Goodbye msnbot

User-agent: msnbot
Disallow: /

Yes, I’ve blocked you msnbot. I’m tired of finding you in my stats coming from random searches that don’t even show my site in the search results, such as “keeping,” “album,” “comments,” or any of the other thousand or so one word searches you come to my site for. I don’t show up in your search results (at least not high enough for me to care) nor do I really want to show up in the top 100 pages in search results for the word “keeping.” So, you are no longer welcome here. I don’t want to see you on my property anymore. I don’t really care that this may drop me out of live.com’s search altogether. It’s a crappy search engine and anyone who uses it is an idiot and shouldn’t come to my site anyway. So, in conclusion, stop visiting my site msnbot. You’re not welcome here.

My Life has Disappeared

I use a service called Lifestream.fm to aggregate my online life. It gathers my tweets from twitter, pictures from Flickr, my Diggs, recently played songs, my Del.icio.us feed, and blog posts from this blog. It’s a great service. It’s very easy to use, includes more social services than Socialthing, and looks great. There’s just one problem. The site has disappeared. When you go to Lifestream.fm, there’s just a GoDaddy parked page. Very odd. Anyone know what’s happened to it?
EDIT: It seems to be back up now. Weird.

Searchme

For the past several months I’ve noticed I’ve had a regular visitor to my site that would hit random pages multiple times throughout the day. Yes, it was a bot. The bot was indexing my site. The IP resolved to a company called Searchme. I went to their site but it was just a plain page that gave a little information about the company. I naturally wondered what they had in store and if I should be worried. There was no search field on their site so I wondered if they were just harvesting my content and republishing it somewhere or if they were actually going to launch a search engine. That question was answered this morning thanks to h0bbel.

What Searchme has done is take results of your search term and present the webpage results in an Apple-like coverflow format. Not only that, but it highlights where on the page your search term comes up. It’s pretty nifty. I don’t know if I’ll continue to use it, it all depends on how relevant the results are to what I’m looking for, though I’d imagine being able to see the site before I go to it might help me determine the relevance before even clicking it. Check out my results here.

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What Will Happen to Flickr?

Ever since Microsoft began its attempt to takeover Yahoo I started thinking about the future of Flickr. That’s really the only Yahoo service I use (and I pay for). Microsoft does not have a good history with web services. Yeah, at the beginning of the web everyone had a Hotmail account, but they quickly fell behind in the times with that. They couldn’t keep up with the features and storage of other competitors, like Yahoo and Google. It seems that every attempt they’ve made has failed. Does anyone actually use Microsoft’s Spaces? Can anyone actually find anything via their Live Search? Personally, I think Microsoft’s Live search has to be the worst search engine out there.

I know thinking that Microsoft going in and breaking a winning formula (winning in the user’s views, not necessarily in the business sense) probably isn’t going to happen, but it is Microsoft. I don’t have much faith in them. No, they won’t rewrite Flickr to use ASP.NET or something crazy like that, but I do worry about what they can do to mess up Flickr. I also think that a lot of the passionate Flickr users, especially the ones that were there pre-Yahoo, will definitely not like the change of hands and move to a new photo service. I really wish Google would spend some time developing their Picasa and Picasa Web services, up the storage allotment, and make it a real competitor in the online photo storage market. It has great potential, and with Microsoft trying to take over Yahoo, now would be the perfect time for them to woo users. Of course, I may just be paranoid about what will happen to Flickr, but it’s a service I pay for and a place where I store my photos, so I do wonder about the future. Do I really want to feed my money and data to Microsoft? Not likely. If Microsoft buys Yahoo, will you stay with Flickr? Will you move somewhere else? If so, where?

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Feedburner Broken API

For a few weeks Feedburner’s API has been broke. If I try to pull the statistics of the title and URL of my posts it comes back “NO TITLE.” The statistics package I use, mint, has a Feedburner pepper and it has been showing NO TITLE for quite a while. Apparently this has been reported but has yet to be fixed. Come on Google, fix your stuff. If you’re going to provide an API, make sure it works. I want to see which posts people are viewing and clicking in my feeds. NO TITLE doesn’t help me very much.