Flickr Technology

by Zef Hemel

Flickr logoOver here you can find a (slightly outdated) presentation given about Flickr. Apparently it is implemented in PHP 4 using MySQL as a database. Some interesting stats from the presentation:

  • 60,000 lines of PHP4 code
  • 60,000 lines of templates
  • 70 custom smarty functions/modifiers
  • 25,000 DB transactions/second at peak
  • 1000 pages per second at peak

Note these are outdated probably, but it’s nice to know for an indication. Somehow you expect that these kinds of sites use very fancy C++, Java, or whatever languages or frameworks, but that does not have to be the case.

See the presentation here (PDF).

Advertising on Google Earth

by Zef Hemel

The Dutch insurance company FBTO is putting its logo on the roof of its main office. The white lettering on a bright blue background should attract the attention of the users of Google Earth and Google Maps. The text, which spells “FBTO.NL”, the insurer’s company website, is very readable from a 300 meter height. “Within a few months the satellite will fly past here again”, says a FBTO spokesperson, “so we shall see how it will work out.”

The enormous painting is 30 meters long and 10 meters wide. According to the FBTO spokesperson FBTO is the first to target its advertising towards space.

FBTO.NL

Is this the beginning of a new trend?

(Source: Dagblad van het Noorden)

Good Morning! And in Case I Don’t See Ya…

by Zef Hemel

Truman

Remember the Truman Show, the movie made barely 10 years ago? Well something very similar has now actually happened, but not without the “Truman” (his name is Justin) knowing about it. Justin is a guy walking around with a camera plastered to his face that is broadcasting live to his website: Justin.TV:

And he won’t take it off until he dies. We’ll see about that.

Twitter: the New Communication Platform?

by Zef Hemel

The first thing I thought when I saw Twitter was, “meh, how is this new?” As so many people, I didn’t see it. But as time passed and people just can’t seem to stop talking about it and it even appeared in the financial times, me too started to see the power of this idea.

Twitter is a kind blogging system, but smaller, messages can just be 140 characters. They’re more like short SMS messages. This length is no coincidence: you can put messages on your twitter page by SMS texting it to some number. Twitter is extremely simple. All you can do is write a message:

twitter update page

Beside that you can add other Twitter users as your friends, the messages they write will appear on your home page as well. Other than that you can follow people (basically that is like a non-reciprocal friend or something). You can send and receive updates to and from twitter over the web, SMS and Jabber/GoogleTalk.

Soon it will also be able to send messages to individual users and that opens quite some potential. Nik Cubrilovic:

With this new functionality we can expect to soon see a number of services similar to those you can find at other SMS services such as Mozes. Services like weather (d weather 94027), news (d news headlines), search (d google nik) and much more.

The advantage that Twitter has is that it is a generic communications platform with social networking components. It can be accessed with SMS, Instant Messaging, the website itself and a plethora of applications that have already been built to read/write to Twitter. For potential service providers, Twitter has a rapidly growing base of users who originally signed up as a way to communicate with ‘real’ friends. These users have already registered their email addresses (for email in/out), mobile phones (for SMS in/out) and IM handles (for read/write via IM).

This idea maybe has too much potential for one company to run the game, Twitter already is very slow as it is. Therefore people such as kosso and Dave Winer wonder if we shouldn’t create an open source twitter and standardize the APIs and let different Twitter “clones” interact with each other. Personally I would say: yes, we should standardize some kind of API, but I’m not sure if an open source twitter would be necessary. It would be kind of interesting to see what kind of companies would pop up implementing their own twitter-like services, that hopefully will be able to interact with other such services through the standard interface.

I spent much of the day thinking about Twitter and its potential and I do believe it’s huge. I have quite some ideas on improving this whole twitter thing and stuff you can do with it. I might just try out something myself, will have to see. Once again, interesting times!

Incidentally: my Twitter page.

Daily Show: YouTube vs Viacom

by Zef Hemel

A great fragment of the Daily Show on the YouTube vs Viacom lawsuit. Basically Viacom is suing Google for $1 billion because of copyright infringement, as people uploaded lots of Viacom stuff (Viacom owns, among other things, Comedy Central which creates The Daily Show and The Colbert Report).

TDS Screenshot

Watch it.

