A commenter on my last article jokes:
I thought : “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.” was Robbie Wiliams stuff!
I should issue a couple of corrections to improper attributions in that article.
1500 Lines of Code
Original article posted to PHP Advent 2009, Click to jump to discussion. Happy Holidays to you and yours!
Even the best of us can only write 1500 lines of code a day, so we need to make those lines count.
There were so many great articles in PHP Advent this year, that I couldn’t think of a good topic—I like to believe my peers stole all the good ideas this year… 🙂
Continue reading about Read about 1500 lines of code after the jump
bebo recruiting math
- Image via Wikipedia
I got an e-mail from a recruiter at Bebo looking to hire me into the same position I had at Tagged. This caught my eye:
ABOUT BEBO:
Bebo (www.bebo.com), Located in San Francisco; with over 40 million registered members viewing billions of pages monthly, it is the largest social networking site in the UK, Ireland, and New Zealand, and the third largest behind MySpace and Facebook in the US. Officially launched in July 2005, received the 2006 Webby Award People’s Vote as the best social networking site in the world.Our people can boast demonstrated records of success in viral online marketing and social media, having come to us from such companies as Google, Ringo, Tickle, BirthdayAlarm, Friendster, Organic, Yahoo, and MTV.
From its $15M initial round of funding back in early 2006 (from Benchmark Capital) Bebo has enjoyed positive cash flow since day one.
Our recent merger with AOL will bring tremendous opportunity by combining Bebo’s fast growing user base with the social graph of AIM and other assets.
Third place in the U.S.—really?
Facebook US rank: 3
MySpace US rank: 5
Tagged US rank: 108
Hi5 US rank: 288
Bebo US rank: 394
Friendster US rank: 534
MySpace US rank: 5
Tagged US rank: 108
Hi5 US rank: 288
Bebo US rank: 394
Friendster US rank: 534
Hmm, Tagged passed Bebo just after they got bought out by AOL for $850 million (and while I was working there) and Friendster right before I left. Given that Friendster passed on hiring me twice—that’s the sweet taste of satisfaction! 😀
Depending on the metric, you might make a case for it being #4, but to displace Tagged? Really? Not to mention, completely pissing on the hard work I did there. 😉 Besides this slight isn’t exactly going to make me jump ship from my new job back to my old one—just with a different color scheme.
Twitter's Retweet API
- Image via Wikipedia
Apparently, I’ve gotten the beta for Twitter’s new Retweet feature, so I thought I’d use this moment to rant a little bit about the Twitter Retweet API.
The Retweet API is actually a set of five API functions, and, as per Twitter’s horrible documentation habit, they’re spread across one namespace (“statuses”) but two different classes: “timeline methods” and “status methods.”
I’m not sure how I have the retweet beta UI, but traditional retweets aren’t reformatted automatically for me (the first entry is a retweet). *sigh*
Continue reading about Things that annoy me about retweet after the jump
TumblrPad
(Full disclosure: I work on Automattic, which makes software and services in the same space as SixApart.)
- Image via CrunchBase
Today, TypePad announced the launch of TypePad micro, which I found out about from John Gruber’s somewhat snarky tweet.
This marks the first time (to my knowledge) that SixApart is embarking on a free hosted blogging service, so it was definitely worth a look, especially given some of the things we’ve worked on, have recently got working, and will work on at here at Automattic. Besides, free is the price I like 🙂
Registering for a new account (especially with the Facebook Connect integration) was so easy, I thought, “Wait! Where is my Staples button?”
The blog, though there is some confusion as to the URL, has an aesthetically pleasing layout. It certainly seems to share a lot of influences from Twitter, WordPress P2, Pownce, etc. but the biggest influence has to be Tumblr.
Continue reading about Thoughts about TypePad micro after the jump
Vivanista
(Disclaimer: I work for Automattic which contributes to the development of WordPress, WordPressMU, BuddyPress, and bbPress.)
At this month’s Bay Area WordPress Meetup, there were four interesting talks. One of which wised me up to the Zemanta WordPress plugin, which I’m using now, any content creator (or Another Search Startup) should check it out—it’s quite clever.
