Voting closes for the SXSW People’s Choice award tomorrow. Don’t forget to cast your final votes for Feedhaus and keep your fingers crossed!
If you’re going to SXSWi, catch up with me in one of the panels by downloading my calendar ICS feed.
Team Feedhaus put out a new release tonight. This was primarily a bug-fix release. Here’s a run-down:
1) Speed up history detail pages — we’ve got more than 1.2 million stories stored up since our private alpha began in early September. Finding those records to show required some heavy lifting, but by adding some indexes to that table and making a few code changes, you can now play with the history slider all you want and pull up old stories almost instantaneously.
2) Speed up regular detail pages — some browsers were having trouble displaying some of the detail pages, mostly just because they were too big! We’ve capped the number of stories now at 20 per detail page. Eventually we’ll add pagination, but for now, there’s still plenty of news and blogs for you to read, with the latest and greatest stuff always bubbling to the top.
3) Detail page clipping — some tags returned feed content that was too wide for the detail page, which required you to scroll horizontally to see the full extent of the content — yuck! (We’ve had lots of complaints about this.) Using some CSS hacks, we fixed that for all the major offenders that we could find. If you find any other “wide loads” (i.e. detail pages that are too big for their britches), please let us know.
Charles Knight of AltSearchEngines.com had this to say about Feedhaus. Thanks, Charles, we think it’s cool too!
My wife is arguably my biggest fan, although my mom probably deserves “honorable mention.”
If you too are a fanboy or fangirl of someone, like, say Robert Scoble, you may want to know what he’s blogging about, pod/vod-casting about, Twittering about, etc. Someone put together this great aggregator called Robert Scoble’s Temple of Ego.
I thought, wouldn’t it be great if we all had our own Temples of Ego?
Back to my wife. Despite her self-professed fanhood, she’s been having trouble lately (well, okay, ever) keeping up with all my web activity. This all stems from the fact that Feedhaus, a site I built and launched last fall, was selected as a SXSW Web Award finalist and I’ve been blathering about this fact in every online setting imaginable, including here on dev2dev. (Please vote for us, BTW.)
So, with upwards of five different blogs, Twitter, Facebook, Google Reader shared items, flickr, YouTube and del.icio.us — keeping track of my enormous ego is a formidable task.
But now, with the power of the semantic web and a great tool called Yahoo! Pipes, you can create your own Temple of Ego in five minutes.
Here’s mine.
Simply go to Yahoo! Pipes, log in and create a pipe. In the “Fetch Feed” node at the top, simply enter the RSS or ATOM feed from whatever you want to include in your Temple of Ego. For example, I included all my blogs, my tweets (from Twitter), my Facebook posted items, my Google Reader Shared Items, my del.icio.us links, my flickr photos and my YouTube videos. That’s a good start.
Now, drag in a “Sort” node and sort by descending pubDate. This puts all the newest stuff first, known to geeks as “reverse chronological order.”
Finally, wire together the Fetch Feed node with the Sort node and then the Sort node with the Pipe Output node.
Now, if you’re really egotistical, you can email all your friends a link to your Temple of Ego and encourage them to add the pipe’s outbound RSS to their feed reader of choice. (Here’s mine.)
So, what on earth does this have to do with ALUI?
ALI 6.5 — which the good folks at bdg are using to build social applications for Participate.08 — has some pretty slick RSS capabilities and some really beautiful user profile pages. Imagine if everyone’s profile page had the output from their Temple of Ego embedded in it. How powerful would that be? And, with ALI 6.5 and a little Yahoo! Pipes magic, setting this up in your ALI deployment will be a breeze.
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Posted by: allisonbucchere on February 13, 2008 at 1:17 PM
Posted by: jbayer on February 13, 2008 at 5:17 PM
As a finalist in the “Technical Achievement” category, we’re also eligible to win a “People Choice” award.
But to do that, we need your votes! Vote early, vote often. (You can vote once per day every day up until March 3rd.)
Thanks!
Also, if you’re local (DC Area), please join us at our SXSW send off party in Courthouse (Arlington, VA) on February 21st.
