With The Band

JESS3 has been working on a not-so-secret project for C-SPAN in the past few weeks.

TechCrunch, the best tech blog out there, just reported on it. C-SPAN is still ironing out some last issues, but IT’S ALIVE!

Read it.

A very big moment!

Much more to come about it later.

There have been many studies and articles about the changes in the human mind due to the Internet. The Atlantic has a particularly powerful one. Even as I was reading it, I constantly found myself switching around to email, twitter, facebook, google reader, etc.

I’ve been noticing for a while that, since graduating from college where I had to memorize programming languages, I learn less and less. Why should I bother to memorize the ins and outs of every system when instead I can just do a quick google search and find what I need?

As a web designer/developer, am I contributing to this? Is this a good thing or bad thing? And how can we combat it, or accept it?

Being a web designer and developer, the CMS I choose for a client is a huge issue. I wrote a little bit about it before. However, sometimes you just can’t find a CMS that will work for that particular project, and, barring changing the architecture of the site to fit in the mold, you’re left writing your own system for displaying and updating content, which, sadly, I’ve had to do a number of times.

I read an article today about FireRift - this seems exactly what I was looking for out of a content management system.

Firerift is a Template Independent CMS. That means you design and/or
develop how you want, and then plug Firerift into the portions of the
site where you want it to manage that content. Firerift will scour your
code looking for any Firerift Code Snippets and convert them into the
corresponding function.

Really looking forward to this, as should any frustrated web developer.

Stemming out of an heated conversation about who knows what, an idea was born. Jesse and I decided to hold off client projects for one day (just one, calm down!) and set out to build an entire Facebook application from scratch. We had tossed around different ideas in the week before, but by the time we set marker to whiteboard on Monday morning, we had locked down an idea - Facebook friend-based statistics. Jesse is a huge fan of data visualizations, and I like discovering information and patterns out of existing data that I didn’t realize.

So we started from scratch, and by the end of the day, we had the wireframes, full design and a functional version. Jesse was blogging during the day about it.

And now, it’s a full app! Say hello to FriendCompare! We still have a LOT more we want to do with this - even at 1 AM the next morning, Jesse and I were on the phone brainstorming on different things we could do. However, we had to cut it off somewhere!

Development-wise, the application didn’t turn out to be as easy as we thought it would be :-(. Hence why, for the past week, among with working with all our clients, I’ve been working like crazy to get it out.

Some Development Notes:

• Having all the information about the users - their friends, events they attend, education information, is AWESOME - and digging out the interesting nuggets of data poses a really cool challenge.
• FQL, Facebook’s own version of SQL - the language used to access information from just about every modern day database - gives you access to what you think would be a great wealth of today, but also poses HUGE roadblocks, besides the privacy restrictions. You would think that for a statistics application, you would need lots of standard SQL functions like COUNTs and JOINs, but as Facebook had neither, we were left pulling huge amounts of data down onto our server and analyzing it there. This makes any good web developer cringe in pain.
• Additionally, Facebook’s API is horribly slow. If you try to make more than a couple FQL/API calls, Facebook starts timing out, rendering the application useless.
• Enter Preload FQL. Rather than you calling the API from your server, you can specify ahead of time what information you’ll need from the Facebook databases, so when Facebook calls your application, all the data you need is already there. However, developing in that method tripled the amount of time necessary.
• We needed a LOT of different pieces of information, so bearing in mind all the above issues, it took a lot more than a day’s work to get it done.

So, in hindsight, maybe this particular idea wasn’t the best to try and tackle in a day. We were offered an existing codebase, however I turned that down, as it seemed a better decision at the time to write from scratch.

Thanks to everyone who helped out, including Eric and Jay from Lookery! Not to mention all the people who blogged about it and sent messages of support, and our clients for letting us take the day off!

Late last week Sam Huleatt approached me to tell me about a side project he was working on, in addition to his company and main product. I, while working for JESS3, volunteered to help out, and whipped up a logo for him. Sam launched it today.

StartupTweet is an open forum for people to make micro-posts. You’ll be able to subscribe to the content over Twitter.

Pretty neat, right? Check it out.

Learning from other people’s mistakes is a heck of a lot better than learning from your own.

Continuing the *Camp franchise, a group of entrepreneurs with failures under their belt held an unconference in Philadelphia to focus on their failures. It was last weekend. Sad I missed it!

Check out FailCamp. Hope they post their slides and such soon!

BarcampDC2 is coming up in September/October - are you ready?

We’re just wrapping up a planning meeting for BarcampDC2, here at Murky Coffee. We are looking for sponsors and such, and soon opening it up to people to register. If you have an idea or are interested in sponsoring, check out the wiki here!

BarcampDC was a pretty big turning point for me. Having lived in the DC area for so many years, I had never even thought about reaching out to the tech community in the area - I wasn’t even aware it existed. It was there I met Ann, Justin, Keith, John, (the four of whom are sitting here planning the event with me) and many others, whom I consider mentors, colleagues, business partners, and friends. There is no doubt that where I am today is a direct effect of showing up that morning and talking to people.

If you are in the area, come on out!

I’ve started working with my mother to post a bunch of her artwork (20+ years of it) on Flickr!

At a wedding - the cake was designed to match the artwork!

Straight up, Paul Graham has a page up on YCombinator’s site about ideas they would like to fund.

In light of all the recent Facebook and Social Media frenzy, which, to me, has very little impact outside of it’s self-engineered ecosystem, I’ve been thinking about ideas that that solve issues that really matter.

Look no further than this list.

Really gets the ideas flowing.

Going down this list, I found 5 or 6 “pains” that really intrigued me. The juices are really flowing. What can you think up?

The usual frenzy and buzz surrounding Facebook will peak today as Facebook has their second developers conference. Mike Arrington thinks he know whats going to be launched.

• Facebook payments platform
• Facebook Connect
• Three tier application system

We’ll have to see what happens, but….

• The Facebook payments platform will only work is if it is ridiculously easy to pay for something. However, with increased ease of use comes decreased security. My girlfriend has access to my Facebook account. My friends leave themselves signed into my computer occassionally. I leave work signed in to Facebook. No-one regards their Facebook account as particularly sensitive, maybe at most somewhere in between e-mail and your online bank account. How can this be secure, yet usable?
• It will be nearly impossible to have premium applications that cost money. With the barrier to entry for a Facebook application, free knockoffs relying just on advertising will replace it.
• There will be a run on Facebook enabling e-commerce stores, assuming Facebook allows this.
• The tiered application system will be interesting. I have thought for a while that their needs to be a premium tier, where application developers can pay a certain fee to have better listing/support/features. With the top tier limited to a few applications by the top developers, most applications will be fighting not to hit the bottom tier.
• Facebook Connect… that will be cool.