While the rest of the tech world is focused on dueling announcements from Apple at WWDC and Microsoft at E3, Twitter quietly picked up one of the technical pioneers of the Web 2.0 movement, Akash Garg, a cofounder of Hi5.com in 2002, who most recently held the position of CTO at Bebo, where he worked for almost a year, starting in July of 2010. Upon joining Bebo, he was quoted as thinking of the company "as a startup". Now at Twitter, he's got one that more closely fits the label.

Credited with developing the technology behind Hi5's growth to more than 250 million registered members (per LinkedIn), Akash paralleled decisions made by other fast-growing companies of the time, including SixApart, Google and others by leveraging low cost commodity hardware to deliver a highly scalable, highly available system - something Twitter is getting increasingly better at after years of spotty uptime.

Twitter's communications team confirmed his hire, saying only that he is an engineer on the Platform team at the company. Last Friday, a colleague, Sabrina Bruning, in community management at Bebo, posted a photo from a goodbye on his last day at Bebo (See the tweet along with Foursquare photo) and he was added to Twitter's Team list this morning, an informal way to track the comings and goings of Twitter's fast-expanding roster.

In addition to his work at Bebo and Hi5, Akash is a mentor to 500startups and i/o Ventures.

At the end of last month, I highlighted Zerply as an intriguing alternative to About.me or LinkedIn. The professional-looking personal profile network, then in invite-only beta, is now open to the public, so anybody can join and start adding business contacts. While still retaining the beta tag, the site's founders have added a whole list of features that should aid in expanding one's network, seeing site activity, and serendipitous discovery.

While the company is billing the upgrade as a redesign, the improvements are more about function over form in this round.


   New Stats and Notifications on Zerply

As any business network is more powerful with connections to others, the site, like many others, offers the option to connect to Facebook and Twitter to find friends elsewhere on the site, where you can easily save people from these search results to your network/address book. You can now search based on the location of other members, and can click on others' listed location to see additional users in a radius of 50 kilometers, wrote cofounder Christofer Karltop in an email to me last night.


One of the twists to Zerply upon registration is self-tagging with keywords that describe your background. Users can endorse your tags, and these updates are now shown in a notifications tab upon logging into the site. Coming soon, possibly even in the next 24 hours, is the option to receive email notifications when others endorse you or your profile is saved to another's network.

True to practically every social network, casual or business, is the craving for statistics. Zerply now tees this up as well, letting you see how many unique profile visits you have received in the last calendar month or all time, and how many clickthroughs your listed services (such as your downstream social networks) have received.

I liked Zerply enough that I made it my personal profile link on Twitter and you can find me here: http://www.zerply.com/profile/louisgray. If you didn't get an account the last time I wrote up the site, now's the time. The door's open at http://www.zerply.com/.

Following the release of the Google +1 button for Web sites (such as this one) last week, the search giant's answer to the Facebook Like button is popping up everywhere. Seth Ladd, a developer advocate for Google, has gone the extra mile, posting a Chrome extension that adds the +1 functionality to Twitter.com, so you can +1 tweets you like, and have them displayed on your Google Profile. This is a lot like Jesse Stay's hack with Kynetx which added a Like button to tweets late last year.

As Twitter's Web site becomes more versatile, Twitter.com has become a target for innovative development for developers looking to bring more functionality to users, including my6sense's relevance tab which we introduced in February, and the word filter posted by Mike Grace, tapping the Kynetx platform. Seth's proximity to the +1 launch as well as his fondness for Google Chrome and HTML 5 (he's one of the more ardent advocates and presented at Google IO this year) no doubt made the interest to bring +1's to Twitter a must-do.


The +1 extension for Twitter not only displays +1 next to tweets in the stream, letting you +1 them, but also shows how many other people across the platform have also done so. It's a lot like seeing how many people have favorited or retweeted a tweet within the tweet itself, data which can be harder to find. The extension itself is open source.


The extension itself is JavaScript-based and only is active when on the Twitter.com domain. Seth goes into detail on his post explaining how the +1 extension works, and how he needs to wait for the entire Twitter page to load before displaying the +1 buttons, while also explaining some shortcomings that apply to polling for new tweets in the timeline. Surely beyond version 1.0, those tweaks will come. Luckily, for those who have already grabbed the extension, it should update automatically. Go get it.

