Disqus - Friends of srod710

Re: Google gets a patent on reading lists (Scripting News)

ryantate — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 21:27:00 -0000

Google Reader's bundles can, in fact, be subscribed to, by other Google Reader users and potentially by third-party readers that support OPML subscriptions. Two flaws: Their OPML was not validating when last you (Dave) checked, this is why I say the feeds may "potentially" be subscribed to -- if it doesn't validate it's not OPML so who knows where it will work. Second flaw, Google Reader's reader did not last I checked support the ability to subscribe to an arbitrary third-party OPML URL.

Not sure any of this has bearing on the patent, though, given the extensive prior art outside of Google.

Re: Chrome bookmark synch (Scripting News)

ryantate — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 12:41:44 -0000

Chrome for Mac isn't out yet, you're referring to the daily builds of Chromium, the open source foundation of Chrome. http://build.chromium.org/buildbot/snapshots/ch...

PS Would love to use it, but am addicted to Firefox's Command-Shift-T -- "re-open that tab I just accidentally nuked." Maybe Chrome will have this when it's done but I'm not holding my breath. Of course, Undo should handle this but programmers seem to hate implementing Undo.

Re: Following the people of the NYT and Twitter (Scripting News)

ryantate — Sun, 17 May 2009 17:54:08 -0000

Thanks! Will make for a great feed

Re: Following the people of the NYT and Twitter (Scripting News)

ryantate — Sun, 17 May 2009 17:37:48 -0000

I don't get it -- cluelessnewbie feed doesn't have any of the content of the streams. I was hoping for an RSS feed that contained the tweets (or, failing that, maybe an OPML pointing to the original tweet feeds)

http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/37586...

It seems to me if the content of the page (eg http://nyt.100twt.com/) is the actual tweets, the RSS feed should be the same thing. If the content of the page were just pointers, it would make sense for the feed to be also just pointers.

Re: Retweet is stupid (Scripting News)

ryantate — Sun, 26 Apr 2009 19:46:35 -0000

Yes that would rock and solve the problem! As long as there is some sort of formatting explaining who favorited it. Favorites should look a touch different in the feed. (As I mentioned above before seeing your post http://www.scripting.com/stories/2009/04/26/ret...)

Re: Retweet is stupid (Scripting News)

ryantate — Sun, 26 Apr 2009 19:41:02 -0000

You nailed it -- favorites is key -- Twitter needs to make a tiny tweak to favorites and it would have a huge impact: just put Favorites in with the whole stream -- when you follow someone you get both their tweets and their favorites (with some kind of formatting for the favorite so it's clear who you got it via and why). Same for RSS -- default feed should have both faves and items.

You'd want to be able to turn this off person by person or all at once, of course.

(Update oh I see Jim Roepcke also said this below)

Re: The Next Killer App is to Twitter as 1-2-3 was to Visicalc (Scripting News)

ryantate — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 18:20:38 -0000

Come on, this gets said _every_ time there's a new Web publishing meme. The new thing is always called a trivial stupid variation on the old thing.

"Web CMS just duplicates what you can already do with ssh/emacs and ftp. Except worse."

"A blogging system is just a CMS with a particular template, what's the big deal?"

And now "Twitter is just a type of blog."

Slapping a Twitter template on WordPress is different in all kinds of ways from actual Twitter. You're glossing over all kinds of little differences -- presumably as "trivial" -- that are the crucial reason Twitter is where it is.

It doesn't ask you to type a headline in your post. It doesn't allow you to edit a post, ever. These are just the tip of the iceberg. The little things make all the difference. Trivial isn't trivial.

Re: Solving the TinyUrl centralization problem (Scripting News)

ryantate — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 23:00:46 -0000

PS According to Disqus you posted your reply _before_ the comment you're replying to. Odd.

Re: Solving the TinyUrl centralization problem (Scripting News)

ryantate — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 23:00:06 -0000

Interesting point! I hadn't thought if that way.

