B. Mann Consulting

David Crow in Toronto picks up the community platform meme and lists some other tools / platforms available in response to Chris Pirillo's announcement regarding the building of Gnomepal on Drupal.

I already commented on Chris' initiative here, but here are some comments I made on David Crow's post:

Now, which of those listed platforms have portable data? Which of them are a suitable platform for building the (invariably) custom pieces that each community may want as they grow?

The tough part with many systems -- especially closed, hosted ones -- is that they provide great initial starting points, but then often lack in customization or growth options. And god forbid that your platform provider "go away" -- then you're completely stuck, and need to start over.

This is why I have chosen to go with fully open systems, because they can grow with communities and can never be locked down or disappear.

@Varun:
Facebook is ultimately closed and not a participant in the "open web". And it's someone else's platform with someone else's rules. I would hope that we steer around such closed instances and strive to connect openly.

@Peter Childs:
"What I’d like to see is a platform that recognizes communities are networks of interests (people & organizations) and doesn’t try to become a destination"

I think this is spot on -- don't try and a become a destination IN AND OF ITSELF -- but rather add value through various aggregation and hub features. This also seems to argue for mini-networks that cross sites.

Open platforms are as important as open data or any other cross site initiatives. I don't care what you end up picking as your community platform, as long as your data and your users can seamlessly interwork with the other systems out there. The network is not the destination.

My usage of Facebook has dropped. At the same time, people messaging me / contacting me through there has increased. At least the message shows in email now.

What I am still using quite a bit is the SMS integration for status messages. I know that updating my status sends out SMS notifications to a bunch of my friends, and vice versa. Yes, this is not new -- it's microblogging / Twitter / Jaiku, etc.

The mobile integration grounds the social in the "real world". There is an element of serendipity in sending a ping out to the world, and wondering who might respond back, who else is wandering the streets, cellphone in hand, ready to go for a drink or join an activity.

I imagine when Jaiku gets their US / Canadian mobile integration up and running, I'll use that more.

What SMS services are you using in Canada? Travis' description of SpinVox sounds great -- except for the whole Rogers is the devil and expense of it :P

I'm going to be on Business News Network this afternoon, 4pm PST / 7pm EST, talking about if Microsoft is still innovating? This is, of course, related in part to earnings announcements from a bunch of companies, and more directly, the Microsoft investment in Facebook. I'll be on a mini-panel with Fred Vogelstein.

Some related links / thoughts below, I'll clean this up after the interview:

• John Battelle on Facebook and Microsoft
• Paul Kedrosky on Facebook and the Microsoft Curse:
  

  Do you believe that Microsoft knows its own strategic interests, and that it can act rationally and appropriately in their defense? Ten years ago I might have said yes, but today I have a much harder time. So when it comes to defending a large strategic premium over a credible competitor with a better basis for economic valuation, I have a hard time.

• Recent interview with Steve Ballmer at the Web 2.0 Summit -- from Ballmer on Windows Live search, "it's like a 6 year old playing hoops with the 12 year olds"
• Did Microsoft pay too much for Facebook? Well, Facebook might be overvalued, but it's small dollars for Microsoft and gives them potential insite into profile / social based advertising
• MSFT failures -- Zune, Windows Mobile (failure outside of the US), search
• MSFT wins and/or in progress -- Silverlight, an Adobe Flash competitor, casual gaming and home based social networks (XBox Live Arcade, Windows Media Center, etc.)
• innovation? Microsoft Research (PhotoSynth), new offices and working environments down in Redmond and elsewhere
• closing thought: competition is good, Microsoft isn't going anywhere; they *should* compete more on innovation rather than dollars and marketing

I'm helping out the local Vancouver Facebook Developer Garage event this coming Tuesday by running a "Future of Facebook" Q&A. Johnny Bufu of SXIP will be on hand to lend expertise around portable social networks, especially regarding identity, OpenID, the OpenID Attribute Exchange extension, and related tech.

The timing and title of this talk is interesting: there is an "all hands" meeting at Facebook on Tuesday, so the rep from Facebook that was supposed to attend can't make it. There is much speculation here, everything from "Microsoft will buy them" to "Facebook is worth $15 Billion". It will be fun to talk some of this through live at the event, but I'll mainly try and jockey live audience discussion, not do my own pontification.

It has been most interesting, with the "rise of Facebook", to see its vast spread into "non techies". Indeed, that's where *I've* found it to add real utility: since so many people are on there, both organizing events and seeing what people are up to "in the real world" has become much simpler, and has led to more in person meetings, for me at least. Pointing the way what a ubiquitous, interoperable identity infrastructure on the web could enable?

Some other preparatory material for such a discussion is this video of an interview of Mark Zuckerberg interviewed by John Batelle at the Web 2.0 Summit.

The event is this Tuesday at VFS starting at 5:30pm, full event details on Facebook, of course :P

Since I've been rambling on about Facebook recently, Mark Shropshire pinged me to let me know that Facebook is blocking / taking legal action against apps that attempt to remotely "automate" Facebook. Said like that, it sounds kind of bad, but in reality, it's MoodBlast trying to update your status across all systems -- FB, Twitter, Jaiku, etc.

TechCrunch has a longer write up on this trend. What does this mean? Well, it's probably not a good idea to treat a large, commercial system as a coral reef (hat tip to Dave Winer).

