dangerouslyawesome

Originally Uploaded by ducttapeavenger

First off, you should know about a blog that was started during BlogPhiladelphia. Literally, in the 30 minutes of me running an open grid session, a blog was created from scratch (domain purchase to live) as a response to Scott McNulty‘s “Group Blogging” session. You can keep an eye on it’s evolution at PhillyGeeks.net. The most recent post by Viddler’s Colin Devroe, has elicited the following response from me. It’s sort of to Colin, sort of to myself, and sort of to you, the reader. Some of it requires reading his post first, which I suggest doing. In the end, I’ll likely end up taking it elsewhere, since this is effectively a brain dump.

So I apologize for any confusing direction of a message, or the language used. This is direct from my brain to your screen.

Here goes. [...]

I’ve managed to somehow make it my business to know whats going on in the local industry (and beyond), but in regard to local events, I have a lot of events and groups to keep up with. I still haven’t streamlined that process, though the combination of Google Calendar synced with ical over SpanningSync sure helps a lot. I tend to distribute “things going on this week” via twitter, email groups, and various IM conversations, it’s hardly efficient.

Well, I’ve decided to take a plunge into ultimate transparency. I’ve decided to feed by personal google calendar over the web, and it’s now available to be viewed and subscribed to at http://www.dangerouslyawesome.com/calendar/.

I haven’t gone back and set visiblity permissions on past events because, well, they’re in the past. But moving forward you may see “busy” blocks on my calendar. Those are things that I’m decidedly keeping private…whether to protect other parties involved, or for safety of my own sanity .

In general though, all of the groups, meetups, and events that I attend, plan to attend, or hear about that I think are worth attending (even if I can’t make it) will go into this calendar.

If anyone has a particularly handy way of projecting this information better, please speak up in the comments, I’m open to suggestions. The benefit to google calendar is it’s portable and subscribeable, as far as I can tell. And doing this doesn’t disrupt me existing workflow while it (I hope) adds value to some of my readership, especially the Philly folks.

[tags]calendar, shared, transparency, public, events, meetup groups, philadelphia, independents hall[/tags]

There has been a LOT of buzz about Facebook’s F8 application platform since it’s release on thursday night. And don’t get me wrong, I think this is a REALLY cool opportunity to leverage the tools AND the community that Facebook has in place to spread usership and awareness of web apps. Facebook has opened up some ridiculously cool tools to a very large audience. But maybe..it’s too large?

I’m scanning my “friends timeline” and noticing a clear division.

My geek friends are adding Facebook apps left and right.

My school friends (current undergrads and recent grads) have ALMOST no app usage, with the exception of the most popular app on facebook, iLike.

What does this mean? Well, at this stage in the game it means that geeks are bleeding edge and the rest of my friends aren’t as tech savvy. Fine. But long term, will the adoption rise? Depends on the app. I see things like last.fm getting a lot of traction. Music listening habits are always popular conversation on college campuses, and that data will become increasingly valuable to record companies and the artists, so I wouldn’t be surprised if the next step was INCENTIVES from the labels and artists to share your listening habits. Just my own speculation.

But beyond that, I’m having a hard time seeing F8 apps take facebook by storm. Even though facebook has opened beyond the “University Only” model, they have a stigma. In time, that stigma will likely go away, and if F8 is Facebook’s team being forward thinking enough to prepare for it, that’s interesting and awesome in itself. But I think that the Facebook audience at large (the large concentric circle of a large percentage of students in the US) compared to the rest of us who are really excited about F8 (a.k.a. “social networking geeks of the world”) still has huge opportunity for market penetration, like the Last.FM example above.

App developers: try thinking like a student. What do students need and use? I can easily answer the question because I was an on-campus undergrad very recently. Here’s a short list:

• Take-out Food
• Textbooks
• Music
• Nightlife
• Discount ANYTHING

This is hardly the end of the list, but a couple of quick, easy to illustrate examples. I’ll hit them one at a time, and how I think integration with Facebook would boost usership of Facebook AND the service being provided.

When I lived on campus I had little interest in walking to the dining hall to get lousy food that was going to eat a hole in my stomach. Cheap pizza places (2 large pies for <$10) and hot wings (40+ wings for $12) were all over campus, and they all delivered. And the best part? When CampusFood.com came out, I could browse a menu, and then with saved credit card information, click “order”. Cheap food delivered to my door with minimal human contact, and no cash transaction, every college student’s dream. Campusfood (or someone else) needs to integrate this into Facebook. They already claim to support transactions, so that part should be easy.

Scenario: I come home from a party, a few beers in, browse facebook to add my new party friends, poke a couple of the girls that I think are cute, and order a pizza, all in one workflow. And best of all? In the morning I can browse the public timeline to see what all of my OTHER friends have ordered…maybe there’s a new spot on campus that I haven’t tried yet, and Johnny’s sandwich order sounds really tasty…boom. You have personal recommendations without people even needing to talk to each other.

