Haha, sure. Since this was a random fun project, the code was written with the objective function being "least amount of code to get the job done well enough" :)
As it should! Too often I get stuck in a rut, inspired by the myriad of articles I read about certain patterns and libraries, that I take too long to get a simple task done with my head in the wrong space. Good work! You can't refactor code you've haven't written.
"PostGIS adds support for geographic objects to the PostgreSQL object-relational database. In effect, PostGIS "spatially enables" the PostgreSQL server, allowing it to be used as a backend spatial database for geographic information systems (GIS)"
Also see "Programming the K-means Clustering Algorithm in SQL": http://pdf.cx/6gc9a
The key value is not as much in the data itself, as much as the _timeliness_ of the data. Access to the halfhose allows you to answer a _very_ valuable question:
"What's happening right now?"
This question is worth a lot of money, and something that doesn't have a good algorithmic solution(e.g. Google News.) Twitter is probably the only company that has a privacy-compliant solution to this, hence making it a very monetizable product.
Well, it was a problem for me, so I fixed it, and thought I'd share :)
Notably my 2 issues were:
1) My eyes hurt so much that I preferred using my iPhone over a 24" screen. After installing this, my eyes are feeling much better. Maybe I'm just old.
2) Before, my Friends' status messages were 13px, everything else was 11px. I prefer that my friends' thoughts be more important than UI chrome.
Where's the autocomplete? I only see find-as-you-type -- there are no Google-suggest like suggestions, per se.
Also, I am very curious to see back-of-the-envelope calculations on resource usage -- e.g. what is the expected billing per user (in dollars)? ("Doesn't matter" is an acceptable answer for now, but I'm worried that this type of service is unreasonably expensive to provide and cannot be offset by ads/freemium models)