But the presentation I want to focus on in this article, was Annie Vranizan’s Vivanista demo.
Vivanista is a social network for women focusing on philanthropy. Even if you don’t have a passing interest in such things, the website deserves a look, it’s quite an attractive website and built in record time—a couple of months.
Being a vertical, this is mostly the territory of white-label social networks, and more recently, Facebook. In fact, if you look at their team, it reads more like a group blog than a company.
That’s because it is.
What makes Vivanista so interesting is that it is built on WordPress MU blog publishing platform in combination with Andy Peatling’s BuddyPress plugin.
Continue reading about More about how Vivanista was created after the jump
Learning Programming Part 2: Programming Frameworks
- Image via Wikipedia
(Full disclaimer: I work at Automattic and am a speaker at PHP conferences.)
A couple days ago, Gina Trapani posted an interesting article on learning to program.
This reminds me that some people may take the wrong points away in my last article on the subject, the priority shouldn’t be what language you should learn, but rather, what is going to get you motivated to learn. PHP is a popular language because it naturally invites “immersion” style learning, not because it makes a good teaching language—which it doesn’t. That is, assuming the thing you are immersing in is “building a website”. As I like to say:
In the comments, I wrote:
After [the first] chapter, I’d say [PHP and MySQL Development]offers the most “immersion” gratification (at the least cost) than any other language’s textbook. The chapters are easy and by the end of it you have an eStore written and working from scratch. What do you get at the end of the Learning Python book? And how easy was each subsequent chapter? I’d say much less and much harder.
…
[Unfortunately,] it’s that first chapter that does the first timer in.
Continue reading about More about learning web programming after the jump.
They should have called them Terminators
Jane Mayer’s reporting on the Predator Drone program in the New Yorker last month is both fascinating and sad—on one hand we’ve definitely crossed the line between war and murder, on the other hand it is “the only game in town.” 🙁
xkcd said it best: “At some point there, we left the present and entered the future.”
I cannot see good things coming from this.
Total Eclipse of the Lyrics
Via Laughing Squid, I found out about this flow chart:
There really is something about this song that makes it so fun to poke fun of:
Just figured I better mention these memes before I forget. 🙂
Social gaming
- Image via CrunchBase
There was an interesting article in the New York Times about FarmVille. The only major error I have to comment on is that, given my experience at Tagged, saying Zynga is profitable is a massive understatement.
I think it’s instructive how companies like Slide and RockYou could have been so slow to capitalize on game designs that date back to 1980’s bulletin board systems. Perhaps they’ll study that in b-school. With 20-20 hindsight, this model does complete sense—interaction and bandwidth limitations are pretty much the same relative to the existing technology in each time period are strikingly similar in both BBSs and social networks. And just to further emphasize that it was not first mover that defined success, but rather failure to capitalize, I’ll remind the audience that neither FarmVille nor Mafia Wars were original ideas on Facebook—both were swiped from competitor products.
I will give Zynga (and the others) this. They have a far more mature understanding of social virality than the days of Plaxo, Tagged, or even RockYou/Slide. Earlier social gaming (like the first such app, Zombies) used traditional models based on optimizing signups and invites, but the Zynga model is optimizing views and clicks and they’re doing a good job. Remember, FarmVille only launched in June and now is all over the Times.
This is Mafia Wars, Zynga’s copy of Mob Wars. Note the use of various promotions to cater to instincts of people to bring their eyeballs here daily — gambling with daily chance, limited time offers and jobs, cross selling their other applications like Farmville, etc.On this screenshot showing a fold and a half of content, you only see one “social” touch point (at the bottom). That’s because the social aspect is only used like e-mail for messaging—and even then, only for notifications because real interaction like in Diplomacy or Chess would need much more brainpower than simply clicking.
Clicks are optimized here; social interaction is minimal here.
Trust me, they make a lot of money off of this.
Before any of us start rationalizing, part of learning is admitting when someone does it better than you. Hats off to Zynga.
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