Psst. If you’re on dialup, you might as well disable images in your browser and then try loading this page. This page is going to take forever if you attempt to load all the images.

Introduction

When people think about search engines and privacy, the might think of incidents such as AOL publishing the searches of more than 650,000 users and the New York Times identifying a woman based on her AOL searches. Google isn’t well-known for privacy either. Privacy International did a study and gave Google a failing grade (PDF). Nowadays, Google seems to be getting itself into privacy troubles all the time with projects such as Google Street View.

What’s that? It’s a bird! No. It’s a plane! No. It’s Cuil! Cuil is a new search engine that was a major subject of discussion this week. Cuil claims to have indexed a whopping 121,617,892,992 webpages.

Cuil’s successes

1) Privacy

Not only does Cuil claim to have a massive index, Cuil also apparently does not keep logs of user search activity.

Cuil protects your privacy. Click on the photo to view the original image. Original image created by Flickr user dogseat. No I will not put an lolcat in every blog post.

2) The user interface

Cuil’s user interface brings something new to the table. Other search engine result pages (SERPs) are somewhat lacking in the type of fresh design that Cuil has.

Click on the above image to view it full-size.

3) Suggesting different keywords

Cuil, while it may or may not give you good results on the first query, will give you some example queries to narrow or expand your searches.

Of course, the feature has some flaws.

Click on the above image to view it full-size.

An interesting Cuil feature is that the links bring up tooltips that have more information about whatever the link is.

Click on the above image to view it full-size.

The tooltips appear to be the from first sentence from the word’s Wikipedia page.

4) Generating hype

Man, it seems like everybody is talking about Cuil. You can see a list of other blog posts and articles at the end of this post.

Cuil’s mistakes

1) Irrelevant images next to search results

Cuil puts what it thinks to be relevant images next to search results. This isn’t very accurate, as the below screenshot shows.

TechCrunch has more on this issue.

This is a huge problem, as other people are very upset when they see irrelevant images when searching for their own names.

Of course, Google News has had similar problems.

I found this above image on this Google Operating System post.

The wisest approach for Cuil would have been to only suggest images when Cuil is really sure that the images are relevant. Google will often display a few image results along with the standard web results if the algorithm believes that the images are very relevant.

2) A bad first day

On the first day that Cuil launched, Cuil went down. Given how important a user’s first impression of a website is, it’s rather unfortunate that it went down. Again, I’m going to link to TechCrunch, where there’s a post on Cuil’s downtime.
3) The name

I’m fine with the name Cuil, but some people have been very vocal about the name. Nobody can come up with a name to please everybody, but perhaps Cuil should have spent more time thinking about whether Cuil was a good name or not.

4) The result count for queries

While Cuil claims to have have the most pages indexed, some queries in Cuil give far fewer results than other leading search engines.

This isn’t absolute proof that Cuil has barely any pages indexed; it could be the algorithm filtering out results that appear in other search engines.

Regardless of what causes the fewer results, users are disappointed.

———-

On a side note, i80and continues displaying his interest in old browsers and tried out Cuil in Phoenix (Firefox) 0.3. The result is below.

Click on the image to view it full-size.

Above, I promised a list of blog posts and articles that have covered Cuil. I obviously cannot list them all, so the below are just the ones that I believe are the highest quality blog posts covering Cuil.

• Time Magazine — Why Cuil Is No Threat to Google
• ReadWriteWeb — Cuil: Good, But Not Great
• GigaOm –  Cuil Finally Gets Going
• Louis Gray — Can Cuil, Built for the Long-Term, Win the “Instant Analysis” Battle?
• Search Engine Land — Cuil Launches — Can This Search Start-Up Really Best Google?
• Bits (a New York Times blog) — No Bull, Cuil Had Problems
• Business Pundit — Cuil vs. Google? Not exactly.
• PC Magazine — The New Cuil Search Engine Sucks
• The Cool Cat Teacher Blog — Cool Cat Teacher’s Take on Cuil’s New Search Engine

Disclaimer: Cuil search result pages seem to change fast. Actual search results may vary. Do not submerge a computer with this blog post in water. Do not submerge any computer in water, unless it is waterproofed.

