The following is a list of profiles from all types of social networks. Some are general networks like Facebook. Others are niche networks like Bakespace. One thing I find interesting is how each niche site tries to let the user express themselves in a way that is unique to the site. For example, Genlighten has a genealogy slant and the profile reflects the users actions in that space. That is a critical feature for any site that has a particular focus else why not just use our Facebook (or other similar network) as our global profile on every site. The unique attributes like recipes or genealogy societies are key to success for focused networks. The images do a much better job conveying the message from each site so have a good time looking through them. Look for a future post on how networks help with user discovery and search.

In fact together we are stupider then when we are apart.

We still need creative thought. We still have problems to solve. What is a species to do?

1. Take advantage of the strengths of the group. The advantage that you have over and individual is more background and diversity. Keep the redundant BS to a minimum. This is much more difficult than it sounds as people tend to like to reiterate what the guy next to them just said. This also results in a great deal of positioning. Which leads to...
2. Brainwriting instead of brainstorming. The approach taken in the study is interesting. I would like to see another study conducted on the effectiveness of IM or text based conversations to see if the principle can work when the group is forced to participate in an online forum. The anonymity of the internet can lead users to do stupid things. Could that same shield provide a more relaxed environment for group brainstorming.
3. When you have a hard problem to solve try a threesome. Three person groups fared better than all others at solving logic based problems.

There you have it. The next time I act annoyed at another brainstorming waste of time I have actual research to backup what I've observed so many times:

None Of Us Is As Dumb As All Of Us.

I have a new answer:
"We are the borg"

For those who are geeky like I and my wife* the borg were a human like species that merged the organic with metal, wore goth makeup and thought as a group. Twitter is our first evolutionary step towards becoming the the pale faced, laser wearing, funny talking collective that lived in giant boxes. Perhaps the borg have even come back in time and brought us this wondrous technology and destroy our lives.

Don't get me wrong. I love twitter. Never before have so many voices been able to be heard at the same time. However, the negative is that now there are so many voices. Borg thought was shared among all members of the race. At the time the show came out that was a very disturbing scenario. However, social media has changed they way we interact with one another. Now when it is time to walk your dog, make toast, or attend the most conference ever you can let it be known to the collective.

Of course there is a downside to this. Whenever Jean Luc Picard and the brave crew of the enterprise would 'rescue' someone from the grasp of the borg that individual would feel lonely and miss all the voices in their head. All those power twitter users out there know what this feels like. A few moments or gasp hours away and . When twitter goes down it's like that scene in Star Wars where Obi-wan says "it's as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced." A blip in twitter's operation shuts everyone up and we all get very lonely so don't let that happen.

If blogs empowered average citizen journalists twitter put us all back up on soap boxes in the park each with one hell of a megaphone. No one need ever be lonely or unheard again. Famous people are on Twitter. Nerds are on twitter. Guys that ride bikes are on twitter.

Facebook gave us a way to connect with the friends we already have. Twitter gives us the power to connect with and listen to voices we may never actually meet. The result is a reduction in social friction. I don't have to actually meet that expert ruby on rails programmer to engage in a conversation. Instead I get the opportunity to observe the thoughts and actions of anyone I like or admire (follow) all day every day. That might seem creepy or even pornographic to some, but like the borg I can carry on a conversation with hundreds if not thousands of interesting individuals all at the same time. So next time someone asks you "what is twitter?" Tell them "we are the borg. Resistance is futile. You will be assimilated."

*Callie used to watch Star Trek Next Generation with me. Don't let her deny it.

Just keep me off the bull dozer on the days I don't agree with my code.

Anyway I've observed some interesting situations over the years. When I worked at Sorenson Vision the guys that worked 8am-7pm made fun of the 'long haired hippie' types that we hired from Apple. They didn't start work until 10am. How ridiculous.

I was young and stupid then. I am old and stupid now, but I have realized that when you write software the most important thing you can do is to (cliche alert) have your head in the game. Unfortunately, for my poor wife she has observed this in action.

There are only a few moments when I am not writing code. For some reason I write the best code on Sunday mornings in the shower. The trick is keeping it in my head until Monday morning. I write awesome code at 2am. At least I think I do. I frequently fall asleep drooling at the keyboard and I don't remember much after that. Thank goodness for testing.

The best code tends to come in spurts. There are a few times when I have built entire applications in a few days. Those are very expensive days that incur a very high social cost. My wife doesn't usually talk to me for a while after that type of event so I try not to do that much anymore.

