- Mapping Twitter Topic Networks (Pew Internet) — Conversations on Twitter create networks with identifiable contours as people reply to and mention one another in their tweets. These conversational structures differ, depending on the subject and the people driving the conversation. Six structures are regularly observed: divided, unified, fragmented, clustered, and inward and outward hub and spoke structures. These are created as individuals choose whom to reply to or mention in their Twitter messages and the structures tell a story about the nature of the conversation. (via Washington Post)
- yasp — a fully functional web-based assembler development environment, including a real assembler, emulator and debugger. The assembler dialect is a custom which is held very simple so as to keep the learning curve as shallow as possible.
- The 12-Factor App — twelve habits of highly successful web developers, essentially.
- Fast Approximation of Betweenness Centrality through Sampling (PDF) — Betweenness centrality is a fundamental measure in social network analysis, expressing the importance or influence of individual vertices in a network in terms of the fraction of shortest paths that pass through them. Exact computation in large networks is prohibitively expensive and fast approximation algorithms are required in these cases. We present two efficient randomized algorithms for betweenness estimation.
"web app" entries
Next-generation Web apps with full stack JavaScript
Power scalable Web apps with 100% JavaScript
Since its introduction, JavaScript was often seen as a limited object-oriented language that had many “bad” parts. The situation today is almost the opposite.
In competition with Java, C#, and Ruby, JavaScript is developing one of the largest ecosystems for web applications today. Why, as it seems, is a language made for web browsers gaining traction for building next-generation web applications on the server-side too?
In fact, you can see another example of disruptive innovation at work. As Clayton Christensen explained in his innovation theory, affordability and access are important drivers behind technology shifts. While the LAMP stack and its peers with Ruby, Python, Java, and C# provide the foundations for many server-side web applications today, JavaScript ships natively with web browsers, which enables a much larger part of the digital population to experiment with web development. In addition to lower costs of infrastructure and easier installation, companies get access to a larger pool of web developers.
Read more…
Four short links: 21 February 2014
Twitter Clusters, Web Assembly, Modern Web Practices, and Social Network Algorithms
Four short links: 12 July 2013
Name Analysis, Old UIs, Browser Crypto Social Network, and Smart Watch Displays
- How Well Does Name Analysis Work? (Pete Warden) — explanation of how those “turn a name into gender/ethnicity/etc” routines work, and how accurate they are. Age has the weakest correlation with names. There are actually some strong patterns by time of birth, with certain names widely recognized as old-fashioned or trendy, but those tend to be swamped by class and ethnicity-based differences in the popularity of names.
- Old Interfaces — a lazy-scrolling interface to Andy Baio’s collection of faux UIs from movies. (via Andy Baio)
- Pidder — browser-crypto’d social network, address book, messaging, RSS reader, and more.
- What I Learned From Researching Almost Every Single Smart Watch That Has Been Rumoured or Announced (Quartz) — interesting roundup of the different display technologies used in each of the smartwatches.
Four short links: 15 December 2011
Ada Initiative, Ignorance, Social Business, and Web vs Native
- Donate to the Ada Initiative — they’re fundraising for their 2012 activities which include events, activities, and resources for women in open technology and culture. They’ve got my money.
- The Anosognosic’s Dilemma — first part of a series on how the worst kind of ignorance is about your own failings. Even if you are just the most honest, impartial person that you could be, you would still have a problem—namely, when your knowledge or expertise is imperfect, you really don’t know it. Left to your own devices, you just don’t know it. We’re not very good at knowing what we don’t know.
- Values are Features (Clay Johnson) — Google is actively investing in social and philanthropic causes, from combating human trafficking to open government. Yet it stands head and shoulders above other technology companies, and the biggest (Apple) is last in line. I just don’t see most people buying a crapper product without egregiously broken values; unless Apple is conducting human sacrifices at the Cupertino campus and it ends up on 20/20, most everyone will be happy to keep buying their iStuff.