Click on the above image to go to the original version. Original version made by Flickr user Mr. Wright.

Ever since Twitter‘s famous fail whales started appearing, a group of people (including me) started looking for alternative microblogging services. I experimented with identi.ca, which runs on the open source laconi.ca microblogging software. However, the alternative microblogging service that most stood out to me as a viable competitor to Twitter is Kwippy. First, take a gander at Kwippy’s looks.

See that little green rectangle with “Feedback” written there at the top? The feedback button is easy to find, and a user can quickly give suggestions to the Kwippy team. The Kwippy folks were smart enough to put the feeback feedback button right where nearly everybody can see it.

It’s great that Kwippy really wants your feedback, but what I think is even better is that individual kwips can have comments.

Click on the above screenshot to see it full size.

This solves the problem that Twitter users have faced with the @reply feature. In Twitter, replying to a user’s tweet does not indicate which tweet of the user you are replying to. Kwippy avoids this by allowing comments for kwips. Comments cannot reply to other comments, but commentors (for the lack of a better term) can be notified of upcoming comments if they wish.

Like Twitter and some other services, Kwippy also has an IM bot that you can use to post kwips. The IM bot will notify if another user friends you, buzzes you, favorites one of your kwips, or comments on a thread you are tracking. All of the notifications are configurable, so you can decide if you do not want to hear certain notifications.

Hmm, I seem to have forgotten what character limit kwips and comments have. Oh wait, they don’t. Kwips and comments do not have a character limit, and this is one of the more interesting things about the service. Kwippy’s blog has posted their reasoning on why they have not put a character cap.

Okay, so the Kwippy folks want feedback, make good user interfaces, allow comments for individual kwips, and don’t put a character limit on kwips and comments. But what about scalability? Will Kwippy be able to handle a Twitter-like userbase? You can look at the inner details as another official Kwippy blog post gives stunning insight on the technology that Kwippy runs on. Whether or not Kwippy can scale to huge amounts of users remains to be seen.

Unfortunately, Kwippy is an invite-only service. Existing Kwippy users have infinite invites, so it should be very easy to obtain a Kwippy invite.

Now, if you’ve glanced at the title, I’m assuming that you’re waiting for the interview with Kwippy CEO Mayank Dhingra. Mayank consented to an email interview, and here are the responses to the questions that I asked him (some spelling/grammar corrected).

Q1: Having a business model is crucial for a startup. How does Kwippy plan to make money?

A: Well leaving aside ads as a backup we are exploring other options which haven’t been used elsewhere.

Q2: Another thing crucial to a startup’s success is the ability to learn from mistakes. What have you learned from the mistakes of other microblogging services and what mistakes have you made in the development of Kwippy?

A: In hindsight you always realize there are things that shouldn’t have been done or could have been done better. Scalability/Stability is one of the most prominent problem haunting the microblogging world but their are some other less prominent problems like [the] “complete disappearance of the blogging perspective” & monetization. We’ve been quite aware of them from start and are constantly trying to do our best in taking care of them.

Q3: Why did you even want to start a microblogging service in the first place?

A: Kwippy started as a “IM Status aggregator” in the first place, then we added ability to have discussions over them, by this time all of us were avid microbloggers but our understanding of microblogging was quite different from the existing services and thus kwippy evolved into a “Microblogging App” in an effort to bring out the best of blogging and microblogging worlds.

Q4: What would you say to people that say Kwippy and other smaller microblogging services will never take over Twitter?

A: All I can in this regard is Twitter has the first mover & Community advantages working in its favor. Community is built over time, it was the case with twitter and it certainly will be the case with others. I strongly feel any service which offers a better yet easy approach to microblogging and manages to stay up has a good chance to be successful.

