Social Software Posts

  • 12.02.07 Facebook and Decentralized Identifiers (Social Software, Web)

    I finally made myself a Facebook account. The most interesting thing I noticed is how the service has no visible identifiers for user identities; this has a surprising amount in common with experimental decentralized-PKI systems, and holds out hope for the prospect of distributed online social networks, saving us from the technical, social and privacy problems of centralization.… MORE

  • 11.01.07 Review: ZackAndWiki (Social Software, Games, Humor)

    It’s a sure sign that wikis are going mainstream when one appears for a video-game console. “ZackAndWiki” has the requisite goofy name (like TikiWiki or WikkaWiki), but once you try it out, you’ll find it approaches its job very differently than you’re probably expecting.
    … MORE

  • 10.26.07 Leopard Feature #301 (Social Software, Web, Computers)

    Even though I’m still recovering from a bad cold, I can ring in the new OS by pointing out yet another little improvement, one that didn’t make it into the official Top 300 list.… MORE

  • 04.18.07 Twitter, Rails, Hammers, and 11,000 Nails per Second (Ideas, Social Software, Computers)

    There’s an interesting kerfluffle going on regarding the scaling woes that Twitter.com is going through, especially since it’s built on Ruby On Rails. Here’s the original interview with one of the Twitter coders, the somewhat evasive reply by the lead Rails architect, and Mark Pilgrim’s cruel-but-funny dissection of the latter.

    Ruby is a lovely language and Rails is a lovely framework, but both of them trade performance for aesthetics and convenience. That is, they’re slow. No … MORE

  • 10.13.06 Dream apps and the perils of screen-scraping (Ideas, Social Software)

    There’s an interesting online competition going on called My Dream App. The idea is that a bunch of people pitch their ideas for a Mac application, and the set of ideas gets winnowed down in several rounds of public voting, until one is left. A group of experienced developers have promised to implement the winning idea as a shareware app, whatever it turns out to be.

    It’s a fun concept, but it highlights some of the problems of having end users design software. A number of the proposals give me a particular sinking feeling I associate with user-interface design meetings: lots of ideas that sound super-cool as one-sentence pitches, accompanied by irresistibly glitzy faked-up screen shots (all replete with translucency, rounded corners, and this year’s de rigeur reflections). But too often there’s no “there” there. It’s all so vague that I can sense that these people haven’t thought through the difficult bits or worked out a coherent idea of what the app will do.
    … MORE

  • 10.07.06 Please wave “hello”! (Social Software, Me)

    This is simply a black box into which I type words, and they pop out on a page, and someone might or might not be paying attention. It makes me feel like I’m Helen Keller standing on a soapbox. [….] Therefore, I am asking of you reading this that you please comment on this post. Just a quick “Hi, I read your blog”, like a wave or passing-in-the-hallway smile. Thanks.… MORE

  • 03.10.06 Signing XML (Social Software, Languages)

    I’d just begun to muse about signing Atom/RSS articles, when Johannes Ernst began blogging about the topic. I had assumed there must be some easy standard way to do it; but the answer turns out to be that there is a standard, but (according to Johannes) it’s far from easy, so much so that it’s nearly unuseable.

     (The problem in a nutshell: Digital signatures operate on raw data, so to sign something you have … MORE

  • 06.15.05 Little Boxes Of Words (Ideas, Social Software)

    Much of what I’m consumed with (at work) boils down to a question of: what is the right shape for the small but plentiful bits of writing that we are all creating daily? Here shape means largely visual representation but also sequencing and topology.

    It’s a problem of hypertext, primarily. The World Wide Web established one shape for hypertext: individual pages with one-way links in the text, replacing one another in a back-forwards chain. It’s proven to be a pretty good shape, but it’s not the only one, and earlier thinkers like Engelbart and Nelson had lots of other ideas.
    … MORE

  • 03.01.04 SMTP (Ideas, Social Software)

    The Simple Mail Transfer Protocol is by no means perfect—its lack of authentication is a prime reason why spam is such a problem—but I think it got one thing right: it has the right topology for building a person-to-person communications system.… MORE

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