Russell Beattie has posted a rant about Web 2.0 startups. I actually disagree with much of his critique (he veers toward “640K should be enough for anyone” territory more than once), but the rough taxonomy is useful in sorting the heaps of new companies and projects.
Via Rafe I learned of an astounding Javascript hack done by a MySpace user. Excerpts from the summary, allegedly written by the creator:
…anyone who viewed my profile who wasn’t already on my friends list would inadvertently add me as a friend. Without their permission.
8:35 am: You have 74 friends and 221 friend requests. Woah. I did not expect this much. I’m surprised it even worked. 200 people have been infected in 8 hours. That means I’ll have 600 new friends added every day. Woah.
Humor services provider The Onion has moved the back-end of their extensive, and presumably extremely high-traffic, website to Drupal as of August 30th. It’s not clear what they were using before, but I believe it was homebuilt PHP stuff. I’ll miss playing with their old remotely exploitable headline-generating script, but this seems like a good move. One of the developers has posted an interesting overview of the redesign process.
It’s a nice feather in the cap of the Drupal community to have a prominent and busy site adopt their software. My only dig at them is that I figured it out because I saw “/node/” in the URLs!