B. Mann Consulting

Tomorrow is the Macworld 2009 keynote, this time by Phil Schiller instead of Jobs. Regardless, it's that time of year again -- Apple rumour time! Mac Rumors is still my favourite site for this sort of thing -- here is their 2009 rumor roundup. They are on twitter now, so as well as the MacRumorsLive site, you can also follow them @macrumors.

The rumors seem pretty believable. I'd like to think something more exciting is planned for the MacBook Pro 17" than just a better battery. Maybe touchscreen instead of a keyboard? That's what I was thinking last time ... no keyboard, no trackpad, an entire touchscreen / tablet interface on the "bottom half". Think what this would do for audio mixers, Photoshop tools, etc. etc. I call this crazy wild idea the "Macbook DS" (partial props to UnConed on that one). (you know, kind of like I predicted 2 years ago :P)

Here's a quick audio preview of content for upcoming posts, that I recorded on a brand new Nokia E71.

• I'm OK with 3 year cell phone contracts here in Canada (this is going to be a post)
• I like the E71 (this will be another post)
• Rogers is the devil, Fido is the anti christ (and for hipsters)
• "They do have dogs, which is why I signed up for them in the first place" - Stewart Marshall.

Here's the audio file. My dad is heading back to Spain for another walk along the Camino, so he's learning his way around the E71 in wifi only mode, while I'm still on the Nokia N78, except now with a data plan. I need to also do a final review post of the N78.

Since my post on Redanyway, I've gone a few steps further into experimenting with Google Friend Connect.

Basically, it allows you to drop in a members system / social network onto any site. It doesn't need to be a CMS or a dynamic system at all, since it consists of just some Javascript that gets inserted wherever you like. You create a new network / site at the Friend Connect home, and then go on to upload a couple of files to your server. Select some widget options, copy and paste code, and you've got a place where visitors to your site can join your site's network.

Now, as opposed to creating yet-another-profile, visitors use their (presumably existing) Google Account to login. Google Accounts have Profiles attached to them (since about December 2007, although it's only recently that they are being talked about more). Here's my Google Profile.

There aren't really any built in "friends" in your everyday Google Account / Profile (in fact, in Google Reader it's really hard -- I enjoy Brendon Wilson's rant on this), so you can also activate several other networks to automatically connect with "friends" from those systems. Twitter and Plaxo are two that I experimented with. Orkut is also supported ... but when was the last time you signed into Orkut?

Twitter does that oh-so-lovable enter your username and password trick that leaves me feeling more than a bit queasy, but since I have a good size network, it seems pretty useful. You can then post to Twitter from within the widget to invite other people to join the network you've just entered. Plaxo does the better looking remote authentication and works just fine ... except I don't really use Plaxo all that much anymore.

OK, so now you're a "member" of a local "network"! What next? Well, on to the world of "Social Gadgets". There are ratings and a comment wall, and also support for OpenSocial apps. The OpenSocial apps are, I guess, the interesting part of this in the future, sort of allowing bridging of different data with mashups unique to the members on your own site. Except there's not much there today. Comments and ratings are fairly uninteresting when dynamic sites powered by Drupal or WordPress either do these things out of the box or can add them easily with a couple of plugins.

But....I'm not completely down on this system. In fact, I've been talking to Anthony of Farmstead Wines, who is a heavy Twitter user, about adding Friend Connect to his website. He can use his large Twitter network to build a social network around his website. It doesn't do a lot of interesting things *today* ... but you can already see how member profiles on Google Maps and other mashups will be trivial to implement in the future. Adding full network functionality to his website would cost a lot of money and time if needing to be "built in" directly, whereas the Friend Connect route lets Anthony build his network today, centered around the permalink of his own website (as opposed to some other system like ye old Ning).

I've included a Google Friend Connect network widget and wall widget after the jump. Jim Pick has also created one for the Vancouver Freebase.

Will you be adding Google Friend Connect to your site? Do you find it useful? Where is this heading?

Redanyway is one of a number of distributed social networks that is beginning to emerge. Google Friend Connect and Facebook Connect. It was Techcrunch'd last week so more people are likely to have seen it now.

As TechCrunch says, it's a bit like "MyBlogLog on steroids". The concept of followers etc. is now more widely known from both MyBlogLog, Twitter, and so on. The "asymmetric follow" concept -- where people can be fans / followers / etc. is a good one, as it actually allows scale ... as opposed to Facebook, where both sides have to confirm a connection (and why they have groups and pages which are asymmetric).

Like the other systems, it's currently widget / plugin based. Here is the widget embbeded in this post -- I may end up adding it to a sidebar on the site here as I experiment with Google and Facebook's offerings. MyBlogLog? Yeah, that widget is gone (another Yahoo early lead squandered...). Does anyone actively use MyBlogLog these days?

Ultimately, my issue with these systems is that they don't semi-permeably integrate into any existing community. I define community pretty narrowly: sites that actually support full account logins with some level of customization that you can do once you have an account. That leaves out most blogging only platforms (e.g. WordPress), but includes larger Drupal sites that allow and encourage . I'm especially interested to see how BuddyPress (a beta release today, I believe) might play into this space.

We do have the component tech pieces to build this distributed system -- OAuth, OpenID, and so on. But, we don't have great UIs nor great uses cases that make people want to use this functionality today. It's going to be interesting to see how this space evolves. Scobleizer calls it the "war over your blog's friends".

Dries recently wrote about funding a code sprint for Fields in core. Acquia is committed to funding various bits and pieces and supporting it directly. I know what that's like -- Bryght and some of our clients funded many early Drupal improvements and gatherings directly.

So why should you support this particular code sprint? Well, for one, it means we can ideally have one of the key innovations of CCK / Views directly in the core of Drupal, making it a more robust / scalable / flexible system. Me? I just want to kill the profile module and move a few other alternate field-light systems to a native field solution (e.g. webform). Don't have money to donate? That's OK, head on over to the Fields in Core group and participate with golden code. Or golden UI mockups. Or golden patch testing. You get the picture...

I, personally, have a history of trying to round up funding for various improvements. Since I can only code well enough to convince other people it should be done better, I try and spend my energies describing possible solutions or rallying money/resources behind such ideas.

I actively encourage companies and individual contributors to put up donate buttons. I've recently been in need of large / multiple file uploads, so I approached the SWFUpload maintainers, helped clean up the issue queue, and set up a big chipin right on the project page. That money will go directly to developers working on making this solution better.

Privatemsg is another module that has a donate button, but they are actually few and far between. I've made some comments on commercial interests on Drupal.org itself, but at the same time, I absolutely want to help support a commercial ecosystem. One way of doing that is for module maintainers to put donate / contact me buttons directly on their module pages. Why, for instance, doesn't Earl put a donate button on the Views project page?

The danger, of course, is tying or expecting compensation. You share (primarily) for "community ROI" -- every piece of code, comment, design, support request that you interact with in a larger community is something that you are giving ... and the return on your invested time WILL come back to you many fold in a number of different ways. Increased exposure, increased business, better code, more connections. Direct participation in the community is worth MORE than money.

But look at the code you use and the people behind it. If you feel you can't commit time or your own resources, money is a perfectly acceptable substitute. Any of the items I've mentioned here are things I consider worth funding. Pick one of them, or think about a donation directly to the maintainer of some module that you use regularly.