TwitterContacts is just a simple application that I built in a few nights. It’s purpose is to provide an option to check out which of the people who you are following on Twitter are not following you. Simple, clear, easy and all-in-one-page.

Someone asked me about the real value contributed by this application. Apart from the purpose, I think the real value is that you can get the code here (GPL). Anyway, doing this was just a pastime.

I gotta say, I had thought this before. Google provides a new way to enhance 404 pages. If our visitors get a not found error, we can give them some alternatives using a simple Google snippet. This code provides the closest match (for the URL) and other things to try such as search into the site. This is useful information designed to help them find the information the users need.

You can read more about it on the Official Google Webmaster Blog.

Has Google acquired Digg for 200 millions dollars? Michael Arrington has written a post on TechCrunch saying that both companies have reached an agreement for around 200 millions dollars. The popular social bookmarking site would become part of Google News property.

Plurk is a new microblogging based application. It lets to publish from texts (140 characters) to multimedia files such as pictures and videos. The most revolutionary feature that Plurk brings to us is the original timeline. When you take up using it, it can be a bit confusing, but you can get used quickly. I like how the system let the user knows new updates as well. I think Plurk could be a nice alternative to Twitter, but I have some questions:

• Why don’t they make a search engine for users? When you start using Plurk, it’s complicated to find friends
• Why don’t they let upload ours own files directly onto the system?

You can follow me on http://plurk.com/user/alfonsojimenez

Many people speak about the future of web applications, but I would like to stop and comment on the present. I have been observing a curious phenomenon throughout the recent years. I have seen a backwards movement as far as the way of the social communications on the Internet are concerned. For example, I can spot similarities between Twitter and the IRC, which is still in use, but not like few years ago. The first difference that I have noticed is the transmission time. The communication by IRC is synchronous, whilst the communication on Twitter is unsynchronous.

An unsynchronous communication has some advantages. The main advantage is probably the null intrusivity. An unsynchronous method is not intrusive. We can find an analogous example on the use of phone or email. When someone phones you, you have to stop what you are doing in order to answer the call. On the other hand, if someone sends you an email you can read it whenever you like. Obviously the priority plays an important role, for example if you have something urgent to say, an unsynchronous method is not the most appropriate way.

Another advantage of an unsynchronous method is the possibility of reading (or listening, or watching) a document wherever and whenever you like. It is not possible to do this using a synchronous method.

In my opinion, this regressive trend is an intelligent movement.

Since I started to build YouAre.com I knew that the scalability was an important matter to solve. Sometimes the scalability is more important for your pocket and for the success of your startup than originally thought. According to Google, a slow performance could cost you 20% of your revenue. If you are starting a new company, you ought to know that any savings in servers can accelerate the growth of your company. These costs include hardware, software, human resources and time (for many people the most appreciated resource). Apart from the monetary costs, it’s proved that half a second delay in page load time can kill a user’s satisfaction.

The scalability is a relative problem which depends on many things: the technology used, the fault tolerance and the availability of programming staff. Many people think that scalability=performance, and they are wrong as there are more aspects to be considered. For me, the scalability is to maintain the balance between the resources and the number of users, when the size of the problem increases. The size of the problem is the growth of the number of users and the resources. A graphic which represents a good scalability could be the following:

We can appreciate how well the growth of users (n) have been solved. The amount of required resources grows logarithmically.

Some good points for scalability that should be considered:

• Good database design: Normalize the database, select a suitable DBMS, consider the users’ necessities, …
• Search engines: Use a search engine for your application. Lucene is a very high-performance text search engine library. You can also consider Nutch or Solr, both based in Lucene but oriented to web applications. If you are finding some engine more basic take a look at Sphinx.
• The Keepalive problem: Enabling Keepalive for images and external files (such as CSS) is very good for clients, but bad for servers. Keeping Keepalive off we reduce a lot of the memory of the server. A good solution is to have separate images in a different server, getting the added benefit of higher browser concurrency with multiple hostnames (it will let you to load images in parallel). In YouAre, we are using Amazon Simple Storage Service to store our images.
• Cache: Cache as much of your dynamic content as possible Memcache could be a great option.
• Take care of your code: Take care of your code and it will take care of you
• Use GNU/Linux: GNU/Linux uses spare memory to cache files on disk. This means much faster I/O.

More information | Rico Mariani
More information | Shiflett
More information | No VC required

One reason I lost interest in Facebook was having hundreds of Facebook application invitations on my board. Although I must admit that at first I received invitations for interesting applications, but now it just pisses me off. Eventually my homepage was being flooded of useless, boring and repeated applications. I sincerely prefered Facebook when these types of applications were not present. Even though it was a great idea, but now Facebook probably has an interface problem that they don’t know how to solve. Today surfing the web, I have found a solution - a simple ignore all bookmark for Facebook.

Really it’s just a simple Javascript code, and when running it, it selects the ignore options on every request, apart from friend requests, group invites and event notifications. You can access this at http://www.ignoreall.com/.

The Spanish Ministery of Health and the Andalusian School of Public Health have developed a robot called Robin who is able to answer your questions about sexuality (diseases, information for children, …) and alcohol (risks, effects, suggests, …) through MSN Messenger. His answers can include graphics and other resources. You can add Robin at robin@msc.es. Robin’s main goal is providing information to young people about sex and alcohol. It’s a curious way of giving health information to young people. Robin uses a familiar language for boys and girls between 12 and 17 years old.

Link | El País

I can’t believe it. A 28-year-old french guy called Arash Derambarsh has been elected for President of Facebook by a non-official third party application. The story started when Derambarsh ran the application and started to invite his friends creating an official program for his campaign. When the elections were finished, Derambarsh received more than 9,000 votes and it converted him in the “first president of Facebook”. At the beginning, using this information Derambarsh got coverage with some French media. But the story raised up when it was covered by big TV channels and traditionnal media like TF1, Le Point, L’express, …
Derambarsh has become a star in France, being invited to talk about his presidency in some programs and gettings his own page in Wikipedia. We can check out his electoral program in FacebookPresident. He pledges to promote goodwill and tolerance among the three world monotheistic Faiths (Christian, Jewish and Muslim), to fight against illiteracy and analphabetism and to promote the French culture around the world.

Link | Techcrunch

I can understand Wikia would have errors. I can understand that it’s only an alpha version. I can understand I cannot search words in Spanish (with accents and ñ). But I can’t understand how they can make something like this public.