Aside: coral reefs and other ecosystems flourish around the rusting hulks of sunken ships. Should we extend the analogy to businesses as well? Didn't all these other social networks spring up because of the dead carcass of Friendster?

Not a big thesis on this topic, just an observation that this evening, as I was thinking about organizing something with friends for tomorrow morning, my instinct was to open a tab and go to Facebook to contact them...rather than email.

And of course, this is exactly what ActiveState's Up4 Facebook app is trying to help with as well.

Update: And of course, today I see that Facebook has added straight-to-email messaging -- "No more switching back and forth between email and Facebook. When you are writing a message, simply enter any email addresses into the “To:” field.". There is a longer post on the Facebook blog about this.

The answer is "probably yes". I just wrote up a description of our Vancouver Drupal Users Group event over on Bryght, but saved the provocative title for here.

I think that maybe I'll lift my stance on only adding Facebook apps that have a "public Internet" face as well. Much as I hate locking data into Facebook, I do want to support local developers: ActiveState's Up4, DabbleDB's DabbleDo, and the soon-to-be-released Opus Player by the Donat Group / Project Opus.

But don't think I won't be continuing to push folks to figure out ways to nicely push and pull data in and out of Facebook in a way that benefits the open Internet as well as respects the privacy and security of user's content within Facebook.

Finally I wanted to share with you that yes, we did indeed continue to chat over beer. The strangest phrase that came up was camel cheese. Nice.

A late meeting I had last night ended early and I was at loose ends downtown, so I ended up swinging by the Third Tuesday event, since Rob Lewis' post at the TechVibes blog reminded me that there were a couple of events going on mid week.

Tonight (Wednesday) is the nPost Entrepreneur Meetup*. I'm not too sure about nPost. I mean, it's great to have more people highlight and promote tech in Vancouver, but there is such a thing as too many different events and focus at some point... The focus for nPost seems to be startups, and highlighting the people and companies in cities where they have events. Rob and the gang at TechVibes are sponsoring, so I'm sure they'll do a good job of guiding them into the Vancouver scene. Unfortunately, I won't be able to make it, I've got the Granville Island Night Photowalk to attend.

Back to discussing the Third Tuesday event...this was a sort of "kick off" event, so there was no speaker or discussion, just mingling at the Soho Cafe in Yaletown. I think there were as many as 30 people through out the course of the evening. I ended up mind melding with Rob Lewis as we talked about the rebirth of TechVibes.com and tech / events in Vancouver in general. Soon the martini-wielding Jenn Lowther** from Invoke Media and Mike***, a Comp Sci / Cognitive Science student from UBC, joined us bad kids by the bar.

One of the things that we discussed is "where to post events?". Third Tuesday itself is the perfect example for this. Rob posted about it on the TechVibes blog, and linked to the listing he created on TechVibes.com. That, in turn, linked to the Meetup.com page. On the Meetup page, we find that a CollectiveX group has been created. I created an Upcoming entry for Third Tuesday, but I actually originally found out about it through the Facebook group.

Yeah. That *is* ridiculous in case you were wondering. I won't go through this time and analyze the usefulness of each of those listings, but as two data points, I believe Mike and Jenn both found out about the event through Meetup.com. Oh, and why did I create an Upcoming.org entry? Because there is a widget for Facebook, so posting to Upcoming automatically gets it into Facebook. I just did the same thing for the Granville Island Night Photowalk -- the upcoming entry can be a public Internet URL, but it shows up inside the walled garden of Facebook as well.

The ideal event listing platform would allow you to do two things:

1. aggregate event listings from all platforms in a management queue
2. publish those events you want to talk about / promote / etc. with a local permalink, which in turn would all you to cross post to those platforms that don't yet have a listing

For bonus points, aggregate back all the media that gets created to your permalinked event entry. Merging attendee listings might be fun to try and tackle, but approaching impossible until we get closer to the whole portable social network concept.

In any case, thanks to the organizers of Third Tuesday. I'm looking forward to a more structured 2nd event with a speaker. Just let me know where to look for event announcements :P

So...while I am experimenting with Facebook Apps myself (see http://apps.facebook.com/bmannconsulting -- but really, that just allows login to this website), I am unlikely to add arbitrary Facebook App X. The only ones I'm interested in are ones that connect out to the Internet: random little apps that live only inside FB are less interesting to me. And actually, ones that let users add content but then you HAVE to be a member to even see the content...yeah, yeah...I get the viral thing, it's just annoying!

That means a lot of "ignore this" from me.

Also....I'm only adding friends that I've actually met in person OR spent a significant amount of time interacting with online. This is a long standing rule of mine that I've used for years.

If you're a friend of a friend that I've met once or twice: don't feel bad, we're "connected" through that friend of mine. That's how these social network things work.

My dad, Horst Mann, turned 70 yesterday. He has an old Canon digital camera, my hand me down 15" Powerbook G4, and talks to his daughter and grand daughter in Italy using Skype and video.

He is an "Old Skool" Flickr member. I kicked him off my home server hosting using Gallery, and he's been a Flickr community member since about March 2004. Yep, that's '04, March. On Flickr, he's known as Opa, which means "grandpa" in German.

As of yesterday, he and my mom both have Facebook accounts. They both use NetNewsWire to keep up to date via RSS with a variety of sites, including this one. Subscribing to new sources is hard, but then clicking through every link in a blog entry and reading every resulting page takes some time, so I'm not sure they have room for more. They blog occasionally, but uploading pictures to Flickr seems the easiest way to tell a story.