Not satisfied with the overcomplicated process of making plans at competing websites, we’ve got it down to one screen, and actually just one field! Type in a title and let your friends fill in the details. It’s that easy. You can have a plan page up in about 10 seconds and let your friends use the planspace wiki, vote on time and locations, create and respond to polls, and chat. And of course you can get notifications on your phone, email, rss, integrate with calendars, and one-click post to Twitter and Facebook!

We wouldn’t be here today without the hard work of the Planypus team, especially Luciano Pouzada, the talented designer who created the interface for the new Planypus. And tons of thanks to our beta users who helped us test the product in its final pre-release stages. Your support has kept us going!

And while all that’s been going on, we launched our new platform website at http://platform.planyp.us to help websites use the Planypus engine to enable social interaction on their events. Get in touch with us and find out how we can create page views and brand loyalty for you!

Now onto world domination in 2009 :-)

So my first problem is that people even as informed as RMS are still calling SaaS cloud computing. The second problem I have is with the actual meat of Stallman’s statement: he claims that e.g. giving google your data is somehow going to lock you in, and this will cost you over time. Now despite the fact that he calls this cloud computing, I’m going to grit my teeth and respond anyway: O RLY?

First of all, I recall when Gmail opened up it was free and offered 2 gigs of storage. Today it offers more than 7 gigs of storage, and is still free. Does Google have an immensely evil plan to get me locked into their email system and ten years later to start charging for it? Not likely. And what’s more, the free market won’t stand for it.

Besides, as hardware costs approach zero, businesses built on charging for commodity resources are very low margin and quite frankly not interesting to companies like Google. Instead, it is a way to get you into the Google world. The gateway drug to Google apps, if you will. And all of this is, of course, an evil plan to harvest your attention data and sell you advertising. Well as horrifying as this is — guess what else is an evil way to harvest your data and sell you advertising? Credit cards. We got over it (well, most of us anyway). We have benefitted greatly from it. I hope RMS carries only cash, otherwise he’s giving away his data to proprietary vendors.

Let’s face it, our generation doesn’t expect any privacy. We’ve recognized intuitively that with the great power and capabilities of online search, social networking, and the immense quantities of raw data being generated by everything we do, comes a tradeoff in privacy. Hell, many of us have embraced it. You know there’s this little app called Facebook where people voluntarily dump the most private of data for the world to see. Like credit cards, the utility provided by these things to their users, clearly outweighs their invasion into our privacy.

In his interview, Stallman railed against companies that are claiming that the process of outsourcing your data to external services is inevitable, and said “It’s stupidity. It’s worse than stupidity; it’s a marketing hype campaign.” Yes, there’s that. And then there is pure hard factual economics. If Google can store my data cheaper, and more reliably than I can, and on top of that give me some extra capabilities like collaboration, then why shouldn’t I put it there? There is no good economic reason, and if we live in a free market economy, then that means that it is inevitable.

Face it — Skynet is coming, it’s just a question of embracing it early on and developing standards and methods for security and privacy control, or to call it “idiocy” and “stupidity” and do nothing about it. I choose the former.

Yahoo identifies five different competitiveness levels for social communities (Caring, Collaborative, Cordial, Competitive, Combative) and recommends different ways of handling reputation in your system based on the behavior of its users. I found it very insightful to break down behavior in this way as point systems work better in competition, for example, while named labels help in caring and collaborative situations. Looking forward to more of this sort of stuff from Yahoo! Original blog post at the yuiblog.

There are way too many tagging plugins for Rails. I’ve produced this post as an attempt to summarize the differences between them. Disclaimer: I didn’t actually try all the plugins but I did peruse their code when deciding which one I would use.

My criteria for choosing a plugin was:

• Important: Supports user-owned tagging
• Important: Supports tag cloud generation
• Less important: Code as clean as possible for extending
• Somewhat important: ability to contribute patches. I had been stuck with a heavily customized 2006 acts_as_taggable before and didn’t want the same thing with the new plugin.
• Not important: Related tags, and other complex tag searches

After reviewing the options, acts_as_taggable_redux seemed like the best candidate. I immediately had a couple contributions, which I first emailed to Wes, and later he moved the plugin to github and I am now a direct comitter.

I plan to continue to enhance this plugin, and possibly add some features to it from the other plugins, such as tag caching which becomes important for scalability. As it’s the most minimal of the plugins I feel it’s a good base to start with building clean code that doesn’t have a lot of legacy stuff from the 2006 plugin, which was the dark ages of Ruby coding with lots of ugly code produced :-)

Twitter’s very nature attracts chatterboxes, connectors, social sneezers. Twitter has become a social network of influentials precisely because these people understand the value of being heard, and conversely the value of being up to date with the latest trends.

It’s just a natural extension of blogging. The same people who derided blogs for being a waste of time (after all, who wants to hear about your whiny thoughts) are once again entirely missing the value of this tool. Everything I wrote about why you should be blogging applies to twitter, except with a higher sense of immediacy.

If your company is not twittering about product releases, you’re missing out. If you’re not using twitter to engage your userbase directly in conversation, you’re missing out. If you’re not using twitter to complain about bad customer service, you’re missing out. And if you’re captured in an egyptian jail and you don’t have twitter you’re missing out.

By now it should be clear, twitter is not just a place to tell people about what you ate for breakfast, but a very significant tool for businesses and individuals looking to build social capital and engage in the most direct form of marketing currently available on the web.

So coming back to the revenue issue…clearly twitter is a very valuable service for companies like Southwest, Zappos, and Woot. They are making money from twittering by attracting new business. So why shouldn’t twitter share a piece of the pie? Facebook’s dismal CPM rates and the research findings that suggest that most ad clickers are middle aged women imply that ad revenue on twitter will likely be largely irrelevant. But I bet Southwest, Zappos, and Woot would be more than happy to pay for a premium service. Twitter should come to these companies with a log of outbound clicks and show them all the business they’re driving. I bet that’s worth something. Hmm….