With so many to choose from, it’s getting harder to settle down with just one social networking site. Most of us are SNS polygamists, spreading the love around to a few.

The first one is always special though, and says something about who you are. For instance:

LiveJournal
You are old school and were blogging before there was even a name for it. A select number of friends read your long thoughtful posts over warm spiced chi.

Twitter
You have way tOo many friends, and they have tOo many friends. The constant beeping of your cell phone keeps you in the loop to what your friends are up to when you should be concentrating on the road.

LinkedIn
You are power-lunching outgoing socialite with a resume as long as my arm. Your friends (connections) keep you abreast of their upcoming IPOs.

FaceBook
You are well-educated and have multiple Gmail accounts. When bored in company meetings, you update your status from a Blackberry Perl.

Net neutrality, the concept of treating all Internet traffic the same, has been a hot topic of late. Even our esteemed statesmen in Washington have mulled over the subject. Traditional ISPs have stayed out of the debate, letting other players squabble over the politics of packets and pipes.

But now a major ISP is taking matters into their own hands, and causing headaches for many of its users. The ISP is Comcast, and the users are music enthusiasts (illegal file traders). Specifically, Comcast is disrupting the popular Bittorrent file sharing protocol by mangling its data packets.

Unfortunately the problems don’t stop with Bittorrent. Other applications, like Lotus Notes, are also experiencing strange behavior when connecting through Comcast. This is a very scary situation.

When ISPs decide what customers can and can’t do with the bandwidth they pay for we all lose, and lose big. So much for net neutrality.

It wasn’t long ago that web developers obsessed about page weight (the total file size of a web page’s HTML, images, scripts, CSS, etc..). The “lighter” a page, the faster it would download, and presumably offer the user a more enjoyable browsing experience.

With everyone on lighting-fast Internet connections, optimizing page weight has fallen by the wayside. When I was developing content heavy sites for publishers in 1999 we would typically keep pages at 50k or less. At that size even modems users would find the site usable.

Today I did a quick survey to find that many popular sites are over 300k (3x the size recommended by HCI).
www.cnn.com: 631k
www.abcnews.com: 331k
www.cnet.com: 533k

This, of course, is no problem for users on dual-core machines connected to DSL. But many people now surf the web from mobile devices, with much slower processors and Internet connections. With the popularity of these devices, it’s almost as if we have been hurled back in time to the days of modems.

The solution may be to re-visit these optimization techniques from days of old, or to operative twin sites, one being specific to mobile devices. Whatever the answer may be, I beg you, as a mobile surfer, please put your sites on a diet.

Many have suggested, and I agree, the iPhone is bad for web developers. Travel back in time with me to 1997. Microsoft releases a relatively competitive browser, for free, that can render standards based websites well.

With the help of Microsoft’s excellent marketing, the new browser quickly became a hot platform to develop for. However, some features developers were utilizing were specific to IE, and broke compatibility with other browsers.

Today a similar situation is brewing with Safari 3 and the iPhone. Although the iPhone is supposed to render standard sites well, many iPhone-only sites are popping up.

Thus, the suffering of web developers everywhere continues…

There has been a lot of talk about Wonderfile lately. For those of you in the dark, Wonderfile is our answer to the problem of organizing, sharing, searching, filtering, archiving, and distributing digital information.

To accomplish all the amazing things you can do with Wonderfile, we give you three tools: Libraries, Categories, and Tags. This trio of tools allows for unparalleled flexibility, organization, and searching capabilities.

To further illustrate how these tools can be put to use I have prepared a list of my top 10 ways to use Wonderfile:

Keep Track of all the PDFs I Download
Library: PDF Stash – Tags: Documentation, White Paper, How-To

Organize My Source Code
Library: Secret Sauces – Tags: Open Source, PHP, Security

Store Scans of Take Out Menus
Library: Munchies – Tags: Chinese, Free Delivery, Fast

Archive My Digital Artwork
Library: My Artwork – Tags: Anime, Flash, Black and White

Share Photos of the Kids
Library: My Two Sons – Tags: Candid, Halloween, Sports

Backup My Important Software
Library: Tools Of The Trade – Tags: Utilities, Drivers, Shareware

Capture Important Emails
Library: Transmissions – Tags: From Me, Receipts, See Attachment

Store Bookmarks
Library: World Wide Wonders – Tags: Funny, Useful, Blog

Play Photoshop Tennis
Library: 40 Love – Tags: My Serve, Completed, Draw

Sort Candid Celebrity Photos
Library: Celebrity Snaps – Tags: Vacation, Britney, Red Carpet

My Home Away From Home

Flickr has a great feature that lets you annotate your pictures by drawing little boxes right over the image and adding text. You don’t have to browse Flickr long to find some incredible photos enhanced with this fun feature.

I find exploring someones photo annotations much like embarking on a treasure hunt. You never know what you’ll find.

I recently took advantage of this feature to document the typical developers work environment (mine).

Click the photo or here to view the annotated version.

So you’ve bought the iPhone. Now you have to inform everyone your number has changed.

Or do you?

Not if you have a Grand Central phone number. The new web-based service will allow you to sign up for one number that you keep for life. It’s a pretty sweet service and as of this writing, it’s free, unless you have a gajillion phone numbers to unite. (more…)

Want to work at Amazon? Now you can, answering incredibly mundane questions that computers aren’t generally very good at. I decided to try out Amazon Mechanical Turk, a service which allows programmers or others with hard questions for computers but easy questions for the human mind to interact with anonymous humans. This is a cool idea, but the implementation of it is a little unfair; now I know how HAL felt. (more…)

I haven’t thought about reputation much since high school, and that was primarily other people’s reputations, not my own. Return Path resurrected this term during their webinar Thursday afternoon titled “Reputation 101: Five Things You Need to Know to Get on the Good Side with ISPs”.

The presentation discussed the importance of monitoring your IP address reputation to better understand and manage your email deliverability rates. Reviewing your email bounce rates is one thing, but understanding why your email subscribers are unsubscribing, or not even receiving your messages is another.

(more…)

A few random thoughts about a web development company working on its own web site….

First and foremost – it’s hard.

Client work always comes first, we have hundreds of other related obligations, it has to be good, creative, effective – which makes it a little scary. At the end of the day we’ve spent all our juice working on our client’s sites, there’s not a lot left over for our own stuff. (more…)