onfocus

A peek behind the curtain at Facebook with an anonymous FB developer.

"...Brad's work was altogether more messy and funny and human and passionate and complicated, just like the man himself. I can offer no more succinct summation of the man than that he was a good man and a good friend, profoundly funny and profoundly kind." Anil shares some memories of Brad.

"...the hero is the most damaging person on a team, particularly on a team that’s supposed to be writing high-availability or otherwise mission-critical software." Interesting analysis of team dynamics. [via jessamyn]

"One user following another in social media is analogous to one page linking to another on the Web. Both are a form of recommendation." Amit Singhal on how Google ranks Tweets for real-time search.

Rules for PR folks who want to work with bloggers. "FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE means FOR IMMEDIATE DELETE."

Hey, blogs still exist. What do you know? This is a great list, and a good reminder that the best of the web is still delivered in chunks longer than 140 characters.

It'd be great to hear her speak and the W+K space is cool.

"The Federal Trade Commission will try to regulate blogging for the first time, requiring writers on the Web to clearly disclose any freebies or payments they get from companies for reviewing their products." I wonder how many people they have dedicated to this. Because they're going to need more.

Search for icons or browse icon sets they've indexed.

Cell phone nostalgia! I had the Ericsson S710a right before the iPhone, and it's true that the camera was better and Internet tethering just worked. I'm tempted by a Google phone now too just to show my unhappiness with the iPhone App Store. It'll be interesting to see how this goes.

J.D. gets close to the TV media machine and finds everything a bit too scripted. It's a good reminder of one of the reasons many folks started writing weblogs.

I honestly hope Merlin turns his blog into a treatise on creativity through Steely Dan anecdotes.

Anil offers a high-level view of Apple's current developer-relation woes. He blames their culture of secrecy.

Steven Frank is letting go of his iPhone until the Apple fixes serious problems with the app store.

This is great. I'd love to see more people aggregating tweets and offering them outside of the Twittersphere.

"...there’s a nearly infinite universe of things you might wish to express that simply can’t fit into 140 characters. It's not that the Twitter form forces triviality upon us; it's possible to be creative and expressive within Twitter’s narrow constraints. But the form is by definition limited. Haiku is a wonderful poetic form, but most of us wouldn’t choose to adopt it for all of our verse." [via sippey]

Greenwald on Cronkite, Russert, Halberstam, Lapham, Hunter Thompson, and journalists as celebrities.

Nice summary of Fuelly with a list of things to do once you sign up. I bet interest increases directly with gas prices.

Google's take on YSlow--Yahoo's excellent website performance analyzer. Not as polished as YSlow, but looks promising and includes some analysis that YSlow doesn't cover such as CSS efficiency and image compression.

Ryan Tate on Oakland bloggers: "...I often found that bloggers were the only other writers in the room at certain city council committee meetings and at certain community events. They tended to be the sort of persistently-involved residents newspapermen often refer to as 'gadflies' — deeply, obsessively concerned about issues large and infinitesimal in the communities where they lived."

"They certainly don't make SF book jackets like they used to." Fun post about classic Penguin book covers. I enjoyed browsing through the Penguin Covers on Flickr as well, and I recommend Penguin By Design by Phil Baines for even more design inspiration.

Eric Johnson covered on a Nintendo. He mimicked the guitar tones (including harmonics) well. I can almost picture the side-scrolling shooting spree this could back. [via waxy]

Lifehacker brings down the hammer on commenters. Interesting to see what will earn someone an instant ban from their site; it's a catalog of bad online behavior.

Bruce Sterling is taking over as editor of Cool Tools. Neat.

"Open, decentralized micropublishing." A distributed Twitter sounds fine, but don't we already have this in the form of "weblogs" and "newsreaders"--and without the 140 character restraint?!

Matt's new cycling blog.

Nice way to let people browse extremely large photos with the Google Maps API.

This is a nightmare. But it's a good reminder to change your passwords if they're simple dictionary words.

Blog by a film location scout with great pictures of New York City. [via MeFi]

This tutorial shows how you can use Google as a CDN for components of your site. (If the requests will be limited to under 650,000/day.) [via hackszine]

Handy list of world currency symbols.

This is a nice theme for Movable Type that doesn't ship with MT4.

Neat idea for finding a meeting spot. [via kottke]

The word lifestream makes me gag, but this is interesting anyway. A self-hosted, PHP, social stuffs aggregator. [via Hackszine]

Funny idea and video from Sara Silverman. (nsfw)