The soup du jour in the Web 2.0/startup community is Facebook’s new API. StyleFeeder has an app on it now, because it made sense and it’s a good fit. You should try it out. Phil did most of the heavy lifting, and we should pity him for it, because it’s very poorly documented, not completely built, and nerve-wrackingly unstable. But it works, and it’s pretty cool to be able to get in to a place people feel comfortable and offer them something we think is useful, that Facebook never would have got around to building. Not everyone is impressed about the whole idea though:

Kottke obviously wasn’t doing any internet development in 1994 or he would have heard “why isn’t my website as nice as stuff I see on AOL?”

“What happens when Flickr and LinkedIn and Google and Microsoft and MySpace and YouTube and MetaFilter and Vimeo and Last.fm launch their platforms that you need to develop apps for in some proprietary language that’s different for each platform?”

It’s pretty clear what would happen. People would develop for Google and MySpace, people are already developing for Microsoft, and the others would be ignored. You need massive scale and a big carrot (Facebook’s is a massive, clean network of users), to pull this off. Everyone else puts their faith in the W3C. Eventually the Facebook API will be deprecated or ignored, and if there are any good ideas in it, they’ll trickle out into the mainstream.

Valleywag has a screed by someone who bought the hype and blames Facebook for it, and is now apparently trying to generate some backlash to justify to management why it didn’t work as promised. Keep in mind that the hype was not from Facebook, I didn’t get any emails from them, see any ads, it was solely driven by tech-pundits, bloggers and VC panic. This person is sad that they didn’t get millions of users overnight and that Facebook “undercut” developers by preventing them from spamming their apps all over the place. If your app is useful or fun, it’s going to grow on its own, just like any other software distribution method. Sure it may seem unfair that some people got in and got big before the rules tightened up, but it’s also unfair that my parents got a house with an acre of land for $32k before I could (I was 3).

Ineffective Campaign

Originally uploaded by Eric Kilby

So you may have heard of this guy Barry. Barry plays baseball for a living. Barry is really, really good at his job, and has been for a long time. At a certain point, Barry noticed most people his age weren’t doing so well, so he tried this and that to keep his job. Some of this was good old fashioned exercise. Some of that was kinda-sorta-not-so-legal-even-less-ethical-but-not-illegal (in an unofficial, nobody’s-telling way, of course). We don’t know exactly what happened, but alot of people made up their mind regardless.

Many of these people were at the Red Sox vs. Giants game Friday night. They were easy to spot, they chanted “ster-oids” whenever Barry showed up at the plate, maple in hand. These people also stood on their feet to watch a hall-of-famer bat for the first time in Fenway Park.

Advice: If you want to boycott someone, you don’t spend 30, 50, 100+ dollars to buy a ticket to a game, and you don’t stand up on tiptoes to see every pitch thrown to him.

PuTTY is the most popular free SSH client for Windows. It’s very stable and very lightweight, due to the developers keeping bloat out of the source. One piece of bloat that I would like to see is the ability to pick icons, which I find very valuable when working on multiple servers, a common task for most developers. Luckily it’s pretty easy to roll your own PuTTY, so I figured I would offer a little how-to here.

1. Download and install Cygwin. I’m not sure which packages you need, as I typically just install everything.
2. Download putty source code from here: http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/download.html
3. Open cygwin shell
4. cygwin: mkdir putty
5. cygwin: cd putty
6. cygwin: unzip [wherever download is]/putty-src.zip
7. cygwin: mv WINDOWS/PUTTY.ICO WINDOWS/PUTTY_ORIG.ICO
8. Now put your icon (.ico) file in WINDOWS and name it PUTTY.ICO
9. cygwin: cd WINDOWS
10. cygwin: make -f MAKEFILE.CYG putty.exe
11. You should now havea nice fresh putty.exe file in the WINDOWS directory, copy this wherever you wish.
12. Copy the next icon to PUTTY.ICO and re-run make. Repeat until you have one executable per server.

Saw this over at Matt’s LJ, seemed interesting.

IF YOUR LIFE WERE A MOVIE, WHAT WOULD THE SOUNDTRACK BE?
REMEMBER, DON’T CHEAT!
So, here’s how it works:
1. Open your library (iTunes, Winamp, Media Player, iPod, iPaq etc)
2. Put it on shuffle
3. Press play
4. For every question, type the song that’s playing
5. When you go to a new question, press the next button
6. Don’t lie and try to pretend you’re cool…

Note: I skipped the song if the same artist came up again.

