Another blog bites the dust

Last Thursday I went to Jeff Pulver‘s party for Israeli Facebook users in the Tel Aviv Harbor.

All in all it was very fun and the mood was great. We also discovered that Israelis don’t drink that much even in an almost open bar – Jeff had to take a mic and rush us all into the bar to get to the minimum he told the bar he would pay for :-)

I wish I could attend iPhoneDevCamp but unfortunately I won’t be in the area (or in the right country for that matter ;-) ).

I just read Chris’ post about iPhoneDevCamp and I think these are the right reasons to make the iPhoneDevCamp.

There are a few facts that support Chris’ view:

• In the first week Apple sold 700,000 units
• The iPhone is closed for outside application, but not for web applications
• Having a couple of million units out (after it is also sold in Europe and Asia) means there are a couple of million users using Safari on their iPhone and want to get the right experience in all/most sites.

The day I heard that the iPhone will be closed to 3rd party apps but will use web applications as its main extension approach I thought one thing. Apple should make Safari (or at least just Safari on the iPhone) Microformats aware.

Being a big fan of Microformats as well as a relatively new Facebook user, I find it odd that Facebook has no Microformats support (at least non that I know of).

I’ve decided to remedy the situation a bit and created a small Facebook application which adds hCard support to your profile as a profile box. It is called the hCard application.

It features your Contact information (as much of it as it can) which include:

I just wanted to let all of you know that we just released a new feature on Yedda which integrates nicely with your Twitter account.

You can read the official blog post here.

In a nut shell, upon giving Yedda your twitter username and password, you will be able to share your Yedda expecrience with your Twitter friends.

We will twitt on behalf of you about questions you ask, answers you give, questions you add to your watch list, thumbs up you give to other answers and questions you are being invited to answer by Yedda (all configurable through the settings screen).

I’ve recently started to use Google Apps for Your domain to host my private emails on the sandler.co.il domain.

Google Apps for your domain is quite cool and was very easy to configure. I mainly moved to it due to the unbelievable amounts of SPAM and I didn’t have the power or time to configure SpamAssassin in a reasonable way that would actually work.

When I moved, one of the things I did was to change the “default” URL in which me and other members of my family use to access the web mail of the domain. Google Apps for your Domain allows you to do just that by configuring it in its configuration screen and settings a CNAME record that points to ghs.google.com.

2 days ago I wrote a post about the lack of Google Israel’s involvement in the development community.

It seems that in most of the places (I’m sure in the US, I’m not sure if the rest of the development centers in South American and Europe have the same involvement) where Google has development centers they are a little more involved with the development community in the form of lecture, places to meet and chat, sponsoring events, etc.

I know that Google‘s original Googleplex at Mountain View is very active for non googlers. There are frequent open lectures there and they host a bunch of other things like Summer of Code (well, not always host, but sponsor and make sure people know about it) and Google Developer Day (which is happening at 10 different locations worldwide, but NOT in Israel).

I know there are suppose to be two development centers in Israel, one in Haifa (which I know is located in MATAM cause you can see it from road #2 leading from Tel Aviv to Haifa near Intel and Microsoft Haifa) but I have no idea where the other development center in Israel is located, other than the fact that its suppose to be in the Tel Aviv area.

I own a Nokia E61 phone which I’m very happy with (leave aside the PC Suite backup problem my wife had when she upgraded to an E61 as well).

Even though I’m an Israeli I use its English interface because it’s less buggy and because most of the things I do with the phone (Emails and such) are usually in English, but from time to time I do need the occasional SMS in Hebrew.

This is a bit of shameless promotion but I think it’s worthwhile never the less :-)

One of the things I did lately on my day job (Yedda) was to integrate it with Twitter (check the integration here and add Yedda as your friend!).

Yedda is all about sharing and us sharing things like code with the rest of the world is no exception.

So, without further due, I’m proud to present the Yedda Twitter .NET / C# Library (you will see that it’s more of wrapper than a library… really ;-) ). The post about it in our Dev Blog is here and the details, source and binary are here.

There is a lot of buzz about Sun’s announcement of OpenID support and the fact that Sun will be giving OpenIDs for all of its employees.

While this is indeed good news for the identity community in general and for the OpenID community specifically, it got me thinking about the implications for such a move in which a big company OpenID enables all of its employee.

If a company OpenID enables all of its employees and its OpenID server is usable for outside parties to authenticate against it means that now every employee of that company, when authenticating with his/her OpenID can be verified as an employee of that company (providing that no one spoofs the domain and DNS settings, etc).