This one’s easy. Facilitating a textbook exchange on Facebook is easier than ever. Someone should do this RIGHT for a change. I’d love to see a Netflix for textbooks, though I understand the challenges of varying versions/editions of textbooks. Still, seems possible. The ability to announce when I’m done with a book via the public timeline and have someone come along and snatch it up seems pretty plausable.

Music

The success of the Last.FM plugin is encouraging, and I already mentioned my thoughts on incentive-based scrobbling. If nothing else, the publicity of “I’m listening to…” being announced on the “News Feed” is free publicity. I’m not looking to get paid for my data in cash, but something from the label to say “thanks for providing us with some of the most valuable market research info we’ve had in years” would be nice. Maybe an album or two of mainstream music that doesn’t blow? Discounts on itunes, etc seems to make the most sense, but again…I’m open to suggestions.

Nightlife

One of the most successful features of Facebook, in my observation, has been the party planning tools. Set a time, place, and invite a pile of people. RSVPs. Privacy from the guest of honor, if you need. Conversation about what to bring. Etc. College kids love to party, but once they grow up past the legal age to drink, many of them move form house parties (where they sit around and drink apple juice, i promise) to the local bar scene. These bars need to be taking advantage of Facebooks new open-ness. Promotions and event invitations with incentives like drink specials, guest list only open bars, theme parties…etc.

I’ve been using Philly2Nite.com regularly (and recently had the pleasure of lunch with one of the co-creators Chris Nagele, who has an awesome eye for the kinds of strategy I’m describing), and think that other city-based niche nightlife sites could benefit from Facebook’s new open platform. Philly2nite has it’s own social network and has come up with some cool ways of leveraging it, but tying the two together seems like a match made in heaven. PLUS, that network extends past graduation because we all know that people don’t stop having social lives when they graduate (at least, I hope they don’t stop). Announcements of friends attending a particular event is easy incentive to get someone to come out to a party that they might not have otherwise, and the Facebook mechanisms are perfect for that.

Discounts/Bargain Shopping

Slickdeals, Restaurant Coupons, FatWallet(and other cash-back deal sites) all NEED to recognize the opportunity to hit a target audience of kids who want to have the hippest, coolest, trendiest WHATEVER but are on a tight budget. Cash back and discounts are quick wins in the eyes of a college student. Take advantage of that, and work it right into my facebook account.

I could go on and on with this list, and if I had more time myself I’d build every single one of these apps, or pursue the means to make them exist. But I’d love to see the mechanisms provided by F8 really recognized better by the greater part of the social economy that comprises Facebook. Let’s see where this goes, and if anyone sees any of my app ideas (or anything similar) please let me know in the comments!

Technorati Tags: campusfood, discounts, F8, Facebook, music, nightlife, opportunities, students, textbook

In his first post on his new blog at BMC Software by William Hurley (A.K.A. Whurley) wrote of a metaphor for the open source community called “Opensville”, and alluded to how its a place where everybody wants to hang out but nobody wants to live because socially and economically, it’s straining. This discussion has boomed over the last few days, and has been generating some excellent commentary on Open Source communities.

Dave Rappo, a good friend of mine, has a project which has the primary objective of taking some of the strain off open source project managers as well as developers who wish to contribute to open source initiatives. This initiative uses monetary incentives in the form of “bounties”, placed on tasks and feature requests, by the users who request them. Essentially, he’s created a streamlined workflow for the concept of “put your money where your mouth is”.

This project is appropriately named Bounty Source.

Bountysource itself is a Ruby on Rails application, coded by co-founder Warren Konkel (in his free time no less…he’s a full time contractor for the famed Revolution Health Group). Another very interesting part of the model is that Bounty Source, which acts as an integrated project management and source control tool (similar to Trac and SourceForge), is itself driven by the BountySource incentive model, and portions of it are open source (the SVN browser, for example). That is to say, the tools used to make BountySource what it is are available to have bounties and feature requests placed on them. Then, like any of the projects that they host, a developer can come through, choose a task, complete it and submit it for review. Upon approval, the bounty is released to the developer.

Bounties vary in size because they are created by users who want to see a feature included. If they want to see the feature really really bad, and can afford it, they could place a rather sizable bounty on it. Also utilizing the power of strength in numbers, multiple people can contribute to the same bounty. So if someone else wants the same feature you do, they can chip in (less, same, or more than you) towards the total value of the task.

This realistic monetization of tasks takes away a large amount of the dissent in the OS community, where projects stagnate due to a lack of resources, or developers and project managers get frustrated about the number of feature requests with no “contribute back” factor. Many open source USERS forget that OS is a two way street. Bountysource goes out of its way to remind people, and lets them contribute in a real tangible way.