Opening Credits: Dr. Dre & Ice Cube - “Natural Born Killaz”
What kind of movie is this going to be?

Waking Up Scene: Susie Van Der Meer - “Somebody Has to Pay”
From the Run Lola Run soundtrack, not a bad choice for a breakfast montage.

Walking Down The Street Scene: House of Pain - “House of Pain Anthem”
This could be funny, fitting or tragic depending on which street we’re talking about.

Car Driving Scene: The Police - “Don’t Stand So Close to Me”
Eh, not a great fit.

High School Flashback Scene: Mr. Mackey - “It’s Easy, Mmkay”
Nice choice here. Life advice, South Park stylee.

Drug Abuse Flashback Scene: Blue Swede - “Hooked on a Feeling”
Bizarre.

Summer/Beach Scene: Blink 182 - “All the Small Things”
Good beach music.

Nostalgic Scene: Insane Clown Posse - “The Neden Game”
Just can’t make this one work.

Bitter, Angry Scene: Nine Inch Nails - “Where is Everybody?”
Few better choices than Nine Inch Nails for bitter music.

Break-up/Throwing Things/Slow Motion Scene: The Dust Brothers - “Psycho Boy Jack”
If you broke up in a run down gas station with flickering flourescent bulbs, this would be a good choice.

Regret Scene: Ahmad - “Back in the Day”
Title works, song doesn’t.

Bar Scene: Air - “The Vagabond”
Harmonica, hand clapping and Beck, sounds like a good bar to me.

Nightclub Scene: Underworld - “Ballet Lane”
It fits if its a laid back club full of people sipping amaretto.

Fight/Action Scene: Green Day - “Basketcase”
Eh, can’t imagine this song causing any fights.

Sad, breakdown scene: Korn - “Lost”
Angsty, gritty, good pick.

Death Scene: Hüsker Dü - “M.I.C.”
Pacifist punk song, bad fit.

Funeral Scene: Moby - “My Weakness”
Kinda sad I guess.

Mourning Scene: Beastie Boys - “Eugene’s Lament”
Probably the best pick of the bunch.

Mellow Scene: Kittie - “Immortal”
Instrumental Kittie song, I guess that passes for mellow.

Dreaming About Someone Scene: Bjork - “Sod Off”
Dreaming about pre-emptively dumping someone.

Sex Scene: Kompressor - “Vitamins are Good”
Bizarre.

Contemplation Scene: Outkast - “Prototype”
Well he says “i think” alot…

Fancy Party: Ministry - “Psalm 69″
Not too fancy.

Realization Scene: 311 - “Fat Chance”
Realizing one of your favorite albums is almost over.

Flashback/Build up Scene: Howlin’ Wolf - “Moanin’ at Midnight”
This song begs for sepia tone.

Chase Scene: Mudvayne - “Nothing to Gain”
Hmm, wouldn’t work for a car chase, maybe a foot chase through the city.

Happy Love Scene: Marilyn Manson - “The Speed of Pain”
Might work with a loose interpretation.

Happy Friend Scene: Cut Chemist meets Shortkut - “No Mistakes in this Number Son”
Not a bad fit.

Closing Credits: Basement Jaxx - “Same Old Show”
Decent credits song.

I’m with many others, including Yuval, in saying that Apple porting Safari to Windows is unfortunate. Web developers have basically got 3 main browsers to deal with right now, and adding a 4th isn’t going to help. IE6 is dying, but still prevalent. IE7 isn’t great, but is obviously a force to be reckoned with. Firefox is bloated and slow, but comfy and relatively painless to develop against. Safari is outdated, buggy and less standards-compatible than IE7 or Firefox, often intentionally so (try styling a submit button).

The big claim Apple makes is page rendering performance. Firstly, I hope nobody takes Apple’s performance numbers seriously, they’ve been flat out lying about them across the board for a decade or more. Even if the stats are legit, picking a browser based on page rendering speed is silly, it’s like buying a car that goes 200mph instead of 150mph, when you live in Los Angeles and spend most of the day in slow traffic anyways.

I think Apple ported Safari to force people to support it, since it’s often sidelined due to low usage and its quirky behaviors. I’m really loathe to support a browser that offers no new features yet has a unique set of drawbacks. The solution here is for Apple to abandon the KHTML core and put it’s overstated development resources into the Gecko engine, giving them the ability to Mac-ify and brand a browser, but not impose increased costs on web developers. They should look to their own successful Airport line for how you can drive adoption, leverage/strengthen a standard, and maintain a strong brand at the same time.