Comments by indiekid
Reply | Original | Permalink | TweetStan, great writeup.
This is Matt, one of the Founders of (the original) Socialthing. One thing to note is that while we currently only support installation via the "bar", that will be changing. Our plan is to be able to peel away any feature into its own distinct widget. Hope that helps!
Reply | Original | Permalink | TweetLouis, they're actually already using Facebook Connect in iPhoto (just not in the typical "Connect" button experience).
When you click on the "F" in the toolbar to upload a picture to Facebook, it's using the Facebook Connect product to actually make the authentication happen between iPhoto and Facebook.
Just wanted to clarify...
Reply | Original | Permalink | TweetSo I totally get where you're coming from, Micah, but truthfully, my changing from @indiekid to @mattgalligan was because I wanted to get away from the nickname. Everyone in real life calls me Matt. That's my name. And as a result, I wanted people to call me "Matt" online too. Simple as that.
The "real name" as your identity thing really works well on Facebook, and I think that the more people are using services like that, the more the same principles will start to leak into other places.
Reply | Original | Permalink | TweetThis is VERY exciting…glad to see more attention being brought to Boulder…congrats to the ID and Automattic guys!
Reply | Original | Permalink | TweetSo I'd just like to chime in as an API user. While Socialthing! uses the authenticated API and we're not at all affected by this, we have similar restrictions at other sites. Up until now, Twitter had really been an anomaly when it comes to how their API is served up (in both authenticated and unauthenticated calls. First off, almost every single other site out there with a popular API has rate limiting on the IP level. Yeah, it sucks, but there's really not many other ways of doing it until push comes to pass. Gnip is a solution for sure, but those same API providers need to plug into Gnip for it to happen.
Twitter is just coming to a point where they're realizing that they can't easily sustain their previous models. Anyone that is currently using unauthenticated calls will soon be able to pull from Gnip to be able to optimize their calls (and likely, be more accurate than they were before).
APIs are a tough game...both on the consumer and the producer level. Twitter understands that their developers are their lifeblood, that's why they're working hard to improve the service for all. I think it's safe to say that the reason they're bumping up the auth'ed calls, and down the unauth'ed calls is because more people actually interact with services that are authenticated. Think Twhirl, Twitterrific, Socialthing!, etc. Now, the non-authenticated services are probably pulling far more data at a much larger detriment to Twitter, but most of the activity isn't going on with those places. This move is a very positive thing for the API as a whole, and you can rest assured that they will likely have other solutions for folks that simply can't auth the API going forward.
Great post, Louis
Reply | Original | Permalink | TweetAndy, thanks for the comment for sure!
Louis, just thought I'd let you know that 2.0 is up and running, so why don't you come on back and check it out...much more stable, put some old services back in and tossed a few new features in there while we were at it. Check out the blog post describing everything here:
Reply | Original | Permalink | TweetGreg, terribly sorry it's taken us so long to comment on this. I'm one of the founders of Socialthing! and I just want to let you know we're far from dead and gone. We've got a good loyal userbase, but most importantly, for the past two months we've been hard at work on our massively revamped version 2.0. It's now almost done, and it will really change the way people think about our service. I hope once it's out, you get a chance to check it out and let us know what you think...we'd really love to hear what you think!
Reply | Original | Permalink | TweetHey J. Phil and Louis...we had to disable them simply because of the sheer number of calls we were sending them.
We call the services in a very different way than FriendFeed and others, mainly because our goal isn't just to aggregate you and your profiles, but rather, aggregate your friends on that service. The end result is a single dashboard with all of your friends' activity elsewhere.
What this does, is cause a whole lot of extra calls that we have to make to the services. Some of the APIs that we call are prepared for this, and deliver most all of that information in a single, or maybe two calls. However, in the case of del.icio.us, Digg, Last.fm and YouTube, the process was like this:
1 call for your activities
1 call for your friends list
x calls for x friendsIn a very short period of time, we might call a service like Digg 102 times in 1 second (let's say, if you had 100 friends).
To remedy this, we've worked with the services to find alternative ways of calling them, as well as have completely re-written our architecture and ways that we call the services from our end. When we launch 2.0, it will reflect this, and all of those services will be added back in immediately. The new infrastructure also allows for us to call RSS based sites and services, as well as opens us up to many other services. We're expecting to launch the 2.0 features very soon (I can't give a specific date, but I can say that we're almost done testing, and pretty much just awaiting deployment now)
I hope that could answer a few of your questions.
