Since the days when I coded my first reactor [POSA2] back at MIT, I have been convinced of the conceptual simplicity of non-blocking event driven server. Aside not blocking for I/O and being able to scale well beyond polling architectures, it is harder, sometimes impossible, to make concurrent programming mistakes with an event-driven programming paradigm. However, reactor servers never took off massively, probably because event based programming of server-side applications is a more complex programming paradigm for the average programmer than a thread- or process-per-request.…

The release of Facebook’s Open Graph Protocol has spurred renewed interest in the semantic web. I give credit to Facebook for pushing forward an RDFa derived format onto the world wide web. In fact, RDFa is the least interesting part. Producing semantic data has been around for a long time. Most importantly, I give Facebook credit for focusing on the interesting part of the problem: consumption of semantic data.

And although it’s a great achievement, I regret the locked-in and centralized nature of Facebook’s Open Graph Protocol.…

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I keep saying that the web follows the pattern of the fashion industry. It’s about image, it’s about fun, it’s about entertaining. Sure, you can also buy stuff and do useful things. But that’s what you have to do, not what you want to do.

That’s why facebook is popular – it’s fun, it’s about image, it’s about entertainment.

And now, to prove it, a nice chart for the breakout of Facebook applications.…

Sun is changing its ticker symbol from SUNW to JAVA, as announced in Sun’s CEO Jonathan Schwartz’s Weblog on Thursday 23rd August. There has been a lot of mixed feedback. Most techies and engineers inside and outside Sun are criticizing the decision, as they see it narrowing Sun to Java technology. However, Wall Street did not seem to care much.

The stock went up 1.62%, while the Nasdaq index recovered 1.38% so one can possibly assume the market was insensitive to the change.…

LinkedIn’s CEO Reid Hoffman promised at the end of June to open the LinkedIn platform, very much aligned with Facebook’s publishing its developer APIs, and surely trying to experience some of the same growth Facebook is receiving thanks to opening their APIs. I hope however that LinkedIn is thinking about all the risks associated with opening up a business community.

LinkedIn will need to review and approve every single application out there consuming their services. The last thing you want is a pile a lawsuits on your desk because of misapproprated data, especially personal data covered by the EU/95 Privacy Directive, also implemented in the UK via the Data Protection Act, and somehow applicable to US companies under the Safe Harbor Agreements.…

In July, Nielsen’s NetRatings changed its web traffic measurements to focus on time spent at a given site rather than the traditional page views, and page views per user (PV/UU). Since then, many web 2.0 sites, including communities, gaming, video, etc. have received this change as the Holy Grail of web ratings, even those whose ranking went down.

While it is true that time spent at a site increases  exposure to ad display, and possibly CPM, the time-based measurement paradigm is only applicable to countries with deep internet and broadbrand penetration.…