Dylan Schiemann

In my annual informal review of social networks among our cousins and other people under 21 that are still fickle, Facebook has completely replaced MySpace in their lives. In fact, the only people I hear talking regularly about MySpace are a bit older and just learning about social networking. I know, I know, small sample size, but why are social networks so fleeting?

• The network is only cool if your friends are there (a reason why MySpace became so popular)
• The network is only cool if it feels special or unique (a reason why MySpace is struggling to keep people)
• The network is only cool if it keeps adding new, non-annoying stuff (this is why Facebook’s app API is cleaning up… they are doing more to make things less-annoying, and why LinkedIn and MySpace are suffering). I still prefer LinkedIn for the business side of things, though I don’t actually do much with it other than collect professional contacts… most of its services feel too oriented towards “real” businessmen and not CEOs that still write code
• The network is only cool if it doesn’t get filled with so much junk and spam that it stops becoming useful (a reason why MySpace, and email, the original tech social network, are suffering). I believe that the single biggest reason for the success of walled-garden social networks is their ability to fight off spam.

Apple’s new application, Numbers, is a really nice refreshing blend of Excel and a general diagramming tool. It is surprisingly feature-rich, making actually somewhat more complex to use than a typical Apple app. It’s interesting that the new iWork suite has the Leopard theme or skin. Because of the Leopard delays, Apple seems to be in this weird hybrid states where many of their new applications have the new Apple style, but the operating system itself does not. It’s a very different model than Microsoft where apps take on the theme and UI guidelines of the version of the Windows. The Numbers templates, while nice, are not nearly as impressive as the screenshots and demos shown on the Apple web site. Hopefully some of the people that create some of the amazing Keynote themes and templates will do the same for Numbers. The nicest thing about Numbers is that it actually makes spreadsheets somewhat fun to use and work with.

So what does this have to do with the iPhone? Well, it seems that the iPhone does not yet recognize Numbers documents when sent as attachments via email. I was really curious to see how the iPhone would handle some of the 3-D charting capabilities…

I’m giving two talks about Dojo on the iPhone, one at AjaxWorld in San Jose in late September, and the other at Grails eXchange in London in mid-October. The talks will provide a good general summary of Ajax dev on the iPhone, then get into Dojo and Cometd specifics. I’m really curious to know if the iPhone will be available for sale in Europe before I give the talk!

I seem to be having the same issue as outlined in this Apple iPhone thread – I no longer seem to be able to sync photos back from the iPhone to iPhoto. Has anyone else seen this issue, and more importantly, is there a known fix?

Update: if you iPhone is locked with a passcode, you can’t sync photos except on a reboot of your Mac. If you enter your passcode, you can transfer photos from your iPhone again.

Well that was fast. Facebook now has a beta FBJS implementation for their developer API. I had mused in mid-July about the Facebook acquisition of Parakey, and now we have a fairly reasonable looking JS API. While I have no idea how little or how much Joe and Blake were behind this effort, it was enough for me to stop resisting and finally activate a Facebook account so that I can check out the Booze Mail and Soundflavor apps.

While speaking of schwag, it is worth mentioning that we’re doing a one-day Dojo training course at the end of September in Dallas. What does that have to do with Schwag? Each attendee will receive a t-shirt with the new Dojo logo. I know, I know, much more impressive than an iPhone or Wii, and much scarcer as well. We’ll be cramming years full of information about Dojo 0.9 into one day.

Two great conferences are coming to the Bay Area in early September, and each has an interesting give-away.

The developer-centric Rich Web Experience, from September 6-8, 2007 in San Jose, is offering attendees their choice of a Nintendo Wii or 30GB iPod Video. This conference is a spin-off from the Ajax Experience, when TechTarget acquired Ajaxian, and has an excellent line-up of speakers

The tech CxO-focused Office 2.0 Conference from September 5-7, 2007 in San Francisco was an amazingly high quality conference last year. I was impressed last year when conference schedules were handed out in the form of iPod Nanos, but this year they have upped their game: every conference attendee will receive an iPhone (or comparable device if you already own an iPhone).

During the event, you will use your iPhone to lookup the conference’s agenda, the biographies of speakers, and the map of the facility, thereby saving a lot of trees. Using applications developed by Etelos, you will also be able to exchange your contact information with attendees and exhibitors, schedule meetings with participants, and provide real-time feedback during sessions. The conference’s facility will also provide a scalable WiFi network that will allow you to access any online application, leveraging the full power of Apple’s wonderful device.

Depending on your interest and motivation, I can highly recommend the Rich Web Experience if you are looking for better information about technology and development, of Office 2.0 if you are more interested in networking and/or the business side of tech. Or you could sign-up for both, double-up on the schwag, and get 4 packed days of conference fun.

One of the real oddities of JavaScript toolkits and online message boards is the prevalence of fan boys. The pattern basically goes like this:

1. Ajaxian posts an article about something new in toolkit X
2. Fan boys of other toolkits, regardless of the content of the article or great new feature, and often times without actually checking out the new feature, mention how great toolkit Y is and that you should use that instead, how that toolkit is better at Z, and then proceed to @#$% all over the work of the people working on toolkit X or product that uses toolkit X

It sunk to a new pathetic low when Sam Stephenson blogged about improvements to Prototype and Backpack. The fan boys were obviously not quite aware that Sam was the creator of Prototype, which made it all the more funny with his comment:

Ethan and Mark, we’re very happy with Prototype and script.aculo.us at 37signals, but thanks for your concern. Prototype has served me quite well since I created it in early 2005.

Several of us at Dojo have used Backpack for a long time. We like and encourage the use of any good quality open source project. I encourage you to use and embrace the toolkit or toolkits that work best for you, the way you work, providing the features that you need. I really don’t think the world is better served by the fan boy comments though, as it is just wasting the time of the community.

One of my favorite geek dinner topics, browser possession, was highlighted at the end of the Ajax Experience. It’s something I’ve talked about with Brad, Alex, and even Brendan before in the past. The idea goes something like this: “instead of waiting for the weaker browsers on the market to update their codebase, use another browser’s rendering engine as a plug-in for the inferior browser.”

It is a very non-trivial problem, but it would have been great in the days of Netscape to avoid Netscape 4 (the Adobe SVG plug-in would have been an interesting infection vector), or today Internet Explorer (Google Toolbar or Gears would be a great Trojan horse). At the end of the day, I would hope something like this would exist for the sole purpose of giving certain browser vendors the swift kick they need to encourage more rapid improvement of their browser. Getting such an installer to patch IE is far from trivial. My guess is that it is actually more likely for Microsoft themselves to make rendering engines pluggable than it is to get a reliable third-party plug-in that works and works well with their codebase.

I was quoted in a recent Vitamin article, Back to the Future of the Web. Basically they asked a bunch of people the question, “10 years from now what will we look back on as important to the web?” I think the variety of answers and perspectives is pretty interesting.