Wishlist for next gen of social networks

So today I was playing around with Facebook and every few days it draws closer to what I really want to see social networks to become like.  So I am going to list for you want I really really want to see in the next gen of social networks.

• Email
• RSS
• Online docs
• Blog
• IM
• Communities/Networks
• Persistent messaging system
• Calender

Pretty much take everything Google does, add it to the core of facebook and give it a descent desktop app and you’re set.  But the biggest problem would be not limiting the service you allow people to connect to. If I want to use bloglines, Gmail, Zoho, and WordPress I should be able to.

So that list isn’t just things I want to see aggregated, but features that allow me to interact with them. So I can post to my blog, mark favorites on my RSS stream, create,edit, delete docs, or add events to my calender. I also want to have trusted friend able to edited or add things using the central system.

I don’t see the feature of social networks as just a place to gather and stalk what friends are doing, a centralized portal to who I am and linked to on the internet. I am really excited for the google social network, not because I think it will necessarily be better than Facebook, but because it will be good and it will (hopefully) be real competition for facebook and push the development of Social networks.

i don’t have a toaster!

gah. as the title suggests I no longer have a toaster. I just recently moved to a new apartment and the toaster at my old one was a room mates. Now I don’t have a toaster which means I can’t eat breakfast since my breakfast ALWAYS is an eggo or two.

In other news I finally got the internet back. It’s been a hellish weekend with no connection. Hopefully this afteroon/tonight I will have time to get some free web space to throw up my examples and .fla’s for selected files. I also hope to eventually start writing tutorials and creating more random experiments.

I just need to think of some interesting things to do with actionscript for me to try and play with. I a big fan of menu’s so I think I am going to read some on menu theories and create some just artsy pieces. I normally work in only AS but for these I think I’m going to have to using some library calls to get some pretty animations.

I will post a link to my test/experiment page as soon as I get it created.  It’s not going to be pretty since I simply don’t have the time to make it so. So it will be a bunch of links and flash files with dates.

other than that not a lot of news. trying to figure out a MC within MC problem at the moment and after that I will be working on a site called Ascenta or something like that.

Oh, and I was told to play rubies and eventide… is it any good?

grow/blur/inertia & deeplinking/XML search – actionscript

*UPDATE*

http://www.geocities.com/open_bracket/botttles/products_animate.html 

There is a working example without Deeplinking.

Ah, fuck.

I have been writing actionscript for I dunno… three months. Not a long time. Especially for someone that ISN’T a programmer. No! I was trained to be a designer, not a scripter, though I did write PHP on my free time. Well anyway you look at it, I am now a Junior Web Developer. Luckily, I love it ^_^ This is an artform.

Anyways, I have three main projects on my plate, 2 of them which I will be working on today. The first one is what sounds a lot more simple than it is. I have four bottles. I want to roll over one and have it grow using an inertia script. I also want to have the over bottles blur. Now, you may be saying that not difficult, but go ahead and try it using just actionscript. I’m not allowed to cheat and use gotoAndPlay’s. Well anyways, I have all of it done except for the inertia at the moment. Its about…100 lines of code and on each bottle there are about.. 50 lines. Again doesn’t sound that impressive, but with three months experience I think I have a right to be pretty damn proud of myself.

The next project I have is to create a prototype that uses deeplinking. DL is a series of JS/AS scripts that manipulates the address bar somehow through flash. The problem is the example doesn’t work, its poorly documented and I have no god fosaken clue what I’m doing with it. And to boot, I got to understand it and then create a series of XML files that are searchable and on click uses the DL scripts to change the URL and then change move the flash movie around.

Oy.

As always I will post my scripts if I ever finish it. The bottle one will hopefully be up tomorrow. And after I learn the DL and the searching idea, I will share that too.

Trillian Astra! Black Donnellys and FooBar!?

