Say Yeah!

The importance of infrastructure: Haiti and beyond.

Lee Dale — 2010-02-10 02:41:00.0

In the wake of the earthquake and ongoing disaster relief in Haiti there has been a lot of discussion around the political state of Haiti. Setting these political issues aside, let's look at the disaster itself and, more specifically, how Haiti's infrastructure has played a roll in multiplying the level of destruction and, as a result, greatly increased the requirement for aid and subsequent rebuilding efforts.

First, let's clarify what I mean by infrastructure. I'm talking about the fundamental tenets of a healthy nation: education, employment, government, communications (phone and Web access), roads and buildings. The reality of the situation is the disaster in Haiti was compounded by a dearth of infrastructure. Concrete buildings are not supposed to completely collapse in the face of a natural disaster. This can be traced back to all of the above issues, all of which are in the purview of organizations such as the Web Foundation; organizations focused on empowering local people and economies through holistic planning, while working with on the ground organizations to build lasting infrastructure that local individuals can manage and thrive under.

Now, with massive amounts of aid being piled into Haiti, how this aid (and the most certainly required future aid) is applied to ongoing infrastructure development will determine whether or not Haiti can avoid a disaster of this magnitude in the future and, more importantly, become a healthy nation.

With this in mind, we need to be thinking more holistically, not just in Haiti but beyond; reacting less and, instead, focusing on long term planning. This is why we've put our support behind the Web Foundation because it truly has the power to change people's lives and local economies, ultimately increasing standards of living, health, and safety. This isn't a sales pitch for the Web Foundation; it's a call to engage in more holistic giving, based around empowerment rather than relief.

By all means, support Haiti now as we are at this Thursday's HaiHaiTO event, because the requirement for disaster relief is ongoing, and the Canadian government is stepping up with each donation we make. But let's remember it's holistic reengineering of infrastructure, not reactionary rebuilding, that is required to ensure this level of disaster is avoided in the future.

Support Now

HaiHaiTO Haiti support evening on Feb 11 at the Courthouse on Adelaide, 7:00p to late, with support for the following groups:
Canadian Red Cross
Pierspective Entraide Humanitaire
Toronto Haiti Action Committee

Purchase HaiHaiTO tickets here.

You may also donate your Air Miles to the Red Cross.

Ongoing Support

For Haiti: Haiti Partners

For other locales, including South America, Africa, and more: Web Foundation

Access in the information age: the threat of ongoing supply chain battles

Lee Dale — 2010-02-01 02:23:00.0

Amazon's decision to cease selling Macmillan print books and eBooks last week had me extremely concerned regarding this form of, well, censorship. An interesting reaction given that Apple pulled the same stunt in 2007 with NBC, pulling their content from iTunes due to disinterest in capitulating on pricing. In that case, an act where I was rooting for Apple simply because I despise protectionist agendas and see video content owners as far more egregious in this area than music, which does not bode well for consumer access (and with the rhetoric on that one being that it followed "NBC's decision to not renew its agreement with iTunes", rather than a unilateral decision on Apple's part to make this content unavailable). But books. Man, I (yes, naively) expect Amazon to do whatever it takes to make every book available to me. To be a leader in access to knowledge. In that sense, the Google of the retail world. So when Amazon intentionally makes unavailable an entire publisher, including most of their subsidiaries, that was a wake up call. And I immediately thought: boycott Amazon, let them know why. Buoyed further by the excellent outsider's guide to the fight article from Charlie Stross. But, yesterday, Amazon capitulated.

What continues to be worrying about this whole tact is that they didn't simply cease selling the eBook version of MacMillan titles, but the "Kindle Team" had the print versions pulled as well, which were not suffering from any pricing dispute. Scary stuff. Short of having an open burning of Macmillan books, this feels oh so wrong to me. Am I overreacting? I feel Amazon has a responsibility to make the written word available to me. To leverage their reach to ensure that nothing is out of reach. By selectively choosing what they carry, the expectation they're now setting is that diving into their catalogue on a particular topic is not at all thorough. Meaning I should work on sourcing and considering writing from other sources now. Back to niche retailers who curate intentionally and with due consideration for the content rather than eliminate choice based on the almighty dollar.

