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And I said, "Jesus Mother of Fuck, what are you thinking! Do not strap the 'Groupware' albatross around your neck! That's what killed Netscape, are you insane?" He looked at me like I'd just kicked his puppy.

A fun and poignant read.

The Genius Workshop dinner Sooz and I hosted went wonderfully. I'll write more about it soon but in the meantime I took some pictures and Peter Caputa compiled a handy list of attendees' websites.

An almost-user of frassle sent us this email:

It seems that Frassle's weblog doesn't support Asian characters. When I post a note with Chinese charactors in the body, it becomes something unreadable. An error occurs if the title or the category contains non-English text! So I'm not going to try Frassle until
you've added Asian language support. I wish it realize soon. And
thanks for the great work!

Sadly, this is one area where we don't know what we're doing:

Thank you for your interest. Unfortunately, we're not experts in
software internationalization. We'd like to make frassle more useful to
people who write in non-latin languages, but aren't sure how. If you know
anyone who'd like to help an open source software project get international,
please point them my way. Especially if they have Perl or PostgreSQL
experience.

Shimon Rura

I thought I'd repeat that call for help here. Anyone?

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Russell Beattie points to a cool project, TagSurf, which has some resemblance to Frassle. It's all links, tags, and messages. In Frassle, the organizing principle is links: you make a comment by creating a blog post whose title links to my blog post; two categories or blogs are associated when they link to a lot of the same stuff. TagSurf, as its name would imply, is organized around (shared) tags. But also around links - you can get a set of responses to a given URL.

I should spend some more time grokking TagSurf and seeing whether it's worthwhile to copy some of its features.

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It's true that Google obfuscates their Javascript to make it small, but with a feature as popular as google suggest, people are bound to reverse engineer it into something readable. Not to mention write Perl modules for the backend functionality.

By the way, it would be quite nice if one way to add frassle categories was using a text field with autocomplete. You could type fragments of names and see what's already there, or simply type a new category to create it. No XMLHttp would be needed, because the user's categories are already listed on the page.

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Rather than renting DVDs to you, the Peerflix company facilitates trades among members. Brilliant.

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Katharine Mieszkowski has a short story about tagging in Salon.com. She interviewed me for it, but unfortunately frassle didn't get a mention. It's a pretty light piece but has a nice illustration.

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On 3 Feb 2005, a few Berkmanites including myself joined Greg Narain for some Beercasting — a podcast recording of people telling stories at a pub. It was fun. I think I'm on the topics titled Love At First Sight, Or Almost and Traveller's Tales: Stories From Near and Far.

Update: Steve Garfield has a cool video post about this.

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John Battelle follows up on the Bloglines acquisition by Ask Jeeves. The companies made their official announcements today.