Another Twitter ( http://twitter.com ) API script announced today, Did Yuh’ Know? ( http://didyuh.com ). Did Yuh’ will allow Twitter users to prefix their messages with DYK: or YUH: to note that their message contains short fact, clipping, or idea. Messages with the prefixes will be displayed on the Did Yuh’ site. This service is similar to Sidebar Creative’s http://overheard.it/ and Matt & Mark Armendariz’s (they’re friends but not actually related) http://yayandnay.com

read more | digg story

Some folks are just never satisfied. Maybe it’s because they’re professional critics who don’t do much else other than voice their opinion for a living, or maybe they’re just cranky people in general, but I’m just sick and tired of people bitching and writing useless articles about Twitter. All this bitching is just noise, data and information pollution, and most importantly… not productive.

I think people are putting a silly amount of weight on this company and it’s service. If anyone builds a component of their business that relies on ANY webservice they don’t control to the point that that service is mission-critical, then they’re optimistic (which is admirable) and an idiot (which is not admirable).

They’re having scaling issues, the end.

Almost every service that I’ve come across in 12 years that didn’t start with some supermegacorp style backing has had scaling issues. People used to just deal with it. Circa 96′-97′ (pre Microsoft) Hotmail used to be (and still is IMO) a super slow piece of garbage, yet people still use it.

If the folks that I see that claim to be so dependent on Twitter that they feel the need to fill Technorati with tons of useless complaint posts, they should either stop bitching and maybe invest in the company, donate money to them, send them pizza, go to work for them to fix things and make things how they want them to be, OR just build another service themselves. They even use someone else’s service for their status blog now themselves.

I’m sorry, but I’m really tired of all of the useless noise about this service being unavailable. If only people were this vocal about stuff that matters more to more people we’d be in a different world. Like a extremely large percentage of personal computers and laptops shipping with a broken & POS operating system. Or Hillary Clinton just generally being an idiot and getting in the way of a candidate who can kick McCain’s ass… anyway, you get the point.

The real point is this…

Twitter doesn’t have a revenue model that user have to “deal” with.
Twitter doesn’t have a sketchy policy regarding the content that is posted through it’s service
Twitter was initially engineered for SMS
Twitter has a decent API that many people have built neat tools and services with, some of which are even useful!
Twitter has changed the way many people communicate with one another… “@” now has two purposes on the web, cool.
Twitter doesn’t edit or censor content that passes through their system. (unless it’s actually damaging or abusive to a specific person… read here and here)
Twitter is I18n friendly.
Twitter is free.

Ning is a pretty neat idea… on paper.

It’s a site where you can “roll your own” social networking site targeted at any weird or random idea you can come up. There’s enough random stuff out there, and this is the only proof I need.

In the age of there being so many of those already, it seems like putting the creation of a network site into anyone’s hands seems like it’s ripe for over-saturation and misuse unuse.

As I’ve been tooling around with Kenny Miller’s Interlinky network on Ning, I’ve started to think to myself… “what’s the point of having 83475345 redundant web relationships?”

Living in New York, it’s easy to find social industry events most nights of the week, there are tons of social groups that exist offline, besides all of the ones you can find on meetup.com. But what do we actually do with all of this networking? When we get together face to face to do stuff drink, we sometimes end up making friends who we talk about work with. Sometimes we make friends who we don’t have to talk about work with (but can). And even sometimes a business contact is made and/or a business relationship is formed. Most of the time, it’s just social silliness, high-school style, minus the big grass field and the paranoia about the cops coming at any moment.

Some social services do make sense cents

LinkedIn is an example of one of those few sites out there that does actually serve a purpose. I have use it to reconnect with ex-coworkers from 10 years ago, and other people have used it to get in touch with me about hiring me or NaterKane (the business) for interactive work. Since LinkedIn is all about business, work, your professional reputation and trust… folks don’t tend to add others as contacts who they don’t know, or haven’t already worked with.

Many of the other big sites however, have little if no quality control.

I actually wish that facebook kept their business model around targeting college kids. I know the world would be different, however I wouldn’t have to deal with people throwing virtual sheep at me for no reason (thanks to the assholes who write useless and what I consider abusive software over at Slide.com) or the unsolicited Vampire/Zombie/Seamonsterboogieman invites reminiscent of those Underworld movies.

This post which was originally written just after the FOWD NYC conference somehow got eaten by the wordpress monster… I have just now found it and decided to repost

So I’d really like to head down to Miami at the end of February for FOWA. IMHO web applications are more interesting that “web design” these days anyway. I have some friends down in Miami that I never get to see. I also generally like to run around and not work for a few days and be social with other geeks, attractive female designers who are too young for me to talk to, and friends 10 years older than me who usually can’t guess my age if they don’t know it already. (oops, did I just give something away?)

