So what exactly is a firehose.  It goes beyond being a real-time push stream of data.  If you just had my twitter stream in real-time would you call that a firehose, hardly.  Firehose is all public data, the full thing.

As the Twitter Api says:

Returns all public statuses. The Firehose is not a generally available resource. Few applications require this level of access.

Now I’m starting to see more people say “we got a firehose!” when they dont have anything close.

First, Yahoo. See the Read Write Web Article (which shows they didnt look or didnt care, just repeat the Yahoo Press release)

The first sentence makes it clear that it is not a firehose:

The Updates Firehose API gives developers access to the full, real-time Yahoo! Updates index and allows developers to search, filter and combine Updates data using YQL.

That’s right, the full firehose to query.  What?  It isnt push, it isnt a full stream of data, it isnt even close.  Instead this is just a combination of several APIs from yahoo into one endpoint.  That’s cool for what that is worth, but that isnt real-time and it isnt streaming.

Second Spinn3r.  From their site:

Spinn3r listens to a new Twitter firehose API which is a sample of the full Twitter feed.

Again, if it isnt the full stream it isnt the firehose.  That’s like firefighters showing up with a garden hose. (likely the api method they use)

I’m glad to see that we have gotten more streams of real-time data on the web.  I’m glad to see some companies providing a firehose of their content, even if they charge for it.  The ability to build  some of the next large scale ideas depends on that.  Just dont crowd the search results with overusing the term, use it correctly.

OR most of the time if you have your script in a window.onload event, or the jQuery version $.ready().  I’ve seen some people saying this has happened on a number of different scripts, including google maps.  This isnt a big deal, because in most if not all cases their is an easy solution.  But this is still odd, unexpected behavior from IE.  Something that Firefox and Safari have no issues with.

Moral of the story is if you get the error “internet explorer cannot open the internet site”, check your script tags.  remove them one by one, and find why IE is choking on them.

A couple resource for more info:

• http://lifebaker.com
• http://www.richardcastera.com -  This didnt work for me, others have reported it as working for them, so this just might not be a solution in all cases.

Ignite is coming to Santa Fe.   Ignite is a great speaking event, with a bunch of presenters on different topics giving quick presentations.  They each get 20 slides that auto advance after 15 secs.  Come out for the night to Sf Complex, meet some great people, and have some fun.  The event starts at 6:30pm on April 29th. check out ignitesantafe.com for more info.

Hope to see you there.

Google voice is the newly integrated grandcentral.com, which google bought long ago for the core technology. Google voice is awesome. Same great features, plus many more. I’m loving the SMS feature. You can interact with your friends via sms through google’s web interface. It is like gmail 160 characters at a time. Threading, search, etc.

Now I want that bought to XMPP. Imagine having a feature that allowed you to receive and send sms through your IM client, to contacts that are already on your list. I’ve used other service to take SMS’s to IM before (AOL has had this for years, and iChat use this directly) But this would be transparent to the person you are talking to. They would see the SMS coming from your google voice number (which there is talk of porting numbers to google voice). It would be as if you replied from your phone.

Tie in some features to only send to IM when I’m present, otherways forward to my phone, and I think we have a great feature. Google, please create a google voice api, and we will have features like this.

A few things that I learned:  

Carrington theme (which is misleading as it is more then a theme) looks awesome.  It modifies a bunch of wordpress functionality making some of the theming pains experienced by developers go away.  The big feature of it is the ability to apply themes simply based on tag/categories/author/roles/post/pages/etc .  You can find more info here.

Wordpress has a very healthy community.  There are many developers(150 developers contributed to 2.7), millions of hits on wordpress blogs per day, both on wordpress.com and single installs.  The second largest blog on wordpress.com is CNN…the largest, http://icanhascheezburger.com/  

Wordpress: A Blog, a CMS, or a social network?  Wordpress has more flexibility then I have ever given it credit for.  With projects like Buddy Press (Which in Matt’s own words he says Automattic is ‘long’ on buddy press) wordpress shows that is more then just a blog, really it is a great core to build anything on. 

Check http://central.wordcamp.org/ for a list of upcoming wordcamps.  If there is one in your area, I recommend attending it.

The 6th picture in your flickr photostream:

This is a picture that I took at Wolf Creek Pass in early autumn this year.  I was dropping my father off on a backpacking trip and decided to snap a couple of pictures.

The next meme of Andrew’s is to list 7 random things about yourself, so here we go:

1. I broke my femur when I was in the second grade riding a bicycle.
2. I was born in New Mexico…and have always lived there.
3. I’m the only child of my parents, I have no cousins so my grandparents on both sides have other grandchildren.
4. I was only kinda spoiled growing up
5. I’m working on a startup right now, interested in talking funding?
6. I skied for the first time in my life, this year.  Normally I’m a snowboarder
7. The only time I’ve been out of the country, I went to Japan.

            ”TimePosted”: new Date(1221571632000),

javascript picks up on the new Date function, but not PHP.  so I had to switch the JSON data result to return the date as a string

            ”TimePosted”: “9/16/2008 1:27:12 PM”,

The website that I found in the process of finding this out might be helpful for someone else too. http://www.jsonlint.com/  a JSON validator.  and it takes JSON data and make it easy to read too, that a big bonus!

That’s it.  JSON on!

On a side note:  Like a stupid person I forgot to backup my iphone before updating to 2.0…lost everything since last sync, a week or 2 ago, Lame.