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There’s a lot going on: enough for a long form post. Too much Twitter, not enough blogging!

Viva MSI Chicago

The Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago is hosting a marvelous social experiment: they’re looking for someone to live in the museum for a month.

Living in a science museum for a month, participating in science demos, taking pictures, blogging and tweeting, getting access to places most people don’t get access to — I have completely failed to think of anything more awesome (outside of my immediate family, of course).

MSI Chicago takes the whole thing quite seriously: the application is 14 pages long, with an additional essay and video, due next week. The next round is a phone interview, and the final round is in person, in Chicago.

I’ll be thrilled if I just get a follow up phone call, but winning the contest would make my decade.

Webtrends

I’ve been contracting at Webtrends, working on some cool stuff that may or may not have anything to do with Facebook. Darned NDAs. Regardless, it’s been a great opportunity to work with some really smart, well adjusted people.

Speaking of which, if you’re looking for the opportunity to work with some really smart and well adjusted people, you should check out the Webtrends Careers page. There’s over 30 open positions in engineering, sales, marketing, and other categories.

I’ll be here for another couple of months. If you happen to work at Webtrends, come say hi!

Scala and Haskell

Ahh, the joy of learning new languages. I’m using Scala to prototype and build out Capacity (see below), and tinkering with Haskell to beef up my functional and theory chops.

Scala is pretty sweet. It’s a weird mutt of a language — object oriented, imperitive, functional, scripted or compiled for the JVM, and groks XML as part of the language. It’s fun because it’s so flexible: it’s easy to jump into, and if you’re familiar with the Java universe, you can be immediately productive with all of your existing Java libraries and frameworks.

To a point. The flexibility can also cause some consternation. There are a lot of things you can do with the language that you probably shouldn’t do, particularly when it comes to style. That said, if you hang out and share code with some experienced Scala developers, you’ll pick up good habits and see some really elegant code.

If I can get a few things together, I might be presenting at a PDX Scala event in the near future. I’ll post more here if that happens!

Regarding Haskell — if you’re like me and you don’t have much background in functional programming, getting started with Haskell is like getting smacked in the head with a thick book. Fortunately, it’s also a good book. And, like any significant head injury (or any good book), Haskell will change you.

My first non-trivial Haskell project is a card shuffler that simulates the action of different shuffling techniques — riffles, overhand, piles, etc. The challenge isn’t to write something that randomizes a deck of cards (fairly trivial), but to build a piece of software whereby you can analyze how shuffling works, and how different techniques influence game play.

It’s a great introduction to list manipulation, functional development, lazy evaluation, and the idea of pure functions — a challenge when dealing with randomization (I’m always up for a vigorous discussion of randomness).

Big thanks to Jonathan over at Galois for helping me up the learning curve, and on a slight tangent, if you’re interested in some cutting edge software discussions, check out the Galois Tech Talks. Intimate, detailed, incredibly geeky!

100 Mile Countdown

My last post was about getting off the couch and back on my bike. Since April, I’ve been riding (almost) every day to get in shape for the Harvest Century — 100 miles of rolling hills in the Tualatin Valley.

Current status: 50 mile rides aren’t killing me, and on the flat lands I can keep up a pace of around 14 MPH. I’ve also lost 15 pounds. Gotta work on those hills, but I think I can get there in the next two months!

I’m always looking for people who are interested in riding with me! The next opportunity is the Bridge Pedal — a 40 mile tour of Portland’s beautiful bridges on Sunday the 8th.

Got Capacity?

For the last few months I’ve been working on a new web application — Capacity. It’s a system for helping small business plan products, manage “just in time” manufacturing, and fulfill orders. Right now I’m working with a couple of companies to help define the product and build out the alpha. We’ll probably have real orders flowing through the system by the end of the year, and an official launch in early 2011. But, like all things web and startupy, that’s just a rough estimate.

If you’d like to follow our progress, have an interest in using the system, or are just curious, head over to http://getcapacity.com and sign up for the announcement list.

I’m posting articles from my daily reading to the @peatsreader account on Twitter.  The pieces are culled from my daily reading of several hundred news feeds, covering photography, architecture, economics, street art, software development, comics, and other odd topics that tickle my fancy or get me thinking.

