in Comet? Until recently I didn't realize that you could "connect" to someone in Comet, but not be their friend or family. I think this concept makes sense, but what does it actually do for me, the user? Making someone a friend or family means that I can make my posts visible only to them, which makes sense. But I can't make a post "contact" only. So if I make someone a "contact" all it really means is that they show up on my "Connect" page. I guess they would also show up in my "neighbhorhood" and I would see their recent posts on my My Comet page. The concept, and the nomenclature, are confusing to me, though. Friends and family seem like types of contacts to me, but really, contacts, friends and family are all types of people you can be connected to on Comet.

It seems like when you connect to someone on Comet, you should be asked to classify the connection as one of three possible things:

i) family
ii) friend
iii) contact (business associate or someone you've just met on Comet)

Right now the ui uses checkboxes, which is just wrong. Something I've always to try and just did, is to add someone as both a friend and a family member. You can do that, which makes no sense to me. The way it should work, IMHO, is to have a drop-down menu with the three options above. That seems much clearer. Dividing the world into family, friends and other people whom you have some connection to but are "close" with seems much closer to the way human beings actually classify people in their minds.

I'm going to rewrite this and submit it to "Feedback" too but I thought I would throw it out to the Comet community at large for discussion too, since Feedback tends to feel like a black box.

Has been since about 9:30pm last night. By "Comet home page" I mean the page you get when click on the Comet logo, or on the Comet link in the light blue navbar. This page:

http://www.notcomet.com/home

When I go there, I get the nav at the top, as well as the footer, but where there should be content, I just get the "oops" message:

Anyone else having problems with this page? I sent a bug report to "Feedback" last night but haven't heard back from them. Perhaps it will be fixed in the bugfix version (0.41?) that's supposed to come out today.

Song: Watch Me Jumpstart (Guided By Voices "Alien Lanes")

An anthem for our generation. And for any generations after us.

Is there any point to commenting on photos, books, music and movies? It seems like the comments entered there are very hard to find-both for the people whose assets they are, and the Comet community at large.If you comment on a post, at least an email alert goes to the person who originally made the post. Commets on assets, though, seem to get lost entirely.

Update: it turns out I was wrong. If you comment on an aset, an email is sent out. I guess no one has ever commented directly on one of my assets, so I had never seen it happen. Or this is a recent change to Comet.

This weekend I noticed that the RSS feeds I had set up in Safari seem to be working now. If something was changed to enable them to work, then kudos, because I love RSS-it triggers most of my browsing nowadays. 

Recently some people have started using the term Comet to describe a new style of AJAX development, in which data is pushed to the client instead of being pulled (polled) by the web app.

Will this cause confusion if Comet ends up being the shipping name of SixApart's product? As seems likely since that's the name you guys have been using publicly for it.

Interesting article that was referenced by slashdot this morning, The Surprising Truth About Ugly Websites, about how sites that are "ugly" (the article writer's word) can make surprising amounts of money. He cites, among others, Ebay, Craigslist and IMDB as examples.

I'm not sure I'd describe websites like Craigslist and IMDB as "ugly." Rather, they are functional. Functional doesn't mean ugly. It just means a lack of gratuitious beauty.

I think one of the main reasons that simple, functional sites do well is that they are fast. Fast is really important. You want people to stay on your site all day, you'd better make it as fast as possible. People will tolerate slow page loads in a site they don't visit very often, like a corporation home page, but not in a website they spend hours on-a "soverign" site, to borrow Alan Cooper's term.

Back in the day, what slowed sites down were endless bitmaps, used to create nice backgrounds. With css, bitmaps aren't needed as much, but instead, we have complex css parsing for the browser to do. For example, this page (the Comet compose page) is 44k of html, but contains references to about seven external css files and twenty javascript. Even with the kind of caching a modern browser can do, that's still a hell of a lot of processing that has to occur. So when designing a web app, it's always important to think about whether the design is going to help the user get their task done, or is it just design for design's sake?

today-Professional AJAX by WROX Publishing. I would have inserted it into this post except the Amazon lookup for books is busted as usual. It seems to be really, really unreliable for books-I've only gotten it to work three times out of the about twenty I've tried i t.

Using my knowledge of AJAX so far, I made this:

http://trizzle.fozboot.com/artists-list.php

Not terribly useful, but still cool, especially how fast it loads the data.

This is my last post of the day unfortunately. Have to get up tomorrow and be at my contracting gig at 9am (ugh) for another epic day of rebooting Windows.

Right now the Comet welcome page shows you recent posts, comments and photos from one's friends and family, which is great. I would also like to see recent Music (and maybe also Movies and Books) in here as well. Even better: make the page configurable, so I could choose which assets I'd like to spotligiht.

Also, because you have turned off underlining in your links, it's not always obvious what's clickable and what isn't.

- djchall

When I first started using Comet earlier this week, everything I saw made immediate sense to me (blog, tagging, photos, etc.) except "Collections." I wasn't sure what it meant, though I guessed maybe it was a way to connect different assets. When I clicked on it, though, the resulting dialog box gave no hints as to what I should (or could) do.

Since then, I have figured out how to add things to it, but it's a cumbersome process, and I still don't have a clear idea of what I would use it for. (Maybe to make photo albums?*)

if I were doing feature triage, this is probably the first thing I would jettison from the current Comet implementation, because it's not clear to me what it's supposed to be used for, and there seems like a lot of other features and enhancements that really need to be in Comet that aren't right now.

- djchall

*if this is the case, I would consider changing the name of the feature. "Collections" feels a bit techie to me, it's like what the engineer would call the generalizable object that would group assets.