stormbrew

Here’s the thing: Facebook should not try to be a better twitter. When we were lagging behind on features at Nexopia for two years, we constantly ran into the trap of thinking about how we needed to do these things our competition did and do them better. When we finally came out with something that made us, in a couple of ways, a better facebook than facebook, it burned us hard. I can’t go into any detail on how, but suffice to say it did hurt us.

Facebook should try to be a better facebook. It is, at its core, a social utility for your REAL life. For the people you know in person and want to keep in touch with. This change, to be like twitter, where it’s about networking with people you may not know but do know OF, takes them away from that core advantage.

The last update, though I bitched about it, at least made the site more organized and streamlined. This is exactly what I needed from a ’social utility’. Information organized into neat little buckets where I could see immediately where things are. Now.. well now my friend feed gets horribly spammed by whomever posts the most updates. It eliminates my ability to get an overview of what’s going on in my real-world world.

This is, incidentally, why I really dislike the twitter facebook app. And it’s only going to get worse now that the feed is spammable.

Goodbye organization, hello feedspam. Please, Facebook, leave twitter to twitter and get back to being a social utility.

So tonight, for the first time in about 4 years, I did public speaking. Back in college there was a fair amount of public speaking and presentation giving to do, and I enjoyed it then. I always come away from doing public speaking feeling like I’ve done a good job, and I hope that perception is accurate. I find myself able to get my thoughts across clearer in presentation form (even though I always wing it) than I often can in just direct discussion.

What I presented was, of course, bittablog, which has been my pet project for the last little while. I knew from experience that last minute additions to a presentation are a bad idea, so the feature where you can post a bitta directly from your twitter account didn’t make the cut as something I could present, but the bonus of cutting it out was that nothing in my presentation failed. And I think that’s pretty important.

I won’t get too much into what bittablog is here, because I already covered it here in my first post on here, and the front page manages to do it concisely in 140 character bitts. Suffice to say that I really enjoyed presenting bittablog tonight, and I think a lot of the audience got a kick out of it too.

One interesting thing that I experienced, which was reminiscent of RailsConf last year, was the way in which people were twittering as I presented. After I was done, I pulled out my iphone to read what people were tweeting as I was talking. I have to say, it was really gratifying to come back and see the really nice things people said about it while I was up there talking.

At RailsConf I got to see this from the audience side through IRC (there was also twittering, but I was unconverted at the time), and one thing that I said I wanted to do then at some presentation was have a cohort twittering/ircing at the same time, answering people’s questions and talking back.

One difference though was that there was no silent heckling going on, and I think that’s good. A lot of the railsconf presentations had some really viscious talkback going on on irc. Some deserved, some not, and it was actually kind of intoxicating and hard to resist falling into the same trap. None of that at #democampyeg, which is great. This is a very supportive community, and I hope it stays that way.