When bugs attack - mail server and social integrations get nasty

Unfortunately our mail server has experienced a problem so if you have created an account in the last day or two and didn’t chose OpenID or Clickpass, then you probably did not receive the activation email.

The issue is resolved now, but if you did not receive the activation email when you signed up please accept our appologies and send an email to hellothere at nsyght dot com, including your username, and we will be happy to activate your account manually. Mail is now being sent normally.

Unfortunately that is not the only bug to report. Because of the large volume of new user registrations, we uncovered a bug in the code we use to integrate with Delicious, Twitter, Digg, Last.fm, and Pownce.  This has now been resolved so if you continue to see any errors don’t hesitate to contact us.

Sorry for the problems everyone. Everything should be ironed out now!

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Help us suck less

Here at Nsyght, we are big fans of lots of things. Things like coffee, iphone hackers, and Ben & Jerry’s. But what we like the most is not sucking. 

However, according to The Search Race, brought to you by your good friends at ReadWriteWeb, we are sucking big time.

Currently, Nsyght is ranked a paltry 40th out of the top 100 search engines.Please help us improve this ineptitude by voting us up! :) 

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Nsyght finally launches beta

After months of coding, hours of IM, several visions of laptops hurtling out of the window, litre’s of coffee, and more than a few gray hairs, we’ve finally launched our Beta!

First off guys, hat in hand, I need to extend thanks and appreciation to the community. We are a small team but you guys have stuck with us and been great with your suggestions and feature requests. Please keep them up.

Secondly, big thanks to everyone on the team. Everyone worked incredibly hard and did not stop until we were happy with the finished product. Granted, we are a bit late, but perfection takes time.

Our feature list is pretty long! But here it goes:

* Cleaner UI - Fired the designer (me) and simplified the UI.
* Tag support - Tag your favorite sites then use them to filter your search.
* Clickpass - We have a Clickpass tattoo, do you? Clickpass makes OpenID super simple and fast!
* Simpy support - Now you can syndicate your bookmarks to Del.icio.us, Ma.gnolia, AND Simpy!
* Tagclouds - See what’s popular across the entire site, or just for a given search.
* User clouds - We make it easy to find friends with similar interests.
* Private bookmarks - We won’t display bookmarks you select as private from del.icio.us
* Tag support - Tag your favorite sites, then use those tags to filter your search
* Improved RSS support - Better views of your and your friends bookmarks
* Advanced Search options - filter your search by just your bookmarks, or only your friends
* More bug fixes than you can shake a stick at
*……and more cowbell!

We hope you like the new Nsyght. As always, suggestions and feedback welcome.

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Server downtime today - 13:00 EST/20:00 GMT

We will be consolidating the web server into a new rack today at 13:00 EST. While the move and power-up should only take a few minutes, the physical website may be down for up to an hour.

Sorry for the short notice. We will update this space once everything is back up (the blog will remain live).

EDIT: The site is back up now. So what did we do? We’ve added some additional servers to the mix and consolidated them in the same rack. Always a big fan of more power!

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Call for feature requests: Alpha 2 in development

Since our initial Alpha release last September, we have rolled more and more features onto the site. Now however, we are gearing up a pretty large release we are code naming, “Chamberlain”. Its too soon to hype what this release will contain, but suffice it to say it will be a major step forward from where we are today feature-wise.

However, we would be remiss if we did not ask for feature requests from you, our awesome user. If there is a particular feature or enhancement you would like to see, please comment here on this thread, or privately via our email (hellothere AT nsyght DOT com).

One note regarding our delicious and magnolia integration: Because we are getting more and more new users with rather large bookmark collections, we have had to re-visit our integration to avoid sending too many requests when we do our initial export. This re-work will be completed in the next day or two, and normal import/export operations will resume.

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The Long Tail vs. The Social Graph

Read Write Web has an interesting transcript of a panel session with Jimmy Wales (Wikia), and Jason Calacanis (Mahalo) at the DLD conference in Germany. Both introduced their service and spoke of the strengths of their brand of user-augmented search and how that competes with Google.

The industry all has their eyes on the prize, the holy grail of search. Everyone all wants to build a search service that can take a query and return the most highly relevant result. Jimmy Wales believes users will contribute to build the most relevant result (not unlike Eurekster), whereas Jason sees a need to have an editorial component shape that result set.

