Jonathan Terleski

i just read something about this today.. .apparently it makes people vomit... let me know how it goes. - jenna

My copy should be arriving sometime this week. If I can't make it in to work. you'll know why. - Mihai Parparita

For the first time I've found myself in a position to actually care about whether I should get a game for the 360 or the PS3. Apparently the PS3 has some undisclosed 'extra content' but I greatly prefer the 360 controller. Anyone have any insights into platform differences for this game? - Kevin Fox

I played the 360 demo and found the controls to be quite cumbersome - I'm going to wait for the PC version and play with my tried-and-true FPS controls of WASD+Mouse - Nathan Chase

@Kevin--for me the only diff. besides the controllers would be the multiplayer. That and the 360 drive noise is annoying--unless you've got a big HDD and can rip it to your drive with this week's dash update :) - Josh

Kev - in general I prefer the 360 controller also. But this game is much, much better with the PS3 controller. I tried the demos on both systems and the 360 controller just got in the way. That, along with the better graphics engine making sure your eyes don't stress too much from the all the white - is the reason I got it for the PS3. Great game if only for the experience for moving through the world. Cutscenes are awful and the story is just okay. There is a demo on PS3 also if you want to test it. - Nida

Meh. Play Fallout 3 instead. - Jonathan Terleski

Also watching it here: http://www.sfgate.com/election... - Michael Leggett

Thanks Michael, the SFgate link is great! I was just wondering about where to find results on Measure R (the George W. Bush sewage plant). : ) - Jess Lee

Yeah, SF isn't reporting anything yet... so Prop 8 still has a chance to fail. But, I fear it is going to require a big margin in SF to cover the current 8% gap. - Michael Leggett

My faulty math: If the trend continues, with 11% reporting and a gap of 8% (252,592 votes) we need 2,296,290 votes to defeat Prop 8. - Michael Leggett

SF results at http://www.sfgov.org/site/elec.... So far they're reporting 14,387 (32.39 %) as Yes on 8 and 30,035 (67.61 %) as No on 8. - Jess Lee

Only about 350,000 - 400,000 registered voters in SF. So, that's only going to give us 150k at most. :( - Michael Leggett

55% yes, 17% reporting... : ( - Jess Lee

Prop 8: Please die. - Jonathan Terleski

It is closing. 53% yes 47% no with 25% reporting. The green is spreading down the coast: http://www.cnn.com/ELECTION/20... - Michael Leggett

Not looking forward to talking to some of my coworkers tomorrow if Prop 8 passes. I can't even begin to imagine what it feels like to be told who you can or can't marry. - Jonathan Terleski

The gap is closing a little bit, but it's still quite large -- 47.5% no, 52.5% yes. - Jess Lee

no autographs, please. - Josh McFarland

i heard U2 will be playing at that party. - peter

If it weren't for the ho-hum interview with Ginerich, it would have been a contender for funniest episode ever. - Cyrus Lendvay

bah It wasn't funnier than the 'Obama: He Completes Us' one - David Knight

sweet. - Alan

People don't seem to understand that the smaller Google acquisitions (not YouTube, DoubleClick, etc) are generally for the people, not the product (or at least not the product as it is). - Paul Buchheit

@Paul, totally. I work with great people everyday and a lot of them came as part of an acquisition and I couldn't imagine some of my projects without them. - Jonathan Terleski

@Paul People often don't understand that because it's not made clear when the acquisition is announced. - Kevin D. White

+1 Kevin. If a service has users pre-acquisition and the intention is that the service will be mothballed and the engineers re-distributed then that intention should be made clear to the users. I believe that Grand Central will eventually open up again, but Jaiku? And what's FeedBurner done lately? - Kevin Fox

@Kevin Given that all 3 services you've mentioned are working just fine and serving their existing users I'm not sure what more could be expected of them. Given that Google doesn't pre-announce stuff all you can know is that these things are still working. I think we all know better than to believe that because there are no user-facing changes or dramatic announcements that a service is dead. Sadly many of the pundits don't build software and so think that if you go more than a few months without feeding - Adewale Oshineye

the hype machine then you must be dead. There's no real way to refute these sorts of allegations without making thing worse. It's like being asked "when did you stop beating your wife?" - Adewale Oshineye

