Why? Well, nginx hasn’t been working out so well – or more specifically spawn-fcgi – it just keeps crashing. Nginx by itself is great – the memory footprint really is smaller and the config file is simple. If you only need to serve static files (like for an image server), you probably can’t beat it – but until there is something stabler for cgi support (for fcgi running PHP 5.3 there is / will be soon) – if I really want to run werc, I need to switch back to lighttpd for now.

And if lighttpd is “suckless” enough for Anselm, it ought to be good enough for me.

Robert Scoble was probably the world’s foremost FriendFeed evangelist – worth reading some of the discussion here:

http://friendfeed.com/scobleizer/b26ae1fd/talk-about-facebook-buying-friendfeed-here-on

Bittersweet news if you loved FriendFeed. It reminds me a bit of my initial reaction to Yahoo acquiring Flickr – nice to see a beloved service make it big, and the simultaneous fear that everything that made it great is suddenly in jeopardy. Yahoo was relatively hands-off and Flickr fared well (sadly to no avail of it’s parent company). Like it or not, it seems unlikely FriendFeed will share this fate, and perhaps rightly so, it’s Facebook enthusiasts who stand to benefit here.

My only hope is that Facebook is able to assimilate more from this than real time status updates and 75 thousand potentially disgruntled users. Whatever FriendFeed team members they can retain belong in key roles both in UI design and overall strategy.

Facebook doesn’t have to be as simple as Twitter, if it could just become half as open and simple as FriendFeed, I would gladly spend more time there.

Interestingly, while potential Google and Microsoft relationships are discussed in detail, and granted the protracted Facebook acquisition talks are now behind them, I generally got the sense that the team is side-lining their most immediate opportunity: to outright own the public (search-able) social networking space that Facebook is still lacking.

We know Facebook is working to fill this (now obvious) void as fast as they can, but it will be slow and difficult to implement. Despite this, at least from the available evidence, there’s not much to indicate that the Twitter team is equally focused on building out their own social graph fully enough to really compete in this space. Twitter is a unique service, granted, and Google and much of the media may be right to separate the “micro-blogging” space from traditional social networking, but it’s clear from these documents that all this is still very much up in the air.

Arrington lists “Identity Crisis” among his subheadings, and there’s definitely a strong element of that, perhaps understandably, since none of this information was ever intended for public release.

But I will say this: Twitter is not in any position to compete with Google directly, Google indexes information, Twitter indexes tweets. Any strategy along those lines is deluded. While clearly (in their own vernacular) “trending” right now, they will eventually need to be fully indexed by Google to stand any change of reaching their user and traffic targets. They need to just accept that.

But in terms of Facebook, and even more so, Microsoft – they’re right to be wary of any partnerships and default to full-on competition mode.

As a side note, it will be interesting to see what this rouses out of Google in terms of password recovery and other security issues related to Google Apps and accounts.

http://blogoscoped.com/archive/2009-07-16-n41.html

This is definitely one of the stranger Google mysteries to come along in a while.

Anyway, I accidentally removed a most visited link/thumbnail from the homepage and then realized, that since the interface update is incomplete, there’s no way to restore it through the GUI (you have one chance with the undo link, but that’s it).

If this happens to you, you can directly edit the preferences file in your home folder:
/home/YOU/.config/google-chrome/Default/Preferences

Find this this entry – and edit as needed:
"most_visited_blacklist": {
},

If you have any “blacklisted” links – there will be lines in here you can delete to restore them to the most visited list on the new tab page.

You’ll also see this at the bottom of the file:
"session": {
"restore_on_startup": 4,
"urls_to_restore_on_startup": [ "about:linux-splash" ]
}

But edit or not, unlike the last build, this one seems to be hard-coded to display the dev warning on startup.

And really, if the name of your blog is Google Operating System – and your stated mission:

An unofficial blog that watches Google’s attempts to move your operating system online.

And then, after more than five years of dutiful reporting, after all the speculation, it’s not April 1st, and Google announces that they are, in fact, actually releasing an operating system…

…and this is the post?

This is level-headed, well-researched, and downright understated – it’s journalism – he even points out, and quite right, that Good OS has been gearing up to release an almost identical product called Cloud (there was some buzz about this quite a while ago, though it seems to have been aptly named, still vaporware for now).

But really, all l I can say is good work, Alex, it’s just srange to watch the rest of the tech media go crazy while someone familiar with Google’s history can so calmly explain the new product.

Am I excited? Of course. I’d bet you are too.

But, is this the end all, come all, end of Microsoft, end of the desktop as we know it?

Not really (or not yet at least).

I think the whole concept is getting a bit overblown in terms of the MS impact – then again, yes we are seeing the transition from desktop to cloud really begin, and Google is in by far the strongest position to lead (and profit from) that movement.