Cybernetics

I had the occasion yesterday to help out someone with their website.

Which they created with google sites: http://sites.google.com

I was at first very impressed, although I have know about this website for a long time, I hadn’t had the occasion to actually test it, with a live site.

Google websites are as always very well done, and documented, and easy to use. But at the heart of the website, there really wasn’t much to the site. It was in fact just an advanced online editor. And by using online editor, it would probably be pretty quick to reproduce an alternative to this site.

It was also very limited in what it was allowing users to do, there seemed to be no way of adding javascript, a different web statistics tool, or any type of dyna;ics.

But the simplisity of it was impressive, but this showed that there was most probably place for an alternative and a more advanced tool once again.

I the same way as I could see the charts.google.com tool, really interesting and a fun basis for a more advanced statitics tool for developers.

The 3rd website, which could also have made progress is definitly googlemaps, since the API, requires so much tweeking to get anything to work, but once again, I am sure that this team is actually already working on making progress on this.

As I got up this morning. Easter sunday 2010.

I had a great idea.
I was going to build a url shortener website, and add statistic tools to it.

This seemed to be a dead easy thing to do, and I am sure, with my technical skill and knowledge to build a better one than all those which exist online.

What is the point in a url shortener site:
1) shorten urls to make them easier to “tweat” or text
2) log information from the users who visit your site: location, browser, page on which they clicked
3) many other things like this link suggests:
http://www.friedbeef.com/top-5-url-shorteners-and-how-they-help-you/

I will start by choosing a cool web name:

such as:
sho.rt, qui.ck or smi.le

But as I surfed the web, and looked at what was already out there, I discovered those which already existed:

These are the ones I found:

The leader:
http://bit.ly
http://j.mp

Google’s:

http://goo.gl

Other:
http://is.gd
http://sn.im

http://go.to/
http://start.at/
http://i.am/

But this one alerted me that it was maybe not such a good idea after all, since it can lead to too many spammers using the tool:

http://tr.im

I still think it could be an fun to create something better, and the competition doesn’t seem that high.
But it may just take a bit more time.
I also think this could be the perfect project to test out my shinny new dedicated server.

I will still keep the idea at the back of my mind, but maybe not for this weekend.

Anyway, another interresting aspect of these websites is the use of exotic top level domain (tld) of  countries to create interresting urls such as:

.ly for lybia
.gl for greenland
.im for mariana islands

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Internet_top-level_domains

The last interresting point will have been the actually domain name hunting:

I was pretty surprised to see how many tld ovh.com now had on offer.

I still have to found out how to get the .ck for qui.ck for the cook islands.

I was sorry to found out that the .le did not existe yet, since this could have been used for very interrestin names.

I will definitly keep this in mind if I ever get to set up an interresting website on day.

I have never felt so close to being an internet junky.

I have been in Paris for less than 24h. I have spent most of my time here trying to get a clean internet connection, and spent nearly 150€ trying to do just that.

I have just bought myself a new 20 minutes internet fix for 2.5€

I have a couple of things I need to do before starting my new job on monday: Read and learn my mission brief documents, and then prepare for the mission. Then fix a couple of small bugs, in order to finalise my previous job. This requires a quick internet connect, download a 1.5Gb archive, deploy it, set up a copy of the site in order to test the changes, fix 2 or 3 small things, recreate an archive and send it to the client or put it on the ftp space.

If I had been on a clean internet connection this could have taken me less than an hour, but in travelling conditions this can be an exhausting job. And I could have spent a few hours doing other usefull thing on other projects.

How did I manage to spend 150€

- mobile phone number: 15€
- cybercafé to get a hotel room: 3€
- hotel room with wifi: 85€
- recharge mobile: 10 €
- wifi option in hotel: 15€
- 3€ another card to get password of wifi

Although I have free internet with “neuf” and “free.fr”, since I have the logins and passwords, and there is free internet all over Paris, in parcs, train stations, mcDonalds, starbucks … etc. The wifi option of my hotel is in fact a partnership with orange, and this means that you need to buy small doses of 20 min or so and charge up gradually. I thought I would just buy 15euros yesterday, and I wouldn’t have to think about it again, and could happilly get a lot of my buisness done yesterday.