@Adewale: Sorry for any confusion. I wasn't making an allegation, I was raising a question. I honestly don't know what's going on at Jaiku, but I do know there are products that have been bought and augmented, products that have been bought, torn apart, and re-worked into other services, and products that have been bought for talent, where the service was mothballed and I'm openly wondering which category Jaiku and FeedBurner will end up in. Also, I would suggest that a social network service that has closed signups isn't "working just fine and serving their existing users" but that's not the point I was trying to make. Sorry if I ruffled any feathers. - Kevin Fox

As long as people understand that there is a difference between when they see on the outside and what is really happening on the inside. Obviously I can't comment on some stuff simply because it isn't public. But I appreciate that perception matters, of course. And vice versa, the public should appreciate that they're only seeing one part of what is going on. - DeWitt Clinton

@Kevin I can't speak for FeedBurner or even Jaiku. However the best way to learn what's going on with Jaiku is to join the site and follow jyri/teemu/termie. Drop me an email on adewale at gmail and I'll send you an invite if you don't already have an account. - Adewale Oshineye

@adewale, in your comment to Kevin, you said that these services were "working just fine." Maybe you don't use any of those services, or you have a very loose definition of what "just fine" is. These services are slowly being mothballed and deconstructed bit by bit. That is NOT fine. - Mark "Rizzn" Hopkins

Google used to define innovation now they simply stifle it. Their motto: If you can't beat em, buy em and bury them in the backyard. - Matt Shaulis

Matt, I'll play Devil's advocate: What did Google ever innovate? They weren't the first search engine. They weren't the first company to sell CPC ads by auction. They weren't the first to do web mail, online documents, web video, IM, blogging, wikis, or any number of other things. Google's strengths are making incremental, yet essential, improvements and doing it on an unheard of scale. Immunity to Not Invented Here syndrome is a positive. - Steve Weis

Everything is incremental. Products don't have to be entirely new in order to be innovative, and in fact an entirely new product would probably be completely incomprehensible. - Paul Buchheit

Call me biased, but I still think Google Maps was a damned awesome launch. If you want to talk about acquisition success stories, you can't get much better than that. Not every acquisition works, but I think Google has got a way better track record than most, including some total home runs. - ⓞnor

Yeah, Google Maps was great, though the acquired product was actually a windows client, so it's also a good example of changing the product direction post-acquisition (for the better). - Paul Buchheit

Google Maps was a game changer. It really changed how we thought about what could be done with the web. - Jason Carreira

Yes, part of why I call it a success story is that it wasn't just Google buying something and slapping the brand on it. Where 2 had this crazy idea that you could pre-render maps for the entire world and use that to drive a totally different user experience, and they had a serious passion for high quality map rendering. Google knew a lot about Web design and large scale services, and a combined team brought it all together to launch something neither company would ever have pulled off by itself. - ⓞnor

@Mark You state that "hese services are slowly being mothballed and deconstructed bit by bit." I'm on the internal Google mailing lists for 2 out 3 of these services. I see them writing and checking in code on a daily basis. That's what I base my belief upon. What basis do you have for your claim? - Adewale Oshineye

@Paul exactly, talented people are a great reason for acquisition. Precisely why Google took over jaiku. Not because of the service, but because they got their hands on some really talented mobile guys - Alexander van Elsas

Adewale: I base them on the fact that I've been users far before acquisition on two of the three, and the fact that I'm really observant. GrandCentral is rotting away and getting less usable by the day, and FeedBurner continues to be robbed of major features that make it in any way an attractive solution. - Mark "Rizzn" Hopkins

"Why not build new services and integrate at the same time? There are lots of opinions about the best way to go through integrations. Our perspective is that the time you lose trying to continuously merge an updated legacy codebase with a new rewrite causes you be in a world of never actually getting the integration done because you're constantly working on merge problems, which gives you less time to add new features OR get the new backend integration done, and eventually you kind of grind to a halt." ( http://blogs.feedburner.com/fe... ) - Ionut

