Thailand's military-led government has banned YouTube for refusing to pull video insulting the monarchy. As YouTube becomes a global portal for video, it is drawing not only copyrighted material but political protest and the censorship attempts that come with it. Turkey blocked the portal last month for video insulting Ataturk. The Thais revere their national symbols as well, and insulting the monarchy is a serious offense there. The video mocking King Bhumibol Adulyadej isn't political satire or criticism, it seems more like a juvenile rebellion against stuffy law. We wonder how YouTube solved the standoff with Turkey. Perhaps they'll block the video to affected destination IPs.
Haha, the same story made it to Mashable, where Pete Cashmore and Marshall Kirkpatrick are having a philosphical debate over cultural relativism. I chime in and remind them that Western states have our own sensitivities and tensions:
Come on children, you think Western states are immune to these kind of cultural sensitivities? Remember that flag burning was ruled Constitutional by a slim 5-4 majority by SCOTUS. (Scalia casting the fifth vote!) And three Yalies just got arrested in New Haven for burning the flag. Some perspective, please!
The other isn't really a mashup per se, but shows a cool application of the Papervision 3D Flash engine to display a Tweat timeline. Does Lee Brimelow's app remind anyone of David Gelernter's Lifestream project? (click through the image below...)
Facebook has been a good open source citizen, sharing significant improvements to memcached. Now it releases the homegrown software framework Thrift:
Thrift
Thrift is a software framework for scalable cross-language services development. It combines a powerful software stack with a code generation engine to build services that work efficiently and seamlessly between C++, Java, Python, PHP, and Ruby. Thrift was developed at Facebook, and we are now releasing it as open source.
Release 20070401
Source, .tar.gz format
Thrift is released under the Thrift Software License.
Overview
Thrift allows you to define data types and service interfaces in a simple definition file. Taking that file as input, the compiler generates code that can be used to easily build RPC clients and servers that communicate seamlessly across programming languages.
Besides downloading the source code, there are two easy ways to learn more about Thrift:
* Visit the Thrift Developers Group
* Read the Thrift Whitepaper
Thrift is one of Facebook's core software engineering resources. It is used in various ways across many products, including Search, Mobile, Share, Notes, and Platform. If you use the site, you've used Thrift.
Requirements
Thrift has been widely tested and deployed on Facebook's systems. Though the code is designed for portability, we can't guarantee that it'll run on every system. Here are some basic things you'll want to have. (Note that you do not need to have every language package installed if you only intend to use some of them.)
* A relatively POSIX-compliant *NIX system
* GNU build tools (Autoconf 2.59c+)
* boost 1.33.1+
* g++ 4.0+
* Java 1.5+ / Apache Ant
* Python 2.4+
* PHP 5.0+
* Ruby 1.8+
Think this sounds like a fun thing to work on? Submit a patch or join the team.
I’ve been making similar arguments to the Planypus founders about this very issue. If Gvite truly clobbers the small, intimate group planning arena, then maybe the opportunity for startups is to address the needs of event organizers who plan larger, more public events. Trouble is there’s a whole slew of competitors in that space too (addressing the corporate meeting planners of the world)
The other competitive threat to the invite services comes from plain email itself, be it Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo mail, office mail, whatever. I've noticed lately that friends are skipping evite altogether and inviting friends via CC, even for larger than intimate gatherings. People are so comfortable now with internet life that some value added services become unnecessary. When entrepreneurs try to find value to offer the masses, they should ask, is it really wanted? The "hassle" of inviting or coordinating people through email is less of a hassle than people think. Why do people spend so much time on Facebook getting apparently nothing productive accomplished? "Social crack" = entertainment. Invitation service as optimization is something that psychologists like Simon Baron-Cohen (Ali G's cousin) label as those closer to the autistic end of the spectrum, ie, the typically male, scientific types, and not the more social and typically females would appreciate.
I haven't followed the professional event planning space much. That's a whole different market. Interesting is the software to do seating organization. I remember one or two PC apps on the market recently joined by Web 2.0 server side AJAX new entrants.
Btw, Renkoo is struggling for an identity; wisely they chose to steer away from being a straight up invitation service but are playing a bad copycat to Twitter which owns that nascent category. Socializr will probably be at best a new clubby Friendster for a small group of people in SF. Vibely is actually achieving the same for DC partygoers and it doesn't have the overhang of Jonathan Abrams sized expectations. Planypus is making an earnest effort to compete with Evite straight up by taking the service into new spaces like Facebook and events or regional websites.