One of the latest bounties posted to BountySource actually stemmed form a conversation Dave and I had in the car yesterday, regarding the lack of Firefox extension support in Camino. Evidently, someone had just posted a ~$200 bounty on creating a fork of the Camino project that had a single customization: enable middle-clicking on tabs to close them. THAT WAS IT. Someone wanted this feature SO BADLY that they were willing to pony up 200 bucks. Dave and I weren’t ready to drop $200 on a single feature, but we agreed that we’d switch to Camino for speed and stability if it supported XUL/Extensions.

So Dave created a bounty for Firefox extensions and addons for Camino within the same project, dubbed “Alternative Camino“. This bounty calls for Firefox 2.0 Extension support (at a minimum) in Camino. I’ve dropped $10 of my own money (as did Warren) on this feature request, and if you’re a mac user frustrated with the general instability of Firefox (not unusable instability…its just not Camino) but stick with Firefox for plugins…drop a couple of bucks and see if we can’t get this bounty fulfilled.

And while you’re at BountySource, check out some of the many (372) projects that they do host, and see if you want to ask for anything, or take on a challenge to collect a bounty yourself.

[tags]whurley, david rappo, warren konkel, opensville, bounty source, communities, opensource, incentive, camino, camino + firefox[/tags]

im not a skinny blogger, but im not so sure im a fatblogger either.

While my weight loss has been highly “unofficial”, I’ve lost 20 lbs since December 1st-ish.

I actually lost 15 of it during the month of december, but new years festivities put it right back on, and I’ve struggled to drop back down to that near-200lbs-point since. SXSW actually helped a lot, i dropped about 12lbs during those 5 days. I suppose no eating, lots of drinking, walking everywhere, and an hour of sleep a night will do that for you.

AAAnyway, my point was. I’m 199lbs as of 5 minutes ago. I havent been below 200 in a good year and a half or more. I was stable at 220, though everyone said I “wore it well”. But now that I’ve ducked back into the 100s, I’m pretty motivated to keep up the high stress/health-ish eating diet that’s succeeded for me this far.

[tags]weight loss, fatblogger[/tags]

http://www.weknowhtml.com, the business-y end of this operation, finally got the overhaul it deserved.

design by Dan Wilt (i’ll link to him when his site is up), development and copy by me(duh), with some editing help from my awesome girlfriend and a KILLER testimonial/case study from Tara.

working on the wordpress template version of the site so it can have its own blog, thats coming by the end of this week.

but it’s nice that the business cards will be driving to something i’m proud of…and i’m really, really proud of this one.

"which makes me think there should be a glow in the dark version of easy cheese. it's not like the product has any integrity to begin with. If you will eat room temperature cheese that comes out of can, you probably wont mind if it glows in the dark, too." - mitch hedberg (RIP)

ive been a happy user of newsgator for the last year and change. Having all of my feeds in one place, that keeps track of what I’ve already read, independant of the computer I’m on, is key. Everyone always asks me how I seem to be so cutting edge with what I know, and really, i owe it all to my news feeds and my news reading habits. I work on a schedule provided by the motivational timer Instant Boss, 8 minutes on 2 minutes off. It keeps my mind fresh, and allows me to take in new information before it expires. And, effectively, accomplish a solid 80% or more utilization (more often, it’s higher, since Instant Boss, much like my alarm clock, gets ignored for some intervals should I be in “the groove”).

At any rate, Newsgator is great but has its downsides. More than anything, its responsiveness sucks on a regular basis. Crashes, hangs, etc…pretty much anything you’d expect from a fairly highly traffic’d asp.net site Careful, MS evangalists…I work at a .net shop, i just prefer php for my freelance work. A recent post on one of my favorite design/ux related blogs, Design Meltdown, covered web sites that provide a service, but don’t lack in style either. Among its ranks laid NewsHutch, who may have taken NewsGators place. It’s clean, responsive AJAX interface picks up where NewsGator left off…allowing me for even more efficient use of my news feeds, in a cleaner interface (i was never a huge fan of NG’s layout..though it did improve during their one major refresh in the last year). For some reason, NewsHutch makes my news look just as appetizing as I think it should.

It was nice being able to import my feeds using OPML.

It isnt so nice that the refresh intervals dont seem to be variable, and are set somewhere in the 30 minute mark. while this is slightly annoying for someone with the 8/2 schedule i run, perhaps this can prompt an adjustment in my work schedule. We’ll see what kind of effects it has on my productivity, as well as my connectedness with the world.

p.s., in case anyone is wondering, my news feeds are almost entirely tech. things like CNN/world news depress me, so i stay away from it until prompted by one of my more politically-minded friends clues me into something important.

politics are for suckers, anyway.

a long weekend left me with quite a lot of work to catch up on.

In the mean time, look at what I got for Ryan for our 2 year anniversary.

it’s tough to see what it actually looks like cuz it’s so damn shiney with the flash, but here’s the product shot.

oh, and this picture was taken on MY anniversary present.