Yahoo! 360

So, I got a Yahoo! 360 account. After giving it the basic once-over, it looks very, very similar to Tribe.net, of which I am a regular user. While I love Tribe, I think that Yahoo 360 will probably grow larger faster, if only for the reason that anyone with a Yahoo ID can eventually have a 360 profile by default. People are used to going to Yahoo for all their online needs already, and while it was kind of hard to get people into Friendster or Tribe or whatever, 360 shouldn't be as foreign to new users since it will all be under the friendly Yahoo umbrella. Local reviews, groups, IM and email are all already built in and refined. These are features that a community like Tribe has to work at integrating after they get the core infrastructure of their community working. Yahoo already has these things and can tack them on as needed, and basically are just really building up their profile functionality. Oh yeah, and they just bought Flickr, so adding that as a 360 feature just add more value. It will be interesting to see if they succeed in getting the community part right.

So, now that we see features like blogs, local review, photo sharing, etc becoming standard features in social software, it really kind of starts to homogenize what different sites offer. MySpace used to be different because they had user blogs first (if you don't count LiveJournal, which is a little different since it's main goal is not community at the start). Tribe had discussion groups ("tribes"). Friendster had neither, and had to step up in order to compete. Now Yahoo 360 starts off with all of these as basic feature sets. I think we will see everyone adding similar functionality in order to not lose members just for the lack of features. In this case, I think community sites will really have to start setting themselves apart by targeting different social groups. Myspace seems to go for younger hipsters. Tribe caters to a more alt crowd. Orkut has the Brazilian contingent down pat. Friendster probably had the widest spread before now, but Yahoo should win out in that category soon. Which community site you frequent has the potential to define your online identity now more that ever.

Speaking of which, the one thing that I think needs to be really highlighted with Yahoo 360 is privacy. It will be very easy to get people to make a 360 profile, but I'm not sure how many new users will realize how much of their personal info will be associated with their Yahoo ID, and how much they should choose to not share online. 360 allows you a fair amount of choice as far as what you can show and to who, but it does not include any pointers on the reasons why.

I think it one thing new users have to learn about online communities is that your identity is something that suddenly becomes searchable, and that gives it a context that is unfamiliar to normal modes of socialization. Someone who really wants to find out EVERYTHING about you can and probably will, if you give them the chance. I've seen stalking become an issue on Tribe more than once, and though ID theft has only been low-level (posing as someone when posting messages), adding a user information laden behemoth like Yahoo to the mix could possibly up the ante more than someone would anticipate.

Oh, and I seem to have some invites for Yahoo 360 avaliable, so if you want one, let me know.

Wordpress

So, I've been taking a second look at wordpress lately and I am thinking of defecting. Main reasons:

1. Inclusion of Magpie, which I use for the feeds below. Caches results into the database instead of writing a file.
2. Written in PHP, so it's very easily customizable.
3. The Markdown plugin seems to actually work, unlike the MT version I tried to install.
4. A lot of the little annoyances I found with it in the early versions are now gone. (cleaner code, more sensible control panel).
5. open source instead of single-user licence.

Only thing it lacks that I really want, however, is Typekey integration. You can ask users to register for your site before commenting, but I doubt anyone would really do that for yet another site. I'm thinking it's more likely that they would have already registered with Typekey, however. I tried taking a look at the PHP-Typekey API, but I think dreamhost doesn't have PHP complied with GMP, so no dice there. I have also been trying to get the Perl client to work, but my extreme lack of perl knowledge is an impediment. Also, I don't think I have Crypt::DSA installed, which I will have to look into. Until I can figure this problem out, I will stay with MT, but I am starting to see the grass grow greener on the other side.

EDIT: Ok, ok, given recent events, I guess that grass looks a little yellow now.

Sleep Patterns

Observation: It's not how much sleep I get that matters, it's when I wake up.

So, I noticed this about the past two nights. Yesterday I had the day off, so I was up until about 2:30am the night before, just screwing around. Last night I did pretty much the same. Now usually, I go to sleep at about 10:30pm on most weeknights, and I wake up at around 7:30am to go to work. That's a solid 9 hours of sleep, yet when wake up every morning, I always feel tired, without fail. The past two mornings I've waken up at around 10-10:30am. That's about 7 hours of sleep, yet I feel totally rested.

I remember seeing an episode of 60 minutes or something when I was in high school that followed a school district's study of teenager's sleep patterns and how it affected learning. They found that most teenagers liked to go to sleep at around 12-1am and wake up around 9-10am. So instead of doing the usual school hours of 8-3, they did 10-5 at one school as a test, and they grade point avearage of the entire school went up. That's pretty compelling. Yet knowing this, we still have school hours around the country that keep teenagers out of sync from their natural sleep patterns.

Looking at the way that most of American society models it's work hours, do you think that we could see productivity rise if work hours shifted to flow around human behavior patterns rather than the other way around? Why do we all wake up early for work and force ourselves to go to bed before we are ready just to fit a job schedule, when it affects our ability to function? There needs to be an effort to rectify the demands of the rat race with actual human behavior in order to allow us to do our best. And it might not be that we to do less work, but that we just need to be able do it when we are ready.

New Design

So, you've probably noticed that I've made a few changes. This is what I reffer to as the "gmail" design, since it's all friendly and shit. I'm still not so sure about the colors (was thinking to doing it in blue, too), but I'm really happy with the layout. Except for the flickr feed, there are zero images used in the layout itself. The rounded corners are done using javascript and css, as documented here. Great thing is, even if a browser doesn't like the javascript (like IE 5.2 on the mac), it will still degrade pretty gracefully. I chose HTML 4.01 strict due to xhtml media type issues, and since I still get the standards compliant box model, it should work for just fine for me. I'm going to leave all my old photoblog entries in the old layout style, and just have the new text entries in the new style. So, what do you think?

Back Home.

So, I am back in San Francisco now. I have no idea what I have learned from my SXSW experience, except for that I am still young enough to endure 5 straight days of drinking, not sleeping enough and trying to pay attention in a lecture. Much like going back to college for a week. I got to see Al Franken, Bruce Sterling and the guys who do Homestar Runner, plus some other geeks that I was vaguely recognizing from the internet, and that is good. It let me feel normal again to be around other people who speak my language.

The emphasis seemed to be heavy on The Blog this year, with many panels focusing on the media and blogs and politics and blogs and money and blogs. Somehow, despite all of that, I have managed to come back with a desire to pick this blogging thing back up in a more serious capacity again. I have the feeling that if I can get myself out of my rut and moving forward again, that it will probably improve my outlook on life, and in order to do that I need to organize myself once again for some calculated maneuvers. No better place to start than somewhere I am familiar with: here.

Oh yeah, and I took some photos.