Thanks for the LOLs. Visit site »
Totally narcissistic, but fun. At the moment, I’m in a heated battle with The Onion, plus my friends Eric Meyer (@meyerweb), Ariel Waldman (@arielwaldman), and Aubrey Sabala (@aubs) for 200th most powerful person on Twitter. Eric I can take, but I won’t even try to compete with the ladies. :) Visit site »
My old Seattle buddy Tara Brown got engaged to Sean Bonner tonight — over twitter. Congrats, you two! Visit site »
All good tips. And yeah, I’ve probably broken all of them at one time or another. Doesn’t mean I don’t think they’re good tips. Visit site »
According to a growing number of people on Twitter, Apple is having problems with its in-store activation process. Couple this with the botched MobileMe rollout, and this launch isn’t looking good for Apple right now. Here’s hoping they get it all resolved in short order.
In response to a Michael Arrington post on TechCrunch that as clearly designed to irritate, Ev and Biz at Twitter politely explain several details of their architecture and how Twitter works, and what they’re doing to make the service more reliable in the future. Nice. Visit site »
After nearly two years of high profile scaling problems, Twitter is planning to abandon Ruby on Rails…
As a Django fan and evangelist, I admit it would give me great pleasure to see this as a colossal failure for Rails, point, laugh, and generally poke fun at all the Rails fanboys and girls.
But let’s be real for one minute. Twitter doesn’t suck because of Rails. Twitter sucks because they have ridiculous amounts of traffic (especially to their API and SMS gateways), a limited ability to cache (a non-realtime Twitter is a pretty useless Twitter), and (as far as I can tell), they’re not making any money, so they probably have limited resources to pour into more hardware.
The bottom line is that Twitter will probably cause major scaling problems for any platform, be it Rails, Django, Java, .NET, PHP, or tin cans with a string tied between them. Ruby is undeniably slow compared to Python, Java, and PHP, but I really doubt the problems Twitter deals with are at the Ruby level, anyway. Much as I wish they weren’t, anyone who says Twitter sucks because of Ruby on Rails is either foolish or joking.
Twitter sucks because of Rails. Just joking. Visit site »
You Look Nice Today is an audio-based Journal of Emotional Hygiene, staffed by lonelysandwich, scottsimpson, and hotdogsladies.
In other words, its a podcast by some of the funniest dudes on Twitter. Check it out. Visit site »
Dan, Justin, and Rob roll out a big new feature for StrawPoll—the ability to run your own Twitter polls. Clever stuff, using the Summize API. Nice job, guys! Visit site »
You enter your Twitter username, it gives you a list of people you probably should be following. Worked remarkably well, for me. via Zeldman. Visit site »
The first celeb on Twitter I’ve ever wanted to follow. I mean, c’mon — we have the same birthday. via Rex. Visit site »
Sarah gripes about people that pipe their blog posts into twitter or their tweets into their blog feeds. I couldn’t agree more. It’s incredibly annoying. Visit site »
Gruber compares web clients for Twitter on the iPhone. Personally, I think Thincloud is pretty good (and my favorite of the bunch), but it still hasn’t been enough to make me give up Twitter over SMS. Gruber says Twitter over SMS is too annoying — I disagree. I find it to be perfect. It has all the feature John wants, works well, and has the most “iPhoney” interface of all.
All that having been said, I hope (and suspect) someone will create a killer native iPhone app for release after iPhone 2.0 is out. Visit site »
First: welcome back, Dean! Second, Dean’s experience with Twitter echos mine. First time around: “What? This is f’ing stupid.” Second try — you know, when I actually friends who used it: “Wow. This is f’ing brilliant.”
It’s too bad my realization that the concept is brilliant didn’t make the site’s design suck any less. Visit site »
Very cool. I’m not going to jailbreak my iPhone for it, but I hope to see this app working under the official channels when they’re available. Twitter really need to figure out some way to automatically geocode Tweets. I know it’s a very difficult problem to solve, but it would be such a killer feature. Visit site »
Attempt to thread Twitter conversations. Works well, but not perfect (I’m not sure it’d be possible for it to work perfectly). Pretty cool idea. Hmmm, maybe jeffcroft.com needs this… ;) Visit site »
Rob Goodlatte and Dan Romero use Twitter to conduct brief online polls. Fun idea, fun site, and nice implementation. Word of warning to would-be parallaxers: I believe think effect is this close to jumping the shark, and I’ve only seen it on like four sites. Rob and Dan do it really well, but still… Visit site »