to an individual paper in that journal (and by extension authors); it's an inappropriate statistic. But still, it's clear we need some way to aggregate the collective judgement of many scientists, in terms of ranking the importance of papers. Some combination of views, downloads, citations, could prolly do it, but how exactly isn't obvious to me. - NatBlair
wouldn't you want to cite it by either the direct citation count for the paper, or by the citation counts for the authors, rather than the impact factor of the entire journal? - Richard Akerman
Richard, that would probably be the best way to go in the end. That would remove some of the stranglehold that publications have (although journal influence will be implicit in whatever metric you use). - Deepak
I agree that it is obviously better to judge individual papers based on how much they actually got cited rather than based on the impact factor of the journal in which they got published. But how will you sort papers that have been published within the past half a year and thus have not been cited yet? By number of downloads? Or is the impact factor perhaps not that bad a proxy for the expected number of future citations? - Lars Juhl Jensen
@Lars: Due to the terribly skewed nature of the distribution of number of citations to papers in any given journal, the impact factor, which signals the mean citations per paper, is never a good proxy for the majority of papers in that journal. Now, downloads and views might be better for more recent things, but I don't think many journals are releasing that info. - NatBlair
I think this would be a great biogang project! - Mr. Gunn
NatBlair - I think we're looking for a journal-independent measure of impact. Certainly papers in some journals will have more citations just because they're read more, but that's also the opportunity for more impact. If you'd like to know "would the same paper have gotten as many citations/reader if it were published in another journal?", well that's a great question, but not one we can answer. Maybe some sort of naive Bayesian approach can find a classifier that predicts the number of citations? - Mr. Gunn
@Mr. Gunn - I agree, and was mostly supporting trying to remove ourselves from the idea of judging a given paper solely by the "Impact Factor" (trademark of ISI) of the journal it is published in. Sry if I wasn't clear. The broader question of how assess of the impact (i.e. the importance/influence/etc.) of a paper, is a tough one. Citations are one kind of vote, downloads/views are another. Something like the Faculty of 1000 (esp if opened up to more people) ratings are again another. How to combine em? - NatBlair
Perhaps, rather than Impact Factor as predictor of expected cites for a given paper (bad for reasons NatBlair gives), we could use an extension of the h-index idea. If Deepak's h-index (or whatever) is >> Bill's, then we expect Deepak's latest paper to be cited more than Bill's. Further, if the "cumulative h-index" for Deepak's group is higher than that for Bill's group, we have more evidence for the same prediction; and so on for the department, university, and so on. - Bill Hooker
Aha, there's a word limit. Good, I need one. Last point: my suggestion does not solve the "rich get richer" problem, but I'm not sure any prediction method will... maybe an algorithm based on publication/cite histories of many authors? - Bill Hooker
I also think that ranking individual papers on a quality measure of the journal is not very appropriate. As others have said, it really is not a good approximation to the quality of the individual paper due to the long tail distribution (a few papers determine the impact factor). Unfortunately there is no easy/timely way to evaluate single papers. It would be great to have citations, number of downloads and/or citations per paper of the authors. - Pedro Beltrao
there was some related discussion over here: http://tinyurl.com/58s7jh Somewhat connected to Pawels points - I talked about with Julius Lucks and the folks at PLoS about trying to move methodology out of the (supplementary material of) papers and onto services like OpenWetWare. Then you could track uses of a specific protocol and get a sort of impact factor for that protocol as opposed to the papers that they are found in. Thinking about it - we could harvest PLoS to populate OWW as well :) - Cameron Neylon
I see the point about the long-tailed distribution, but I still think that people are underestimating the importance of the journal. I have no doubt that the exact same paper will be download, read, and cited much more if it is published in Nature compared to if it is published in the Bangladesh Journal of Botany (not that there is anything wrong with that journal). Maybe the median number of citations is be a better measure than the mean? - Lars Juhl Jensen
The H-index is interesting. I wonder if there's some way to back test it to see how predictive it really is. Like using 5-10 years ago to predict 1-4 years ago. - Mr. Gunn
..or open your bugzilla and let the community assist :) - Naor
Maybe they took the idea and ran with it... "The server at twitter.com is not responding". - cmiper
I agree with Naor open source it and see what kinda crazy crap the community can come up with. Of course that doesn't solve the server down aspect :) - Tom Ray via twhirl
