Roll back the clock ten years. Imagine you wanted to know what what going on with one of your friends who lives far away. You'd call them or send an email. Maybe one of your other friends would relate a story. Most likely you wouldn't find yourself in the next aisle of the supermarket eavesdropping on a conversation. Something very similar is happening on Facebook and other social networks tonight.

As I have been doing for several weeks now, I will check my facebook page tonight to find conversations between my friends posted on their "walls". Unlike email, or even the relatively quiet conversation in a supermarket, these conversations are shouted at me. Big chunks of text call out to me and invite me to click to the "wall-to-wall" page for these two friends where I can read the entire conversation in reverse chronological order. It's clear these conversations are not explicitly intended for me to obvserve. There is no indication to the participants that I'm listening, unlike when I might walk up to two people talking at a party.

One theory holds that these are people entirely new to social networking and don't realize their conversation is out in the open. Facebook makes it easy to click to a friend's profile and start typing away. I have watched these conversations unfold rapidfire, exactly like you'd see in IM. Perhaps these people will realize they want more privacy and these conversations will disappear into IM or email.

My hope is that I'm seeing the beginning of people sharing their lives more openly. It's certainly entertaining me and making me feel closer to my friends. 

Facebook and MySpace are the two leading platforms for the social Web. Increasingly, marketers are finding they need to be there because so many of us spend our free time there. We go there to get information about our friends, and so it follows that these platforms ought to make it easy for us to contribute. It's easy to update your status all day, and it's easy to upload photos. It's not so easy to wrote long, thoughtful pieces--what we might think of as the traditional blog post.

MySpace provides the more mature platform. Each account has something called a blog. Blog posts have titles, bodies and threaded comments. I guess they have some "advanced" interface for posting to your blog, but it doesn't run on Firefox 3 and/or Ubuntu. The plain text interface is fine, but there really isn't much excuse for not providing a full HTML editor. There are free libraries for providing this functionality. Wordpress and Drupal do this very well.

Asking for a posted time and date is dubious. I can see writing a post to be made live ahead of time. Writing a post for January 1, 2006 seems like nonsense. Categories are good. Giving me a closed set of categories is too limiting. Folksonomies work. MySpace should support them.

MySpace asks you to tell your readers what music you're listening to (yeah, I might listen to music while I write), what book you're reading, what DVD you're watching or what video game you're playing (I can't do any of these while writing a blog post). They also ask you to note your mood. This is the spot to hack a folksonomy, but none of this seems very well thought out.

Given that I blog here on Clear Night Sky and on my own site (www.leonatkinson.com), I would much rather have content flow from those sources into my MySpace page. There is no such option. There is an option for flowing posts outward. It's standard to include a tag in the HTML header to indicate to your browser that a feed of the posts exists. It's also customary to present a small, orange icon to the RSS feed. MySpace provides a textual link only. Regardless, you can subscribe to this link and get the public posts in yoru preferred feed reader. (Mine is Google Reader). There are a few MySpace bloggers that I follow. Output was sketchy for a while, but it's been fast and reliable for many months.

Allow me to qualify that last statement. It's reliable when reading in Reader. It's entirely unreliable when it comes to flowing into Facebook, which does support importing "notes" from an RSS feed. I can only conclude that between MySpace and Facebook, one or both of them has created this problem. Perhaps this is a way to make the other platform seem bad.

Facebook prefers to call their blogging platform "notes". There's a title and a body. You can attach photos. And you can list the people you mentioned in the note. There's no way to apply tags, or note your mood. Most importantly, the editor is plain text with the option to apply styles if you know HTML. 

I do like that Facebook allows me to import notes automatically from an RSS feed. I don't like that I can choose one--and only one--feed. Many of us blog in multiple places. There is technical solution to this. I could aggregate the feeds from my two blogs. Google Reader can do this for me, but I should not have to work around Facebook's limitation. It seems to be tied a decision to offer a set of import points (Digg, Flickr, Delicious) which treats "blog" as a parallel. I can only assume this is due to lack of imagination at Facebook.

It's common for a blog aiming to make someone money to truncate the posts in the feed, which forces readers to click through and look at ads to finish reading the post. I'm sure that's why MySpace mangles their feeds, too. It's a cheap trick they don't need to play. Facebook does not seem to offer a feed of notes, so the situation is even worse.

For anyone who wants to blog while also getting their thoughts into Facebook and MySpace where their friends will find them, I suggest creating a blog for free on Wordpress. Set the feed to import into Facebook. On MySpace, find the "RSS Reader" app. This creates a separate box on your profile page that lists your blog posts. If you want to take a step up, get a low end Web account ($5/month) and run a copy of Wordpress yourself. That will allow you to use the MySpace Crossposter plugin for Wordpress which sends your posts directly into MySpace.

Yesterday, in a keynote address at ZendCon, Andi Gutmans announced a partnership between Zend and Adobe. Zend also sent out a press release about it.

Together with Zeev Suraski, Andi founded Zend to promote the development of PHP. (Both of them helped me with Core PHP Programming and I used to write a column for Zend.com). Zend offers tools and support for PHP developers. Adobe makes many tools for designers, including Flash and Flex. Flash is an ubiquitous platform for games and videos hosted on Web sites. Flex is a programming language for building Flash applications that appeals to programmers more than the designer-oriented Flash studio.

