It turns out that this will be more than a site redesign, it will be a whole new type of site. It won’t be run with WordPress, it’ll be run with Drupal. That will give you an idea of the scope of the changes that are going on. Watch here for more details.

-Mike

Take this blog post, for example. I could have simply taken the title and sent it out via Twitter and gotten my responses back that way. Would that have been enough? Not really. I found that by sending tweets out for topics that warrant a blog post, I’m essentially being lazy. By not taking the time to throughly write out what I want to say about a subject, I’m not only cheating myself out of a potentially good piece of writing, but I’m lessening the value of what I write.

Has anyone else found themselves using Twitter as a quick and dirty blog post?

I’ll sum it up for those of you that don’t know: Robert was using a Facebook app to scrape data from Facebook so that he can use it in his own database. Apparently this is against the Facebook Terms of Service since Facebook doesn’t have an export system for your contacts. Worse, Facebook shows your friends’ email address as as unclickable image rather than a string of text you can copy and paste.

So Robert gets in trouble for using this Facebook app. He gets banned from Facebook and they reinstate him after a day.

In the wake of all this, I’ve listened to both sides of the conversation from people that agree with what Robert did and people that don’t, but a serious question rises from all of this: who owns us?

If I give my contact information to my friend Bill from college via Facebook, am I allowing him to only contact me through Facebook? That seems kind of silly, don’t you think? I mean, I’ve known the guy for almost 20 years. If I wanted his contact info without going through Facebook I could call him up. However, we did join up in Facebook and that’s where this little story makes a serious turn.

Let’s say I want to pull Bill’s info off of Facebook and into Outlook (or the Mac equivalent: Entourage). This way I can have it in my iPhone or Address Book. Who knows if Facebook will be down at a time when I need to contact someone, or if I’ll have web access to get the information I need. Unfortunately, there’s no way to do that. I can’t even copy and paste his email address into Outlook because his email is displayed as an image.

So this brings up a few interesting points. First, it seems like Facebook wants a monopoly on your data. They don’t let you export it, and they ban you if they find you data scraping. Second, the inability to show people’s email address as text is a way to discourage people from copy and pasting that text into another app like Outlook, or another service like Gmail. They could claim that they’re preventing spam, but in the light of recent events, I’m not so sure. Spammers are a notorious bunch, they’ll use OCR to convert the image to text if they have to so I believe Facebook did this to prevent casual copying of the data. Under normal circumstances, you can’t get someone’s email address by default unless you added them as a friend anyway.

So after all that, who owns the data? If I give Bill the right to have my contact information, why is Facebook preventing him from copying it for his own use? If I write down Bill’s contact info or type it into Outlook manually, have I just broken Facebook’s Terms of Service? If I really wanted to argue the point, I could say that the data came onto my computer screen at home.

Personally, I think that any data I put on the net through any service for friends, family, and acquaintances, should be completely controlled by me if you subscribe to the notion that I put the data there for those people to have in the first place.

I also believe that this recent blunder by Facebook is opening the door for someone to create a better service. We’ll have to wait and see what it is. I just hope it has vowels in the name.

1) Family > everything.

2) Never go into business with someone you’ve known for less than three months. That’ll give you enough time to see the happy/sad/sober/drunk/depressed side of them, and see how they treat you. Usually, drunk + depressed is a bad mix.

3) If someone has a blog in which they openly bash others, chances are you’ll be next. Even if they swear you won’t be.

4) A drastic change may be the best thing you ever do.

5) If you ever have a feeling in the back of your head that someone may be a bit “off”, be wary. It’s your subconscious screaming at you.

6) This is going to sound cliché, but if you have a goal, finish it.

7) Time management.

8 ) If you don’t like someone, move on. Real friends shouldn’t treat you like shit.

9) Re-read your emails before sending.

10) There may be a perfectly good explanation.

11) There are people out there that don’t think “internet people” are real, therefore, they treat them differently than real people because they don’t have to deal with the real-world consequences.

12) You might be wrong.

13) It’ll be there in the morning.

14) The world is getting smaller. Be excellent to each other. You never know who you might bump into at the next trade show.

15) If you don’t have time to use it, don’t buy it.

16) Do absolutely, everything you can to not get financially screwed by someone.

17) Don’t take your frustrations out on others.

18) People that are perpetually angry make bad friends.

For 2008:

1) It’s not worth “trying to see the good in people”. If someone’s 90% prick, the other 10% isn’t worth having around.

2) Time management.

3) Still working on that goal. Getting closer.

4) Be excellent to each other.

5) Family > everything

So, I should start by talking about the Big News which was being filmed for Second Skin. It was a wonderful experience. Not only was it great to FINALLY meet Renata, but the guys who work at Pure West Docs are a great trio of professionals. Basically, they filmed us recording a show for World of Warcast, complete with bloopers and screwups. I wasn’t nervous at all in front of the camera. Ren and I just did our thing and we tried VERY hard not to be conscious of the guys working around us. I hope we last more than 20 seconds on-screen .

After they left, Ren went back for a nap and I just sat around editing the show a bit. For dinner, Ren and her husband Cryler, and Lindyen and I went to Champps in Menlo Park for wings and beer and, uh, more beer

The new Nine Inch Nails album was released on Tuesday and I absolutely LOVE IT. I’ve been a NIN fan for many years, and I think this new album goes back to the roots of what NIN was all about. Not only is the music great, but I popped the CD into my car’s CD player with the cover brown, and afterwards it came out white! I thought the CD player did something to it. It turns out the CD has some material on it that changes color when heated, revealing a binary code which translates to a web site related to the album. Awesome.

As far as WoW goes, it has its ups and downs as always. Good days and bad. I’ve been farming like mad for my epic flying mount. I had over 1600g saved up, and now it’s down to over 1300g. Most of it went to getting professions up and my Cobalt Talbok. Farming sucks. The only thing that makes it worthwhile is hanging with people while doing it.

And Blizzcon was announced. As of right now, I’m stoked to go. The problem is that some of the people I was hoping to see aren’t going. Still, it should be fun and some good friends are going, including Ren. Maybe they’ll have a playable demo of Starcraft Ghost

And I realized that I never finished Final Fantasy XII. Why? WoW. Is WoW an addiction? Not in itself. I’m more interested in meeting up with friends in the game which makes WoW much more of a social experience than anything else, and FF XII is just a single-player console game. I really should get back to it. Yeah, right after I get my ass to Mt. Hyjal.

Even my moblog is empty. I guess there’s nothing even worth taking a picture of!

IE users: That white space under the banner is Bill Gates laughing at you! Seriously, IE doesn’t work with PNG files properly. I’m working on a fix.