It seems like there are more and more social networking services popping up all the time, but many of them are no more than a rehash of what SixDegrees used to be — i.e., I know you, and you know somebody else, and we’re all connected. It was a brilliantly innovative idea, but unfortunately not extremely useful, which might explain why SixDegrees isn’t around any more.

Fortunately, the nature of innovation is such that people build on the ground-breaking ideas of others, and now we’re starting to see people come up with ways to actually do something, like share musical tastes or trade business contacts, with social networking services.

Well, here’s another one. 43 Things allows you to form networks based on common personal goals. If I want to learn Spanish, I can mark that as my goal and I’m instantly connected to everyone else with that interest. Each goal has a blog to which its participants can contribute, so you have people sharing their advice and experiences.

It’s pretty interesting so far, as I’ve been exploring and marking so many of those things that I’d love to do and never get around to. One small issue that, since the interests are user-contributed, I’ve noticed is that there multiple goals that basically mean the same thing, which could cause missed potential connections if the participants of one don’t know about the other. Still, having the possibility lends to the free-form spirit that allows interesting unexpected developments in group-based technology.

It’s in beta and is currently invitation-based, so if you want to give it a spin, send a comment with your email address (it won’t show up on the blog) and I’ll send you an invite!

As weblogs continue to grow as a medium, its enthusiasts are unfortunately faced with the dark side of that popularity. That’s right — spam. Now that only the most creatively-crafted spam makes it through the average mailbox’s filters, how ever is the more vapid virtual vendor to attract attention? Well, they apparently start taking advantage of less mature technology to make our lives miserable in a whole new way.

In a trend that extends their pattern that started with email of taking a new, exciting, open means of communication and trying to ruin it, spammers are forcing weblog authors to take action to prevent their pages becoming filled with crap. Comments add a unique flavor to blogs. They allow readers to participate and feel some ownership. Anonymous comments, where allowed, create still another dimension. But when you allow just anybody to add whatever text they want to a public forum, you’ll inevitably wind up, as I did this morning, with pages full of ads for free online poker.

Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy a good card game as much as the next guy, and heck, dealing with comment spam makes me feel like I’m one step further toward becoming a “legitimate” blogger! But this is the wrong forum for it. So what’s a guy to do? You can go the Slashdot route and simply allow anonymity but create a mechanism for self-regulation. Or you can go to the other extreme (a la boingboing) and disallow comments completely. In both of those examples, that choice largely defines the feel of the entire site. And neither really works well without a huge base of readers — let’s face it, my DSL provider’s not particularly nervous by the amount of traffic this weblog gets (who did that poker company think was going to see their spam anyway?).

So while I had tried for a short while to embrace the freedom that comes with anonymity, if you want to comment now you’ll have to register with typekey first. It’s not too tough — give it a try. If there are any real people reading this, I’d love for you to say hi and let me know you’re there! And if you’ve ever had to deal with the same problems, let me know how you solved it.

In February of this year I moved for my job, as do many in the software field, to the San Francisco Bay area. Coming from Rochester, NY, a medium-sized city, and having visited San Francisco on many previous occasions, there were a lot of changes I knew to expect. Public transportation, for one. I love not driving to work. If you do drive at all, even if it’s not to commute, the sheer volume of people mean that your life must be planned around traffic patterns. Rent, of course, is too depressing to talk about. And then there’s the weather–no rain and a little cooler in the summer, with no winter to speak of. It’s a mix of good and bad, but nothing particularly shocking.

// begin whine

For the past several months, though, I’ve been feeling the need to rant about the grocery stores here. It’s one of those things that nobody thinks about much when moving, but, assuming you eat, has a big effect on your day-to-day life. Sure, the prices are a little higher and it’s still a little weird seeing wine and liquor on the shelves, but that’s nothing unexpected. There are a few things, though, that really get on my nerves. Maybe I have unreasonable expectations. Maybe I’m just a big whiner. It’s likely I’ve been ruined by Wegman’s for the rest of my life. Oh well, you can decide for yourself.

First, the price of produce is crazy. Bananas are always more than 70 cents per pound. We couldn’t get tomatoes for less than four dollars a pound yesterday. A box of Clementine oranges is eight bucks. We’re talking double the price in New York. And this is where they grow the stuff!