Back to my take on the actions of Apple as compared to Amazon. NBC is just entertainment, which was distracting from the real issue: preventing access to knowledge and information hurts us. If Amazon had pulled Harlequin, I would have ignored this larger issue in much the same way I did with NBC. But the fact remains, whether it's a cultural landmark, or a valued treatise, it should be available to us. (Not withstanding my disinterest in any of this eBook/online video content which is DRMed up the wazoo). And that's what makes the comments following Amazon's capitulation even more disconcerting.

There's a lot of pro Amazon drivel here about giving in to bad old Macmillan, that Amazon should fight for the consumer, and that a Macmillan boycott is underway. This is crazy talk. If Macmillan wants to price an eBook at $14.99, that's their prerogative and the consumer has a choice of whether or not they want to purchase at that price. The same can be said about a song or sitcom but, on the other hand, they're just not the same thing. The process of researching, writing and publishing a book, be it fiction or non-fiction, does not correlate to a standard television program which also has far more ubiquitous and available distribution. I see books as being more delicate and, most importantly, Amazon had far more control over distribution than Apple did with NBC. The equivalent would be if Rogers cable said they're going to stop airing CBC on their cable network because CBC wouldn't provide them with Online or On-Demand content. Rogers would of course be skewered by the press and by the people.

So let's be mindful of what's at play here and, as consumers, stay focused on the big picture. There are battles shaking down with new distribution models, where behemoths of industry are going to continue to fight to squeeze every last dollar out of their supply chain relationships. In the end, for consumers, the only thing that should matter to us is that we don't lose access, whether due to pricing or licensing limitations.

Some important related links regarding access to information:

http://faircopyrightforcanada.ca

http://democraticmedia.ca

http://saveournet.ca

http://neutrality.ca

http://openvideoalliance.org

http://webfoundation.org

'tis the season.

Lee Dale — 2009-12-04 15:28:00.0

It's that time of year again when there's a party every night, mostly to celebrate everyone's success. While we love a party as much as the next cat, it's always nice to get together with a purpose other than handing out business cards or measuring alcoholic intake. And the success we've enjoyed throughout 2009 makes us even more aware of the struggles others have gone through this year.

With that in mind, we're very pleased to be able to support this evening's Heart for the Holidays event put together by the GenYTO crew and in support of the Hearth House Hospice.

But we're not stopping there. This December 16 is the third HoHoTO event. Each one of these has been in support of the Daily Bread Food Bank and we couldn't be happier having helped contribute to the over $38,000 raised at the first two events.

So please join us in celebrating 2009 and supporting those that can use it most. Heart for the Holidays is this evening at Marben, 8:00p, with tickets still available, and HoHoTO tickets can be found here. And if you have your own charity event you'd like to share with the community, please post it on the Toronto Events Calendar.

Website surveys, round 2, when to ask for my opinion.

Lee Dale — 2009-10-26 07:33:00.0

Previously, I wrote about website surveys and the right and wrong way to display such requests on your website. What I didn't talk about was when to ask someone for their opinion, which is equally as important as how you ask for it.

The issue with when to ask for user feedback is based around the customer's goal of browsing your website. Interrupting that process is, at best, disconcerting and, at worse, annoying. In other words, if you care about me as a customer enough to ask for my opinion, at least have the courtesy to ask for my opinion when I've completed what I'm trying to do.

We collectively suffer from the same issue with phone based customer support centres. I've actually been in the middle of troubleshooting an as yet unsolved problem with a customer support agent and been asked if I wanted to hear about a new promotion. You're trying to up sell me while my service isn't working!? How incredibly inconsiderate. And annoying.