Q5: In one sentence, please summarize what sets Kwippy apart from similar microblogging services.

A: Till we implement all that we have plans for[,] it will [take the] “IM Status aggregation and Blogging like approach.” Also [a] lack of whales or other creatures :)

Q6: What has been the most enjoyable part of being part of Kwippy?

A: From coding to evangelizing every bit has been exciting but nothing compares the joy of creating a product that evolves according to user feedback and makes people who are part of the change very happy.

Q7: If you are willing, can you give us a sneak peek of some upcoming features in Kwippy?

A: Next in line would be import/invite features. Making friends,  adding support for more channels and other small things to make the site more engaging and viral.

Q8: What is the number one reason that an existing Twitter user should switch to Kwippy?

A: Because kwippy is “Microblogging redefined” :)

———–

Want to see even more coverage on Kwippy? There are two posts on the official Kwippy blog that have lists of more blog posts covering Kwippy.

Also, as a Kwippy user (my Kwippy page here), I have infinite Kwippy invites to distribute to you. Post your email address in the comments if you want a Kwippy invite.

Also, I apologize for the lolcat at the top of this post. I couldn’t resist.

In one of my periods of lunacy that I enter into from time to time, I decided to try out the ancient relic known only as “Phoenix”.  Or, really-really-old-Firefox, if you prefer.  Sampling both 0.1 and 0.3, I was impressed, actually; all of the sites I visited had more or less perfect rendering, with only a few trivial sizing glitches (Although more technologically advanced sites such as GMail and Google Pages either didn’t work or loaded a more basic view). However, I did make one interesting observation: Phoenix 0.3 had somewhat better Acid2 compliance than Microsoft Internet Explorer 7. That’s right: a 2002 early development release of Firefox still had better standards support in some areas than the latest and greatest from our pals at Redmond.

Take a gander, and ponder this facinating tidbit.  Its actual relevance is questionable as certainly more sites will work with IE7, and additionally Internet Explorer 8 beta 1 is known to more or less pass Acid2, but it’s interesting to me nevertheless.

A couple days ago, I saw a couple FriendFeed messages linking to FriendFeed accounts that spam. To me, this was quite alarming. I love FriendFeed partly due to it’s excellent community, and the idea of another good community being destroyed by spammers wasn’t one that I wanted to think about.

Of course, not thinking about the problem is a pretty bad way of solving it. I just read Mike Fruchter’s post titled “Spam invades Friendfeed“, and it brought to my attention an idea that Robert Scoble had about controlling spam on FriendFeed. Scoble’s idea is to put a FriendFeed account into a jail if there are a certain number more blocks than subscriptions.

Of course, Robert Scoble’s idea, although interesting, can be improved upon. What if spammers create an enormous amount of accounts to all subscribe to each other in an attempt to balance the increasing number of the spammer accounts that were blocked?

The first thing to reduce this as a possibility is to ensure that blocks increase faster than subscriptions. Assuming that FriendFeed doesn’t already do this, the number of accounts created per IP per hour should be limited to a number that won’t be too much of a hassle for computers sharing an IP, but should slow down individual bots. Of course, various techniques could be used by spammers to get around the IP limit, but at least it would make the job more difficult for spammers and might encourage at least a few to go other places where spamming is easier.

Second, instead of seeing if there are a significant number more blocks than subscriptions, I would use a separate flag specifically reserved for spammers. On the user interface, this might look like, “Report this user as a spammer,” or some other phrase. The reason for a separate, spammer-only flag is that the normal blocking feature is currently used to generally hide all activity of certain users that others do not want to see. Highly well-known, but very disliked FriendFeed users might accidentally trigger the anti-spam mechanism because of a high number of blocks relative to subscriptions. For easy access as well as keeping the user interface clean, I would add a “Report spam” button to the box that users on FriendFeed see whenever they mouseover a link to a FriendFeed profile. I would change it from what it currently is,

and add the link as shown below.

