Embracing Chaos

I see a trend of how we’re approaching Tim O’Reilly’s Web 2.0 ideal in a way that he didn’t really identify. But I think the trend is important, and growing, although still in its infancy. The trend is towards richer web APIs that enable people to build value on top of existing websites. I’ll give some history on how we got here, and talk about the current trend-leaders that I see: Facebook and Google Maps. I’ll also explain why I think Microsoft is in the best position to build the required enabling technology. Original Web 1.0 Universal access to massive…

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I spent Saturday hanging out with about a dozen hackers building Tagmindr: Remember the future. Here’s the site’s self-description: Put any bookmark in a time capsule and we’ll send it to your future self. Give us your del.icio.us username and we’ll feed you anything that you’ve tagged as: “tagmindr” and “remind:YYYY-MM-DD”. We’ll remind you via RSS, SMS, Email or IM, so long as it’s RSS. (SMS, Email and IM coming later.) The use case is that you find a page about a product or service that you’d like to look at sometime later so you tag it into del.icio.us thinking…

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I’m posting about a bug I ran into recently in Rails. It’s filed against the core team and being addressed, and documented on the forums, so this post might be unnecessary. But the bug is bizarre and confusing enough that I thought I’d post a succinct summary of the problem and how to fix it. If you have code in a controller that redirects to another page, say like this: def index redirect_to :controller => :store # WRONG! end This looks fine and actually runs fine too. But there’s a problem if you try to test it — the tests…

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I access my gmail accounts through POP3 from my phone. The problem with doing this is that all messages get exposed through POP, even the ones that are filtered out of the inbox. This means that my phone which has much lower HCI bandwidth gets cluttered with all this list-mail that is less useful to me. I’ve configured gmail to filter this stuff out to be lower priority I’m using the web interfaces, but when I’m using a POP client, this filtering is lost. What I’d really like is the ability to configure the POP3 access with a checkbox saying…

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I’m going to try applying some economic theory to a classic career decision. Imagine that you must choose between two possible jobs, let’s call them “Big Company” and “Startup.” Big Company will pay you $100k per year. Startup can only pay you $50k per year, but with a 10% chance of paying you a $3 million bonus in 3 years. Which one do you take? I’ll present an analytical economic framework for making this decision which shows why this decision is ultimately very personal. For the purposes of this discussion, I’m going to ignore the time value of money –…

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