@Tom seriously speaking - I still can't figure out if the problems are hardware related, infrastructure or architecture. spending some time in my past with tier 1 telco billing, processing both inserts and lookups of several millions "transactions" per day can be very tricky without the proper architecture in place.. here is where the community might assist - Naor
Open Source Twitter??? Won't work unless the infastructure is right. - Roberto Bonini
This is an interesting article, I've thought of it, but hadn't dared say it. I think we're all betw a rock and a hard place. Even if Twitter came back to 100 percent reliability, it would be a long time before confidence returned, if it ever would. For the 180th time this is why centralized communication systems suck. - Dave Winer
Open source twitter? Ok, lead developers get in a fight and it forks: Twitter and Fwattr. Fwattr adds a ton of features but Twitter remains the same. Twitter development seems to stagnate and everyone moves to Fwattr. Fwattr devs reunite and merge back with Twitter. Meanwhile, there were 10 different standards developed throughout this drama. Yeah, let's open source Twitter. Now I'll turn around so I can promptly get tore to shreds..I couldn't resist, it's Friday :) - Bwana McCall
@Naor- I agree -its very tricky to build industrial strength apps that sustain X transactions /min. Having a good farm of servers or the latest servers is just one facet of the solution. It all has to come together, H/w, architecture, network bandwidth etc. Do startups complete a due diligence review on scalability , watermarks,/ thresholds etc.Or just launch as quickly as possible and hope for the best ? - Peter Dawson
Yeah, Opening up Twitter wouldn't be good. However, I'm sure that there are all sorts of people that could help Twitter right now. - Roberto Bonini
The fact that everyone kicks off when twitter is down shows how addicted we all are. Those who can't put up with the outages will go elsewhere or stop using it. But they'll always have that feeling that the party is happening without them. Twitter, in the words of Lou Reed, I'm sticking with you. Cause I'm made out of glue. - Gez
If i was another social network, I'd be marketing like crazy right now.. plurk plurk... - Britney Mason
Gez, we're just weaning ourselves off it bit by bit - Andrea B
Twitter is dead if you shut it down now. People will leave to another service and once the become rooted in that service they won't want to go back. I don't see how shutting down Twitter would work....via feedalizr - Chris Rodgers
@Peter, too often "just launch quickly" twitter is very visible so we all see what happens, but many others struggle with the same issues and loose customers (and make me loose my hair trying to assist :)) I can't blame them really, there is a lot of pressure from the funding guys and sometimes very bright young guys but with not enough experience, when it comes to large scale type of services I always advise to have "one gray hair" guy around and accept that planning ahead is not necessarily something bad - Naor
I totally disagree. Proof: Jaiku. It has totally lost it, since closing signups! I'm a big fan of twitter. My patience is not endless. But they created something amazing. I still love to evangelize it. - DC Crowley
"A well thought out plan. So not for Twitter then." hilarious! - Richard Bradshaw
it is definitely hard to convince my friends to use it since every time I try and demo it, it is down.... not very convincing.... my only problem is that I've got everything already syncing with Twitter... I don't want to have to do it all again, so I guess the bottom line for me is that I hope they fix it - nick carrasco
The downtime is still exaggerated. Barring a few isolated examples there haven't been a plethora of examples of it being down for long periods. The fact that I still use it on a daily basis, and have rarely been unable to do that, suggests it's up a lot more than its down. Not that it's perfect, but the flaws are overstated. - Robin Cannon via twhirl
be it because I'm using Twitter off-peak - because I'm in Europe - or because I use clients (thwirl and twibble) I haven't really seen a lot of the much-touted downtimes. so whats with that? - Günther Mulder via twhirl
@Morton Fox: Yeah. Shut Twitter down. It's not meant to be working anyway. - Ryo
Opening twitter would not be good? That's the only solution if you see it long-term. Live free or die hard :) - Ryo
i agree with gunther - twitter in european day time is seamless!!! - Denise Young
Something similar to the Carpentry course, but with a greater emphasis on the 'why' (tests, version control, automation, handling domains in flux), rather than the 'how' (strings, OO, etc). I was thinking one in the UK and one in the US: grass roots, profits to charity. - Matt Wood
Modern, flexible approaches apply equally no matter what your field or your revenue stream! - Matt Wood
I think it should be aimed at academics to a degree, but industry will come. Let me know if I can help somehow. I am sure you met the right people here in the states to drive this - Deepak
Something like http://upcoming.yahoo.com/even... but online ? A one-time event (say a weekend) where people submit code and hacks, all working on one direction ? (hmmmm... that sounds like something for the biogang wiki) ,,, or would you like it in modules like the software carpentry ? I vote and can help for a module for software quality and standards ! - Ntino