I have observed a couple of interesting trends. Non technical types who lead software types I think fear the software they are creating. The relationship is something like the United States government and the Manhattan project. They new they were going to get something amazing. They also knew that it would cost an insane amount of money and that it could kill us all.

Most software does tend to cost a lot of money and instead of annihilating the human race a poorly executed project can annihilate the company and in fact has done so many times. Microsoft (Windows ME, Vista) stands as one of the few companies that can execute poorly and survive.

The result is a desire to micro manage the mind. oDesk wasn't the first company to micromanage engineers, but their process was so disturbing as to border on voyeuristic. It goes like this. Developer signs up. Business guy pays developer. Developer gets paid, but business guy can look at developer guy via a web cam and observe his desktop. Good thing most of us geek types aren't that attractive lest sexual harassment become the new globalization.

Today I saw an ad from a company in India. $4,000 a month gets you a developer in any number of languages. Just like you can lease a car you can lease a programmer.

Or can you?

The most I can hope for when I hire someone like a widget is that I get a widget with a butt in front of a keyboard. The poor sucker will sit there all day. He/She might even type and if you give them a procedure list of things to do they can turn it into code. If they are good they might throw in a bit of creativity and even offer some suggestions. At the end of the day they will go home, go to the bar, play xbox, or watch tv, but they will not think about you or your project until the next day when they have to stare at the screen all day and wonder if you are peeping in at them from a distance.

Ever wonder why open source projects can catch up to commercial one so fast? Ever wonder why there are a few programmers who seem to excel. Wonder why they are more productive than entire teams of developers? Wonder how how couple of guys can produce something in a few months that teams of developers fail at over several years?

The secret is that the productive developers itch. They can't wait until they can sit at the computer again. The code is always there being written and redesigned in their mind. I heard that Frank Lloyd Wright hadn't drawn a single design on paper for Falling Water until the client, Edgar Kaufmann, called and said he was on his way. He drew the entire thing in less than an hour. His head was devoted to the project no matter where his butt wandered.

The guys who are the best at what they do can't stop scratching. They crave the code. Their head is always spinning in a mess of design and implementation no matter where their butts might be headed. Sitting in front of a computer is merely an opportunity to write down what has been in their heads for weeks.

If you want to be a good programmer put your head in the game. If you love what you do you will work hard. The harder you work the better you will become and the more you will love what you do. Software practices and methodologies will come and go but they are merely a tool for success and sometimes a cover for failure.

The head is a fountain of knowledge and wisdom. You know what comes from your butt. Guess where your code should be coming from.

Justin Voskuhl spent his weekend writing an application that makes it pretty easy to take a photo and turn it into a Lego mosaic. I am impressed. He is even promising to release it as open source. (Please use githhub).

This isn't the first application that performs this task. Legoizer does something similar. The Slashdot crowd was quick to point out all the ways that you could have accomplished this task before Voskuhl came along. However, what they don't get is that this application has the potential to make the task very simple. Sure I could use Photoshop and run some algorithm, but then I would have to learn Photoshop and deal with that process. I could use Legoizer, but I don't know anything about Lightwave and frankly I don't have time to learn. Those tasks get in the way of what I actually want to do which is to play with Legos. Voskuhl's application might take a while to run, but I don't care. This application makes it possible to accomplish a fairly complex task with minimal effort. Congrats to him on building something cool and special thanks if he releases it as open source.

This situation got me thinking about how important small features can be. Once upon a time people in geographically diverse locations played chess via regular mail. I would write down a move drop it in the mail and wait for my opponents response. You can see how this would be tedious. The advent of email helped speed up the process. Now I can go online and play chess with anyone around the world. I would be few people played chess via the mail. A few more might have used email, but I would bet exponentially more are willing to use an online chess board that lets them play in real time.

Once upon a time not so long ago editing a document was a tedious task. Typewriters required that you use caution with each keystroke lest you spend the rest of the day high on whiteout. Word processors made it easier to edit documents. The addition of copy and paste I think changed the world forever. Truly, if you could pick one feature that helped change the world of writing I would bet that is it. Google docs provides us with one of the next great features - online collaboration. I think there is a way to do it with Microsoft Word, but it requires setting up some kind of server and dealing with that mess. Sure it has more features, but I don't care. I only need to be able to type, copy/paste and share my ideas. Google docs takes care of that for me and is free.

Companies like 37signals have built their business on the idea of simple. I don't actually think that their success is because of simple. I think their success is to due to doing it right which means picking the few features that change people's way of doing. The simple, marginal improvement that takes us from sending letters to sending email changes the world. (How many letters were sent even before email vs how many emails traverse the world every day now?)

