Soon after the release of Google Reader’s public share feature there was a huge outcry by the user base against the lack of privacy tools and permission granularity.

Google was quick to explain on how to use properly the new set of features, allowing for the users of Reader to share only the stuff they want with whom they see fit.

Of course some minds got working on how to use this public filtered stream of data. And sure enough some services launched that tap in to Google Reader’s public feeds.

ReadBurner is a nice example that I actually find attractive not only from the design stand point but also by the way news are sorted.

Alexander Marktl the creator of ReadBurner, made two excellent choices in the conception of this app. The first and most important option at least for me is that all the feeds that ReadBurner indexes were made available by the users.

The second choice Alexander took that makes me real comfortable by using this service is that it sorts news items by their popularity, much in the way Digg works but without any voting.

News items are simply ordered by the number of times users have shared such items, which means that the important stuff will quickly rise to the top of the heap.

Unlike Digg there is no concept of front page, all news are sorted in the same page. This raises some scalability problems for the future, but they’ll probably only paginate the list.

Items are also divided by their language, which is a nice idea, despite the language choice being a bit limited and some major languages are missing, like German or Portuguese.

And obviously a service that indexes feeds being filtered by users using a online feed reader has their own feed, which can be easily customized on site.

All in all this is a great idea. Right now there aren’t that many users which means that there aren’t that many feeds being uhm… fed into the system. But ReadBurner has a lot of potential and will surely be a major player by the end of 2008.

It went under the radar of most people and tech bloggers, but this ground breaking stuff from the micro-blogging giant Twitter.

A few days ago Starling the messaging queue platform used by Twitter has been released to the open source community to tinker with.
According to Alex Payne in the brand new Twitter Technology Blog:

Starling is at the core of what we do at Twitter; it moves small messages around to daemons that work on jobs like processing updates, delivering messages, archiving user accounts, and so forth.

Until now, Starling has lived a sheltered life in the Twitter code base. We’re happy to announce that Starling is now open source and freely available for anyone to use, modify, and improve. We’re eager to see patches and to start a proper open source community around Starling.

This is a bold move, and I agree with Jesse Stay when he compares Twitter to an early Google.

Any developer can now improve on Twitter’s work, possibly making for a better and faster service. I don’t believe that with this release there will be a swarm of Twitter clones popping all over the web, mainly because the costs of supporting tens of thousands of SMS are pretty steep and also because it’s not a simple service to monetize.

Twitter has the micro blogging and virtual presence market cornered, and while it isn’t a monopoly there isn’t much in the way of competition. Jaiku is still light years away and Google hasn’t yet done anything to cover the ground gained by Twitter.

A few days ago it made the rounds in the intertubes, and I’ve even made a post about it here, that there was a website enabling non-US residents to use music streaming service Pandora.com.

Somehow I wished that Pandora would pretend nothing was happening and leave globalpandora.com alone.

Pandora is restricted to only broadcast music to the United States, due to the DMCA.

But Pandora is abiding by the rules, and has deniability of the whole globalpandora thing.

By ignoring the middle man Pandora would be able to once again reach the entire planet without breaking any laws.

But unfortunately for me, Pandora has blocked globlapandora’s access to their service yesterday. I went to the site to take a screenshot for this post and lo and behold, it’s working again.

This will probably drag for a few weeks in a cat and mice game. Pandora block’s the ip’s, globalpandora gets new ip’s and is back up.

But sooner or later Pandora will probably take legal action in the form of a cease and desist and that will be the final nail on globalpandora’s coffin.

I need to start by saying that I’m a Dreamhost client. This blog is hosted with them. And to be perfectly honest I really like them.

They are are renowned for their sense of humor which I do enjoy, specially the monthly newsletter. Now and again there’s a bit of downtime, but that’s to be expected. Their support works great and folks are very helpful even when I accidentally borked one of my websites by accident.

But this Monday they’ve fumbled the ball big time, by triple charging almost all of their thousands of clients. Apparently I wasn’t affected, at least no money went missing from my credit card. I’ve only received an e-mail stating that I was all paid up until 2009 which left me scratching my head but I didn’t bother to check what was happening.

But hundreds of others clients weren’t so fortunate as me and flocked to the support phone lines and e-mail. Not a very good day to work at support I’m sure.

