My dear friends: Happy New Year to you all! Instructions: Open the below .txt file in Notepad. CTRL+H and replace all 6 with _ (underscore). Make sure the font is size 10 (regular) and Lucida Console. ;-)
You've obviously perfected time travel, Johnny, so could you send a time machine to pick me up & take me to the future?
- josh neff, geek at large
Yolanda... As someone who usually has to wait for software and media releases until it's 'x' o'clock US time... NENER-NENER-NENER :P
- Johnny Worthington
Johnny in the future do you all still use napkins or is the mouth vacuum a big hit?
- Rick Schmidt
He wants us developers to do something cool that they haven't thought of.
- Jemm
Ok, just making sure I understood it correctly. It seemed super bizarre for a dev to suggest developing the UX, when people are talking about a specific issue. Maaan I would be embarrassed to have someone like that represent my brand.
- Mona Nomura
Raffi's new - I believe he just started in the last couple months. He's learning.
- Jesse Stay
But Jesse, it's Twitter. A <100 company valuated at 1billion. Really? REALLY?? LOL
- Mona Nomura
He should just learn to express himself in 140 characters :)
- Jemm
Mona, Comcast has similar issues - it's a common problem for growing companies, but I agree it shouldn't give them excuses. That said, I've gotten used to it - they've been doing this type of stuff since their early days, and it hasn't stopped.
- Jesse Stay
In some ways, it's so moronic it's genius. They don't have to think or work but have other people do it for them. That said, since third parties are helping the UX, they need someone to fix their backend already. The 503s combined with the 403s need to fixing already haha!!
- Mona Nomura
"timelines that we didn't think of" .... Is he talking about parallel universes or what?
- Tapio Kulmala
I think their ignorance of the UI will backfire on them eventually, especially when the open efforts going around begin to pull traffic away from Twitter as a backend and onto other services. Once everyone is using a 3rd-party Twitter client, it doesn't matter what data is supplying that client. See what Wordpress and Tumblr just did (and Identi.ca)
- Jesse Stay
Could be that they are a bit afraid to do major changes because they fear criticism. When FB changes something, people always complain (minor but loud percentage). Retweet -feature wasn't welcomed that well, but Lists have been accepted better. Still, it took too long for these basic features to appear in the web UI/API.
- Jemm
Jemm, I doubt it - if so, they're ignorant of the fact they can ask developers beforehand since we deal with their users more than Twitter itself does. Twitter never asks the developers before releasing new stuff (okay, rarely). They seem to be getting better, but the fact that they're still repeating 2-year old mistakes isn't encouraging.
- Jesse Stay
it tells me that internally some people have moved on or left and they are losing what little corporate memory they had
- bear (aka Mike Taylor)
Bear, I think you're right. It scares me a bit because I was starting to get excited about the direction they're going. Let's hope they're still learning.
- Jesse Stay
the flag for me will be if ryan delivers on the api and "firehose" changes they announced at LeWeb
- bear (aka Mike Taylor)
Jesse, Maybe they want to be move responsive. They don't want to think about every possible scenario when they make API changes. They want us to create UIs and ask for API changes that support those new innovative ways of presenting the data.
- Tapio Kulmala
Tapio, responsive would be to let us know when they launch changes into the wild, like removing the retweet functionality or changing the way tweets over 140 characters are handled. None of those changes were announced to developers, and developers were stuck dealing with their users complaining that the features were missing or their apps were broken because of it.
- Jesse Stay
Bear, yeah - the API rate increases they announced would be huge for me.
- Jesse Stay
I'd have to agree with you, Jesse, RE "their ignorance of the UI will backfire on them eventually", but I think it's more widespread than that. In some sense I don't really see what defensible competitive advantage Twitter has other then the network effects of everybody using the system. That may sound a little silly, but I mean they're don't stand out in terms of UX, customer service and support, developer relations... in a sense they're just milking the network effect cash cow.
- Ken Sheppardson
... if the top three or five 3rd party clients all supported a parallel, alternative back end bus, I think you'd start to see some significant cracks in their armor.
- Ken Sheppardson
Ken, I predict that's coming. It will be all about how Twitter responds at that point. I've compared them to Compuserve before, and I think the Compuserve phenomena is still possible unless they start opening up and focusing more on their own UI. They want to be Google, but what they don't realize is that Google is focused on the open web. Twitter is focused on their own service.
- Jesse Stay
I think the UI train has already left the station. If they start trying to drive users back to the site from 3rd party clients, they'll be alienating the folks who got them where they are today, i.e. the people who made the ability to post to Twitter ubiquitous. Seems to me they're more likely to be successful as an enterprise-class, secure, rock-solid reliable subset of a broader messaging infrastructure.
- Ken Sheppardson
And I think they'd be well served to study Hal Varian's "Reward = (Total value added to the industry) * (Our share of industry value)" idea as described in Google's post the other day (http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009...)
- Ken Sheppardson
Twitter is already a pipe not a place. They need to grok that, and sort their monetization path forward accordingly.
- Thom Kennon
Good conversation broke out here ... i think you folks are all onto something here... ken, jesse, and Mike ... esp with the 3rd party apps getting together to support a unified back-end (status.net?)
- Chris Heath
Ken's another one who's been writing on the Twitter API for the last 2 years
- Jesse Stay
Ken and Chris, there already is another backend API that is common across multiple clients, it is called Facebook. The main reason this is still a conversation is because Facebook is still a little difficult to work with, whereas Twitter's API has been fairly complete. 2010 could be interesting if Facebook really wants to attack the API side.
- Rob Diana
Rob, that's a total myth. Look at how many apps on Facebook vs. Twitter. Many, many more developers on Facebook than Twitter, much, much more API use there. The only reason we're still talking about it is because the major Tech blogs keep talking about it. Facebook's API is also much, much simpler. You only need to know HTML and Javascript to use it.
- Jesse Stay
I suspect that with folks like Dave Recordon, Bret, Paul, et al at Facebook they'll also be out ahead of Twitter in adoption of standards like Activitystreams that'll make it easier for them to be part of a non-Twitter network. Plus they really haven't given much ground in terms of handing over UX to third parties. Facebook's probably the most heavily used Social Networking UI by a long shot these days.