As the economy tanks and the world seems to crumble around us I look for the next little thing. There are innovators out there thinking of one small change that will change the world and make people's lives easier. This time around it might be a better way to lend or a better way to deal with mortgages. The innovations might be cheaper ways to produce and exchange goods on a local level rather than bringing them from around the world. Perhaps there is a simple micro power system. Hard times breed clever, simple, focused ideas. I look to those innovations more than the 700 billion bailouts to save the economy.

My wife makes the best muffins in the world. Period. Every year, at least during the years when she can find apricots, she makes apricot jam. Said jam is then inserted into her home made muffin mix before baking. Something about the jam keeps it from turning into rock candy in the oven (like the other jams we have tried).

The result is a little bit of heaven in your mouth.

Turns out that you can open:
documents - .pdf, .doc, .txt, .html, .rtf and .odt
spreadsheets - .xls, .csv, .ods
presentations - .ppt

By feeding the file url to this google url:

http://docs.google.com/?DocAction=updoc&formsubmitted=true&uploadURL=DOCUMENT_URL

Here's an example if you needed to view a W4 form from the IRS url:

http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/fw4.pdf

Use this url:

http://docs.google.com/?DocAction=updoc&formsubmitted=true&uploadURL=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.irs.gov%2Fpub%2Firs-pdf%2Ffw4.pdf

http://docs.google.com/?DocAction=updoc&formsubmitted=true&uploadURL=http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/fw4.pdf

Now if it were just as easy to replace missing flesh as it is to replace missing bike parts....

Whenever something happens to me I appreciate how much we take for granted. Just being able to walk and bend your knee is not insignificant. Last year I lost hearing in my right ear which was then replaced with a constant ringing. It kept me awake at night and drove me crazy. Luckily it went away. I now better appreciate that my father's ears rang for years after he had chemotherapy. Last year I messed up my back. Sitting at a desk was akin to torture. After time and some exercise it is stable now and the pain is gone.

I appreciate the little things more now - being able to sit, to walk, to hear.

I have long worried that someday my turn would come.

Today it did.

I am a pretty cautious rider. I don't like wrecks. I don't like hospitals. I don't like needles. I don't like surgery. I got a good dose of all of that today.

This morning I woke up early to go ride with Joel. I was debating taking arm warmers. They are extra bulk, but the cold (50 degrees I think) made me wear them. I was freezing, but you warm up when you ride. Turns out that today was a really good day to have them.

I like to ride with Joel. We chat about technology ideas, business ideas, and how those ideas relate to education. It was during just such a discussion that I missed the rattlesnake winding across the road in front of me.

I went right over the top of it. It isn't the first time that I have hit a snake on my bike, but it was the first time that I hit one that big. It was two feet long and about an inch and a half in diameter.

Hitting the snake didn't make me go down, but the feeling that something had just hit me in the back and settled in my jersey pocket sent me into an absolute panic. I tried to rip off my jersey and in so doing managed to run myself off the road. My knee caught the edge of the asphalt. The impact on the newly chip sealed road ripped my leg open. I was hoping for a scratch, but when I saw the inner working of my leg laid bare I was a bit ill and in shock.

The next steps went like this:

1. What the crap do we do?
2. Wash the wound with the water we had on hand.
3. Look for something to wrap the wound. Today I was glad to have my arm warmers. I tied both around my leg. They make great bandages.
4. Get help

Lucky for me Joel was there. There isn't any cell phone reception in the canyon. He rode until he got reception and got help. Ironically, not a single car passed me the entire time I sat on the asphalt waiting. The thing that makes Black Smith Fork Canyon great - minimal traffic - also makes it a bit dangerous - no help is available at times.

Joel's wife Julieanne and picked us up. Callie took me to the hospital and Joel was kind enough to hang out and offer help.

While we were hanging out doing the typical hospital wait for people to show up while your guts are laid bare all over the place we noticed an awful lot of armed police officers. On the way to the hospital we noticed that Zions bank was taped off. Sure enough a couple of guys tried to rob the place, got hurt, and we shared the ER with them.

I was hoping for a few stitches, but they called in an Orthopedic specialist and I found myself in surgery. That was fine with me. They put you out and so I didn't have to watch them inject methyl blue into my knee or see them cut off the skin and stitch it all back together.

Today was probably my least favorite cycling day I ever. The snake and I both lost. I know because my health insurance and bank account are about to get a good workout and while waiting for help I had time to see the dead rattlesnake lying on the side of the road.

In a bit of irony the dr told me that my scar will be in the shape of an 'S'. Maybe that will be an omen to tell the things to get off the road when i am coming.