Then there’s the feeling I get when I realize that half the dairy expires in two days, and maybe another quarter of it is already past its “sell by” date. It’s the feeling that I have to try to avoid a bait-and-switch more suited to a sleazy used car dealership than a grocery store. It seems like I never had to be so careful in the past. Wasn’t this supposed to be the land of ultra-regulation?

But that’s not nearly as bad as the shock you’ll get when you try to get in line. At the wrong time on a weekend, I’ve stood in lines fifteen carts long, stretching into the aisles. People still shopping have to turn around and go all the way back to get to the next aisle because there’s no room at the front near the registers.

Seriously, what is it with these grocery stores? Am I just in a particularly lousy area? The store I usually go to has ten registers, a few of which are usually not open, even during the busy times, plus four self-service checkout stands. The stores I’d grown accustomed to had, in about the same amount of space, about twice the number of registers. And we’re talking a much lower population density. How does that work?

Anyway, that’s enough moaning for now. I feel much better! I would be interested, though, in hearing about anyone else’s experiences to see if perhaps I’m just shopping in the wrong area or store.

This is killing me. A school in Texas has changed their annual “TWIRP” day, where the kids basically cross-dress, into a “camouflage” day. Apparently it’s because they’re afraid it might turn their kids gay.

I love this quote:

“It might be fun today to dress up like a little girl — kids think it’s cute and things like that. And you start playing around with it and, like drugs, you do a little here and there (and) eventually it gets you”

What I want to know is, why isn’t anyone scared of the camouflage turning their kids invisible?

Nearly ever since I can remember, the idea of communicating with other people over computer networks has fascinated me. I cut my technology teeth on movies like Wargames, and I recall thinking how cool it was that Matthew Broderick could connect to other computers by putting his telephone handset on top of the modem.

Soon after, I saved up enough money to buy a Commodore 64 and a 1200 baud modem (hook the phone line right in–no handset necessary!), and discovered the hidden world of the Bulletin Board Systems. My life was quickly consumed calling BBSs, reading and posting in local message forums, playing door games, and chatting live with sysops. This was an entirely new way to communicate and interact with people, and I felt like it could change the world.

As the Internet gained in popularity, so did the face of online communication, and I soon was blessed with email, newsgroups, web-based forums, cool social networking tools like (the now defunct) SixDegrees.com, and massively-multiplayer online games–all examples of using computer networks for communicating in new ways.

I must confess, though, that for the past few years I haven’t kept up with many of the more interesting innovations in the field, so I was pleasantly engaged once I started using Bloglines to manage some RSS news feeds and started reading some interesting weblogs on the side. Turns out we can use this (relatively) new term, “Social Software,” to refer to any type of software that allows group interaction.

It seems like a cool side effect of this blanket term, now that we’re associating these varied tools with each other through their common attribute of online interaction, has been the emergence of a sort of Social Software meta-group consisting of people who, like me, are excited by the effect it’s having on the way people communicate, and are using tools like weblogs to talk about it. It makes it easier to stay on top of the developments in the field that might prove to alter that effect in interesting ways. As an aside, it was very cool to stumble across a one-time professor of mine (and one for whom I have much respect) from RIT, who seems to be a prominent member of this community.

Now I’m more or less caught up. I’m starting to keep track of my bookmarks on del.icio.us, and hey! I’m even writing in a weblog! So I’m starting to think about the ways I can apply some of my own creative energy to the space. One of the reasons that I became a software developer was to help build tools like this (the other was video games–what kid doesn’t love them?), so I’m excited to begin experimenting with some cool ideas of my own. As time becomes available, I’m considering starting an interesting project that provides community-building tools to java-based web developers, but I’ll be writing more on that later…

My first major disappointment with the new iBook came yesterday as I realized that something was missing that had become so ubiquitous with laptops that I hadn’t even bothered to research whether it was supported.

The extended desktop, or the ability to connect an external monitor and see different things on each screen, didn’t work. Mirroring, where you see the same image on both screens, worked, but there was no splitting in order to increase the usable desktop area. This was particularly surprising since Apple pioneered this feature, and Macs had it years before Windows ever did. Today, just about any new PC laptop with an external monitor port has this feature, so why didn’t my new iBook?!

Thinking I must be missing something obvious, I took to Google for the answers. It turns out I wasn’t missing anything, because while the computer has the capability, it was intentionally disabled by Apple, presumably to incent people to check out the much more expensive (but only marginally more powerful) PowerBook line.

