If you’d like to keep up with me and Carrie as we amble across Europe this summer, please check-out CarterHeartsCarrie.com.  We’ll be posting trip updates and photos there!

My abuelo passed away this past Friday (4/24/09).  Despite the distance (he lived in Miami) and the language barriers (he spoke mostly Spanish) I felt very loved by him.  He taught me how to play (and cheat) at dominos and was clearly the formative influence on my father’s gregarious sense of humor.  I’ll miss him dearly and send all my love to my family in Miami.

More pictures to come!

The photos are up on SmugMug and the password is “hitched”.

Overview: This is a quick-and-dirty primer for a new tool I’ve developed (SocialDM) where DM stands for “direct message”.  The need is fairly straightforward: many services (such as FriendFeed) don’t support DM.  Others do (such as Twitter).  For those services that don’t, I wanted to create a simple, opt-in service that allowed people to provide an email address and then broadcast to  people “you can reach me here”.

Abuse: The method of avoiding abuse is to limit the people you can receive messages from to the people you’ve chosen to subscribe to.  So, if user A subscribes to user B, A can receive a message from B.  If they reciprocally follow each other, they can message each other.

Sending Message: Once you’ve registered an account, people can send you messages using the web-form below.  They do not have to have registered an account to do this! They can also skip the web form and shoot an email to [service]+[username]@socialdm.com (they must have a SocialDM account to do this).  Right now the only supported service is “ff”.  So to send me a message, someone would email ff+cubanlinks@socialdm.com.  Obviously, you can do these things too, but you can only send messages to people who have SocialDM accounts.  Which leads us to getting discovered.

The Service: when you register, a nice little feed gets created for you (mine is http://www.socialdm.com/feed/cubanlinks.rss).  Until FriendFeed supports SocialDM as a 1st class service (soon, we hope!) you will want to add this feed to your list of FriendFeed services.  Use the “Custom RSS/Atom” option:

The feed is simply a daily digest of how many DM’s you sent and received.  You can see mine here.  The content of this feed is pretty up-in-the-air, but that’s the current behavior.

Conclusion: Ok, that’s it for now!  Please leave comments here or on FriendFeed.  Hope you enjoy the service!

@carrie_k nominated me for the Texas Social Media Awards! Check it out and leave a comment! http://bit.ly/Pjjk

The Carterfone is a device invented by Thomas Carter. It connects a two-way mobile radio system to the Public Switched Telephone Network. This particular device was involved in a landmark United States regulatory decision related to telecommunications. The 1968 Federal Communications Commission allowed the Carterfone and other devices to be connected directly to the AT&T network, as long as they did not cause damage to the system. This ruling (13 F.C.C.2d 420) created the possibility of selling devices that could connect to the phone system using a protective coupler, and opened the market to customer owned equipment.

Now that v0.3 of FF2Disqus is in private-beta, I thought I’d put up a page to answer basic some questions about the application and record feedback.  Please check-out the example above of how a typical sync works.  If you have any questions or comments, please leave them in the comments.

Ping Response

FF2Disqus provides users the ability to ping a URL to initiate a sync.  We automatically run syncs once an hour, but some people aren’t that patient. The format of the response is JSON.  The response object has the following attributes:

• success: true or false
• errorCode (optional): is success is false, this provides a short code explanation (invalid-user/time-out/unknown-error)
• message: if success is true this is an array of comments that were synced, else a longer explanation of the error

[UPDATE]: FF2Disqus is back up, but in limited beta.  Email/Twitter me if you’d like to try it out.

Over this past weekend I wrote an app that attempted to bridge the gap between comments occurring on your blog (old school) with the comments proliferating on FriendFeed (new skool).  It started out as a client-app, matured into a service and was beset by glitches.  I spent the better part of 2-3 days trying to track down what exactly was going wrong, and now I finally have an answer.

The problem was when I executed Disqus API calls on my computer the results were DIFFERENT than when I called those same API’s with the exact same parameters on my host (Google’s AppEngine).  I will not pretend to have the faintest idea of what is going on.  Someone, somewhere is caching the results of these API calls and passing them back to my service.  You can see for yourself the results of two seperate (but identical) calls to the service “get_thread_posts”.  If you do a search for “Mo bugs mo problems”, you’ll see that comment does show up in my local response, but DOES NOT show up the response provided to AppEngine:

Disqus response (appengine)

Disqus response (local)

…which lead to insane amounts of duplicate comments at random times for random people.  And so ends my quixotic journey to have my comments and eat them too.  If someone from Disqus has some time to look into this, I will provide any information I can.  In the meantime, I apologize for letting down the people who signed-up and got some use out of FF2Disqus.  I think I understand now why it’s a bad idea to put things out there that aren’t fully baked.

Updates

• Looks like to might be Google’s fault (link #1) (link #2)
• Ryan Williams points me to a work-around
• And… we’re back! But super-limited beta.