Andi said the purpose of the partnership was to smooth out the experience of developing with PHP and Flex together. Specifically, the two companies plan to integrate support for Action Message Format (AMF) into Zend Framework (a library of PHP code developed by Zend). They also plan to get Zend's Eclipse-based PHP IDE working with Flex Builder.

I am looking at this in the context of Google's recent release of Chrome, a new browser that looks to compete with Firefox and MSIE. There are three significant platforms for rich internet applications: Flash, Silverlight and Ajax. Sponsors of those platforms, respectively, are Adobe, Microsoft and Google. Microsoft also supports Ajax but is doing what it can to squash Flash as it did Java. Mozilla is a strong supporter of Ajax, although we could argue that since most of their revenue comes from a deal with Google, it's passthrough support.

Flash and Silverlight can do one thing that Ajax can't, multimedia such as video. Otherwise, Ajax has a great advantage because it requires no plugin. Of course, Flash and Silverlight are easy to install, and Microsoft made a big push for installs by paying NBC to host a bunch of video for the olympics in Silverlight. Both Flash and Sliverlight still suffer from poor availabily, especially in lower end system. Sometimes an Ajax site might seem a little slow, but running a complex Flash app on a slow computer is painful and sometimes unendurable. I know this first hand from sitting with my kids trying to play Sesame Street games on an old Windows box.

I suspect this partnership between Adobe and Zend is a hedge on Zend's part. Zend also appears to be closer to Microsoft lately, and Microsoft certainly has been moving to support PHP. PHP's best strength has always been easy integration with everything and it hold helps to make it work well with Flex. Adobe on the other hand seems to be realizing that while their horse was out in front for a while, they are now falling behind. Ultimately, I see Ajax winning this race. For the next five years, Google will continue to have the midas touch and they have clearly chosen Ajax. PHP already has good support for building Ajax apps and this partnership will be a bonus.

Via a weekly email from Elance, I got a link to the following report: <http://www.elance.com/php/landing/main/ElanceSkillIndex.php>. (It pre-selected "Web & Programming" for me, but your mileage may vary.)

 

Elance is a marketplace for independent contractors and consulting agencies...not really like Clear Ink so much as the agencies down the line who will churn out production work. I find this data fascinating because it suggests how big the market is for a particular service and how many people there are serving it.  The numbers shown on this page are how many service providers there are. Clicking on the most of them will tell you how many open jobs there are. It looks like clicking on low demand skillsets return search results for providers.

For instance, for PHP I see 11,463 service providers and 1,906 open jobs. Logically, as a service provider, you'd want to be in an area with lots of open jobs and relatively low number of providers. As a buyer of services, you probably want to open jobs where there are the most number of service providers.

Of course there are complex issues to consider. Some of the technologies presented are subset of others. If you do ASP.NET, you probably also can do ASP. If you do Javascript, you certainly do DHTML and Ajax--even XHTML for that matter. Also, there is no distinction here between PHP 4 and PHP 5, but shops not experienced with PHP 5's object oriented features are probably comparable to shops who only do the old style of ASP. The most significant takeaway is that this report is not a recommendation to choose PHP because it's at the top of the list. Let's set aside the non-optimal breakout of the skills and look at the consumer to producer ratios.

I believe the numbers for Com are wrong. When I picked a developer on the list of "Com Experts", the skill wasn't listed. Since most of use have .com in our domains, I suspect Elance's search engine is making a mistake. Therefore, it looks like there's good opportunities for SEO, HTML, Flash, MySQL, Joomla and PHP. I'm somewhat surprised to see Joomla up there. My myopic view has been that Drupal is the darling of the CMS crowd.

If I put on my client hat, I might be encouraged to go with Drupal because there are 956 developers fighting over a measly 32 projects.

I also see that "Social Networking" is right in the middle of the list. That's great news for Clear Ink, or any agency looking to sell more of these types of leading edge services. As an agency aimed at leading clients with innovative techniques, you want to spend your time keeping yourselves at an expert level on the new trends and leave the commodity services (e.g. HTML) to partners.

We all know the common marketing technique of the branded, mostly worthless gifts we get from all sorts of vendors. Hey, look! Here's a coffee mug that costs ten cents to make, but this one has my logo on it! Do you love me yet? If I already love the brand, I'll probably like the tchotchke. For example, there's that awesome Linux Journal shirt I got at the 2004 Linux World featuring political choices of donkey, elephant and penquin. Come to think of that, I had to extend my subscription to get that shirt. Splunk's shirts are good too, and free (as in beer). Otherwise, we know this stuff is just junk. I like that old NaviSite notebook I got for listening to a sales pitch, and maybe it kept their brand in mind, but I didn't make the mistake of thinking of it as anything terribly valuable.

So, you might imagine what a turn-off it was to come across Open-source software: It's the free coffee cup of today over at CNET. Hey, SUN's a client of Clear Ink's. I have friends who work there. I think some of the stuff they are doing, such as Darkstar, is really great. And I really thought the MySQL acquisition was a great deal. But I cringed to read that CFO Mike Lehman compared MySQL to a free coffee mug. Yikes!

MySQL is a database I've lived with for about 11 years now. Along with PHP, it revolutionized programming for me. I wrote a book about it several years ago. I do not appreciate the notion that MySQL is just a cheap giveaway. The strategy to support open source software in order to sell hardware makes sense. Slipping up with a message like this does not demonstrate great marketing sense. I'm often told "you're not the target audience" when I express negative feelings about advertising, but in this case I a good representative of their demographic. Talking about a great product like MySQL in that way will not encourage IT managers to switch to MySQL.