I have to admit that my first thought was, "Yawn, yet another social something-something," but then I read the blog post and was pleasantly surprised. I might just sign up.

Btw., the design could use some tweaking. It looks a little like a Microsoft FrontPage template.

"productivity is equally as important"

Node has a lot of good features, but programmer productivity isn't one of them currently. There are close to zero full-featured frameworks with "the works" (Geddy comes close, but is no longer maintained, and Express is essentially no more than a mini-framework). You simply have to write a lot of code yourself to do stuff that in other frameworks such as Django is included by default. Add to that the fact that deploying a Node site isn't nearly as easy and fast as deploying a PHP site, and you've got a setup that isn't ideal in terms of productivity.

'With Node and a framework like Express, you can understand things at the level of "let me look at this HTTP request and decide how to respond to it."'

Sure, but roughly the same kind of thing is available in most other serverside languages. Python has Flask, Ruby has Sinatra, and PHP also has several mini-frameworks.

Right, I like Sinatra a lot. But there's substantially more magic there than in Express, which is actually a pretty thin (yet powerful) wrapper around Node's low-level HTTP API.

Flask seems nice and simple until you need to access a database such as MySQL. With SQLAlchemy it seems like there's a lot more code needed just to perform simple CRUD operations, whereas Django's ORM is really simple. Is there a better alternative to SQLAlchemy? Is it possible to use Django's ORM in Flask?

Gonna answer this one myself: Seems http://www.sqlobject.org/ might be a good alternative.

I like the idea of using a web-based interface for tasks that are normally done in framework code: Altering data structure/models, etc. Drupal already has this (CCK), but it's not exactly a lean/small framework, so it's not the ideal solution unless you actually need the CMS feature (the ability for non-techies to edit content on the website).

Anyway, I think a framework that includes a web-based data handling thing might be a success.

Beats me how anyone would use a computer where both the OS, browser, and major applications are made by the same company - a company whose living depends on making huge databases about its users' personal data - a company that is based in the US where the authorities have easy access to your data.

The privacy implications to using Chromebook are huge, in my opinion.

The first time you start ChromeOS it asks which search engine you would like to use. You are then free to use any web app you want. The OS is open source so you can check for any tracking code. If you don't trust the build that comes with your chromebook, you can install your own chromiumos build on top. You can't do the same with Windows or OSX, you have to trust in Apple and Microsoft that they won't spy on you.

It's hard to get any more transparent than that.

You missed the point. You can of course choose the Search Engine but not the browser. Chrome calls home frequently. As Matt Cutts outlined in one of his posts(http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/google-chrome-communication/)

"If you are typing a search or url in the address bar, Google Chrome will talk to the current search service to try to offer useful query/url suggestions."

And since its "only cloud" device, most of the applications you will end-up using are Google products. Mostly because other players aren't yet convinced that all applications should exist in the cloud.

As far as trusting Apple and Microsoft is concerned, I think it is about the business model. Apple and Microsoft make money by selling Products and Software. Google on the other hand makes money by collecting your data. I do not understand why people fail to understand the difference.

I hope you are not using an iOS device then... Given Apple's success, few people seem to mind.

Apple doesn't make money by mining my personal data - that's the difference.

I am sure they are mining your data, too. They sell stuff.

Their business model isn't dependant on it. This makes it not worth the risk to sell personal data (the risk being bad publicity).

Where does Google sell personal data?

I didn't say they sell our data (although I honestly can't say for sure, since there are a number of things Google employees aren't allowed to talk about). I'm talking about the fact that Google builds huge databases about its users, and the fact that Google is in the US where the authorities have easy access to said databases.

Apple has just built a big new data center. Just saying...

Rackspace Cloud is (sort of) missing on your list. "Sort of", because Slicehost is on your list, but Slicehost was bought up by Rackspace, and Slicehost will eventually be moved into the Rackspace Cloud brand, as far as I know.

Also missing: Gandi.net.

The list of providers on the website is not comprehensive yet. I have a big list of providers offline that I plan to add. I wanted to get the website functional and get some feedback before I go too far. I will make sure that these two are in my list.

This is one of the reasons why I'm moving away from Gmail and starting to use a European email provider.

Slightly irrelevant fact of the day: Tigger means "beggar" in Danish.

> While it is annoying, it is how he got to where he is.

Not necessarily. For years GoDaddy has had the cheapest non-promotional domain pricing. That's what made a lot of IT-savvy people use GoDaddy despite of its annoying user interface.