matthew witherow.com

Here’s a cool look into my recent travels and wanderings via Flickr and created with Pummelvision.

Pretty fun.

My Pummelvision from me on Vimeo.

UPDATE: no

If you’ve been surfing the web over the last few weeks, it’s probably been hard to avoid the Google Wave. Is it the best thing since sliced bread? I don’t know, but the last time a Google product had this much anticipation around it was a little app called Gmail. Google Wave looks to reinvent the way people communicate and collaborate via the web. It all makes sense. I mean, email was invented back in the 60′s! This is new and exciting and what’s not exciting from Google?

I signed up for the preview in June, probably a couple of weeks after they demoed it at Google I/O in May. Some of my friends got in on the Beta “sandbox” list and played around with it a bit, although for the most part everyone was frustrated with the fact that they had nobody to Wave with – sad. I on the other hand looked forward toward the official Preview being released.

That day has come, the Preview was released to about 100,000 people on September 30th, but to my dismay I didn’t get an invite! I mean, what does it take to get an invite when you sign up a week or so after the thing is demoed? Anyway, after some scrambling I landed an invite after a co-worker “recommended” me. Now I’m happy to be part of the club, but aside from 3 or so people, I’m stuck Waving at myself. On top of that, if you’re like me and got invited by someone else, you don’t even have any invites to give out. Google says: “Unfortunately, we aren’t able to pass out invites as fast as the nomination list has grown, so we’re not currently adding more people to our waiting list.” All we want is more people to party with! I know, this is preview, it takes a bit to get the infrastructure in place. In the meantime, it’s been fun – installing extensions, waving with friends, and thinking about ways to make Wave even better.

If you want an invite when I do get them, just leave me a comment and I’ll add you to the list.

That I haven’t even written a post yet in ’09! It’s been busy. We launched the new bravotv.com just before the Superbowl and it’s been crazy for me at work since. We built it on Drupal and it was quite an experience to see all that it was (and is) capable of doing. We did a pretty awesome Twitter and Facebook integration for the finale of The Real Housewives of New York City (links to the archive page – we had live twittering during the finale) and I’m looking forward to many more cool mash-ups and integrations as we add new functionality.

Lately, I’ve been getting pretty excited about RoR in my spare time. I feel like it’s opened me up to a whole new world of web development – what took me so long? I think a good initial goal would be to build this site/blog out in Rails and take it from there. I’ll keep you posted on that.

i’m back and going strong with wordpress 2.5, the admin interface is very slick with a much “fresher” user experience and so far it’s been a joy to work with. keep checking back, i should be updating this thing regularly for the rest of the year. woohoo!