- Ken Sheppardson
The other reason we're talking about it is because Twitter's interface is such a closed interface we're wanting to find ways to make it more of a standard. Facebook is already building on open standards (to an extent, but that will grow much, much more in 2009)
- Jesse Stay
heh - great minds think alike - Ken and I posted that the same time :-)
- Jesse Stay
Jesse, I was talking more in the sense of posting and getting updates, search and list mgmt. Facebook is still fairly closed in some ways there. They do have an active platform, and the html/js angle is a great option.
- Rob Diana
Rob, yes, search is one of the main reasons people are using Twitter these days. Once Facebook opens that up, you'll see even more developers than "just" the developers working on over 500,000 active applications on the Facebook platform. :-)
- Jesse Stay
Twitter search is a pain in and of itself to work with though - you can pull similar information, amongst a users friends, in a much more efficient manner on Facebook (using a SQL-like syntax even!)
- Jesse Stay
All Facebook needs is a better privacy API and once that's out they can open up their public search to developers.
- Jesse Stay
Jesse, if Facebook opens up search better, it would be huge and could affect Twitter in a very negative way. I will admit that Facebook has more options for working with it as well. Geo-location will be important in 2010 for Facebook as well.
- Rob Diana
Rob, privacy-controlled geo-location will be important for Facebook. They won't do it unless they have privacy controls built around it. Everything released on Facebook Platform must have user-controlled privacy built with it. That is their entire mantra, and it's a powerful one. (and why they're so big)
- Jesse Stay
@sofarsoshawn, I usually let most things slide, but that first comment was quite out of line.
- mjc
from iPhone
Jesse - I think the thing that's missing from this discussion about the Facebook API - is though there are tons of apps out ON Facebook, there really aren't that many apps FOR Facebook. Why? Because they haven't spent time developing the APIs for accessing profiles, newsfeeds etc etc, and moreover they haven't spent any effort attracting front end app development. It's not been so important up until recently, but now Facebook needs to get into the act of being accessed via 3rd party apps.
- guruvan (Rob Nelson)
most #interesting conversation about #tech i've read all year (well, at least today i guess i'm just hyperbolic today) .... someone should tell Scobleizer about this one (pre-marking #scobleapprovedconversation ... pending approval)
- Chris Heath
Rob, "there aren't that many apps FOR Facebook" - based on what evidence? More than 80,000 websites have integrated Facebook Connect alone. Even that number's much, much higher than Twitter's. 2/3's of Comscore's top 100 websites have implemented Facebook Connect. Accessing the newsfeed and profile is as simple as a little piece of Javascript on your site - try doing Javascript with the Twitter API.
- Jesse Stay
Facebook has the problems as Twitter but not as horrible as Apple - there just isn't an efficient work flow and communication method, which makes it seem as if they (the services) don't care. Let's do talk about Facebook and how their API breaks every time there's a change, and people (users) complain and complain about the devs, not Facebook. Way to throw developers under the bus.
- Mona Nomura
Mona, I won't argue with that - Facebook does need better communication, although their devs (note: actual devs, not a support team) do get involved on the developer forums quite frequently. They also stage each and every change in a beta staging environment a week before they go into production so developers have the ability to know if it breaks code. They are also now starting a...
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- Jesse Stay
Regarding things that break, Facebook has also been pretty good at updating their blog when things are slow or down so both devs and users know. They also fix them pretty quickly.
- Jesse Stay
You can also come over here and chat with Bret or Benjamin or Kevin or Paul or any of the FriendFeed team who are now leading the Platform over on Facebook. I have to admit they're all pretty dang responsive. I'd love to make more Facebook devs aware of that. I'd love to see the FriendFeed team initiate a Platform-Feedback room on FriendFeed the way they did for the FF API.
- Jesse Stay
If we can't catch a Nigerian with explosives in feminine underpants, whose father alerted the U.S. embassy, whose ticket was bought in cash, who didn’t check bags, whose visa was denied by the UK, who studied in Yemen, whose name was on a watch list, who can we catch? - http://origin.reddit.com/r...
Maybe we're not trying to catch terrorists? Maybe we're trying to manufacture excuses to more tightly control US citizens, and terrorism is just the rationalization du jour?
- Mr. Gunn
Mr. Gunn: Space aliens are actually doing the terrorizing in preparation for 2012.
- Christopher A Carr
Petr: While I'm sure it, in a strange way, comforts you to think there a Grand Order behind all things -- a Big Conspiracy to rule them all -- that's really not the reality. Human brains are exceedingly good at recognizing patterns, but sometimes this capacity is hyperactive (as in your case). If you think the Virgin Mary appears to us in common objects, your brain will construct Virgin Mary visages on burnt toast. And you ascribe way too much competence to human organizations.
- Christopher A Carr
I read this week that the two most important changes to airline security since 9/11 are re-enforced cockpit doors and that now passengers know to fight back. Who knows how many plans have been thwarted by the first, and between 1 and 3 have been thwarted by the second (depending how you count it: Flight 93, the shoe bomber, and the underwear bomber).
- Kevin Fox
I'm with you Cristo....heavy on the incompetence.
- Bonnie Foster
Please translate from Latin(?) for us dumb folk, thanks
- LANjackal
from IM
*remove the cause - sickness will go away itself* - old medical proverb (yes, in Latin)
- A.T.
if people can crash a White House party and it goes on and on
- VAL D. Zone
And yet we have no problem putting 12 year old girls on the no-fly list because of a name match ( http://www.huffingtonpost.com/chris-k... ). The people working at the TSA are clearly fast-food burn-outs. At what point do we, as citizens, stop putting up with this tomfoolery?
- MVB (Curmudgeon of FF)
I'm not convinced this can adequately be explained by incompetence. I don't know that there was a conspiracy, but I can't dismiss the possibility given the depth of incompetence required. Assuming conspiracies never happen is as mindless as assuming everything is conspiracy.
- Bruce Lewis
from fftogo
It *is* pretty interesting that people bitch about too much airport security until there's a thwarted bombing, then they say there's never been enough.
- Kevin Fox
I'm not complaining about there being too much, Kevin, just that there isn't any effective.
