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You clearly didn't read the Washington Post article.

The 16 years old kid who logs onto MySpace at 02:41 is using the same computer in the basement that mom and dad use the next mornign at 07:45 to log into their bank accounts, pay bills, trade some stock, and so on.

That's why even a free MySpace is a good target. As a matter of fact, MySpace is an excellent target because it has highly loyal and extremely active users who log into MySpace multiple times a day. This means that if the phishers' crack stays on the site even for a very amount of time, they will be able to grab a solid number of usernames. If they did that on Simpy for example, a site with nowhere that many daily active users, the catch would be a lot smaller. That's why phishers targeted MySpace.

Hah, interesting! Here is a post on a very related topic: Social Spam and Spam Incentives, as it relates to Simpy. It asks about incentives, about the choices of things that are "spamvertised" (who follows "home loan" links on a site that so obviously stinks of rotten spam?), etc.

Hah, interesting! Here is a post on a very related topic: Social Spam and Spam Incentives, as it relates to Simpy. It asks about incentives, about the choices of things that are "spamvertised" (who follows "home loan" links on a site that so obviously stinks of rotten spam?), etc.

I support the idea of using Simpy for the backup (or even real) store of Opera's bookmarks. Firefox is already heading in a similar direction with their bookmarks revamp, and Flock is already there.

Give users more monitor real estate (less toolbar, more web page) and reinvent favorites/bookmarks. Say automatic online backups to Simpy.com and an easier way of keeping bookmark catagories organized. I've recently gotten into genealogy and the links pile-up in a hurry. I almost want to use a browser exclusively for that research alone.

The Linux support is awesome however. It's the best browser for that platform.

Yes, you're absolutely right. Those libgaim guys deserve most of the credit- but Meebo is doing jolly well and now expanding their offices. Again.

The Skype for Linux is a binary - but there must be a way of wrapping it... or perhaps using the Windows binary through Wine.

I'd hate to guess how much RAM that would cost though...

Some people have analysed it rather well but there is still a long way to go.

I'm a happy user of Orca, which I use to graph all kinds of aspects of the system that runs Simpy's cluster.

It sounds rather simple, doesn't it? Unfortunately, it ain't that simple. The difficult part is scaling. With advertizing rates being as low as they are, you need a LOT of page views to make any decent money. In other to have a lot of page views, you need a lot of users, and a lot of regular/active users (Slashdot is a good example). Once you have a lot of users your expenses go up - more bandwidth, more CPUs, more app servers, more NAS, more clusters, more failover this and that, replication... and then you have to answer all those emails that start pouring in, you've got to have a blog to keep people updated, etc. And there are only 24 hours in a day. And you want to have a life, friends, and family. So you need to hire people. But you need money for that. So you go to VCs because your ads don't cover all these expenses. So, you see, it's not that simple. :) Moreover, some crazy people like me give away money from their advertizing.

Indeed, more heads are wiser than one. An old concept applied on a massive scale, and so far it works. The piece I personally like best in this article is from Craigslist's founder who points out that the reason his team is so scalable is because they provide self-service. Everything I ever built (including the latest Simpy) was like this, and I've always been happy not to have to hire a team of people to manage something that users of the system could handle themselves, or amongst themselves.

The other piece I like here is also from Craigslist guy, about not having to charge everybody. This reminds me of what I did with Simpy (see this Simpy + AdSense bit, and pay attention to the Q&A towards the end of the entry). People have been very happy with the simplicity of this concept, and no user has complained about ads - they don't see them... but others do!

Indeed, more heads are wiser than one. An old concept applied on a massive scale, and so far it works. The piece I personally like best in this article is from Craigslist's founder who points out that the reason his team is so scalable is because they provide self-service. Everything I ever built (including the latest Simpy) was like this, and I've always been happy not to have to hire a team of people to manage something that users of the system could handle themselves, or amongst themselves.

