MobileMe Notes — Matt Mullenweg
First, the notes application on the iPhone is handy, but please sync this to a quickie app on Me.com so I can put stuff in and out of notes easily. Second, and this is a stretch, I know you don’t like to-do applications, but I also have an inkling you could do something that would make me stop using paper and pen for to-dos. And synchronize it.
Yes, please.
My MobileMe is going to need renewing soon. I’ve been taking some serious looks at whether to move everything to google/gmail or MobileMe. Optimally, I want ONE personal email and ONE work email, but right now, I have three personal accounts that mix and merge, and I hven’t decided the best way to fix that. There are things about both that I like, and both that I don’t like — and to be honest, there are things about what Yahoo is doing with their mail I like, too, but I need to be comfortable that Yahoo’s bottomed out, so I’m holding off.
For now, I’m doing to go with MobileMe and the tight integration with the iPhone. A year from now, I don’t know. Lots can change between now and then… But Matt’s noted a couple of significant weaknesses with that approach. Another is a good bookmarking tool that ALSO works with firefox on the desktop, not just safari. Not there yet.
Open Source Communities – Push cx
Open source projects should be judged as much by their community as by their technological achievements. The code tells you what it’s good for, but the community tells you what its future is.
Communities need to be active to continue improving the project, deal with bugs and changes to their ecosystem. If no one is interested enough to talk about the project, none of that will happen. Newcomers need to meet experienced users to be sold on why to use the software, to get help as they learn their way around, to maybe be drawn into contributing to the project itself.
I nice view of the dynamics of communities by Peter Harkins. One of the aspects of this, I think, is that from the communities I’ve been involved in over the years, the smaller the set of people actively involved in the decision process, design and implementation, the more sensitive that project is to fading or falling apart if the life or motivation of a key member changes. For that reason alone, communities really need to foster new members into the project and ways to recognize and enable the most effective and capable into the “inner circle” where they’re ready and able to step up and move a project forward. If you don’t do this kind of “succesion planning” from the start, when you need it, it won’t be there.
Geeks tend to think you don’t need marketing, but they’re wrong. Marketing, even of an open source project, is key to enable adoption and convince people to evaluate it and join the project. projects really should consider community growth as a key metric in he success of a community, and communities really need to look at outreach, evangelism, and recruitment to be tasked out the same way bugs, features and documentation are, and those members should be part of the “core team” whether or not they actually code.
One reason it looks to me that Rails has taken off faster than django is simple: the rails guys did a lot of talking and promoting and evangelizing of rails, where the django folks have been quieter and less self-promoting of themselves and the technology.
A technology nobody knowss about may be great, but it won’t change the world.
A really nice resource guide
Here’s a very nicely done, concise set of resources by a web designer. I really like the concept and the implementation; I believe I’ll come up with something similar for this site. Well done!
(hat tip: Ajaxian)
Welcome to www.chuqui.com
Welcome to the new home for my blog and other writings and “stuff”. Long in planning, I’ve finally revamped things and moved my blog off of typepad and back to my own domain here on www.chuqui.com.
If you need to subscribe to the RSS feed, point your reader at the new feed url: http://www.chuqui.com/feed/rss.
The new blog was designed in Wordpress 2.7. I’ll go into more details once I’m sure the feed redirections work and all of those other details. Content transfer from the old blog has started, and now that this thing is up and running, you’ll see new content showing up with more regularity, and over time, I’ll be moving the content off of the old typepad blog to this one as have time to clean it up, update it as necessary, and generally getting rid of the dust bunnies and broken links and making everything spiffy and clean.
If you got to this posting from your RSS feed, then yes, my redirections work, and you don’t need to do anything, other than continue to read the postings — and perhaps drop me a note and tell me what you think.
Back in a bit. Gotta head down into the engine room and throw some more coal in the boiler.
The biggest problem with Web 2.0 today is….
What’s wrong with this picture?:
As I clean up loose ends getting ready to launch the new chuqui.com, I’m finding little details all over the place that need fixing — like my yahoo/mybloglog profile showing me working at a place I left 18 months ago. oops
And one of the great unsolved problems of the web 2.0 space: everyone wants me to create my profile on their service (because, of course, that information has value).
Now, what’s best for me, the individual, is to have some way to create this information once, maintain it in a single place, and then distribute it out to everyone to use as a shared resource.
Now, the hassle is that every service will be really happy to do that, as long as the single place is their place, and all of the other services pull from them.
So we still have this tower of babel as far as user profiles.
Who’s going to bell this particular cat? anyone?
Is It Time to Let FeedBurner Burn? | Chris Baskind dot com
Is It Time to Let FeedBurner Burn? | Chris Baskind dot com:
So perhaps it’s time to let FeedBurner burn, and reconsider self-hosted feeds. This decision may not be easy or even possible for sites which are already heavily invested in FeedBurner. But for those who are willing to give up something to get something back — or for new projects — there are potential rewards for going it alone.
This is something I’ve been arguing with myself since I decided to get the new blog set up and running. Initially, I was going to go without feedburner. The other day, I talked myself into it and plugged the feeds into it.
Chris pretty much nails it, though. And I’ve changed my mind again and I’m going back to my initial decision (and my gut feel on the issue, which I should know by now to trust on these things); the feeds get whacked out of feedburner before launch and I think it’s time to start letting it fade to black unless Google does something to change our minds again. It reminds me way too much of what Yahoo did to MyBloglog for my tastes.
and any purchases you made will be treated as referrals by us.