After some time, Josh Jones offered an explanation to what had happened on Dreamhost’s official blog. Which only made matters worse, because the tone of the post was light and jovial, using The Simpsons pictures to illustrate their mistake.

I surely understand the frustration of some clients who sites were down, and some whose bills/rent/mortgage bounced. I would be pissed too. I would be more pissed to find that the explanation of the error apparently makes fun of the whole situation.

Despite their immediate action to return all the money and even cover the charges that some clients have incurred due to this error it’s obviously a mess, and the end result is lots and lots of cancellations, threats of legal action and probably some guys showing up at the Dreamhost offices with baseball bats.

These past couple of weeks have been rich in events. CES in Las Vegas and now MacWorld.

But on the sidelines of these big mass gathering events there always something that goes horribly wrong. The major mishap at CES last week was when TV’s started to turn off magically. Some guy then proceeded to turn it back on, just to watch it go off again a couple of seconds later.

The prank by itself has no major consequences, except annoying those working at the booths. But when someone takes responsibility for such prank,publishes the incriminating evidence on video and confess to the whole thing on their website, things get out of control fast.

The culprits got banned from the event and even tried to explain themselves by referring to the whole incident as journalism.
Nobody cared. That’s what happened during the Gizmodo coverage of CES.

I’ve personally did similar stuff during computer expo’s that I’ve attended. To my defense I was young and was there as an anonymous guy.

The consequences were none and the thrill of misbehaving was huge. So I truly understand what motivated Gizmodo guys to do that kind of silly stuff.

The consequences for Gizmodo were on the contrary quite different. Not only were they banned from CES but they got virtually crucified by every blogger and news outlet across the globe.

Sometimes I like to use the old gray matter for a change, and I got thinking about this incident. Nobody talked about Endgadget coverage of CES, but everyone is talking about Gizmodo. Bad publicity is better than no publicity.

Do you agree with my theory that this was all a setup to enable Gizmodo to stand out from the crowd, or was just a prank?

I’m not much of a music fan. I enjoy listening to it while driving or whenever I’m doing boring and repetitive tasks. I enjoy silence.

But I’m not that happy when the silence is imposed on me. I’m talking about Pandora.com which is a music service that launched a couple of years ago. The launch caused some raised eyebrows in the music industry at the time. So it came as no surprise when Pandora closed down it’s service to the whole world except the US and the UK in May 2007.

Internet music broadcasting in the US is regulated by the DCMA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) which streamlines the process of acquiring all the licenses needed to keep such a service running. But outside of the US deals have to be negotiated with record labels in each country, which is a legal nightmare that Pandora (much like Hulu.com) choose to live without.

According to Podcasting News website:

Founder Tim Westergren said this week that the company cannot reach an agreement with music industry trade bodies over music licensing fees, adding that the licensing bodies’ rates “are far too high to allow ad-supported radio to operate” in the UK.

This would be sad news for music fans, but the community as risen to the occasion and launched a new website called globalPandora.
The site wraps around Pandora.com allowing this way everyone around the world to once more enjoy high quality music for free on the web. There are several other music services similar to Pandora link MeeMix.com. But I really like the minimalist interface, the quality of the audio and the way music genres or artists are cataloged and served.

Now if someone just did the same for Hulu.com I’d be a happy camper.

Via I Blog All

Following a scheduled maintenance the popular photography site Flickr.com went down and stayed down for the better part of the weekend.

It all started when George Oates posted this entry to Flickr’s dev blog on Saturday.

2:30pm PST: We started on a database upgrade and a few alters to the database structure last night. Given our scale, work like this takes a long time, and makes a definite impact on site performance.

You may have noticed today that the site is having lots of hiccups and that behavior is generally pretty erratic. So, we’ve decided to take the site offline help things settle down. We’re anticipating a couple of hours is all we need at this point, so, we’re hoping to be back online around 4:30 PST.

The downtime expectations were a bit off and flickr was down all night and some hours on Sunday which I truly understand. Time estimates are usually made in a conservative way, always allocating some spare time to tackle some last minute problem. Apparently this last minute problem was serious.