The other piece I like here is also from Craigslist guy, about not having to charge everybody. This reminds me of what I did with Simpy (see this Simpy + AdSense bit, and pay attention to the Q&A towards the end of the entry). People have been very happy with the simplicity of this concept, and no user has complained about ads - they don't see them... but others do!

I wasn't able to be there in person (it's a bit far from England) but the MP3s of the talks were very informative.

Here is the link to the recordings. (Coralised)

I have some other associated bookmarks.

What's the big deal? Simpy has been giving away AdSense cash for a while now. Mike Arrington covered the topic on TechCrunch the other day.

What's the big deal? Simpy has been giving away AdSense cash for a while now. Mike Arrington covered the topic on TechCrunch the other day.

I only signed up to http://www.simpy.com/ yesterday and I'm already a fan.

I'd always thought about having a shared bookmark facility and only now, ten years later, have I managed to get around to doing it. It's great when you're using several computers at once; all I miss is the really simple list format from clicking Bookmarks in Firefox or IE. Sometimes all I want is a list, devoid of clever tags or links.

However, now that Google Toolbar is being released with similar functionality, the "average" user will probably use it in preference.

Will Simpy and del.icio.us be able to compete with the Google Toolbar?

http://simpy.com/ does it pretty well. You can mark links public/private, create groups of users (ie your household). One thing I don't like is the firefox sidebar. But a simple bookmark to simpy.com and I can then manually search, enter a new bookmark, etc.

Comparing tagging to meta keywords is a bad one. Apples and oranges. Both are fruit, but should not be compared without more context. Doublin Core meta tags called for abuse, as they were created by the very author of a web page they described. As with blogs now, people go ego-crazy (or $-crazy) and will do almost anything to game the system and have a high placement on search engines like Technorati for blogs or Google for any other web page.
Tagging is different.

Tags are created by _others_, and that is the key. Sure, the author will tag his/her own blog/page/link, but the masses will tag the ____ out of any link, and the "wisdom" will prevail. It's hard to fight a big crowd.

Those tired of hearing about and misspelling del.icio.us, look at Simpy, especially if you don't like being forced to expose _all_ your links or if you want to be able to save+tag with your fellow geeks.

I used to work with Ari at Blink. I also run Simpy. While all 3 services deal with links/bookmarks, they deal (or have dealt) with them differently. There was hardly any social aspect to Blink. Internet users of that day probably would not have gone for it. Delicious & Co. (re)created the notion of openness. Some call that "social", while I call that exhibitionist. I think Simpy strikes a good balance by not forcing you to share absolutely everything (got to keep that pr0n away from your mom and dad), by allowing different privacy options and better group tagging.
Plus it gives away AdSense money.

I used to work with Ari at Blink. I also run Simpy. While all 3 services deal with links/bookmarks, they deal (or have dealt) with them differently. There was hardly any social aspect to Blink. Internet users of that day probably would not have gone for it. Delicious & Co. (re)created the notion of openness. Some call that "social", while I call that exhibitionist. I think Simpy strikes a good balance by not forcing you to share absolutely everything (got to keep that pr0n away from your mom and dad), by allowing different privacy options and better group tagging.
Plus it gives away AdSense money.

Delicious is not the only game in town. Try Simpy, it just got a nice TechCrunch writeup. Has import, export, API, privacy, full-text search, you name it.

Yeah, delirious is not looking too good these days. A few people emailed me about importing their data into Simpy. Thoughts, anyone?
While Simpy is not open-source, its dad is involved in several open-source projects, one of them being Lucene. Does that make Simpy more interesting? I don't know, your call.

Yes, you can import your del.icio.us links and tags in real-time - here (need to login first, of course).

i like http://simpy.com/ for social bookmarking. i've found it to be a good delicious alternative.

Bloggers are not necessarily the world's tech elite, but they are certainly the loudest, the most outspoken and, yes, most of them are the early adopters.

The same (early adopters bit in particular) can be said about social bookmarking users. For instance, less than 1/3 of all Simpy users use IE, and over 40% of them use Firefox. If we assume that early tech adopters are also Firefox and not IE users, then yes, bloggers and social bookmarker are early adopters. But does that make them the elite? Does Linus Torvalds have a blog? Not. Yet.

