December 9, 2005
@ 08:22 PM

Yahoo! continues to make all the right moves. From the post y.ah.oo! on the del.icio.us weblog we learn

We're proud to announce that del.icio.us has joined the Yahoo! family.  Together we'll continue to improve how people discover, remember and share on the Internet, with a big emphasis on the power of community.  We're excited to be working with the Yahoo! Search team - they definitely get social systems and their potential to change the web. (We're also excited to be joining our fraternal twin Flickr!)

We want to thank everyone who has helped us along the way - our employees, our great investors and advisors, and especially our users.  We still want to get your feedback, and we look forward to bringing you new features and more servers in the future.

I look forward to continuing my vision of social and community memory, and taking it to the next level with the del.icio.us community and Yahoo!

Congrats to Joshua Schachter and the Yahoo! folks. This is definitely a great match.

 

Categories: Social Software

Thanks to Miguel De Icaza, I found an interesting speech by Harold Pinter which is reprinted in the article Art, Truth and Politics. Parts of the speech ramble at times but there is a particularly potent message which has been excerpted below

The tragedy of Nicaragua was a highly significant case. I choose to offer it here as a potent example of America's view of its role in the world, both then and now.

I was present at a meeting at the US embassy in London in the late 1980s.

The United States Congress was about to decide whether to give more money to the Contras in their campaign against the state of Nicaragua. I was a member of a delegation speaking on behalf of Nicaragua but the most important member of this delegation was a Father John Metcalf. The leader of the US body was Raymond Seitz (then number two to the ambassador, later ambassador himself). Father Metcalf said: 'Sir, I am in charge of a parish in the north of Nicaragua. My parishioners built a school, a health centre, a cultural centre. We have lived in peace. A few months ago a Contra force attacked the parish. They destroyed everything: the school, the health centre, the cultural centre. They raped nurses and teachers, slaughtered doctors, in the most brutal manner. They behaved like savages. Please demand that the US government withdraw its support from this shocking terrorist activity.'

Raymond Seitz had a very good reputation as a rational, responsible and highly sophisticated man. He was greatly respected in diplomatic circles. He listened, paused and then spoke with some gravity. 'Father,' he said, 'let me tell you something. In war, innocent people always suffer.' There was a frozen silence. We stared at him. He did not flinch.

Innocent people, indeed, always suffer.

Finally somebody said: 'But in this case "innocent people" were the victims of a gruesome atrocity subsidised by your government, one among many. If Congress allows the Contras more money further atrocities of this kind will take place. Is this not the case? Is your government not therefore guilty of supporting acts of murder and destruction upon the citizens of a sovereign state?'

Seitz was imperturbable. 'I don't agree that the facts as presented support your assertions,' he said.

As we were leaving the Embassy a US aide told me that he enjoyed my plays. I did not reply.

I should remind you that at the time President Reagan made the following statement: 'The Contras are the moral equivalent of our Founding Fathers.'

The United States supported the brutal Somoza dictatorship in Nicaragua for over 40 years. The Nicaraguan people, led by the Sandinistas, overthrew this regime in 1979, a breathtaking popular revolution.

The Sandinistas weren't perfect. They possessed their fair share of arrogance and their political philosophy contained a number of contradictory elements. But they were intelligent, rational and civilised. They set out to establish a stable, decent, pluralistic society. The death penalty was abolished. Hundreds of thousands of poverty-stricken peasants were brought back from the dead. Over 100,000 families were given title to land. Two thousand schools were built. A quite remarkable literacy campaign reduced illiteracy in the country to less than one seventh. Free education was established and a free health service. Infant mortality was reduced by a third. Polio was eradicated.

The United States denounced these achievements as Marxist/Leninist subversion. In the view of the US government, a dangerous example was being set. If Nicaragua was allowed to establish basic norms of social and economic justice, if it was allowed to raise the standards of health care and education and achieve social unity and national self respect, neighbouring countries would ask the same questions and do the same things. There was of course at the time fierce resistance to the status quo in El Salvador.

I spoke earlier about 'a tapestry of lies' which surrounds us. President Reagan commonly described Nicaragua as a 'totalitarian dungeon'. This was taken generally by the media, and certainly by the British government, as accurate and fair comment. But there was in fact no record of death squads under the Sandinista government. There was no record of torture. There was no record of systematic or official military brutality. No priests were ever murdered in Nicaragua. There were in fact three priests in the government, two Jesuits and a Maryknoll missionary. The totalitarian dungeons were actually next door, in El Salvador and Guatemala. The United States had brought down the democratically elected government of Guatemala in 1954 and it is estimated that over 200,000 people had been victims of successive military dictatorships.