So, the task at hand. I'm on your website to find something, buy something, or look for information. You'd know this if you were tracking my clicks. A series of searches. Browsing a product list. Configuring a computer. All of these things are easy to recognize and track, and you should not be interrupting these tasks with survey popups or redirects.

If I'm not involved in such a clearly identifiable series of tasks on your website, then your website is either disorganized, broken, or I'm not worth being surveyed. If I am involved in such a series of tasks, the time to ask me to fill out a survey is when I've completed what I'm doing, either by moving on from an identifiable goal (moving from shopping to searching) or, better yet, clearly having completed a goal (such as completing a purchase or adding a comment to a support forum).

The time to ask me to fill out a survey is not after 2 minutes of browsing. Not after 10 random clicks. And certainly not after 1 click and with a message asking me to take 5 minutes at the end of my website visit by following a little birdy, or some suitably inconsiderate trick I must perform in order to help you out. Case in point, Dell Canada:

What does "retrieve the window titled "Study" remaining on your desktop" even mean? Are you installing software on my computer? Why am I retrieving something at all. You're already asking me to spend 5 minutes of my time to help you.

Not only that, but you've interrupted what I was trying to do with all of this gibberish and, on top of it all, are now asking me to make sure I retrieve something after I give you my money. What? Oh wait, I missed the asterisk at the end of this meandering, unclear request.

If I spent the 2 minutes to read all of this (because what I was *trying* to do is clearly not at all important) and got past the incredibly poorly worded confirmation that says "Thank you for your help! Yes. No." (Again, what?) I'd see the asterisk leads to an explanation of this retrieval business: "A second window will open on your desktop if you click "Yes". Please make sure not to close this window if you wish to participate in the questionnaire." Holy crap! "Powered by iperceptions." So they're the idiots that came up with this? Man.

This is lazy web development. Lazy programming. Lazy copy writing. Lazy everything. Serves me right for trying to price check against Apple's new Mac Mini Server. (The Mini being substantially cheaper than the Dell I priced out, which included no server software, btw.)

Oh, Snow Leopard, you're so pretty but so broken.

Lee Dale — 2009-10-23 00:12:00.0

Apple promised a refined, optimized, and elegant release with Snow Leopard. And in many respects they delivered. Here's what they missed.

Address Book

The Address Book app is now suffering from a number of minor issues with copying, editing, and searching data. All of these issues are new from Leopard. I'm not sure if they rewrote Address Book as they did Finder. If so I can see how these cropped up. Otherwise, they broke things that didn't need to be touched.

Copying

For example, you can no longer copy whole addresses as you could in Leopard. Now you may only select one field at a time. This makes it a real pain to share addresses via email, etc.

Searching

Additionally, searches are no longer sticky between Groups. In Leopard, if I typed someone's name and there were no results in a group, shifting to another group which included addresses that matched my search would filter the addresses within the new group based on the search. The behaviour now is that the search is reset, so even if my search is success, switching to another group just shows the entire group, instead of filtering against my previous search.

iCal

iCal's painful interface issues are perhaps exacerbated by the fact that I only use it in the monthly view. I don't know if these issues are as painful in a Weekly or daily view. I find those views painful enough as it is. In the end, the two main capabilities of iCal, adding an event and viewing event details are very poorly implemented.

Adding an Event

The always completely terrible event edit popup which I believe was introduced with Tiger is still with us (see the image below). This is a usability nightmare because it doesn't actually pop up when you add an event so you have to do all this clicking and mouse movement to add any event details other than the name of the event. Adding a new event should take you to an edit pane where you can quickly tab between fields so you can fill out all of the event details.

The Inspector Pane

That said, Apple has introduced an Inspector pain which automatically shows event details when you select an event, well, as long as you keep the Inspector pane open. Unfortunately, the Inspector pane is a separate window that doesn't move with the main iCal app window. And it still doesn't solve the adding an event issue as you still have to click into this window if you want to add anything more than an event name when you add a new event. It's a cheap hack, if anything. Not what I'd expect in Snow Leopard.

