TechBook

So I was hoping to be able to post my first thoughts on Diaspora (the source code was released yesterday), but due to some difficulties, that's going to be put off for a bit. Instead - enjoy these easy chicken recipes that I've been making in my new KITCHEN!

Sweet and Sour Chicken
Ingredients: Chicken breast, onion, green pepper, rice, sweet and sour sauce.
Slice the chicken into bite sized chunks and cook them in a light coating of sweet and sour sauce. When the chicken is nearly done, add the green peppers and onions (more sauce may be necessary). Cook the rice separately. Serve the chicken over the rice. Add more sweet and sour and/or soy sauce to your liking. Savor the amazing-ness of your cooking!

Citrus Chicken
Ingredients: Chicken breast, lemon juice, oranges, onions, and rice.
Squeeze about half an orange and mix with roughly equal amounts of lemon juice. Let the chicken sit in this sauce for about 10 minutes, then start cooking. When the chicken is nearly done, add onions. Serve with rice. Simple and tasty!

Mustard Chicken
Ingredients: Chicken breast, spicy mustard, onions, basil, garlic salt.
Start by mixing your sauce - don't be shy putting the spicy mustard into your mixing bowl. Add a few shakes of garlic salt and several shakes of basil. Ever so slightly water down your sauce, then spread it on both sides of your chicken. When your chicken is nearly done, add plenty of diced onions. The sauce is a work in progress - so if you make a better one - let me know! Still - as is - very tasty!

Cheese Fondue
Ingredients: Mild cheddar, swiss, basil, garlic salt, dippers.
OK - so its not chicken, but I thought I'd share anyway. For this you'll need a fondue pot. I used about a pound of cheddar and 6 slices of swiss. When the fondue has melted and is hot, stir in enough garlic salt and basil that they each make a light coating over the top before stirring. Dip bread, sausage, apples (yum!), or whatever you please!

As a sort of follow up to my discussion on social networking, I'd like to investigate what Facebook should be used for. In my personal opinion there are 3 distinct and obvious answers.

Option 1. Facebook's Original Intent
Everyone has heard about Facebook's origin. It was intended to be for Harvard students as a sort of social phonebook. This seems to me to say that it was designed with the idea of meeting new people in mind. And in the older designs, I feel this was apparent. There was a public wall where you could swap messages with other people and that was the main interaction. Privacy rantings aside - Facebook was founded to be (for the most part) public. If a user was to choose this option, it would surely mean that the only things that would be posted would be the types of things that would be said in public. However, more recent design changes have change the basic mode of communication away from wall postings (which are like talking in public) to status updates (which are like shouting in public). This changes the whole dynamic, so instead of only posting things you'd talk about in public, a user would probably only post things they'd be comfortable shouting about in public.

Option 2. Social Networking Your Personal Brand
This option is the market yourself option. You friend everyone you've ever met because you want to be able to contact them at a moments notice. You're the one your old class president turns to because even when its time for your 5 year reunion - you'll still be friends with everyone. This is one of the many ways you market yourself to the world and you want as many people to see it as possible. This is also a very public option, but it has a key difference - you are being active about putting yourself out there. You are "social networking". You'd post only those things you want the whole world from your best friend to your boss to the CIA to know about you.

Option 2b. Keeping In Touch
I list this not as a separate option because it shares the same user idea as the previous one. You friend everyone. But your motivation is to keep in touch with all of these old friends. You are probably not as active as putting yourself out there, but the same rules for what you post would apply.

Option 3. Privacy Is King
You are trying to maintain a social network for your close friends. You only friend those who you actually talk to with some frequency. You might feel comfortable posting pictures, events, and such so you can share your life with your friends. Despite the name, you are not necessarily freaked out about your privacy, but you don't want your boss seeing those pictures of you on the beach.

I don't claim that any of these is better than any other. However, in my quest to decide what to do with my personal facebook account, I wanted to solicit other's opinions. What option do you fall under? Is there another answer I've missed? Feel like I've misrepresented what you do? Post your choice, praise, or grievance in the comments!