If PostgreSQL's full-text indexing is anything like MySQL's, I urge you not to use it. Things I heard about MySQL's full-text index are horrible! Instead, integrate Lucene with your application/database. If you need a book, there is Lucene in Action with free code and sheap eBook version. Full disclosure: I'm one of the authors. Simpy is a good example of PostgreSQL + Lucene integration.

Oh, and if you want non-Java solution, there are several Lucene ports available: C++, Python, Perl, C#, Ruby...

See http://lucene.apache.org/nutch/ and look for Nutch NDFS (something similar to Google's FS you mentioned). I use Nutch over at Simpy (think Web 2.0) and am very happy with it.

This is very similar to what happens to popular tech/geek sites and their audience over time. At the beginning we have early adopters, and those tend to be technically savvy people and geeks. Web server log analysis shows high percentage of Firefox and Safari browsers. Time passes, and the site becomes known to less techy people. Web server log analysis starts showing a decline in Firefox users and increase in Internet Explorer users, despite Firefox slowly taking over and spreading among the typical Internet users. This must have happened with Google, and this is now happening to Simpy, an increasingly popular social bookmarking and personal web service.
The same phenomenon happened in the world of blogs, where bloggers like Steve Rubel said they wakt up at 4-5AM in order to beat the other blogging crown and blog news first. Of course, that can't last very long. When people like that run out of steam, regular, more normal and numerous bloggers enter the stage.

Funny you mention delicious :)
I run Simpy (see the signature or use the
demo/demo account), which has some notable advantages over delicious, especially in the search area (surprise, surprise).

Funny you mention delicious :)
I run Simpy (see the signature or use the
demo/demo account), which has some notable advantages over delicious, especially in the search area (surprise, surprise).

Hello from Otis, one of the co-authors of Lucene in Action. It is interesting the book review starts with a problem with bookmarks in the browser, because I run Simpy, a fairly popular social bookmarking service. The reason I started the service a few years back was because with a few keywords + search I could locate my bookmark far more easily and much faster than traversing my bookmark folder hierarchies.

Anyhow, I just wanted to connect these 3 islands - Lucene in Action + bookmark problem + Simpy. I'll go back to reading the rest of the review now...

RSS indeed dominates the feed scene, but Atom 1.0 has just been reviewed and approved by the Atompub Working Group (part of IETF, the same group that standardized HTTP, SMTP, and many other RFCs).

Thus, I wouldn't be so quick to claim RSS' victory. Tim Bray is a big supporter of Atom, and here is recent report titled RSS 2.0 and Atom 1.0 Compared. Over at Simpy (feel free to use demo/demo account if you don't have an account yet), I am happily supporting RSS and Atom (as well as RDF).

I believe Atom also has the "push" component, and not just "pull" that RSS has. That is, I believe Atom spec contains specification of Atom as a way for making requests to web services, while RSS, I think, only lets you publish the data passively, and have clients actively pull it.
I can't find good references to this now, but maybe somebody else can find them and reply to this thread.

RSS indeed dominates the feed scene, but Atom 1.0 has just been reviewed and approved by the Atompub Working Group (part of IETF, the same group that standardized HTTP, SMTP, and many other RFCs).

Thus, I wouldn't be so quick to claim RSS' victory. Tim Bray is a big supporter of Atom, and here is recent report titled RSS 2.0 and Atom 1.0 Compared. Over at Simpy (feel free to use demo/demo account if you don't have an account yet), I am happily supporting RSS and Atom (as well as RDF).

I believe Atom also has the "push" component, and not just "pull" that RSS has. That is, I believe Atom spec contains specification of Atom as a way for making requests to web services, while RSS, I think, only lets you publish the data passively, and have clients actively pull it.
I can't find good references to this now, but maybe somebody else can find them and reply to this thread.

