Radio UserLand Notes

John Battelle: "The time is right for me-centric community - a way for you to get the information and connections you want, without giving up control of your information. Yahoo! 360° lets you control not just what you see but what others can see about you."

Roland Tanglao: "Yahoo! 360 looks less lame than MSN Spaces was at the start."

Marc Cantor: "No they didn't get completely right- but it does successfully combine these two latest technology aspects - which each have been hailed as new 'spaces' (marketplaces, trends, what have you.)"

Russell Beattie: "Though I think the service is good, I'd be lying if I said I thought it was perfect. First, I wish there was more stress on *blogging*, as right now it seems more focused on networking and sharing."

Tristan Louis: "While some integration points are pretty solid (Yahoo! messenger, Yahoo! Launch, Yahoo! local, and the Yahoo! photo service seem well integrated), others are major misses. For example, why is it that this service has a different mailbox than my already existing Yahoo! mailbox?"

Upstreaming improvements are finally in private beta. I've been using them for nearly three straight days with fantastic results. We modified existing scripts, rewrote some logic and allowed the assignment of different scan intervals for folder types.

A great example is the weblog archive, a folder structure who's likelihood of changing decreases as time passes. In the beta, it's scanned once a day instead of once every 10 seconds (the default).

[Jake Savin](http://jakesavin.com), UserLand's lead developer, has pushed [Patrick](http://patrick.userland.com) to refactor, profile and debug instead of rewrite. Patrick took that to heart and with help from Jake, wrote the new logic. We think you'll be impressed.

I've spent most of the day adding infrastructure to the aggregator. On the development copy, Radio now stores a list of stories for each service. This allows us to finally have "view by channel" as a preference instead of passing URL arguments to an existing script.

I also created a new script that deletes stories from the aggregator on demand which will allow a developer a safe method to delete content. The actual code took an hour, but the test code took two, a lesson learned from Jake and Patrick. You can't write good software until you know how to make it work *and* how to break it at will. With this piece of code, I definitely moved up from "single A ball" to "double A".

If Jake approves, you'll all see it soon...

[Paolo Valdemarin:](http://paolo.evectors.it/2005/03/29.html#a2463) "Saturday was my third blog birthday."

TidBITS (Matt Neuburg): "Remember the magical feeling you had when you first used a Macintosh, and played with those early bundled applications, MacPaint and MacDraw? The magic - though you may not have been conscious of this at the time - lay in the fact that these tiny applications were essentially just showcases for the Mac's underlying technology. You could draw a square or an oval, with a thick or thin line, filled solid or with a pattern, because those were all basic QuickDraw primitives; in effect, you were accessing the very same code that gave the Mac itself its distinctive look, allowing it to draw windows and buttons in the first place."

Jeremy Zawodny: "There more I look at the blogging "market" these days, I see things falling into fairly well defined places--at least in my head."

Dave Sifry says that [Technorati is having a contest](http://www.sifry.com/alerts/archives/000303.html):

> "Technorati would like to mark this special event for our members with a "One Billion Links Tracked" contest. Entries must be received by 11:59 p.m. Pacific time on Tuesday, March 29, 2005."

My Technorati one billion links guess is Thursday, March 31st at 2:34PM Pacific Time