Web 2.0.11562 beta

Nielsen Online reports that Twitter continues to grow at an astounding rate. Something on the order of 1380% year over year, and 50% from January to February. I for one don’t think that torrid pace is going to fade quickly either. Nobody understands twitter at first look, but it invariably wins the hearts and minds of developers and users alike.

The Internet itself grew at an astounding rate as first email then the web turned into the killer apps that made the underlying ‘net indispensible. In spite of the telcos’ efforts to build “smart” Internets, the model that won out was the most flexible one - a dumb transport mechanism deferring all intelligence to the endpoint applications. That made it infinitely useful and flexible, for so many cool things like twitter that could not be envisioned in earlier times.

Twitter itself is also simplicity of purpose, leaving vast room for value-add services at the endpoints. They try to do nothing but deliver a simple, easy to use, easy to interface with service. And let the programmers of the world do the rest. Simplicity.

I wasn’t sure I’d have a car last this long, but my 1997 saturn has now gone over the 100k mark. It’s looking old, but never has any problems. That and the fact that it gets pretty good gas mileage (manual transmission) means it’s a very cheap car to operate. So sexy new cars be damned, I plan to keep driving this around for a while.

Please note that I’m not claiming this is the greatest car or anything. I have one other car, a 2004 Volvo s60 and it is so much more comfortable and nicer to drive on any trip of length. But the cost of ownership will be much higher by the time it reaches 100,000 miles if I keep it that long.

Website builders would do well to keep this in mind too. Build your sites to last. That’s not to say don’t use the hot new stuff, just go to great lengths to strictly adhere to web standards. Functional websites usually persist longer than people expect them to. I’m referring to intranet tools, web-based applications, functional public websites, etc.

After a very long break in Thailand I’m back. Happy new year! Now it’s time to get focused and get to work.

This will be a challenging year, and yet it should be a very rewarding year for those who find ways to take advantage of some strong trends. Like the continued flight of advertising money to the web. It’s more targeted, cost effective and reaches more people every day. Tough economic times cause cutbacks in budgets for less effective advertising, like magazines and television.

Another great and obvious trend many will capitalize on is location-based services. If my smart phone always knows where I am, then shouldn’t more and more websites offer services based on that info? Many more too - my point is that while many will suffer trying to stay afloat in hard times, others are amassing market share in growing markets. These will be the titans of tomorrow.

OK so the forum is up. http://thaidomainforum.com

I am in this for the long run, comitted to Thai language domains, and there does not seem to be a resource catering to this niche. So I’m going to maintain it in hopes of seeing a community form. If a community develops we will all be the richer because of it. Niches are great places to try to serve IMO, because otherwise the interested parties have nothing.

I’ve tried phpBB in the distant past - it’s lame and had a bunch of security issues back in the day. I frequent some forums that use VBulletin but it’s not free. Vanilla and SimpleMachines are both free, but written in PHP and no way to get export access to their repositories. I decided to install SimpleMachines because Vanilla, true to their moniker, seemed feature-deprived. The landscape is pretty bleak though - none support a lot of databases, none written in some cool language, none offering a github link.

Having said that, I like the SimpleMachines software. It looks decent, has a couple themes and a nice set of options. The beta version seems to work fine, although I did manage to screw it up installing a language pack.

I’ve only been using apache for about 700 years now. So I was a bit anxious about what I would run into when I started playing with some of the newer choices. Of course, an obvious one to try is nginx (pronounced engine-x) It’s very lightweight compared to apache (what isn’t) and is typically setup to just serve static content and proxy all other requests to an application-specific server. Yes I know this can easily be done with apache and many people do.

My impression so far? It’s small, simple and nice. Of course it’s setup to avoid the heavy lifting, but there’s something appealing about being a specialist. That’s the weakness of apache - everyone wants to climb onboard. How many modules are there anyway? mod_music, mod_vote_2008, mod_mod - yes I’ll give passenger a try soon (mod_rails) but there’s really only a few features I use and apache has just gotten more and more of more as the years go by. My nginx config file for two sites is still under 1k. Not only that, but it has so few lines I actually understand them all !

update 10/29: here’s the canonical reference with great comments from topfunky

OK you mention footwear companies and I think of giant marketing machines with sweatshops. But Adidas has gone and made such a cool product. Not content with lame old-fashioned advertising, they created a counterpart to a real product that is tailor made for second life. Their a3 Microride shoe actually gives you lots of bouncing ability in SL. Now that’s smart. If beer companies offered the same kinds of products the girls around you would actually start to look better as you consumed virtual beer in SL.

Did you know you could drag Firefox tabs to re-order them? You could have found this or pretty much any buzz on the web at popurls.com

Bill Gates not only knows what microformats are but says we need them? Maybe he just likes things that start with “micro”?

There’s Jeremy Keith’s presentation on, what else?, unobtrusive DOM scripting, and finally this great list of AJAX tutorials.

An interesting glimpse into the heads of the latest crop of web 2.0 startups at “Under the Radar” including the office-like apps that are being snapped up before they even get to see their success. The cool social software apps are there, and basically anyone with a new app looking for venture capital or outright purchase by one of the big guys.

Elsewhere, check out Moveable Type’s venture into the Chinese market, as reported on Niall Kennedy’s blog.