- MVB (Curmudgeon of FF)
Ummm I think you're confused, Kevin. The *general public* complains about there being too much security. The only people who complain about there being too little are politicians trying to win votes via FUD & scaremongering
- LANjackal
from IM
Anyone know the names of the companies who are making whole body scanners? I think I need to buy some stock.
- Victor Ganata
Kevin - There's a reason for the "no getting up last hour" rule, and it's not to prevent a terrorist from going to the bathroom. It's to prevent innocent people with headscarves from being tackled by well-meaning but jittery passengers.
- Mr. Gunn
Moot point, that rule was silly and has since been repealed
- LANjackal
from IM
As I understand the TSA strategy, it involves catching anyone who tries to do something that has already been tried. In other words, we're preparing for the previous "war" rather than the next one.
- Mark "Godt Nyt Ǻr"
In other words, the TSA strategy = FAIL.
- Victor Ganata
Seriously. An amazingly _expensive_ FAIL. All that time, people-power, money spent, so we can hear platitudes about why it did not work or that there are things that can be improved.
- Rick Cogley
Three hours delay at Paris CDG for this the following day on-route to Detroit. Most of this spent in the queue at the departure gate as they had only one male and one female officer to carry out an intensive search of 300 pax and their carry-ons. Explanations from Air France were very sparse, fortunately I'd caught all the details on Sky News at Manchester.
- Nick B.
I don't think I have the stamina required to start now and stay awake until midnight. I can put down some beers, but I'm not superwoman.
- Michelle Martinez
"With all the recent changes in airport security, it’s only going to get harder and harder to get your camera gear onboard a commercial plane. In fact, I predict that soon, it will be impossible. In fact, it is impossible to get the usual amount of gear on from Canada right now. A friend of mine was told he could not bring ANY carry on during his flight from Edmonton to Seattle. He was allowed to put his D3 around his neck. He had to check everything else."
- Jeff P. Henderson
from Bookmarklet
This is just Fucking ridiculous!! OK, the terrorists have won, lets, just shut down all of the airports in the US and ground all of the planes. We're done.
- Jeff P. Henderson
I'm all for that. Close down the airports. Only private planes will then be used for terrorist activities, cause anything goes there.
- CW™
The no carry on rule is utterly unacceptable! What about people who take medication and need to bring it with them? How do you travel with children? What am I supposed to do for 12+ hours on an international flight?
- Jeff P. Henderson
Answer: Check the children in at the counter.
- CW™
I travel with breathing equipment for sleep apnea
- Matthew DeVries
Matthew, every successful terrorist attack thus far has been carried out by people who were breathing. How much longer do you think it will be before they rule that out?
- Glen, Bespectacled Elder
I rarely travel by air anymore, but the increasingly idiotic rules that continue to be added will assure that I do not travel by air in the future.
- Jeff P. Henderson
So why is medication any different from a camera, a laptop or any other small carry on? What about a diaper bag with food, milk etc? will these be outlawed also?
- Jeff P. Henderson
I've said it before, all of this hype is being bankrolled by the tramp-steamer industry, so people will go back to traveling that way.
- Matthew DeVries
I wish the general public would get a clue and organize to boycott air travel until these ridiculous non-security rules are gotten rid of! Nothing will change until the airlines feel financial pain. When that happens, watch how fast the airline lobbyists will be on capital hill trying to loosen up the restrictions.
- Jeff P. Henderson
And we can thank Howard Hughes for this mess - without him air travel would have been nationalized in the 40s and all of this would have been rolled into a nice government subsidized package, with fuel being purchased pre-taxes and security rolled into the defense budgets.... And that's asshole's airline was one of the first to go tits-up because it couldn't deal with the fact air travel is a money losing venture. It costs too much to pull off for anyone to afford to use it while you turn a profit.
- Matthew DeVries
@cecily, bringing camera gear as a carry on is the only option if you want to see your gear when you get to your destination. There is little or no security for checked baggage and you have zero recourse with the airline if your gear is stolen from checked baggage. Professional photographers must travel with tens of thousands of dollars worth of gear and they rely for their livelihood. These new restrictions are unacceptable for working photographers.
- Jeff P. Henderson
Cecily, thanks for the link. The problem is that these restrictions literally change on a daily basis, are different from airline to airline and depend on your destination.
- Jeff P. Henderson
I've shipped my stuff by courier the last several times I've flown. Saved a couple dollars, and I get a tracking number.
- MVB (Curmudgeon of FF)
Cecily, you are correct, as the article states you do have another option to ship by private carrier, but that is truly an inconvenience for people who travel a lot.
- Jeff P. Henderson
You cannot rent camera equipment. It's a system, a highly personalized group of equipment, and they all work very differently from each other.
- Matthew DeVries
Renting gear is very costly and is only available in big cities. Working professionals have very specific gear that is configured to their specifications. Renting gear on a regular basis is really not a viable option.
- Jeff P. Henderson
MVB, when you shipped your gear, did you have someone on the other end that could receive the gear? What do you do if you are traveling over seas and do not know anyone at your destination, or are traveling to say 6 locations in 6 days? Is it possible to expect your gear will always arrive on time in the location you are going to be in?
- Jeff P. Henderson
Have not gone overseas. If I am travelling for work I ship to the office there or to the hotel. If it's pleasure, then to the hotel. I generally plan it out to arrive the day after I arrive and take a small bag with me.
- MVB (Curmudgeon of FF)
MVB - Virgin Atlantic is 37 planes. Delta is 450. Northwest is 320. USAir is 460. British Airways is 300. Branson is just running an regional airline, with farflung regions. It does speak to something I do believe in though - Vertically integrated conglomerates are just stupid, all large companies should be broken into a hundred tiny companies.
- Matthew DeVries
I'd be very leery about shipping $10K worth of camera gear to a hotel. Seems like a giant opportunity for a whole new industry segment to open up. The service would make it easy to get your stuff reliably to and from your destination. Some sort of check in at or near the airport and delivery to your destination. Everything would be insured. If something is lost or stolen, they would guarantee immediate replacement or reimbursement.
- Jeff P. Henderson
UPS, FedEx, et el. could easily modify their service offerings to make shipping for travelers more convenient.
- Jeff P. Henderson
I agree, Jeff. It's much easier if shipping to your office or to a relative.
