Disqus - Latest Comments for rythie

Re: TweetDeck Promises to Integrate Twitter Lists Support Soon

rythie — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 14:26:59 -0000

Were Tweekdeck the to let you group the people you follo?
We had interest levels at launch in June 2008 in FriendBinder
http://blog.louisgray.com/2008/06/friendbinder-...

And tags which are the same as groups essentially shortly after.
http://blog.friendbinder.com/2008/07/tags-and-n...

I don't think we were even the first.

Re: Who or what will be the BitTorrent of Realtime? (Scripting News)

rythie — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 18:02:38 -0000

For years it seemed company after company was trying to be the new Napster and they would get closed down and all the code was lost.

I suspect the reason that BitTorrent won is that is was open source so no one could find a company to shut it down. BitTorrent has the benefit of known protocol with multiple clients and multiple sites for finding .torrent files. I think in a sense, it is the HTTP of peer-to-peer, it won because not because it's the best, but because it's open.

So it stands to reason that bitTorrent of realtime will be someone who creates an open system that everyone can use.

Re: There Is No "Osborne Effect" In Web Services

rythie — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 17:16:30 -0000

Facebook's problem right now is that are trying to please everyone in one or two interfaces rather than letting people choose their own interface to that data. I believe Twitter is popular partly due to the way people can pick the interface that suits them. This is slowly coming to Facebook, though they still have some more to do, opening of the API to make it really useful.

Re: louisgray.com: Twitter Gives Bing Access to the Firehose, Promises More to Come

rythie — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 16:32:58 -0000

Have you thought they could even be profitable? They surely would have charged Microsoft several million dollars for this access and Microsoft can afford it - especially to get it before Google. It sounds like their costs are less than 10 million - so with this one deal they could be profitable or close.

Re: How to learn to love the Fail Whale (Scripting News)

rythie — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 13:58:29 -0000

As someone who writes such a tool, http://friendbinder.com , I've thought about it a few times. In fact we already support several networks + RSS so if they have an alternative feed that can be added into the same friend. When Twitter is down our users can still read their friend's old tweets.

It doesn't seem like we and other tools are too are away from this.

Re: WikiReader Is a Handheld Wikipedia for $99

rythie — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 19:53:09 -0000

Wikipedia already has an optimized stylesheet that works very well on the iPhone/iPod touch - though I expect this device it is aimed at less tech savvy folks (the type of which don't read mashable of course). One issue of course is that parents are uncomfortable with their children being on the Internet unsupervised and this solves that is an easy to understand way.

Re: louisgray.com: Designing the Perfect Twitter Client Is Impossible, But Tweetie Is Close

rythie — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 06:01:38 -0000

It's interesting that even those clients that do have versions on multiple platforms, have different features on the different platforms. Seesmic for instance is very different on the web and desktop. I've taken the view with FriendBinder is that you should never be unable to access an interface to it, so we support the web (modern browsers + IE6) and the mobile web (anything half decent, the iPhone, Nokia, Sony, Android etc.) and that the features should be the same, so we use the same code base.

Also I wonder why none of these clients seem to support showing of threaded replies on Twitter, I've found it very useful since we implemented it on FriendBinder:
http://blog.friendbinder.com/2009/08/threaded-t...

I notice that Tweetdeck and Seesmic already support Facebook. Brizzly sounds like it's going that way too, so I wonder if Tweetie will too.

Re: http://blog.louisgray.com/2009/09/on-raising-money-goals-valuations-and.html

rythie — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 07:50:06 -0000

The difference to companies you mentioned is that is that Twitter has a massive API community and large number of users who see the service as essential to their day. You can see evidence of this when Twitter goes down. I think given that Facebook recently raised $200m and have raise much more before, I don't think this is a massive amount.

I think Twitter is infrastructure company and they need to get the best scaling and algorithm minds (for search) to take on Google and Facebook. I'm sure the real money is in real-time search for which Twitter is the gatekeeper. If they can't do that themselves they risk having to sell to a company that has proved they can do it.

Re: louisgray.com: I Don't Want To Hear About Distributed Conversations Any More

rythie — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 20:40:08 -0000

I think there are a few problems with blog comments that underlies most of these efforts.

Tracking replies to your own comments is pretty difficult as far as I know when you comment on someone's blog. Disqus, Digg, Twitter, FF, Hacker News essentially solve this problem by giving a place to check the replies. Many blogs now have an option to track replies via email which is less than ideal since it mixes the replies in with important stuff like email and many of the comment systems are not threaded so the 'replies' are not even replies anyway.

For people wanting to write tools that comment back on the blog, track conversations etc. then RSS is really suited to that.

In most cases it's not worth commenting on popular news sites because there are so many people there with out threading or comment voting you can't really have a good discussion there.

Re: Nomee: Social Aggregation on Adobe Air

rythie — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 08:04:04 -0000

For those of you looking for something where you don't have to re-friend people, you should try http://friendbinder.com (which I work on) that just launched this month.

Re: Style update and Launch

rythie — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 06:44:56 -0000

Ok, fixed now

Re: louisgray.com: ReTweet.com's Rip-off Of TweetMeme Is Embarrassing and Wrong

rythie — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 10:53:40 -0000

Aren't those categories essentially the same as Digg even with the ampersand which precedes both sites?

