I've found a use for microblogging (Twitter etc.)

I'm still not sure I entirely understand all the fuss about Twitter. Microblogging feels like an exhibitionist version of cell phone texting: “Look everyone, I'm eating something yummy right now”. It occupies a curious niche between instant messaging, chat rooms, and blogging. But, looking for a good way of blogging links, I've found that it fits my needs perfectly:

• New entries are simple to create. For link blogs, one only needs a short description and a link.
• By exporting to RSS or Atom, I can include the link blog in the side bar of my main blog.

I initially tried Twitter, but it turns URLs into micro-URLs such as http://bit.ly/zd5p0. By introducing another level of indirection, linking becomes a lot more brittle: Should bit.ly ever shut down, all my links would be lost. Thus, I looked at Plurk, but finally decided on FriendFeed, because it does not have a limit on how long one's text can be.

Facetator: simple data publishing (with JSON and jQuery)

Facetator is an open source tool for publishing lists such as recipes, journal entries, favorite movies. With Facetator, this kind of data is easily browsable (via faceted navigation) and searchable. Because it is a client-only JavaScript application, you don't even need a special server to use it. A demo is online. The JSON data needed by Facetator can be produced programmatically or manually via Hyena.

Mac OS X tip: upgrade to the latest version of X11

Apple’s XQuartz is always a few version numbers ahead of the standard Mac OS X version. It pays to upgrade, as the latest version offers more (directly configurable) preferences, mainly for clipboard handling and windowing behavior (clicks etc.).

Video: Requirements for web applications and GWT

The video “Google Wave: Powered by Google Web Toolkit” is a great overview of what features web applications need and where GWT currently meets the requirements or soon will.

Earth is one big ant colony

The article “Ant mega-colony takes over world” describes how humans helped create one large pan-global ant colony whose scale of world domination is similar to humanity’s. [Source: doggdot.us]

Do you need a software license?

Software licenses are necessary evils in this modern law-driven world. There are two instances where you need to be at least aware of them:

• As a content producer: You have created a web page or a program and want to make sure that people use it the way you want them to.
• As a content user: You need a picture for your web site and are not sure where to find one that you are allowed to put online.

As a content producer, you can choose from an abundance of licenses. They even have names that sound partially familiar: Eclipse Public License, Apache License, BSD License, … But the licenses that are best explained for mere mortals are the Creative Commons Licenses: The summary looks as follows:
A separate page then explains what the icons mean. The site provides several ways of including a license: as a button for web pages, as a text file for file archives, etc. You can also choose your license in a wizard-style manner.
An important idea in software licensing is copyleft (the reversed C icon above): You don't exert any copyright over your work, but force derived work to do the same. The latter requirement has led to Microsoft calling copyleft “viral” (a term that has since lost its negative connotation).
So how about you wanting to use a picture? There, Creative Commons (CC) helps you, too: If you do an advanced search on Flickr, you can choose the CC license a picture should have. The same holds for the search options of Picasa Web Albums (when the results are displayed). I usually link back to the picture page underneath the picture or make the picture itself a hyperlink. Wikipedia pictures also carry a CC license. Lastly, the CC site has a search page to search for liberally licensed content.

Beware of Google Groups

I love the Google Groups user interface: It is easy to understand and you can get started right away (quicker than with all alternatives that I’ve seen so far). It is a great tool whenever teams need to collaborate, because it gives members a choice between RSS, email, and online reading. I’ve used it often when working with groups of students.



Alas, it also shows Google’s modus operandi of running things on auto-pilot. Almost a year ago, out of the blue, Google Groups banned me from their site. Some kind of automatic trigger went off; I was never given a reason. Now, on one hand, I cannot manage my own groups. On the other hand I cannot access any information stored anywhere in Google Groups. If I’m logged in, that is. Thus, I now use Firefox for browsing the web (where I’m logged into Blogger, Google Calendar, etc.) and Safari (where I’m not logged into any Google web apps) whenever I need to look up information that is stored in Google Groups.



I did try many things to fix this: I sent an email to the Google accounts help desk, posted in the Google Groups help groups (well, I sent it to my brother who posted it for me) where this is a frequent topic of discussion, even sent a fax to Google headquarters. All to no avail.



So Google does share a trait that is common in big companies: it does not listen to its customers. Or only when it suits them. Granted, they are popular, have a lot of customers, and are free, but this is still very frustrating. Losing control over one’s own data makes “free” services very expensive.



Alternatives to Google Groups that I know of:

• Nabble (version 2 is powerful, but a bit complicated to use)


• Yahoo groups (not tested, yet)


• Groupsite


• Posterous groups [added 2010-12-25]


• Onhub [added 2011-01-10]


• Tangler [added 2011-01-10]

Update 2010-12-23: John Resig (creator of jQuery, among other things) writes about why he abandoned Google Groups in “Google Groups is Dead”.