Morning Wrap 2007/06/14
In the past I've relied on del.icio.us to post a wrap up of some interesting links to my blog. While this was a very quick and easy way to do it it you are restricted by the social bookmarking service's limit on the description field length. So until I find a new service that allows arbitary links to be tagged during the day for automatic posting I'll have to do this the old school way :)
Analyzing the Facebook Platform
Unless you've been living under a rock you're probably aware of and have used some of the third-party applications that is integrated into Facebook after the launch of the latest version of the Facebook Platform about three weeks ago. Marc Andreessen has a very thorough analysis of the Facebook Platform and why it is such an important leap forward for the internet industry in general.
Very interesting is how the prolific rise of the iLike application forced the developers to rapidly scale up from two into the hundreds and possibly thousands of servers to cope with the traffic coming from Facebook. Something to keep in mind if you don't want your smart application killed by it's own success on Facebook. A related rumour had it that Facebook had to dilute their stock by 10% last year to meet the unexpected explosion in traffic. That translates to quite a significant amount at the current valuation... [Link via Techmeme]
Rolling your Own Online Office
Josh Catone on Read/WriteWeb on setting up an online, virtual office environment.
Two tools I'll definitely add to the selection mentioned in the R/WW article above, especially if your work is service related, is Blinksale and Time.onrails.org. Blinksale is a indespensible tool if you're looking to quickly and effectively send and track invoices online. If your billing is time based the integration with time.onrails.org makes it very simple to convert time-tracking into invoices. And if you're already using Basecamp to manage your projects it'll be good to know that Blinksale integrates with the Bascamp API.
Pibb
"Pibb brings together the familiarity of forums, power of blogs, flexibility of email and convenience of instant messaging in one browser window. All messages are delivered in real time and then archived automatically for later search/viewing, making Pibb ideal as a communication back-channel for conferences, for use as a support tool, or for community based private/public discussions. Each channel can have many topical threads for organizing discussions and thoughts" And of course it supports OpenID :) [Link via Kevin Fox]
Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 and the Microsoft.NET Framework 3.5 in Context
Daniel Moth summarizes the core elements that makes up Visual Studio 2008 and .NET 3.5 in two short posts. If you need to explain to your boss what makes up these two related products/stacks this would be good summary to have handy. Brad Abrams expands
New Oracle Developer Tools for Visual Studio .NET
Oracle released some tools in the form of Visual Studio Add-Ins making life easier for teams targeting Oracle and bringing the Visual Studio Tooling for Oracle up to a level comparable to the SQL Server support currently in VS. Tools include integration with Server Explorer, a PL/SQL Editor and Debugger and tools to make deploying ASP.NET applications on Oracle easier. I assume the last point has to do with providing membership and profile functionality on Oracle. [See the full set of tools on the Oracle Site]
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