There is good news, though. Luckily, the option to disable extended desktop is an open firmware setting, which can be changed by the user. There’s even a handy utility to do it for you, which works like a charm on the new 1.2GHz iBook with the ATI Mobility Radeon 9200 video card. Now I have the best of both worlds: lots of screen space while I’m at my desk, and the mobility that comes with a super small screen.

Well, I’ve spent the larger part of my free time this week playing with my new iBook! Ever since Apple came out with OS X (finally delivering the elusive “Unix for the desktop” that Linux never seemed to achieve), I’d said that I would get one if only the hardware price were reasonable when compared to a PC.

Well, I made good on my promise. I was looking for a laptop that was small and light enough to conveniently carry to work every day, and powerful enough to use as a development machine. The 12-inch iBook has all that, it runs Unix, has a wireless card built in (nothing to snap off), firewire, USB 2, CD burner/DVD player, and a battery that lasts over five hours! I’ve hardly seen a PC laptop match that, and certainly not at the same price.

There are a couple down sides, but they’re not too bad… it comes with 256MB RAM, which performs less than ideally with OS X. But after adding a 512MB chip (standard laptop DDR – very nice!) for a total of 3/4 gig, it hums like a bunny (do bunnies hum?). At 1.2GHz, it’s not the fastest CPU around, but I’ve hardly noticed as I’m not using it to play games, and spend a relatively small amount of time compiling large amounts of code.

Anyway, my impression after a week is VERY good. I’m getting to love the UI navigation tools — it’s much easier to keep a million windows open, even on this 1024×768 screen. I’m running Eclipse, Camino, Quicksilver, Apache, JEdit, Fink, and yes, even vi.

Yes, I still have my Windows desktop at home for games, etc, and the email/web server under the desk is running Linux. But man is it nice having all of the Unix tools in one spot, and having that spot be wherever I am, even on the BART on the way in to work. Count me as a convert!

I can’t believe I haven’t come across this before now. It seems I’ve been letting my attention slip away from all of the new and cool crazes in my post-college, married life.

Anyway, NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) is a (multi) nation-wide event in which many thousands of insane people each try to write a 50,000-word short novel, from scratch, in November. After excitedly reading through the site, including many of the forum posts, I found myself halfway through a detailed plot outline before I started thinking rationally about this. 50,000 words in 30 days? That’s 1667 words (or nearly five pages) a day, with no break.

I can’t even manage to take a vitamin every morning for a week!

I do think it’s a very cool idea. This is a terrific use of the Internet to bring a large group of like-minded people together to do something passionate and downright amazing. And the support network they’ve built around it is nothing short of stunning. There are local events organized throughout the month just about anywhere you might find yourself writing a novel.

In junior high school, I wanted to be a pulp novelist for a short while (yes, the random obsessions can be traced back at least that far). While the career plans eventually changed, I never did lose respect for the written word, though I more commonly find myself on the reader’s side of the relationship. If only for the sake of my erstwhile self, I would love to participate, but I know I just won’t make time to commit to such a large undertaking this year. Oh well, there’s always next year!

As anyone in my family knows, I’m a particularly terrible communicator. People will often go weeks without hearing a word from me. Also, when I develop a new interest, I tend to obsess about it for a short time only to drop it just as quickly when the next shiny object catches my eye.

For example, a couple years ago I was obsessed with making my own mustard. There are fancy shops that sell little gift packages of “gourmet” mustard, and I figured I could do just as well! It’s a process that involves grinding up mustard seeds and mixing them with vinegar and other interesting ingredients. I think. I really can’t remember, but I still have a mostly-unused box of Ball canning jars and boxes of mustard seeds in my cupboard.

Understanding this about myself, it is with low expectations that I jump on the blog bandwagon. I’ve decommissioned the placeholder I’ve had at frankpape.com for years (never got around to finishing that “personal site” redesign), and replaced it with this. Now, perhaps for the next several days or even weeks, I’ll come here to post about what’s going on or something that I find interesting.

Who knows? Maybe I’ll prove myself wrong and I can laugh about it here a year from now. Or maybe you’re looking at this in October of 2005 with one or two entries above it. If that’s the case, I probably haven’t died or disappeared. I just saw something shiny.