Just some words to thank you all so far for the feedback.
You guys sure are no brittle matter, but that's also why you rock. I mean it.
I've at least "pack-minified" most resources to make things a bit faster. It's still slow (YSlow ~ 70) but hopefully more bearable for demanding hackers :).
I also wanted to renew my call for help. I'm still looking for people (koders or designers) who would be interested in making this a great (and cool) journey.
No I've used java because it was faster for me to code something functional. There's no other specific reason.
The slowness is due to the tons of non-minified javascript loaded, to the not-yet optimized number of requests to the back-end, and also to the fact that my VPS is not a competition server.
It's actually a miracle already that it renders the way it does. I understand only now how sensitive the HN community is to these aspects, I should have understood it already I guess ... hackers like clean efficient code, and it's all good feedback.
Wave was a great product, still is actually. I liked it a lot too.
But let's get it straight ... Symbyoz is far from being Wave.
Wave is an awesome brute force of technology. We're not even close.
Wave intent was to replace email. We don't (meh ... Google is a legend, I'm a lone hacker).
Wave was a self sufficient (closed?) communication and collaboration tool. We aren't. We talk to Facebook, Twitter and GMail right off the bat.
Wave target was to rack up every e-mail users out there. We obviously would like to dream about it, but ... :)
If Symbyoz grows, it can become a lot more like Wave. For now, it's just a social platform to quickly jot down ideas and share with friends.
I think of it more as the secret child of 43things and Evernote who's being raised by Facebook.
(And for the rotating comic, I'll definitely take care of it :))
1. 2000: Y2K fear passes, Bush is elected as president through Supreme Court Decision, 2001- 9/11 attacks, Beginning of war on Terror, 2002-2003: Beginning of War in Iraq. Yuck... Bad memories. You need a beer too.
2. As I stated, the site is still in development (as you stated, there's still a lot of work on the design). I'll clean it up.
Planning on it ... as it's still in development I didn't bother doing that just yet. Thanks for the feedback, yes, it's painfully slow at loading :(. It gets a bit better after.