Qshop will become a super-quick-and-easy way to find and buy stuff on Amazon. I think big sites like Amazon are suffering from years of feature creep which cause their sites to become slow and unusable. For example, "The Matrix" DVD page on Amazon is currently a 545kb download with 134 files, where the same page on Qshop is 32k with 6 (soon going to 3) files. Wdyt? ¶3:12 PM; digg

Anti-spam ESP platforms. I would like Gmail and the other web-based Email Service Providers (hotmail, yahoo, aol, etc) to publish APIs to allow third-party developers to publish their own spam fighting algorithms. This would allow massive experimentation, and result in more rapid evolution of better anti-spam solutions than any one ESP can develop on their own.

I want these features in the Anti-spam ESP platforms:

1. Object types such as "MyFriends" (people you have received/ok'd and/or sent email before), and "MyBadWordsRegexps" (your own list of frequent bad words you get from non-friend spammers, noting that you should not do content filtering for your friends), MyBadSubjectRegeps, etc. Having objects allows efficient anti-spam programming instead of requiring the third party developer to add a freaking rule for every item.
   
   
2. Easy stats so you can see how often each of your items is used. This will help the developer make sure they don't waste time filtering for BadWords which in fact never come. (Allows developer to keep their anti-spam code and data really tight.)
   
   
3. Allow developers to publish their algorithm's URL so their friends can help test new algorithms.
   
   
4. Allow built-in actions such as ReallyDelete (for when you are absolutely sure a particular non-friend email is spam), HideButLabelAndArchive (for when you "think" a message is spam).
   
   
5. Allow developers to publish (or use) their own (or someone else's) sender identification protocols to allow more aggressive blacklisting and whitelisting.
   
   
6. Allow commercial anti-spam developers to sell their plug-ins by subscription or one-time fee.
   
   
7. Allow open source developers to easily publish their source code in the ESP's Anti-spam plug-in directory.
   
   
8. Allow developers to opt-in to having stats about their platform published to the net at large.
   
   

What else? I will update this post at my esp-antispam-apis.html page.

¶5:15 AM; digg

Outage pages. All the cool kids are trying to use humor with their site outage pages. I am going to start to keep a cache of these as I run into them. ¶10:59 PM; digg

The new facebook.com is on fire.

This ain't the facebook of a few years ago.

The new facebook now has an open platform which allows any developer to snap in any functionality which wants to take advantage of a social network. Facebook is my addiction of the week, I've spent hours playing around with the new applications, and connecting to people.

I think the Facebook user interface is extremely well done. It is very simple, no extra garbage (except for the annoying graphic ads), and has just enough info (but not too much) to make an interesting social newsfeed. There are so many clever little things about this site.

I now fear for any startup who is trying to create a new vertical social network. Why would a user join a new travel social network (for example) when they can instead use travel on facebook, which already has info about all of their friends?

Prediction: facebook could become the next Yahoo. I'm not kidding. ¶9:12 AM; digg

Alanis Morrisette - My Humps is the funniest video I've seen in months. (And Perfect is the saddest.) ¶10:49 AM; digg

Noel Junke? I just got a telesales call from Ziff Davis (888-464-1180) asking to speak with "Noel Junke". That is a name I used to use when I purchased magazine subscriptions for my work. :)

My latest strategy is to use celebrity names, which makes our mail people curious, and also makes telesales people suspect when calling. ¶11:25 AM; digg

What What Where is a cool New York band featuring Ruthy Mirsky and friends. Check them out! ¶6:10 PM; digg