test 04/07/2008
How To: Getting Started with Amazon EC2 - PaulStamatiou.com
tags: EC2
tags: startup
Comcast, Twitter And The Chicken (trust me, I have a point)
tags: twitter, customer, service
Diigo monitor twitter well
Software Engineering for Internet Applications
tags: web, engineering, book
Why I don’t like Friendfeed as much as I wanted, it lacks intention « Alexander van Elsas’s Weblog on new media & technologies and their effect on social behavior Annotated
tags: friendfeed
I have had a few good times on Friendfeed, but these times were characterized by the interaction that took place over there. People commenting on something and replying to each others comments. Interaction is what I like most in any kind of service. I like Twitter for just that reason. While Twitter was made for people to answer the question “what are you doing?”, I like Twitter much better when an uncontrolled , unexpected, funny and often surprising @conversation starts (that is, people actually addressing each other on Twitter instead of addressing the whole world). It’s interaction and it makes the service work for me.
By now each Friendfeed user probably has imported 10-20 RSS feeds and isn’t even remotely aware of all the stuff he is sharing automatically. Because of this lack of intention most of the shared stuff is worthless. If I see something that I know my friend really likes and then share it intentionally with him, it provides us both with value. But if I spill my guts to the world without thinking about what I’m sharing it makes most of the things I share pretty worthless.
The Semantic Web will also be a richer, more customizable Web. Imagine running your cursor over the name of the hotel and being informed that 15 percent of the people who’ve voted on its quality say it’s excellent. If you happen to know that the hotel is a dump, you can instruct your browser to assign those people a trust level of zero. (The polling information would be saved on a third-party “annotation server” that your Web browser accessed automatically.) By assigning high levels of trust to people who match your tastes and interests, and “bozo-filtering” the people who don’t, the Web will start looking more like your Web.
