From a man that has gone through similar scaling issues with Flickr. It’s well worth a read. “…solve the growth issues, with appropriate solutions for growth, which rarely involves architectural solutions.”

Bottom line have lots of queues: a receive queue server, seperate delivery queues, additional queues for alternate routing (IM, SMS etc.) and standard caching for the web and API. Good stuff.

Worth noting that some OpenID providers (e.g. WordPress.com) are immune to this attack because the landing page doesn’t ask you for your password (although the phishing site could still ask and hope users don’t notice).

By integrating XMPP into a private network of media devices, external media sources could be accessed like local devices. Could also be used to share information about media (e.g. playlists) via PubSub.

Seems like a nice use of the technology to me.

This is a little bit creepy – and why Fire Eagle’s approach to security is a very good idea. They contact you at regular intervals to check that its still ok for them to aggregate your location data.