Phil801 - Geek Blog

Over the weekend I accomplished or got started on a couple projects that have been pililng up for a few umm, years. 

First, I dug up my old website from before I was really aware of blogging.  I used to handcode my personal website, journaling things we were doing, recording my thoughts and posting things I wanted to share.  The site has been down for several years but in the centralization process I’ve been working on (moving everything to one server, etc) I wanted to put it back online.  So, here is the link to the site.  This link is to the section of that site that I now recognize as a Photo Blog.  It was kind of fun going back through all that - I like blogging a lot more, it’s easier!

 As for the new, I’ve been wanting to NOT keep all my photos on Flickr for several reasons, mostly because I’m not confident they’ll still be around in 10 years.  But the convienence of it and all the features on it have kept me using it.  I finally looked pretty carefully into Gallery2 which I had been meaning to do for a while.  There are several features in it that were important to me such as being able to post pictures via email (I do this with my cell phone to flickr), being able to use tagging to organize and browse my pictures, rss feeds to albums and tagged albums, being able to customize everything and lots of other stuff.  It’s acutally a very full featured picture hosting program.  So over the weekend I got it set up and configured.  There is still a lot of work that I want to do on it, but it’s coming along nicely.  I haven’t skinned it the way I want it yet, that will come soon.  Anyway, take a look at it if you like, there are a hundred or so pictures on it so far.  It’s hosted on the site that will soon also host my new personal blog.

Just a quick post because there are a few things going on this morning that are interesting. 

First, Microsoft released MS Mesh last night.  I’m looking forward to learning more about it and hopefully getting in the beta soon.  Mesh is an Application/Document/Device Synch system (and lots more) that has the potential to make multi-device computing much more usable.  Check it out, I think it will be huge when they release it to the public.

The other thing is that Facebook released chat for the Salt Lake network today.  I’ve been playing with it this morning and it’s pretty cool - but it also sucks. :)  Here are my first thoughts on it:

1. It’s very cool that I can now chat with all my contacts when I sign into Facebook.  There are plenty of people on there that either don’t have/use instant messaging or that I have just never set up a connection with them.  This bridges that and lets me chat with lots of people.
2. It has a popout window for the chat so you can navigate away from facebook and still be connected.
3. Some interesting info can be gleaned from it like getting a snapshot of how much of your network signs into facebook and for how long.  That also leads to some serious privacy implications - so I’ll also point out that there is a setting on there to hide from chat.
4. Here’s where it sucks - so far, there isn’t a desktop app or a jabber client and webchat sucks.  There is no system notification that you have a message waiting, so you have to constantly look over to the chat window. 
5. Hopefully they’ll release a good api for the chat system, then desktop or jabber clients can be made for it.  Then it won’t suck!

 There are two things that have prevented me from using Amazon’s Web Services in the technology I’ve been building - and Amazon just announced the solution for one of them!  Jeff Barr just announced on the AWS blog that they are going to be releasing persistent storage within EC2 which is their computing cloud.  Why is this important and what does it mean?  I’m sure there are lots of innovative ways that this will be used, but the main reason I haven’t used EC2 to this point is there are two things I need from it - one is the ability to use MySQL databases in their cloud.  It wasn’t feasible before but now they’ve made it so you’ll be able to load up a virtual machine with MySQL installed on it and bam! it will map to your persistent storage!  Finally!  You can now use databases easily within EC2.  Combined with their Elastic IP Addresses I’ll be able to address my databases on EC2 with an IP address and the whole database system will be able to scale. 

This is huge!  Amazon is killing in the compute cloud environment.  Unfortunately, this wasn’t a production announcement - it’s coming out sometime this year - but at least it’s coming! 

Now, if they would just get Windows 2003 working as the operating system I won’t need to buy $150,000.00 worth of servers this year!

Be sure to read Jeff’s full announcement here

Maybe it’s because the site has evolved from being a college yearbook type application to being the most over-hyped website of the year.  Or maybe it’s the way it is because that’s exactly how Zuckerberg  wants it.  Whatever the reason, Facebook has a lot of suck - and they keep rolling more of it out.

I’m not going to include the most obvious things in this list like: “walled garden”, data lock-in, etc.  This will be more picky and will focus on the Home Page, and I’m sure some people will disagree with me that some of this stuff sucks.

