Social Networks 2.0
A question was recently posted on Linked In about the future of Social Networks. And not a week goes by when someone doesn’t ask me about building on of these behemoths. It’s hip, it’s trendy, and “everyone uses FaceBook or MySpace.” Lets ignore the business aspects of this for a moment – which drives much of the interest, anyway – and look at where this whole deal is heading.
When one steps back and looks at Facebook and MySpace, and view it as a “network” one can indeed see that it is a vast set of connections from one person to another, or many others. It is a network much like the streets of a city … it provides the means to get something from one place to another; or like a phone book … you can look up anyone you may want to find and contact them.
This is basically a “passive” network. When you really boil these services down, they are a place to put “stuff” where other people can find it, and a place to find other people’s “stuff.” Anyone who uses these still needs a phone, email, IM, TXT-messages, RSS readers, a Twitter client, and so on. So, the actual real-time networking between people is actually carried out outside of the social networking sites.
After the dot-com bubble burst, it seems like all things Internet fell into a kind of malaise. Investors were scared to take risks, jobs were few and far between, and in general the Internet was being treated like a utility – a step below phone service, but above trash pickup.But some new AJAX-based offerings are bringing some of the old excitement back. You can start to see where the ‘Net can change the way we live, work, and interact again. Five in particular are in beta phase and well worth looking at: Meebo (unified IM and chat), NetVibes (aggregator and web-top console), BlinkList (bookmark manager and sharing), RoundCube (email), and Writely (word processing and document collaboration).
You’re working on a Photoshop template and 7 versions ago you had a layer in it with the client’s logo with just the right shadow effect. But since then you’ve cleaned up all the unused layers and can’t find it anymore.
The flow of spam (“Unsolicited Commercial Email” or “UCE”) into Internet citizen’s email accounts is seemingly endless and boundless. Email users and corporations are forced to use server-side and client-side filters, challenge systems, and other means to protect their server assets from the deluge. There have been various attempts at legislation as well, which want to attack the problem from different angles.
Many algorithms to check if two windows overlap (a very common activity in window system and interface design) rely on doing multiple comparisons of the positions of the sides of the two rectangular areas in question. This is usually fine for most instances, especially in these days of multi-gigahertz desktop PC’s. But sometimes you need to do so many such comparisons that speed becomes the paramount concern. And sometimes you do not have a super fast processor to rely on – such as on small hand-held devices or cell-phones.
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