This all being said, it is currently a tough time to be a web designer working on Windows. I constantly get “the business” in conversations I have with peers and collegues. The thing that gets me is, minus Michael… who I bust on just for kicks, I have yet to  feel the need to walk up to someone using a mac and start shit with them. I “get” that it is the need of smaller population cultist groups to be loud to get their point across, but the fact that a choice of OS invokes the same behaviour as someone believing in a religion, scares the shit out of me. I don’t hold Apple or Steve Job accountable for this, they are capitalists just like most Americans and they are selling a image and a creating a need/desire just like any fashion magazine or sports car manufacturer. I actually think Steve Jobs is quite brilliant and I would probably pay more to read his publications on things like marketing then I would pay for his laptops, desktops or music players.

So whats this post about? Well honestly I am bored with the conversation, the arguments never change and there are about 1000 other interesting things to talk about, so just like I did with my “why I don’t believe in god” post from a couple years back, I am making this post as a reference point to link to all people that start “the conversation” with me. So lets make this short and sweet and get down to business.

1. Computers are tools, not fashion accessories. Is it for you? Thats great. It’s not for me… and if it was, it sure wouldn’t look like a missing prop from a Hello Kitty Japanese anime cartoon.
2. I replace my machines at least every other year. I also buy relatively top of the line machines. This means I drop about 1.8k a year between laptops and desktops. This includes monitor and external HD and the whole deal. That is all I am willing to pay. I have yet to have any feature I am missing that will make me pay more and I refuse to compromise on speed/space. I can’t in good conscious spend more then that if the options are available at that cost. Granted I am no saint… it has to play Warcraft, but really, how can anyone be ok with being so wasteful when there are options not to be… it is like leaving the fridge door open all day or leaving the water running… yeah maybe you can afford to, but it just isn’t right.
3. I am no longer an angst filled teenager that needs to hate “the man” or cheer for the underdog for no other reason then the fact that they are “the man” or the underdog. I do have many problems with “the man”, but as a business person myself, I respect success and don’t feel the need to go “underground” to “spite my parents”. Hating for the sake of hating is so played out. Give me a real reason and I will listen, but popularity and success shouldn’t be that reason.
4. I am not a machine. I refuse to buy into a product lifestyle that is sealed and controlling. I refuse to be defined by a piece of hardware. I found a great comment on wikipedia the other day and I think it sums up exactly what I mean:

I think what we’re seeing here is the classic human behavior related to in-group vs. out-group.

Basically, these people have bought the kindle and like it, or at least don’t hate it enough to throw it away. What they really DO like is the fact that buying it puts them in a group of people who have a cool device and therefore they get a feeling of belonging. They identify part of their own self-worth with the “coolness” and value of the device.

Therefore, if the device is perceived as “cooler” or more desireable by the general population, they emotionally can transfer that to themselves. They’ll promote kindle without reason and defend it to the death because they’re really defending themselves. The sad part is that many of them don’t know it… they truly believe they’re objectively promoting this product, and they truly believe that the people who haven’t gotten it yet eventually will.

The same thing happens with many technology items, like many in the cult of Mac or those who are rabid about Linux… the technologies’ true worth and faults are irrelevant to them, sometimes without them realizing it, because they identify themselves as “Mac Owner” or “Linux User”, and all that matters is if someone attacks their technology, it’s an attack on them and their in-group

So thats about it, here it is… once and for all, I am really bored talking about this topic. I know I am not going to change anything as I am almost fighting a religion, but I know when the “next” fashionable technology comes into play, I will be able to look back on this with a told you so giggle.

EOF

Here is a little screencast that goes over what environs is, why we did it and where we want to take it:

So please excuse any design hicups or missing posts while I “move in”

Let me know what you think of the design, feedback … as always… is welcome and appreciated.

I know as a member of many communities where I would consider myself an expert in the field, it is annoying when a beginner comes in and asks all sorts of questions… questions that are answered 100 times over by simply searching google so I fear my involvement in a more advanced community in any subject, especially when I am not willing/able to give back to the community in such a way. It is like books… there are 100 idiot or beginners guides to anything, but all the other books are always labelled “advanced techniques” or “expert’s guide”. Does that mean you are either a beginner or expert? I really don’t think that is true.

Perhaps there needs to be some sort of graduating levels of communities, like school, that you can test in and out of, not really so you have a status (although I am sure that would be a benefit/con for some people) but more so that I don’t feel I am bothering the experts with my idiot questions and that I am not wasting my time on forums looking for answers from complete beginners.

I know in a community the idea would be to have beginners and gurus together and they could all work together, but lets be honest… how many professional web designers want to sit there month after month and show newbies how to use dreamweaver? Sure, I don’t mind helping one or two people, but from a community level you have to take AND receive… it can’t always be a one way street.

