Tag: programming

Does Yahoo signal critical commercial mass for open source?

Posted on by Daniel J. McKeown

 Tim O’Reilly thinks that Yahoo has made a major announcement for open source:

 

‘One of the most important announcements at Oscon last week was Yahoo!’s commitment to support Hadoop. We’ve been writing about Hadoop on radar for a while, so it’s probably not news to you that we think Hadoop is important.[…]Let me unpack the two parts of this news: hadoop as an important open source project, and Yahoo!’s involvement. On the first front, I’ve been arguing for some time that free and open source developers need to pay more attention to Web 2.0.[…]OK — but why is Yahoo!’s involvement so important? First, it indicates a kind of competitive tipping point in Web 2.0, where a large company that is a strong #2 in a space (search) realizes that open source is a great competitive weapon against their dominant competitor.’

 

Read the whole article here. 

My new app bookmarks, messages and uploads files

Posted on by Daniel J. McKeown

UPDATE: Flightpath now has its own homepage with links to the latest version at flightpath.sf3am.com.

I’m starting a test run of my new app, Flightpath 0.41. It allows anyone with an API key to create one of three types of tasks–save a bookmark with description, tags and URI link; leave a short message of 140 characters or less; or upload a file. Then all three types of posts go onto the app’s home page as a “public timeline” which shows the last 10. The archives are searchable by number, and posts can be perma-linked.
So even though these can be very different types of information, they all run into the same flow. I don’t know how that will work in practice but that kind of mixed media is popular at the moment anyway with things like tumbleblogs and Twittergrams.
I was inspired by Twitter of course, but I also wanted to build a good file-storing app because I want to be able to send files larger than 10 MB in Pownce. Now I can link to files on my site, of whatever size HTTP and PHP can handle!
It’s in closed alpha now but I want to be making more API keys or a beta version available to more people as the site is improved. I also plan to eventually add a feed.