gdp's Comments

PeteSearch : How to easily pull avatars from multiple services

Wed, 22 Jul 2009 05:38:34 +0000

Is it possible to access the 73x73 version of the twitter icon with this?

Make the Future : Introducing act.ly - Petitions Designed for Twitter

Wed, 22 Jul 2009 04:00:05 +0000

Yes. If you're thinking about something specific you want, just drop me an email and I can get it to you sooner in non-official form.

Make the Future : People from 26 Countries on the list for NationBuilder

Sat, 18 Jul 2009 06:45:38 +0000

31 countries! Added Guatemala, South Africa, New Zealand, Netherlands, and the Philippines.

Make the Future : Introducing act.ly - Petitions Designed for Twitter

Wed, 24 Jun 2009 03:15:32 +0000

Thanks Eric. I've thought about that, whether a tweet should be required to sign. I think it should be, because it gives the signature a lot more weight. You're not only willing to sign this petition, you're willing to tell everyone about it. Petitions have gotten less and less useful over the years as we've made it easier and easier to sign. One thing I like about doing it on Twitter is that we can make it *even easier* to sign, while making it a more meaningful signature, AND spreading the word. It's kind of beautiful.

Make the Future : How do you deal with competitors in open systems?

Sun, 31 May 2009 15:24:49 +0000

There's enough data in NationBuilder to do this. You could flag anyone who endorses/opposes a given priority (or set of priorities) and do something different with them. Like on White House 2, there's a priority for "Admit government can fix nothing, can only make worse." (http://whitehouse2.org/priorities/878-admit-gover... In the context of this political site, it seems wrong to discount their votes, but in another context, I could see how it might be helpful for an Administrator to have the ability to just throw away the votes of anyone who endorses that priority. But now we're getting into an ethical area, how do you ensure that sort of a feature isn't used simply to stifle dissenters... which would be antithetical to running a democracy in the first place!

Make the Future : How do you deal with competitors in open systems?

Sat, 30 May 2009 22:42:35 +0000

Thanks for your thoughts.... I do remember reading recently about the registration/moderation approach having the opposite effect of what was intended. What about the people who in fact want the *general* project to fail. Let's say I'm running Craigslist in an open fashion, anyone on the internet can be involved on how the company should be run. It's quite reasonable to expect that people working at newspapers might view the success of Craigslist as directly hurting their ability to make a living. So they participate in how Craigslist should be run, and suggest things like charging for listings so their classified ads wouldn't be undercut. I suppose more and more transparency does help that, although it might be hard to actually get that out of people. But if you know that 70% of the people supporting this one idea all happen to work in the newspaper industry, then you can take that into consideration. So then, how does that manifest itself on a website in an easily digestible way. We can't expect everyone to delve into everyone else's background. Maybe there's a means of tagging other people? In politics, it could be something like "20 people tagged this person a lobbyist"...something like that.

Make the Future : Making the Future

Mon, 11 May 2009 20:23:59 +0000

WH2 will be running on NationBuilder. Technically, it's all the same codebase, I've just been making the whole thing more customizable behind the scenes. Development will continue on full time, I've got a whole ton of ideas for this.