You may have noticed that FrankenFeed rarely works.  For quite some time it worked fine.  We had over 40,000 users merging more than 600,000 RSS feeds.  Then someone built a bot to attack the system.  Suddenly we were merging several million feeds bogging down the system.  We would shut him down and then he would pop back up again from a new IP address.  Finally, we stopped trying to stop him, but let the system bog down to a crawl (basically not working).  We figured that eventually he would go away when whatever he was trying to do (Google SEO we think) stopped working.  He didn’t go away.
Rodrigo began work on a new version that would prevent various types of abuse that we had seen in the first several months of use.  He completed his work this summer, but we never got around to bug testing it.  Today one of our clients needed the public version functioning for a project and we made the decision to launch the new version (in true alpha) immediately.  You will need to recreate your feeds (sorry about that ~ but surely you were not actually using the system since it didn’t work constantly).

We will report here on the blog regularly on the new system and let you know what we are working on.  In the meantime, enjoy FrankenFeed 2.0.

We moved the Big in Japan servers to our new data center and during the move PodServe was taken offline.  For some reason we failed to get it back online until this afternoon.  Sorry for the outage!  We hope that our new facilities improved infrastructure will make up for the service interruption.

If you were heir to the throne of England and you were bitten by the “blogging bug” this is what your blog might look like: The Prince of Wales.

Prince Charles thinks his site is a blog, and perhaps if you were a prince your blog might look a lot like his.  Seems more like a website to me, but alas I am not a prince…  [via]

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Charlie O’Donnell pointed out that Sony had YouTube remove all Casino Royale trailers from their site.  I am with Charlie on this one when he says “huh?”

Okay, give YouTube a call if someone posts the actual movie to YouTube, but if someone posts the marketing trailer I would be excited.  Right?  Is there something I don’t understand?  I am sure some lawyer will be able to explain how they “had to” remove it, but I am sure I could figure out how to allow the trailers to remain.
Charlie sums up his feelings better than I can:

If you’re in charge of movie trailers, no matter how big or small your movie is, and you don’t have them uploaded to YouTube, you’re an idiot.  That’s it.  You’re just an idiot.

YouTube can be a great marketing tool for your business (see uShip video from earlier today) or your television show.  Take time to consider how best to incorporate it into your overall social media strategy ~ don’t turn this one over to the legal department, send it over to the marketing department instead.

Certainly click-to-call has limitations and risks for abuse, but implemented correctly it can offer clear advantaged for certain web service providers.  Contrary to some reports, Google’s click-to-call was not pulled (it is still functioning).

Integrated into web based services such as Salesforce.com, Mailroom (woot!), Basecamp ~ our Podcall functionality can offer unique social interactions and services previously difficult to implement and afford.

Yesterday I had an interesting call from a prospective Podcall customer and a feature we had previously not announced came up.  While we provide the phone system, network interconnection and API hooks we don’t necessarily have to provide the minutes.  If you want to negotiate your own wholesale minute rate we can simply connect to your provider and let you pay them directly.  No need for us to markup the dial-tone costs.  (our pricing for North America is currently around 2.5 cents per minute)

Did you know that for over a year, Big in Japan has provided WordPress support services to clients both large and small.  Automattic, the company behind WordPress, partnered with Big in Japan last year.
Specifically, we have experience supporting WordPress based blogs hosted on our systems or on those of other vendors including WordPress.com.  We also have experience integrating CSS and HTML from great designers such as Mule Design and Hyku into WordPress.  Finally, we have built and customized various plugins to make WordPress work the way you need it.

If it is WordPress we can help (sorry we don’t do MovableType*).  From custom development, installation and support we can make your blog big in Japan ~ big wherever you want…

*we can; however, migrate your MT blog to WordPress!

Om Malik reminds us that Amazon’s Alexa service is having downtime issues (14 hours in November) as well as their S3 and EC2 system.  We are excited about the ability to use both S3 and EC2 as a solution for usage spikes, but Om’s warning is well taken.  Our current thinking is that S3 and EC2 are good solutions, but they should not be your ONLY solution.  We are building S3 and EC2 into our operation, but we will be pushing the data at the “right service at the right time” ~ just how we do that might turn out to be an interesting service.  Imagine a control panel that could help you do least cost routing of processing and storage based on any number of factors.

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The social web is creating great opportunities for product research.  Paul Kedrosky has been suggesting that web services will be “honey pots” for data.  He explains, “Usage of such services throws off wonderfully rich data that is almost certainly of use to someone, but too often it is not captured and represented in a usable form.”

Paul gets his wish.  Our favorite social picture service, Flickr, is now letting us all have a peak into picture meta-data.  The feature is called camera finder as explained by Stewart (founder of Flickr):

See the most popular cameras on Flickr, search by camera model, check our macro, portrait, night and action shots from each model, see the trends for camera usage by manufacturer and find reviews and pricing information – it’s like a whole, um, camera finder on a web site! If you’re curious about the capabilities of a new cameraphone, how good the little point and shoots are going or what people are using the latest digital SLRs for, it’s a pretty fantastic resource.

Paul suggests that the data generated from your web application (i.e. for example Pingomatic) might be worth more than the actual service.  Be careful with your data, but remember it is likely very valuable.

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In a move that reflects the current direction of the Big in Japan business, we are launching our first true tool set ~ an API to allow web applications to build in robust voice features  that are built, managed and hosted by Big in Japan. Big in Japan doesn’t want to build the applications you use, we want to make the applications your deliver better! Think BASF for web services.

We have been providing Voice 2.0 integrated applications as dedicated services for quite some time. Now we are offering a robust API (application programming interface) that allows any web developer or application developer to integrated custom phone features into their application.  The first API provides hooks into our Podcall system.  The API work regardless of the web technology (Ruby on Rails, PHP, Flash and of course simple HTML to name a few). Want to offer this sort of functionality found on Google:

Originally built to allow for quick and easy integration for Courtney Cox’s new television show Dirt, the Big in Japan team is opening the API for any developer who needs access to a telephone system. What can it do? The possibilities are endless. Start with simple functions like providing messages or wake-up calls to your users or clients. Then build interesting dating applications to connect people together. Or create robust identity verification system for your services for payment processing or demographic data collection. The system is robust and the applications are limitless.