Elliott C. Back: Internet & Technology

Trying to read my feeds I get some nice 500 errors from Bloglines:

Internal Server Error

The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request.

Please contact the server administrator, webmaster@bloglines.com and inform them of the time the error occurred, and anything you might have done that may have caused the error.

More information about this error may be available in the server error log.
Apache/2.2.5-dev (Unix) mod_ssl/2.2.5-dev OpenSSL/0.9.7a Server at www.bloglines.com Port 80

This kind of error is interesting because while Bloglines’ home page is up and working, their service is not, and that’s something very hard for monitoring tools like Pingdom to monitor without the cooperation of the web service. If there’s ever a standard created for an open web 2.0 service, an interface by which one can query which parts of it are up and down should factor in. It could be as simple as a ping, or as complex as a list of components and statuses. Just fire off a request to api.example.com/ping and get back “up” or “down.” You could use api.example.com/uptime for information about uptime and api.example.com/status for more detailed information.

It’s hard to describe what AideRSS is and what is does. On their about page, they describe themselves as:

AideRSS is an intelligent assistant, which continuously monitors RSS feeds, finds the good stuff, creates a PostRank™, and delivers it to you. We do the grunt work of collecting information on every post, allowing you to focus on your agenda and stay on top of the news stream.

Essentially, they want to scan the RSS landscape for the best stories and bring them to you in an easy to use way. To get an idea of what they offer, let’s take a look at their report for my blog:

They offer a few basic statistics based off of their analysis of my feed. First, they give you some information about my recent updates and how often I write on the blog:

6 posts per month • 13 posts since Jul 05, 07 • Last update: about 7 hours ago

This information is incorrect only because they’ve only been monitoring my blog for two months in which I’ve been quite busy. It’s likely that in the future the number of posts per month and total number of posts will increase. Still, there’s no easy way for them to get this information from a “plain old” rss file. They’d have to look at my sitemap, or gosh, even manually crawl the page.

The second useful feature AideRSS provides is a list of your posts and the conversations around them. For example, that my post about a tank riot got 22 mentions on DIGG. It also counts comments and uses them to compute a combined “PostRank” which they graph for you over time. My postrank over time is also shown as a sparkline graph, and a pretty cool one at that!

Finally, the give your readers the option to subscribe to your good posts rather than just your plain old feed, thus reducing the noise readers have to deal with to get good news. Here are the feed URLs for my blog, courtesy of their widget:

As you can see, I’ve replaced the large Yahoo advertisement in my sidebar with the AideRSS feeds for you to follow. All in all I like the idea of it, but there are still some issues that it has. It will definitely have trouble scaling, with 100,000 feeds added already. It takes a while to pick up your updates. Also, it creates a multiplicity of feeds so that tracking subscribers becomes impossible. Obviously, the only clear way for AideRSS to really succeed in the long run is to build something great enough that Feedburner feels compelled to buy them out and merge their services. Otherwise, AideRSS will create more confusion in the world of RSS than it claims to solve.

Right now I’m having 15Mb / 2 Mb Verizon FIOS high-speed internet service installed. It’s $49 / mo but available in my new home in Staten Island. Time Warner’s road runner, which I had before, cost me the same after their 6 month introductory price expired, and only offered 7 Mbs down / 384Kbs up. They also had some service issues, occasional downtime, and once they “accidentally” physically disconnected my service.

FIOS is interesting, because it’s fiber optic high speed internet. This means they have to physically send people to your home to string fiber. The guys that are here now are nice, fairly professional guys. They strung black fiber down the hallway, drilled a hole in the upper corner of my studio room for the wire, and then strung and stapled the black wire around the room to where they’re going to connect it to their router-like endpoint. After that they just have to splice the wire they strung into the main system running into this building and I’ll have super fast internet.

Looking around the internet, all I see are glowing reviews:

• “Well I finally had FIOs installed at my house, and let me tell you it is well worth the money!” [src]
• DSL reports has 637 positive reviews to 22 negative, with six month rating of 85% [src]
• “If you can get FIOS, its definitely worth the time and hassle to switch. Dealing with their 800 number can be frustrating, but the service quality is still good.” [src]
• Macworld can’t shut up about how great it is, heh.

The bad reviews are hilariously empty of any real information or complaint, and read like bad trolls:

When it’s working, it’s nice … but right now my 14.4K modem over a noisy tin can string would have better throughput.

In a few minutes when it’s installed I’ll be able to run a speed test for you and let you know if FIOS can, in the short term, deliver the download speed it claims.

Update: It can. Not only does the NYC Speakeasy speed test report 10 Mb/s down and 1.8 Mb/s up, but a popular application like Azureus confirms that you can attain these speeds in real life. Don’t believe? Here’s the proof:

And that’s with a firewall turned on! Niiiice.