I tried to resist. Really, I did. The API launched, and the first Facebook Apps appeared, and they were terrible. Awful. Hideously ugly beasts that clogged up profiles, spread themselves like viruses, and served no useful purpose.

And that still describes a lot of the Facebook Apps, especially those from companies like Slide and RockYou.

But out of the gloom have appeared a small number of apps that do genuinely useful and interesting things. And now I’ve added several of them to my profile. Read on…

The #1 Matt was in town on Wednesday night, so some folks organized a meetup at the Heartland Brewery. I only took a handful of pictures, none of which turned out very well, but fortunately John Keegan has shared some nice snaps.

It was neat to chat with Matt and find out more about Automattic as a company and what some of their plans are for Wordpress. He’s a really fun, personable guy. It’s awesome to use a product with such a great spokesperson.

One of the troubles with putting a website to sleep is you have difficulty finding a topic interesting enough to be worth waking it up for. Each whack at the snooze button makes trivial posts about nothing that much sillier.

I’ll have more to say about New York over the coming weeks, but this is just a kind of funny side observation from my time in the city, unrelated to the city itself. (For the impatient, there are a handful of pictures here and here)

And it has to do with memory. Read on…

It’s a verb, a noun, an adjective and nothing if not an enigmatic company; the greatest place for a hacker to work, a pattern for the future, and more romantically, a cathedral awaiting Alan Turing’s soul. In January, I’ll be heading to NYC for a few months of working with the Google Maps Team—it’s hard not to be a little excited.

Once again it is that my life has taken a bizarre and unpredictable turn. Surprise is the flavour that keeps one anchored in the present; I have no complaints.

When I changed my banner image for the fall, it was more an act of defiance than as some sort of genuine reflection of the reality outside. We’ve now had several dustings of snow, and there was the small issue of my bicycle brakes being encased in ice, fused to the wheel.

Anyhow, I ran into Matthias Wandel at Swing Club this afternoon—he’s a UW grad, and has a number of really neat project writeups on his site. It was just funny that I was half-heartedly studying some circuits in the studio, and when I asked him about an op-amp question, his response was more about what a useless circuit it was, than what exactly the filter behaviour would be.

In other news, I seem to be getting the hang of Tango a bit more. It’s a far simpler dance than Lindy, and certainly less flexible, but fun enough in its high-heeled, strutting sort of way. Like any of the more intimate dances, it’s more about the subtle communication between partners than big showy spins and tricks.

I’ve been a fairly consistent user of reddit almost since its inception. It’s elegant, simple, and the links are fairly good. What’s also good is the discussion. Reddit takes the unusual step of ignoring chronology when laying out comment pages: new comments start at the top, and high-quality comments stay there.

This fluidity means that reading the discussions is—on the whole—a positive experience. It also means, however, that the layout of the threads on a given article can greatly change from one visit to the next. They have several built-in features that help you find your old comments and their replies, but I wanted two additional features, so I made a quick Greasemonkey user script to add these. Read on…

I’ve unsubscribed from Slashdot, in favour of Reddit.

To the casual reader, Reddit is a page of interesting links. To hardcore Redditors (the “mob”), it’s a steady stream of fresh content, each piece to be evaluated as a candidate for the +1 vote of confidence, or the -1 vote of dismissal. Accumulate enough points—quickly enough—and it’ll appear on the front page of the site.

Perfect system, right? Read on…

Web developers, repeat after me: Flash is bad.

Flash navigation removes right-click functionality. It breaks bots and search engines. It fills up the advertiser’s arsenal with entirely new ways to obscure content and frustrate users. Sites built entirely in Flash break the basic metaphor of the Internet—the page. You can’t link or bookmark anything, and if you mistakenly hit the back-button, you’re back to square one.

And yet, there’s been some really neat stuff happening with Flash. Especially when combined with Javascript to provide unobtrusive enhancements to pages. I have here two examples… I also have a really neat idea, but I’m not talking about that until it works; I hate vapourware too. Read on…

So I’m back online again.

The (otherwise super-terrific) folks at Dreamhost sprung a surprise Rails 1.0rc4 upgrade on us, and I was definitely not prepared for it.

At any rate, I’ve got little else to say, so I’ll just share two little experiments with you: The Google Maps Autolinker and the Ajaxian File Browser.

Neither of them is perfect, but 24 hours offline wasn’t perfect either.

Way back in early high school, I remember folks tossing around the notion of “Internet 2.” It was going to be some extraordinary thing that mad scientists in China were developing behind our backs and would one day use to take over the world.

It turned out to be just a bunch of new protocols for high speed transfer and things like multicasting.

Of course, consumers could care less about the technical specs. BitTorrent has nearly all the power of a true multicast, and yet is implemented strictly in Internet 1 technologies. Read on…