Default Event Time

Finally, there's a Preference to set Day Start and End times, which I've done. This should set the default alarm time to somewhere within the times you set, but instead the default alarm is always 12:00a. Who the hell schedules events for 12:00a? Completely ridiculous.

Mail

Mail is probably the App I use the most on a daily basis. Sadly, this is my life. Issues with managing mail. I have a dull headache on a daily basis trying to figure out what to do with my Inbox. But I digress. Let's start with a bizarre change from Leopard to Snow Leopard. And try to tell me this one makes any sense.

Copying Email Addresses

Want to send someone an email address? Copy it into address book? Well, Mail no longer just copies email addresses. Instead a whole string with the name and email address is copied. ie, Lee Dale <lee@nospam.com> Who thought this would be helpful? Even if I wanted the name and address, I sure wouldn't want the address bracketed.

RSS

And, let's see, is there anything Apple's done right with their handling of RSS in Mail? Trouble is, I got sucked into the convenience of having RSS in Mail so i don't have another App running, and appreciated the ability to kick important feeds into my Inbox, when this was called for (though that's always been a glitchy endeavour).

Almost every aspect of Mail's RSS implementation has been flawed from the start. There's been difficulty with importing feeds where you'd have to click on them twice in Safari before they'd show in Mail. (This appears to be resolved in Snow Leopard.) Feeds would stop updating at times and you'd have to delete and add them again. There was even a file automatically generated by the RSS list that would be automatically dropped into Trash at regular intervals which prevented you from emptying the Trash without rebooting. This, too, seems to be solved in Snow Leopard. So what remains? No way to view the address of a feed. No way to export feed addresses.

RSS and the iPhone

Generally I wouldn't care about addresses and exporting (though there's certainly no excuse for Mail to horde this data), but I just got an iPhone. Which now has an RSS reader. Which I'm inclined to spend more time using now that I have a data package, App, screen, and mobile Web browser that doesn't make me weep (see ya later Blackberry). So, how the hell do I get my feeds in the RSS reader on my iPhone? The answer is, by adding them manually. Well, screw you Apple. How can they have a Mail App and .Mac, which syncs date from the Mail App to the iPhone, but not have an iPhone App which connects to all the Mail App features. Mail. Check. Notes. Check. To Dos. Check. RSS. Nope, and we're not going to let you get access to those folders and feeds either. Have fun! Not. Acceptable.

Folder Management

I also have a major issue with a missing refinement. I thought it inevitable that we'd see colour labelling for Mail folders so we could effectively create visibly identifiable sections within the Mail folder list. We can colour label messages, so why not folders?

As it stands now, filing a message within one of probably 200 little blue mail icons in my folder list is remarkably tedious. It's just too hard to discern where the specific folder I'm looking for is, even though I haven't changed the order of my folders in about 2 years. I'm constantly scrolling up and down waiting for a folder way down the list to appear, missing it or misfiling. Colour labels exist for folders in Finder, I don't understand why this capability wasn't propagated to an app like Mail. This, this is something that drives me nuts every day. Bad for productivity.

Unzip

Apple ships a basic unzip program which pops up if you double click on a zipped file. It does a fine job of zipping and unzipping and means I don't have any need to install a third party unzip utility. It even uncompresses password protected files. The problem? You have to use the Terminal to get a Password prompt. The App GUI has no support for this and, instead, you get this terribly unclear error message that is nowhere near, "This file is password protected and cannot be opened."

Quick Look

Quick Look was a great addition to Leopard. And now, with Snow Leopard, I can see Illustrator files too. Granted, all the layers are turned on, but it's something.

Zip Files

In Leopard I could see the files contained in a zip. In Snow Leopard, I just see an icon. What happened?

