Danah’s brilliant take on myspace.com

I’ve said this before, but I have the very good fortune of working with people that are smarter than I am. I guess that means they have the misfortune of working with me, but let’s not talk about that.

Many of these people blog which means that you get to read some of their thoughts for free and become a little smarter too. For handy reference I’ve got them linked from the blogroll on the right.

One of these smart people is Danah Boyd and she has shared with the world her notes from a talk she gave on MySpace. MySpace is now a huge part of youth culture and parents, geeks, and business folks frequently ask me “Why?”. The answer I give them is to read Danah’s posts. As usual she’s incredibly insightful, eloquent and original as she shares her thoughts on myspace:

“Youth are not creating digital publics to scare parents – they are doing so because they need youth space, a place to gather and see and be seen by peers.”

Insights like this are critically important to understanding myspace in the midst of the sensationalism used by traditional media. In the bay area, local news stations now use every opportunity to scare parents into thinking that myspace will somehow come and eat their children. Her notes will hopefully make it into more it into more places because it’s work like this that will make our transition into a true digital society less scary.

Technorati Tags: myspace

Apple releases iPod boombox

Not nearly exciting as all the news about Microsoft’s Origami device but a high quality iPod Hi-Fi sounds good. Honestly, my iPod has become a victim of data abundance. Just like my RSS reader accumulates more posts than I’ll ever be able to read. My iPod now contains so many songs that I often discover new material that I didn’t know existed when listening to it. What the Apple Hi-Fi really needs is wireless connectivity so that I can control it and manage all that music from my powerbook. The main problem I’ve always had with the iPod is just the management of the music at the point of irritation. The point of irritation being the time and place that I’m listening to a song that should be removed or re-annotated.

Apple also is deciding to kick accessory makers in the teeth by releasing a leather case for the iPods today.

Largest Edonkey 2000 server shut down, zero users affected

RIP Razorback

The largest server on the Edonkey 2000 network has been shutdown. The owner has been arrested and the servers have been seized. This guy was Swiss… I always thought Switzerland was the place to hide things. Guess you can’t hide a server there… the server doesn’t even hold the infringing data.

Oh well… this is only worth noting today because Razorback was alive on the network for so long and usually hosted a million plus users between their servers. The Ed2k network is so large and distributed, you really can’t do anything to it. Unlike napster/shareaza where you only need to cut the primary company off, ed2k’s network relies on a large network of servers which are distributed all over the world. These servers are generally funded by porn and commercial piracy operations and at this point server capacity outweighs usage (approx 3 mil). Users will just reroute themselves… actually they don’t even have to. Most users won’t notice that Razorback is offline as clients actively build large lists of active servers and will reroute the user to another server automatically. So a move like this really has a zero net impact on Edonkey 2000.

Brute-Force Crunch, a new development approach

I had a chance this weekend to visit the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. It was a Saturday night and I was suprised to see a lot of students at the campus. They weren’t goofing off or hanging out, just heads down busy constructing and drawing. These students were serious, some have taken to sleeping at the school since they spend several days a week without sleep. The workload is so great that there is no option other than not sleeping. They produce a tremendous amount of output every single day and there is no consideration for any balance of work and life.
The results are impressive. Portfolios have a professional quality to them and the students demonstrate obvious competence with constructions of models out of wood, plastics, metals, and clay.
It makes me question how important a balance really is in our software world. Perhaps it’s only important if you aren’t doing what you enjoy.

I’m curious what would happen with applying unbelievably short timelines to software projects. I’m not talking about what we did for Hack Day, but rather a standard way of working on software projects with a completely insane intensity.

I’m going to call this “Brute-Force Crunch”. Where the only way to complete the project is by sleeping a few hours a night for a few weeks. Possibly even running more than 1 project at a time like this with the same resources. The prequisite for this style of work is that everyone there needs to be extremely passionate about what we are trying to accomplish. Project planning and design is left to those who are actually building. No one who is not producing actual output will have any part on the team. So if you aren’t producing code or graphics, then you wouldn’t be around a team working like this. I would estimate that the span of each crunch would be around 6 weeks at a maximum.

It sounds brutal but I think we’ll like the results. Many products already go through crunches but these are a result of poor planning and poor management by people not actually producing output. With a Brute Force Crunch, the intense style of work is intentional. The goal is to be insane about your work and to not allow anyone who isn’t like minded to stand a chance of influencing the output.

When people see your work and say “That’s insane that you guys did that in such a short amount of time”, then you know you are on the right track.

Bradley Horowitz blogs, you all benefit

You people are lucky. Bradley Horowitz is now blogging… He starts off with a great post on Social Media sites. If you are in this space, which is most of you, this should be the hot read of the day. Like I said, you people are lucky to get this kind of info for free.