short random notes about things that I see, hear and do.
I wanted to play around with ASP.NET MVC and Amazon SimpleDB for a little bit - so I thought I could write a TinyURL clone. So here it is: http://xur.li/ …
It’s written in ASP.NET 3.5 using ASP.NET MVC and connects to Amazon SimpleDB using the Simple Savant library for C#.
Chrome:
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.2; en-US) AppleWebKit/525.13 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/0.2.149.27 Safari/525.13
Safari:
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.2; en-US) AppleWebKit/525.19 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.1.2 Safari/525.21
Must try this sometime …
What I’m talking about is a flight simulator embedded within GE.
I hope this will get people to think - I mean, there must be a reason why “Made in China” = cheap …
Mattel Inc. (MAT.N), the largest U.S. toy company, recalled millions more Chinese-made toys on Tuesday due to hazards from small, powerful magnets and lead paint, sending its shares down as much as 6 percent.
[Mattel recalls millions more Chinese-made toys - Yahoo! News ]
This is something that has been bothering me for a looooong time …
Social Networks are great, but great variety of sites and fragmentation of users is a big problem. I have a contact list in my email client and in Gmail, Yahoo Mail, etc. I have contacts in Flickr, del.icio.us, LinkedIn, Xing, Plaxo, Orkut, etc. And now I have started building my family tree in Geni. But none of these has all my contacts - they’re all not in sync. It would be great if there was a way to synchronize all this information. Yes, I realize that all these social networking sites have an interest in keeping this information separate, but that doesn’t make it good - social networking should be open, not closed. How can you have a true network if everything is closed?
FOAF seems like a great idea and seems to be working towards having a site-independent way of specifying these relationships, but none of these big sites seem to support or implement FOAF. Maybe FOAF is too cumbersome? Maybe FOAF is also lacking necessary functionality? Maybe FOAF is just too complex for “normal” people to understand?
Also, what I’m also missing from most of the existing services is that they usually don’t specify the type of relationship, i.e. friend, acquaintance, business associate, colleague, (former) classmate, relative (could be more specific - and might thus allow automatic building of family trees).
The following are just a couple of notes that I started writing down quite some time ago, and that I intended to expand on in order to write a proper blog entry, but I just don’t have the time right now and I want to get this posted. But I think you can all get the main points anyway …:
1) Standard API and data structures for information exchange
2) Locator/directory service, user identified by URL (FOAF?) (or optionally email address - using email address requires central webbased directory service), similar to myopenid. Designates Social Networking service used by user - could be special link tag in header of (home)page, points to site that user uses for contact management. URL of site (e.g. flickr.com) has another link tag that points to API endpoint
API functions:
1) Connection Request: send request from user A to user B with request to establish link and allow for information exchange.
2) Connection Response: approve or deny request for information exchange - approval includes public key of user B
3) Connection Acknowledgment: acknowledges receipt of approved connection request and includes user As public key
4) Contact Information Request/Response: retrieve users contact information - must supply public key of user to get information
5) Contact List Request/Response: if allowed by user, send users contact list to other user
Actual contact management, etc. are functions offered by individual sites, i.e. competition between sites is about additional features that can be offered (e.g. flickr is about photo sharing, etc.). Also, sites should allow easy export/import of contact list data (including public keys), so contact relationships do not have to be re-established manually.
Happened to run across geni.com today. I’ve been thinking about creating something like it myself - oh well. I’ll be checking it out a bit. However, what keeps bothering me is that I have several separate Social Networks (xin, linkedIn, Flickr, etc. etc.) that are totally un-networked - and that’s a pain in the a$$. If only somebody would figure out a way of linking them all …
Just testing something here, so don’t bother reading on …
Travelzoo Announces 2007 Travelzoo Award Winners
Let’s see if this comes up on PR Newswire/Technorati now …
Over the last couple days, I’ve unsubscribed to a bunch of newsletters that I never read anyway - in a futile effort to unclutter my inbox … I’ve seen this quite often (Dell is only one example) - that they tell you that it may take up to 10 days to process the unsubscribe. What’s up with that? How hard can it be?
"UPDATE subscriptions SET subscribed = 0 WHERE email = 'xxx'" should do the trick just nicely - it does for us anyway…