- MVB (Curmudgeon of FF)
Certainly I have insurance on my gear. But that doesn't do much good when you get to your destination and your gear is gone. You can't just go to the local Walmart and replace your pro gear. If you are on personal travel, it is an inconvenience. If you are on a pro job you have a lot more to lose than just your gear. You can be sued for breach of contract for instance if you don't deliver on a job.
- Jeff P. Henderson
Well, yes I'm unhappy/mad about the ever increasing rules. Yes they are very inconvenient. I want somebody to prove to me that any of these rules make us any safer. I don't believe that most of them do. I think there are plenty of other ways to provide safety besides limiting our ability to move about freely and conduct our personal and professional business without ever increasing limitations.
- Jeff P. Henderson
The problem with the continuous changes in air travel regulation is that almost all of the changes made since 2001 are knee jerk reactions to isolated incidents. Example, taking your shoes off at the entry gate. This obviously did not stop the most recent incident. He sewed explosives into his underwear. So what next, we all have to take our underwear off at the gate?
- Jeff P. Henderson
That's the precise point, none of the new measures, nor any of the measures currently in place would have stopped any of the recent incidents or incidents in the past. Meanwhile, the simple and easy to use measures aren't being fixed, ie. Checking the fucker's ID card and seeing if the CIA has flagged him as a "dude currently carrying a bomb and looking to get on a plane" for the last 2 months.
- Matthew DeVries
First of all, the restriction on carry-on from Canada to the US was imposed by Transport Canada, a branch of the Canadian government, as indicated on the link Cecily posted. Airlines traveling to and from Canada are required to follow Canadian regulations and have absolutely no say in this matter. Second, I presume that most of these measures are emergency stopgaps: decisions made...
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- Tudor Bosman
... and I predict that most of these measures will be eased in the coming weeks. The TSA has already lifted the ban on live information (live TV, navigation data, in-flight phone and Internet access) and the requirement that people stay seated during the last 60 minutes of a flight.
- Tudor Bosman
Tudor, I definitely understand that each country has it's own rules and regulations. I was focusing mostly on the TSA regulations that I am most familiar with, but it applies to each different countries regulatory agency. Shoe removal was a hastily imposed restriction in reaction to an incident that occurred several years ago and we still have to remove our shoes to this day. I'm just...
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- Jeff P. Henderson
I wish that technology could be used more instead of the brute force physical measures that are in place now. I personally don't have a problem with being scanned, sniffed x-rayed etc. If these types of technology based measures could be made close to fool proof, then we would again be able to bring whatever we wanted on to the plane without having to disrobe or be physically searched.
- Jeff P. Henderson
Seems like those RTW tickets are going to get harder to sell.
- Cristo
Shouldn't be a problem as long as you don't bring a carry-on ;-P
- Jeff P. Henderson
Right, because traveling to 15 different destinations around the world with checked luggage makes tons of sense.
- Cristo
Many great points expressed here, but I sadly doubt your Congresspersons are checking your Friendfeed comments. So I hope you are all passing your opinions along to those who can actually make a difference here. You know, like abolishing the TSA. (A guy can dream, no?)
- Anthony Citrano
As someone in reality tried to get reimbursed for the insured professional photo equipment I'd say it's no fun at all, and your check comes more than a month after reported loss. And — yeah, there is a significant deductible. Even if something could be replaced in 24 hours (don't know how, and where exactly it's physically possible) that means you need to be at your job location 24...
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- earlyadopter
hi, i just accidentally ignored a subscription request from you. just got a little spastic with the mouse too near the the word ignore and it was gone. if you want to send another i'll try to be less of a spaz! i'm new here are could use more connections!
- Sarah
Incredible. I'm wondering how the little animal do that. Flexible bones, I guess...
- Carl Cabading
silpol on If we can't catch a Nigerian with explosives in feminine underpants, whose father alerted the U.S. embassy, whose ticket was bought in cash, who didn’t check bags, whose visa was denied by the UK, who studied in Yemen, whose name was on a watch list, who can we catch? - http://www.reddit.com/r...
And beautiful people too. I mean that in the good way, of course. ;)
- Martha
Martha, yes, lots of beautiful people - awesome people, too
- Jesse Stay
@Jeff He is thinks he is getting smarter there but he always needs to move the conversation off of that place because you can't really have a deep engaging brainshare there...
- manielse (Mark Nielsen)
A Haiku: "To claim us all DEAD, To tell us we are all WRONG, makes one just look LAME"
- Johnny Worthington
Why not post it on Twitter? I'm all for saying what you think. Telling it how it is. (stirring things up.) ;) If you want a conversation, if you need to discuss anything, if you need to talk, it has to be FriendFeed.
- Sandra Large
People that talk about the subjects you like and give you bits of information that you can drop in later conversation...
- Johnny Worthington
from iPhone
Mona, it means you're smart enough to ask what it means :-)
- Jesse Stay
If it's for smart people I better leave. ;-)
- Kol Tregaskes
I like aggregators because they should make things more simple and they appease my need for order. But they are by no means perfect and aggregation is sadly not enough.
- WorldofHiglet
And yes, you know I like them too. (obviously) I've had my "Does the world need another perfect aggregator?" blog post in my to-do pile for a while now, and thought I'd finally post it.
- Louis Gray
For a long time I thought the ideal would be a single point of aggregation that not only pulled in but pushed out to all the nodes where I was active, too. Then I thought that I would probably like to tweak it so that certain things were pulled in and pushed out, and then I realised that the architecture that we have at the moment is probably what we need. Most users (and by that I mean...
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- WorldofHiglet
Aggregation alone is not a business and that was proven so many times already: at some point even FriendFeed founder Paul Buchheit said so in a RWW post --- so that they would focus on communication and not aggregation --
- TechFuga
In regards to Convergence, those of us with long memories may remember all the promises around Apple and "The Golden Convergence". The "Apple Media Player" was a big part of that. It didn't happen. See: http://old.macedition.com/baha...
- Louis Gray
Excellent article Louis....And I think I agree with the premise. I use the hell out of Ff, but just for the people, 99% of my participation was in Ff-actual, not via aggregation.
- Matthew DeVries
wondering which job will be outsourced next..