Update: Ah, Matt tells me I must have had a plugin installed.

Performance Bug

Never mind that Quick Look has a very bad habit under 10.6.1 of jumping up to 500+ MB of RAM and 75% CPU for no discernible reason.

Spaces

The much improved Spaces retains an incredibly silly little bug from Leopard. This was working when I first installed Snow Leopard, but it's been broken either because I moved the Space App from the root of the Applications folder and/or since the 10.6.1 OS update.

Preferences? Hello. Are you there?

What's the issue? I have Spaces showing in the menu bar. When I click the menu bar icon and choose "Open Spaces Preferences..." nothing happens. (It's supposed to open System Preferences to the Spaces pane.) I've tried moving the App back into the Applications root directory, but still nothing. Which leads me to a major gripe about Snow Leopard.

Application Folder BS

A basic Apple OSX install includes in the Application folder a Utilities folder and, I believe, an Applescript folder, but all other Apps are just thrown into the Applications folder. That doesn't work for me because it's impossible to find anything by App type once you start adding copious amounts of apps. (I find it's easy to forget names, etc, and I also like to have folders in my dock with related Apps so I don't have to load a Finder window to find an App.) So I organize related apps into subfolders:

Broken OS Features

The first issue I noticed when I had all my Apps in folders, back with OSX Tiger, was right clicking on a word and choosing "Look Up in Dictionary" from the context menu had much the same effect as "Open Spaces Preferences..."; nothing happened. I had to move the Dictionary app back into the root directory for that system wide function to work. (I just tried this in Snow Leopard for the first time, and that issue is solved, so Dictionary is comfortably back in the Multimedia folder. What fun!)

But that's the least of the Application folder related issues. Thing start to really go haywire with software updates.

Software Update for Apps

The first issue is, running Software Update yields no results if your iLife or other Apple products are not in the root and/or the default Apple folder that they originally install in. (Which is why I have iWork '09 instead of just iWork; change the name of this folder and you get no more automatic iWork updates. Ridiculous.)

My inelegant workaround: when I hear that there's been a software update, I move the apps back to the root folder and run Software Update, then move the apps back to the folder I had them in after the update has been applied. Tedious. Annoying. But not the worst of the Application update issues.

Software Updates for OSX

I am pretty sure the most annoying of the Application update problems that I first noticed with Tiger had been resolved with later versions of Leopard, but the 10.6.1 update of Snow Leopard was an absolute disaster as a result of my Applications folder organization.

A little background. Applications are actually .app files. These .app files are in fact a collection of files and folders. Right click on an Application and you can see in the context menu the option to "Show Package Contents". This lets you into the folder system of the App package where you can find any number of files and folders. Now, when Software Update pushes an OSX update, in many cases it's updating standard Apple apps such as Address Book, Spaces, etc. When updating these Apps, the OSX updates are just pushing the handful of files within the .App package that need to be updated. So, what's the problem?

What happens is this: Software Update will send these files and, during installation of the OSX update, try to put these files in the .App package in the root of the Application directory. Because my .App file is in a subfolder, I end up with a mini version of the .App package in the root directory that contains only the updated files. You can't run these Apps because they're incomplete and, effectively, the working versions in the subfolders are now out of date since they haven't been updated.

The solution: move all the affected Apps into the root of the Applications directory, download the OSX update manually (because Software Update thinks it's already installed) and run the update again. Trouble is, I never know which .App files will be affected until I unsuccessfully run an OSX update, so I either abandon my folder structure completely or continue to suffer through this issue.

Suffering Productivity

Sure, I could fill an equally long post note subtle Snow Leopard improvements that have pleasantly surprised, but the above issues are all rather inelegant problems that 2 years of refinement was supposed to have addressed. And, with issues that result in limiting productivity when using some core Apps or making it difficult to manage Application and OS stability, security and speed, this is all too painful to ignore.