In a world where the cost of storage is practically zero, and the incentive to delete data declines, I'm befuddled by the lack of prioritization for some companies to focus on a complete search history, and in parallel, an intentional erasure of information by more prominent content producers, who seem to arbitrarily decide that the long tail of the Web, and the interest of future readers is less important than being seen as participating in the latest hip wave.

Even as I've changed technologies, blog providers and structures, I make extra effort to not lose historical archives and keep comment streams intact, not for ego purposes or for SEO, but because it's the right thing to do.

Steve Rubel, an executive vice president of global strategy for Edelman, a longtime blogger who was among the first to espouse the benefits of blogging, social media and was often at the leading edge of tech only a few years ago, has more recently swayed to and fro based on the hot startup of the day, leaving thousands of broken links in the process. After running out of time to update his blog regularly, back in 2009 he ditched the blog to run a lifestream, based on Posterous. (Google cache). Last month, he pivoted again (another hot thing to do in the Valley these days for those with unsuccessful ideas) and now is the proud owner of a Tumblr-powered blog.

But instead of leaving the older sites open, he deleted everything, proudly stating:

"With just two clicks of a mouse I rid the web of literally thousands of blog posts, some of which I am proud of - others less so - and redirected the URLs to the new site."

While no doubt many of his older posts (like mine) have limited or no value to today's readers or those in the future, they are an insightful historical record of one of the more visible bloggers of a specific period, one who is now in the process of erasing his tracks.

With more than five years of blogging myself here, the blog archives now take on their own role as a personal reference desk. When Kevin Rose left Digg, I was able to go back to my comments on Digg in 2006 to see my thoughts at the time. When TweetDeck was sold to Twitter, I could go back to 2008 and see my first thoughts on the service. With PostRank selling to Google yesterday, I found a post I made two years ago that had comments on it from people who now work at Google. If I didn't manage to keep the posts alive and the comment threads as well, this would not be possible.

For those of you who don't consume my blog exclusively by RSS, you might have noticed some recent changes to the look and feel (Go ahead and look). It's not a major change, but an upgrade nonetheless. Part of the reason for my slow migration was the criticality for me to not lose the existing posts, structure, external links and attached discussions. I know some comments from a few years ago are still out of reach, but I'm hoping to bring them back.

Of all the Web content I have produced or managed in the last fifteen years, one of my biggest regrets is the complete void from my time in college, both from my own personal home page, and from the student newspaper where I was the online editor and also wrote hundreds of posts, most on the front page. Current Valleywag editor Ryan Tate, who picked up the online editor job at the paper after I had left, struggled with a series of malicious hacks, and all our collective work was gone, erased from the Web like a bad memory. Whenever we trade emails or talk in person, we both lament this loss.


This data obliteration is something that really is avoidable now, and yet, we let it happen on a near-constant basis. Most newspaper stories from the terrorist attacks in 2001 come up as 404s, beyond the reaches of the Archive.org project, or Google's search engine cache.

What I would like to see is a proposal from Google, or some other well-intended Web entity, such as Amazon, to offer a solution, embedded in today's modern browsers, as an option, that solves for intentional or unintentional content deletion. All those links that I provided back to Steve Rubel's MicroPersuasion blog from 2006 to 2009 should automatically be detected as dead, and then presented, to the best of the tech's ability, as they originally were, using Google cache or S3, Archive.org or something. And yes, I'd love it if somebody like Google or Microsoft would also give Twitter or Facebook a helping hand to get their own search archives into something useful.


The issues I have with Steve's approach to pouring gasoline on his past and then lighting it on fire is not one of a choice of platforms. While seeing him join Tumblr is about as hip as your dad trying to snowboard with the cool kids, the more important part is that it eliminates the choice for readers, present and future, to ever get that data, and fill in the blanks. It's not his call to decide what has value for others, even if he sent me a tweet saying "we're foolish if we think the world really cares."

The world should care about walking through the historical record - be it on Steve's blog, or Dave's blog, or Robert's blog, or Mike's blog, or Penelope's, or any of the people who have been chronicling the world they see around them. I wish we had full archives from newspapers for years and decades backward, or the personal journals of people famous and ordinary from centuries past. What they might have found mundane is intriguing to others of us - maybe not massive populations, but to one person, they could contain serious insight. The Web is supposed to cater to the long tail, and the history of what we've produced should be there when they come looking for it.