- Paul E. Ester
wondering wich job will be insourced next :)
- PierG
Mobile development finally becoming mainstream, CSS3 finally being useful in a large number of browsers, and the launch of the Palm Pre and its use of CSS/HTML/JS to build mobile apps rather than java or objective C.
- Luke Kilpatrick
Seeing that Facebook Connect and Twitter can essentially replace OAuth.
- Christopher Galtenberg
Realizing that Google is trying to re-invent the whole web stack -- I expect to see HTML, CSS, Javascript, scripting, and compiled language alternatives in 2010-2011. And I'm all for it.
- Christopher Galtenberg
Thinking about bigtable database solutions for the highest scalability (and the tradeoffs that come along with the switch)
- Christopher Galtenberg
This year I became programmer to entrepreneur. Started two companies, one fell out, one remains.
- mytweetmark
too many, Google Vincent release with brand effects (yuch!), personalized search, real-time search in Google, Bing/Yahoo deal, site performance a ranking factor, should I go on?
- Arthur Coleman
Java 1.6 on Mac, finally. Node.js shows up and reinvents what it takes to write asynchronous server-side applications (though I haven't used it for anything real). Google Chrome upset the browser extension development paradigms (no longer require a deep understanding of the browsers). Google Web Toolkit improves their run-debug cycle and lets you develop on any browser on your machine (or in a virtual machine).
- Matt Mastracci
John, congratulations! That's a very tough, but rewarding experience!
- Jesse Stay
Visual Studio 2010/ .net 4. Let you know when I think of more.
- Roberto Bonini
from iPhone
Balancing paying work and beginning my first 2 entrepreneur ventures with family. Not to mention the ever changing APIs of popular web services.
- Marc Betts
Squeezing into iPhones and watching Java raise the white flag.
- Michael Galpin
from iPhone
Geolocation becoming a real thing, the ability to make money from iphone style app stores, the continued buildout of cloud functionality, NoSQL mindshare exploding.
- Todd Hoff
Leaving Grazr, the company I co-founded to start something new. For programming, completely switching over to using Python for almost all of my web dev.
- mikepk
I can tell you my 2010 big change as well: no longer having to think about IE6 when developing for the web. That'll happen sometime late Q310, I'm sure.
- Matt Mastracci
The cloud left 'cool' status and is on the radar of CTO's
- jeremyoday
Definately the Cloud. Windows Azure came of age this PDC too.
- Roberto Bonini
from iPhone
Roberto: have you shipped anything on Azure yet, though?
- Robert Scoble
The cloud was big for us in 2008... we made a big bet on AWS then and it's paid off dividends though 2009 as Amazon dropped its prices. It was marginally better than hosted servers in 2008 and it's now beating it hands-down. I suppose that's a change in 2009 as well.
- Matt Mastracci
Not yet. I'm working on that. Doing my Honors year project on it. Will have somthing in a few months.
- Roberto Bonini
from iPhone
Matt: there are two types of programmers in the world: those who use Amazon and those who use Rackspace Cloud. :-)
- Robert Scoble
I'd love to consider Rackspace, but it'll take a year without multiple major outages before it goes back into my evaluation pool. We get outages and machine failures on AWS, but they are a lot rarer and shorter in my experience. It might be that the reporting of outages could be biased against Rackspace, too, but without more data it's a big risk for me as a founder/CTO.
- Matt Mastracci
Listen to Jesse. IRC and mailing lists.
- John
from Android
Having my employer fail completely and close the doors. Second time that has happened to me.
- DGentry
Matt: we've had, I believe, three major outages this year, very unacceptable. Two were power outages in our Dallas datacenter. The third was a configuration mistake made by a team at Rackspace as we started to move customers over to our datacenter in Chicago. Yes, because many big web sites like 37signals, Techcrunch, and Mashable are all on Rackspace our downtime gets noticed every single time.
- Robert Scoble
Seeing a 2010 free of major high-profile downtime would be enough to convince me that things are stable. Rackspace should put up numbers on their downtime vs. other providers, even if it's not entirely flattering, so we can see them in the open without the high-profile-site bias. Sorry to derail your 2009 thread here! :)
- Matt Mastracci
2009, the year it became cool to be a geek :)
- Kashif Khan
Matt: the problem with numbers is it's hard to figure out. Even during our three big outages not all of our customers were involved (we have 50,000 servers and 10s of thousands of customers and are the world's largest hosting company).
- Robert Scoble
Have a few: 1) It's been far easier to make money using PHP than C#, 2) jobs on dice are increasingly becoming more javascript/ui focused, 3) starting to understand how to use twitter.
- David Nelson
You know moving all my servers over to Rackspace from Amazon was pretty significant too (and I'm saving a lot more money)
- Jesse Stay
Am I a fuddy duddy for not feeling like the cloud risk is worth the reward? I have a google-fast site with BBG, it's close to bare metal, it's cheap, we have support. I dunno. I'd make the same choice again.
- Christopher Galtenberg
Christopher: that's why we still provide traditional hosting too. Cloud is not for everything. That said, almost all of the new startups I've been interviewing lately have been on either Rackspace or Amazon. There are major cost advantages to cloud (especially for sites with spiky traffic) that more and more are going that way.
- Robert Scoble
I think cloud needs a disaster-free 2010. Then a lot more 'moderates' like myself will bring the big money over.
- Christopher Galtenberg
The cloud risk is worth it in our experience. We have a lot of servers on amazon doing crawling, indexing, API hosting, etc. You're a lot more nimble when it comes to swapping out machines. Our overall downtime on AWS is basically the same as when we had hosted servers. We also pay careful attention to what we shift to Amazon's CDN so our boxes are serving what they serve best. The only Amazon fuckup that affected us this year was losing an attached storage device that we didn't have backed up properly.
- Matt Mastracci
Christopher: I've seen quite a few companies that self host have major problems. Twitter is a good example. Self hosting is not disaster free either. Cloud is actually more reliable in many ways than self hosting is, especially if you do self hosting wrong.
- Robert Scoble
+1 to what Robert said. In 2008, when you balanced out the cloud cost + the time spent managing servers you'd end up very close. Prices have dropped by nearly 50% since then. Major disasters are way more expensive while self-hosting, but you don't see that many of them unless you've got a fleet of a few dozen machines running 24/7. Every company's evaluation of risk/reward is different though - ours tipped over to the cloud though and we're definitely using it as well as we can.
