Derek Gottfrid: Archive

Name Suggestions?

Hey all. For legal reasons, TumblrChat cannot have ‘Tumblr’ in the name. Since it is a chat strictly designed for Tumblr, I’m currently at a loss of what else to call it. Does anyone have any creative suggestions for a rename? Feel free to send suggestions to the Ask Box.

Nice piece. Caroline glad you are making it happen.

“Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to build bigger and better idiot-proof programs, and the Universe trying to produce bigger and better idiots. So far, the Universe is winning. – Rick Cook” —My 10 favourite Programming Quotes | Ginktage

“Our final advantage is the hard-to-duplicate culture that permeates Berkshire. And in businesses, culture counts” —Warren Buffet in his 2010 review letter to shareholders of Berkshire Hathaway Inc [pg 8]

Play

The official Instagram API was released yesterday morning and it has some pretty interesting stuff. They are utilizing the “latest” in API design - realtime w/ Pubsubhubbub / web hook, JSON only and OAuth 2. But the most interesting part is not the technical decisions of how to expose the data via the API but what functionality they exposed. All the writes/updates are around tags, comments, likes, and social graph but nothing for photo upload - all of that will still happen within the iPhone app. It will be interesting to see what people build with it - particularly intrigued by the realtime Pubsubhubbub portion.

“Opponents of matrix management believe that it is an outdated method to organize a company. One disadvantage of matrix management is that it doubles the number of managers when compared to line management, and as the time to reach a decision increases with the number of managers the result may be an increase in management related overhead expenses.” —Matrix management - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

awesome.

4,294,967,296 - 3,490,480,915 = 804,486,381

Only 804 Million more posts. I thank our digital overlords for 64bit machines.

“My experiment with Scala is not working out. It’s just not ready for prime time, and is overkill for my needs. Reluctantly, I am falling back to Java.” —Switching to Plan J (via fakederekg)

I wish I knew where all this glitter was coming from. I am constantly covered in it.

This is so unbelievably badass. If anybody other than Google was behind this I wouldn’t believe it or trust it.

“I’m a punk rocker at heart, so rules are tough for me. Sometimes I ask myself if the co-op is really worth it.” —At Park Slope Food Coop, Nannies Covering Shifts (via harrisj)

“Beyond the definitional issues, there’s a more fundamental problem with Apple’s approach, one with profound strategic significance for publishers: Customer data is the lifeblood of ad-supported media, particularly in an increasingly real-time, interactive context. Consumers want more relevant ads, more engaging content, more actionable offers, and they want it all now. None of that happens without intelligent, real-time synthesis of consumer data. If Apple becomes the only aggregator and analyzer of consumer data for its current and future iDevices, or if it decides on a whim which third parties publishers get to work with to deliver and enrich their apps, digital publishers forfeit their most important means of generating cool consumer experiences.” —

The Battle For Consumer Data

If you let some 3rd party mediate your relationship to your users, you are setting yourself up for disaster.

Ah, the late breaking news in San Diego...

niccidubs:

“Kris Gregorian is “The Koala” editor behind the controversial picture and article. Late Wednesday, Gregorian returned a phone call from 10News and refused to do an interview unless 10News gave him a case of beer. 10News did not, because it is 10News’ policy not to pay for interviews, so Gregorian ended the conversation.”

“Aaron Harris and Josh Abrams of Tutorspree expected Yuri Milner to mail them a check. “One night he just shows up with three strippers, four bottles of vodka and a duffel bag full of 20s,” said Harris. “He yells out, ‘Let’s do this, bitches!’ and before we know it, we’re completely smashed and dancing to really bad techno.” Milner recently made news when he promised a $150,000 investment with very favorable terms to any company in the YCombinator program.” —Yuri Milner pays $150k YCombinator investments by ‘making it rain’ « Founder Daily

This is like.

“New York State education officials released a new set of graduation statistics on Monday that show less than half of students in the state are leaving high school prepared for college and well-paying careers. ” —

As the verb shows, the construction here expresses a plural number, not an amount; so use “fewer,” not “less.”

Phrases We Love Too Much - NYTimes.com

The libspotify C API package allows third party developers to write applications that utilize the Spotify music streaming service. Hopefully, this will enable and inspire you to build some really cool stuff. We’re looking forward to seeing what you can come up with

Wish this would just come to the US. I want access to all the Spotify goodness.

“JPMorgan plans to buy and sell shares in these companies on behalf of clients, and will not directly invest the firm’s own money, one of these people said. But simply having a base of ready base of retail investors could give JPMorgan’s investment bank a competitive edge in winning business from the fledgling technology firms. Analysts have long viewed retail customers as a more stable source of capital, compared to money that moves in and out of stocks owned by hedge funds and other institutional investors.” —JPMorgan to Start Social Media Fund - NYTimes.com

“We think that there's a next generation of startups that are developing social versions of these applications, where what Zynga is to gaming, they will be to media and news, and we're really excited about that.” —BBC News - Stop the presses: Facebook CTO says news next in social revolution

marciw:

The past tense of “plead” is “pleaded.” Not “pled.” I’m looking at you, news anchors everywhere.

“Is” is not a preposition. It’s a verb. Also, “it” is not a preposition. It’s a pronoun. Both of these words should be capitalized in titles, and Joyce Carol Oates has helpfully provided the perfect…

Marci has made me seem less like an idiot many many times. I have even internalized several of these rules. Thanks Marci - share more things.

I am fascinated by this. I proposed a very similar thing at my last job - readable api for paying customers. I think the challenges will be explaining it all to the end user. If I am using X app why do I need to pay Z. But maybe people are savvy enough. Clearly plenty of folks stream Netflix through their Wii or Xbox. I think the key is creating a real ecosystem and putting marketing behind it to clearly explain all the benefits to the users. Personally, I am hopeful this is a big success.

4:23:28 PM Danny Marom: how do you want ideas for feedback?
4:23:42 PM Danny Marom: in writing? in person? song perhaps?
4:24:29 PM Sebastian Delmont: song
4:24:33 PM Sebastian Delmont: in spanish

A week later, he dropped a CD on my desk

APIs done right - OAuth2 + JSON

“An earlier Stanford study found that bloggers, over time, had more influence than mainstream publications in areas like technology or entertainment” —Twitter Topics and Why They Become Popular - NYTimes.com

“I think Zuckerberg has created the personalized news engine we always dreamed of. … it’s a lot easier to enter and prune a friend list than it is to define one’s tastes by keyword.” —Nick Denton (via tedroden)

This is one of my favorite blogs and I couldn’t be happier to now have it on Tumblr.

“Sulia, a NYC-based startup, has made it a point to figure that out. Using a combination of crowdsourcing, human editorial insight, and machine learning, Sulia creates topic channels, somewhat akin to news verticals, whose content is curated from experts in particular subjects — both broad (tech and science) and narrow (Ruby and Ruby on Rails), both of historical import (the protests in Egypt) and not so much (bacon). Think of the channels as megalists (or, more accurately, metalists): composite lists consisting of the most authoritative members of constituent lists” —The Egypt list: Sulia curates content by curating expertise » Nieman Journalism Lab » Pushing to the Future of Journalism

“Tumblr, est-elle une plateforme de blog pour hipsters?” —David Karp : «Tumblr pourrait être aussi connu que Twitter et Facebook» - 20minutes.fr

Bill, please check out Tumblr! We will keep you entertained for hours.

Derek Gottfrid

February 2011

50 posts