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A year ago, we launched the "pre-alpha" version of FeedBurner. Well, we've made it to "beta", and we're threatening to drop that designation any day now. We just have a couple more milestones to hit.
Working on FeedBurner has been very rewarding, and I can't wait to launch some of the things we've been working on in the coming year.
In a post on Burning Questions, we talked about how popular our feed splicing services are, and offered up this perspective on where we think things are going:
[F]or some, the feed is becoming a first-class citizen in the world of content, and FeedBurner wants to help. Feeds pretty much started out being a lightweight content transport, or a notification mechanism. This remains a completely valid and appropriate use of feeds: as an extension of your web site that draws users to visit your web-based content. But as publishing tools begin to specialize ("I keep my photos on Flickr, my blog's with Blogger, I use del.icio.us to store my links, and then I've got my calendar, NetFlix queue, Amazon wish list, and so on and so forth"), it starts to get harder and harder to point to a single URL and say "This is me." The one thing that all of these content sources have in common, however, is the ability to provide a standardized representation of themselves as a feed. A FeedBurner goal is to help you collect and manage the "scattered pieces of you" into a single resource that can easily be shared with others. The feed starts to become much greater than the sum of its parts.
Erik Benson, of All Consuming and 43 Things fame, recently did some cool personal content consolidation using Bloglines as the integration conduit. Check out his posts "Outsourcing the blog" and "Using Bloglines to manage my online presence".
This meme has been floating around for a while (see also "more thoughts on similarities between software packages" and "Interweb connectivity through ping-/trackback"), but Erik's duct tape implementation is the first real implementation I've seen outside of MT plug-ins. Nice job!
Maybe a touch less satisfying than Matrix Reloaded, but it's still a helluva movie. If you were to evaluate strictly as an action movie, you have to give it high marks, but it's a bit more than that. In my opinion, the Wachowski brothers did a good job of resolving the storylines into an effective conclusion for the trilogy. I had managed my expectations for this film since I talked to a number of people that were disappointed by it, but overall I thought it was great.
A bit of a sadistic thriller, this movie kind of reminded me of an old Clancy book called Without Remorse -- <movie-trailer-voice>a man pushed over the edge</movie-trailer-voice>. I really enjoyed the relationship between Washington and the very talented Dakota Fanning, but the last act of this film was just a little too much to swallow. Three stars.
I'm happy to report that I've got a new girl in my life! Maya Grace Lunt was born at 5:51am on February 15, 2005. She weighs in at 8 lbs. 13oz. and is 20.5 inches long. Big sister Jessica can't wait to meet her!
If you read this via my feed (the only sane way to keep track of things, imho), let me apologize in advance. I'm going to be messing with it a little bit, so some old items might show up as being modified. Sorry about that.
Christine and I were all set to finally watch "Matrix Revolutions" when we decied we needed a little refresher course on the Matrix universe. So we popped in the Reloaded DVD. It seemed a little slower than I remembered, but I picked up more of the subtle plot points the second time around. I still highly recommend it.
I wasn't really familiar with the persona of Howard Hughes, so this movie really opened my eyes. Martin Scorsese puts his mark on this biopic, Leonardo DiCaprio does an excellent job of portraying this complex character, and there are some great supporting performances. What a life this guy led! This is a fantastic, engrossing film that, sadly, was the only Best Picture nominee I saw this past year!