We’re very pleased to announce that Feedhaus has been selected as a finalist for a prestigious SXSW (South by Southwest) 2008 Web Award!
We’ve been selected, along with four other great nominees, from among a pool of hundreds of sites for the “Technical Achievement” category, which, according to SXSW, describes “sites that are re-inventing and re-defining the technical parameters of our online experience.”
As a finalist, we’re also eligible for the “People’s Choice” award, so please vote for Feedhaus (daily until March 3rd).
Kudos to the SXWS committee for recognizing Feedhaus! Hope to see you in Austin from March 7th-11th for this great conference.
With the amount of downtime that twitter experiences, it makes me wonder whether or not Ruby on Rails is a viable alternative to PHP, Java, etc.
Is it the platform (RoR) or is it just bad code from Twitter? Or something else entirely?
Back in November of 2007 I gave a one-hour talk in Tyson’s Corner, VA entitled “The Enterprise Relevance of Web 2.0.” There were probably about thirty people in attendance. Since then, I’ve had several people tell me that they were sorry they missed the talk, etc. If you were one of those people, these next six posts are for you.
Why I am delivering this content in a six-part series?
I don’t have a video streaming server set up nor do I care to put one up and pay for the bandwidth. So, YouTube is an obvious solution to the hosting and bandwidth problem. Unfortunately, YouTube has a ten-minute limit on the length of uploaded videos. So, I needed to edit my talk into six, ten-minute clips.
Therein lies the problem.
What I’m learning in the process is that HD video editing is hard, even on a Mac. The first problem is space: I’ve got about five gigs of raw footage. My conversion program, Voltaic, was choking near the end of each 2 Gb conversion, so I switched to a PC (for shame!) and used the software that came with the camera (a Sony HDR-SR5) to convert from MTS (raw AVCHD format) to MPEG-2. Then I needed to buy a program from Apple for $19.99 (thanks for nickel-n-dime’n me, Steve) to convert from MPEG-2 to MOV (QuickTime format). Now I’m importing into iMovieHD. Each one of these conversions takes about two hours and has an output between 2x and 12x the size of the original MTS file! That means, just to be safe, you need like 15Gb of scratch space to edit a 1Gb movie! On top of the space issue, I’ve hit Google already dozens of times to figure out how to deal with things like frame rates, aspect ratios, sound compression, format conversion, and so on, ad infinitum.
And this is supposed to be easy! I’m on a Mac for goodness’s sake!
So, why am I ranting about my video editing woes in a post that’s purportedly about the enterprise relevance of Web 2.0? Because I think there’s a lesson to be learned from all this.
If personal computing is this challenging, that does not bode well for the enterprise, where everything is 10-100 times more expensive and 10-100 times more complicated.
Is this a good thing? For me and my company, maybe, because we’re making a living trying to make sense of the complexities of the enterprise and building user interfaces that help abstract people away from all the complexity so that they can do their jobs effectively.
But to truly bring Web 2.0 to the enterprise, we need to take these concepts — abstracting, simplifying, beautifying and “social-ifying” — enterprise applications down to the point at which they’re simple, beautiful and fun to use, all the while maintaining their power and utility. The experience people have using corporate software should mirror the experience they have using well designed, functional sites like Netflix, Facebook, Wishlistr, Dopplr and Kayak.
Most people writing corporate/enterprise software these days — with a few notable exceptions like 37 Signals (the makers of Campfire, Basecamp and Highrise) — are stuck in a function-over-form rut that’s really hindering the process of bringing Web 2.0 to the enterprise. Those of you who have had the pleasure of using AquaLogic Pages know that it doesn’t have to be this way.
Software can be both fun and functional at the same time.
So that’s an awfully long-winded and angst-ridden introduction to my six-part series on bringing Web 2.0 to the enterprise. If any of the above struck a chord with you and resonated even a little bit, then I highly recommend that you check out the forthcoming videos.
That is, assuming that I actually succeed in producing them!
While you’re waiting for the videos, you can check out the slide deck.
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Posted by: jbayer on January 23, 2008 at 7:44 AM
Josh Owens and Chris Saylor of The Web 2.0 Show interviewed me for their podcast. Give it a listen.