Just something to think about.

I will definately be stopping back some day soon… would be nice to go there maybe twice a month (1 1/2 hour train ride makes anything more then that sort of unefficent) and hopefully if I can’t drum up any more community around here, I can at least find a community to belong to!

Now I understand why this wouldn’t be for everyone, you really should understand what you are doing before you get started and not just use something without having a grasp of what is going on, but I view it like a JavaScript library, once you do understand what is going on, why should everyone who wants to build a RoR facebook app have to redo the work over and over and over. So we at PBG will be releasing a set of Facebook code on Git which is basically a RoR app with a lot of the facebook stuff already setup. This includes:

1. Adding the App to Your Facebook Account
2. Inviting Your Friends to Use It
3. Instructional Pages
4. Adding an Icon to your App Sidebar
5. Notifying your friends you added the app in your feed
6. On Your App page showing the friends also using this app
7. Facebooky stylesheets for the whole thing

The code, known as RoRBook, will be available here as we update it. Requests, feedback and help are always welcome.

Upgrade took all of a minute, with 59 seconds of that being ftping the new code up to my site and a single click to “upgrade”.

New Features include upgraded admin interface, automatic upgrade of plugins, dashboard widgets, media gallery and much much more.

I am/was very excited about the dataportability movement earlier this year, but after reading the docs, following the groups, the three things I felt were lacking was the plans of what to do with the data, the lack of contribution from people who were going to actually do things with it (designing from one side of the equation is never good) and the correct marketing plan to make John and Jane Doe see the need.  I think the dataportability movement has realized this and it making plans and is trying to reevaluate/correct these “flaws in the plan” so to say. I think this is a part of the solution, but the problem needs to be addressed not with code, but with concepts.

The Diso project takes a different direction to solve the same problem. Instead of thinking “how do we get our existing information out of the system”, Diso looks at it more like how do make a connected social system that you control/own/manage. I think approach while faulted in the fact that we have existing networks currently and it doesn’t seem to leverage that data, it has more vision to solve the problem “once and for all”. Yes we may need to reset up our Facebook networks, but hopefully it will be the last time. Who knows, maybe Facebook will play nice.

So talking to some business friends of mine about this theory, they of course wanted to know “what is the business model”. If everyone moves their data off these centralized services, how are people going to make money and is everyone going to have to a geek to set this up. I understand where these questions come from. From a very high level people think “oh I have to get my own server and install this software and run it and manage it… NO WAY!” It is more in depth then that.

The solution something like Diso offers is making the social network modular and building connectors to make those modules speak. Diso isn’t software per say, it is more of an IDEA of making software talk, share and play nice. The hope is by giving people options of where they want to store their data, the providers will be forced into setting up methods to communicate with each other.

Confused? Don’t worry, so was I. Here is an example that I think will help illustrate the point/power.

We have three friends; Sue, John and Nancy. They all each have a blog, a micro blogging solution, online photos and interest groups they are apart of. They want to be able to effortlessly share these bits of information, but each have their own preference of the tools they want to use. Sue has a Wordpress blog, uses Twitter and Flickr for her photos. John stores all his information on Facebook. Nancy has a hybrid solution where she uses Facebook for most things, but like Flickr for her photos.

So what now? Well currently all three friends would have to have accounts on Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and follow multiple Wordpress blogs.  Not only is that annoying for each of them to have to use tools they don’t want to, but that means they each need to check in tons of places to keep up. So the Diso solution would be that everyone runs in the configuration they want to whether that is self hosted or hosting with a provider that supports cross platform communication and when you want to check your friends information it is displayed for you in your UI from your friend’s chosen source.

So from our example when you wanted to look at your friends pictures, if you used Facebook for photos you would view all the photo information in Facebook, but for your friends that used Flickr or something like gallery, it would talk to those web sites and get the pictures and display them for you.

So what does this all mean? If everything “falls into place” correctly you will be able to host your data wherever you want and still communicate with your friends without your information being held hostage by one centralized provider. This is not to say that commercial providers won’t exist, they will just be competing based on features and not winning because “I have to be there, that is where all my friends are”, but win because they have the best feature set/interface/network/speed/tools.

By having open source solutions to social networks components, you can of course choose to self host everything and truly “own it” but the larger providers if they don’t already provide methods to export/get your data, the “connectors” will allow you to take your information where you want to go, so while you may not “have it” in terms of you are hosting it with a company, you have the freedom to move it where you want, in essence making it yours. Using Flickr but decide you like Picassa Google better? No problem… move it.

Anyway, a lot of things can change in 2 years, but the winds of change are “a comin”.