What it does well

If you’re familiar with other social networks, you might say that Buzz is Friendfeed and Twitter integrated into Gmail.  It can pull in content from various sources, like your blog, your Twitter feed, your Flickr or Picasa photos, and display them to all of your followers.  It also handles discussions very well.  Once you participate in a conversation by commenting on a friend’s buzz or “liking” a buzz, further comments will push that buzz into your Gmail inbox.  If you’re like me, that helps you keep track of these comments quickly and painlessly.  For this reason, Buzz is brilliant.

What it doesn’t do

Buzz should not be confused for an aggregator like Google Reader.  It will not pull in photos of your Flickr contacts for your perusal.  It won’t pull in the tweets of people that you follow.  If you happen to be following someone in Buzz who has linked their account to their Flickr account, then you’ll get to see photos, but otherwise, the only photos you’ll see there are your own.  Here’s why that’s a bit of a problem: if Google wants us to maintain our social relationships in Buzz, they need to provide a way for it to act like a Twitter reader and a Flickr browser.  I have existing relationships on those sites that I don’t want to lose just because I want the convenience of having Buzz in my inbox.  As it is, if I’m visiting Twitter and Flickr anyway, why would I want the extra hassle of maintaining Buzz?

Why Buzz is bad

I have linked my Twitter and Flickr accounts and this very blog into Buzz.  For the 40 people who follow me in Buzz, they’ll see my status posts, photos and blog entries show up in Buzz.  Because the commenting is good (better than Twitter), they may be tempted to respond to me there.  When you comment on one of my photos in Buzz, that comment does not end up on Flickr (and vice-versa).  The same goes with Twitter.  By commenting in Buzz, you’re removing yourself from the conversation on those other sites (my own blog included) and diminishing the value of my Flickr page, my Twitter feed and my personal blog.

How it’s worse than Twitter

I said that Buzz has better support for conversations than Twitter.  This is true for most of the people I follow.  Try following a celebrity in Buzz and you’ll see a different story.  I followed Felicia Day and even though she only has 1000 followers (compared to 1.7 million followers in Twitter), there are constantly comments on the things she writes and posts (or are posted for her from other services).  You can mute a post so that they won’t keep floating to the top and making your buzz feed useless, but I don’t want to do that for every post that a celebrity writes.  I am interested in their thoughts, not the thoughts of their droves of commenters.  In its current form, Buzz is a big failure for following people who reach more than a handful of followers.

All in all, it’s an interesting experiment.  In a few weeks, it may go the way of Google Wave, but I don’t think it will.  Like Google Talk, this is probably around to stay, for better or worse.

Here are some of the things that we touched on:

• Flash sucks
• Genuine fan interaction is critical
• Go where the people are (Facebook, MySpace, etc.)
• But bring them back to your site (don’t let Facebook own your relationships with the fans)
• Having a not-so-great site is better than having no site.

The other panelists were:

• Larry Mizell, 206 Proof
• Brenden Mulligan, Artist Data
• Scott Porad, Cheezeburger Network
• Steve Mack (Moderator), Lux Media

• It took nine and a half months to tweet the entire book.
• I tweeted one paragraph every hour between 8AM and 8PM CST every Monday through Friday. The length of those paragraphs were entirely up to Melville.
• It took 12,849 updates to tell the whole story.  That’s an average 64 updates per day (I said 45 on Twitter but I was wrong).
• I originally thought it would take me about a month or two, but I was oh-so-wrong.
  
• The book was published 158 years ago.  It took that long for someone to invent a way that I could handle reading it.
• I actually enjoyed reading it in these small snippets.  Sometimes it was hard to tell what was going on, but you also ended up with some really hilarious non-sequiturs.
• A nearly identical project cropped up a couple of weeks ago by someone with no knowledge of my project.  I feel bad that I preempted his (forgive me if that is the wrong pronoun) idea.  Perhaps all the people who missed my tweeting could get that going again.
• As of the last line of the book, the twitter account had 163 followers.  After all the buzz created by the completion of Moby Dick, I now have almost 120 more followers than that (at the time of writing).
• I plan to begin the next book on Monday, May 18th (my birthday!). You can vote on which book I should tweet next over at this handy dandy little poll: http://answers.polldaddy.com/poll/1618811/

Subject: Your Account Was Banned
From: Capossela Swanger

This is a joke

Out the way they did if it wouldn’t be i met max had cut down one of the enemy in a skirmish with up. Rutherford was gone, and i may as well say prairie it is not decent to call on a man as she fireescapes. To no one, for quite a while, did.

