Picnics and Barbecues

Planning my big Labor Day weekend coming up. Everyone here seems interested in a big backyard gathering, with a huge barbecue or at the very least a picnic where we grill burgers and hot dogs and everyone brings a dish to share. We used to go to the beach to celebrate Labor Day, but with the price of gas still so high, we are staying closer to home.

My 2011 wordpress / automattic wish

I am really hoping that the fine folks at automattic / wordpress will roll out less updates this year. Don’t get me wrong, I love fact that they actually do security updates, and that there is a global community working together to find any security issues and reporting them so they can get fixed, but all of the new features they keep coming up with are really a waste of time. I’d also like to see them spend more time fixing bbpress and buddypress.

I love wordpress, but I do not enjoy the massive amount of time I have had to spend helping my friends constantly update their blog sites. I see a lot of promise in the buddypress add-ons, and the bbpress forums – but those seem to have so many problems and lack of attention to essential ingredients, that right now they are nothing more than snips of code hobbyists might spend weeks of time trying to get basic functionality out of, only to find lacking support and better products from other software vendors.

Hopefully this will be a better year of polished products from Matt, Doncha, and the rest of the Automattic crew. Right now I am really torn about keeping a standalone wordpress, and almost ready to tell all of my friends to simply switch to a different bloggin product in order to avoid all of the constant manual updates to wordpress and various plugins. I already steer friends and colleagues away from the bbpress and buddypress products, as there are much better solutions available. Even though some of the better products cost money, and these open source projects are free, once you add up the hours spent trying to get basic functions to work properly, you will find that spending a few hundred bucks actually saves you lots of time and money. My 2011 hope is that this will change this year.

Mass migration to facebook changes blogs, emails, and chat worldwide

The migration of the masses has been slowly eroding away many blogs, and chat portals and even email communication around the world. It’s been affecting the way I communicate with friends, and family, and even the connected internet world as whole. As more and more people spend more and more time using facebook, I see many people using the other chat, email and blog services less and less.

For quite some time the industry has been touting the mobile web as the new big frontier for internet and communication, and I do see that as being a big segment of the world market in the future. I do however see the future of yesterday as it is today, and currently it is facebook. I have a facebook profile, but I do not use it as much as so many other people are.

The amount of time that so many people are now spending on facebook is definitely taking away from many of the other great places on the internet. What is most disturbing to me, is how many people use facebook so much that they assume that everyone else on their friend’s list is using it in the same way, and those assumptions often lead to expectations that we know what is going on in their lives simply because it was posted on their wall, in the activity stream, or added to their photo albums. I for one do not see all these updates that everyone expects I have already seen.

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Slate features one of my favorite authors / books

I hardly ever get a chance to catch up with Slate, but I was on some website that had a one liner about patterns in architecture, and I have always been a big fan of patterns and architecture, so I clicked over and found an article talking about e of my favorite books and authors. A book called a pattern language describes outside the box ways to look at neighborhoods, houses, rooms, designs, all kinds of things to consider when building a house, an addition, a community – it is one my all time favorites.

That book changed the way I look at houses and streets, and it definitely gave me insight when looking into code and how to setup coding projects – and that is actually mentioned in the slate article – check it out to learn more.

Facebook now has 350m users – and there’s no point in advertising

Read a very interesting article today at the gaurdian, I had no idea that facebook now has more than 350 million users. I was also quite surprised to read the information about about profits (or lack thereof) with facebook and twitter. It seems that very few people click banner ads, and that is a way that many online social networks intended to make money.

facebook

Personally I think the little branded apps like the games on facebook and taking them to mobile phones with embedded adverting, like the farmville game using purity milk or the cafe game having decorations with pepsi or coke may be a much better way to monetize these networks.