Flyingtroll.com

I’ve seen an upswing in Twitter followers lately. Welcome y’all. Is this a sign that Twitter’s gaining even more popularity now, or is it just that I’ve become more interesting?
I’m now in the process of trying to keep 3 blogs up to date. This one, the company one over at industryinteractive.net and the development blog for Mailmanagr. I’ll try to Tweet updates for all of them.

Well, this being my personal blog, I’ll talk about personal stuff, like how the weather was absolutely amazing this weekend and I was able to make some good headway on the deck-rebuild project. I’m determined to be able to sit ocean-side this summer….

The kids and I went to the park this afternoon, and had a great time. I’m trying to teach them a little self-sufficiency in their play, instead of “daddy, come lift me to the top of the slide”, I’m trying to get them to think about how to get up there themselves (the can, they’re just lazy sometimes).

I’ve been putting in a lot of billable time lately, as well as trying to keep on top of some side projects. Mailmanagr is quite a fun project to work on, but I’ve hit a snag in my hosting (which should be resolved later this week). Regardless, I’m hoping to have a beta out by the end of the week. In my continuing quest to bend 37signals’ APIs to my will, I’ve got a fully-functioning task synchronizer between Highrise and Basecamp… only because of limitations on the Highrise API, I can’t generalize it enough to make it useful for other people as well (I have to statically set certain things, which sucks).

Rachel started working at the bakery last week, and seems to be enjoying her time out of the house (grown-up time!) She’ll be doing a full 20 hours this week, so hopefully I’ll be able to balance the work I need to get done with her time away. Worst case scenario is that it will mean a few late nights… oh well!

Found via. Michael Geist, every Canadian’s favorite legal blogger, iOptOut is the Canadian answer to the American Do-Not-Call list. I can’t personally vouch for the effectiveness of this, but being Michael Geist, I’m at least confident that it won’t increase the number of annoyances in my life.

Hey, maybe the Lethbridge Herald will stop calling now asking if I want to subscribe! Get a clue folks, you can’t identify geographic location from area code anymore.

I had a brief discussion with my wife tonight, which is the best way for me to tame techno-snobbery. The point I was trying to make to her is that Facebook is lame, and it’s completely jumped the shark now that people have started to realize how lame it is. My argument goes along these lines:

1. Facebook is great at connecting people. It’s the first “social network” that I’ve ever bothered to use. I was able to find people I went to elementary school with, identify them, and connect.
2. Facebook sucks at playing well with others. There are Facebook Apps to integrate things like Flickr and del.icio.us, but they really blow, and why isn’t Facebook building that functionality right in anyways? My prime example is that the only way I can integrate my blog posts into Facebook is by importing them as notes. This starts an entirely separate conversation thread, instead of just letting the conversation take place on my blog. This is the dumbest implementation I’ve ever experienced.
3. Facebook does a lot of it’s peripheral stuff very poorly. The photo albums? Crap compared to Flickr or Picasa. Messaging? How many people prefer dumbass Facebook messaging to e-mail?
4. Facebook is turning into AOL circa 1995 in trying to build their own private little Internet (except they have a platform!) It’s pretty crappy trying to get your data in or out of Facebook.

The reality check from my wife was: what about people like my father? He has no idea what Flickr is. He doesn’t blog. He barely uses e-mail. Facebook is like one-stop-shopping for people like him.

Absolutely! Personally, I think the hallmark of a great product is that it can be useful to a range of users. Facebook is pretty good for the beginners, but fails for people like me. There is no way that I’m going to upload photos to two separate places. Having to choose between Flickr and Facebook? Sorry Facebook, you lose. Having to pick between responding to comments on my imported Facebook notes, or comments posted on my blog? Sorry Facebook, you lose again.

And now, rapidly, Facebook is losing appeal to me. Instead of sharing anything through Facebook, I’m now relegated to having a presence on Facebook pointing people to my “real” URLs.

Should Facebook ignore my father-in-law, and cater to me? No! They should bridge the gap. If you think about the term “social network”, to me, it means a way for people to connect. That’s all. It shouldn’t be a bunch of half-assed applications with the focus on implementing more half-assed features (you’ve heard about Facebook’s new chat feature, right?

What to do? How about giving us some baked-in integration of 3rd party services instead of relying on 3rd party application developers to cook something up? How about integrating it so tightly and improving your own existing tools so that my father-in-laws’ profile can look exactly like mine, with him using the internal tools, and me using my external ones?

But hey, what do I know? I’m not so young and so rich like Mark. For me, however, Facebook is becoming more and more passive. I log on every couple of weeks to see if I’ve missed anything interesting with my friends. That’s all.

Since the cat's out of the bag, this service will eventually live at Mailmanagr.com. I've got a temporary site up there now where I plan on blogging development progress etc. Hop on over and subscribe to the feed or via. e-mail if you want to be kept in the loop.

I mentioned briefly over on Flyingtroll that I was going to start playing with the Basecamp API a bit. I did that this afternoon, and built a bit of an e-mail interface for interacting with Basecamp.

It’s pretty basic at the moment, it lets you send messages to “email_td@domain.com” in order to add a to-do assigned to a specific person, or “email_mile@domain.com” in order to add a milestone to a specific person. Also planned are adding messages, and adding files over e-mai, adding general to-dos and general milestones and having it mail you a list of your to-dos and milestones.

First off, if you’re a Basecamp user, is this a good idea? Essentially you’ll set up e-mail addresses for people on each project and be able to interact with things that way.

Second, am I missing something that you would see as essential from the list above? Message categories (I was just going to post everything to a single category)? Multiple to-do lists (I hadn’t thought about how to deal with it yet — if you have a suggestion, feel free to chime in).

Once it’s a little further along, I’ll open it up for some other folks to try: so if you’re interested, leave a comment with your e-mail address and I’ll get back to you.

Update: this post has gotten some link love from the 37signals Product Blog. If you're visiting from there, welcome! I'm still pretty early in development, but I do have a working prototype that I'm currently using for my own projects (handles to-dos, milestones and messages w/ file attachments). If there is something that you're really dying for, please drop me a line or leave a comment, I would love to hear about it.