<?php
    define("WIN", true);
    define("FAIL", false);
?>

Just use those constants religiously everywhere in your code. No doubt, anyone to come after you will wonder what you were smoking.

1. Changed the sources.list file to point to the Lenny repository and used ‘apt-get -d dist-upgrade’ to download all of the packages before the time I was scheduled to shut the web server off.
2. Ran ‘apt-get dist-upgrade’.
3. Cursed.
4. Tried various things to get the packages to work. ‘apt-get -f install’ brought me various levels of success. Some packages just reported failure, but without explanation.
5. Found out that upgrading straight from Sarge to Lenny is not necessarily a good idea.
6. No network services, including SSH will start.  My existing SSH connection is my lifeline.
7. Changed the sources.list file to point to Etch.  Ran the upgrade again.
8. Some packages fail, like “subversion” so I remove them, planning to reinstall when the upgrade was done.
9. Some more packages fail and hold up any installs/removals/upgrades that I attempt.  I discover that in the install scripts that come with Debian packages, they are set to fail silently, not giving you any error messages.  If you go to /var/lib/dpkg/info/, you’ll find that every package has scripts with extensions like “.postinst”.  If one of these fails during installation, it’ll just crap out.  Go in and change “#!/bin/sh -e” to #!/bin/sh” or remove the line that says “set -e”.  The next time you run the install, you’ll find out exactly what is going wrong and you should be able to fix it.
10. Get almost everything to work properly.  A few packages are still being jerks, but they aren’t holding anything up, so I switch back to the Lenny repository.
11. Run dist-upgrade one more time.
12. Everything works perfectly.
13. Except one thing: In Sarge, I used php4-sybase and the sybase_ functions to connect to both Sybase and MSSQL servers in PHP.  This simply would not work in Lenny and PHP5.  In fact, it errored out saying that it couldn’t find sybase_connect(), even though Debian insisted that php5-sybase was installed.  It also would not install php5-mssql, as it said php5-sybase was what you had to use.  On a whim, I tried changing to the mssql_ functions in PHP and it worked pefectly.  Weird.  The actual database functions were only called in abstraction through PEAR::DB, though, so a few database connection settings had to be changed in some include files and then everything switched over smoothly.

The moral of the story?  Keep your Linux installs up to date or the eventual necessary upgrades are going to be a pain.

Make SSH connections with PHP

Yesterday, after doing a proof of concept, I packed it into a Scriptaculous extension so that it would be as portable as possible.  Since it was already in a nice and neat little script, I decided to release it so that it might be of use to everyone else.

Autocompleter.Gears

For these examples, we’ll assume that I’m in a folder that contains the folder that this domain’s files are in. First, we’ll want to make a backup of my files and then delete everything inside the subfolder for the domain. You can skip this if you’re doing a fresh install.

tar czvf dancoulter.com.tar.gz dancoulter.com
rm -rf dancoulter.com/*

Next, check out the Subversion “tag” that corresponds to the version of WordPress you were using. I was using 2.2, so it looks like this:

svn co http://svn.automattic.com/wordpress/tags/2.2/ dancoulter.com/

Now, if you have made a backup of your files (if you’ve made any changes to your theme, or uploaded any files or plugins, you definitely need to do this), simply unzip that backup file you made before.

tar xzf dancoulter.com.tar.gz

If you look at your WordPress site now, you’ll see that it should be working normally.

Now to upgrade (this is the only step you’ll need to do to upgrade files from now on), just point your Subversion “working copy” to the new “tag”. I was upgrading from 2.2 to 2.2.1, so I just ran this command from the ssh prompt.

svn switch http://svn.automattic.com/wordpress/tags/2.2.1/ dancoulter.com/