Can't access the site as I write this. Not sure what it will be like (I never liked Biology news net). What I do like is the geeky Drupal post - Deepak
Seems to be up now. It looks pretty interesting. And yes, Drupal is cool. - Kevin D. White
Finally got access (couldn't get in from work for some funky reason. Really like the look and feel, esp since this is all algos. - Deepak
It looks very good. Completely automated content is a great idea. I wonder how the categoriser handles bioinformatics? - Neil Saunders
I love this: "Tamagotchi effect: If you take care of your users, the right investors will rally around you and talented hackers will line up to work for you." Graham +1 ;-) - Erhan Erdogan
I like that :). And I appreciated this paragraph in particular: "The curious thing is, this elixir is freely available to any other company. Anyone can adopt 'Don't be evil.' The catch is that people will hold you to it." Friendfeed, clearly, has opened up with clear expectations to "be good." People will hold it (and them, the employees) to that standard, and I think that's awesome :) - Adam Lasnik
I wish more nonprofits operated using the Tamagotchi effect as a basic operating principle. - Allan Benamer via twhirl
Be good! Reminds me of E.T, good post I also like their transparency it gives me confidence in their vision and objectives! - Joe Dawson
Take care of this user please and make it so when I jump from the normal search to the advanced search, my search query won't be lost :) [also, please give me the link "Search all of FriendFeed »" even when the other search found some results] - Philipp Lenssen
do you guys need a marketer? Or does that not fall into 'be good" ar ar - anna
@Philipp The Friendfeed Feedback room is your friend :) - Erica Baker
@Paul: Invent a new slogan for FF. You 'll be needing that in future. - Varun Mahajan
"Be Good" produces "make really Good" software applications! woo hoo! Neat article. Very inspiring to see someone take a stand on "Do No Evil" and then go one step further and commit to "Be Good"! - love it! excellent example and role model for aspiring Web App Devs!! Keep up the "good" work!! :-) - Susan Beebe
I don't know why, but when they described PB as "cherubic" I just had to laugh. It was so cute! - April Buchheit
@April - same here! when they described PB as "cherubic" - awesome! angel face!! ha, ha!! - Susan Beebe
I find it fascinating that there are no comments on the actual Times Blog post but plenty o' comments here and acknowledgement by well over 100 people. Friendfeed power right there. - Jason Toney
Jason, good point, one of the things I value most about FF is this interactivity. - susan mernit
I finally read this. Nice article, Paul. Good luck. - Robert Konigsberg
That Paul Graham's article is one of his best - so true and succinct. I guess, the more social the online world becomes, the better (as in "less evil") will companies need to be. - Nenad Nikolic
I see advantages for both methods, but a combination would be better and probably could be managed (e.g. "Hutch Carpenter bookmarked this on del.icio.us, shared this on Google Reader, posted this on Twitter" - link-centric UI with one line per person). If I had to go for just one, I'd prefer link-centric, though. - Cyvros/fyc
i see the benefits, but also the problems behind it. (not saying one should not try!) It would also switch intentions. people do not post answers to you if you blog about something, but they will post because famous person X has shared that for example and they answered to *that* person. putting the comments to the 'original' changes the intent. so a listing like that would need to make a tree out of that. - Nicole Simon
I think additional aggregation would be nice, but you'd open up a can of worms. For example, I often click like on the first one I see it, then may add it to my SU or other services. who get's the top spot? the one where it first hit Friendfeed which in some cases may be through twitter because they are pulled more often? - Nicole Simon
www.friendfeedmachine.com goes some way towards alleviating this problem, with some more features due in a few days, especially around aggregation - via FriendFeedMachine - Scott Goldie
Both :) IMO link-centric presentation is preferable, assuming of course UI and work flow related issues at the point of adding a link to FF directly are nicely resolved. - Eugene
I think I'd prefer person-centric but link-centric is interesting too. I see link centric as a personalised memetracker... - Andy Davies
+1 for person centric filtering first - Alex Gawley
i prefer link-centric since it would clean up FF.. but thinking that rather than accumulating events like 'Shared on Google Reader' or 'bookmarked on Delicious', it should be shown as 'Likes' on the original feed. If there is some value add, like Comments or Tweets, only then, show it as an event. - Vishal M
@shakeel - i think the purpose of 'person centric' is to group all of a single person's activities as they relate to a specific URL into a single entry. As such FF doesn't do that right now. - Alex Gawley
I prefer link-centric. it would be great to centralize the conversation. There should be a priority tree, though. Blog>Google Reader>Delicious...etc. The item with the higher priority goes first. - Alejandro S.
Person-centric could be used in the user's own list of activities. - Alejandro S.