I thought eBay used Java, no?
Technorati uses Java and is pretty big [1].
Simpy [2] uses Java.
Indeed [3] uses Java.
All 3 use Lucene [4] (Java search engine)

[1] http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details? q=&url=technorati.com
[2] http://simpy.com/
[3] http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details? q=&url=indeed.com
[4] http://lucene.apache.org/

Who's going to enter URLs + bookmark names by hand?
They should just let me import my bookmarks from elsewhere. For example, from Simpy, using its REST API:
http://www.simpy.com/simpy/service/api/rest/

There is one thing that's a little tough with folders. You have a resume Word document, and you need to save it somewhere. Where do you save it? Which folder? Job? Personal? Career? Job Hunt?
What if it fits in all of them, somewhat, as it does in this case?
Oh, shortcuts/symlinks? A little hacky and hard to maintain. This is one of the problems solved by tagging systems (see below for an example). With tagging I don't need to know which folder my resume document is in, I'll just tag it with all relevant labels, and I'll find it later on in no time.

http://simpy.com/ is built around this concept, and so far its been working great and people are loving it, so I think tagging is an improvement over folders.

There are lots of ways to organize data without folders. Think meta-data, think automatic classification and clustering, thing labelling/tagging, etc. All of this can be done at "save time"! [1] -- link with an example at the bottom.

Also, you don't need your files to be in certain places, really. You only really need to be able to get to it quickly. When you don't need a file, who cares where it is, as long as it is somewhere, and as long as I can open it in less time and with less effort.

For instance, you may have your CV/resume saved somewhere on your computer. How often do you look at that file? Every few months or years? So who cares which folder it's in, as long as when you want to apply for a job you can type in "resume" and pull up your file in less than a few seconds.

I've been saying this for a loooong time, so I'm happy to see that Apple has integrated this into the OS, and that people finally dig search. Simpy [1], a social bookmarking site with tagging and full-text search (and NO folders/categories! :)) is built on this premise, and so far people are very happy with it.

[1] demo/demo account for playing

Oh, I think you don't really need order there. Maybe in the real, physical world, but in the world of information things are, I believe, a bit different: as long as you can formulate, expand and contract your query, you will be able to find that needle in the haystack, or at least get very close to it.

For instance, I was setting up Postfix a few weeks ago, and saved a few links to useful resources in Simpy [1]. I now wanted look it up, and found it with a single search. Had I not found it with a single search, I could use the '- ~ +' options to prohibit, add, or require additional search terms (tags in Simpy's case). Eventually I'd nail it.
But luckily, when you have a searchable index, you can just enter all relevant terms at once, as opposed to getting to the target only a small step (open folder) at a time.

[1] demo/demo account for Simpy to see some of this stuff in action.

Oh, I think you don't really need order there. Maybe in the real, physical world, but in the world of information things are, I believe, a bit different: as long as you can formulate, expand and contract your query, you will be able to find that needle in the haystack, or at least get very close to it.

For instance, I was setting up Postfix a few weeks ago, and saved a few links to useful resources in Simpy [1]. I now wanted look it up, and found it with a single search. Had I not found it with a single search, I could use the '- ~ +' options to prohibit, add, or require additional search terms (tags in Simpy's case). Eventually I'd nail it.
But luckily, when you have a searchable index, you can just enter all relevant terms at once, as opposed to getting to the target only a small step (open folder) at a time.

[1] demo/demo account for Simpy to see some of this stuff in action.

Of course!
Hierarchies suck for large amounts of data (when was the last time you went to ODP or Yahoo Directory to find something?)

That (folder hierarchies suck, search rules!) is one of the main hypothesis behind Simpy [1], a social bookmarking service with tagging and full-text search (think of it as a better and prettier delicious), so there is even a FAQ entry about it:
http://www.simpy.com/simpy/FAQ.do#hierarchies

[1]
Simpy's demo/demo account, to see the goodness of bookmarks without hierarchies

Of course!
Hierarchies suck for large amounts of data (when was the last time you went to ODP or Yahoo Directory to find something?)

