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Dare Obasanjo aka Carnage4Life

Truth, Justice and the Pursuit of Excellent Software

Some Thoughts on Facebook Connect and CitySearchNovember 19

Early this morning I found out that the new CitySearch beta site uses Facebook Connect to allow Facebook users to sign-in to the site and bring their social network with them to CitySearch. Below is a screenshot of the sign-in experience

a user can choose sign-in with their Facebook credentials and if so they can bring their social network and profile info from Facebook to CitySearch and there is the option that some of their activities on CitySearch are republished to Facebook.

Here's what it looks like to view my friends page on CitySearch after signing in with my Facebook credentials

From the screenshot, I have five Facebook friends who have also associated their Facebook profile with CitySearch.

A feature like Facebook Connect is something I've always wanted to see implemented but I've always gotten hung up on the details. The first stumbling block is the chicken and egg problem. Connecting your identity on multiple sites is only valuable if all my friends are doing it as well. From the above screenshot only 5 out of my 472 have linked their accounts and three of them are Facebook employee

Live Framework (LiveFX), Is it Microsoft's GData or Something More?November 17

Disclaimer: What follows are my personal impressions from investigating the community technology preview version of the Live Framwork (LiveFX). It is not meant to be an official description of the project from Microsoft, you can find that here.

At Microsoft's recent Professional Developer Conference, a new set of Web services called Live Framework (aka LiveFX) was unveiled. As I've spent the past year working on platforms for user experiences in Windows Live, I actually haven't been keeping up to date with what's going on in developer API land when it comes to programming against our services. So I decided to check out the Live Framework website and find out exactly what was announced.

What is it?

Although the main website is somewhat light on details, I eventually gleaned enough information from the Live Framework SDK documentation on MSDN to conclude that LiveFX consists of the following pieces

1. A Resource Model: A set of RESTful APIs for interacting with Live Mesh and Windows Live data.

Some Thoughts on Walled Gardens and Social Operating SystemsNovember 13

About a year ago I wrote up a definition of a social operating system in my post The Difference between a Social Network Site, a Social Graph Application and a Social OS which I think is worth revisiting today. In that post I defined a Social OS as

Social Operating System: These are a subset of social networking sites. In fact, the only application in this category today is Facebook.  Before you use your computer, you have to boot your operating system and every interaction with your PC goes through the OS. However instead of interacting directly with the OS, most of the time you interact with applications written on top of the OS. Similarly a Social OS is the primary application you use for interacting with your social circles on the Web. All your social interactions whether they be hanging out, chatting, playing games, watching movies, listening to music, engaging in private gossip or public conversations occurs within this context. This flexibilty is enabled by the fact that the Social OS is a platform that enables one to build various social graph applications on top of it.

In retrospect, the fundamental flaw with this definition is that it encourages services that want to become social operating sy

Coming Soon: Updated Windows Live Online ServicesNovember 13

From the Microsoft press release Microsoft Introduces Updated Windows Live Service we learn

REDMOND, Wash. — Nov. 12, 2008 — Microsoft Corp. today announced the next generation of Windows Live, an integrated set of online services that make it easier and more fun for consumers to communicate and share with the people they care about most. The new generation of Windows Live includes updated experiences for photo sharing, e-mail, instant messaging, as well as integration with multiple third-party sites. The release also includes Windows Live Essentials, free downloadable software that enhances consumers’ Windows experience by helping them simplify and enjoy digital content scattered across their PC, phone and on Web sites. For more information about windows live go to http://www.windowslive.com.

Consumers today are creating online content and sharing it in many places across the Web. To help make is simple for the more than 460 million Windows Live customers to keep their friends up to date, Microsoft is collaborating with leading companies including Flickr, LinkedIn Corp., Pandora Media Inc., Photobucket Inc., Twitter, WordPress and Yelp Inc. to integrate activities on third-party sites into Windows Live through a new profile and What’s New feed. The new Windows Live also gives consumers the

In-Memory Caching: Why We Can't Just Trust the Database to get it RightNovember 9

I remember taking an operating systems class in college and marveling at the fact that operating system design seemed less about elegant engineering and more about [what I viewed at the time as] performance hacks. I saw a similar sentiment recently captured by Eric Florenzano in his post It's Caches All the Way Down where he starts describing how a computer works to a friend and ends up talking about the various layers of caching from CPU registers to L2  caches to RAM and so on.

At the end of his post Eric Florenzano asks the following question I've often heard at work and in developer forums like programming.reddit

That's what struck me. When you come down to it, computers are just a waterfall of different caches, with systems that determine what piece of data goes where and when. For the most part, in user space, we don't care about much of that either. When writing a web application or even a desktop application, we don't much care whether a bit is in the register, the L1 or L2 cache, RAM, or if it's being swapped to disk. We just care that whatever system is managing that data, it's doing the best it can to make our application fast.

But then another thing struck me. Most web developers DO have to worry about the cache. We do it every day. Whether you're using memcached or velocity or some other caching sys