http://breasy.com/blog Musings on design and technology Mon, 07 Jul 2008 19:23:57 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en A friend of mine recently decided to tidy up her Facebook profile information. She got to the relationships section and thought to herself, "you know what? this is nobody's business. I don't want to broadcast this to everyone." She saw a message there that said "Leave status ... http://breasy.com/blog/2008/07/08/is-facebook-stirring-up-trouble/ A post on Knowing and Doing inspired me to check out Wordle. Wordle generates a good looking jumble of words for any text you paste in. The more often a word is used, the larger it appears. I did a 'select all' on my blog's front page ... http://breasy.com/blog/2008/06/18/what-i-write-about/ It's been 4 months since I last decided to write here at Udi's Spot. Hard to believe. The main reason I've dropped off the blogging planet is that a few months ago I moved down to Buenos Aires. You could say that I outsourced myself. ... http://breasy.com/blog/2008/04/01/outsourced-argentina/ Call me crazy, but perhaps Google's not-so-unofficial corporate motto, "don't be evil", isn't such a great thing to aspire to. I sincerely believe in their good intentions, but maybe this was the wrong way to state them. I'm reminded of this classic Chris Rock bit: You know ... http://breasy.com/blog/2007/12/27/of-course-you-shouldnt-be-evil/ Danah Boyd has written an awesome post about how inefficiency and unreliability can actually be beneficial in certain social situations. Think about all of the interesting interactions that happen while people are waiting for drinks at a crowded bar. She also asked if anyone could think of any ... http://breasy.com/blog/2007/12/15/deliberate-inefficiencies/ Recently my father shared an interesting story from Slashdot with me about a man that pays other people to argue with him on Amazon's Mechanical Turk. The Mechanical Turk is a place where you can offer up money in exchange for the performance of a task. Typically it's ... http://breasy.com/blog/2007/12/12/quick-cheap-usability-testing-with-amazons-mechanical-turk/ Joshua Porter asks the question, "Did the Long Tail beget social design?" I think the answer is absolutely yes. Here's what Joshua had to say Netflix rents most of its movies from the catalog of past movies, not from the current list of blockbusters. Same with Amazon and books, ... http://breasy.com/blog/2007/12/04/the-long-tail-did-indeed-beget-social-design/ It seems like the Facebook engineers add another javascript and css file to their pages with every new feature. As of today, viewing the Facebook homepage loads 36 javascript files from Facebook and 4 more from advertisers. In addition to these 40 files, there are 12 css files. ... http://breasy.com/blog/2007/11/22/facebook-is-slow-but-theres-an-easy-fix/ Last night I went with a few friends to Yoshi's in Oakland to see Ukulele player Jake Shimabukuro put on a sold out show. This guy is a Ukulele player. He's outrageously talented, but he's still a Ukulele player. I'll bet most people in the Bay Area ... http://breasy.com/blog/2007/11/09/jake-shimabukuro-and-the-exploding-niche/ Nothing ground-breaking here, but I wish someone had told me about these things sooner. Maybe these will help some of you out. Firefox ctrl+1 . . . ctrl+n will switch to that specific tab. ... http://breasy.com/blog/2007/10/30/random-tips-tools-nerd-alert/