Webby awards from IDG are out and there are some really popular names this year. Names that are going to make you happy coz it may be a case that you are attached to them someway. Without much ado let me put the list of winners.

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We all knew this is gonna happen some day, but not so soon! Twitter has actually reached and overwhelmed Facebook in case of market shares. Hitwise reported that as of Tuesday, Twitter, the popular microblogging service, had for the first time surpassed the market share of visits of the hit content aggregation site, Digg. According to Hitwise, Twitter now stands at number 84 in its Computers and Internet category, one space up the chart from Digg.

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Digg was down. And that is about it. Its 1 AM and that is why you are not feeling the impact. Imagine if it had stayed till morning, how many bloggers and website owners will get the strangest shock of their lives!

Anyway, unperturbed Taragana has some nice points to share with you. Please take a look and pray meanwhile.

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I wrote an article on a Google interview question in June, 2006 describing the problem and offering a simple solution. What makes this article interesting is that several people came up with better ideas and very thought provoking comments. If you are a puzzle enthusiast, you will surely enjoy the article; if not for the article but more importantly for the alternative solutions proposed. They excel in many cases the original solution; they also provide lots of original thoughts. If I like anything as much as simple thoughts, it is original thoughts.

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Digg is down. It comes up with an amusing message directing you to several sites like TechCrunch, PaidContent, BBC News & others.

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Social Bookmarking is back on Simple Thoughts blog. I have added Alex King's Share This plugin along with a modified version of Digg It plugin.

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This is a very interesting presentation (see below) on the technologies used to make Digg, the challenges faced along the way and how they overcame it. I would recommend it to any Web 2.0 startup architects.

In short Digg uses multiple MySQL slaves with a single master, multiple load balanced PHP servers which connects to random MySQL slave (for load balancing obviously). They also use Memcached with multiple specialized pools like a separate pool for search.

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