Black Donnellys

What a wicked show. I just watched it (thank you bit torrent) and was blown away. I have only really started watching TV shows last year starting with Prison Break and House. And this totally kicked Prison Break’s ass all over the air and putting it on on par with House. Which is a lot to say since I love House (not the character, the show :P). If you haven’t seen the first ep, go forth, and watch it. Download it, find a rerun, check the NBC site. They may have it. But next Sunday is a new episode(ep 2) so if you wanna be up to speed, you best watch it.

F ooBar

I remember why I hate foobar. It’s not because the program is bad. No, I love the program. Its the community. They are pricks. They have BEAUTIFUL layouts for their foobars, but NO one will share. And there are no community guides or even documentation o how to do this (with the new plugin, Panels UI). FUCK! If I could get a guide on how to make my foobar look like those on the site, I would blow my load all over the screen. But seriously, they won’t help even if asked, and they won’t give guides or proper papers on the program. In all honesty they are one of the worse communities (up there with relic) I have never seen.
Trillian Astra

Finally! I got invited to the beta for this software. I love multi protocol IM’s so I was thrilled to have a chance to test a new one. And let me say this is actually really good. The program is small (mem print wise) responsive and slick. It has a really nice layout and the chat windows are well done. But remember this software is still in beta, so I am going to make it known that I have some problems with it.

1) Group Containers – Would MUCH rather see a smaller group container with smaller, and nicer looking tabs at the top. I like the idea of the group containers, but the graphics could be better.

2) Color Themes – The user should have the ability (a menu) that allows them to create their own color themes since I imagine there won’t be a lot of skinning going on with this program. They have a good amount of color themes (20 or so) but only a few are any good.

3) Chat Window – GIVE ME A OPTION TO TURN OFF THE RSS FEEDS! ARGH! I am a VERY minimalistic person when it comes to graphics. I would rather see the feeds in a little bar on the bottom if done properly so they aren’t obscuring my chat window.

4) User Status – I want to be to be able to turn of the status overlay on the chat windows.

5) History in chat window – I would like to see this become more separated from the rest of the chat. Put a line under it, or on the first message chuck a lot of whitespace in there.

6) MAKE IT FREE! This is a great program, but if they charge for it like they did with other versions of trillian no one is going to buy it. Well there will be a few 1000 uneducated people that don’t know other multiprotocol clients exist for FREE!

7) Bug – Memory Leak ( i think) its starts at around 10k which is really good for a IM client (Miranda uses about 12-15k and msn is up around 40-50k if i member correctly 😛 ). But you let Astra run for 10 hours and you have 22k mem usage. I dunno if it keeps going but I will try to watch. I exit astra to play DOD so I restart it every once in a while anyways.

8) Bug – Flashing window. Sometimes when you minimize a chat window, it flashes like when you receive a new message. There is no new message though. This is annoying.

9) Themes – some of the themes make the menus really difficult to read. Would think that themes bundled with the program would all work properly.

10) Tooltip – Would like to see the client that MSN users use. Gtalk has this in their tooltip and I would love to see this with MSN.

11) Themes – Option to create themes via menu. I stat this again because I think this is important and should be taken into consideration.

12) Bug – Changing Skins – When using the skins in the program, change it three times and Astra won’t redraw the skin properly.

13) Web client – The web client needs a LOT of work. I signed on only to find that I needed to make my connections there too.  So that wouldn’t have been a problem but there were no tooltips, on text. But a bunch of different different colored balls. After clicking around I found MSN (no jabber?!?!). I made my connection and only 5 of contacts appeared… when i had about 35 online..  And then I tried to send a message with no luck. The chat window just didn’t open. This doesn’t stand up to Meebo

So, Cerulean, please address the issues I have outlined here. I personally think if you address all these issues, you will have the best IM client out there! So please, for the sake of the IMers such as me, make this the best client ever!

New blog!

I have launched my new blog with limited results lol.  Like, 40 views if that so far.

Anways, the blog is all about web game development and can be found @ http://webgamedev.wordpress.com

So far I haven’t been able to come up with a game but I hope to in the near future and I hope that it will start to gain popularity. If anyone has any articles to contribute or links to add, feel free to message me.