Also I'm not sure why friendfeed should get credit for liking, how is it different to favoriting something on Flickr or 'loving' something on Last.fm which both precede it?

Re: Retweeting Is Cheating, Thread The Conversation

rythie — Sun, 16 Aug 2009 15:53:43 -0000

Threading the conversation from your friends on Twitter is possible. We just added it to friendbinder on Thursday:
http://blog.friendbinder.com/2009/08/threaded-t...

Re: http://blog.louisgray.com/2009/08/twitter-to-embrace-retweeting-releases.html

rythie — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 17:31:12 -0000

That's great, I'm planning to put this in friendbinder as soon as we can get it.

Re: Another brick in the cloud (Scripting News)

rythie — Sat, 08 Aug 2009 13:37:12 -0000

It seems you could already do this quite simply with the DNS system that already exists.

For example, if my username is rythie and random.com manages that. I could have address at rythie.random.com with TXT record storing any bit of text I liked such as an RSS url. Since DNS is federated, random.com would be able to be down for a day or two without anyone really being affected (as long as they don't need to update their URL)

In fact you could probably store something like all your own details that would have been in a FOAF file in DNS records and if it became popular specific non TXT type records would be created for this purpose.

Re: Oh, the Trouble With OAuth

rythie — Sat, 08 Aug 2009 13:14:45 -0000

I agree. The main problem that Twitter needed to solve given that they are dependent on the API was that third party apps had to store your password in a plain text or reversible encrypted form, which made it hard to know who had access and how to revoke it. It's something Flickr solved years ago and perhaps never had the problem.

A completely different problem is that users don't like having lots of logins, using Twitter's oAuth for logins helps that, but ultimately it wasn't designed for that and Twitter isn't setup to support that really.

I think the problem with relying on the third party for authentication, be that oAuth, OpenID, FB connect or whatever, is that the third party has to provide a service has to be very very reliable and with a good support system behind it. Twitter is not currently such a company, they are notorious for reliability issues, they are young company with relatively few staff and pretty much all in one location. If you compare that to Google for example, they are an old company with a massive staff, lots of experience and reputation for good uptime. Also, Google have people in several different timezones supporting their core stuff, so if something goes wrong there is always someone who is at work, at their desk, who's job it is to fix it and they are more than qualified to do so.

Re: Stats Confirm It: Teens Don’t Tweet

rythie — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 13:01:07 -0000

Maybe they signed up and followed them, but never actually used the service in the end

Re: What a 140-char message looks like in RSS (Scripting News)

rythie — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 14:51:29 -0000

ok will do

Re: What a 140-char message looks like in RSS (Scripting News)

rythie — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 14:40:03 -0000

Exactly, this doesn't mention server to server propagation and that really isn't good enough right now.

So the "Nothing new needed to be invented." statement is wrong.

Re: What a 140-char message looks like in RSS (Scripting News)

rythie — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 14:23:22 -0000

Except, how do you write a client that reads all of those, once a minute. E.g. 200 friends * 60 minutes = 1200/requests an hour, which is fair old load on a iPhone's 3G connection.

I can request what all my friends are doing from twitter in one request, tweets come through almost instantly to search.twitter.com and there are the various realtime feeds from twitter. It's the realtime aspect that is missing from RSS.

Re: AOL’s Lifestreaming Initiative Evolves with New AIM Beta Release

rythie — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 08:40:51 -0000

FriendBinder does this with more networks and you can reply to twitter and comment and like on facebook items.

http://friendbinder.com

Re: Europe no longer matters to lead position in mobile

rythie — Sun, 12 Jul 2009 05:37:06 -0000

I don't think the iphone has been without it's problems. In the uk people expect video and mms which the iPhone hasn't had till recently. Also the price is a bit high which not only put people off purchasing it but also worries people that it is expensive to replace if broken or lost. One thing about text messages is that they are private, everyone i know can receive them, will get them straight away and are more likely to reply which is essential for arranging a night out - twitter doesnt have that and the iphone only just got notifictions whereas for text messages this is baked into every phone. All that said at all the tech conferences most the attendees have iPhones.

Re: Too Busy To Read Tweets? Try Twitter For Busy People

rythie — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 05:37:27 -0000

This is also available in friendbinder (http://friendbinder.com) - in fact it's just one feature of a site that helps you keep track of multiple networks. A screenshot of the friends page:
http://twitpic.com/8u67j

You can also use it in the normal way you would use twitter/facebook/flickr client including twitter/facebook replies etc. Also it continues to work properly when you follow more than 500 people.

Re: Facebook Stream API support in FriendBinder

rythie — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 07:25:18 -0000

Ok, thanks for telling us. I've fixed it now.

Re: http://blog.louisgray.com/2009/05/friendfeed-simplifies-joining-process.html

rythie — Wed, 06 May 2009 06:26:27 -0000

I've noticed that, probably due to the attention it got, a lot of people signed up to friendfeed but don't actually login. It would be interesting to know of that 45% how many actually do login and participate since even when friendfeed says someone has commented - it often just means it has imported comments from other sites.

I think whilst this feature does help make friendfeed a better aggregator, you will still miss out on people who don't join friendfeed.

I think there is still a real need for a proper aggregator like friendbinder (Disclosure: i'm biased) which lets you keep track of your friends where ever they choose to be active and doesn't require everyone to have an account on some central site. For example I think it's very unlikely that I could persuade my friends on facebook to join friendfeed.