Facebook is having problems today. I'm glad to see that others are having issues too while Elftown is working just fine ;P

I needed to check some stuff there though. :/

Yay! I'm elevated to become a guinea pig!

Tomorrow I'll have my heart scanned for science in an MRI-camera. I always have wanted to see that equipment and now I can get into one. Claustrophobic as hell, but I can't even imagine how to be scared of that (And I got stuck in a sand tunnel as a kid, but that was scary because it could collapse).

I got no instructions what so ever (except time and place)... I guess starting the pre-party before and risk vomiting is not recommended... It's at 15 to 17 Swedish time tomorrow (14-16 Elftown time).

I'm on my way back to Linköping. The train left 41 minutes ago, but I'm still here... My train further ahead was canceled, so I have to stay here 2 more hours. Will hopefully be home at 21 o'clock or so tonight.

The thing is that I have nothing to do for an hour now. And I'm quite sleepy.

Tonight (Have to go up at 03 AM... The horror) I'm leaving Linköping and is going to stay with my parents up in the forest during Christmas.

News feeds <= Fun stuff there!

If someone eventually post some stuff, which I just did.

Oh... A Buffy movie is on the way! Cool! Let's dust!

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1444302/

StateOfFacebookCompetition
Are you interested in how Facebook is growing? I've compiled loads of interesting statistics for you:

I've been watching The Social Network. I'll not try to review it, because it can't possibly be the same thing for you as it is for me.

I relate to how it was when I was starting Elftown in 2002 with every part of the beginning of the movie.

Let's start with the stealing ideas part. Did that. Done that. Didn't get sued. I basically copied the functions from a site called Sylvester or Sylvia, but used a different layout (and totally different code). That's one reason for that the status-column is to the right as I didn't want to Elftown to be too similar.

To get a site started, you need a lot of people who are interested in working hard with it. I found absolutely no one here in Linköping, which totally sucked and still sucks. [thomas] was great to have as a benchmark sort of brother and the connection to Elfwood was absolutely necessary, but we didn't work on Elftown together, except that we helped each other out with the hardware and discussed ideas. But I did get a lot of interested people from around the world who helped out with graphics, stylesheets, ideas and feedback.

Facebook's main thing came to be that you can tag the photos other people upload. I thought that Elftown's main thing would be the forums that were more advanced than normal web forums, but not as complicated to learn as LysKOM. The forums were a big thing in the beginning. But one night at the end of September 2002, I thought that why not integrate a wiki into Elftown? It was sort of ready after a few weeks, and it then became the main thing that almost all new users were using. At most there were about 1600 new users per week (many of them people who had forgotten their old username, but most were new), and most of them never used the forums, but send messages to each other and commented in the wiki. 

One thing that sites like Facebook can't compete with is that Elftown is handing out power to normal users that help creating contests and activities so that you can meet people whom you would otherwise not start to talk to. In this way, Elftown is more like a club, than a social network. Elftown is a place where you meet, not a place you go to talk to your friends only.

Then I guess I, compared to Mark, had a lack of asshole in me. We started to have an application system that pretty much killed the growth, due to demands from people who thought that there were too many cybersex-addicts here. Now when I'm looking back, I should have ignored people's whining and put other features in play to filter out the worst crap for people, instead of totally denying these people access to Elftown. As it turned out, the worst whiners about the cybersex crowd were the same people who wanted a huge audience for their art. Another problem is that I built new sites (Baltbalt first, but I think Linkmeet was more ready first, Elfpack then CatHug) instead of diving Elftown into different parts. Facebook built on networks in different schools, but they were connected. In the same way, Elftown could be built like a network of "clubs".

I got more help from people, even with some programming ([Nita] and [True, plain and simple] mostly), but it really sucks to work with people only over the Internet, and it wasn't anything like full-time jobs. Maybe things would have been totally different if I could have met the right people or just pushed harder in the right direction.

For the future of Elftown I don't see any obvious path. Maybe I should work on connecting my different sites somehow. Not so that you get all your messages from all the sites in the same message box, but so have an overview of all the sites somehow. I've looked a little on connections to Facebook, but there was nothing I really liked there. (The API didn't allow for Elftown to upload photos to your Facebook account last time I checked, which was the main thing I wanted to do. I could just create empty photo-albums...)

There is of course a lot of small things I'll fix on Elftown though. But nothing of it is something that really will attract new users. So instead I'm dreaming about that someone(s) will run into my life and give my sites the same rocket-boost as Facebook got, and then there will be a new movie The Internet Meetingpoints...

Pust! 07:24 AM.

I've been working on the Intervallen party for 13 hours now. Me right lower leg feels like broken glass, but it became a little better after drinks and a bath.

Everything went well though. We managed to have very few queues. Maybe except for the bathrooms-queues, but that wasn't our fault.

One word: Kiwi-wine! 12th of October 2010 - This is the date I'll be talking about to my genetically engineered grandchildren when I'm sitting as the honour guest at the 12-October-feast on a remote space station. Telling everyone about how I for the first time drank kiwi-wine, the most remote fruit on Earth finally in a wine-form. How I realized that there where no more remote fruit to make wine of. This was the time when the spark for real change started. When plans for maglev trains in vacuum tubes, the swoosh, was drawn. When the science really started to be used. When the real space age was started, even though there still was a long journey ahead to moon-berry wine, Venus Balloon Melon wine or the brown wine of Ur Anus. This was the time. 12th of October 2010. The word was kiwi-wine. And it was green.

Soon I'll be going down to Rydnäs in the deep forest south of Linköping. Hopefully I'll return tomorrow.

Sometimes ... well, all the time actually, I'm quite happy that I don't run any website in the USA:

http://slashdot.org/story/10/09/02/1250224/Woman-Wins-Libel-Suit-By-Suing-Wrong-Website

From GesaMovingIn

Luke vs Darth... Old style:
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xdvj89_anachronisme_creation

Google is having a hard time understanding a sentence with "Swedish" and "sexy" in it and autocorrects (män)"men" into (kvinnor)"women":

Jag heter XXXX och jag kommer ifrån Frankrike. Jag tycker att
svenska män är väldigt sexiga så därför bestämde jag mig för att åka
till Linköping.

My name is XXXX and I come from France. I think
Swedish women are very sexy so therefore I decided to go
to Linköping.

(I submitted a correction to English some minute ago and already it does the right thing to all languages!)

Bläh! I think I finally managed to break my camera. The lens is stuck again after I dropped the camera. But this time I don't seem to be able to get it unstuck.

Nerd-talk about programming:

I'm working on cleaning up Elftown's Javascript now. It will not bring any new features, but it will hopefully make it swifter for to develop things in the future. I've found some minor bugs and will probably replace them with some new ones.

The thing is that I'm rewriting the code to make use of Jquery, which should make the code shorter and possibly with less bugs. It seems like it eventually will lead to shorter code (faster loading times) too, but that is a very tiny difference.

Now I'm off to test every function... A hell of a lot of them are there!

http://wildammo.com/2009/08/09/what-stormtroopers-do-on-their-day-off/