Sometime in the next few months, Fluidinfo will launch an alpha version of FluidDB, the database with the heart of a wiki. It’s a big engineering task, and there will still be a lot to do when we go into alpha, so we’ll initially only have a small number of applications being built on FluidDB.

But that doesn’t mean you can’t get into the action early.

Starting today, we’re pleased to offer FluidDB domains for free to Twitter users. This is perhaps the simplest way you’ll ever sign up for a new web service – if you’re a Twitter user:

Simply follow FluidDB on Twitter.

Yes, that’s it. You’re done.

Later, when we create your FluidDB domain, we’ll send you your FluidDB password via a direct message in Twitter. Note that we haven’t asked for your real name, your email, a password, sent you a cookie, or asked you to fill out a pesky sign-up form. The point here is simply to give you an early opportunity to trivially claim your preferred name.

Feel free to tweet the URL of this posting (http://bit.ly/bezc). You can follow me too for extra credit. If you’re not already a Twitter user and you want a free FluidDB domain name, sign up for Twitter, and then follow FluidDB.

Mini FAQ:

Why would I do this? By following FluidDB you will reserve your (Twitter) user name as your domain name in FluidDB.

Is there any charge? No.

What is a FluidDB domain? Sorry, but you’ll have to wait to find out the answer to this. We can tell you though that FluidDB domains will have many uses, and that they wont all be free.

What if I change my mind? Just unfollow FluidDB on Twitter.

Why Twitter? Because we like Twitter. We may do a similar thing for other services, allowing users to later claim their domain via OpenID, but that introduces the potential of naming conflicts.

Finally, please note that we can’t give an iron-clad guarantee that you’ll get your Twitter user name as your FluidDB domain name, but we’ll do our best. At this early stage of the game, we reserve the right to do whatever we want :-)

This is just a quick hack, done in about 20 minutes in 32 lines of Python. The following script will print out the Twitter screen names of the people who signed up immediately before and after a given user.

I’m happy to have reached the point in my Python development where I can pretty much just type something like this in without really having to think, including the use of operator.add and functools.partial.

BTW, the users who signed up immediately before and after I did were skywalker and kitu012.

The above is just a hack. Notes:

1. If it can’t retrieve a user for any reason, it just assumes there is no such user.
2. Twitter periodically deletes accounts of abusers, so the answer will skip those.
3. Twitter had lots of early hiccups, so there may be no guarantee that user ids were actually assigned sequentially.
4. This script may run forever.
5. I’m using the Python Twitter library written by DeWitt Clinton. It’s been a while since it was updated, and it doesn’t give you back the time a user was created in Twitter. It would be fun to print that too.

As you were.

Andrew Hensel was an extraordinary human being.

We were graduate students together at The University of Waterloo in Canada in 1986-88. I met him on my first day there and we spent many hours together on a daily basis over the next 2.5 years. I don’t want to try to say too much about him now. It occurred to me a few days ago that I might post a few stories here. We did lots of crazy things. At one point I had wanted to write something titled “100 things to a Hensel” and I made a bunch of notes, but it went no further.

I wrote about him in my Ph.D. acknowledgments in 1995:

Andrew Hensel, with whom I shared so much of my two and a half years at Waterloo, was the most original and creative person I have ever known well. Together, we dismantled the world and rebuilt it on our own crazy terms. We lived life at a million miles an hour and there was nothing like it. Five years ago, Andrew killed himself. There have been few days since then that I have not thought of him and the time we spent together.

I still think about him frequently. Today I was remembering one of his many, many oddball projects (most of which went unfinished), which he called “10,000 things”. It was to be a list of 10,000 things that he thought of. By the time he started sending them to me we had both dropped out of Waterloo. He was back in Australia and I was in Munich.

He only sent me 300 of the to-be 10,000. Of course I still have them. They’re all very short. At the risk of being thought macabre I’ve decided to bring Andrew back a very little and post them to Twitter, chosen at random, one a day. You can follow adhensel to get just a glimpse of his mind. The first tweet, people being planted into earth, is already up.

There are at least half a dozen twitterers who knew Andrew, including one who knew him probably better than anybody. Once in a while I get email from someone who finds my online mentions of him. Invariably they also found him extraordinary.

What would Andrew have made of Twitter? I have no doubt at all that he’d have immediately dismissed it as “weak”. That was one of his favorite adjectives. Almost everything was weak. It’s a small miracle to me to partly bring him back to life 18 years after he died, by posting just some of his 10,000 things to Twitter.

And… my apologies to anyone who knew Andrew and who finds this upsetting.