I usually don't post "popular" things, but this one is really neat. Probably one of the more fun Google Maps mashups I've seen.

The Web 2.0 Innovation Map places popular Web 2.0 sites on a Google Map based on where the site is located.

We're listed as Bloomfield Hills, MI which is where I'm originally from (and where the WHOIS shows for Openomy), but we're really based in Chicago.

One thing that really surpised me was just how distributed it actually is. I expected a whole bag of Silicon Valley (which there were), some in Seattle (which there were), then maybe ten or so in New York, then maybe three or four in Chicago (which there were) and that would be about it. Turns out it's much more distributed than that.

Being a native Detroiter, I'm really excited for the Super Bowl this weekend. (I'll be in Detroit, not at the game, if anyone will be in town wanting to meet up.)


One thing that always amazes me about Detroit is the pride that Detroiters have. Living in Chicago for the last four years, I've definitely realized how great Detroit actually is. I thought I'd share a couple great articles by well-known journalists about Detroit:

Detroit doesn't deserve its reputation (Michael Robertson)
Welcome, world: XL-sized smiles will greet skeptical visitors (Mitch Albom)

Enjoy the Super Bowl. We promise we'll play good hosts. Go Seahawks (and native Detroiter, Bettis).

Maurice and I are both extremely large supporters of open source software. Without it, Openomy would not be possible. While you may have noticed that Openomy uses ASP.NET for the web site, we're by no means running Windows servers. In fact, we run all Linux boxes and use Apache + Mono and use MySQL for some database support. Now, we're even beginning to use the awesome MogileFS project.

Over the course of this project, we've spent exactly $0 on software. Pretty incredible, really.

We decided it was time to begin to formally give back to the open source community. We also know that some outside contributors have been wanting a way to give some open source software related to the Openomy APIs back to the community as well.

With that in mind, we've begun the Openomy Open Source Library (OOSL) project, housed at Sourceforge. It's currently home to API language bindings (Python and Ruby so far), Python and Ruby FUSE implementations (more on these in another post shortly), and also the Openomy/RSS project.

It may also become home to the work we've been doing on MogileFS.. I still want to talk to the maintainers of that project first, though, to see where they'd like to host that work.

I hope you all enjoy this new initiative, contribute, and use the work of others. We think this is a very important step in the right direction in terms of giving back to those who have helped us so much.

I'm really excited to let all of you guys know about our new data center.

We've been scaling pretty fast at Openomy and because of this we're moving data centers to accomodate the growth. Last night we spent the entire night (I kid you not, I got home this morning at 5:30am) setting up most, but not quite all, of the new servers.

As posted on the Openomy status blog, tomorrow we'll be switching the actual web server so you will see some downtime as we move all the actual data to the new machines. We'll also be changing the DNS, so you may see some lag before the site appears to come back up.

For your enjoyment, here is a pic of just the new guys (from Maurice's cameraphone):


Update: Shrunk the image to be nice.

Up until now I've always liked 43things, but more as a fun type of site rather than a really useful service. I guess I was missing a lot.

Erik, one of the guys at Robot Co-op (the creators of 43Things/People/Places/All Consuming) wrote a post today on the Robot Co-op blog about subscribing to people.

Essentially, rather than subscribing to individual RSS feeds from a certain person (whether it's their blog, their goals, their del.icio.us account, their Flickr photos, etc), you can use 43People to subscribe to them. One feed gives you all you want about that person. Here's Erik's example.

That's a totally killer feature of a social network, in my opinion.