Our lead developer, Michael Buckbee, put together this great collection of un-prompted testimonials from tweeps who enjoyed using my.SXSW, powered by The Social Collective.
Categories
Asides
There has been quite a bit of chatter that we’ve been following in the SXSW community about the launch of my.SXSW. Fortunately, most of it has been good news. (Phew!) We’ve also gotten some great, constructive feedback and some fabulous ideas for new features that we wish we would have thought of ourselves!
There’s one issue that has come up a few times that we’d like to address in this post. Several people in the community have expressed concern about the lack of context in tweets coming from my.SXSW. (This only applies to people who have integrated their Twitter accounts.)
We’ve applied two changes to The Social Collective software to help with this. First off, we changed the application source from “The Social Collective” to “my.SXSW” with a link back to the my.SXSW site. Also, we added a “on http://my.sxsw.com” link back to messages that notify people when you join a group.
Keep the feedback coming — we’d love to hear from you!
Categories
I Don’t Even Like Radiohead, But. . . .
I wouldn’t consider myself a Radiohead fan. But what they just did is about to turn the music industry on its head . . . again. Check out this snippet from an e-mail they just sent me:
To coincide with asking radio stations to think about playing Reckoner we are breaking up the tune into pieces for you to remix. After the insane response we got from the Nude remix stems and the site that was dedicated to your remixes…
Unique visitors: 6,193,776, Page Views: 29,090,134, Hits: 58,340,512, Bandwidth: 10.666 Terabytes, Number of mixes: 2,252, Number of votes: 461,090, Number of track listens: 1,745,304
…we thought it only fair to do the same with a tune that at least is in 4/4. You can get the stems (the different instruments/elements) from here.
Sample, cut, take the sounds, whatever. Play it in a club. Or your room. Then if you want you can upload your finished mixes to http://www.radioheadremix.com and be judged by everyone else. You can create a widget allowing votes from your own site, Facebook or MySpace to be sent through too. [Emphasis mine.] To start things off we asked James Holden and Diplo to do their versions.
Whatever you want to call this (user-generated production?), it’s downright brilliant. The idea that I — a mere mortal — get to mix and produce the next Radiohead song and that my version (if the general public likes it) could be the next big Radiohead hit is simply a mind-blowing and totally game-changing idea. Starting with Napster, then Kazaa and other P2P networks, then the idea that a major-label artist like Radiohead would put up an album (In Rainbows) and ask people to name a price for it — including $0 — the music industry has changed dramatically over the past ten years. And Radiohead is, as usual, leading the charge.
For anyone attending Oracle Open World, I’m planning to give a preview of my SXSW 2009 talk entitled “Not So Simple Any More: RSS’s Bleeding Edge” in the unconference track at OOW. (This will happen regardless of whether or not SXSW selects my talk for inclusion in the 2009 agenda.)
The talk is scheduled for Monday, 22 September 2008 at 2 PM Pacific in Moscone Overlook II. BTW, I’ll probably be spending most of my time in the unconference track at OOW, because I’m just that kind of guy.
I had this Twitter argument today with former coworker, fellow web developer and friend Bryan Hughes:
bucchere: The Spring Framework is driving me crazy. If this were Rails, I’d be done already.
huuuze: @bucchere If it was Django, it’d be faster and ready to scale.
bucchere: @huuuze I’m not interested in a religious war right now. Please don’t provoke me. 😉
huuuze: @bucchere No war — even the Rails guys agree: http://is.gd/1ZZu
bucchere: @huuuze Apparently Gluon is even faster than Django. But is anyone using it? You have to consider factors other than performance.
huuuze: @bucchere Um, Django’s used by thousands. It’s not some fringe framework. Guaranteed anyone that’s used RoR and Django will prefer Django.
bucchere: @huuuze How could you make that “guarantee” when you’ve never used Rails? I said I didn’t want a religious war, you damn Python Nazi. 😉
huuuze: @bucchere I’ve built a couple sites using Rails. How many sites have you built using Django?
bucchere: @huuuze bdg’s svn server just crashed. I have more important things to do than continue this pointless argument.
huuuze: @bucchere Then quit wasting time on Twitter. I’m not trying to start anything with you. Just be aware that RoR isn’t the only game in town.
bucchere: @huuuze There are lots of religions too. And if I want to pick one and say the others are “wrong” then that’s my prerogative.
huuuze: @bucchere Whatever dude. Not sure why you’d say Django is “wrong.”
bucchere: @huuuze All I’m saying is that language/framework wars are like religious wars. I have mine, you have yours. Leave it at that.
bucchere: Enjoying a homemade caprese — my favorite salad. (Now watch while @huuuze tells me his favorite salad is better than mine.)
huuuze: @bucchere Having never tried caprese, I have no opinion on the matter.
bucchere: @huuuze LOL. I’m glad we can still be friends. 🙂
huuuze: @bucchere Get real. I’m only friends with Christians and Django users. 😉
* * *
So the time it took me to compile this discussion made me wonder why Twitter doesn’t have threaded discussions. Summize (now search.twitter.com) has “conversations” but, like Facebook’s wall-to-wall feature, just because the posts occur consecutively, it doesn’t mean that they’re actually “in” the same thread. If I were re-writing Twitter, adding threaded discussions — and with it, the ability to reply to a specific Tweet — would be near the top of my list.
