Dotmad.net

Recently a privacy issue concerning web 2.0 was raised, as a new Twitter service called “GroupTweet” caused private messages to be published for everyone to read due to a misunderstanding of the system.

However, I do appreciate the response of Aaron Forgue, the person behind GroupTweet (taken from the site):

• This is NOT a privacy bug with Twitter. I apologize for any negative voodoo I’ve pulled down on them. Their service works great and there are no privacy issues (that I know of). Please direct your hatred at me!
• There are no known bugs or privacy issues with GroupTweet as long as you create a separate Twitter account for your group.
• The reason that a particular GroupTweet users’ direct messages were exposed is because she registered her PERSONAL Twitter account at GroupTweet. The site was doing exactly what it was supposed to: taking direct messages sent to the GROUP account and re-publishing them as tweets. When the personal account was registered here, direct messages sent to the account were republished. Unfortunately, these were not meant to be republished.
• I am 100% at fault for this fiasco because I did a poor job of explaining the steps one needs to take to use GroupTweet. I sincerely apologize
• I WILL BE DISABLING ALL GROUPTWEET ACCOUNTS. The only way I can ensure that this doesn’t happen to anyone else is to disable all accounts. If you are sure that you are using GroupTweet correctly and would like your group re-activated, simply email me or re-register (once I turn the form back on)

So what did we see here?

1. Clearing Twitter’s name (originally Twitter toom the blame).
2. Taking a complete responsibility.
3. Disabling the service until further “accidents” may be prevented. (the site is back now)

How many companies / people do you know who would have behaved this way in Aaron’s place?

Jeff Atwood (CodingHorror) complained about the fact a caching addon for Wordpress is optional, and is not included in the basic software:

Personally, I think it’s absolutely irresponsible that WP-Cache like functionality isn’t already built into WordPress. I would not even consider deploying WordPress anywhere without it.

And why is that?

This is an incredibly scary result; blog.stackoverflow.com is getting, at best, a moderate trickle of incoming traffic. It’s barely linked anywhere! With that kind of CPU load level, this site would fall over instantaneously if it got remotely popular, or God forbid, anywhere near the front page of a social bookmarking website.

I don’t have a traffic report for stackoverflow.com, but since both Jeff’s and Joel’s blogs (both being among the most popular technical blogs in the world) point there, I suspect my definition of “moderate trickle” may differ from Jeff’s.

And as Arik pointed out, Wordpress may target smaller users, for which this is not an issue (someone wrote the problem occurred with more than 20000 users per day) while power-users can install optional components to deal with the traffic issues.

Four reasons to use Twitter:

1. Meeting new people
2. Finding new sites and resources
3. Promoting your blog
4. Nice to “hang out” with virtual friends when you have spare time

Four reasons to avoid Twitter:

1. Spending time on Twitter-related issues: the way your Twitter page looks, Twitter utilities, Twitter statistics (as if your blog didn’t consume enough time already)
2. Increased cell-phone bill (because you can’t find Wifi everywhere)
3. Great temptation to “Hang out” when you DON’T have spare time
4. Great way to procrastinate

1. Watch others play and gather the nerve to try yourself
2. Wait for an opening and take the guitar, pretending you did it just because there was no one else to take it
3. Press the 5 colored buttons according to the sequence that appears on the screen, together with the black button at the base of the guitar
4. Play until you manage to complete an entire song (or you feel like your arms are about to fall off)
5. Tell others of your huge success
6. Let someone else play
7. Watch that someone switches to “expert” level and complete the song with 99% success
8. Humbly walk away
9. Repeat steps 1-8

• Still learning how to properly use Twitter (any tools recommendations?)
• Facebook seems to be using 100% CPU on my home computer for each page load
• Removed the “Blog RSS feed reader” Facebook application - it stopped updating the feed some time during TechEd and never recovered (even removing the feed and adding it again didn’t help) - now I’m trying the “Simply RSS” application instead

Arik asked few questions after my last post on the subject, so here are answers and additional comments.

1) We chose NHibernate over LINQ because while classic ORM is about seperating the user from the database structure, DLINQ is about creating an easy interface to the database inside the user’s code. I don’t want to write “Select” queries in code - I want to work with classes.
2) We used Picasa and not another storage service for our photos, since it was easier to implement. We chose it over Flickr because the larger storage offered for free. We may choose another service in the future.
3) Apparently using GoDaddy’s services for a web application involving reflection (used by NHibernate) is a mistake - we ended up moving to another host.
4) While we still use Youtube to store videos, the upload process requires the file to go through the site (meaning increased traffic, and traffic is limited by the host). This is due to the fact we need to log in to the service, and this can’t be done through the user’s browser for security reasons.

The site is up, but with very limited functionally. We are still working (in our spare time) to implement all missing features as soon as possible.

1. Keynote
2. Odyssey in SOA - A Voyage Through SOA Infrastructure
3. Top Killer Features of .Net Framework 3.5 and Beyond
4. Building and Running Successful Product R&D Teams
5. Building a ServiceHost for your WCF Services - The Right Way
6. Implementing Workflow Enabled Services and Durable Services using .NET Framework 3.5
7. Seven Habits of Highly Effective People
8. Control your Database Lifecycle with Data Dude
9. Game Development Using Microsoft’s Latest Technologies
10. Pushing The Technology To The Edge - A Real World Story