- Matt Mastracci
I became a lover of cloud apps after working on the infrastructure team for a recently famous startup. Not fun to say the least. I don't like babysitting Nagios and fearing database disks failing, 3 year old multi-threaded code you didn't write deadlocking, etc. :-1
- David Nelson
cloud and morphing from ASP.NET to WordPress(PHP/CSS)
- Melanie Reed
I don't know all the niceties that Rackspace offers (Robert could chime in here), but AWS also gives you easy and fast access to S3 and cloudfront for content serving, SQS for job queues and various load balancing features. Having access to some of those little features really does take a load off your mind. I keep hoping that Amazon will start offering giant, hosted memcache instances. That's one thing I love about the cloud: hosted extra features.
- Matt Mastracci
starting to develop for Android, feels like a warm bath after a year of Objective-c for iPhone. Yes the iPhone is hot and sexy, but developing for Android is much easier. Ow, and looking forward to deploying on Amazon's AWS, almost can't remember thoughts of buying hardware myself :)
- Dirk
Dirk: 2010 is going to be a big year for Android. It isn't lost on me that Google is starting out the new year with a big Android announcement (I'll be there).
- Robert Scoble
the one thing Android needs now is an excellent user interface, hopefully close to the iPhone's. User experience is the one thing the iPhone is light years ahead in
- Dirk
Matt: we're working on many of those things and more for Rackspace Cloud too. We have some of the world's experts on database technology (one of the guys who worked on Cassandra, which is Facebook's system, works for us, for instance) and you'll see a lot more from us, as to specifics there are other better places to compare us to Amazon, would love to help anyone figure out the differences, though, if it's not self evident.
- Robert Scoble
Robert I agree with you about 2010 being the year of Android . Also developing for it is awesome . Do you think it will also be the year for T-Mobile ?
- Kashif Khan
Dirk: agreed. Android is getting bettter though and we'll see next week just how much more they have to go. Kashif: I really doubt it, but you never know. Most of the geeks in Silly Valley want Verizon.
- Robert Scoble
The economy of 2009 made business take the cloud way more serious.
- Eric @ CSTechcast.com
Dropbox changed my world this year. All of a sudden users can painlessly get large numbers of files from their desktop or iphone to my site. All the previous options are comparatively awkward: web forms, email, Picasa client, XP wizard. It also upped demand considerably and forced me to turn to cloud storage for help.
- Bruce Lewis
Learning the basics of web programming. Whoa.. there's a whole lotta ways to do the same thing.
- Mark Essel
Robert: cool, re: extra features. I'll keep an eye out this year for new Rackspace features.
- Matt Mastracci
GWT for showing how webapps can be written, Adobe Air for showing how they can be deployed, webkit/chrome for raising the bar really high, cloud services that are almost good enough to host a real business and up and coming DBs like Casandra for saving us from RDBs
- john schneider
from iPhone
2010 will not only be the year of the Android, but also mobile in general (and I'm including 7 inch tablets in that statement).
- manielse (Mark Nielsen)
GWT was/is _huge_ but wasn't that 2008? It's really matured in 2009 for sure. Love the new features like code splitting.
- David Nelson
Oh ya, the google plugin for eclipse! Love it!!!
- David Nelson
GWT made huge leaps in 2009. The development experience of 2008 was hosted mode (meaning IE in windows). The GWT 2.0 experience is plugin-based, slicker and much faster. The new plugins also let us debug our GWT-based firefox extension in Eclipse which was impossible before. I just released some of that code as an open-source project (gwt-firefox-extension) </shamelessplug>
- Matt Mastracci
My developer friends ripped me a new hole for suggesting that GWT was good. And I actually tried it - and it was good. They were just being arrogant ignorant jquery assholes.
- Terris Linenbach
Matt - totally agree about GWT making huge leaps in 2009. You think it was because google started using it on more high profile projects like wave and adwords? Perhaps they ramped up development of it?
- David Nelson
It may seem small but my biggest change was my coding font. I went from Monaco to Consolas.
- Andrew Smith
Consolas is a good one. Anonymous Pro is also good.
- DGentry
David, I think a lot of the features that appeared in GWT 2.0 were driven by internal customers (code splitting and the new UI binder for sure). The GWT team is incredibly smart and they were building a lot of the new infrastructure on top of the solid and mature GWT 1.x series. This year was all about solving some of the real-world issues that came up when GWT-based projects started to mature as well as figuring out how to cut out much of the boilerplate.
- Matt Mastracci
For me it was Hadoop, Lucene/Solr, AWS, RDF, re-learning Ruby, Scala, dynamic Virtual Resource allocation/de-allocation, real-time data mapping. Nice to finally get back to doing meaningful work for a change ;)
- Altan Khendup
And yes, moving our org to support mobile technology further. Tablets and encouragement of Android use
- Melanie Reed
Right. GWT team - talk about talented engineers! :-) They do amazing work.
- David Nelson
WPF & Silverlight has been huge for me in 2009. Seems like all the projects I worked on where based on them. Overall though cloud services have changed everything.
- Ryan Lane
To be honest... the Thesis framework for Wordpress and Wordpress MU
- Seth Goldstein
Probably that I became skilled at Scala programming.
- Dave Briccetti
The biggest thing was Solr; it revolutionized how we present data to our clients. Second biggest thing was finding out how flawed Rackspace currently is: Rackspace pre-2009 was much different than it is now. Here's to hoping 2010 is much better.
- Mark Trapp
Growth of Joomla and Drupal,and the ecosystem to support them. 2010: Microsoft, Google and IBM's responses will add to the mix.
- Brian Benz
Also, the announcement Office 2010 and Sharepoint 2010. The changes have not been noticed widely - yet, but they will be....
- Brian Benz
Server side JavaScript really picking up steam. JSGI, CommonJS, Web Sockets, Narwhal, Jack, NodeJS, Persevere, Etherpad.
- Raphael, Raphael
The cloud.. Ec2, s3, the entire stack of cloud services provided by amazon.. That's the biggest programming change for 2009
- Jeethu Karthik
from iPod
Realizing the potential in asynchronous, long-running processes and how they could be utilized in different kind of products. Also, everything dev-related announced/published by Microsoft.