Happy Friday everyone (and happy 3-day weekend for hard-working and hard-twittering Americans)!
I used to love Feedheads. It’s a simple, elegant and beautiful application that does one thing really well: help you share your Google reader shared items.
Unfortunately, the “new” Facebook has rendered the application utterly useless and I can’t think of a good way, as an end-user, to fix it. In fact, as someone who’s built two facebook apps, I can’t even think of a way that the Feedheads developers can fix it. What a calamity.
So here’s the problem: the News Feed (and the Mini Feed) introduced an option that allows end-users to set the story “size.” When a Google shared item story comes through Feedheads now, it defaults to the “one line” size and as a result, it doesn’t say anything other than “Chris posted an item to Feedheads.”
Thank you very much, Facebook. That piece of information is completely useless. People who are reading your feed need to click through into the Feedheads application in order to see what story you posted — and the whole point of Feedheads is to help you share your shared items, not make them harder to find.
(As a result of all this, Facebook also broke one of my applications, called WhyI. It has < 200 users, so very few people care, but . . . the point of the app was to help people ask themselves and their friends questions that have to be answered in five words or fewer. And of course, the questions and answers would show up in the Mini Feed and News Feed. But not anymore! Now it just says: “Chris posted a new mini-update using WhyI.” Again, a totally useless piece of information. Drats.)
As an end-user, I can set the “size” of each feed item. So that means, after I hit Shift-S in Google Reader — which doesn’t take much effort — I have to wait for the story to be published in Facebook and then, if I remember (which at this point is unlikely), I have to go into that little drop down on the right and set the size to “small” instead of the default, which is “one line.” And here’s the best part: I can’t tell Facebook to remember this, so I have to do it every time.
All this just to share a shared item on Google Reader through Feedheads . . . ick.
Here’s the best part. I just noticed that Facebook added their own feature to the new and “improved” news feed. You can import your shared items from Google Reader! And, not surprisingly, the news feed actually shows the stories’ titles. In other words, Facebook took a great application — Feedheads — and replaced the functionality with their own feature; in the process, they rendered Feedheads useless.
This makes me sad. I only have one thing to say:
Wow, Facebook, how very Microsoft of you.
Has anyone noticed that Twitter replies are fundamentally broken? Or, I should say, at least the “Replies” *tab* is jacked.
This isn’t another “Twitter is down” post — this is about a feature that doesn’t work as it’s designed.
As far as I can tell, replies to me only end up in my “Replies” tab if my Twitter account name (@bucchere) is the first token in the tweet. Yet a lot of people reply to multiple people or use the “@” notation in context, e.g. “I’m playing tennis with @bucchere.”
That “reply,” although it’s clearly got my name in it, won’t end up under my replies tab. Oops.
In The Social Collective, any time an @ token is found, it stores the message as a reply. Isn’t that how Twitter should work as well?
Has anyone else noticed this? Is anyone else annoyed like I am by this obviously broken “feature?” WTF?
There is a workaround, but it’s kludgey. You can use Summize (now located at search.twitter.com) to search for @bucchere. I did this, then ingested the resulting RSS feed into Google Reader and now I go there instead of to my Replies tab in Twitter. FAIL.
[Update: This is now fixed. Yay, Twitter!]
Categories
Our Web 2.0 Strategy
Here at bdg 2.0, we plan to capture long-tail ecologies by disintermediating citizen-media value while we integrate Cluetrain life-hacks to aggregate user-centered podcasts, blogging and tag clouds that reinvent social ad delivery and syndication while designing rich-client widgets that enable rss-capable peer-to-peer communities to engage user-centered folksonomies.*
*Courtesy of the Web 2.0 B.S. Generator
Calling all local Rubyists! I’m speaking about modular page design in Ruby on Rails at tomorrow night’s NovaRUG. The title of my talk is “To Portal or Not to Portal: How to Build DRY, Truly Modular Mashups in Rails.”
The meat of my talk is going to come from these two recent blog posts:
Modular Page Assembly in Rails (Part 1)
Modular Page Assembly in Rails (Part 2)
I’ll be followed by Arild Shirazi of FGM giving a presentation entitled “CSS for Developers.”
Get all the details here.
P.S.: Free pizza!
I’ve presented at seven Plumtree Odysseys, one BEA World and two BEA Participates. Help keep the streak alive by voting up my Oracle OpenWorld presentation!
Here’s what people had to say about my P08 preso this year. . .
Q5: What did you like most about the session?
- The ppt presentation style!
- Straight and to the point, dives right into it. Chris did a fantastic job!
- very nice to hear how they put this together
- amazing and inspiring
- great session; should be one of the first sessions provided.
Q6: What could we do better next year?
- bring this guy back (again)