I’ve been lately digging in RubyForge trying to find good open source projects built using Ruby. Unfortunately there are only few mature projects out there. However, there are plenty of new ones with great potentials.

The adoption of Ruby in open source projects is as important as adopting it in the enterprise.

There are so many reasons to use Ruby to build open source software, here are few:

• Fast gorwing community of developers and supporters
• Short learning curve
• Easy to read syntax, allowing developers to understand the code with minimum documentation
• Posses an excellent MVC framework (Rails) making it a great fit for web applications.
• Supports trendy technologies such as RSS, SOAP, XML, REST and AJAX.
• High code reusability by utilizing plugins and engines

And of course Ruby is open source after all …

In the upcoming weeks, Ximda will roll out a new website called DealBurnr.com. The website is a web 2.0 approach to bargain shopping.

We took Digg.com concept of story voting and applied it to deal hunting.

Users can submit deals to dealburnr where people can vote on these deals with either Hot or Cold. The hottest deals rise on top of the queue.

dealburnr is built using Ruby On Rails and utilizes a lot of web 2.0 nifty functionalities such as tags, RSS, social networking and AJAX.

Time Warner has recently replaced Comcast in the Dallas area. It’s so easy to notice that the service is going down hill.

They’ve been promising a very smooth migration between the two services. But if they call loosing Internet connectivity for 12 hours (on a businesses class account) a smooth migration … then god help us.

Not considering that you have to wait on the phone for an hour at least to get a real help. Why did Comcast leave Dallas???

Sun has officially opened Java under the GNU General Public License version 2 (GPLv2), the same license as GNU/Linux.

So thank you Sun even though you are late… I wish Sun was wise enough to open Java sooner. I think Java would have gained much better place among open source developers.

I’ve been reading lately The Long Tail book (by Chris Anderson) during my free time. The book talks about how the digital era is changing the sales patterns of hits and non hits songs (media productions in general).

The author explains the invalidity of the retail store 80/20 rule with 20% of the products responsible for 80% of the revenue. And how online stores such as amazon are making more money by selling more of non hits songs.

The Long Tail of web 2.0

I’ve been seeing the same Long Tail pattern in web 2.0 applications. People are no longer using one mainstream website such as Friendster. Instead, they are scattered throughout the internet using a plethora of niche applications such as LinkedIn, 43things, ma.gnolia, etc.

I totally agree with the author’s theory that the mass culture is fading, and being replaced by a series of niches. And thats why I think big hits websites are going to loose their traffic gradually to non-hit/niche websites.

I think Yahoo, Google and amazon were the first to realize the “Long Tail” effect on the web.

Yahoo for example has been actively acquiring small startups such as del.icio.us, flikr, upcoming, etc. to create their series of niches.

Google on the other hand has been very successful opening their APIs to developers while encouraging them to create their own niches.

amazon who has probably the biggest experience leveraging the long tail to their advantage has been opening their webservices to allow anybody to sell amazon products on their websites or blogs.

The book made me feel better about the way I approach web entrepreneurship. Especially that I’ve been criticized for stretching myself very thin by constantly creating more projects such as ThingICanDo, TagMyCity, Ximda Consulting .. and more coming soon ;)

My philosophy was always similar to “The Long Tail”… Create a series of niches rather than creating a one big hit.

Any thoughts?? ….

I’ve realized lately that my productivity level is going lower than usual. The reason behind that is the distraction caused by emails, IM, SMS, skype, phones, etc. Not to mention RSS subscriptions that could easily get out of hands.

My decision was to limit my communication overhead to minimum. That means less emails, less chatting and less RSS.

I understand the importance of knowing what the rest of entrepreneurs are doing. But what more important is to do the actual work.

A lot of people have great ideas, but only few build them. Ideas don’t mean anything without a proof of concept.

So if you are surprised why I am doing less blogging & chatting. then you should know that I am up to something. You will know sooner than you think ;)

We just added new functionalities to Tag My City to allow better social networking throughout our website.

Here is a summary of the new features:

• Provide friendship support. Users now can add each others as friends
• Support an internal message system to allow users to contact each others.
• Allow users to bookmark TMC places and events using popular social bookmarks such as del.icio.us, ma.gnolia, digg, etc
• Show the number of people who call a certain place their favorite.

We are sill working on adding more features and supporting more cities.

If you like to recomend a feature, please send me an email to kinan[at]ximda.com