I’ve decided to make this year (2007-2008) the time for me to spend more of my personal money than I’d care to, to attend a number of conferences. This decision was made in August when I quit my job at Ultra16 and lept back into the world of consulting. So far I’ve hit the Ajax Experience (a very expensive social event with tons of smart people and good information, and catering) and the Future of Web Design (a $200 social event that was a bit of a mess, followed be Media Temple sponsored drunkenness which was great fun). I am considering FOWA, Web Directions North (a great chance to get some “better than Vermont” snowboarding in this winter, and I already have tickets to SXSW Interactive.

I was a little disappointed in the FOWD conference. I’ve been thinking about it and I’ve decided to tell you guys why. The following may read as a rant, or a bit of a slam. If it offends anyone, then I suggest they respond by organizing a conference that isn’t thousands of dollars and is also worth attending for more than just having a chance to socialize.

the future of conference formats

A one day conference with one room and one stage sounds to me like more of an overbooked mid-90’s style rock festival than a web conference. An enoromous room with tons of echo just adds to the sentiment.
Many of the speakers at FOWD either ran short or long. The notables I think were Josh Davis‘ dirty mouth (bravo), Jon Snook and the guys from VIRB who’s names I can’t recall at the moment Ryan Sims & D Keith Robinson. There was a bit more “evangelizing” than I think anyone needed. I can’t believe people actually work as corporate technology evangelists. I have alot of respect for folks like Jon Resig, Kevin Hoyt, etc. But isn’t having the word “evangelist” on a business card a little creepy? Sorry for the sidetrack…

It seems that a split format with some longer and some shorter sessions happening in parallel and in smaller spaces would have made FOWD a much more enjoyable and possibly more educational experience.

The food available was also pretty bad as well. It wasn’t very expensive, however there were ZERO vegetarian options that I could find, so I ended up having to go hike a couple of avenues just to find food that I could eat anywhere near the Javits Center where it was held. Thank goodness we were in New York.

That’s right, in a couple of the few spare minutes I find every week, we managed to get a new blog together for Ultra16.
There you’ll be able to find some Ultra-specific posts, news, and general ideas that are going on around the office.
If you’d like to subscribe, you can find the feed here.

Location: New York, NY

URL: http://www.ultra16.com

Description

1. Love what you do, we do and that’s why we’re here.
2. Be great at what you do, we try our best to be great, so it’s fair to ask it of those we work with.
3. Never claim you know it all, unless I’ve bought a book with your name on it.

We’re not just looking for a specific skill-set, just smarts and personality.

So let us know if you can answer a few of the following, or have any other interesting stuff notched on your belt:

• Do you know all the basic standards compliant, unobtrusive, semantic and accessible stuff?
• Know $()?
• Have you worked with AS3? Can you Delegate?
• LAMP, .NET, Rails. can you sling two out of three?
• Are you friends with designers? Did you used to be one?
• Have you worked on the agency side before? If not, tell us why.

We are Ultra16, we have a big green wall, an office in NoHO, AirTunes, and often hang out at the office just because we want to. We also have been around since the 90’s and work with clients who you’ve probably heard of.

To apply hit us up at humanresources@ultra16.com

This ad was originally listed at
http://jobs.37signals.com/jobs/1019

I was flipping through the Google Blog and came across this article. Turns out that today marks the second annual World Usability Day. With events taking place today around the world the Usability Professionals Association has put together this international holiday of sorts to bring the issues of usability and “making life easy” back into the minds of web professionals.

World Usability Day, November 14, 2006, is for everyone who’s ever asked these questions. This Earth Day style event, focused on raising awareness and visibility of usability engineering and user centered design, is currently being organized by volunteers and local event coordinators from around the world. Whether a usability professional or just an enthusiastic (or frustrated) user, each participant is making a contribution to “making life easy”.

http://www.worldusabilityday.org/about

Since writing my own blog software is somthing that I can file under “been there/done that” I’ve decided that I want to do things a new way, just for fun. Today I started to write a little app that pulls my full blog off of myspace, parses it and delivers it through my personal site instead of relying on the bullshit truncated rss feed that myspace wants me to use. Why am I am doing this you ask? Because it’s stupid, and I like making work for myself. Besides, what’s a little regex amongst friends? (more…)

justcurio.us is an anonymous question and answer system, open to anyone, with one simple rule: to ask a question, you must first answer someone else’s question. Question yields answer yields question. Strangers helping strangers.

this is my question