Nathan explaining some Androidy stuff: “CyanogenMod exists because Android is an open-source mobile operating system – in fact, it is the only commercially viable open-source mobile operating system. When the words “open-source” and “commercially viable” exist in close proximity to each other, I usually start talking too fast and wave my arms excitedly.”

So this is exactly why Google shouldn’t be in the content business. They’re not even any good at the content business (they are good at algorythms and UI).

I noticed Google is using a new (?) layout for forum results. Google has since long identified certain sites as “forums” and given them a different layout in their search results, but this layout is new I believe.

Practically, this means that forums can get 5 links instead of the usual 1 or 2 in a search results page.

More quoting of Dave Winer: “I read the article about this Sidebar Wiki thing and their product manager said it was just like blogging. I suppose if you have no soul it’s just like blogging.“

Agree on this one. Google’s Sidebar Wiki thing is a terrible, terrible idea, and will be overrun with SEO spammers just like their other content wiki initiatives were. It’s not just that Google sucks at content, it’s that content is the wrong place for them to be in the internet ecosystem. They point people to content. They shouldn’t manage content sites themselves. Youtube is an edgecase, this wikithing is way over the edge.

Back to the good old blogging and linking to other blogs. Dave Winer: “the fact that Apple holds up apps and rejects them often because they compete with their own software is to me like buying a coat made of the skins of endangered species. I won’t use iPhone apps for ecological reasons.”

Loosely coupled systems scale more easily and are easier to maintain, but they can cause some unusual error messages when one of the parts of the system is down. I understood this message, but I imagine most users wouldn’t.

The new Amazon Cloudwatch monitoring ($0.015 per hour for each Amazon EC2 instance, so that’s about 10 US$/month per server) graphs in the (free) AWS console for ec2 instances are AWESOME:

(Yea, that’s a strange disk read spike there…) Now I just have to learn to interpret these and understand what’s going on there.

What happens to user behavior when we tweak the site to be slower in various degrees for them? It turns out that over a large gradient of site slowdowns, users in general spend around the same amount of time on Facebook, as measured by session time (user activity up until a certain period of idleness). Logically, page views suffer as a result.