I would suggest marking users as spammers if a significant number of comments are identical or contain URLs to the same websites, but that is easily defeated by posting slightly different variations of spam messages and using different URL shortening services to mask the URL.

Now, if you’re reading this, you are probably thinking that my ways to improve FriendFeed’s spam handling and reporting capabilities aren’t that good, you’re probably right. The problem with spam is that it’s so difficult to automatically handle. CAPTCHAs can be broken, the spam of one spammer come from multiple places (such as accounts or IPs), and a variety of other techniques can be defeated by spammers.

Since the most accurate way to make sure that spam comments are not displayed is moderation, I’ll briefly explain how you can delete FriendFeed comments on your entries.

So, how would you reduce the spam on FriendFeed?

Gentlemen, start your compilers.  On July 13, 2008, Linux 2.6.26 was given the green light, and features an impressive list of changes.  Go ahead and download it at the kernel archives.  And, if you have the nerve, see the list of commits.

There are several new features that I consider worthy of particular mention.  First of all, there’s the addition of a V4L/DVB driver that adds support for USB Video Class devices; this means that most USB webcams, video cameras, video capture cards, etc. will now work fine with Linux.

One of the more controversial changes is the addition of a kernel debugger, or KGDB.  Linus Torvalds has been notoriously against kernel debuggers, but I guess in the end, KGDB was good enough to be merged.

KVM, or the kernel virtualization layer, has been ported to more architectures; IA64, S390, and PPC.

Barriers have been enabled by default in ext4.  This improves data integrity, as it gives a mechanism for ensuring that the transaction information has been written to the filesystem journal before the commit record can be written, along with the rest of the write operation.  However, Andrew Morton stated that it can cause a 30% slowdown, and thus the reason that up to now it hasn’t been enabled by default on ext3 or ext4.  The situation may not be as severe for ext4, however, as the barrier process for it is less time-consuming than it is for ext3.

In addition, support for the mesh networking draft has been implemented, which will allow for interesting networking clouds, a lá OLPC.

While people were all hyped up about getting their new iPhones, Jason Calacanis posted that he is officially retiring from blogging. In the blog post announcing Jason’s retirement is the following paragraph.

Today the blogosphere is so charged, so polarized, and so filled with haters hating that it’s simply not worth it. I’d rather watch from the sidelines and be involved in a smaller, more personal, conversation.

Interestingly, Jason is turning to a form of online communication that is not as new and shiny as blogging.

Starting today all of my thoughts will be reserved for a new medium. Something smaller, something more intimate, and something very personal: an email list. Today the email list has about 600 members, I’m going to cut it off when it reaches 750. Frankly, that’s enough more than enough people to have a conversation with. I’m going to try and build a deeper relationship with fewer people–try to get back to my roots.

That’s right. Jason is actually going to use an email list for communication to the rest of the world. Of course, the part where he cuts off the subscription at 750 members is incorrect. I believe that the cutoff limit has passed a thousand subscribers.

When I saw the part about the email list, I subscribed immediately. For those of you that did not subscribe, you can check out a Posterous blog containing the content of the latest newsletter.

Steven Hodson of Winextra has read the latest email newsletter and offers his take on it. Below is a rather large excerpt from the Winextra post.

He [Jason] starts out the newsletter with a couple of paragraphs of discounting the idea that this was all a joke and then gets to the gist of the inaugural newsletter with
this

Is blogging dead?
————————-
Yes, it is. Officially. :-)

Okay folks it’s official we can all hang up out blogs as a waste of time and go onto other things because Jason says so. Wow that’s a hellva responsibility to take on there Jason – being the arbiter of a whole medium’s validity.