1. The layout of the homepage can’t be adjusted.  Why does this suck?  Because I’m stuck with data being presented in the order they think is most important.  Which means that “pokes” (won’t even go over how lame pokes are) are right in my face while friends birthdays - one of the few useful features of Facebook are below the fold.  It means all my zombie invitations and ‘like’ invitations are at the top of the page.  Granted, they collapsed that list but it’s still too big.
2. Tied to number one, and maybe questionable for this list, but it really frustrates me that the walled garden doesn’t let me get the list of my friends birthdays out.  Since we already know it’s a walled garden, they could at least give me an option to have an email sent to me notifying me of whose birthdays are coming up.
3. No group feeds.  Apparently nothing goes on in all the groups I’ve joined.  Afterall, isn’t the home page supposed to let me know what’s going on in “my Facebook”?  What is the point of all these groups if I have to click through to each one in order to participate?  The homepage needs to have a tab that acts like an RSS aggregator for all the activity in the groups I’ve joined. 
4. Same thing with fan pages - what the hec is the point of becoming “a fan”???  Am I supposed to go click on all the fan pages I’ve added so I can see what’s up?  Again, this really calls for a tab on the homepage that acts like an RSS aggregator and lets me post on the wall right there in my homepage. 
5. Status Updates.  Updates from three of my friends are shown on my homepage but I have to click through to get them all.  Meanwhile, my news feed is littered with “Johny is now friends with someone you’ll never know” and a random sampling of friends status’s.  Adjusting the controls for the home page don’t seem to make this work right.  And while we’re on the topic of status updates - why can I get an RSS feed of my friends’ status, but not of MY status?  Guess they just need to rub that wall in your face and the fact that what you put in facebook is theirs, not yours.
6. Facebook forgets who I already said I know.  When I joined Facebook, I gave it access to several email accounts so it could find my friends who were already signed up.  Once it was done, they dumped that data apparently.  Why didn’t they keep it so they could notify me when somebody I know signs up?  Instead I have to keep giving them access to my email.  It would be pretty simple to just store all those emails in a table and have a simple join table that indicates who knows who. 
7. Why can’t I disallow poking?  And Superpoking.  And Ninja’ing.  And Zombie’ing.  I want an option to not allow these stupid, childish applications to spam me like crazy. 
8. The rest of this list is about the “People you may know” feature.  It sucks, a lot.  First and most obvious, it only shows you like 27 people.  There is no “next” button or “show me more”.  27 - that’s all the people you might know, except it’s not.  If you refresh it, about 2% of the people change.  So all you can do (once you’ve added all the easy pickings) is refresh and refresh until someone shows up that you know, and it’s extremely slow!  How stinkin’ hard would it have been to put a next button on there?
9. OK, so we’re stuck with a single page for the people you may know.  Why isn’t there a way to say “I don’t know this person”!?!?  Michael Arrington, Mark Cuban and Jason Calacanis show up over and over.  I’m not going to add them, but I keep having to filter them.  I’ve been tempted to add them just so the algorithm will take them out of my list. The biggest blah is that I’m friends with a lot of my cousins who go to BYU - all their friends at BYU dominate my list!  I don’t know their college friends and I never will - I want to be able to get them out of my might know list.

I hardly use Facebook anymore - there’s really nothing ever happening there.  My news feed on my homepage mostly just tells me that so and so became a fan of this or joined that group.  But, why are they even bothering?  It’s not like becoming a fan or joining a group actually gets you into the conversation - you still have to go to every group and fan page in order to see if maybe something happened that maybe you could participate in.   Facebook is kind of a ghost town for me, the crickets are getting loud.  It’s boring and if it didn’t suck so bad, they might have a chance of surviving even with a walled garden - but they don’t.  Facebook will die soon and all that data that we keep dumping in there will be lost to us - cause it ain’t ours, it’s theirs.

There is one and ONLY one type of person qualifed to schlep advice about being an entrepreneur and that is someone who has:

1.  Actually built a company by creating a product or service that brings real value to real people (hint: that’s not a facebook app or a mashup) a real product or service is something that takes planning, time and resources to build.
2. Gotten to a cash flow positive state with their company
3. If you’re talking about raising money, then someone who has successfully raised real money at the level you’re looking at
4. Exited from at least one company that THEY started.

Again, those are the requirements to be QUALIFIED to schlep advice - oddly enough, it’s sometimes hard to find qualified advice amongst the gaggle of unqualified noise plenty of people are happy to throw at you - kind of like I’m doing right now.

So my first advice is to not take my advice.  I’ve only nearly completed item 1 above though I’m working on 2 and 3.  So I’ll be trying hard to shape what I’m saying not as advice, but as sharing my experiences.  I’ll also say that I’ve found plenty of schmucks who actually meet all 4 requirements.