Note

I think it's worth noting that when I installed Snow Leopard I did a fresh install on my fall 2008 Macbook Pro, first formatting my hard drive. Certainly none of these issues (granted, most of which are GUI related) would be the cause of old hardware or legacy applications causing conflicts.

UPDATE

Dock

There's some inconsistent behaviour with dragging multiple files to Applications in the dock. It used to be that if I dragged multiple images to Preview it would aggregate them in one Preview window or, with Photoshop, it would load all of them in Photoshop. This behaviour is now inconsistent depending on file type, where Preview may only load one file, instead of all of the files, and Photoshop is definitely only loading one file at a time.

So why so quiet?

Lee Dale — 2009-10-12 09:34:00.0

We have tons of stuff we're looking forward to sharing with you but we've been so swamped lately we've ended up being terribly neglectful. I've even got a half written blog post on the sketchy iTunes 9 GUI, which will sadly not likely see the light of day (it's too late to bother now, right?). So, if we've been so quiet over the summer, what have we been up to?

We've been working with Mark Rabo and crew on a completely revised and updated version of StickStickBangBang which looks and works even better. With more great artists coming on board this holiday season will be a great time to stick stick.

We're in the process of putting the finishing touches on the new World Wide Web Foundation website.

We've got a pretty important Calendar update that we've been working on, our version 1.5, which will make it easier to add events, along with support for multiple cities. That's coming in the next few weeks and will hold us over until our 2.0 update, which will make it even easier to add events and hold conversations around the events you love.

We've also been working with a great group at Rogers who are increasingly involved with supporting entrepreneurs across Canada, including their participation in recent DemoCamp events.

Over the summer, we've been pleased to participate in a variety of events which support the Daily Bread Food Bank, War Child Canada and SickKids Foundation through HoHoTo (sponsorship and raffle prizes), the Refresh Summer Social (Lee DJing) and PIBday (more DJing from Lee).

Sadly, we've had to put #patiofriday on hold because it's just too damn cold. But that just means #fireplacefriday is around the corner.

We've got lots more on the go and once these projects start going public we'll be sure to share more with you.

UI exploration: Improving date and time entry.

Matt Rintoul — 2009-09-08 15:12:00.0

While we're plugging away on the next update to the Events Calendar, I thought it would be fun to walk through the process we took while designing the new time entry elements used when adding or editing an event in the calendar.

The current method of entering the start and end time for events is cumbersome, at best. No less than 12 combo boxes are used to convey a start and end date and time. We can do better.

We tinkered with a few ideas, including a UI similar to Time Pickr, but it just lacked that the elegance we were looking for. I took a break, and upon returning there was an email from Lee with a rather cryptic looking idea which set things back in motion.

After some back and forth to figure out exactly what he was talking about, we were on to sketching.

An early idea, with multi line date selection, was rather impractical.

That's more like it.

Oh, handles on the outside, I like that.

Next I hit the computer (not literally), and started with some basic mockups to figure out how it should look. Several hours and iterations later we've got something. Excitement!

Some additional modifications and a trip out to Zipcar.com to see how their time slider worked (yes, they've built something similar, who'd have known?) And we ended up with this:

A few key points of interest

The grey areas indicate when the sun is down, between 9:00a-6:00p. (Summer night time at least, it's depressing to think about night time starting at 5:00p. Damn winter.)
The time scale is 30 hours, rather than the standard 24 hour day. Why? Well, sometimes we like to party until the wee hours, and it made sense to allow people to schedule events from say, 9:00p to 2:00a.

Excited? I know I am! While we're still in development on the final solution, I have high hopes that this new method for selecting time will hopefully provide everyone with an easier, more efficient and even fun (!) way to input their events into the Events Calendar.

Introducing My Events, the best way to track your favourite Toronto Events.