He then follows that up with

Bloggers spend more time digging, tweeting, and SEOing their posts
than they do on the posts themselves. In the early days of blogging
Peter Rojas, who was my blog professor, told me what was required to
win at blogging: “show up every day.” In 2003 and 2004 that was the
case. Today? What’s required is a team of social marketers to get your
message out there, and a second one to manage the fall-out from
whatever you’ve said.

Well Jason you may have been concerned with SEO and digg points or felt you needed to hire a bunch of experts in the social media field (the field you yourself felt you were knowledgeable so many times) but to suggest that this is something that all bloggers concern themselves with is just assuming too damn much. I have been doing this for some time and I couldn’t give a damn about SEO or whether I’ve been on digg or whether I have the most followers on Twitter. There are a lot of bloggers out there who I am sure feel exactly the same way and for you to paint all bloggers with this paintbrush is in a way rather insulting.

Jason, in the email newsletter, says that blogging is dead. In Jason’s final blog post, he says,

First, please don’t take this as a condemnation of blogging. I love blogs and always will.

I believe that Steven Hodson is correct. Blogging is not dead and bloggers don’t have to worry about Digg, Techmeme, etc. Blogging, at least in my mind, is just about sharing ideas and building a community. While Jason Calacanis can do that in an email newsletter, I don’t believe that there is anything wrong with blogging.

I do believe that Jason can teach us a lesson here. Maybe we should be a little less obsessed with search engine optimization and Techmeme and spend more time on making high quality posts.

For additional reading, you can check out:

• Diary of a Rat: There Will Always Be an A-list
• jimkukral.com: The Death Of The A-list
• louisgray.com: Walking the SEO Balance Beam
• seanpercival.com: Top 5 Reasons Jason Calacanis is NOT Quiting Blogging
• mathewingram.com/work: Jason’s long goodbye: Give me a break
• Scobleizer: Jason Calacanis hands keys to blogosphere to Louis Gray

From the website of Foresight,

“Foresight is a desktop operating system featuring an intuitive user interface and a showcase of the latest desktop software”

The question is, is this the case? Does it fulfill its goal? As it turns out, the July issue of Linux Format shipped with it a copy of Foresight Linux 2.0. On a whim, I tried that out, and very quickly got an unusable system. After being contacted by one of the developers in reply to a somewhat inflammatory tweet I made, I decided to give it a second shot with a more recent version.

My test hardware is as follows:

• Laptop model: HP Pavilion dv6000
• Processor: 1.7ghz AMD Athlon X2, 256kb L2 cache per core
• RAM: 2gb
• Video card: nVidia GeForce Go 6150
• Wireless: Linksys WUSB54GC USB stick, using the rt73usb driver integrated into mainline Linux since 2.6.24 (easier and more reliable than my internal Broadcom card)

For this trial, I used Foresight 2.0.2.1 GNOME edition compiled for x86_64. I appreciate the availability of an Xfce version very much, but given that it’s apparently still in a beta stage, I decided to pass on that.

Installation

The installation started out OK. Nothing special. A textual bootloader prompt with a reasonably attractive, if plain, background, appeared, to which I simply hit return. I was pleasantly surprised to note that I didn’t have to disable my APIC to get it to boot, as I have with some other distros and indeed Foresight 2.0. I should have stopped there; from then on, it went more or less downhill until the installation phase was over.

To begin with, the bootstrapping phase of the installer–Anaconda–was a ncurses TUI. There was no interaction required there, so I can forgive that, but it did look aged. And if it was non-interactive, what’s the point? After that, the installer successfully made the transition to GUI. The installation process was fairly linear and simple, with an attractive theme.  Possibly murrine, as it looked too shiny for Nodoka (both of which being very nice GTK+ themes that I highly recommend), but given the progress bar appearence, I would lay my bet squarely on humanlooks.

However, I am not happy with the partitioning system. For starters, it didn’t allow formatting a partition with ReiserFS, which I prefer to use over ext3. For another, it took too many liberties with what I wanted. It was impossible to specify which partition would go where on my hard drive, and it made a partition extended when a primary partition was all both I wanted and needed. Forcing it as primary simply shuffled my partitions around some more so another partition became extended.  Granted, it did appear to support LVM and software RAID, so it is at least powerful.