- Jemm
A few things: The economy, revisiting my commercial app development roots, my first two iPhone apps (ultimately a joy to develop), my first Android app (frustrating so far, but that's OK - I'm cheering Google on), a hard lesson after getting burned by an enterprise client prospect, my LLC's group health plan cost spiral, getting some mega-zen with Objective-C vs. Java, the cloud, IE6 begone ... and Thesis. :)
- Joe D'Andrea
RT @sarahfloss: It's been 2010 for an hour now- Where the FUCK is my hoverboard?! The Jetsons, Marvin the Martian, Back To The Future, THEY ALL LIED TO US!!
fuck, another amateur-shooter... this time in shopping center in my neighborhood :( few ambulances, police in vests and with dogs... my wife had been (on work duty) in library behind this building - they got them out all by now. Fuck!
- A.T.
from Bookmarklet
@tapsakoo she has not been injured or whatever but had aftermath shock - she had been in Prisma about 10-15 mins before that, now trying to recover
- A.T.
@silpol: Must have been very traumatic experience... I hope she recovers soon.
- Jemm
Oh, yeah, I forgot that programmers stay up until 3 a.m. and sleep until noon. But it's noon somewhere in the world! :-)
- Robert Scoble
All your stuff is from twitter now so I don't really think of responding to your posts anymore.
- Todd Hoff
There are many great devs here on twitter and friendfeed.
- Ryan Lane
Todd: this was posted on FriendFeed. Thanks for noticing.
- Robert Scoble
Developers are sleep at this time of day. LOL. Or on a much needed vacation.
- Kishau Rogers
I think holiday time is tough for everyone, including coders. :) I just got back from a ten-day, family road trip. Just getting back into the swing of things.
- mikepk
Seriously though - the most discussion I participate with actual programmers is usually on mailing lists, IRC, and Wave
- Jesse Stay
I don't think developers care much about chatting all day on twitter or friendfeed ;)
- mytweetmark
I'm a programmer!! Yeah. I get what you mean Robert. Very low % of my programming questions answered on Twitter or Friendfeed. Most get answered on StackOverFlow. What Jeff Atwood did there is amazing.
- Roberto Bonini
from iPhone
I've found some quick answers to challenges via twitter directly from the people that develop the languages on twitter. Which is always amazing.
- Ryan Lane
I have to agree StackOverFlow, mailing lists and Wave have all been much better for dev related issues. 140 char is not enough to share a sample of code.
- Ryan Lane
Google is still the best when you are looking for code samples :)
- mytweetmark
Well now studying UI interfaces where ALL I was interested in was the back end integration and data store. Now it seems tha you need to know the whole path and be versatile in implementing it
- ThatDBD
Yeah - I forgot StackOverFlow. I don't do enough there, but that's the other place I interact with programmers. Occasionally you can find a few over on Identi.ca as well.
- Jesse Stay
Ryan: single character variable names, no whitespace, all on one line. There's no problem using twitter, thats how I normally write code. Now if I could just figure out why my code reviewers hate me so....
- DGentry
Funny but the oauth ui on the iphone is either tricky or I can't click properly while reading twitter in bed before having coffee. I clicked "deny" _twice_ instead of approve, heh :-)
- David Nelson
DGentry: I think you're on to something :) Maybe there should be a twitter code challenge.
- Ryan Lane
They're coding! (less/no time to socialize these days)
- Mark Essel
I've always wanted more devs to join (and/or participate) in FriendFeed...
- Jemm
Well in 16 hours, 90 comments, that's quite a bit of feedback from developers. I'm sure they'd like to have you engage them with a follow up well deserved, rather than slighting it as a poor response.
- sofarsoShawn
Interesting to notice that I have over 57% as many subscribers on FriendFeed as I do on Twitter. Especially since there are hardly any bots or spam accounts on FriendFeed. Audience engagement here is still better, too.
Since July I've gotten 14,000 new followers on Twitter and 7,000 new ones here. Not sure why you aren't getting your fair share of Twitter followers. :-) But I think you are better engaged here than on Twitter, which brings you love in return, as Louis demonstrates.
- Robert Scoble
Aww, shucks, all. @Robert - I already have plenty of subscribers*, thanks. I'd much rather the current situation -- highly engaged people to chat with, many of whom have a gazillion subscribers themselves and can filter for me in the off chance I say something interesting -- than end up on something like the SUL with millions of people who couldn't care less being bombarded with my inanity.
- DeWitt Clinton
*Call me old school, but isn't "subscribers" just such a better word than "followers"?
- DeWitt Clinton
My first thought is that "subscribers" sounds so passive, one-directional. Like the recipients of a magazine. "Followers" doesn't sound any better, to be honest. I don't know if "followers" sounds passive, or like a stalker. "Trackers" sounds very disturbing. Is there a phrase that has a bi-directional quality, doesn't sound passive, and yet isn't creepy.
- Carl Setzer
By the way, I've never been on the SUL and if added would ask them to remove me. I agree it's a bad thing. Lists are a lot more interesting, because that's how you find an audience that actually cares what you have to say http://listorious.com
- Robert Scoble
April: I just looked for an SUL on Cliqset and can't find one. Do you have a URL for it?
- Robert Scoble
I don't have a URL for it, but you are on the short SUL they show you when setting up a new account. Could make a new one just for the purpose of seeing who they suggest. ;-)
- April Russo (app103)
April: hmm, I didn't see that. So that's why I am getting added by a few people. Thanks for letting me know.
- Robert Scoble
Of course you wouldn't have seen it when you signed up, as you didn't have an account there yet and couldn't be on that list...lol. But if you were to make a new account now, you'd see that.
- April Russo (app103)
Re: subscribers vs followers... Meh. Now "minions," _that_ is a term I could endorse.
- DGentry
I have 384 subscribers on FF vs. 200 on Twitter. There's very little profound/useful stuff I can say in 140 or less, sorry
- LANjackal
it's good to see a lot of great people not great people but people with good content coming back to friendfeed again
- testbeta
LANjackal: that comment was 123 characters =D
- Mike Chelen
Hence the "very little" part of what I said, hahaha. That rarely happens. I don't consider most of what I tweet to be "profound", though it may be entertaining. It's certainly not informati- WHY IS THE CLOUD IN THE BACKGROUND MOVING ON THIS PAGE #shortattentionspan
- LANjackal
Can you recommend a good FriendFeed client? Would love something like TweetDeck for FF.
