First Principles

I'm not particularly concerned with people who take issue with some of the CouchDB demos I've been doing lately. Either they don't get it or they're trying hard not too. If you're on the cusp, and you're not sure whether or not you get it, I encourage you to read Jacob Kaplan-Moss's blog post from a couple of years ago: "Of the Web". For the non link-clicking types I'll quote the bits that make me happiest:

Let me tell you something: Django may be built for the Web, but CouchDB is built of the Web. I've never seen software that so completely embraces the philosophies behind HTTP. CouchDB makes Django look old-school in the same way that Django makes ASP look outdated.

And more:

Look, CouchDB may succeeded, and it may fail; who knows. I'm sure of one thing, though - this is what the software of the future looks like.

So while there may be platforms that can pass bytes around among a particular set of listeners with less overhead than CouchDB, I'd be surprised if they can also subsume that functionality into a web-first database that also has the resilience and flexibility of CouchDB.

Maybe I should characterize all the chat rooms in Toast with word clouds, so you can see which room has the highest signal/noise ratio just by looking at the top terms. Can your MQ do that?