We Heart Hackers

I love this type of story. About a week ago, I get an email from Noel Portugal, a guy who works at Oracle and likes to hack around with APEX, Web 2.0 stuff, technology in general. In one line that stuck out, Noel mentioned that he was recently “bitten” by the Web 2.0 bug and… Read More

Twitter is Your Friend

Insert Twitter post disclaimer here. I’ve noticed a humorous trend that you can use for a laugh. People like to rant at Twitter, just check out twistori’s hate feed for samples. The beauty part of Twitter and its many clients is that it provides easy outlet for your frustration. Can’t get a piece of software… Read More

Discussing Disqus

If you’ve read and commented here in the past, you’ll have noticed we switched to Disqus to handle comments about two months ago. Rich made the change, and I was initially skeptical because frankly I had no real idea of what switching would get us. Disqus has a few distinct advantages over the built-in WordPress… Read More

Respect My Authority!

Apparently, someone thinks this blog is an authorative source for Twitter information. While browsing through our referrers for the past month, I noticed the Wikipedia listed, which struck me as odd, to say the least. At first I thought someone had created an entry for AppsLab, which weirded me out, but it turns out that… Read More

Twitter is Like the Weather

Warning: This post is about Twitter, so if you don’t care about Twitter, stop reading here. Proceed at your own risk of boredom. Last week, friends of the ‘Lab David Haimes and Michael Krigsman were exchanging some jabs over Twitter, about Twitter. Michael argues that Twitter’s frequent outages make it appear suspect if/when a business… Read More

Stuff That Just Works

I’ve been so very busy lately, but not with bloggable activity. This week has been slow on Mix news; ENTP is putting the finishing touches on a big feature, and we did deploy a few bug fixes. I did finally catch up on feed reading from a month ago, and a post from friend of… Read More

Random Twitter Effects

Hard to believe I haven’t blogged about Twitter in a while. Like New Web in general, Twitter has reached that cusp where early adopters are calling it “established” and new people are kicking the tires. Lots of them. The recent departure of Blaine Cook, Twitter’s former chief architect, could mean any number of things. Many… Read More

Data Visualizations

After a slow Twitter weekend, I stumbled across a new Twitter tool, TwittEarth, via Mashable. This is a beautiful representation of Twitter’s public timeline, similar to twittervision, but with goofy avatars in 3D. It reminds me a lot of the work stamen design has done with Digg, e.g. arc. The visualization shows how many people… Read More

What Superhero Are You?

If you don’t use Twitter or find it trivial and annoying, stop reading. This post will only cement what you already think. I can’t be sure, since Twitter happens to be down for scheduled maintenance right now, but I first heard from Dennis Howlett that this week was superhero week on Twitter. Later in the… Read More

FriendFeed is for Lurkers too

If you missed it, over the weekend, there was quite a testy blog war between Louis Gray and Duncan Riley, ostensibly started by FriendFeed or rather differing opinions of it. Short version: Duncan doesn’t find value, Louis disagrees, obscenities ensue. Makes for a good read. FriendFeed has been all the rage lately among the usual… Read More

Oracle Tweeters

Inspired by a post from Rick Turoczy, the Silicon Florist, in which he spread Twitter goodness across the Portland area and beyond, I’ve decided to attempt something similar for Oracle Tweeters. Rick’s post yesterday accounted for about 25 new Twitter friends in the Portland/Washington area. We were sharing storm news last night as the wind… Read More

2008 in the Crosshairs

Now that I’ve sang “Auld Lang Syne“, waxed sentimentally on 2007 and wiped a tear, here comes the companion piece, 2008 predictions. I’m not a huge fan of predictions, unless I happen to be right. I still think Google will acquire Salesforce.com; that’s my story, and I sticking to it. But, in the spirit of… Read More