- Michael Brown
If you use the FriendFeed Facebook application make sure you've configured it properly. We are switching to a new method of publishing in the not too distant future. If you see this message at http://apps.facebook.com/friendf... just click on the link to provide the proper permissions. (via http://friendfeed.com/bgolub...)
A little late on the info as I deleted this link last week at I was told I was pushing all of my FF to FB people were not happy.
- Ed Mason
I took mine off as well, Ed. Aside from the excess amount of FF content on my FB wall, I also didn't want my IRL friends to pry TOO MUCH into the rest of my online.life. :D
- Helen Sventitsky
why do you not post the link comments from friendfeed to the wall? just the links loses 80% of the value.
- Gregor J. Rothfuss
I'm tired the FriendFeed Facebook app. keeps asking me to fix "the problem" so it can post to my wall. I don't want it to post to my wall! Contacts on Facebook and FriendFeed are different types for me. On Facebook it's about being friends in real life, on FriendFeed it is about interests. At least that is how I use FF and FB. My Facebook friends would probably feel I was spamming uninteresting stuff if my FF posts where copied to FB (well, at least if I used FF so intensive as I want to:-))...
- Stig Nygaard
Please let us select what to publish on FB from FF? I'd rather have tweets not appear on FB, particularly as I post from Ping.fm to FB and Twitter.
- Kol Tregaskes
New publishing method? I hope nothing will change for those FF users who don't use Facebook. (am I alone here?)
- Olivia Lovag
from twhirl
I agree with Gregor ... By not having the comment sent with the link, it's just plain and boring and I'd rather just post directly to Facebook. Unfortunately, however, this would negate the very useful benefit of using the "Share on FriendFeed" bookmarklet.
- Dewade Fowler
It's good to know I'm not an idiot. ;-)
- Kol Tregaskes
Oh, so that was the master plan? 1. Declare friendfeed dead 2. Idiots leave. 3. Enjoy the good stuff without them around any more.
- April Russo (app103)
April, that's not a bad plan actually. Finally Robert's master plan is becoming clear ;)
- Glenn Slaven
April: bbbbwwwwaaaahhhhhhhaaaaahhhhhhaaaaaaa. Said while rubbing hands together in evil fashion.
- Robert Scoble
Keith: I never left. I've been here almost every day since July. I have reduced the number of hours I spend here from about 10 to 10 minutes, though. :-)
- Robert Scoble
Just JOkkkkkking, you know I <3 you LG =;o)
- sofarsoShawn
I'M BAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAACKKKKKKKKKKKKKK!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!111111eleven
- Jim Norris
great to see you back here at friendfeed.. it's still rocking in it's own way.. welcome back and great new year
- Jaap Willem
I've found even if they're not idiots there are some times people that are just so negative or draining you have to block them, at least for a short period. I wish there was a way to do that which wasn't offensive.
- Jesse Stay
Hey Jessie - was hangin' with Damon today and your name came up. Damon ROCKS MY SOCKS.
- Mona Nomura
@jessethey should get indeed like a mute button for 30 days or something??
- Jaap Willem
from IM
Nice to see you still here, Robert. Hope the wife and kids are well.
- Martha
It's seems wasteful to me to have this many legacy connectors on the back of an A/V receiver. It also seems silly to name them things like SAT, VCR, etc when it's not clear how they'll be used.
- Cristo
from Bookmarklet
Ah, but that all looks familiar and comforting. :) Have you found something for zoning out multiple surround sound zones yet? Resorting to creating your own A/V switching/router thingy that works off of CPU sound cards yet? It would be cool to see your plan develop via an on-line collaboration tool. See which elements get picked first and how they effect later decisions. These systems are such a huge undertaking, especially considering some of the subtleties you're trying to cover.
- SAM
SAM, I'm still working on it. From my initial testing, the surround sound zones seem to be relatively synchronized now, meaning both Panasonic TVs are processing at the same speed. The harder ones to synchronize are the lower-end TVs, which process the audio faster. If I put their audio through the speakers in the ceiling, I can probably solve that problem with multi-zone A/V receivers,...
more...
- Cristo
The other problem with putting the TV audio through the ceiling speakers is that it creates another step to getting Sonos audio through those same speakers. Meaning you'd potentially have to use an A/V remote control to switch to Sonos before listening to music and then back again for TV. Sonos built into the remote control would fix this, but I haven't seen that yet.
- Cristo
I agree that today's A/V receivers should consider cutting down on the older connections. If someone is using a new receiver and has the need for one with at least 5 HDMI inputs, do you really think they are using a VCR or a lot of component cables? I'd much rather see them do more innovative ideas such as adding Roku/Boxee or even DVR type services internally. Even consider adding a CableCard slot that could eliminate cable boxes for many.
- manielse (Mark Nielsen)
Agreed that the legacy connections are useless nowadays. But CableCard has been a total failure in the marketplace, adding it wouldn't really help anything
- LANjackal
I'd like to see more advanced timing/delay controls for video/audio and HDMI matrix switch functionality built into the receiver. Also, multiple surround sound zones and digital music capability a la Sonos. Advanced A/V receiver tech doesn't seem that advanced right now.
- Cristo
I think there's still a HUGE divide between the home theater arena and the tech world that badly needs to be bridged.
- LANjackal
from IM
Now just refund me the difference ...
- LANjackal
from IM
@LANjackal I only brought up CableCard earlier as an example of doing something new rather than keeping A/V receivers legacy of depending on you having 10 different components. Allow it to be your Cable receiver/tuner like a HDHomerun device or something similar. Let it have a browser or more. Innovate...
- manielse (Mark Nielsen)
"Notable features that didn't make it to the production car include the front grille that directs cooling air to the rear-mounted engine and the head lamps that are sunk into the bodywork on either side. No price is listed on this particular sale, but we certainly wouldn't expect it to be sold without a large sum of money changing hands"
- MVB (Curmudgeon of FF)
from Bookmarklet