It allows users to

• Discover new books
• Follow what their friends are reading
• Show books on blogs

Wajapi is used to populate the booklist in the sidebar of this blog. The idea is that pasting such a booklist into any blog should be as easy as possible.

Wajapi also has an API interface so anyone who can code can write applications that interface with Wajapi.

Give it a go and tell us what you think: Go to Wajapi!

Slowly but surely, Git is conquering the world.

Today, a “social network for developers” based on the coolness of Git launched: GitHub.

One of the most impressing features of GitHub is their network visualiser. The visualiser shows open source software development in a whole new light. Very nice.

Once the book on Pragmatic Version Control With Git is out, I’ll have no excuse left not to convert to Git. All the cool kids seem to be using it. Git is in. Git is the new black.

A foundation technology is designed to enable innovation, to be the base which will support other even more powerful things to come. A ceiling technology is not. It is designed to provide a value, and for its provider to cash in and cash out.

He can talk, he developed the most important foundation technology of recent times: The web.

In contrast to the web, instant messaging was largely developed as a ceiling technology. The big players, Microsoft, AOL and Yahoo control more than 90% of the market and all of them rely on a closed technology. The result is that although lots of people use IM, the ecology of companies providing innovative solutions based on IM is tiny.

This is all about to change. XMPP, aka Jabber, is an open source instant messaging technology which had largely been exclusive to geeks until Google decided to base its GTalk client on the technology. Recently, it has been rumoured that AOL and even Microsoft will open up their networks to Jabber based clients.

ReadWriteWeb published an interesting article recently on how XMPP might be the future of cloud computing. Currently, the technology is being used by Tivo, Twitter, Mebo and many others and with the the possibility of other major players opening up their systems, 2008 might be the year when instant messaging evolves from being a ceiling technology to a foundation technology.

Duncan J. Watts is a physicist turned sociologist and author of the book Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age. In a recent interview with Fast Company, Watts disputes Malcolm Gladwell’s tipping point theory which became conventional wisdom when his book became a bestseller.

“It just doesn’t work,” Watts says … “A rare bunch of cool people just don’t have that power. And when you test the way marketers say the world works, it falls apart. There’s no there there.”

It’s difficult to build an argument such as Gladwell’s tipping point without relying on anecdotal rather than empirical evidence. Watts on the other hand bases his theory solely on controlled experiments albeit with computer simulations rather than people.

The debate that is sure to follow will be an interesting one and we can safely recommend both books as highly enjoyable.

To install: gem install rak

Rak is useful for searching Rails code through the console. Search results are displayed with the search terms highlighted, which is very useful.

Go ahead, give it a spin!

Apparently, private lenders haven’t raised their rates as much as the banks have because unlike the banks, they don’t face higher funding costs. The article highlights the intriguing point that peer to peer lenders might possibly be better at assessing risk than the bigger players.

On a related note, a new peer to peer lending site called MicroPlace launched recently. It allows users from industrial countries to invest in start-ups from the developing world.