- Apps Are Too Much Like 1990s CDROMs and Not Enough Like The Web (Scott Hanselman) — as a user, more and more, I want to Go Somewhere and get functionality as opposed to Bring Something To Me to get functionality. Managing apps, updates and storage is as pointless as my managing my [tamagotchi].
Four short links: 28 November 2011
Ubicomp Project, Data Volumes, Yahoo! Cocktails, and Fighting Cybercrime
- Twine (Kickstarter) — modular sensors with connectivity, programmable in If This Then That style. (via TechCrunch)
- Small Sample Sizes Lead to High Margins of Error — a reminder that all the stats in the world won’t help you when you don’t have enough data to meaningfully analyse.
- Yahoo! Cocktails — somehow I missed this announcement of a Javascript front-and-back-end dev environment from Yahoo!, which they say will be open sourced 1Q2012. Until then it’s PRware, but I like that people are continuing to find new ways to improve the experience of building web applications. A Jobsian sense of elegance, ease, and perfection does not underly the current web development experience.
- UK Govt To Help Businesses Fight Cybercrime (Guardian) — I view this as a good thing, even though the conspiracy nut in me says that it’s a step along the path that ends with the spy agency committing cybercrime to assist businesses.
What to watch for in mobile web apps
How WebGL, device APIs, and ample experimentation will shape the future of mobile web apps.
Sencha's James Pearce discusses the most promising mobile web app technologies and explains why device APIs could make the web a lot more interesting.
Four short links: 1 August 2011
Visual Illusion, Newspaper Economics, Native Web Apps, and Document Store Query Language
- The Flashed Face Effect Video — your brain is not perfect, and it reduces faces to key details. When they flash by in the periphery of your vision, you perceive them as gross and freakish. I like to start the week by reminding myself how fallible I am. Good preparation for the rest of the week… (via BERG London)
- The Newsonomics of Netflix and the Digital Shift — Netflix changed prices, tilting people toward digital and away from physical. This post argues that the same will happen in newspapers. Imagine 2020, and the always-out-there-question: Will we still have print newspapers? Well, maybe, but imagine how much they’ll cost — $3 for a local daily? — and consumers will compare that to the “cheap” tablet pricing, and decide, just as they doing now are with Netflix, which product to take and which to let go. The print world ends not with a bang, but with price increase after price increase. (via Tim O’Reilly)
- Phonegap — just shipped 1.0 of an HTML5 app platform that allows you to author native applications with web technologies and get access to APIs and app stores.
- UnQL — query language for document store databases, from the creators of CouchDB and SQLite. (via Francisco Reyes)
Four short links: 18 March 2011
Job Titles, Android Copyright, Error Hosting, and Drizzle Ships
- Titles and Promotions (Ben Horowitz) — Andreessen argues that people ask for many things from a company: salary, bonus, stock options, span of control, and titles. Of those, title is by far the cheapest, so it makes sense to give the highest titles possible. The hierarchy should have Presidents, Chiefs, and Senior Executive Vice Presidents. If it makes people feel better, let them feel better. Titles cost nothing. Better yet, when competing for new employees with other companies, using Andreessen’s method you can always outbid the competition in at least one dimension.
- Android’s Linux Copyrights Issue — Google copied 2.5 megabytes of code from more than 700 Linux kernel header files with a homemade program that drops source code comments and some other elements, and daringly claims (in a notice at the start of each generated file) that the extracted material constitutes “no copyrightable information”
- errbit — open source self-hosted error catcher, an open source alternative to HopToad. (via Glen Barnes)
- Drizzle: From What If to What Has (Brian Aker) — fantastic retrospective of lessons learned in the shipping of Drizzle. We have fixed all the warnings in Drizzle. This is something that isn’t sexy work, and the only way it is justified is because cleaning up warnings fixes bugs. If you are starting a new code base let me implore upon on you the necessity of doing this from the beginning. They sweat the dull stuff that matters, not just the shiny sexy featureitis.