Disqus - Latest Comments for sreiser

Re: Facebook paid $50 million for Friendfeed?

sreiser — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 15:50:44 -0000

I've just assumed that the facebook folks came with some interesting work along with 50 million bucks, because to be fair, a share of $50 Million dollars + Salary + Interesting Problems to work one sounds like heaven to me.

Re: Programming wisdom (Scripting News)

sreiser — Sun, 16 Aug 2009 18:19:40 -0000

My Second Law of programming is "Always plan on throwing the first implementation away", which scares people. But like you say once you finish something and walk away from it and have to live with it, a more elegant solution always presents itself.

I'm starting to deal with the URL shortening problem for my personal content. As I import content I've contributed to twitter. friendfeed, etc I'm expanding and storing any shortened URLs where possible.

Re: Why do FriendFeed users feel jilted? Or, an examination of erotic impulses

sreiser — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 01:55:23 -0000

Just the other night, I wrote a small piece with my thoughts about the merger ( http://seanreiser.com/content/thoughts-about-fa... ) in which I said "They built a service, let us play there and now they've found their way to make money, good for them. Let me let you in on a secret, that's why they started FriendFeed, that wanted to profit.".

I really don't understand the feeling of betrayal people seem to have over the merger. When I got into FF I knew that odds something would come along and absorb it or shut it down, it's the history of most startups. Honestly, I expected Google to buy them (just because of the people involved). At the end of the day, if we don't build communities on open platforms, this is the risk we run.

Re: How can ANYONE follow 10,000 or more?

sreiser — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 10:18:19 -0000

It's funning back in april 2008 I wrote in a post "Where I believe that part of Scoble's secret to twitter is correct, the fact that the value in twitter is in who you follow, not in who's following you, I disagree that sheer numbers is the solution. Driving his argument to its logical conclusion we should all just follow the public timeline, like a giant IRC channel because that's how we see the most information and hence get the most value out of twitter. Where he once told me that all his followers are quailty twitter users, I don't think everyone out there is quality." (http://seanreiser.com/content/twitter-equation). I then went on to try and quantify the value of a twitter user with some sloppy math. It is interesting to watch robert change his opinion on this topic.

Now, to be honest, I look at twitter like RSS, not email. If I'm not around, I don't have to read everything that came in, In atmosphere it's like walking into your local bar you're in the conversation while you're there but you don't need to stay up to date while you're not around you'll get caught up in time when you come back.

Re: Trading one centralized net for another? (Scripting News)

sreiser — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 16:16:43 -0000

It's funny, I had always assumed that there would be a username and domain component to an address. I'm not sure that you need to have simple names for things to be easy. The name@domain.tld convention is now used in email and IM (at least MSN and jabber) it's in people's mindset. Dave, think back to your story of first seeing a URL and thinking "people will never type all that", now look where we are today. If we can sell them on robustness of the network, I think people will come or at least enough of them to come to pressure twitter into supporting it.

One of the selling points for corporations would be they could better build their own brand. Instead of "following ashton on twitter" you could "couple with ashton@sony.com" (I'm liking couple with for some reason). I think in a corporations eyes trading twitter for looselycoupled.net is trading one branding nightmare for another.

As far as finding people are concerned, I'm not sure. This is brainstorming so forgive this is it's wrong:

Perhaps the clouds should be maintaining cloud and userlist data (which are exchanged via the RSSCloud protocol). When I want to federate my cloud I make a Server call to any server saying "Hi I'm a New Cloud, here's how to get my userlist". That information is then ripped out through the network via pings. User Directory Sites (or any site that wants it) can then subscribe to the userlist XML files and get pings when users are added, updated or deleted. It's a raw idea, might be overcomplex but it seems to be a peer to peer solution that can work.

Oh and if folks successfully attack / poison the DNS system the loosely coupled network will be the least of our worries.

Re: Followup on NYC rssCloud roadshow (Scripting News)

sreiser — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 03:57:58 -0000

a yahoogroup is fine by me. Actually anything that winds up in my inbox works

Re: Meetup in NYC, next Thurs (Scripting News)

sreiser — Sun, 26 Jul 2009 19:40:53 -0000

I plan on being there this is sounding very interesting.

Re: Number of the Day

sreiser — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 18:24:28 -0000

Talk about Freudian Programming, after reading the content of your article, I read the name of your blog as "Shanksville".

There's no way this is a "bad thing". The terrorism watch list supposedly has over 1 Million people on it including Senators, Congressmen, members of our military and infants none of whom are threats to security they just happen to share a name with someone on the list. Any data professional will tell you that names make horrible unique identifiers. There are stories all the time in the media about false positives.

Also, there's no way to know why someone is on the list, nor is there a way to get off the list if information is incorrect. Striping someone of any right without a court proceeding bothers me on a number of levels.

Before the watchlist can be used for anything useful we need to come up with a better methodology for generating it.

Re: Why the Kindle is a Better Reading Device Then A Computer or IPhone

sreiser — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 17:35:25 -0000

I was reading TXTFiles on my apple ][ in the 80's too.

Been thinking about your point. The Martin Luther thing really stands out. Where nailing the 95 Thesis to the Church Door was the big dramatic step in the reformation from a symbolism point of view, it was the printing press that spread them through Europe. and famed the reformation. In many ways digital publishing will be to the next 500 years what the printing press was the the last 500.

As far as your interface issues, I agree, none of this is perfect yet, that's why it's fun.

Re: Kindlecasting and A Kindle Catcher: A Propsal

sreiser — Sun, 22 Mar 2009 15:43:58 -0000

Thanks for writing, Mark,. Where having an agreement with Amazon would be cool, I'm trying open things beyond that. With Amazon they could use whispernet to get content onto your kindle, this is more for folks who don't want to publish through them.

Re: Kindlecasting and A Kindle Catcher: A Propsal

sreiser — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 16:04:03 -0000

Sorry about the typo, dave. Thanks for your thoughts!

Re: Is there a need for a kindle catcher

sreiser — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 15:03:54 -0000

I'm going to stop writing up ideas at night. This is a much better description of what I'm thinking (http://seanreiser.com/content/kindlecasting-and...). In my head every author could have their own channel.

Re: Tweets I expect from Obama

sreiser — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 13:36:58 -0000

Thanks for writing!

I was half tempted to setup a Fake President Obama twitter account and do this on a regular basis, but was then worried about a visit from the Secret Service.

Re: DRM and Kindle: An Old Debate Reexamined

sreiser — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 13:19:25 -0000

Thanks for writing.

Her whole facebook, twiiter, beebo rant seemed to come from left field, as if her publisher complained that the article wasn't long enough. My first draft of this post included a reference to it, but I cut it out as it didn't seam fit in to my message. Maybe I'll post them separately if I get the chance.

Re: Why the Kindle is a Better Reading Device Then A Computer or IPhone

sreiser — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 21:24:15 -0000

Thanks for your comments!

I know I've said this on Twitter, I'm not sold that this can replace a cell phone for all mobile internet use. The screen redraw is a little problematic, lack of color, etc are all things that I'd think about. Either way it's a good device, Enjoy!

Re: Why the Kindle is a Better Reading Device Then A Computer or IPhone

sreiser — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 21:19:41 -0000

Thanks, Julia. The "playing with stem cells" line has gotten me a little heat from some of my more conservative friends (and, maybe I was baiting them).

Re: Getting The Kindle Etched

sreiser — Sun, 15 Mar 2009 23:20:55 -0000

and thank you for doing it!

