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wordpress > tumblr, posterous

Posted on by jimy
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I had been trying to figure out whether to use Tumblr or Posterous for my personal and company blogs. Tumblr is slow and doesn’t have built-in support for comments (wtf?). Posterous is good, but somehow seems too pushy. Also, Garry just quit recently, so that creates some doubt in my mind as to its future.

Not happy with either of them, I decided to revisit WordPress. Wow, this is really good! It’s snappy (especially relative to Tumblr), and straightforward to use.

Notes on OpenSocial

Posted on by jimy
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I’ve been browsing the OpenSocial API docs just released at http://code.google.com/apis/opensocial/. Here are some initial thoughts and observations.

* The friend model is simple and, as far as I can tell, non-extensible. Basically each person has a list of friends that can be retrieved via the API. There is no way to express different types of friend relationships (e.g., friend vs. acquaintaince). Also, for apps/sites that distinguish “friend” from “follower” (e.g., Twitter, LiveJournal), one needs to be able to distinguish between mutual friendships and one-way friendships. From what I’ve read so far, OpenSocial doesn’t handle this at all.

* There’s a typo on the front page – “and/or access from othter websites” With all the attention this is getting, didn’t anyone bother to proofread the docs?

* The persistence API seems incomplete- for example, there’s no access control. Can an object be marked as accessible to friends only? Nope.

* The activities API is the news feed. You can query all the activities generated by a given app, or all the activities for a user, but you can’t get the activity feed for a user’s friends. Of course, one can query for the user’s friends and then pull each friend’s activities individually, but then 1) that’s a lot of queries, and 2) the activities need to be interleaved by the client.

Overall I get the impression that the API was rushed out the door, and not designed by anyone who has thought broadly about social apps. I am curious how portable the data model will be to sites other than Orkut (again, it can’t even capture the basic “mutual friend” vs. “follower” distinction). It’s a decent start, but there are a lot of missing pieces to be filled.

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hmm

Posted on by jimy
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wordpress.com is alright, but it could definitely be *much* better. The UI is a bit wonky- why are themes under the “presentation” tab? Also I can’t for the life of me figure out how to add arbitrary content to the side panel.