I also specified to use the GRUB bootloader instead of the default EXTLINUX. I’m more comfortable with GRUB, and I knew the EXTLINUX theme that Foresight used was somewhat… ambiguous as to the selection highlight color from my previous attempt.  I’m not sure what advantage EXTLINUX has over GRUB or LILO; fewer people know how to administrate it, it always looked more clunky to me, and any additional features are not immedietely obvious to me.

Now the actual installation phase, due to several complications that I shall now describe, took the better part of an afternoon. For this reason, and due to my stupidity in not taking notes, I have some mental fuzziness as to which installation failed where. So please bear with me, and allow some flexibility for my notoriously feeble memory.

During the file copying phase, the GUI elements were completely unresponsive, leading to a lockup of some variety when I attempted to view the release notes. I’m afraid I can’t figure out the reason for this; as the installer is probably I/O-bound, the O(1) scheduler in Linux should give shorter and more frequent timeslices, which should give a more responsive system. But this was not the case. Perhaps some cycles were being wasted somewhere and severely messing up the interactivity detection? Perhaps it was yielding its timeslices for some reason? I don’t have the knowledge to properly answer that question. Regardless, it was stuck to the best of my knowledge. Eventually I just used Alt+SysRq to force a reboot (I’m aware that I should have done an emergency disk sync first, but it just didn’t matter since the data was going to be corrupted anyway).

So I figured that I’d give it a second shot, without reading the release notes during the file copying stage. Same rigmarole as before. Installation went fine. Took a while (although not as long as OpenSUSE, I think), and I wasn’t happy with the lack of a progress indicator when it did post-installation configuration. It just finished the exact time that I decided to take a nap while it worked. The installation having been completed, I rebooted, and got, instead of a bootloader… “err3err4″. Huh? Pressing a key appended “No operating system found” to that cryptic message. Weird, no? So just to relieve my concern that something broke, I installed Slackware (and during which set up my partition table the way I wanted with cfdisk). After my fears had been proven unfounded, I tried the installation again. This time, I left the bootloader with EXTLINUX, and everything worked fine (except for the wrong boot option being chosen as the default).

Post-installation

I briefly had a sense of relief, as things appeared only gone uphill from there, especially compared to the nightmares that I endured with 2.0. I had a window manager after the installation (metacity), and the package manager was a little bit better in terms of telling me what’s going on. So, yeah. That illusion was partially shattered when I rebooted. It seemed to boot in a snap, but then GDM absolutely crawled when starting up. After everything got going, I tried typing. Yep, as I guessed, it was impractically slow.  A quick check with top confirmed my suspicious gathered from my first try with Foresight: my wireless driver was acting funny again and sucking up 100% of my processor, causing major performance problems.

Unfortunately, this made looking at the more interesting technical features, such as PulseAudio, PackageKit, and especially conary, impossible.  However, after my precursory look at PackageKit, I was inclined to think that it was a tad underpowered.

Also, while my wireless card worked fine as with most distros (although in sharp contrast to OpenSUSE, but that’s another review entirely), Foresight configured X.org with the vesa driver, and therefore required me to reconfigure my video card to use nv post-installation. This brought me back to when I first tried Linux on a GeForce 6150 several years ago; the only difference there was that nv didn’t work at all, while nv worked fine with Foresight.

Conclusion

I am pleasantly surprised at how much more usable Foresight 2.0.2.1 is compared to 2.0. I have a window manager post-installation, and the package manager is more informative and less unsettling. However, it still suffers from several issues that crippled it for me.  It does have a nice and well-rounded desktop environment, and given that all of my problems seemed hardware-related in nature, I suggest giving it a shot.  The improvements that have been made make it a better option in my eye.  Maybe it’ll work for you.  If it does, please do give your impressions in the comments.