A lot of this is common sense, so why am I saying it?  Because real entrepreneurs are hard to come by.  There are bajillions of “entrepreneurs” who are just thinking about starting a company, scripted together some “app” over the weekend, or had their company handed to them by daddy.  It’s hard to get good advice and in the void it can get confusing determining whether you should do what this really friendly rich dude said…

Experience on the other hand is different for each person and much direction can be learned from other’s experience - both directions to follow and directions to ignore.

So in closing, there are only two pieces of advice I’m offering 1) Don’t take my advice cause I’m  not qualified and 2)If you aren’t qualified to share advice on something then shutup.  As for everything else I’m going to say, hopefully you can learn something from my experiences.

I finally made the time (over the course of about two weeks) to move my blog to a different host.  The old host was slow, too expensive and limiting but everything was there and it was easier not to mess with it. 

Now that I’ve moved everything, I think it’s time I start thinking about blogging again.  Here’s the thing - I’ve changed quite a bit.  My close friends tell me I’m a very different person - it’s like I’ve got the Thousand Yard Entrepreneur Stare.  Yes - I’m still an entrepreneur, yes I’m still building some REALLY cool stuff.  No, you don’t have ANY idea what it is I’ve been building for the last year cause I’ve never talked about it or told anyone (ok, some of you know, but only if I told you about it in the last couple weeks).  No, I’m not dead even though very few people have seen me for the last year. 

I’ve learned a LOT about entrepreneurism in the last year - and I’m not talking about all the crap you read in books.  If you’re an entrepreneur who gave up everything for a year to build your baby, you know what I’m talking about.  If there’s one thing I’ve learned in the last year, it’s how to be real.  I’ve been through several gyrations (some of them public) in the last 18 months and there are plenty of things I’m now embarassed that I had to learn - but now that I’ve learned them you won’t see me repeating them. 

Being Real is interesting in a Web 2.0 world - cause most of Web 2.0 isn’t real - most of it is goofy ga-ga playtime “oh look at the new shiny thing”.  Which is great “fun” for about 5 minutes, then you get tired of playing with the kids and it’s time to make money - which most of Web 2.0 won’t do.  I’m talking about making real money here, not bringing in a little change from ads or helping support some poor dude who’s schleping the mashup he built over the weekend. 

So, my blog is going to change.  I’m going to call it like I see it now.  I still like a lot of the Web 2.0 concepts but I’m a capitalist and Web 2.0 is a very socialist environment.  I’ll be calling bogus on a lot of stuff that is “fun” and playful - I’m going to rip “Social Networking” apart, but I’m going to also show how it could be rebuilt to be useful. 

My point is, I’m no longer hyperventilating about “the movement” it’s time for “the movement” to move on and grow up.  I fully expect to get flamed for all this, I’m fine with that because I’ve already proven out what I’m going to be saying.  So if you disagree, bring it on, I’m interested in engaging on how to grow Web 2.0 up. 

Oh yeah, and I still hate Macs.  There are 2 Powerbooks, 1 MacBook Pro, 2 iPhones and 6 iPods in the house along with 4 PCs - I end up doing triage on Mac stuff all the time and never have to mess with my PC stuff.  iPhones are falling apart and crashing, MacBooks are crashing, iPods are forgetting what they are all the time.  And yes, I added that part just to ruffle the feathers of all the Mac bigots out there - just cause I haven’t done it for a while. 

President Hinckley passing away tonight was a bit of an emotional roller coaster, on top of that, Archbishop Christodoulos died tonight as well. 

This tweet from Jeffrey McManus cut through the emotional stress and really made me laugh!

Heads of the mormon and greek orthodox churches both died today. somewhere the pope is looking at his watch nervously

I thought I would share it with you and make sure that I can find it in the future

President Hinckley has been an influence in my life for as long as I can remember.  Equivalent to the Pope, President Hinckley was the spiritual leader for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints and for the last (I don’t even know how long) several years has provided constant guidance to members of the LDS Church.  Instead of trying to write a fitting memorial here, I would like instead to invite you to join several of us who are attempting to memorialize his life in the “Web 2.0″ way. 

• Here’s the official announcement from the LDS Church

• If you are on Facebook, there is a memorial there that you can join and leave your thoughts on the wall.

• If you are a member of Digg, you can Digg up the stories about his passing.

• There is an awesome video on YouTube about his life that you can watch and comment on.

• There are several already, but here is a great blog post memorializing him.

• Technorati already has several blog posts about his passing.

• Here is the wikipedia page on him as well.

May he rest in peace and rejoice at his reunion with his beloved wife.  Mortals weep while Heaven rejoices his returning home.