But here goes.

I havent updated this blog for along time. Lets start off with some official stuff.
Things are doing good for devunity. we released a full support for svn, you can now perform commit/update/checkout using devunity, so if you want to create your devunity project from svn checkout you can easily. it works! we will be also redesigning the devunity interface and cutting back on some useless features you guys dont use pure product work. also, we will be releasing a ‘Quick Colab Dev Project’ feature next month that will let you create a quick collaborative project with a quick registration, just input your svn details, user and pass (twitter or facebook also) and it will automatically auto generate your project and give you a unique url to email to dev peeps to start interacting.

Thats all for this ‘Official’ announcements from your host.

Lets talk about twitter. yes twitter. We have been working on a nifty app called talker.co.il for some time. its a full fledge gui for twitter using their api with sophisticated caching and optimization engine for the api calls. We basically built the ONLY framework code for building twitter applications. Will any of you be interested in using our code for that? its based on symfony framework at the bottom with EpiTwitter and oauth for authentication and api work.

Just a quick note to let you know that i’m reading all of your bugs and feature requests. We are handling everything and we’ll upload a fix pretty soon. Thank you faithful users for reporting the issues. keep on!

Cheers,

Alon

I almost forgot to update, we won the Mini-seedcamp competition last month and told nobody! how uncool is that? so hooray! we won!

We are really excited to see people are starting to put more and more code into the community, Share more code! thanks lucas for this wonderful code.

Here are a few notes from the tc50 event:

1. what presenting companies i loved and why
   * Tonchidot for a good product which was not very innovative in technology but innovative in the way they implemented existing technologies in a smart and beautiful way. and a good laugh.
   * Shryk because i saw how they started in the early rehearsals and what they accomplished at the end. amazing work. smart idea and very innovative.
   * Yammer because i use it from the second they released it.
2. what demo pit companies i loved and why
   * Iamnews for the idea that people can control the media in the years to come. and for the people that run it.
3. what details of the event i loved/liked about the event
   * The fact that they disqualified certain companies that attended the event. Good job.
   * I really liked the rehearsals part, i think if companies could get even a week of intensive rehearsals it could be much better.
   * I really liked the after party on each day hosted by different companies. makes you do some layed back networking with the staff and people.
   * The amazing venue. Big, spacious. Easy registrations, for 1000+ event there were no long lines.
   * Tyler,sarah,jenny,jason,tanya for doing an amazing job getting everything to run smoothly as possible for the presenting companies and everybody.
4. what details of the event i would like to see improved
   * More sitting areas
   * Better cab service. maybe do an arrangement with some town car company so people can car-poll back to the hotel and from it.
   * More restrooms.

I’ve been wondering for some time about this as a designer of functional UI i often see that the Title field in most cases is a duplication of the body first line or a summary of the body part. do you think that the title field is dead? why is the Mobile SMS feature does not have a Title field? is it obsolete? Could someone just invent a good function that can summarize a body into a title? Dont know… just a random thought.

There is a great article posted at techcrunchit.com by a guest writer Marc Benioff (CEO of salesforce.com) about the evolution of the web and where are we going. Im only happy to say that devunity fits right inside the future that marc pictures.

Here is a small part of a great article:

Web 1.0: Anyone Can Transact
Web 1.0 was about the emergence of the “killer app” from companies like eBay, Amazon.com, and Google. Although we thought of them as Web sites at the time, they were really amazing applications with a level of functionality, ease of use, and scale that had rarely been seen before by the average consumer. Transactions, not just of goods but of knowledge, became ubiquitous and instant. The efficiency and transparency that was once the domain of global financial markets was now at the command of individual consumers and businesses. Web 1.0 remains a huge driving force today and will continue to be for some time.

Web 2.0: Anyone Can Participate
Web 2.0 is about the next generation of applications on the Internet, featuring user-generated content, collaboration, and community. Anyone can participate in content creation. Posting a viral video on YouTube, tagging photos from a party on Flickr, or writing about politics on Blogspot requires no technical skill, just an Internet connection. Participation changes our idea of content itself: content isn’t fixed at the point of publication—it comes alive. Google’s AdSense became an instant business model in particular for bloggers, and video-sharing sites have rewritten the rules of popular culture and viral content.

Whether you are creating a business around Web 1.0 or 2.0, building massively scalable data centers that are secure, reliable, and highly available is not a job for the faint of heart or shallow of pocket. For companies entering the emerging software as a service industry, the massive time and capital requirements remain a substantial barrier to entry. Moreover, traditional client-server software development is still mired in painful complexity. And the “rewards” for creating a successful application are arduous deployments and maintenance.

Web 3.0: Anyone Can Innovate
Web 3.0 changes all of this by completely disrupting the technology and economics of the traditional software industry. The new rallying cry of Web 3.0 is that anyone can innovate, anywhere. Code is written, collaborated on, debugged, tested, deployed, and run in the cloud. When innovation is untethered from the time and capital constraints of infrastructure, it can truly flourish.

Go read the rest of the article here

Hurry up on those alpha registrations will ya? according to BBC the Large Hadron Collider based in geneva LHC will ‘maybe’ produce mini black holes or unknown material that will ‘maybe’ consume the earth into a hot lump of unknown material or just transport us into limbo land.

The organization - known better by its French acronym, Cern - will operate the collider underground in a 27km-long tunnel near Geneva.

Most physicists believe the risk of a cataclysm lies in the realms of science fiction. But there have been fears about the possibility of a mini-black hole - produced in the collider - swelling so that it gobbles up the Earth.

This Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is a powerful and complicated machine, which will smash together protons at super-fast speeds in a bid to unlock the secrets of the Universe in hope that a catastrophic incident involving a black hole and some scientists running screaming ‘Its happening!’ wont actually happen.

scary stuff, hurry on that alpha signups, we might release our next version in a galaxy far far away.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7468966.stm

With 55 million active members worldwide (as of November 2007), Facebook’s social networking site allows you to create and share your applications with a massive and growing community of users. Amazon Web Services enables you to quickly implement your ideas for Facebook applications by providing an inexpensive, scalable computing platform. Using these infrastructure web services, your Facebook application is able to reach “web-scale” by scaling up and down seamlessly as demand dictates — with pay-as-you-go pricing and no upfront costs.

I didnt know it, but turns out that facebook signed with Amazon and Joynet for facebook application hosting. They give great tutorials about it. in a nutshell:

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We started using the new wordpress blog software just recently, i’m a very oldskool person and i used a very early stage code of wordpress for a long time. when we installed the blog for devunity we did the

 reasonable thing and downloaded the latest version. although its a far better version then what we used with a rock solid code, nifty features and a slick user interface i just dont understand what is the difference between a category and a tag.

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