dumbphone

I have to admit that my first thought was, "Yawn, yet another social something-something," but then I read the blog post and was pleasantly surprised. I might just sign up.

Btw., the design could use some tweaking. It looks a little like a Microsoft FrontPage template.

"productivity is equally as important"

Node has a lot of good features, but programmer productivity isn't one of them currently. There are close to zero full-featured frameworks with "the works" (Geddy comes close, but is no longer maintained, and Express is essentially no more than a mini-framework). You simply have to write a lot of code yourself to do stuff that in other frameworks such as Django is included by default. Add to that the fact that deploying a Node site isn't nearly as easy and fast as deploying a PHP site, and you've got a setup that isn't ideal in terms of productivity.

'With Node and a framework like Express, you can understand things at the level of "let me look at this HTTP request and decide how to respond to it."'

Sure, but roughly the same kind of thing is available in most other serverside languages. Python has Flask, Ruby has Sinatra, and PHP also has several mini-frameworks.

Flask seems nice and simple until you need to access a database such as MySQL. With SQLAlchemy it seems like there's a lot more code needed just to perform simple CRUD operations, whereas Django's ORM is really simple. Is there a better alternative to SQLAlchemy? Is it possible to use Django's ORM in Flask?

I like the idea of using a web-based interface for tasks that are normally done in framework code: Altering data structure/models, etc. Drupal already has this (CCK), but it's not exactly a lean/small framework, so it's not the ideal solution unless you actually need the CMS feature (the ability for non-techies to edit content on the website).

Anyway, I think a framework that includes a web-based data handling thing might be a success.

I didn't say they sell our data (although I honestly can't say for sure, since there are a number of things Google employees aren't allowed to talk about). I'm talking about the fact that Google builds huge databases about its users, and the fact that Google is in the US where the authorities have easy access to said databases.

Their business model isn't dependant on it. This makes it not worth the risk to sell personal data (the risk being bad publicity).

Apple doesn't make money by mining my personal data - that's the difference.

Beats me how anyone would use a computer where both the OS, browser, and major applications are made by the same company - a company whose living depends on making huge databases about its users' personal data - a company that is based in the US where the authorities have easy access to your data.

The privacy implications to using Chromebook are huge, in my opinion.

Rackspace Cloud is (sort of) missing on your list. "Sort of", because Slicehost is on your list, but Slicehost was bought up by Rackspace, and Slicehost will eventually be moved into the Rackspace Cloud brand, as far as I know.

Also missing: Gandi.net.

This is one of the reasons why I'm moving away from Gmail and starting to use a European email provider.

Slightly irrelevant fact of the day: Tigger means "beggar" in Danish.

> While it is annoying, it is how he got to where he is.

Not necessarily. For years GoDaddy has had the cheapest non-promotional domain pricing. That's what made a lot of IT-savvy people use GoDaddy despite of its annoying user interface.

For smaller projects CodeIgniter is great. It's simple to learn and use, and has excellent documentation (better than Kohana's).