- Conversations About The Internet #5: Anonymous Facebook Employee – The Rumpus.net
Excerpt of a freaky blog post / discussion between someone and a Facebook engineer: "That’s right. How do you think we know who your best friends are? But that’s public knowledge; we’ve explicitly stated that we record that. If you look in your type-ahead search, and you press “A,” or just one letter, a list of your best friends shows up. It’s no longer organized alphabetically, but by the person you interact with most, your “best friends,” or at least those whom we have concluded you are best friends with."
(categories: facebook privacy security development ) - Why do big companies suck? « Scott Berkun
Good reminders if you work at a small company that you want to help keep feeling small.
(categories: business management politics culture social leadership )
Category Archives: Uncategorized
Links: 1-16-2010
- Stevey’s Blog Rants: Good Agile, Bad Agile
Yegge in incentives, agile and how work gets done at Google. So let me get this straight: no dates AND you get free lunches? Sounds idyllic…
(categories: agile google programming incentives ) - Mailinator(tm) Blog: A Beautiful Race Condition
Great blog post describing a race condition that can happen in unsychronized hashmaps.
(categories: java concurrency threads threading race )
Links: 1-15-2010
- ongoing · Doing It Wrong
Quote: "The community of developers whose work you see on the Web, who probably don’t know what ADO or UML or JPA even stand for, deploy better systems at less cost in less time at lower risk than we see in the Enterprise. This is true even when you factor in the greater flexibility and velocity of startups.This is unacceptable. The Fortune 1,000 are bleeding money and missing huge opportunities to excel and compete. I’m not going to say that these are low-hanging fruit, because if it were easy to bridge this gap, it’d have been bridged. But the gap is so big, the rewards are so huge, that it’s time for some serious bridge-building investment. I don’t know what my future is right now, but this seems by far the most important thing for my profession to be working on."
(categories: enterprise software business web web2.0 agile )
Links: 1-12-2010
- Pinboard Blog
Today, Pinboard has grown to about 1200 active users, and we’re coming up on our two millionth bookmark. We store about a hundred gigabytes of crawled content. From one full-time employee, the site has ballooned to a staff of 1.5. We’ve expanded to fill two servers, one hosting the main site while the other performs certain onerous background tasks. And we’ve added piles and piles of features, including Twitter and Instapaper mirroring, better bulk editing, a mobile site, bookmarking by email, archiving, feeds, an API, and even a version of the site for the five Pinboard users who prefer to browse their bookmarks in Spanish.
(categories: bookmarks delicious del.icio.us pinboard entrepreneurship startup )
Links: 1-8-2010
- Blogging Roller: The Jazz Connection
IBM using OpenSocial in their Team Concert product, which can hook up to Lotus Connections.
(categories: lotus ibm opensocial ) - [this is aaronland] continuous partial [redacted]
Some cool stuff around Solr / faceted search / geocoding.
(categories: solr machinelearning faceted search geocode )
Links: 1-3-2010
- Balsamiq Company Blog > A look back at 2009
Peldi makes $1.6m in 2009. Wow.
(categories: startup entrepreneurship revenue startups business wiki ) - webfinger – Project Hosting on Google Code
WebFinger is about making email addresses more valuable, by letting people attach public metadata to them
(categories: openid google email discovery social protocol webfinger finger ) - Facebook | Desktop Notifications
Had no idea this existed. OS X only.
(categories: facebook desktop socialsoftware )
Links: 12-31-2009
- Kwaga’s Diary: Did you forget me?
LOVE this feature. I want this in my email right now.
(categories: email collaboration discussions kwaga )
Links: 12-30-2009
- Paul Buchheit: So I finally tried Wave…
Excerpt: "They could use MIME multi-part to send both a non-Wave, HTML version of the message, and the Wave version. Wave-enabled mail readers would display the live Wave, while older mailers would show the static version along with a link to the live Wave." Nice little nugget there. Curious: has anyone done anything interesting with MIME multipart and email?
(categories: googlewave wave gmail collaboration innovation mime email )
Links: 12-27-2009
- 10 Proposals for Fixing the E-Mail Glut – Bits Blog – NYTimes.com
Some interesting ideas (#1 feels like a rip off of Wave), some not so much (a character limit on email?).
(categories: email innovation productivity informationoverload informationunderload ) - Kwaga :: Smart Email Assistance ::
Kwaga is simple, free, and works with Gmail to enable you to focus on essential emails and follow-through with key decisions in less clicks.
(categories: email gmail semantic dashboard filtering ) - google-enterprise-connector-salesforce – Project Hosting on Google Code
Interesting that the GSA has the notion of "public content" and "secure content", need to get my hands on one to see what the behavioral differences are.
(categories: google gsa search ) - search-reporting – Project Hosting on Google Code
How many of your users are clicking on the first search result? How many refine their search? How many use the Advanced search capabilities? How many click on a cached link? How many have to click the Next page link? How many aren’t finding what they want?
(categories: gsa enterprise google search ) - diykeymatches – Project Hosting on Google Code
Cool search idea in the GSA: for internal deployments, users can add a keyword –> page mapping, much like sponsored ads but without the exchange of money (since it’s an internal thing).
(categories: google search enterprise socialsoftware ) - The Value of Sharing: Social Engagement | ShareThis
Excerpt: On an aggregate level, sharing is now accounting for as much as one-third of the amount of traffic driven by search, which is most often the top source of traffic for sites. So say a site gets 100,000 unique visitors per month from search, they’re also getting 33,000 from sharing. Now, 33 percent is at the high range of our network, but we’re seeing sites across several verticals (mainstream news, tech, entertainment) achieving these levels.