Lee Dale — 2009-08-14 07:36:00.0

I know it's been a little quiet around here. We've been heads down working away on great projects. We promise to share more soon and right now we're super excited having just pushed a great new update to the Toronto Events Calendar. This is the beginning of a new series of incremental updates that we'll be pushing over the coming weeks. Basically, our version 1.5 of the calendar, with more refinements coming soon.

The two main features that I love are:

Attribution

Now when you click on an event page, the person who added the event is front and centre. I love this acknowledgement (and not because I've added so many events, but because we all get to see who's contributing to the community and who's sharing out great events).

I hope this will encourage more people to share the events they love, especially if we all consider thanking those individuals for pointing out a great event we otherwise may have missed.

My Events

And, of course, as mentioned in the title, this is our introduction of the My Events calendar view. On the surface it may look like a simple subscribe option, but this isn't for the event organizer as much as it's for you.

Before today, subscribing to the Toronto Events Calendar meant you had to see every event in a selected category in your iCal or Google Calendar. Now, you can choose to subscribe to just those events you're interested in, which we hope will help keep your other calendars uncluttered and relevant.

As always, if you have any questions or comments, we encourage you to hit the Feedback button to the left or write us directly at hithere@yousayyeah.com.

Talk to you soon!

Thoughts on Community

Paige Freeborn — 2009-07-19 21:22:00.0

Back in June, on a sunny Patio Friday afternoon, we landed at the Adelaide St Pub rooftop patio. As the conversation ebbed and flowed with the arrival and departure of various new and familiar faces throughout the afternoon it became more evident to me that the Toronto Twitter community is strong and bright. We have, as a group, leveraged the online communication utility for many great things, not the least of which is simply to form new and formidable relationships with people we wouldn't meet otherwise. This, naturally, also leads to learning things and finding opportunities we wouldn't otherwise.

Reflecting on the past few weeks of our new Patio Friday tradition I'm compelled to share some thoughts on what 'community' means. I don't think any of it is rocket science, but reaffirms what a lot of us may believe to be true.

In 2000 Robert D. Putnam noted in Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community that "in the US over the past 25 years, attendance at club meetings has fallen 58 percent, family dinners are down 33 percent, and having friends visit has fallen 45 percent." (Source: Wikipedia/ Community)

I wonder if this divide coincides all too conveniently with the advent of personal entertainment devices such as the Walkman, hand-held electronic games, and the home computer. Along with this, the workplace became computerized and demands placed on the career-minded grew driving us out of the home, into the office and eventually into the home office. Interestingly enough the very technology that may have helped to pull our communities apart is now bringing us together in ways never thought possible.

I can't help but believe that in the past three years alone, the Internet and specifically the proliferation of social networks has given us all an avenue to return to a sense of community that was all but lost in the 80s and 90s. We now have a way to connect with people near and far from us on a common platform with common interests that was never available to us before. We can find, connect and engage with people who think, believe and act like we do. Further, being the social animals we are, we are driven to take these new connections to higher levels and meet in person to form stronger, more meaningful bonds. This isn't an entirely new concept, if you think about dating sites and chat rooms that have been around since the 90s, but the technology has become friendlier, personal computers are in most homes and people in general are becoming more technologically savvy. I wonder also, if we're all feeling the unnatural disorder of not belonging to a community disrupting a very primal need, thereby driving us all to find a means to create communities that have been sorely missed for years.

There's no shortage of books and blog posts on the topic and I'm not planning to jump on the bandwagon, but I've started a list of the things that make a community a community. It's by no means complete and I look to you to add your thoughts on what I hope to be a growing definition of community as it pertains to what we are building here and now. This is an exciting time in our lives and I'm personally thrilled to be part of it, learning every step of the way with all of you. I look forward to your comments and additions to the list. Let's see where this goes, shall we?

