Does this mean that you should all stop using cloud services and go back to your own data center? No way! There are better and more reasonable solutions. They just need a bit of thought and some experimentation.

Some people, like Dave Winer, can even see that a new service can emerge from this need. On his article “Amazon S3 down all day“, Dave proposes a possible solution:

It seems there is a business opportunity here — it would be easy to hook up an external service to S3, and for a fee, keep a mirror on another server. Then it would be a matter of redirecting domains to point at the other server when S3 goes down.

So, here’s my proposed solution for this specific problem: use as many equivalent storage solutions as redundacy. Technicaly speaking, you should write your data to multiple services at once and create a read procedure that selects the fastest service and uses it.

This solution can use tarpipe to let you write data to multiple destinations at once, and Gnip can inform your application about the best service to read from.

tagged as amazon s3, balancer, cloud, data, gnip, nirvanix, publish, read, tarpipe, write

Services like plaxo, spokeo, friendfeed or socialthing (lifestream blog has a more compreheensible list) start by asking your identification on different services. Then they aggregate information you update on those services and let you — and your contacts — access that information from a central location.

This obviously means that the aggregators wouldn’t exist if the services they’re collecting information from weren’t popular. Those lifestreaming services opened the way to this new wave of applications. So, what is lifestreaming, anyway?

Lifestreaming itself is the ability to publish quick updates about what you’re doing or thinking at the moment. Those posts can be very short and textual, or they can contain other media such as pictures, or video. There is a considerable number of available lifestreaming services, with twitter being the most popular.

Some people are questioning the true value of these lifestreaming services. Major concerns are a) the increasing volume of information you’ll have to process; and b) the decreasing willingness to participate by writing more extensive thoughts.

Some evidence of these concerns can be found at the Micro Persuasion blog, where Steve Rubel explains that:

We are reaching a point where the number of inputs we have as individuals is beginning to exceed what we are capable as humans of managing. The demands for our attention are becoming so great, and the problem so widespread, that it will cause people to crash and curtail these drains. Human attention does not obey Moore’s Law.

This is also affecting blogging, as Sarah Perez from ReadWriteWeb, believes:

When people post an article on a blog these days, the conversations are occurring offsite. The blog link could be submitted to Digg, Mixx, and/or FriendFeed, and conversations may occur around the topic on those sites instead. The original blog post, meanwhile, has 0 comments.

So, how can lifestreaming and its aggregators be a good thing if they’re disrupting the way you’re used to interact on the Web? I believe we’re in the beginning of a much wider paradigm shift where the interaction will move from localized items — like blog posts — and start spreading all across the Web. What will matter in the future is not the place where you posted your thought or your comment but instead its context.

How will it evolve? Probably microformats will play an important role, as they allow you to refer to disperse pieces of information and define the context of the information you’re publishing. Aggregators and search engines will also play an important role, clustering information according to their context.

tagged as aggregators, friendfeed, lifestream, lifestreaming, plaxo, spokeo, twitter

At a first glance, I could use the Reflection API to get meta-information about the code. Tickets could then be created and assigned to the appropriate person based on the @author doc tag.

The ticket Logger could talk to existing Web project management and ticketing application like Basecamp, Goplan and Hiveminder (from the creators of RT).

Do you think you would benefit from this type of Logger? What ticketing system are you using on your own projects?

tagged as basecamp, error, goplan, hiveminder, logger, php, projects, reflection, rt, ticketing

Apparently Dave Winer feels the same way:

I want rating services to provide clues about what I should be subscribing to. I want them to find not what’s popular with the masses but what will be valuable to me.

He then touches the sweet spot:

It’s a simple matter to apply collaborative filtering to this problem, we’ve even done it in SYO. These ideas need revisiting now that everyone else seems to have caught on that this is a problem worth solving.

Paolo Avesani, who’s already been studying this subject for some time, understands that tags alone are not enough to propose recommendations. Quoting the paper “An Analysis of the Use of Tags in a Blog Recommender System” [Hayes et al., 2007] (PDF):

In the blog domain, however, we find that tags are rather poor at partitioning blog data. Using content-based clustering, we observe that a small proportion of users in every cluster have independently used the same tag tokens to describe his/her posts.

We definitely need something new. What about using collaborative filtering algorithms to gain knowledge about the users’ tastes and eventually recommend them interesting content? The Pearson correlation algorithm is probably a good candidate.

I suggest watching Tayfun Şen’s excellent presentation about collaborative filtering.

tagged as blogs, collaborative filtering, pearson, recommendation, web 2.0

Adegga just came out of a closed beta and right now anyone can start using it as long as they get invited by another user. That’s right, during an initial phase, registration is only available to invited users. This is a way of controlling the growth and making any necessary adjustments as the user base expands.

So, what can you do at Adegga? First, you can use it as your cellar organizer, keeping a history of all the wines you buy and taste. You can also attach notes to any wine, making it easier to contextualize it afterwards.

The breakthrough for me, was the “watchlist” concept. You can actually follow your friends’ tastings as they update them. You can even access the list through RSS and you favorite feed reader. Here’s some of my tasted wines:

Every wine in Adegga is identified by a code crafted with attention to details like the country of origin, the region, the wine type, etc. This code is called AVIN and pretends to be the ISBN of the wine world.

What a great concept. Imagine being able to correctly identify a wine by reading its AVIN. Imagine the possibilities when wine producers begin labeling the AVIN code on their bottles.

tagged as adegga, avin, discovery, isbn, social, tasting, wine

Netvibes calls itself the pioneer of the personalized startpage. Quoting their about page: “Netvibes pioneered the personalized startpage, an alternative to traditional Web portals“.

