Published March 21st, 2009
“IE6 is the new Netscape 4. The hacks needed to support IE6 are increasingly viewed as excess freight. Like Netscape 4 in 2000, IE6 is perceived to be holding back the web.”Jeff Zeldman, standards guru
I saw the link to the bring down IE 6 site today via our friends on Twitter and simply had to announce our support for such an initiative. IE6 while once the browser to which all others were bench marked, is now, frankly the bane of an Internet Start up’s existence. It might have been great once, but all good things must come to an end, and for IE6, that time is now.
For Faraday Media, IE6 support has never been a priority, since our users and visitors are overwhelmingly Firefox users, so unofficially, we’d already been on this bandwagon. Today, it’s official.
If you’re chained to IE6 due to some corporate SOE policy, you have my sympathy. If you’re using IE6 voluntarily, then you only have yourself to blame (just for you, here is the link to Firefox).
I really encourage other start-ups to stand-up and vocally (and officially) join the movement.
Tags: firefox, ie
Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment »
Published February 28th, 2009
In order to celebrate our renewed focus and to inspire all start-ups to battle through these unfortunate times, we’ve given the Particls blog a little make over. It’s been a long while since we gave our little blog some TLC and I think it’s deserved.
Our new header image is design by one of our developers Andrew, and symbolizes millions of “Particls” of data - many isolated, but then coming together, forming streams of information. I love it. What do you think?
Tags: blog, design, faradaymedia
Posted in Uncategorized | 2 Comments »
Published February 22nd, 2009
Note: If you want to get started with Particls, simply follow the instructions at http://blog.particls.com/index.php/instructions
From the day we launched Particls 1.0, people have always been excited with our approach to Attention Management. And while we certainly don’t consider it to be a failure, we always felt that being a Windows only desktop client, with some complex UI challenges, that there was something too difficult for many users to grasp. There was effectively three paradigm shifts (Aggregate Everything, Rank against interests, Variable interruption based on relevance) and this was a too much for a lot of users to wrap their heads around – ultimately creating a ‘barrier to entry’.
We switched over to a web-based solution, cutting Particls in half. The Attention Management Engine was removed and eventually became Engagd, and the visualization and alerting engine became what we called ‘Particls 2.0’. We’ve been working on these two platforms for quite some time, but as the economy turned, and faced with ever increasing costs and minimal resources; we decided to find another way - to work with fine scalpels instead of axes like we once did. A limitations of resources always forces companies to focus on what really matters – and we choose to use this economic downturn as an opportunity instead of allowing it to consume us.
In order to reduce complexity and scope, we’ve diverted all resources onto a new project we’ve been internally calling “Particls Fountain”.
Particls Fountain will eventually become what we wanted Particls 2.0 to be, but rather than building from the bottom up, we’re building it from left-to-right. Right now it is simply a replacement for the Twitter Tracking service, where you follow topics of interest you define and Particls alerts you Tweets about that topic.
Currently these alerts are delivered via XMPP or Direct Messages, but other mechanisms have been requested and are in the pipeline. Unfortunately however, Direct Messages are being limited by the Twitter API. We will be bringing new channels online to compensate. If you want to get started with Particls, simply follow the instructions at http://blog.particls.com/index.php/instructions
Aside from extremely agile development and releasing frequent, smaller updates to the service, we are also letting the community be the primary driver of development. We’ve setup a UserVoice site where great ideas are already flowing from the community of about 100 testers. This feedback is vital, and it’s encouraging to see these users vote for their favorite feature. Its quite insightful, and it clearly demonstrates what we think is a cool feature, is actually not always what users want or care about.
As a developer I also find it extremely rewarding to mark a feature as “complete” and getting immediate feedback about it. Its great and so far we’ve found that not only do we as a team produce code faster, but we also building stuff better than we did without it.
It’s still early days for Particls Fountain, but we really do want to make this a tool everyone will find useful, so please come try it out and give us your thoughts. Be our bosses and tell us what to do to make it something you love.
Because we do.
Note: If you want to get started with Particls, simply follow the instructions at http://blog.particls.com/index.php/instructions
Tags: economy, fountain, particls, recession, uservoice
Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment »
Published August 21st, 2008
The APML community has been itching for the APML 1.0 Specification for a little while now, and Paul, our resident genius; has spec’d out the initial draft for community discussion. You can find the intial draft, at http://groups.google.com/group/apml-public/web/apml-1-0-draft-1
From the Public Google Group:
This comes with a very large fore note: This is a very early draft only, and nothing is set in stone. Given that the community is obviously itching to start seeing APML 1.0 progress, I felt that it would be an appropriate time to release this and assist in structuring the discussion. I intend to follow this with a few more emails that detail individual sections I believe need substantial addressing.
APML version 1.0 proposes a number of substantial changes over the previous 0.6 version, with some of the changes including, but not limited to;
- The Addition of an ‘Entity’ node to describe (People, Businesses and other non-metaphysical interests.
- The Addition of a ‘Location’ node to outline places of interest.
- The inclusion of an rdf:about node attribute to allow for richer RDF-type ontologies without reducing the “simple” nature of APML.
APML has come a long way since its inital conception a little over 2 years ago. And I am very proud to be involved with a community of people all dedicated to creating an open format to give attention back to the people who own it.
