Ali Kuru

I got an invitation to Ginx recently, and want to share my thoughts about this new Twitter front-end, a webware which is currently in “pre-alpha” status.

What makes Ginx attractive is that it handles conversations in a threaded fashion. This makes easier to track people’s replies to each other, hence improving overall Twitter experience. Ginx has another usability feature which is about shortened URLs; it automatically converts shortened URLs to longer ones for preview, you don’t need a browser addon or a user script to do that. It also adds target web pages’ favicons next to the links and, especially if the link is pointing to an image, creates thumbnails (unfortunately, Ginx only takes care of the first one if there are more than one links in the tweet). (more…)

Season 5 is hitting viewers mind quite hard, and this weeks’ episode was not an exception. If you are following his blog, Brian told us in his “Because You Left” and “The Lie” instant reactions that he thinks; “these two episodes probably effectively turned off any casual viewers of the show.” His prophecy is happening according to Doc Artz’s recent post about the decline in Lost viewer statistics. Lucky we don’t have to worry about a cancellation :)

Please think twice before jumping the rest of this post if you haven’t watched the episode five yet, since it will contain spoilers. (more…)

Twitter is testing a new AJAX-based interface which updates users’ time-line automatically, according to a post at RWW.

Although two places differ from each other distinctly, there is obviously a competition between Facebook and Twitter, and this competition probably increased after a recent buying offer came from Facebook.

I don’t think Twitter actually worried about Facebook. Since this attempt of adding features to its interface came after their rumored fund raising effort, they might up for creating a monetization method after almost 3 years of existence without a proper business model.

[via digg]

I love Gmail, it simply gets more useful every day.

If you have Labs enabled in your Gmail account, you can now display your location information at your signature. You’ll probably find this useful if you are a frequent traveler.

First, you have to enable the “Location in Signature” feature in Labs, and then you have to enable signatures under settings and check the box in front of the “Append your location to the signature” option. After these steps, Gmail will use your public IP to locate where you are.

It says on the Gmail blog that using Google Gears with location module brings more accurate results with Wi-Fi triangulation.

[via Gizmodo]

According to my birth records, it’s been 30 years since my official hello to the world, so this “Hello” here is not actually coming from me, but from WordPress, which is a software I use to publish this blog.

It is a tradition around programmers to make their software print out the phrase “Hello World” to prove their initial code is actually functioning. You can read more about the idea behind this from Wikipedia.