Gizmo: Not Bad After All

by Zef Hemel

Gizmo logoI found out about the Gizmo Project when I really had no use for it. Gizmo is a free Voice-over-IP program using the SIP protocol, which is an open standard for VoIP. At that time I used Skype which implemented its own proprietary VoIP protocol, but even with Skype I didn’t have that many people to call. That changed when I move to Dublin and when I got a girlfriend who lives about a thousand kilometers away.

We call on Skype for an hour at least every day. We like Skype a lot, but there’s a few problems. One problems that we’ve been having since a month or two is that when the internet connection goes bad we hear a very loud buzzing sound, the only way to stop it is hang up and call again, after which it might just happen again. Second of all we really would like to record a call sometimes. There is some software to do that, but it’s not a default feature. Other than that we kind of like voice mail and you have to pay for that with Skype.

A week or two ago I got an e-mail from Gizmo saying that version 3.0 was released. On top of Gizmo SIP calls you can now also call Google Talk, Yahoo! Messenger and Windows Live Messenger users. Cool, I thought and decided to install it again. I played with Gizmo before but had some connectivity problems. These seem to be solved now. My girlfriend and I have been calling with Gizmo a bit now and it works fine, the sound quality is just as good as Skype’s and we haven’t heard buzzing so far. Also you can easily record your conversations and leave voice mails for free (which are sent to the person by e-mail). There’s some other features such as your own ring tones, funny sounds you can play during the conversation, music playing while you put a call on hold and so on.

Another nice feature is the “All-Calls-Free” feature. When you use Gizmo regularly and so does your contact, and you or your contact sets their home numbers in their profile, you can make calls to this landline number (and in some countries also mobile number) for free.

Just like SkypeIn and SkypeOut there is also Gizmo Call In and Gizmo Call Out as you might have guessed, some prices seem the same, some are a bit more expensive than Skype, but still they are a good deal.

Gizmo screenshot

Another thing I really like about Gizmo is that Windows, Mac and Linux versions are more in sync. With Skype the Mac version is quite behind on the Windows version and I won’t even mention the Linux version, which looks like it’s still from 2000. About a week after Gizmo 3.0 for Windows was released there was a 3.0 for the Mac as well, which means I have all the same features as the Windows client, which is great.

Anyway, if you use VoIP and are an open standards fan (like me), I’d suggest you give Gizmo a try, it’s really pretty neat. If you want you can add me my Gizmo id is “zefhemel”, if you use some other SIP programme, my SIP number is: 1-747-666-3146

Here’s a nice list of Gizmo’s advanced features.

Structuring Your Notes with Stikkit

by Zef Hemel

Stikkit logoI recently found out about stikkit and have been thinking about it ever since. It’s premise looks very interesting to me. They take the idea of a post-it note, but start to discover structures in it. For example if you write (it’s all plain text):

Stuff to do

- Go shopping
- Feed the dog
- Take a shower

Which in viewing mode will appear like this:
Todo 1

Then I can click the bullet and it will mark an item as done:

Todo 2

If I look at the source of the note again it has changed to:

Stuff to do

- Go shopping
+ Feed the dog
- Take a shower

They established this interaction between a view of the data and the data itself that interact with each other.

If you write down something in a note that looks like a date is being added to the calendar. If you write down something in a note that looks like an address, such as:

Susan Jacobs [sample stikkit]
232 First Street
Portland, OR 97209
503-555-2344
susan@valuesofn.com
http://www.valuesofn.com

Stikkit will recognize it as a “peep”, change the colour of the note and add it to the address list.

Peep

Stikkit currently has three of these special “data types” inside notes: calendar dates, people and todos. This idea intrigued me. Can’t it be made more generic? Why just these kinds of notes/kinds of data? Why not let users create these types themselves. This way somebody could start off by just scribbling down some things in notes, and then after a while when “note patterns” start to emerge, new note types can be created, so you essentially get a database of notes.

For example if one would write down this:

Name: Zef
Age: 23
City: Groningen
---
Name: Justyna
Age: 23
City: Poznan

This is probably something I could scribble down in a text document somewhere when I have to take notes quickly. But this is actually quite structured data. In fact it’s YAML data. We could define a new type called Person which will have a name, age and city field. Once this type information is also “scribbled” down, we can start doing very interesting things with that. It just becomes a database. We can create views on the data and so on.

These are just some premature thoughts I thought I’d share. Welcome to my brain dump ;)

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