Google, on the other hand, still focuses on their algorithm, and the long tail. Yes, the long tail (deep and wide crawl of available documents) presents an infinite set of data in which to search. But in that size lies the problem, content relevancy. Pagerank, in all its brilliance and wonder doesn’t understand about content or even context relevancy. What it does do though, is validate the source.

Jason introduced the problem quite succinctly:

One person can pollute the internet with hundreds of thousands of pages in a matter of minutes.

So if the long tail is polluted, what is the answer? Context or content relevancy.

Mahalo’s answer for context relevancy is editorial:

If you look at the long tail of search we are looking at filling the top spots with journalistic search results.

Which is a very valid response. Look, here is a search for cherry pie, instead of links to pages containing lyrics to the Poison song (yes, I have just dated myself), here are links to actual pages of value for the query. But there are two obvious questions here: can this scale (or is it meant to), and what if we get into more complex queries where the question of bias is introduced?

Melissa Meyer of Google agrees:

To take an algorithm and enhance it with editorial without introducing bias is the solution

The problem with this statement is pretty simple, it is impossible to remove bias programmatically and even editorially.

We, as humans, are all biased. Why? Because we have different experiences, and different points of view. That point of view is not always visible to the naked eye, so we have to trust the source even if we don’t know who that source is. And how do we know if that point of view is not driven by an army of SEO’s that are looking to game the system beneath a cloak of hundreds of users as their disguise?

This is where the power of the social graph steps in. We know what we trust, and we also to a degree trust our friends. By harnessing that trust, we can tailor search to emphasize these levels of trust. This model works the same in the physical world as well. Would you try a restaurant based purely on an ad? Maybe. Would you go based on a good review? Quite possibly. Would you go based on the recommendation of a friend? Definitely.

Our definition of context, or relevancy, is inherently based on trust. We inherently trust our friends, or people we feel have the same concept of relevancy as ourselves. You may not trust tomshardware.com, but my friends do. So my concept of trust trumps yours when I search. This is not a bad thing. Your sphere of trust, and that of your friends, could prefer sits like overclockers.com, or mini-itx.com, etc etc. We need to stop thinking of content and context relevancy as a universal truth. Its different for everyone.

This, has been our core ethos since day one. Building a service that allows people to tap into their own understanding of trust, and allow that trust to expand and augment the algorithm. For them.

Of course, I am biased. But you knew that.

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*Bug* Ma.gnolia integration

As some of you have noticed, we are currently having issues with our oauth integration with Ma.gnolia. We’ve alerted the good folks over at Ma.gnolia and hope to have a fix in the next few days.

Thanks for your patience.

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*Fixed* Pownce Friend Importing

Some of you may have noticed that our Pownce integration broke recently. Our good friends at Pownce recently changed the markup used on their pages, and while the microformat tags were not changed, the pagination markup that allows our spider to discover your friends did.

So what does this mean? The nightly process we use to keep your friendships in sync was failing because the structure of Pownce’s pages had changed. So our little spider kept wandering around on Pownce and not finding the pagination markup it was expecting.

It’s all nice and working now. We here at Nsyght hope Pownce supports oauth soon, grabbing data like this will be far more elegant in the future when they do!

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New Feature: Nsyght supports oauth

Over the weekend we quietly rolled out support for the oauth protocol. What is oauth?

An open protocol to allow secure API authentication in a simple and standard method from desktop and web applications.
oauth.net

What does that mean? Think of oauth as OpenID for data. Currently, if you wish to setup full bookmark syncing with your del.icio.us account, you need to provide us with your credentials. Hey, we are not going to skip town with that data or sell them to spammers, but how do YOU know that we aren’t?

In steps oauth. Our first target integration is with the excellent Ma.gnolia service. In fact, we owe a lot to our implementation to both Todd Sieling at Ma.gnolia (for getting us excited about oauth), and Andy Smith for providing a nice tidy library which was easy to extend for our use.

What does that mean for you? Well now you can sync your bookmarks with your Ma.gnolia account, and as other services around the web roll out oauth support, we will be able to hook into them rather quickly. We like easy things that bring great benefit, if only life was like that.

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Index update in progress

Our index is going through a code upgrade and minor migration. For the next 2-3 hours search will unfortunately be offline. Any bookmark updates or profile changes will not be affected by this.

Sorry for the inconvenience.

**Update**

Index back online.

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