Re: Solving the TinyUrl centralization problem (Scripting News)

ryantate — Sun, 08 Mar 2009 18:01:11 -0000

This is really an implementation problem -- Web app authors don't have the time/energy/knowledge to wire up apache in such a way as to shorten their app urls though they could theoretically do so without too much pain.

Maybe the solution is an Apache plugin/filter that would look for incoming requests for urls over a certain length Then it would generate a short url (using its own database/hashing code) and redirect the user to that url, which would become the canonical url for that link, Rinse/repeat for IIS. Dead simple for the app developer once implemented in the server.

Re: Archiving your tweets in XML (Scripting News)

ryantate — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 21:09:31 -0000

Oh I see, click on the "docs" link above:

http://editor.opml.org/twitterCalendarTool.html

Re: Julie and Julia (Scripting News)

ryantate — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 06:33:17 -0000

Are you talking strictly about this controversial nytimes.com op-ed?

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/22/opinion/22pow...

Because that's a lot to extrapolate from one foofaraw!

Re: CTO of the Year (Scripting News)

ryantate — Sat, 20 Dec 2008 23:26:23 -0000

I had not heard of SQS. It looks interesting, but messages can only be retained for a few days:

http://aws.amazon.com/sqs/

So the model might be: Send message to every follower's "incoming" queue for every tweet.

On the other side: Poll your own "incoming" queue for messages, write to a DB or RSS file and/or send to a cell phone and/or ping IM depending on who it's from.

OR:

Send tweets to your own "outgoing queue." Followers must poll within four days or they miss the tweet.

OR, SIMPLEST THING THAT COULD POSSIBLY WORK:

Your tweets are just an RSS feed with a special flag (via namespace extension) indicating all items are Twitter compatible, ie 140 chars or less. You store them on S3 or any other Web accessible URL. Followers poll at will (respecting any limits within the RSS file as usual).

(Their own client software, probably open source, running on their cloud or desktop, handles the tweets -- writing to an HTML interface, or SMS or IM etc.)

PS Twitter.com is just a fancy RSS reader, with optional hookups to your cell phone, the ability to ferret out and display "replies," the ability to authenticate into restricted feeds and an IM bridge.

A Twitter stream is just a tightly constrained RSS feed.

PPS Caveat: Restricting readership is tricky. HTTP authentication would work but you'd need some kind of universal login database and common login technique. Would this matter to Twitter power users?

Re: What is a netbook? (Scripting News)

ryantate — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 22:27:50 -0000

Thanks!

Re: The space between Twitter and FriendFeed (Scripting News)

ryantate — Sun, 07 Dec 2008 22:57:33 -0000

My thought too. Most people use Tumblr exactly as DW is discussing. But it's not enforced -- unlike Twitter, you can use as many chars as you want. If Tumblr added "tiny post" or somesuch as one of its post types (along with pic, video, txt, etc), with a char count monitor and limit, and offered a truncated version of the feed (enforced to no longer than X chars), it would be a lot like DW describes.

Re: Full text in RSS? (Scripting News)

ryantate — Sat, 25 Oct 2008 02:46:05 -0000

PS and the reader isn't clever enough. And doesn't care! Well, mine at least. Technical blogs, maybe not.

Re: Full text in RSS? (Scripting News)

ryantate — Sat, 25 Oct 2008 02:45:06 -0000

Nah, I'm a fascist! ;->

Re: Full text in RSS? (Scripting News)

ryantate — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 20:41:11 -0000

99% of people don't care if they're reading an excerpt or a "hand-crafted" summation, imho. Granted they're not the same but you're just trying to decide whether to click through. And offering multiple feeds is just too confusing for an everyday non geek.

And if you really care, as a publisher, you could always do an atom feed, which can have a summary _and_ fulltext. But it's much better to have one feed. One less meaningless decision for people to make -- just click the autodiscovered RSS feed tag and you're off.