But the main thing that struck me as quite hilarious was the reactions to the downtime either on twitter or blogs. People literally panicked. All those photos gone without publishing. All those groups without a constant stream of photos to their pools. Quite sad.

All this commotion got me thinking what would happen if Facebook went down for a couple of days. Or even the worse if Gmail went down.

In this day and age how can we survive without these little tools that enable us to communicate?
What would you do if Gmail, Yahoo and Facebook were down for two days? Leave a comment, I want to hear about your doomsday scenarios.

Network Solutions was the only registrar for .com domains for a few years. You wanted a .com you had to go to them. And as always happens in a monopoly, you had to pay the asking price, no questions asked.
Amazingly Network Solutions to this day still asks for 35 dollars for a year’s worth of .com goodness.

A few years ago NetSol lost their monopoly and since then other huge players like GoDaddy and Enom fight for domain name market with cheap prices.
New domain registrations at NetSol dropped to almost nil but renewals are now the main source of income at NetSol. Business was slowly dieing until suddenly NetSol starts reserving thousands of new domain names every day.

Like all registrars Network Solution’s website has a search where potential domain buyers can check if their desired domain name is available.

Some bored exec must have realized that the data from those searches could be used to increase new domain registrations. The way he found to capitalize those searches was by using a loophole in registrar policy.

All registrars are allowed to reserve a domain for five days for free, which is a safeguard created to avoid possible payment issues by users.
In simple terms if some guy registers a domain name using a credit card, and a few days later his credit card is turned down the registrar can remove the reservation with no cost whatsoever.

So Network Solutions started reserving any name searched through their site effectively locking that domain name and stopping registration at any other registrar.

If you search for the availability of mypetiscuteandfluflybutbites.com at their site it will probably show as available. If you don’t buy it at that time NetSol will automatically reserve that domain name.

If one hour later you try to register that same domain name at GoDaddy it will show as unavailable and you can’t do it. But if you go back to NetSol’s website and try again they’ll happily let you register that domain for 35 bucks.

Any lawyer will tell you that’s extortion and I believe that bored exec is now packing his stuff and writing his resume. This is not a shot in the foot it’s a shot in the head.

Do you have an insane domain name that you would like Network Solutions to have? Go ahead and search for it pretty soon that domain will be working and displaying a under construction page.

Via TechCrunch

RSS feeds are the butter of the web 2.0 bread. The rss feed market is by nature a subset of the web but it’s getting bigger each day by the development of new ways to distribute content and media directly to the consumers.

I think it’s safe to say that half of the blogs and podcasts in existence today are consumed entirely via a RSS agreggator. And it’s now common for institutional websites to have some kind of blog too.

The initial wave of RSS clients was based on desktop apps. It took a couple of years for the next logical step, which was web based RSS aggregators.
For the latter part of the last decade our lifestyles have been changing to adapt to the mobile world. And web based rss aggregators fit perfectly in this new reality.
Bloglines was a major player in this revolutionary market until Google deployed it’s all mighty Google Reader and set web based rss reading as the new standard.

Apparently everybody forgot all about desktop based rss readers. At least until now when out of the blue Newsgator reminds us that desktop RSS readers are still alive, by releasing most of their product line for free.

This seems a desperate attempt at desperate times. And i really doubt that this move will dictate the return of desktop readers.

By the way do you still use a desktop based RSS reader? Why?

I’ve debated over this issue many times. Does the average user needs a server at home?
Microsoft thinks so, and it’s pushing it’s Windows Home Server to answer that question once and for all.

Some power users already have servers at home, usually a older pc that is now running some flavor of linux in the shadows.
I personally felt the need for a home server several time already and i’m really thinking of using a laptop as my workstation and housing all my files at a server. But i’m yet to take this leap of faith.

The explosion on the usage of laptops and other mobile gadgets able to play rich media makes this option very appealing. Watching a movie that sits in the server while you’re in bed watching it on your laptop is a huge selling point.
Besides I expect to see this product integrating perfectly with the Xbox 360 which already sits in many living rooms across the world.

I’m in no way a Microsoft zealot but this is a great move at the right time. And the campaign serves a double purpose. First it educates the masses to the possible uses of home servers and most importantly it’s very catchy and simple.

Via (Laughing Squid)