Regardless of professional or personal standing, the community accepts, supports, and encourages its members.
The reciprocal energy found in a healthy community is irreplaceable. It carries its members through the tough times and celebrates with them in good times.
Community is a natural phenomenon. It can't be forced, bought or fooled.
A community grows because it is not just built, but nurtured.
Communities are flexible. They expand and contract as necessary to allow for change.
Communities listen, observe and challenge those within it with the common goal being success and achievement.
Communities are people who choose to belong to a common purpose, belief or goal.

This article is posted in its entirety including a Patio Friday roundup on Paige's blog.

Photo courtesy of Lee Dale.

Facebook Cookbook Review

Lee Dale — 2009-07-16 20:41:00.0

A good technical book will achieve two goals: inform and inspire. Now, a great technical book, that will motivate. It will force you to act. Not out of obligation, but with verve that's usually reserved for a kid in a candy shop. And the Facebook Cookbook is motivating as hell.

It's so motivating that I've passed off the book to our other team members, Matt and Jim, to get them on board with not just some of the Facebook app ideas I'd like to explore this year, but some of the other technical insights that are found in the book. We'll see if they're as excited as I expect them to be after having a read. And, who knows, maybe a great Facebook app will come out of it. As long as it doesn't involve Zombies, I'll be excited to work on it.

So, let's talk about application ideas. Clearly, the Facebook application environment is super crowded, with volumes of applications in all sorts of categories, but there's always room for new successes with a well executed idea. More important than anything, with the Facebook Cookbook Jay's been able to get me to explore ideas that may otherwise have been put on the back burner, simply because of a perceived complexity in building for a new technical environment. The directness with which Jay and guests such as Jeffrey Tseng and Ilya Grigorik (among other great contributors) tackle not just the technical aspects of the Facebook Platform, but supporting technologies, Facebook specific marketing, and more, demystify this new environment.

Even better than breaking down the process of moving from idea to app to growth, across all of the key aspects of managing a successful Facebook app, the Facebook Cookbook is full of detailed and specific insight. For example, Application Notifications are limited (such as the notification you'd get from Scrabulous (now Lexulous) saying "Mike Fragomeni has played a move in Lexulous. You may have moves pending in other games too. Click here to view your games." (By the way, Mike's pretty good if you're in the mood for a challenge)). The Application Notification limits are also based on user feedback. For example, your notifications can be flagged as spam, which sicks the Facebook Platform Police on you. So, you need to be very careful about how you manage your notifications. Rather than ramping up to the maximum number of notifications, play with your wording and context of delivery to ensure that you have a healthy opt-in rate, aren't getting flagged as spam, and aren't losing app users because they're getting tired of all the messages they have to sift through every time they log in. Once you find the right balance, that's the time to increase your flow of notifications. And, the more engaged your users are, the more notifications your app will be allocated. Win win.

There are great insights just like that throughout each chapter of the Facebook Cookbook. I know I'm writing more about idea generation and marketing. That's simply because I don't play much of a role in coding these days. That's where the aforementioned Matt and Jim come in. I can say that the thoroughness of the technical aspects of the book is impressive, with Setting Up Your Environment, FBML, FBJS, FQL and FB API chapters accounting for 70% of the book. Each section with more great insights on subjects from caching to connecting to user data and other integration points.

Facebook Cookbook is so thorough that we not only find a great and relevant discussion on the social graph, but we also have the opportunity to compare the Facebook Platform against Google's Open Social and the wealth of networks that are connected through Google's platform. You even get an answer to the question, is it better for your app to have access to more people on different networks, or have access to a more connected network? Better yet, why not do both? Facebook Cookbook includes details for architecting your app to run on both platforms with as little rework and maintenance as possible.

All this and beyond the publication Jay's still hands on continuing to work with the Facebook Platform to come up with new insights.

Clearly, I heartily recommend the Facebook Cookbook. Truthfully, I have just one complaint. This has to do with a tremendous error in the book that I really hope will be corrected in subsequent printings: Jay, the toilet paper should fall on the front. Come on, man!