Meet Firestatus

... a status update utility for multiple social networks. So, what 's this all about? The story goes like this: You see a cool page on the net and you 'd like to share it with your friends or you just want to update your status, the "Good morning, I just woke up" kind of twit. But your friends don't seem to have reached a consensus about THE social network. So, some of them use facebook, some other use twitter, some use friendfeed and you go on and on and on. What do you do to share the cool link with all of your friends (assuming that you have accounts in all of their networks)? You go to each and every social network page and write the same text again and again ? No. You need a client that can communicate with as many networks as possible and send the update to all. I certainly had that need. However the few clients I had seen didn't do the job exactly as I had imagined. My main problem is that even with multi-network clients I have to write the update and send it separately to each network. Why can't I write the text once and send it to all networks with just one click ? It can't be that difficult. Why don't we create such a client as a firefox extension (we are top engineers after all) ? So I discussed the idea with my friends, XUL and Javascript experts, Panagiotis and Dionysios (the best way to solve a problem is to find the people to solve it for you :-)) and here it is. It took us several weeks because we couldn't dedicate much time to the project but in the process we added friendfeed (instead of only twitter and facebook) and Panagiotis added the notification functionality (it 's a good thing to see what your friends are doing on twitter :-). So now we are waiting for your feedback and we are open to suggestions. We plan to add features like the unread notifications list and of course more networks like linkedin, del.icio.us, etc. Every network with a public API is a candidate. And don't forget to leave a (positive :-)) review here.

What I read and liked on 2008-09-23

Why Isn’t Facebook Making More Money? (Hint: Advertiser Value and User Value Are Not Aligned) - Publishing 2.0
Apart from finding some old friends from high school, I couldn't find any real value to facebook.

What I read and liked on 2008-08-31

Interoperability Happens - The Never-Ending Debate of Specialist v. Generalist

What I read and liked on 2008-08-14

Interoperability Happens - From the "You Must Be Trolling for Hits" Department...

Experience vs Knowledge. They both matter. One of the arguments in the article is that applying in production, the brand new language that you just learned, needs acquiring some experience with it first. I have to add that even picking the next language to study will be greatly helped by experience, otherwise you might end up waisting time learning useless things

Interoperability Happens - More Thoughts on Architects and Architecture

Are you a software architect or a software engineer? Someone that
designs a software system takes into account restrictions like budget,
time schedules and dealines, available staff etc. In that sense his job
is not strictly technical but it also has an economics aspect.
Therefore the word "engineering" seems more appropriate. At least, in
my language (Greek) the word architect has an artistic essence while
the engineer is more technical-economics oriented.

What I read and liked on 2008-07-16

Things I learnt during, and about, my PhD
I couldn't agree more.

What I read and liked on 2008-07-16

So You Say You Want to Kill XML....
An interesting and more cool-headed approach to the Protocol Buffers open-sourcing

JHUG Java Tech Day 07-06-2008

I am too lazy to write a detailed report for the event. Anyway, Paris already did it and Dionysios will certainly write about it soon. I just want to once again declare my willingness to give Netbeans a try (and once again I won't find the time to do it :-)) after the Netbeans presentation by Mikhail Kondratyev. The javascript editor, Mercurial support and the project groups (I really miss them in Eclipse) are of particular interest to me.

I will keep one quote from Kirk Pepperdine 's talk and that is:

"Databases cannot scale"

His presentation was very interesting but I have various db issues so this particular quote got stuck in my mind.

The Jbossians gave very vivid and enjoyable talks. Jboss 5 is something that we 've been expecting for quite some time and another feature set presentation just made us even more anxious, so Jboss guys, get it out soon! The event finished with Jboss cache and despite the fact that I haven't used it before, Manik 's presentation managed to keep my interest.

Ok, now that I finally did my lazy man 's report I cannot close without saying a good word about the lunch break that was really great. Hungry developer cannot code (Slightly altered version of a Greek proverb).