Six of the most distinguished Jesuits in the world were viciously murdered at the Central American University in San Salvador in 1989 by a battalion of the Alcatl regiment trained at Fort Benning, Georgia, USA. That extremely brave man Archbishop Romero was assassinated while saying mass. It is estimated that 75,000 people died. Why were they killed? They were killed because they believed a better life was possible and should be achieved. That belief immediately qualified them as communists. They died because they dared to question the status quo, the endless plateau of poverty, disease, degradation and oppression, which had been their birthright.

The United States finally brought down the Sandinista government. It took some years and considerable resistance but relentless economic persecution and 30,000 dead finally undermined the spirit of the Nicaraguan people. They were exhausted and poverty stricken once again. The casinos moved back into the country. Free health and free education were over. Big business returned with a vengeance. 'Democracy' had prevailed.

But this 'policy' was by no means restricted to Central America. It was conducted throughout the world. It was never-ending. And it is as if it never happened.

The United States supported and in many cases engendered every right wing military dictatorship in the world after the end of the Second World War. I refer to Indonesia, Greece, Uruguay, Brazil, Paraguay, Haiti, Turkey, the Philippines, Guatemala, El Salvador, and, of course, Chile. The horror the United States inflicted upon Chile in 1973 can never be purged and can never be forgiven.

Hundreds of thousands of deaths took place throughout these countries. Did they take place? And are they in all cases attributable to US foreign policy? The answer is yes they did take place and they are attributable to American foreign policy. But you wouldn't know it.

It never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it wasn't happening. It didn't matter. It was of no interest. The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It's a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.

I put to you that the United States is without doubt the greatest show on the road. Brutal, indifferent, scornful and ruthless it may be but it is also very clever. As a salesman it is out on its own and its most saleable commodity is self love. It's a winner. Listen to all American presidents on television say the words, 'the American people', as in the sentence, 'I say to the American people it is time to pray and to defend the rights of the American people and I ask the American people to trust their president in the action he is about to take on behalf of the American people.'

It's a scintillating stratagem. Language is actually employed to keep thought at bay. The words 'the American people' provide a truly voluptuous cushion of reassurance. You don't need to think. Just lie back on the cushion. The cushion may be suffocating your intelligence and your critical faculties but it's very comfortable. This does not apply of course to the 40 million people living below the poverty line and the 2 million men and women imprisoned in the vast gulag of prisons, which extends across the US.

The United States no longer bothers about low intensity conflict. It no longer sees any point in being reticent or even devious. It puts its cards on the table without fear or favour. It quite simply doesn't give a damn about the United Nations, international law or critical dissent, which it regards as impotent and irrelevant.

The winners get to write the history books. I wonder what they'll say about this era in a hundred or a thousand years from now.


 

Categories: Current Affairs

It seems I missed that we launched the Windows Live Favorites for MSN Search Toolbar plugin earlier this week. I was harrassing some members of the Live Favorites team about shipping a toolbar plugin only to find out that they already had. Below is an excerpt from the download page

With Windows Live Favorites for MSN Search Toolbar (Beta) you'll be able to access your favorites from any PC, add new sites easily, find your favorites quickly, and manage them even when you are away from your home PC.

What you can do with it:    

  • Easily import your current favorites from Internet Explorer and MSN Explorer to Windows Live Favorites and use them right away
  • Find favorites quickly based on name, address, or keyword - so finding what you've already discovered on the Web is simple 
  • Add new sites to your Windows Live Favorites with a single click, and access them from anywhere
  • Collect and save new links even when you're away from your home computer

Another Windows Live product marches down the beta path on the road to going gold.


 

Categories: Windows Live

December 8, 2005
@ 11:17 PM

I just spent some time browsing the questions on the Yahoo! Answers site and as usual Yahoo! shows that they get it. They may build unspectacular user interfaces but they know how to build useful software for users of the World Wide Web.

I find this to be an interesting experiment in providing alternatives to traditional search engines for answering people's questions. Unlike Google Answers, there is no payment required from the person whose question is answered. This raises the question of why anyone would want to answer questions on the site. Whuffie?


