thesethings (andy) // @thesethings
portland, oregon
lately: #datascraping #bash #python #design #fun #delight #twitter #tumblr #screencasts
There's lots to say about Lady Gaga's incredibly informative Google Q&A (Really. Regardless of your interest in Gaga, if you're interested in creativity or self-confidence/ insecurity or business or fandom, you will like this video).
But for now... screengrabs of the Google employee Gaga fans. They did a good job.
Making a social website is more art than science.
We don't understand exactly why people on Flickr are super polite, and people on YouTube are horrible to each other.
Answer sites have proven to be an especially confusing petri dish of people.
A few years ago, Yahoo! Answers attempted to create a more accessible spin on the incredible, but slightly insular Ask Metafilter.
We know how that turned out.
Yahoo! Answers is not dead. It's churning out the crazy like never before. But it better watch out. There's a new insane answers site in town. Google is determined to clean Yahoo!'s clock even when it comes to ridiculous questions.
The recently acquired Aardvark has had some crazy threads lately, including this one:
You might be tempted to think this user is joking, and it's possible. But I've been sent some depressing questions from there lately (you get questions sent to you based on "matches" like city, expertise, etc). I'm guessing that it's real.
Your move, Yahoo! Answers.
I recently had to dig up an interaction I had on Twitter. I knew that Twitter's search wouldn't remember the 6 week old tweets, despite the fact that they're not erased. So I went to Google. Some "realtime" search results were neatly displayed among the "regular" results, despite not being the tweets I was looking for. And the non-realtime results weren't even on Twitter.com.
