Living in the Future

Just thought I'd take a minute to point out the work Dave Winer has done to bring Flickr and Twitter together.

I've been following him on Twitter for a while and witnessed his early experimentation.

In a recent blog post, he described the experience of using this new service in a way that was so captivating that I just had to reproduce it here:

"So when I go out for a walk, and see a lovely tree with red flowers, I take a picture, route it to Flickr, my iPhone upstreams it, my agent notices it, posts a tweet, and then 80 or 100 of my followers (awful terminology, btw) click the link before I'm home. In real-time, their eyes and minds have taken the walk with me."

Dave goes on to describe the feeling one gets from being part of this experience as "Living in the Future."  And I have to admit that I felt something quite special, myself, when I first read the last sentence of the quoted passage above.

This is such a fantastic example of the wonderful connectedness being ushered in with the Web 2.0 movement.  I thank Dave for his work.

NBL is JavaScript 2

It's official!  NBL is JavaScript 2.  Just thought I'd pass that along.

P.S. If you don't read Steve Yegge religiously (as I do), then you'll probably have no idea what I'm talking about or why this is a big deal.

TwitKu: No Pownce Integration Yet

I'm excited to see something like TwitKu come along.  I've been wanting something like it for a while, and I figured it was only a matter of time before someone built it.

Unfortunately, the killer feature in my mind is still missing: Pownce integration.  But, this is not TwitKu's fault, because the people at Pownce have yet to expose an API like Twitter and Jaiku have.

According to the Pownce blog, they "hope to have the initial implementation up and running in September."  Get a move on, Leah!

JonGalloway.Kills.Bunnies

"I don't care what [Jeff Atwood] says about namespaces...my default namespace prefix is now JonGalloway.Kills.Bunnies"

- Phil Haack

Beautiful Code

"I find it immensely helpful to work on the assumption that I am too stupid to get things right. This leads me to conservatively use what has already been shown to work, to cautiously test out new ideas before committing to them, and above all to prize simplicity."

- Jonathan Edwards

BuiltWith.com

I love this idea.  I'm always curious about which technologies web applications that I come across in the wild are using.

I just hope they improve their algorithms a bit.  For example, they weren't able to tell me that Cork'd uses Ruby on Rails.

I'll be keeping an eye on them.

LinqToSpaceTime

"Tangent: anyone notice the clock on Scott's computer during that Airline demo webcast? It read 10:30 pm and then magically, when he added the reference to the web service, it became 12:20 am. I asked Scott what the deal was and he told me that a new feature in .NET 3.5 is LinqToSpaceTime... I wonder if I can use that to get my day back today..."

- Rob Conery

Out With the Old, In With the Nu

It's official! I'm leaving my old haunt and heading to NuSoft, a company I've admired and respected for years.

This is a great opportunity and a huge step up in my career. I'll be working with the best and brightest in Grand Rapids.

Wish me luck!

Expert Developers

"Experts are lazy, they work smarter rather than harder. Experts prefer the easiest solution that gets the job done. Experts aren't interested in creating complex solutions simply to have the complexity, that misguided egoism is the territory of more junior developers."

- Frank Wiles

Brain Food 8-5-2007

• 12 Reasons I Use Rails instead of .NET - Softies on Rails has a great rundown from the perspective of a former .NET developer.
• QDB: Quote #779320 - The best definition of "Web 2.0" I've ever seen.
• Pivots of the Web: What's Next After Social Networking? - Read/WriteWeb has a nice breakdown of the various eras the Web has gone through so far and what the next era may be.
• Open Source On .NET Is Not An Oxymoron - Amen, brother!  I'm very fond of several open source .NET projects including SubSonic, CruiseControl.NET, and NAnt.