Monthly Archives: August 2008

links for 2008-08-14

  • (tags: internet memes)
  • "Could Twitter have charged users as an alternative? Sure. And some would have paid it. But that would start a bad precedent. In order for Twitter to get the SMS deals it needs (and has in the US, Canada and India) to make its business viable, scalable and one day figure out how to make it profitable, it can not be beholden to carriers. Setting the precedent of just passing it onto the users would have put Twitter at a negotiating disadvantage with future deals. They needed to prove they'd walk away, even if it meant shutting down a country partially for a while. This was a smart business move."
    (tags: twitter)

What Happened to the Daily Links?

The handful of people who follow this blog might be wondering what the hell happened to the Daily Links. You may or may not be aware that I’ve been using a feature of Delicious.com called Blog Posting. If you have a Delicious account you’ll find this on your Settings page. This is how they describe it:

Experimental feature that can automatically post entries to your blog every day containing your latest links.

Well, ever since Yahoo! launched Delicious 2.0 (which I really like), this experimental feature has stopped for working for many, many people, including me. This explains the lack of activity on this blog for the past couple of weeks.

So what happened? I did some digging around and found this thread on the Delicious support forum. From this thread it’s pretty clear that the Blog Posting feature was not much of a priority for them because only a small minority of Delicious users used this feature. Here is a recent (5 days ago) update from Delicious staff:

Hi everybody – let me explain a little bit about the status of this feature.

First, it turns out we messed up. We intended to just reproduce the old functionality – so the additional [delicious.com] was never supposed to be there, and neither was the apparent 50 posts limit…or the timestamp problems, or these errors.

This is a tough feature, with a disproportionate amount of complexity in it compared to it being a smallish part of Delicious (and used by a smallish number of people). It produces output that gets interpreted by several different kinds of endpoints (WordPress, Movable Type, etc.) – all with their own unexpected inconsistencies – and by individual servers with varying configurations. We rewrote a lot of this feature in order so that it could work on the new Delicious platform, and it seems that we didn’t do it quite right. This is frustrating for all of us.

Daily blog posting also contains a long-standing security issue: we ask for your blog password and we store it. We take security very seriously and we carefully safeguard those passwords, but we’d rather not even know that kind of information about systems that are external to Delicious.

So, we plan to try to shift toward encouraging community-maintained third-party plugins for this functionality, instead of having people depend on us to push updates from a central point. Sonnoprofondo has very helpfully pointed out Postalicious, which is a great example of this for WordPress: http://neop.gbtopia.com/?p=108

We’ll be trying to fix daily blog posting, though. The [delicious.com] thing should be gone soonish. I don’t have a schedule for when the whole thing will function properly, since it’s weird and we do have a lot of other things to work on, but we want to make it work. The people who use this are a minority of Delicious users, but I know you guys are some of our most devoted. Thanks for as much patience as you can muster.

If their estimated timeframe of “soonish” goes another week or so, I will be looking at some other ways to share links on this blog – e.g. Postalicious. Or maybe I’ll actually get off my butt and write some real content for a change.

So Stay tuned. And thank you for your patience – all twelve of you. In the meantime, you can keep up with my links on Delicious, or better yet, follow me on FriendFeed.

If anyone from Delicious is reading this, please fix this soon. There are a few people who were making use of this feature.

links for 2008-08-01

  • "Many trolling practices, like prank-calling the Hendersons and intimidating Kathy Sierra, violate existing laws against harassment and threats. The difficulty is tracking down the perpetrators. In order to prosecute, investigators must subpoena sites and Internet service providers to learn the original author’s IP address, and from there, his legal identity. Local police departments generally don’t have the means to follow this digital trail, and federal investigators have their hands full with spam, terrorism, fraud and child pornography. But even if we had the resources to aggressively prosecute trolls, would we want to? Are we ready for an Internet where law enforcement keeps watch over every vituperative blog and backbiting comments section, ready to spring at the first hint of violence? Probably not. All vigorous debates shade into trolling at the perimeter; it is next to impossible to excise the trolling without snuffing out the debate."
  • A huge list of brands on Twitter.
    (tags: twitter)
  • (tags: friendfeed)