Raible Designs

Why no more than 500 connections?

I recently updated my status on LinkedIn to read:

Matt is determined not to have 500+ connections. Will start removing connections soon.

A couple of days later, I received the following message from a connection:

I noticed the other day you mentioned that you are determined to not have over 500 LinkedIn connections. I'm wondering what the reason is? Not just because LinkedIn shows 500+ after that, is it? As you work for LinkedIn, I assume there's some other reason. I'm interested to know what it is...

I joined LinkedIn May 27, 2003, 22 days after it initially launched. For the first few years, I accepted invitations when I received them. Some folks I knew, some I didn't. When I started consulting for LinkedIn last summer, I had somewhere between 200 and 300 connections. Most of them were people who had contacted me, not folks I had contacted.

One day, I used the import webmail contacts feature to pull in my contacts from Gmail. My number of connections quickly jumped by 100 and it's increased quite a bit since then (mostly due to co-workers from LinkedIn). Of the almost 500 connections I have, I believe there's a good 100-200 of them that are folks I don't know, have never had contact with, and will likely never benefit from being "connected" with.

I guess the main reason I'm planning on trimming my connections is to make my network higher quality. I admit I'm somewhat motivated by the 500+ icon, but it's also a genuine feeling that there's quite a few folks I won't benefit from being connected to. I'm not a LION after all. I believe my LinkedIn network should resemble my real-world network.

What's your opinion? Should I have folks in my network that know me, but I don't know them?

LinkedIn Groups

This afternoon, I noticed there's a LinkedIn "GlassFish" group now available and it reminded me of a couple things:

• LinkedIn currently doesn't have a way to search for groups, but Jason Bailes has setup a LinkedIn Groups Search with Google Custom Search. Thanks Jason!
• I created a Apache Software Foundation group on LinkedIn a few months ago. If you're a committer or member, you're more than welcome to join the group.

LinkedIn Groups don't provide a whole lot of functionality at this point, but I've heard there's big things in store for them. Chances are they'll be very valuable in the future.

The Thin Server Architecture Working Group

From The Wisdom of Ganesh:

Peter Svensson has set up a website where like-minded people can discuss the brave new world of applications whose common characteristic is that no aspect of presentation logic resides on the server side. I admit that's an overly broad-brush generalisation, and it will be necessary to read what the various authors of this camp have to say.

I thought about doing something similar when I first read about SOFEA. I'm glad to see that someone has taken on this challenge. However, doesn't it seem ironic that this site doesn't use SOFEA/SOUI for its own architecture?

IMO, if this site isn't written with some sort of SOFEA-based framework like it advocates, it's pretty much worthless.

WebORB: Have you ever heard of it?

A colleague sent me an e-mail today and asked me if I'd ever heard of WebORB today. Since I hadn't, I figured I'd write this post and see if any of you have heard of it? If so, what is it and what does it do? It it similar to Appcelerator, but server-side only? Or is it more like Granite DS?

[Read More]

YUI Grid CSS and Rails Performance

From Stephen O'Grady, I learned a couple interesting tidbits yesterday.

The first is Jeremy Zawodny talking about Yahoo's new Grid Builder in YUI Grid CSS and Grid Builder Kick Ass! The last time I looked at YUI Grid CSS (that's a mouthful) was almost 2 years ago, when it first came out. It's obvious that this library is better supported than Mike Stenhouse's CSS Framework. Maybe it's time to switch in AppFuse? Anyone know of themes available for Grid CSS?

The second item is Charlie Savage's entry titled Must Read Rails Performance Article:

Using a patched version of ruby and ruby-prof, Alex was able to more than double performance (with hints of more to come) and reduced memory consumption by 75%, or 750MB (yes - that is Megabytes). Alex does a wonderful job of documenting his approach with a series of blog posts here and here.

This reminds me of Don Brown's recent work on Maven. This is how open source is supposed to work - instead of complaining about the problems, fix them. In both Rails' and Maven 2's cases - it's somewhat surprising these issues weren't fixed earlier. Kudos to Alex Dymo and Don Brown for stepping up to the plate. Well done gents.

Shadowbox - a slick Lightbox that supports Flash

Via Ajaxian, I learned about Shadowbox.js. From its creator, Michael Jackson:

A few weeks ago, I was looking for a Lightbox-like script that would allow me to display more than just pictures. In addition to static images, my client required the ability to display various types of movies including QuickTime and SWF. The only script that fit the bill was Lightwindow?a nice piece of work to be sure?but it required the Prototype + Scriptaculous combo and I was already using YUI.

Besides, I thought, it would be really great to have a full-featured media viewing application that was library agnostic. Then, if I need to use a different framework for some particular reason, I can easily switch.

Thus was born Shadowbox?a cross-browser, cross-platform, cleanly-coded and fully-documented media viewer application built entirely in JavaScript.

I've been using Lightbox JS on this site for almost 2 years. The next time I need lightbox functionality for an application, I'll definitely try out Shadowbox. I dig the look and feel. I agree with Ajaxian commentors that rel="lightbox[name]" would be awesome. If it's added, I could theoretically replace lightbox.js with shadowbox.js and I wouldn't have to make any other changes.

View Shadowbox Demos »

Google Calendar Sync for BlackBerry

A couple of days ago, I said the Network Updates feature on LinkedIn's New Homepage is kinda boring. I still agree with this, but I think the new LinkedIn News provides some real value. Today my homepage had a link to Google Calendar Sync for BlackBerry. This is something I've been looking for for quite some time.

If you have a BlackBerry, you can install it from http://m.google.com/sync. I use Spanning Sync to allow me to synch my Google Calendar in iCal and it works awesome. Having a sync to my BlackBerry was the missing part that I really wanted - and now I have it. Thanks LinkedIn! (and Google of course)

As far as LinkedIn's New Homepage, I think the biggest improvement would be to add Atom/RSS Feeds so I could get all my homepage updates (news, network updates and widget updates) in NetNewsWire. I asked about this last week and they said this should be coming in Q1 2008.

LinkedIn's New Homepage

Dion has a post about LinkedIn's New Homepage. In addition to Dion's post, this seems to be a popular topic on Techmeme. I'm proud to say I played a small part in this project and enjoyed working with the fabulous "Homepage Team" that put this together. We celebrated the launch last week while I was out in Mountain View.

To learn more about LinkedIn's New Homepage and the News feature, see the LinkedIn Blog.

Back to Dion's post. He says:

The network connections portion shows me what is wrong with LinkedIn. On Facebook I can see interesting things that my friends have done. On LinkedIn, I see that a connection has added another 6 connections. Who cares?

I agree that Network Updates are kinda boring on LinkedIn. However, I don't find my Facebook News Feed very interesting either. Is your Facebook News Feed interesting? If so, why?

How Gmail will make money

I found the following when cruising through some options in my Gmail account today. Seems like a decent strategy to me.

Account Maintenance

Gmail has been giving me the following error page since Friday morning. On one hand it's frustrating that I can't check my e-mail. On the other, it's kinda nice having a couple of days off.

My parents are in town and we've been cleaning gutters and raking leaves all day. It's a beautiful 69°F to make it all the more enjoyable.

Update: It's been almost 4 days and still no resolution. My account is still out of order and most e-mails to me are likely bouncing. My advice: don't depend on Gmail for your main mail account. Luckily I haven't, so [email protected] should still work - [email protected] seems to be gone indefinitely.

Update 2: I finally got access again on Tuesday afternoon - 4.5 days later. With 268 unread messages in my inbox, I think I'd like it turned off again.