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Diaspora* got some ink today in the New York Times. Who new they had a publicist already?

This will spark even more interest in what looks to be a great project. Let’s hope they can keep this momentum going.

It sounds like the call for an open social network may get answered soon. Diaspora* seeks to be “the privacy aware, personally controlled, do-it-all distributed open source social network.”

There seems to be plenty of interest out there for this project. The guys behind Diaspora* managed to get seed funding (and then some) through Kickstarter in just ten days.

Diaspora* is certainly worth keeping an eye on in the coming months.

Facebook? Rogue? Ryan Singel, on the Epicenter thinks so. In his post, he calls for an open alternative:

It’s time for the best of the tech community to find a way to let people control what and how they’d like to share. Facebook’s basic functions can be turned into protocols, and a whole set of interoperating software and services can flourish.

As Facebook continues to twist their privacy policy to meet their monetization needs, I tend to agree with Ryan–perhaps it is time to move on. We’re not alone, there is even a group of people forming a digital mass suicide pact (they are going to delete their Facebook profiles on 20/10/2010 at 20:10 GMT and suggest inviting some friends over for dinner to commemorate the occasion). And no, the irony that the digital mass suicide folks are using a Facebook fan page to get the word out is not lost on me.

via Hacker News

Farmville is the most popular application on Facebook. With over 70 million monthly active users, more people are playing Farmville than using Twitter. I think Twitter should fold before everybody realizes that the whole tweeting thing is a bigger waste of time than harvesting virtual crops. But, my unpopular opinions about Twitter really aren’t the point here.

Mark Newheiser posted a good story on just why Farmville is so popular and what elements keep people coming back for more (several times a day). I’m sure many game designers are looking at Farmville closely to see what “sticky” bits they can roll into their games.

Reading this made me realize that some people take these things way more seriously than I do:

I got roped into playing Farmville when my girlfriend insisted I needed to help her out and play with her. Together we worked up a spreadsheet to figure out what the profit per hour was for each crop in the game, which lead to some interesting results: unlike the other farming games that I’d encountered, trees and animals seemed to simply be an afterthought, they offered nowhere near the profitability of harvesting crops.

No wonder I never attained godfatherhood during my brief time on Mafia Wars.

slashdot, Mashable

Harvest now has an iPhone application (built and distributed by Y Factorial). It’s really slick, and a welcome alternative to the browser based iPhone solution that came previously. I tested it out last week, and it worked great. Today, however, is a different story.

Note the 4 entries that need to be synced in the screenshot. No matter how much I shake my poor iPhone, those items just won’t sync with the server. Y Factorial notes that some users experience syncing problems, so maybe that is the case here. But, the comments in the iTunes store referring to the sync problem also talk about crashing, which hasn’t happened to me. The newness of this app doesn’t help matters as it seems there is little or no troubleshooting information available. At minimum, it would be nice if one could reset the app’s data file–just to ensure that a manually corrected timesheet doesn’t get hosed if the application successfully syncs in the future.

Update 2009-03-03: Y Factorial was super responsive, on this (see comment below). The log files from my phone may have been helpful, but I had been impatient and reinstalled the application. Anyway, reinstalling made it work, but I have not been able to replicate the sync problem again.

The NYTimes OPEN blog talks about their TimesMachine implementation, and how they used EC2 to convert the archive information into something usable on the web. TimesMachine, by the way, is an archive of Times pages going all the way back to issue number one (18 September 1851).

via Amazon Web Services Blog

The New York Public Library now has a presence on iTunes U. This makes a lot of the library’s digital content a little easier to get at.

via NYPL Labs :: TUAW

Amazon’s S3 Service went dark for a time today. This, of course, effectively shuttered the businesses (or parts thereof) that rely on S3 for online storage. It seems that things are returning to normal, but some customers are upset–and rightfully so. Amazon touted this storage as being pretty much bulletproof; widespread, unscheduled downtime does not live up to that promise.

In Amazon’s defense, this is the first major S3 outage, so their track record is pretty damn good. I’ve been an advocate of S3 for some time, and will continue to be so long as outages like this one do not become commonplace.

This just serves as a reminder that functions relying on web services should fail gracefully. This may be a tall order, if not impossible, for some applications. But, compensating for these sorts of failures should be a major design consideration for developers of applications that consume web services.

Back in December, Jonas said “Wouldn’t it be cool if you could highlight an address on a web page and get subway directions to that location?” Cool indeed. I thought a bookmarklet would do the trick, so I came up with this one: HS Directions from ESB (does not work in IE). This bookmarklet will give subway directions from the Empire State Building to an address (highlighted in the browser) in Manhattan. The idea here being that one would use their home or work address rather than that of the Empire State Building. By having this bookmarklet in your browser, you’re one click away from subway directions.

There are some limitations to this method. For instance, the “Manhattan” destination is coded in the bookmarklet, if your destination is, say, Brooklyn, it’s not going to work. If you traveled to another borough regularly, you could have an additional bookmarklet; more than a couple of these would become unmanageable. Further, HopStop takes other variables into account like time of day and such when calculating routes. This bookmarklet doesn’t really help with that.

I went as far as creating a little HopStop bookmarkelet generator that allowed one to select the default start and end points for routes, then it created a bookmarklet on the fly which could be moved to the browser’s bookmarks. This worked pretty well. But, given the aforementioned limitations, I wondered if it would be all that useful. If anyone is interested in this, let me know and I might dust off the old project. It, however, would be even better if HopStop offered a generator like this.

Bits mentioned the human-guided search engine, ChaCha, today. ChaCha offers both browser-based and SMS search. Text a question to 242242 and ChaCha will answer.

I was interested in just how fast a person could answer a tough question. Today, I asked ChaCha three such questions via SMS and, in all cases, the answer came back within 90 seconds:

1. “Where can I get the best burger in NYC?” ChaCha came back with a definitive answer: “Donovan’s Pub in Woodside Queens has the best burger in New York.” Interesting choice. Their reference is an article in the Post. This question is highly subjective, and I won’t even speculate on the best burger in New York, I’ll give ChaCha a maybe on this one–I’ll also try the burger at Donovan’s.
2. “What is the cheapest way to get from Manhattan to JFK?” Once again, ChaCha came back with one answer: “Cabs are the best way, with a set fare, to get from JFK to Manhattan” referencing a UK Yahoo! site. This didn’t really answer my question, I was looking for the cheapest, not the best. Depending on who you ask, a taxi may or may not be the best way to get to and from JFK, but they certainly aren’t the cheapest. ChaCha got this one wrong.
3. “What is the answer to life, the universe, and everything?” We all know there is only one answer to this and ChaCha got it right: “42.” They didn’t really need a reference here, but they provided a link to IMDB anyway.

One correct, one wrong and one maybe, a passable job given the questions. These answers do seem to reflect 20 cents worth of research. That’s what ChaCha pays their human guides per SMS answer (see FAQ). For that kind of money, I’m surprised they got close at all.

I don’t see ChaCha replacing any of the popular search engines. Then again, I don’t think that is their goal. The SMS feature is nice and I really like the simple, definitive answers that come back. Even if they aren’t 100% correct, at least they sound confident. Just don’t ask any life or death questions like “How do I apply a tourniquet?”