- Slopegraphs — a nifty Tufte visualization which conveys rank, value, and delta over time. Includes pointers to how to make them, and guidelines for when and how they work. (via Avi Bryant)
- Ask Me Anything: A Technical Lead on the Google+ Team — lots of juicy details about technology and dev process. A couple nifty tricks we do: we use the HTML5 History API to maintain pretty-looking URLs even though it’s an AJAX app (falling back on hash-fragments for older browsers); and we often render our Closure templates server-side so the page renders before any JavaScript is loaded, then the JavaScript finds the right DOM nodes and hooks up event handlers, etc. to make it responsive (as a result, if you’re on a slow connection and you click on stuff really fast, you may notice a lag before it does anything, but luckily most people don’t run into this in practice). (via Nahum Wild)
- scalang (github) — a Scala wrapper that makes it easy to interface with Erlang, so you can use two hipster-compliant built-to-scale technologies in the same project. (via Justin Sheehy)
- Madlib — an open-source library for scalable in-database analytics. It provides data-parallel implementations of mathematical, statistical and machine learning methods for structured and unstructured data. (via Mike Loukides)
"google plus" entries
Top stories: July 18-22, 2011
Google+ is a social backbone, how to fix the patent mess, and programming well with others.
This week on O'Reilly: We examined the deeper and broader implications of Google+, four solutions to the patent quagmire were offered up, and we learned about the "art of mass organizational manipulation."
Google+ is the social backbone
There's a lot more to Google+ than a challenge to Facebook
Google+ is the rapidly growing seed of a web-wide social backbone, and the catalyst for the ultimate uniting of the social graph.
Strata Week: There's money in data sifting
DataSift lands funding, popping the hood on Google Plus, data products for education
In the latest Strata Week: DataSift's access to the Twitter firehose proves compelling for investors, the inner workings of Google Plus are revealed, and contestants crank out apps for education.
Four short links: 12 July 2011
Rare Visualization, Google+ Tech, Scala+Erlang, and In-Database Analytics
The good, the bad, and the ugly of Google Plus
Of all the Google social efforts, Plus has the best chance of making something great.
Google has been dinged for being engineer-driven and not having the design sense of Apple or the agility of Facebook. Plus represents a significant change in how they approach and release product, so it's worth stepping back to see how it stacks up.
Search Notes: Why Google's Social Analytics tools matter
Can we finally track social? Also: New Google UI elements and a look at Plus response
In the latest Search Notes: Google Plus got all the publicity, but Google's Social Analytics tools and new interface elements are also notable.