API Software Engineer at Spinn3r in San Francisco

January 20, 2011 in spinn3r
Tags: RSS, spinn3r

We’re hiring an API Software Engineer to join the team over at Spinn3r.

We’re probably going to be hiring 2-3 engineers in the next month or so but don’t grow too fast. We want to focus on one position at a time so we can bring in the best potential hires.

This is a fun time to work in a startup though!

Job Description

Responsibilities:
Interact with customers both in the early sales cycle and support role to answer technical questions about our technology (crawling, ranking, etc)
Work with our API to understand throughput issues, protocol challenges, and optimize it for new issues as they arise.
Develop new version of our API as it evolves (more throughput, additional features, etc).
Monitor our crawler stats to enable understanding of operation and detect operational anomalies, monitor statistics, implement new features, etc.
Work on Java implementation of various new Spinn3r features as well as fix bugs in our current product. You will also be working on infrastructure in this position and responsible for various backend Java components of our architecture.
General passion and interest in technology (distributed systems, open content,
Web 2.0, etc).
should stress that while you’ll be interacting with customers, and providing support, our customers are exceedingly brilliant and amazingly knowledgeable about our space. They’re a major asset and staying in sync with them is very important for the company.

[From API Software Engineer at Spinn3r in San Francisco | LinkedIn]

RSS Is NOT Dying

January 2, 2011 in 24hourlaundry
Tags: feeds, RSS

 

Google Chrome has no RSS reader. It doesn’t even try to render RSS, or even help the user with it in any way. It gives less of a crap than a French man smoking a cigarette in public.

Mozilla will deal the final blow that kills RSS off. In Firefox 4.0, there will be no RSS button on the toolbar by default. Mozilla outright refuse to listen (33 bloody votes!) to their users on this matter.

The reason for this is that statistically, only 3%–7% of users use the RSS button on the toolbar. If not enough people use it already, then how many less people are going to use it if it’s not there by default? How many regular users customise their toolbar to add a button they barely use?

[From blog · RSS Is Dying, and You Should Be Very Worried]

 

Chrome has a RSS Reader – it’s called Google Reader. Same thing for Firefox. They have an integrated RSS client. It’s called Google Reader.

Also, you’re assuming that the only use of RSS is to give headlines to users. This is NOT the case. The typical Spinn3r client is NOT your normal Google Reader style end-user application. We have a few of course. But they’re not the majority use case.

Most of our customers are social medial monitoring applications (in fact most of the industry has standardized on us).

RSS and Atom will be around for a long time to come. They’re a major component of web infrastructure.