So, school has begun and its time to welcome September. I have decided to challenge myself to make more contributions to the internet this month. How you ask? I'm going to write at least one blog post a week and hopefully more. I'm also going to actually try to use facebook (since as most of you know I usually don't use it). Any other suggestions?

Link: http://www.slideshare.net/padday/the-real-life-social-network-v2

Here's the deal. Online social networks suck. At the current time this is almost universally true.

Take an example, or possible the example. I'm not saying that Facebook is evil incarnate, but it is quite annoying. And the reason is simple. Facebook was never designed to be the kind of social network that people have made it. It had a very specific purpose in mind and it is now so far removed from that as to be more of a problem than a help. It is no longer a way to look up and meet other Harvard students. Its not simply that its too big, but that it was never designed to be as big as it is.

What is the major design flaw in online social networks? They don't match up to the way our offline social networks work.

Let me repeat that as it is the critical point: Online social networks don't integrate well with our existing offline social networks.

The most glaring example of this is the concept of "friends". If you want proof, stop reading now and go get a piece of paper. On it map out or write down the different groups of people in your life. Go now and do it. Do it now. Stop reading and do this.

Now you may have put down groups like "coworkers", or "college", or "family", or "new york". Statistically (unless you were very lazy, in which case shame on you) you did not have a group called "friends". BUT this is exactly what online social networks do. For every single person on your contact list they ask "Is this person a friend or not a friend?" This is an extremely binary choice. Is your Dad a "friend"? Is your ex-girl/boyfriend a "friend"? Is your priest a "friend"? Is your friendly online blogger a "friend"? We don't know how to answer these questions because the term "friend" doesn't match up with the way we categorize people.

So the term is bad, easy enough to fix with a quick regular expression right? Wrong! Any binary choice will face similar problems or else be so specific as to be useless in a broad context like what people want from a social network. The key is that you have more than one group in your social network. People are not divided between "friends" and "not friends". Look back at the map you made of your social network. Any successful social network has multiple groups in it. And they should not be statically named either. I might have a "Scouting" group and a "Virginia Tech" group, but you should not be required to group your friends like that. Furthermore I assert that a good social network should allow you to place people into multiple groups. Consider an example like my Dad. Does he belong in my group of "family" or my group of "Scouts"? I contend that the answer is that he belongs in both. (Note: this is a deviation from what the slides say, but I feel it is a better way of doing things for the above reason.)

The reason all of this is important has several names which are all complementary. Some people call it "privacy", some your "intended audience", others your "online identity". What you post is usually meant for a very specific group of people to see. You might want to post what happened in the aftermath of VT defeating UVA in football, but you don't because your boss or parents might see something you'd rather they not. You might not want your football buddies to see your review of the classical music show you went to see. Whatever your reasons, you should be able to control who sees what you post to a fine degree. AND this functionality should be built into the entire social network experience to make it feel as natural as possible.

This is a major shift in the way things have been done for years, and it will not be an easy change for designers/developers to make. However, whoever does this first will have a huge head start on being the "Facebook killer".

If you haven't yet read through it, check out the wonderful presentation by Paul Adams at

http://www.slideshare.net/padday/the-real-life-social-network-v2 . Even if you didn't do the little exercise earlier, you should read this as it is worth your time.

I've put off for a long time learning regular expressions because they looked so complicated. Then this summer I ran up against them in my job. And it turns out that they actually aren't quite as alien as it seemed at first glance. Not just that, but now that I've learned how to use them, I find myself using them more and more. Instead of using a built in function to do string parsing like parse_url(), I find that doing it myself gives better and more controlled results. Instead of bending to suit the requirements of the built-in function, I just add a ? to my regex and poof - who cares if there's a protocol on that URL or not? If you've been putting off learning regex because it looks intimidating - go do it - it's worth it.

/.*/

PS. For PHP see preg_match() and other functions in that family.