The APML Workgroup is committed to ratifying this standard as soon as public commenting is evalutated, and is tasked to provide a smooth transition to the new version; so please feel free to head over to the public Google Group and put in your 2c.
Tags: APML, Data Portability, standard
Posted in APML | 1 Comment »
Published August 19th, 2008
Over the past two weeks, the Faraday Media development team have been hard at work migrating all our products and initiatives into a new datacenter. The new data center was much more suited to Faraday Media technology - much easier to scale, much faster and more reliable.
As part of our efforts, we’ve finally had the opportunity to give Particls and the Engagd platform their own dedicated servers, effectively quadrupling our processing capability. This will allow us to service our partners and customers with increased reliability and confidence.
We’ve taken the opportunity with the new servers, to finally move our blogs off Blogger and onto a hosted WordPress solution, giving us far more flexibility with our blogs and presentation.
One problem, however, after we upgraded to WordPress 2.6, was that when we changed the permalink settings (to something more tollerable than ‘?p=x’) suddenly, index.php worked fine, but any other page reported as ‘not found’. After serverl long hours Googling for the answer, there was lots of “answers” for WordPress on Apache (specifically about correct access to the .htaccess file and ensuring the correct PHP/Apache modules are installed) - but none about how to solve these issues on IIS. It turns out that there are a number of known issues with 2.6 on IIS, which are now solved with the release of WordPress 2.6.1.
With most of our migration issues now sorted, we can now confidently continue to deliver our attention and data portablity solutions to the masses secure in the knowledge that our services are scalable and our bandwidth is plenty.
Tags: engagd, hosting, IIS, particls, scale, servers, WordPress
Posted in Service Status | No Comments »
Published July 14th, 2008
Are you in Sydney or the Bay Area? If so - come join me, Robert Scoble, Loic Le Meur and our host Ross Dawson at the Future of Media Summit 08. A Cross-continental conference.
Otherwise track #fom08 on the various social networks.
Tags: APML, conference, Media 2.0, Silicon Valley, speaking, sydney
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »
Published June 19th, 2008
Ross Dawson has published a list of the top 60 web apps in Australia in the BRW this week. At number 5, our very own Engagd.com - the engine that powers Attention Profiling for the web at large as well as Particls version 2.
This is a testament to the hard work and dedication of the development team. A huge thanks to Ashley Angell, Paul Jones and Jon Cianciullo who have been working tirelessly to manage, build and polish the Engagd platform.
Particls itself came in at 21. That will change of course once we launch the new version!
Thanks to Ross for his hard work compiling the list and including us.
Ashley went to Sydney to demo Engagd at the celebration party. By all accounts it was a big success. Somehow he made a developer platform interesting for a non-technical audience. Good work my friend!
Tags: announcement, engagd, media, particls
Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment »
Published June 12th, 2008
If you think Faraday Media is ‘cool’ don’t forget to nominate us for the Anthill Cool Company Awards.
Does asking for a nomination make us uncool? Hopefully not 
Tags: anthill, cool, nominate
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »
Published June 4th, 2008
There are only a limited number of start-up founders in the world, even less who sets his or her mind to change the very fabric of the internet. Chris is one of them.
When Chris and I founded Faraday Media, it was of extreme importance that just being another startup was not enough. We had to do something meaningful. Something significant. Not happy with fame or glory, we wanted to grow as people - giving back to a medium which had fed us for long time. To take the internet to a new place, just like Google had done nearly a decade ago. Its been a long road for Faraday, and while it hasn’t always been easy, Chris’ drive and aspiration has bought us to new and extraordinary heights, time after time after time; often at great personal sacrifice. I could never ask for a better CEO, or friend.
It’s no secret that Chris and I are the best of friends and it makes me very happy, to congratulate him on being selected as one of the 30Under30’s for Anthill, the leading entrepreneurial magazine in Australia.
From the website:
At 26, Chris Saad is one of Australia’s most impressive young web entrepreneurs. His theory and practice around web standards - specifically ‘DataPortability’ and ‘Attention Management’ - have gained significant traction and are set to have a profound impact on the evolution of media in the digital age. Saad has co-founded several web-related companies and organisations, most prominently Faraday Media in 2006, of which he is CEO. Faraday Media is developing Particls, a technology that learns user habit and taste and delivers relevant information to them via news crawler, SMS, email, flash visualisations, etc. He also co-founded the Media 2.0 Workgroup with 14 industry ‘commentators, agitators and innovators’. There’s no shortage of ideas or energy in this digitally-minded entrepreneur. One to watch in the years to come.
Make sure you click through to the Article, subscribe to the mag and read the other 29 profiles!
This is recognition to a man whom has dedicated and sacrificed so much for the greater good, a true philanthropist. Well done Chris, you are definitely deserving of this prestigious award and will no doubt be one of many in the years to come.
Tags: 30under30, announcement, chrissaad, media, Media 2.0, web 2.0
Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment »
Published June 1st, 2008
I have written on my personal blog about what I am starting to call “Personal Reality“.
As I wrote there:
Personal Media includes your friend’s shared items. It includes the comments you leave on blogs. It includes Social Media. But it also includes private updates. Updates from your Intranet. Updates from your family. Updates from broadcast media. Updates that matter to you - no one else.
Personal Media is about recognizing that people are social and private. They are interested in personal experiences.
Check it out.
Tags: APML, dataportability, Media 2.0, personal reality, personal relevancy, trends
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »
