Here's your snow, @Danacea :)

Click to Play

My Twitter-friend @Danacea (Danie Ware) is always wishing for "proper snow" where she lives in England, but never seems to get her wish. So, since we're having one of our relatively infrequent snows here on the shore in Connecticut today, I thought I'd make a little video for her amusement. Enjoy watching me slave away moving that white stuff Danie!

The Boulevard Diner, Worcester, MA

Click to Play

Today, I was privileged to join Diner Aficionados Scott Monty and CC Chapman on a very fun road trip to Worcester, Massachusetts to visit The Boulevard Diner on Shrewsbury St.

The Boulevard is an authentic old railroad diner car built right in Worcester (Worcester Lunch Car Co. #730 built in 1936). I and my fraternity brothers used to visit the Boulevard, a 24 hr, 6 days/wk, establishment in the wee hours after parties when I was an engineering undergrad at WPI in the late 60s. That's right folks, I used to go there 40 years ago, and it is almost exactly like it was those decades ago.

In those days, my favorite order was an Italian sausage sandwich and a chocolate milk. I ordered the same today and, except for the price, it has also changed very little. Still hearty and delicious. Scott had the steak and cheese, and CC went for his diner touchstone meal, the meatloaf.
Scott and CC's diner blog is Nothing Could Be Finer Than Being in Your Diner and I also posted a photo set on Flickr

A couple of suggestions for improving Seesmic

Loic,
First off, congratulations on seesmic's popularity. It's certainly attracting a lot of attention and a lot of users, myself included.

But as a developer and former CTO myself, I think seesmic could become even more successful if its implementation was simplified and its basic utility filled out a little better. Here are two suggestions I think might make a big difference.

Ditch all the Flash except for video rendering

Yeah, the rotating lists and animation are fancy, but all that "flashturbation" devours processor cycles and memory. While on seesmic, my browser will frequently pin the processor at 100% for minutes at a time, and gobble up nearly 120 megabytes of page-file usage.

Except for the video rendering and its play/pause controls, you would make a LOT of friends by going to an XHTML/CSS/javascript implementation. Memory usage would be reduced and performance would certainly improve, perhaps dramatically. Forget all the cute list animation. Those lists frequently screw up and overwrite, or stall and lock up the browser.

Include some way to find users so I can follow them

It's nearly impossible to locate a user's account page unless you can find a post they've made in the public timeline.

Finding a user could be done several ways. Here are two:

• A search window.
• Something like Twitter's convention of recognizing a simple URL that contains the users handle. (i.e., http://twitter.com/joec0914).

Thanks for listening!

What are your most visited Social Networking Sites?

I'm doing a little research and would like to know what your top social networking or social media sites are. I especially want to know about sites that have some concept of "friend" or "follower" or "contact". That is, sites that let you create relationships with other people on the site. I'll give you my faves for starters:

* Twitter
* Flickr
* Seesmic
* Facebook
* YouTube

You can reply in the comments to this post, on Twitter by @ or DM to "joec0914", or by email to joec0914 [at] gmail.com. All respondents will get an invitation to test a new site in a few weeks.

Thank you!!

Wanted: Rails web designer/HTML coder

I have a little social media/network project of my own going that I'm building in Ruby on Rails. I am a veteran software engineer, project leader and former CTO of a successful medical imaging company. I can design and code circles around most anyone, and have been doing object-oriented design and architecture since the term was invented in the 80s. I have taken multiple product ideas from initial prototype to product. But... in all my years of work, I never really had a talent for web page design or learned the ins and outs of CSS, client-side scripting, etc. That always seemed to be someone else's job.

If you know Rails, you know that building the "view" pages requires graphic design talent, a good knowledge of HTML/CSS and just a smidgen of Ruby/Rails to call the controller functions to fill out the content. The controller and model code is something I am very comfortable with, although I'm still learning Ruby. But creating a decent looking, easy-to-use web page that works for all browsers is something I have neither the artistic talent nor the time to pick up from scratch on my own, although I would love, love to learn about it.

I am looking for someone who does have those design and HTML skills to work with me on this project. In a sense, I'll trade my programming knowledge, if you care to pick it up, for your page and site building knowledge.

Make no mistake, this is a no-pay, sweat equity, bootstrap proposition. In return for a reasonable share in whatever may come of this idea, I need really no more than a few hours a week of your time to carry the ball on the design and HTML end. I have no VC nor angel funding, nor do I want any at this time. I can afford to work for myself and finance an initial alpha site for a while, but I need your design and HTML expertise to do it.

If you're interested, email me at joec0914 [at] gmail.com and have some examples of your work that I can take a look at.

Making chili

Click to Play

I make a pretty mean chili, and since it's Sunday in NFL season, and the Patriots are playing tonight, I thought I'd make up a batch. If you watch the whole thing, you'll find out what my secret ingredient is.

The Power To Un-Follow

From the "What Hath Twitter Wrought?" department, we offer a few thoughts on the ability to block someone out of your on-line life, and the effect this has on both individual and community behavior.

In Twitter, as in other on-line social media/networking communities, you can choose whose messages you see and whose you don't. There are also features to hide what you say from anyone you don't specifically befriend and to completely prevent someone from sending you anything, even a form request to befriend you. These features give users complete control over who they listen to, and who can listen to, or even contact them. It's completely opt-in. No one has any "right" to throw anything at you that you don't want.

This has led to a quite enjoyable environment, and an evolution of groups of people who mutually befriend each other, and share the same sense of proper behavior. There aren't any "haters" on Twitter that last longer than a couple of days because everyone else simply stops following them.

Now, you might argue that this leads to groups who only agree with each other and shut out what they don't want to hear. To an extent this is true. Most of the people in my group of roughly 220 followers/followees I think tend to be politically liberal and tend not to discuss religion or politics. But it is not so much what you say on Twitter as how you say it. We were just commenting last night that we do have a mix of political and religious sentiment across the group, but people tend to not rant, accuse or polarize discussions. That isn't to say it doesn't happen from time to time. I'm probably one of the worst offenders, to tell the truth, but we all endeavor to keep our emotions in check and cut each other considerable slack, realizing that every once in a while something will touch a nerve and we just have to blow off a little steam. I can tell I've done that when almost no one replies to what I've said. The silence is a pretty good indication that you've gone a bit overboard and need to watch what you're saying.

The worst fate on Twitter is to not be followed. It's the online equivalent of the Old World practice of shunning. I've lost a follower or two in my time and it's not a pleasant experience.

And companies that try to join Twitter, befriend a zillion people and then spam them with output-only announcements never make it out of the batter's box. Almost nobody follows them. So, this has the effect of companies not even trying to spam, because it's just not worth the effort.

So what I've discovered from Twitter's "rules of engagement" is that giving people absolute control of what they hear and see is good thing. It's not a sin to be able to shut out people who act badly. It makes people a little more considerate and well-behaved. I think it's the answer to blog comment spam, too.