The Bottom Line

A distro with interesting technical features, but that suffers from severe hardware-related bugs on my system.

I’ve always had a tough time trying to figure out which RSS readers I should use. Plenty of people have suggested Google reader, but I strongly dislike Google Reader’s user interface. There have been a few RSS readers that I kinda/sorta liked, but the user interface would become difficult to use for trying to view more than a few feeds.

Now, my all-time favorite RSS reader was Findory, but that was shut down in November 2007. Just when I thought I should give up my mad chase for a Findory-like RSS reader, I found Feedly. Feedly is a Firefox extension that makes RSS reading more like a magazine. I love it. Feedly can run on all the platforms that Firefox can run on.

Feedly integrates with Google Reader, which is a big plus. It also attempts to see what you like by importing feeds from FriendFeed and so forth. You can read the Feedly features list for more information. Louis Gray has a more detailed review on Feedly.

I love to use Feedly for a quick scan to find the best blog posts of the day, but for more detailed reading, I prefer Liferea. It is available for Linux, FreeBSD, Mac OSX (via Macports), and Windows (via Cygwin).

Liferea is nothing like Feedly or Findory. Liferea’s user interface is somewhat similar to those that I’ve disliked, so my first impression of it was not positive. But then I discovered some interesting features in Liferea that I believe make it a useful RSS reader for me.

Below is a screenshot of Liferea. Click on it to view it full size

If you click on the above thumbnail, you’ll notice that I imported my Feedly recommendations into Liferea. This is where it gets good. I import the Google Reader OPML file, containing feed information from Feedly (remember the Google Reader/Feedly integration). Now I have the power of Feedly’s recommended feeds in Liferea’s user interface.

If you click on the above screenshot, you’ll see a line saying, “Also posted in Bret Taylor’s recommendations”. That makes it even easier to use Feedly’s recommended feeds in Liferea. I can see right away that Bret Taylor likes the TechCrunch blog post. Now, the disadvantage to a desktop RSS reader is that you can’t use the RSS reader easily when you are away from that computer.

If I want to easily read my feeds from another computer, I can temporarily live through the user interface of Google Reader.

Now, this blog post was mainly about me and my difficulties with reading lots of feeds. I have found a good desktop RSS reader, a good RSS reader Firefox extension, and a backup in case I want to read RSS from another computer. What I described here, using Liferea and Feedly together, works for me but might not work for you. I only posted this to help perhaps some folks that are like me and might benefit from this setup.

If you want to, describe in the comments how you handle large amounts of RSS feeds.

I’ve heard a lot of people say it. “There’s just too many choices,” they say. These people are those that are not experienced with Linux, and don’t want to try it because of too many choices. Now, the great thing about open source is that you have choices. But too many choices can bamboozle beginners. Is there a solution that makes Linux easier for beginners, AND keeps the choices open for those that want them?

The first solution that people come up with is to trim down the choices. This obviously doesn’t work. Removing the choices makes it easier for beginners, but like I said above, choices are what makes open source great. Let’s take the example of desktop environments. If Xfce was to be removed, people with older computers wouldn’t benefit. One of the bonuses on Linux is that it can run on a variety of platforms, and that includes older computers.

The second solution is to not have the beginners choose and just give them the default. The choices would still be kept open for people that wanted them, but some looking is necessary to find them. This solution makes the assumption that only the skilled will want the choices. This is true in some cases, but not all. While this solution is an improvement from the previous one, as it keeps the choices, I still don’t like it. I think that there has to be a better solution for beginners to not be so confused by the choices.

The reason that I don’t like the second solution is because it doesn’t really show the other choices that might be a better fit for some of the beginners. I’m going to use desktop environments as an exaple again. I am a KDE fan, but only after I had tried GNOME. Had I not seen the option of KDE, I might be using GNOME or Xfce. I’ve tried all three, and believe that I work best with KDE. Had I not seen it, I might be a little less happy with Linux.