It’s pretty low flow — 10 to 15 articles per day, and throttled at one tweet per hour to keep things fresh.

This is an experiment in combining three of my favorite activities:  I read voraciously, I enjoy sharing my interests with other people, and I tinkering with software and the Internet for a living.  Between my career and my family, I don’t always have time to blog or tweet or comment on the specific articles I enjoy, so I’ve written a tool that scrapes my reading list and publishes the notable articles for me.

For those of a technical persuasion, here’s how it fits together:

I use Google Reader to consume and organize hundreds of news feeds.  When I see an article I like, I share it on my public feed.  The tool checks the feed for new articles, and every hour one of the shared articles is published to the @peatsreader account.  Hooray for automation!

I’ll be happy to share the Ruby source on GitHub if there’s any interest.  In the meantime, follow @peatsreader and let me know what you think.

Holy crap. Every week there’s a miniature gold rush when a new microblogging site is released. Twitter proved the market, and the concept is so simple that anyone with an elementary web development education can put up their own site. And, apparently they are.

So, Twitter kicked the whole thing off, and it’s a compelling system because it’s incredibly simple, and very accessible (web, IM, widgets, SMS, etc). It’s also pretty flakey right now. More on that later.

Immediately after Twitter’s user base “hockey sticked,” Pownce and Jaiku jumped on the scene, with a couple extra features, like pulling in photos from Flickr and whatnot.  [ed: turns out Jaiku launched a few months before Twitter, my bad]

FriendFeed joined the fray at around the same time, adding a veritable raft load of ways to track and comment on posts from other sites.

Then Plurk leaped into battle with it’s headless Doglephant and wildly different user interface, provoking Love It or Hate It responses from everyone who tried it. They don’t pull in other content, but they do allow discussions to grow around specific messages, and they added the concept of karma — more participation means more karma, and extra little toys to play with.

This week, Identi.ca showed up with a back to basics story, and a twist. It’s pretty much just like Twitter, and people want to give it a shot because it seems to be more reliable (more on that later). The twist is basically a marketing move: the software that powers the Identi.ca site is an open source project, so anyone with software chops can use it to create their own micro-blogging community.  Heads up, internal communications people.

Now, regarding reliability. A slightly flakey experience is not a big enough factor to drive away the masses. None of the above sites are Twitter killers, because Twitter has a critical mass of users who have shown that even if Twitter is unreliable, they’ll stick it out to stay in touch with their friends. Will it frustrate early adopters with short attention spans, and rabid interaction habits? Sure. Will they totally abandon Twitter? Not likely.

My prediction? Twitter is going to stay king of the microblogging universe for the next few years, and that universe is going to get much, much bigger. Like Gary Vaynerchuk said on his swing through Portland — “You think there’s a lot of people using Twitter now? Wait until Oprah gets on Twitter.” Hopefully, the fine folks at Twitter are planning for such an event.

I expect that we short attention span, early adopter types are going to stick with Twitter, but spend most of our time on FriendFeed. Why? Because it’s such a powerful aggregator. We’ll continue to sign up for any social web app that shows up on the radar, and we’ll use FriendFeed to track and manage all of our discussions.

Plurk is the only Twitter alternative I’m excited about.  Why?  Because the interface is fun to navigate, gives a better sense of time and community, and has plenty of visual queues for it’s features … and the people who are building it are obviously having a lot of fun. Their logo is a headless doglephant, and they call themselves the A-Team. Never underestimate the power of fun.

They say it’s built to scale, but we’ll see.  Their growth chart this week looks like an insane hockey stick, but I suspect they’re still under 10k users.  My fingers are crossed.  I’d love to see these guys succeed.

In the meantime, you’re welcome to Plurk me.

The idea of broadcasting my every emotion and/or action isn’t particularly appealing, and I’m not too keen on hearing the same from everyone else.  Nevertheless, I love Twitter.  Why?

It’s all about the links.  People (usually) don’t twitter links unless they’re worth reading, so it makes for great reading on a pretty frequent basis.  It’s great for filling those odd little five minute gaps in the day.

I swore I wouldn’t join Twitter.

I thought it was more irritating than useful.

I still think it’s more irritating than useful.

And yet … http://twitter.com/peat