#if debug

WordPress has a feature in it which shows activity surrounding your particular blog, named “Incoming Links”. For a long time, WordPress has been using the services of blog search engine and aggregator Technorati to deliver this feature. Using Technorati was an excellent decision for quite some time, especially when blogging was still relatively new and Technorati where blazing their own trail in that space. It made even more sense when Automattic released Pingomatic, as virtually all blogging platforms sent activity notifications to that and Technorati subscribed to that stream of data.

Things started to change and the usefulness of Technorati started to fade as the big guns entered into the blog search space, namingly Google. Google Blog Search was a great service on its own, using the incredible infrastructure behind Google to keep their blog search index fresh. Not being content with great, Google set out to make their Google Blog Search index exceptionally fresh as they started accepting ping notifications. Of course, as soon as that happened - Pingomatic started sending notifications into Google, which has yielded an index which is minty fresh - usually showing only minutes of delay.

With the recent release of WordPress 2.3, the WordPress team have now switched from Technorati to Google Blog Search for their “Incoming Links” feature. This single link change could have a fairly profound impact on Technorati, as with literally hundreds of thousands of blogs running WordPress - they were getting traffic for free. The lack of the link from WordPress, coupled with the superior fire power of Google and tongues have to be wagging about the future of blog search engine Technorati.

As many people would be aware, Facebook has become some what of a phenomenon of late. Over the last 12 months, the site has seen growth that most internet companies could only dream of. If that wasn’t enough, in May 2007 Facebook announced that it was going to open up the service with what they called the Facebook Platform.

The Facebook Platform allows third parties to develop plugins or ‘application’s which work in concert with Facebook. When your application is loaded by a Facebook user, it passes information into your application which communicates with your own services. Of course, the dependence of your Facebook application on your own hosting, means that the more popular that your Facebook application becomes - the more web hosting capacity that you must have. There are some great tales of the struggles that companies like iLike faced when they launched their product and trying to keep up with the incredible demand. The insane popularity of Facebook means that if even a small percentage of their users load your application, it can translate in literally millions of web server requests and hundreds of gigabytes of data transferred; far more than any normal person could afford.

To help combat the problem, Joyent have teamed up with Dell and Facebook to offer over USD$3 million dollars worth of their accelerator hosting for free. We’re not talking about cheap Facebook application hosting, this offer from Joyent is absolutely free. The free Facebook application hosting offer from Joyent includes a complete virtualised environment with everything you’d need to get your Facebook application up and running using popular programming languages like PHP, Python and Ruby. Joyent are pushing the product as an on demand, scalable architecture which is built on top of their very successful Accelerator product. The beautiful thing about the Joyent Accelerators, is that their free hosting offers a seamless upgrade path into something more substantial if your Facebook application takes off.

To make sure that the offer isn’t abused, Joyent have some pretty straight forward terms. You’re application must be active and in use on Facebook for you to be eligible. The free Facebook application offer provides 1 year worth of free application hosting for your Facebook application - after that point you’ll be required to pay for a normal plan. Joyent are offering 3500 accounts with their free Facebook hosting offer. That might not seem like a lot, however if your application is dormant for more than 60 days - your account will be reclaimed.

If you’re looking into building a Facebook application or already have and the hosting costs keep going up, check out the Joyent offer - it might just be your saving grace.

Over the weekend, I signed up for a Twitter account and that process had a few hiccups which were entirely my fault. After sorting that out, I started posting items into Twitter using the web site and everything seemed to be going swimmingly.

Unfortunately, the site went down with the familiar offline message informing Twitters that they were reorganising some stuff. To my surprise, when the service came back online - it had lost my last tweet. Assuming this was a bit of a one off, I let it go. Later that same night, Twitter lost another tweet. I haven’t posted about it since Friday night as I figured that they were doing maintenance and it wasn’t worth raising, however yesterday it lost yet another tweet and this time I didn’t notice that the site went offline.

I think we’re up to a total of three or four tweets which Twitter have lost in as many days since joining the service. I realise that I might just be a little unlucky, so I’ll be keeping an eye on it over the next week or two to see if it is normal or the exception.

Over the weekend, I signed up for a shiny new account with Twitter. Without realising it at the time, I had actually typed my username incorrectly and missed a t out of Lattimore.

Being a bit of a pedant at times, I went to sign up for another account with the username I wanted only to find out that Twitter wouldn’t allow me to sign up with the same email address. Not wanting to sign up with a different email address, I was going to email the Twitter mob and see if they could just rename my account for me.

To my surprise, the Twitter development crew supply a convenient ‘delete my account’ option. To my surprise, it seems as though clicking that really does delete your account - all of it. As soon as I had confirmed that I wanted it deleted, I was able to immediately create another account with the username I wanted and using my existing email address.

It’s a small thing but I really appreciate it when services put in convenient functionality like that.

Curiosity has gotten the better of me, I’ve signed up for an account with Twitter.

When Twitter first started to get some press, I couldn’t see the benefit of it and it seemed like nothing more than another attention grabbing service that was going to get in the road of everyone. I honestly expected that it’d get hyped, gain a bunch of users and then quietly whittle away and die like so many other web 2.0 style products that have been released in the last few years. To my surprise, the Twitter service seems to be going from strength to strength and they are still gaining new members are a rapid pace.

The only thing I’m struggling to work out is how everyone is meant to remember to drop twitters regularly and more importantly, that they can find the time to do so. I don’t know how that aspect of it will go but I’m willing to give it a little air time to see if I can work out what all the fuss is about.