Jeffrey McManus

The New Thing

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Entries Tagged as 'Web/Tech'

In Which I Do Various Interesting Things with Various Fine Universities

March 5th, 2010 · No Comments · Web/Tech, Work

In the last six months I’ve been doing a few things with a number of universities:

I’ve been teaching a web design and management course for University of Victoria.
I just started teaching a similar course on web development for Minneapolis College of Art and Design. Both of the classes I’m teaching are online which makes the [...]

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Cities Starting to Collaborate on Open Data Initiatives

February 23rd, 2010 · No Comments · Platforms, Web/Tech

I’ve been keeping an eyeball on open data initiatives in local government for a while now, and as I’ve mentioned here we advised our consulting client BART on their open data initiative last year.
I just noticed that the upcoming San Francisco Open311 initiative is planning to coordinate its efforts with a similar initiative underway in [...]

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Price Points for VPS Hosting Services

February 20th, 2010 · 4 Comments · Virtualization, Web/Tech

Over the past few years I’ve done a few posts highlighting the differences between various virtual hosting services, including Slicehost (which we use today and are happy with) and Amazon EC2 (which we’ve used on behalf of consulting clients and also like quite a bit). But as more virtual hosting products with different price points [...]

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Why Location-Based Systems Will Have No Effect On Crime

February 18th, 2010 · 1 Comment · Collaboration, Content, Community, Web/Tech

I’ve been watching the reaction to this service that uses the Foursquare API to tell the world when someone isn’t home, with the implication that criminals will be firing up their expensive laptops to go find people to rip off. This is nonsense, and it’s kind of surprising that it’s gotten so much attention. I’m [...]

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Skype Will Stop Evaporating Its Customers’ Money

January 13th, 2010 · No Comments · School of Customer Service, Web/Tech

In March 2007 I kvetched about how difficult it was to pay Skype online, and about how crooked it seemed that the money you put in your Skype account vanishes after six months.
Well, it looks like somebody agreed with me, filed a class-action lawsuit, and won. Skype credits will no longer expire after six months, [...]

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Yahoo Pulls Plug on Shopping API

January 12th, 2010 · 1 Comment · Platforms, Web/Tech, Work, Yahoo

I’ve been getting a few pings from folks regarding Yahoo’s plans to transition its Shopping property to a third party. My team at Yahoo launched the Shopping API in August 2005 (although I don’t work for Yahoo anymore so I can’t provide insider answers on what’s going on here).
Since the new partner service (PriceGrabber) apparently [...]

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Nobody Said That Open Source Projects Were All About Customer Service

January 9th, 2010 · 3 Comments · Open Source, School of Customer Service, That's Pretty Messed Up Right There, Web/Tech

These are sort of ancient (two and a half years old), but I just ran across them today and found them to be emblematic of a cultural defect that plagues many open source projects. These are a couple of feature requests (for the same feature) filed against the file-transfer utility FileZilla:
#2648: Feature request: Support Amazon [...]

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Because Russian Money is Clearly Worth Less, Somehow

December 16th, 2009 · No Comments · Collaboration, Content, Community, The NY Times Valiantly Attempts To Report on Technology, Web/Tech, Work

Link: Russian Facebook Investor Adds Stake in Zynga – NYTimes.com
Digital Sky Technologies, or D.S.T., an investment firm with offices in Moscow and London, is leading a group that is buying a $180 million stake in Zynga, a fast-growing San Francisco company whose online games, like FarmVille, Café World and Mafia Wars, are extremely popular on [...]

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How Not To Describe Your Platform

December 14th, 2009 · No Comments · Collaboration, Content, Community, Platforms, Web/Tech, Work

Link: PayPal Taps the Developer Community to Build Next-Gen Payment Apps
We haven’t actually released new APIs; what we have done is that we announced a set of APIs on November 3rd, which was our adaptive suite. Adaptive suite APIs include adaptive payments and adaptive accounts. Then we also announced our authentications and permissions API. What [...]

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Technology Platform Content Strategies

November 30th, 2009 · No Comments · Platforms, Web/Tech, Work

A frequently-overlooked aspect of managing a platform technology product is creating a sensible content plan and executing on it effectively. This is not what you’d call a sexy topic: In a lot of ways, technical content is to a platform as horse manure is to a farm. Very few people get excited about working with [...]

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