Social Software

Spotback is now in public beta

urig — Sat, 14 Apr 2007 07:41:31 GMT

Spotback which advertises itself as the "rate everything!" platform for the web 2.0 is finally out of private beta and available to the public.

Spotback provides widgets that blog writers can embed in their blogs. The widgets enable readers to both rate blog posts and see which blogs posts have received the highest ratings from others.

Spotback users are also provided with a personalized recommendation service that takes their past ratings into consideration - a bit like outbrain.com.

I haven't given Spotback a "run for their money" (note that the service is totally free :) ), but it sounds promising. Their public launch should spice up the competition in the emerging arena of personalized rating-based content.

Check back here for a full review of Spotback's new public features.

When did Open Source Software become so friendly?

urig — Thu, 14 Dec 2006 21:20:00 GMT

I've just finished installing MediaWiki 1.8.2 (the same wiki engine that powers Wikipedia) on my machine at work. MediaWiki requires three things to be present on the machine prior to installing: A web server, A database server and the PHP engine.

In my case that meant that I had to install Apache Http Server 2.2.3, MySQL 5.0.27 Community Server and PHP 5.2.0 - all from scratch.

The point of this post is that I was surprised at how easy it was to obtain and install these 4 (counting MediaWiki) pieces of server software. With the exception of MediaWiki, I was able to download and install within minutes. The setup programs are robust, user-friendly and most importantly - almost intuitive.

The one exception was MediaWiki which required me to read through its online installation guide and tackle one undocumented issue during the process (It requires MySQL to run with Strict Mode set to off - I'll post about that in the near future).

It is almost amazing to me how open source software could come this far in providing a free, easy to use alternative to commercial software. The power to all the people developing these wonderful tools of our trade!

LineRider – When wasting time on the web becomes art

urig — Thu, 23 Nov 2006 21:52:00 GMT

If you think you don't have a life – working hard hours on code, spending your free time on open source projects – you need to take a look at the LineRider phenomena and rethink that.

LineRider (beta!) is flash game, or to follow its inventor more accurately, a flash toy where you draw the two dimensional course for a cute bobsledder. Complete with an amusing implementation gravity and inertia it's a fun way to waste a few minutes online.

Unless, of course, you're insane. You're welcome to go to the LineRider Squidoo Lens to browse through some of the most disturbingly elaborate skiing courses ever built for LineRider. These guys spend what must amount to weeks, if not months, of their time to build ingenious courses that will leave you in awe.

A truly humbling display of when wasting time becomes true art.

YubNub - A command line interface for to the web.

Uri Goldstein — Mon, 22 May 2006 12:47:00 GMT

I've just learned about the coolest web app - YubNub. I read about it in Roy Osherove's blog.

What it does is, it gives you a "command-line interface" to the web by allowing you to type in simple commands and then transfering you to corresponsing URLs.

For example, to browse an entry in WikiPedia, I usually type-in to my FireFox: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X where X is the entry I'm looking for. In YubNub all I have to do is type-in wiki X and whammo! I'm there.

YubNub has tons more of useful commands that users added to it, there's a command to list them and search through them (the command is 'ls' of course :) ). Anyone can add new commands pretty easily. In addition, it's available as a FireFox search plugin (which I've installed ASAP).

And in a counter-revolutionary sort of way, there's a YubNub command that does "anti-YubNub". The command 'gui' accepts another YubNub command as its argument and gives you a GUI for inputting arguments into that command. Tres cool.

Now all we need is a batch language that can harvest the output from YubNub commands and funnel it to others we'd have the easiest framework ever for making mashups. Anyone up for it? :D

del.icio.us direc.tor - Powerful UI for del.icio.us

Uri Goldstein — Wed, 18 Jan 2006 13:24:00 GMT

I've just discovered del.icio.us direc.tor which is an innovative and powerful user interface for managing your del.icio.us bookmarks.

You add a bookmarklet to your FireFox (or MSIE) and launch it when browsing del.icio.us. What you get is a drop-down list of all your tags. Choose a tag and another drop-down list is populated with all related tags. Choose a tag from that ddl and the process continues.

This is an excellent way to find links through tags and to see which of your tags are useful and which are not.

Check it out and let me know what you think. Also, has anyone encountered annoying javascript errors on MSIE when using this? Doesn't happen on FireFox, that's fur sure.

del.icio.us is down again :(

Uri Goldstein — Sun, 18 Dec 2005 23:56:00 GMT

It gets scarier:

del.icio.us is down for emergency maintenance. we'll be back as soon possible.

Yikes!

del.icio.us is down.

Uri Goldstein — Wed, 14 Dec 2005 17:42:00 GMT

Oops. del.icio.us are having some serious availability issues:

System error
error:  	Can't call method "prepare" on an undefined value at /www/del.icio.us/comp/user/get line 13.
context:  	
...  	
9:  	my $usedb = 'master';
10:  	my $ret;
11:  	
12:  	if (!$auth_user) { $usedb = 'user' }
13:  	if (!exists ($db->{$usedb})) { $usedb = 'master' }
14:  	$user_name_q->{$usedb} = $db->{$usedb}->prepare('select * from users where user_name = ?');
15:  	my $query = $user_name_q->{$usedb};
16:  	$query->execute(lc($user_name));
17:  	
...  	
code stack:  	/www/del.icio.us/comp/user/get:13
/www/del.icio.us/comp/posts/all:35
/www/del.icio.us/site/index:82
/www/del.icio.us/site/autohandler:110
raw error

del.icio.us bought by Yahoo!

Uri Goldstein — Sat, 10 Dec 2005 23:42:00 GMT

Just got the word from boingboing : del.icio.us is now part of Yahoo! I sure hope impact on del.icio.us is going to be minimal. http://blog.del.icio.us/blog/2005/12/yahoo.html

Google Base is up!

Uri Goldstein — Tue, 22 Nov 2005 16:31:00 GMT

Check it out - Google Base is finally up.

This is Google's publically available (and publically maintained!) open database of everything. A a repository of structured data that everyone can add to. You can either structure an "Item Type" for yourself or choose one from the many already defined and then you feed Items of that type into the system.

Everything ends up indexed in Google Base's search engine. One possible use for it is for classified ads, much like craigslist. I noticed that when inputing data for an item of type "Car", the first field to fill is the desired price for it :).

But it could generally be used to store any kind of list data or object data. I expect Google to provide users with some kind of API for programmatically accessing and manipulating this huge public mega-db.

I guess this is just another step ahead on Google's road to owning The Index of Everthing!. Yikes :).

del.icio.us !

Uri Goldstein — Tue, 15 Nov 2005 16:43:00 GMT

For a while now I've been looking for a solution that will let me access my IE Favorites / FF Bookmarks, regardless of which computer I am working on.

I often find interesting things on the web while at work, and I bookmark them for later reading because, well, I can't read them on the spot - I need to work :). The problem is that when I get home I am surprised to find the bookmarks aren't in my home computer. Silly me.

So I've just opened an account on del.icio.us! I can store all my favorites/bookmarks there and retrieve them from any browser anywhere.

Whenever I bump into an interesting URL, I click a favelet / bookmarklet and immeidately post (and tag) it to my account. It also spends a few seconds being displayed on the del.icio.us homepage - That contains a list of the most recent links people have saved.

Now I just need to find a way to sync my account with my IE / FF. Will let you know if I find out how to do this.