Month: February 2008

Git is the next Unix

With git, we’ve invented a new world where revision history, checksums, and branches don’t make your filesystem slower: they make it faster. They don’t make your data bigger: they make it smaller. They don’t risk your data integrity; they guarantee integrity. They don’t centralize your data in a big database; they distribute it peer to peer.

Superheroes in Real Life

Wendy Darst, the volunteer coordinator, looks taken aback but gladly puts the superhero to work. Soon the Jade Justice finds himself hip-deep in a supply closet, piling books into a red Radio Flyer wagon. He wheels it back to the lobby, entreating the children to select a text. But the kids seem more interested in peppering him with questions. “So are you a cowboy or something?”

Inspired by comic books, ordinary citizens are putting on masks to fight crime

Dataviz Google Gadgets

Google probably intends to use this technology to visualize custom data. One of the interfaces that will allow you create your own Trendalyzer visualizations is an iGoogle gadget which creates a Flash multi dimensional chart. Another gadget creates an interactive table that supports filtering and grouping, the simple table gadget lets you perform queries, while the heat map gadget “displays a map with color intensities that match given values”. There are also gadgets for pie charts, column charts, bar charts, area charts, image lines, scatter charts, organizational charts, time series.

what is the story here? these would be quite useful if documented properly

Social Graph API

Google’s announcement today of the Social Graph API is a major step in the development of what I’ve called “the Internet Operating System.” In a nutshell, what the Social Graph API does is to lower the barrier to re-use of information that people publish about themselves on the web. It’s the next step towards the vision that Brad Fitzpatrick and David Recordon outlined in Thoughts on the Social Graph.

i have had a FOAF profile since 2003. now it is finally useful for something.

Google, as usual, is not far behind. But they are taking a much different and more open approach to the social graph. Today they are launching the Social Graph API, which will allow third parties to grab social graph data that is produced by every day activities across the web – linking. Who you are (defined by Flickr, blogs, Twitter and other web services) and who you know, can be determined by data included with links, or in other data included on web pages but not shown in a browser. The 2 standards around this, XFN and FOAF, provide explicit and public data to Google (and anyone else that looks) on who you are and who you know. Technically this is pretty simple stuff. Links may contain XFN tags to state a a relationship, such as “me” or “friend.” These are explicit, public statements of relationships and are built in to many web applications, or can simply be added by humans.

bradfitz++