 

Categories: Social Software

December 8, 2005
@ 06:37 PM

From the press release New Windows Live Local Service Delivers State-of-the-Art Advances for Web-Based Mapping and Local Search we learn

REDMOND, Wash. — Dec. 7, 2005 — Microsoft Corp. will introduce a beta version of Windows Live™ Local, an online local search and mapping service that combines unique bird’s-eye imagery with advanced driving directions, Yellow Pages and other local search tools tomorrow, Dec. 8, 2005, at 9:01 a.m. PST. Powered by Virtual Earth™ mapping and location platform, these features give users useful new ways to map and find directions to various locations and better visualize their surroundings from multiple aerial vantage points.

“We believe Windows Live Local sets a new standard for what people can do with maps, directions and local search,” said Christopher Payne, corporate vice president of MSN Search at Microsoft. “The combination of immersive aerial imagery, customizable map annotations, innovative driving directions and the ability to share local search information with others gives users an incredibly powerful and easy way to find what they want and get where they want to go.”

The new service, which will be located at http://local.live.com, contains a range of new capabilities that will be exciting to search and mapping users. The most visible of these features is a new 45-degree bird’s-eye view of major U.S. cities such as New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Boston, Seattle and Las Vegas. Covering about 25 percent of the U.S. by population, these bird’s-eye images are captured by Pictometry International Corp. via low-flying airplanes and then integrated with road and satellite maps to simulate 360-degree panoramas that can be viewed from four compass directions. On-screen navigational tools and preview tiles enable navigation between directional views or zooming in closer to a destination. Now people will be able to experience what it’s like to be there, whether they are evaluating a new house to buy, choosing the exact location to meet someone, or just taking a virtual vacation. Over the next couple of years, Microsoft plans to continuously update bird’s-eye, aerial, and road map data and imagery as well as local listings and information.

This is hot. Bird's eye view, integrated driving directions and best of all support for places outside the United States. The Virtual Earth guys have outdone themselves. Now if only we could get some better integration with other Windows Live services. ;)


 

Categories: Windows Live

December 7, 2005
@ 07:48 PM

The folks at 37 Signals have an insightful blog post entitled Don’t scale: 99.999% uptime is for Wal-Mart which states

Jeremy Wright purports a common misconception about new companies doing business online: That you need 99.999% uptime or you’re toast. Not so. Basecamp doesn’t have that. I think our uptime is more like 98% or 99%. Guess what, we’re still here!

Wright correctly states that those final last percent are incredibly expensive. To go from 98% to 99% can cost thousands of dollars. To go from 99% to 99.9% tens of thousands more. Now contrast that with the value. What kind of service are you providing? Does the world end if you’re down for 30 minutes?

If you’re Wal-Mart and your credit card processing pipeline stops for 30 minutes during prime time, yes, the world does end. Someone might very well be fired. The business loses millions of dollars. Wal-Mart gets in the news and loses millions more on the goodwill account.

Now what if Delicious, Feedster, or Technorati goes down for 30 minutes? How big is the inconvenience of not being able to get to your tagged bookmarks or do yet another ego-search with Feedster or Technorati for 30 minutes? Not that high. The world does not come to an end. Nobody gets fired.

Scalability issues are probably the most difficult to anticipate and mitigate when building a web application. When we first shipped MSN Spaces last year, I assumed that we'd be lucky if we became as big as LiveJournal, I never expected that we'd grow to be three times as big and three times as active within a year. We've had our growing pains and it's definitely been surprising at times finding out which parts of the service are getting the most use and thus needed the most optimizations.

The fact is that everyone has scalability issues, no one can deal with their service going from zero to a few million users without revisiting almost every aspect of their design and architecture. Even the much vaunted Google has had these problems, just look at the reviews of Google Reader that called it excruciatingly slow or the complaints that Google Analytics was so slow as to be unusable.

If you are a startup, don't waste your time and money worrying about what happens when you have millions of users. Premature optimization is the root of all evil and in certain cases will lead you to being more conservative than you should be when designing features. Remember, even the big guys deal with scalability issues.


 

Categories: Web Development

Two interesting things have been confirmed in the blog post Next Version of Virtual Earth is indeed around the corner. The first is that MSN Virtual Earth is getting renamed to Windows Live Local. The second is that the version I've been using internally that has better driving directions and birds eye view imagery will be shipping shortly. The post states

We've been working to address a lot of feature requests from our users, and personally I'm really happy with how the application has shaped up. Here is a blurb in The Kelsey Group's Local Media Blog about the forthcoming release. Greg Sterling correctly reports that Virtual Earth has become part of the Windows Live Family and will be known as Windows Live Local (WLL). WLL was first shown at the press launch event for Windows Live last month. Greg's comments are based on a presentation MSN Local Search General Manager Erik Jorgensen gave at Kelsey's ILM Conference last week. As part of Erik's presentation he demoed the release build of Windows Live Local. Keep your eyes open - you should be able to start enjoying features like Birds Eye imagery and User pushpins in just a few days.




