techno.blog("Dion")

It is fun to see the wheel turn around again. I remember when EJB containers were the cats meow, and now when I hear someone say “container” in a meeting it is a social one.

I am happy to see some innovation from the Orkut folks. I have often been frustrated when I have clicked through something and been asked to install an application when I just wanted to see something simple. It makes me so mad that I never say no!

With OpenSocial, it’s possible to create environments where applications can spread because they provide great user experiences. The metric for success would be not the number of installs an application receives, but user engagement and happiness. Environments that focus on more than viral growth cultivate healthy, organic growth and usage. This contributes to the long-term sustainability of social platforms for both users and developers.

To that end, you’ll notice there are a number of functions in the OpenSocial API starting with “request” (e.g. requestShareApp, requestSendMessage). These functions define an agreement between the applications developer and the host container that allows the container to optionally prompt the user for more input, or simply deny the request. While each container will be able to define its own policy, we encourage apps developers and containers to take advantage of these functions to create an “install-free” user experience.

Adding an application doesn’t equal endorsement.

This showed up once again to me today as I had to do a double take on a sponsored piece of content in my mini feed:

Hmm. Why is this strange? Well, Bill Scott is the UX dood at Netflix. This ad makes it looks like he is endorsing public enemy #1, Blockbuster. I haven’t emailed Bill, but the case is probably more that he wanted to give it a looksy. Who doesn’t?

What is Movie Clique?

A Facebook app from Blockbuster that:

• Share: List which movies you’ve seen and which you want to see.
• Suggest: Let your crew know about a must-see flick.
• Rate: Stick it to the critics by rating movies yourself.
• Review: Good? Bad? Ugly? Tell everyone exactly what you think.
• Play Favorites: Make a list of your favorite movies of all-time.
• Queue it Up: Link Movie Clique to your blockbuster.com account and add movies to your Queue right from Facebook.

Next we will see “Steve Jobs added the application Windows Vista” and the like.

People are keen to jump on Facebook whenever they do something “wrong” (e.g. the Facebook Beacon debacle). Companies are going to make mistakes, especially when they are finding their way in a slightly new world, and are trying to work out the boundaries, and how to make money.

It is good that the community keeps a watchful eye, just as people are ready to pounce on Microsoft over IE and monopoly-type things, and even my company, Google. These companies have a lot of power, and a watchful eye can be a very good thing.

There are certain features that users have been glamouring for, and it appears that Facebook is slowly adding them in.

One of my pain points has been a simple feature. It drives me nuts to get emails like this from services:

“Dion, someone left you a message. click here to get it”

Just show me the freaking message. Some claim that it is smart to do this for page view purposes, but that smells bogus to me. Do what the users want, and it will be better for you. In this case, it has already been better for Facebook that they changed this, and I now see my Wall and Fmail messages:

Why has it been good for them? As I now respond! I participate more! Next, they need to let me reply to the darn email to write back instead of going through FB again. Forget about forcing me onto facebook.com and let me use you as a real platform. With the Bebo announcement, it seems like they are getting it, and doing good things. I hope that 2008 will have a very different look to social networks, and we will move to the hard part of getting data portability in a way that makes sense for users.

I never want to have to enter contact/friend information again.

Steve Yegge just talked about X programmers in his latest rant:

But you should take anything a “Java programmer” tells you with a hefty grain of salt, because an “X programmer”, for any value of X, is a weak player. You have to cross-train to be a decent athlete these days. Programmers need to be fluent in multiple languages with fundamentally different “character” before they can make truly informed design decisions.

When I think about the opposite of the weak player, I think of Brian McCallister. He seems to thrive in many languages. He tinkers in Ruby. Builds a platform in Java. And, even plays a little with PHP. And then he is off playing with Scala, Erlang, LISP, Haskell, etc etc etc.

I always enjoy meeting up at a conference, and now that we live in the same hood, I feel like we should get together more. It is fun to run into each other at the Palo Alto farmers market after all :)

Anyway, when I saw that Brian had proposed Apache Shindig as an open source OpenSocial incubator, I knew that I should get together and have a chat with him.

This interview is the result of that conversation: