Category: Technology
I work in technology sector. And I do round a clock, not only from 9 to 5. It is my bread and butter, it is my hobby, it is the fascination of my life. And with the current rate of change particular in information technology (IT), there is always something new to learn, to try, to talk about. I often post news, thoughts, and reviews. And when I do, this is the category I use.
Destroying LiveJournal
Back in December of the last year, when the Russian company SUP bought LiveJournal, I wrote this post, in which, among other things, I said that it wasn’t a very good thing for LiveJournal. A few things happened since then, which confirmed my worries. But the biggest of them is unfolding right now.
SUP removed basic (free) accounts from the registration form. They have also introduced plenty of annoying advertising to existing free accounts. Lots and lots of people got really annoyed with that. In fact, there even was a boycott with some users not updating their diaries for 24 hours, while others going as far as deleting their diaries (no worries yet, since there is a way to restore the diary).
If you missed this whole story, here is a CNews article in English and here is a Lenta.ru article in Russian which cover the basic story. For more, check numerous posts on the blogosphere.
Most of the people I know, saw it coming. And this is surely not the last incident in this story.
Compromised!
It appears that this blog has been recently compromised. Big thanks to one of the readers for bringing it up and letting me know. Especially, since the compromise was hard to notice – one of the recent posts was modified with a blog of hidden markup that contained some SPAM links.
I am still looking into when and how this happened. The blog is powered by the latest version of WordPress (2.3.3), but a few plugins were outdated (it’s been a month or so since the last update). I have edited the post to remove the SPAM links and I’ve upgraded all plugins to their latest versions. I’ll also limit access to administration interface by IP (yes, I know it’s easy to go around, but I think it’ll keep most of the bots out).
If you have any other suggestions on what and how to do, please let me know via comments or directly.
Feeding on friends with FriendFeed.com
One of the things that people on the web do is follow each other. Reading blog posts, watching favorite video clips, stare at shared photos, reply to comments, get status updates, and so on and so forth.
In the previous years, the number of people who were online was much smaller. And they weren’t publishing as much as they do now. Everyone and their dog has a blog. Pictures and videos are flying around. Playlists and favorite songs are shared. Micro-blogging is blossoming. How can anyone follow all that? Well, RSS, of course, is one of the common answers.
But, RSS has its share of problems. It is still too technical to be used by many people. Good tools are a few. And grouping things around people isn’t much fun yet. Also, feed discovery is still an issue (from a person’s point of view, not the aggregator point of view).
FriendFeed.com web service recently went public and solved a few problems. It starts off with feed discovery. When you register and login, you can easily specify all the places that you publish at – blog, Flickr photostream, del.icio.us bookmarks, LinkedIn profile, Twitter, and so on and so forth. This way, when somebody is interested in following you up, he or she will just need to subscribe to you once and get all the stuff from everywhere where you publish. This is cool.
Another problem that FriendFeed solves is the problem of virtual people. In social networks, it is often that you can’t follow a person who hasn’t registered yet. You can invite them in, wait for them to join, and then be notified when they joined. But it is often impossible to follow people who decided not to join the network. In FriendFeed, you can create “imaginary friends”. This way, you can group people and sources in any way you like best.  This is priceless.
For example, you can create an imaginary friend for a person who hasn’t registered, and you can assign a blog and a Flickr photostream to him. Or, you can create an imaginary friend for a real person, who even registered, but who publishes so much that you can’t take it. Instead of following of their stuff, you just pick things that you are interested in (say Twitter messages and blog, but not Flickr and YouTube) and link those to your imaginary friend.
With this functionality, following topics or events becomes extremely easy. If you are interested in kebab cooking ,or in Cyprus switching to Euro, or anything else for that matter, you can create an imaginary friend for the topic and assign it blogs, Google Reader shared items, Picasa photos, or whatever else is supported. There is a lot of potential in here.
Another thing that FriendFeed does right is presentation of data. There are links to original sources whenever possible, and there are thumbnails for whatever possible. Also, people have avatars, which makes it very easy to distinguish who is who and who published what.
And if all that wasn’t enough, you can subscribe to updates via email. Which means that you can really improve your productivity while still following a whole lot of sources. No need to run around the web looking for updates. No need to interrupt your work flow to see if there is a reply to your comment. You just get used to getting back at all the updates once a day in a brief, but nicely looking digest form, and that’s it!
FriendFeed is a really nice services which a lot of people were waiting for and which they will appreciate now that it is finally here. Oh, and just in case, here is the link to my FriendFeed profile.
del.ishli.st – my wishlist is back
Long time ago I used to have a wishlist on this site. If I remember correctly, I even had a few. It was a rather helpful piece of information for the times when I was doing online shopping, as well as for my friends and family before the big holidays (hint: presents).
There were two problems with keeping up a wishlist. One was rather small – people couldn’t find it easily, since it was hidden in the archives. And one big – it was a lot of effort to keep it up-to-date. I kept losing it myself all the time, and I was always forgetting to update it.  These two problems caused it to finally be lost in the sea of other posts on this blog, and, probably, never to be found again.
I’m glad to say though, that a better version of my wishlist is back. It’s something that I wish I had years ago. It’s dead simple, easy to see (no registrations required or anything of such non-sense), and it’s also extremely easy for me to keep updated. This new wishlist is on del.ishli.st.
The name sounds good, but the link is impossible to remember, much like the original del.icio.us one. del.ishli.st is a very simple, yet very smart way of wishlisting. It utilizes my del.icio.us account and the “wishlist” tag, which is something very natural to use for tagging items of the wishlist. And so that I won’t try to remember the URL, or, even worse, attempt to type it, or lose this wishlist in the history of posts once again, I decided to make a big and important link to it, at the top of the site. Yes, that’s right, you can see it together with the rest of the main navigational menu.