That (folder hierarchies suck, search rules!) is one of the main hypothesis behind Simpy [1], a social bookmarking service with tagging and full-text search (think of it as a better and prettier delicious), so there is even a FAQ entry about it:
http://www.simpy.com/simpy/FAQ.do#hierarchies

[1]
Simpy's demo/demo account, to see the goodness of bookmarks without hierarchies

Yeah, there is one:
http://buzz.research.yahoo.com/bk/market/market.ht ml?_mid=8976

Fantasy market, but fun to play and watch.
The 2 leaders there, Delicious and Furl, are commercial (one has VC funding and the other is owned by a publically traded company). Simpy is the first independent service there, and I hope you can see why (demo/demo account). Yes, I'm a little biased, see my URL above.

Yeah, there is one:
http://buzz.research.yahoo.com/bk/market/market.ht ml?_mid=8976

Fantasy market, but fun to play and watch.
The 2 leaders there, Delicious and Furl, are commercial (one has VC funding and the other is owned by a publically traded company). Simpy is the first independent service there, and I hope you can see why (demo/demo account). Yes, I'm a little biased, see my URL above.

... or you can use a tool that has all of these:
1. tags
2. social aspect (folksonomy)
3. full-text search
4. private / public bookmarks
5. nice UI

Delicious has only 1 and 2.
If you'd like to have all 5, I suggest you look at Simpy - you can use the demo/demo account.

IMO, Simpy knocks del.icio.us into a tin hat.

Oh, and while I'm at it, the following will show you the relative popularity and trend of mozilla.org (the link/URL/site) that, I imagine, is directly related to the popularity of Mozilla/Firefox (as well as Simpy):

http://www.simpy.com/simpy/LinkHistory.do?href=htt p://www.mozilla.org/

Try plugging in Microsoft's URL. It's not that popular.

I think that's completely made up.
To see some Alexa graphs for Firefox, Mozilla, Microsoft, etc. see what I posted earlier today:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=149252&cid=125 13459

Over on http://simpy.com/ I see this:

Netscape/Mozilla 29971 (36.3%)
Unknown 24985 (30.3%)
Explorer 22249 (26.9%)
Safari 2441 (3.0%)
Opera 1560 (1.9%)

Opera CEO's cross-Atlantic swimming trick didn't help the browser's market share. Safari appears stagnant. Mozilla % keeps growing slowly.

Ah, interesting. If you've read Paul Graham's latest essay and last night's thread [1] on Slashdot, you'll find this paragraph from Paul'e essay rather interesting and timely:

"What companies should do is go out and discover startups when they're young, before VCs have puffed them up into something that costs hundreds of millions to acquire."

[1] http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=149177&cid=125 06957
[2] http://simpy.com/ - 1-man mini Google

Good urban architects don't impose pavements on people. They let people walk freely and observe the walking routes and patterns. Then they put down the walk-way, and that becomes the standard place to walk. You follow it until you find something better, a shortcut. Then you build a new pavement there.

Folksonomies[1] are hot these days, and they go against the rigid a priory classification that has been standard so far. That's another example of a shortcut. Because it's better (easier, faster, more natural, etc.) people are adopting it, and it's becoming a de facto standard. That's the new shortcut, and pavents are being built to facilitate this new route.

[1] simpy (use demo/demo for a demo)

Try Simpy (demo account: demo/demo). Del.icio.us can't do AND, OR, phrase and other types of searches with tags, which I find very limiting.

According to my logs, about 6.5% of Simpy[1] visitors are using MacOS. This number has been pretty steady over the last several months. The number of Linux user has been dropping slowly.

[1] http://www.simpy.com

If you think del.ico.us is cool, you should check out Simpy. Yes, it lets you tag your links, but also watch other users (think of delicious Inbox, but then multiply them by any number), subscribe to feeds, get your data from Simpy programmatically via the REST API (yeah, for hackers). Oh, and there is full-text search. It helps that the person behind Simpy is a Lucene developer. :)