Re: Why Facebook is Failing Me

sreiser — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 17:39:45 -0000

I have to admit that I do some evangelism when I go through this. A tale I tend to tell goes something like this:

"I have a 16 year old niece and I have to have her as a Facebook contact because I don't want to alienate my family. My niece loves to add my contacts because, like most 16 year-olds, she doesn't understand boundaries. My business contacts feel obligated to accept the connection because they worry that I may be offended. This puts me in the potential situation where I'm responsible for her behavior. The last thing I want is for my niece to send the CEO of a client a purple unicorn. So, I use a business network for business and a social network for my social life"

As most of my business contacts have teenage relatives they understand where I'm coming from and often times they will rethink their personal social networking strategy.

Re: Where were you during the great Gmail outage of February 2009?

sreiser — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 07:23:36 -0000

I'm not discussing hotmail or my office email or some other ISPs, just gmail. I've never had an ISP keep their email servers up for a straight year without an outage. The funny part is the panic we're seeing. There are people comparing a couple of hour mail outage to 9/11. Email is not a life or death situation.

Re: Where were you during the great Gmail outage of February 2009?

sreiser — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 07:08:43 -0000

I laugh at how much people rely on a beta service and blogged about it here http://seanreiser.com/content/gmail-panic

Re: Question of the Day

sreiser — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 22:24:48 -0000

I have a TV, but Standard Def. I don't seem to watch it enough to upgrade until the unit breaks. Also I go without a car since I live in NYC.

Re: Why Facebook is Failing Me

sreiser — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 21:32:49 -0000

it's funny, as I read this it occurs to me how much I work at segregating my social networks. Facebook is for personal contacts LinkedIN is for business contacts, Twitter and FriendFeed is for tech talk and general BS with online acquaintances. There is some cross over but I specifically don't want my business contacts who I don't have non-business relationships with knowing I have a personal life.

Re: Disqus API PHP Wrapper Class

sreiser — Sun, 22 Feb 2009 14:31:13 -0000

It's licensed under the GPL (http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html), as long
as you respect that, feel free to use it.

Share and Enjoy!

Re: My Lost Theories

sreiser — Sat, 21 Feb 2009 04:38:19 -0000

Interesting thoughts but I have to disagree with some points:

1) I'm not sure that The Island actually is jumping in time. I think only the remaining Losties move in time. If the island moved in time so would The Others, The Losties Camp, The Orchid, etc. I believe that the time jumping only began after the Frozen Donkey Wheel was turned.

2) I do believe that the island is moving on the Earth, however, which is where the wackiness with Mrs. Hawking, churches and pendulums comes in. Like you I believe this happens every 108 mins and pressing the numbers was some sort of control mechanism. I'm pretty sure that this began after The Others buried Jughead. While digging the hole they messed with the energy mentioned by Candel/Wickman/Chang in the season's premier. This is why they had to build the Swan.

3) We know that the Dharma Initiative lied to folks about why they were in the stations. Kelvin might have been told he was "saving the world" as the folks in the Pearl Hatch were told that what was happening in the Swan was fake. Why, I have no idea.

Re: On Behalf of the IT Industry, I apologize

sreiser — Sat, 21 Feb 2009 00:55:55 -0000

The big problem, Dan, is the history of the industry. These machines were designed for a very niche market of certain businesses and hobbyists are still being used today by a much wider market. Where the machines today are faster and can address more memory, they are architecturally the same machines we were using in 1984. The last 25 years have only really brought us evolutionary changes, not revolutionary ones. The DOS program we were working with at StockPlan will still run under Windows 7.

The big thing we need to fix this is really give the home user less. Where I'm sure your mom is a wonderful woman (she was responsible for bringing you up) the last thing she needs is a general purpose computing machine, which would include a Mac, BTW. She needs a machine that can do 5 things and that's it. Unless she's doing resticted stock releases for you in her free time, she needs less not more.

I'm going to address this more in a post over the weekend but here is a question: Why do home users need computers with the same interface and capabilities as business's? A business's needs are much different then a home user's, we should be treating them differently. More in a fresh post over the weekend.