DeWitt Clinton

What I’m trying to figure out right now is exactly how Friendster missed their opportunity. Or more particularly, why social networks briefly seemed like they were going to be tranformative, but now appear lackluster and commodity. In this context, “social network” is not just any site that has users and discussions, but rather [...]

Thanks to the hard work of others, the photo galleries have returned to unto.net.

I’ve been impressed with Flickr since they launched. But I never used it personally because I wanted to display my images on unto.net. Unfortunately, that meant that I couldn’t take advantage of all the features that Flickr has to offer.
Fortunately, [...]

Upon seeing the new Google Search History feature, my first reaction was “this is cool!”
My second reaction was “no, wait, this is not cool.”
My current reaction is still “this is not cool,” but now I think I can better articulate why, and what Google can do to fix it.
The problem with the current Google authentication [...]

As part of the migration to WordPress, I took the opportunity to change the layout and format of the site. Just a month ago I had done a bit of an update and basically copied Russell Beattie’s design and tweaked it. (Don’t let that turn you off from his site — he did [...]

I know I’ve spoken well in the past about Blosxom, Rael Dornfest’s lightweight weblog application. There is a lot to like about Blosxom, and I stand by the reasons that I gave before for picking Blosxom in the first place. It is open source, database independent, easy to use, install, and customize. [...]

Actually, I may have to take back what I said about Google’s search history. It might not be that cool at all.
I just signed in to my Gmail account, read some mail, then an hour later after seeing another article (on Drudge, of all places) opened Google (I normally use A9 or Yahoo Search). [...]

That’s funny, I was just about to write saying I expected Google to launch a personal search history feature in the near future. But they beat me to it. Go ahead and sign in here.
The hint was this screen, which started appearing on Gmail earlier in the week:

This was obviously a play to [...]

Unto.net is undergoing some big changes.

First, the machines are being migrated from one hosting provider to another. Second, the software running the site is switching to WordPress. And third, there is a bit of a redesign going on. I will write something about each of these in turn to help explain why [...]

As I wrote about at length in a piece called The Disc, the theoretical end of the music industry’s business model is approaching faster than you might think.
And just to lend further evidence to that claim, InPhase Technologies announced they had developed a holographic disc that can hold 300 GB of data. They are projecting [...]

I just wanted to point out a minor, but potentially very useful, improvement to the AWS OpenSearch Engine on unto.net.

Previously, each item returned in the OpenSearch RSS feed appeared to be unique and independent from one another in the eyes of a blog reader or RSS aggregator. This was problematic [...]