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: There Is No "Osborne Effect" In Web Services

louismg — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 22:55:04 -0000

Twitter is innovating in their Web interface, but a huge number of people utilize third party apps. Right now, almost all Facebook access is through their site.

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

eas — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 19:23:38 -0000

The seeming deficiencies of bittorrent are interesting to consider. The other P2P clients I'm aware of, like Napster, Kazaa, Limewire, etc, bundled both content discovery and content distribution. BitTorrent only handled distribution, and even that wasn't totally decentralized, since the client needed a "tracker" to find other users with the content one wanted to download. As you note though, all the pieces were open, which, among other things, allowed the deficiencies to be addressed or worked around.

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)

dave — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 14:01:34 -0000

I'd love to find out more about what you're doing.

Want to talk?

Send me an email at dave dot winer at gmail dot com, if you include your
phone number I'll call. :-)

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

louismg — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 23:40:07 -0000

Notifications for replies to comments is pretty standard from Disqus and JS-Kit Echo. Interestingly, most of the other networks don't do a good job on checking for replies.

Your comment about commenting on popular news sites is no doubt right. The bigger they are, usually the uglier the comment stream.

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

louismg — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 12:47:05 -0000

Digg clones are many - and yes, there are overlaps, but not in the same clear way as Retweet.com vs. Tweetmeme.com. When it comes to news, you can expect some basics, but this is silly.

As for FriendFeed and "like", yes you can favorite/thumbs up/love things all over the Web, so they weren't revolutionary, but their specific use was later copied by others.

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: Twitter’s platform shortcomings

rythie — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 06:42:12 -0000

Is Flickr currently extorting you for money?

Robert, you have 3,682 items on Flickr (http://www.flickr.com/photos/scobleizer/) and Flickr store the full resolution picture, lets assume these are all photos (no videos) and conservatory that's 2MB per photo that 3682*2= 7.5GB of storage (of course ignoring any family/friends photos you have).

10GB of hosting from 1&1 costs $3.99/month i.e. $47.88/year (http://order.1and1.com/xml/order/Hosting) and I could find anything much cheaper and rackspace don't list prices AFAIK except for slicehost/rackspace cloud which cost a lot more.

Flickr charge £24.95/year (http://www.flickr.com/upgrade/) and the price has been fairly constant.

Granted you did sign up for Flickr in Feb 2004 when it launched and posted one picture, but the second picture wasn't until July 2005 when they had been bought by Yahoo. I've been paying for Flickr since the end of 2005 and I thought they were charging before Yahoo bought them, though I can't be sure.

You can download everything again using the API at anytime and put them somewhere else.

It seems pretty a fair deal to me.

At the same time you complain about various things twitter are doing, so does that mean you wouldn't like it if Twitter charged for a pro account that showed your older tweets? even if it was $25/year?

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)

datashaman — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 04:06:03 -0000

Twitter realtime? At the moment none of my searches work, no error, no apology post, they simply do nothing.

Is it really realtime if you have to refresh the page to see changes?

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

AndrewBurton — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 23:16:41 -0000

Why does no one remember NNTP?