(categories: analytics socialsoftware sharing communication ux facebook twitter email ) - SharePoint MindsharpBlogs > Kim Lund > How to Increase SharePoint End User Adoption
Pretty good blog post describing the pitfalls / challenges when rolling out SharePoint.
(categories: sharepoint adoption enterprise ) - Some other SharePoint 2010 tidbits – FierceContentManagement
Excerpt: "He points out that the path of ECM is littered with failure and that Microsoft’s goal with SharePoint 2010 is to put the end user front and center (while providing more comprehensive back-end administration). The idea, he explains is to get the end user to use the system. If it’s too hard or too restrictive, then end users will always find ways to work around the system to the detriment of the CMS. It will be interesting to see as the SharePoint 2010 beta goes into wider use, and use cases emerge, how well Microsoft has solved this perennial issue." Not really much of an ‘idea’ IMHO.
(categories: sharepoint enterprise adoption userfocus ux ) - Archiving and eDiscovery for Collaboration Systems | Messaging News
Excerpt: "A wide range of regulations and statutes require organizations to safeguard and manage complete records that document what happened in a business or organization. Financial services companies are subject to SEC and FINRA regulations, life sciences organizations to 21 CFR Part 11, federal government agencies and defense contractors to DoD 5015.2, and companies publicly traded in U.S. markets to Sarbanes-Oxley. Common among these regulations and statutes is the concept that the subject matter determines what needs to be managed, and not the medium used for transmitting or communicating information in the record. This means that business decisions communicated through collaboration systems are just as relevant for records management as a printed contract."
(categories: ediscovery archiving quickr sharepoint ) - Mauro Cardarelli : What If You Throw a Party and Nobody Shows Up
Excerpt: "So, here we sit; a few months away from the launch of SharePoint 2010, a framework that offers so much more business functionality and impact. What’s the (potential) problem? SharePoint 2007 has been so widely adopted, across the entire enterprise, that there exists a comfort in the functionality it delivers. Right? SharePoint’s strength has always been in its simplicity. So now we’re going to beef it up… more flexible content management, better workflow, enhanced search and business intelligence. What’s the one word to summarize? … Overwhelming? One of my fellow panelists, an IT Manager, stated it perfectly when he told the crowd that his ability to promote new features in SharePoint is directly dependent on the business users’ ability to withstand the change. Exactly! Change is always risky. Therefore, lots of change brings lots of risk."
(categories: sharepoint adoption enterprise ) - Collaboration and Content Strategies Blog: 6 Things You Should Know About How Office and SharePoint 2010 Work Together
Excerpt: "Office 2010 can find files to open or insert on SharePoint as easily as files stored on the C: drive – A user’s “SharePoint Sites” is a list available under the Office client application “Favorites” dialog, alongside of “Documents”. This list can be managed by either the user or an administrator."
(categories: sharepoint office enterprise ) - NewsGator Talks SharePoint, The Future of Social Computing
Quote: ":There has been a lot of movement in social computing in the enterprise. As he takes a look back Holston tells us that a year ago the conversation was all about ROI and use cases. Enterprises were still considering and experimenting with social computing… Now, Holston says, the focus has changed to deploying solutions enterprise wide and getting the highest return stories for initial deployments (which are usually one or two elements of social computing like micro-blogging)."
(categories: sharepoint socialsoftware microblogging enterprise ) - 10 Microsoft Predictions For 2010
Excerpt: For developers, Sharepoint 2007 was complex and non-intuitive. Third-party application integration and workflow tools were unwieldy. But in Sharepoint 2010, Microsoft focused on tooling and project support and, for the first time, made it possible for developers to use Visual Studio to build Sharepoint applications.
(categories: sharepoint microsoft open ) - Open source became big business in 2009 | The Open Road – CNET News
Quote: "Open source stopped being a sideshow for Google and instead became the main event." Not sure that it’s the main event at Google (I bet ad revenue is still > 95% of their overall number) but true that it’s getting bigger.
(categories: opensource google ) - Microsoft’s New Open Source Web CMS
Quote: Oxite is blog software built on the new ASP.NET MVC framework provided by Microsoft. Although they call it a blogging engine, they also say it is able to host everything from a blog to a large website.
(categories: cms microsoft blogging opensource sharepoint )
Links: 12-24-2009
- neighborhoods and subcultures in social design
Excerpt: "… Once you have a stake in the ground around your social object, you need to think about the kinds of activities that would revolve around that activity. What are people already doing? What kinds of activities naturally want to happen? Let the answers to these questions help define the features that you implement. Keep in mind too, that the social object and the kinds of activities that you support will help define the subculture that will emerge on your site. Different activities are going to draw different kinds of people depending on the level of participation required to be involved.
(categories: socialsoftware design ux navigation patterns ) - 5 Steps to Building Social Experiences – Boxes and Arrows: The design behind the design
Designing social interfaces is more than just slapping on Twitter-like or Facebook-like features onto your site. Not all features are created equal and sometimes a little bit can go a long way. It’s important to consider your audience, your product—what your users will be rallying around and why they would want to become engaged with it and each other, and that you can approach this in a systematic way, a little bit at a time.
(categories: ux social socialsoftware experience socialdesign )