The first two words in the title of this post say “My solution”. So, what solution do I propose? I say that all of the options (or some of them, if there are too many options to display) should be displayed, along with a very short description. This makes the choices easier, and there can be a recommended choice if the user is still having trouble choosing. Why do I believe this is the best? Well, it allows beginners to be exposed to multiple choices, and it helps the beginners choose the choice that is best for him or her.

So, do you have your own solution for beginners facing too many choices? Post it in the comments.

Introduction

Recently, the Twitter clone identi.ca launched. Identi.ca interests me more than the microblogging services Jaiku, Pownce, or Plurk because identi.ca is open source.

Of course, identi.ca has gotten some criticism. At the time of this writing, identi.ca is shockingly featureless. There are also some minor bugs, and it appears to be unstable at times. I have seen PHP errors on the page, timeouts, and identi.ca messages (informally called by the community as dents) not appearing. Identi.ca supporters counter that identi.ca was released early and it is expected to have problems.

But this raises an interesting question. Should a microblogging service open up to the public when it has few features, or when it is fully polished? Open source applications traditionally allow input from the community at a very early stage. But when a product is released to the public, it generates a lot of buzz, which is useful in getting people to use the product. This buzz can go away when people get bored of talking about the product, and it is possible that potential users could become uninterested with the service and not come back when it has new features and bugfixes.

Of course, a lot of open source applications can still be open to the public early and generate the most buzz at the right time. Firefox is one example of this. Even though many people had tried out the Firefox 3 alphas, betas, and release candidates, Firefox still got a lot of buzz during Download Day.

But the thing about Firefox 3 and Download Day was that Firefox generated a lot of buzz by attempting to go for a world record. Attempting something like that is much more difficult for smaller organizations.

But so far, I seem to have overlooked an option. I have only mentioned going public early or staying completely private until the service is, for the lack of a better term, done. There is always the option of the invite-only phase. In this situation, the user base grows as people invite others, but the growth is slower as people have to be able to obtain an invite to be able to use the application. Invite-only testing also gives more control over how many users join, because the application developers control the invites. This means that the growth of the userbase can be slowed or even stopped should scaling problems appear.

Also, I’ll note that in my idea of an invite-only microblogging service, anybody can view the messages of a user, but only those with invites can register accounts and post replies.

Below are the advantages and disadvantages of going public from the start, staying private until the product is finished, and

Going public from the start

Advantages:

• You have more eyes looking out for bugs.
• You have more time to build a community, which is a big part with Twitter clones.

Disadvantages:

• If you are not careful about how you market it, people could see your service as uninteresting as people have already talked about it.
• The community might not come if your service doesn’t have necessary features or is buggy when they tried it.

Staying private until the application is polished

Advantages:

• The application is abundant with features.
• The developers have the ability to radically change the service without worries. There are no users to be affected by the changes.
• If the application is tested properly, bugs are caught quickly and before the bugs annoy any users.

Disadvantages:

• The developers cannot listen to the wishes of the users. This means that time might accidentally be spent on features that the users do not think are completely necessary.
• Usability testing is limited to very few people.

Going with an invite-only testing phase

Advantages:

• Control over the growth of the user base.
• Hype as not everybody can get a first-hand look at the service.
• Benefits involving the community without the negatives of going public early.

Disadvantages:

• Microblogging generally works well when you have a large community. Having a small community reduces the use of microblogging as fewer people can respond to a user. Because of this, the user is given more incentive to invite other people to contribute to the discussion.

Conclusion

None of these paths for microblogging services are perfect. I say that it depends on the developers. If there is a clear plan for marketing the service, going public from the start looks like a good choice. If the developers think it is best to gradually increase the userbase to test see if the application scales up properly, invite-only seems like a good option. If the developers want a grand opening, or some other better reason, staying private until a later stage might work for them.