Well, dit it? Let’s travel back to 1999 when there was no such thing as AJAX or RoR, and Mike Arrington was just leaving the comfort of his office at Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati to dedicate his time to the “brand new Web”.

Sometime between the launch of Napster (May 1999) and the launch of pitas.com, the free weblog hosting (July 1999), someone in the UK launched “a one-day hack” which provides a nice, concise view of news from several sites (in LWN, July 1, 1999). Better than that, he published the source code of his creation, allowing anyone to use it and change it. Quoting freshmeat’s project entry from August 8, 1999:

Portaloo is a set of reading tools for RSS format files (my.netscape.com, etc.) and rendering these. It can cope with arbitary input formats and also includes gathering tools for other sites. Portaloo needs no writeable disk storage, uses cookies for control and can run round robin across multiple web servers under load.

Of course this is a very technical description to what we now call a personalized startpage. Portaloo was, at that time the free, open source version of the then popular My Netscape. Netscape launched its personalized startpage at the end of 1998 and it allowed the visitor to add and remove boxes or channels. You could search the Web, access your e-mail messages, and even chat with your friends via IM.

What happened since then? A lot, actually. First, the bubble, leaving only the big players intact. Then, a new generation of Web adventurers started to emerge, experimenting with new technologies and ideas.

So, what have you been doing all these years?

tagged as ajax, netscape, netvibes, pageflakes, portaloo, protopage, startpage, web portals

Placestreaming, as in the stream of content originating from a specific place. We think this really captures what Brightkite is all about. We enable location based conversations. And location based conversations, in aggregate, are placestreams.

You’ll be able to stream about a certain place when you’re there or even when you get home. What’s more interesting though is the ability to actually receive information about a place when you’re in that location:

When other people are in that place, they can read what people have streamed from that location - this is when it gets fun. People begin to communicate in a new way, (…)

This idea followed similar concepts coined at the time as lifestreaming and eventstreaming. Lifestreaming is all about telling other people what you are doing right now. It emerged with the popularization of blogs and, more recently, with the launch of services like twitter and more recently Pownce. According to Wired Magazine 15.07 article “Clive Thompson on How Twitter Creates a Social Sixth Sense“:

But the true value of Twitter — and the similarly mundane Dodgeball, a tool for reporting your real-time location to friends — is cumulative. The power is in the surprising effects that come from receiving thousands of pings from your posse. And this, as it turns out, suggests where the Web is heading.

Eventstreaming was coined by TechCrunch’s Duncan Riley at the iPhone Day. He noticed how people were streaming live content directly from the event, bypassing the need to wait for blog or mainstream media coverage. Quoting his story:

Eventstreaming is the missing link in Web 2.0’s challenge to network television.Who could ever forget the coverage of the London Bombings in 2005 where user generated video featured as a main source of footage. Two years later and the technology has continued to improve; the step from recording footage of an event to streaming it live over the internet has been made.

What else is going on around these topics? Groundspeak, the company behind Geocaching.com has been developing a new way to mark places on the planet, so that other people might be able to find them later:

Waymarking is a way to mark unique locations on the planet and give them a voice. While GPS technology allows us to pinpoint any location on the planet, mark the location, and share it with others, Waymarking is the toolset for categorizing and adding unique information for that location. Groundspeak’s slogan is “The Language of Location” and our goal is to give people the tools to help others share and discover unique and interesting locations on the planet. We invite you to share your part of the world with us through Waymarking.com.

There’s also another concept called Ad loc, a “system for mobile devices to collaboratively tie persistent virtual notes to physical locations”, according to Derek J. Corbett and Daniel Cutting, the authors of the Ad loc paper. Quoting the paper:

Notes that are relevant to particular locations can be created and then cached using serendipitously formed one-hop wireless ad hoc network connections. The location provides an address to which the information is relevant and devices attempt to keep the information stored at devices which remain close to this address.

It seems that there’s a lot going on around this topic, after all. Is this the next big thing? Is this the next Web revolution?

tagged as aggregate, blogs, conversations, eventstreaming, gps, lifestreaming, location, map, mobile, placestreaming, wired magazine

PHP and Smarty on Large-Scale Web Development is a Short Cut Book from O’Reilly that I wrote along with Vitor Rodrigues. It’s a book for developers, engineering managers and Web designers. It shows you what a good choice using PHP and Smarty can be for Large Scale Web projects.

The book covers numerous topics related with Web development, template systems and performance solutions. Here’s a taste of the type of material you’ll find in the book:

The biggest advantage of the Template View Pattern is that it allows web designers to compose the content of the page simply by looking at the page structure. This means that you can efficiently split the tasks of development and web design within your team.

The approach described on the following pages is rather unconventional for applications using PHP and Smarty, but it is an excellent and elegant way of implementing the MVC pattern.

The Short Cut is currently available for download on the O’Reilly Web site.

tagged as book, development, large, oreilly, php, scale, short cut, smarty, web

They also opened their application to outside users by providing a very simple API where you can perform several tasks. You need, of course, to be registered to do that.

So I registered myself and started using the API immediately. I created a small PHP script that gets all the people that are signed up and then finds the relationships between them. The script simply outputs data in the DOT language that is consumed by graphviz.

Some people might say that there’s no practical use for this network graph but I really enjoy exploring visually all the connections between people and see how the network grows over time.

Anyway, can’t wait for the next weekend. The fun is just beginning…

tagged as 2007, api, graphviz, hackday, hackdaylondon, network graph, relationships, yahoo

I also had a great time during the coffee breaks talking about different subjects, from Open Source to Web Art. I hope more conferences like this take place in Portugal because it’s a fantastic way to share opinions and, who knows, start new projects.

tagged as citot, json, php, presentation, rest, services, slides, soap, web, xml