@Mark You're still not getting it. Ade just told you he see's code being checked in for 2 of 3 of the services you mention. How does this equate to "rotting away?" WRT FeedBurner, exactly what major features was it robbed of that makes it unattractive? I've been a huge FB user since long before the acquisition so I'm curious about the functionality I should be missing. Everything still works like it did before for me. - Erica Baker

No, I think it's you guys who aren't getting it. Don't get me wrong, I love a lot of Google stuff, but you folks are killing some of my favorite features. Replacing FAN with AdSense? Completely dumb move. GrandCentral used to work reliably. Now, half the time I can't download or listen to voicemail. You guys may be doing stuff to the code, but I'm here to say it isn't improving the service. These aren't temporary problems or issues - these are shifts in service levels. - Mark "Rizzn" Hopkins

This is the kind of awesome targeting we've seen from AdSense for Feeds since Mashable switched over from FAN: (http://mashable.com/2008/08/15...). Gay pr0n and ponzi schemes. As I said earlier in the week, robbing FeedBurner of the one key advantage for publishers (i.e. sophisticated monetization) will kill FeedBurner. It's trivially simple to set up RSS redirection, which is the only other major benefit to FB. - Mark "Rizzn" Hopkins

Collect $200, return to Go? - Kevin Fox

So Ben gets to make FB money as well :)) - Bindu Reddy

Does that mean I'll get $10 for every YouTube video I watch? - Roshan Vyas

This is just amazing infoviz. The most telling elements to me are how much being the host country influences the number of medals you win (presumably a 'home court advantage' and a larger number of competitors), and how many more countries have been participating in the games in the last 20 years compared to previously. It's really amazing. - Kevin Fox

That's pretty damn cool. I thought 1936 was especially interesting. - Cyrus Lendvay

It's cool to see that as time passes, especially from 1988 on, there are a lot more countries winning medals. - tim

don't do what Scoble says, especially! :-) - Robert Scoble

Damn paradox-maker... - Kevin Fox

Or as the great Todd Rundgren says- "Don't change your music to your audience, change your audience to your music." http://www.tr-i.com/ - Nice Fish Films

In business analysis, we say "listen to what the users want and then give them what they actually need." - Nathaniel Payne

Stories that validate my employment and salary will always get a "like" from me. - Jonathan Terleski

http://www.birthdayalarm.com/ - Kevin Gough

You'll have some competition: http://www.jackcards.com - Mike Doeff

What if you could use your phone to take a photo of a handwritten note, and the site would clean it up, put it on a card, and send it? - Jim Norris

I would love this... I would want it to send a bunch of flowers or some such as well... - Bindu Reddy

jackcards is great! i'm using it now. thx mike doeff - peter

Will receiving a birthday card mean anything if it no longer means you remembered? - Amit Patel

Every X% of the time (X is based on a personality survey taken at signup) it will send the card late with an apology. - Larry Greenfield

Probably not because I never remember to do this early enough. Now, if you could promise same day delivery for an extra $1, I'm game. P.S. you should offer to include gift cards (I bet you could get some kind of commission from places like Best Buy, REI, Target, etc). - Michael Leggett

love the same day feature for those like Michael...and me! - peter

It should mail the card to *me*, along with a stamped, addressed envelope for the recipient. I take it out of my mailbox, sign it, write "Happy Birthday!", and stick it right back in the mailbox. I'm imagining some sort of netflix-esque mailer... - Doug Zongker

doug - check out jackcards.com - like it? - peter

doh! - Doug Zongker

do you think your friends know your handwriting? your family might recognize it. wondering if the handwriting could come from someone who isn't you. - peter

Knowing me I would enter a date that was too late. - j1m

sounds like a great app for a social network that already knows your friends birthdays - Kevin Marks

nah, i probably wouldn't use this. i like giving people real things. - Michael Sippey

i dont think this would work on a social network. it's more about your most important relationships. like your mom. - peter

i tried jackcards.com. cool concept but implementation needs some work. took me too long to schedule a card. - peter

How about calendar events that trigger *actual* events? Whether it's online bill payments or sending birthday cards, triggering arbitrary services / APIs based on a time/date you put on your Google Calendar could be interesting. - Jonathan Terleski