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I've been comparing and playing with a bunch of distributed key-value stores lately. Here's an annotated list of interesting articles: Richard Jones (from Last.fm) has compiled an useful comparison of the various distributed key-values stores out there including MemcacheDB, Cassandra and CouchDB. He seems most interested in Scalaris and Project Voldemort. redis seems to be a very interesting key-value store. It behaves like memcached but supports strings, lists and sets as ...

Quantum of Solace opened this weekend, and as any self-respecting die-hard Bond fan would, I had to go watch the opening show. Lines were long, seats were suboptimal, but thankfully, the movie wasn't a disappointment. There's no denying that Quantum of Solace is stellar. It helps further the new direction that the Bond franchise is moving in. It's a thrill-ride (yes, it's cliche) for the die-hard Bond fan as ...

Here's a quick tip if you've ever wanted to publish your blog entries on Twitter automagically. There's always been services like TwitterFeed but they are slow to update and requires that you share login credentials with yet another 3rd party site. Enter FriendFeed. With the launch of their new feed publishing feature, you can post to Twitter any or all services that are linked to your account. Here are ...

At my day job at Yahoo! Research, I get to interview my fair share of engineers. Almost always, the candidates seem to fall into one of two types - the specialists and the generalists. The specialists are those who come from a strong background of fundamentals. Over years, they have honed and assimilated the details of their language or technology of choice. The generalists are the hungry scavengers. ...

Imagine if the attempts by startups in the genome space like 23andMe were to succeed at cataloging everyone's DNA. Would this piece of DNA become the ultimate representation of who and what you are? What would be the effects of having all the things that make you uniquely human be reduced to a string of characters? It's interesting to wonder if there would exist social networks around your DNA. ...

Wordpress 2.5 finally launched after a few delays, and it hasn't disappointed. I was glad to see them concentrating on revamping the Dashboard and the general Admin area. Wordpress has proven itself to be a solid extensible platform, but their admin area lacked in usability and flexibility. The upgrade process was a snap thanks to this guide.

There I said it. Is it true? You tell me. Comparing FriendFeed to SocialThing is not like comparing gelato to ice cream (regular, fatty kind). Rather, they are really two sides of the same coin. FriendFeed aggregates your activities. SocialThing aggregates your friends' activities. Why people get into flame wars over this is beyond me. But clearly, people feel strongly either way. Unfortunately, during this heated school yard brawl, I fear ...

Stephen Paul Weber released a new Actionstreams Wordpress Plugin today at the DiSo forums. You can see a live version powering the "My Lifestream" section to the right. Inspired largely by the MovableType Actionstreams plugin, this one is really fast, extensible and supports a wide range of services (I'm working with Stephen to add support for Tumblr, Google Reader and others that aren't supported just yet) Download: Download Actionstreams Wordpress ...

I just got back from Graphing Social Patterns conference earlier this week in San Diego, where Dave McClure of 500Hats put together a fun and informative 2-day event. The events were littered with people you expect to see in this space. David Recordon was on the "Need for Feeds" panel. Chris Messina did a quick trip to present on DiSo. Charlene Li had an insightful ...

If you hadn't already heard, FriendFeed opened up to everyone a couple of days ago after securing $5 million in funding. FriendFeed competes in the highly crowded lifestream space with others like LinkRiver, ImInta, SocialThing, lifestrea.ms (and catchup attempts by Facebook too). But most would agree that FriendFeed is leading the pack in features, usability and stability. And now it would seem that their business model is ...