The screenshots show the bird's eye imagery and as you can see, it is quite sweet. I can't wait for this to ship.


 

Categories: Windows Live

December 6, 2005
@ 01:59 AM

Brady Forrest has a post entitled Two Weeks of MSN on MSDN where he lists a bunch of upcoming webcasts on about various APIs in the MSN Windows Live platform. Below is an excerpt of his blog post with the upcoming webcasts

MSDN Webcast: The MSN Search Toolbar: Building Windows Desktop Search into Your Applications (Level 200)
Monday, December 5, 2005
1:00 P.M.–2:00 P.M. Pacific Time

MSDN Webcast: Extending Start.com Using Startlets (Level 200)
Wednesday, December 7, 2005
1:00 P.M.–2:00 P.M. Pacific Time

MSDN Webcast: The MSN Search Toolbar: Tips, Tricks, and Hacks to the MSN Search and Windows Desktop Search Platforms (Level 200)
Friday, December 9, 2005
1:00 P.M.–2:00 P.M. Pacific Time

MSDN Webcast: The MSN Search APIs: Building Web Search into Your Applications (Level 200)
Monday, December 12, 2005
1:00 P.M.–2:00 P.M. Pacific Time

MSDN Webcast: Virtual Earth Tips, Tricks, and Hacks (Level 200)
Wednesday, December 14, 2005
1:00 P.M.–2:00 P.M. Pacific Time

MSDN Webcast: MSN Messenger: Extending MSN Messenger with Multi-Person Instant Messaging Applications (Level 200)
Friday, December 16, 2005
1:00 P.M.–2:00 P.M. Pacific Time

You can find more information on MSDN..

If you are interested in building applications that integrate with MSN Windows Live services and applications, you should definitely check out these webcasts. I'll most likely be participating in a webcast when we finally ship the MetaWeblog API implementation for MSN Spaces.


 

Categories: Windows Live

December 5, 2005
@ 08:06 PM

The time has come again for me to share the top five crunk tracks getting heavy rotation on my iPod. If you like Lil' Jon or the Ying Yang Twinz but don't know what else from the dirty south might tickle your fancy, try some of these tracks.

    1. Grillz - Nelly feat. Paul Wall & St. Lunatics
    2. What U Drankin' On - Jim Jones feat. P.Diddy, Paul Wall & Jha' Jha
    3. Stay Fly - Three Six Mafia feat. Young Buck, Eightball & MJG
    4. Stay Fly (Still Fly Remix) - Three Six Mafia feat. Slim Thug, Trick Daddy & Project Pat
    5. Turn It Up - Chamillionaire feat. Lil Flip

During the intro for Three Six Mafia's Most Known Unknown, they complain that they influenced a lot of what is popular in hip hop today but don't get the credit. These seems very true to me. I remember listening to tracks like Tear the Club Up and Hit a Muthafucka back in the late '90s in Atlanta before any of the ATL rappers really became hot down south. I'd definitely recommend the Most Known Unknown Hits to any fan of the genre.

PS: I don't like D4L's Laffy Taffy but it is the first song that I've seen have about a dozen people doing synchronized dance steps in a club. So it gets an honorary mention.


 

Categories: Music

December 5, 2005
@ 06:12 PM

Since the release of v.1.3.0.38 of RSS Bandit last week, I've read a number of posts like Scott Reynolds's complaint in his post I Love Jason Haley In A Totally Manly Non-Threatening Way. Serious. Totally Platonic where he wrote

Also, RSSBandit devs: What the F? I am using Nightcrawler Alpha, which I love, but ctrl+m no longer marks posts are read. It’s ctrl+q. Ghey. That’s a UI no-no if I ever saw one. Worse than going agains expected behavior, changing previously existant behavior arbitrarily just makes users mad. Still a great aggregator, but I’d like to hear a why on that decision.

A number of people have complained that we changed the keyboard shortcut for marking items as read from Ctrl+M to Ctrl+Q. The reason we made the change was because of a bug report we got which pointed out that (i) Outlook Express and Outlook use Ctrl+Q for marking items as read and (ii) Ctrl+Q is easier to hit than Ctrl+M on most keyboards.

Due to all the feedback we've gotten, we'll be including a keyboard shortcut editor [originally developed by Phil Haack] in the bug fix version of RSS Bandit scheduled to ship later this month.


 

Categories: RSS Bandit