But since I didn’t write down the login and password. I had the bad surprise this morning, to realise that I needed an internet connection to get my password back. And this means that I had to go and try and hunt down the other free alternatives to get my password back. But to my suprise the station and mcDonalds wifi did not work as easily as expected and after over an hour looking, and my frustration growing to a true adicts level, of I need my internet now. I bought myself another 20 min dose, just to get my password. And this really felt like getting a short fix.And I think I really got to understand the parallele between drug adiction and internet adiction one bit more.

It felt at this point that “orange”, and the mini doses was only truely destined to true internet adicts, and that only people with this true adictive feeling would go and get a 20min fix for 3€, or 1h for 5€ like I did this morning.

Finding a solution to give internet access to all, like the other companies do, could be a solution to solving this internet adiction. But the internet adiction probably a much more complexe thing that just helping those in need. Since this internet adiction will just grow. People who break their computer, or find themself in remote aeres, with electricity shortage, most likely experience similar feelings of frustration.
And giving the dose to the people in need feels is only a short term solution. If someone was a drug adict, the solution wouldn’t be to give them their drug, it is far more complexe.
I beleive this is exeptional for me, I have an important issue I need to solve by tomorrow.
So this is exeptional, I think in my case, and beleive I can more or less cure myself. But I am sure not everyone has the same self control.

Looking at all the homeless people in Paris this morning really made me think.
All these people, probably just had a similar frustration point at some point at least when they lost their home or job. And at some point they lost control, and could not or would not ask for help. Either because they couldn’t or out of pride. And the longer they stay in this situation and the more difficult it is for them to solve they problem.

They probably all need to learn how to manage they money, or whatever has cost them so much. When you lose control of things, you tend to just spend money in a rediculous way, like I did this morning or this weekend, in a way that no one can really afford. And you will always have a company out there who is willing to help you, and take everything they can away from you in a legal way, but for a rediculous amount of money, just like “orange” has been doing it with me today.

I can see now, how information control could probably solve this. People tend to just not know how to count. They are overtaken but problems which they did not manage to predict. Everyone how has lost control has most likely fallen in this situation.

If we had a tool which could tell us, what is going to happen next, and which type of dangerous situation we are falling into (drugs, internet, television, gambling, food alcohol addiction), mesure this type of adiction or danger. And everyone woud have a grade of self control or loss of control for every dangerous situation. Then this could most likely instantly solve all these problems.

OK, I just though I should react on the post which I have to say. I found a little of trck from reality.

http://daxey.net/blog/phenomene-facebook-soyez-vigilants#cpreview

And this is the translation of the page:

http://translate.google.com/translate?u=http%3A%2F%2Fdaxey.net%2Fblog%2Fphenomene-facebook-soyez-vigilants%3Fcommented%3D1%23c000031&hl=fr&ie=UTF8&sl=fr&tl=en

This is my anaylsis:

Je voudrais juste revenir sur quelque point …

Le système de contagion virale :

-         L’utilisation des informations des emails, et du carnet d’adresse des comptes msn, et gmail, n’est autorisé que pour le parrainage de contact que l’on souhaite. L’utilisation frauduleuse d’un base de donnée de mots de passe de compte email, serait considéré comme criminel dans de nombreux pays. Ceci conduirait inévitablement à la fermeture, ou du moins au ralentissement de la progression d’adaptation de facebook dans de nombreux pays. Facebook, n’a donc aucun intérêt, à utiliser des pratique de ‘fishing’, qui est l’utilisation des mots de passe de site qui ne lui appartient pas.

-         Il y a déjà de très nombreux site qui cherche à concurrencer facebook comme tu l’expliques. Facebook n’a donc pas interet à utiliser de méthode illégale.

-         Le système viral a conduit à l’adaptation rapide du site par de très nombreux utilisateurs. Ceci est effectivement le point qui crée le buz (à la manière d’un scoop) et qui s’attenura une fois la contamination (communication du site) aura été faite et que la majeur partie de la cible des utilisateurs (15-35 ansutiliserons) le site.

La simplicité du site :

-         Il y a très peu de fonction utile, et le site n’est au final qu’un carnet d’adresse dynamique, qui se met à jour automatiquement, avec de très nombreuse application inutile mais divertissante qui s’attache à l’idée de base du site.

-         Ceci permet de garder contact avec les personnes que l’on rencontre au fur et à mesure que notre vie avance, et de ne plus perdre contact, contrairement au ancien réseaux de rencontre, qui n’ont qu’un potentiel de retrouver d’ancien amis. Celui-ci à dans l’esprit de les conserver.

-         Le site est également très simple à adopter, car simple à utiliser (à la manière de google) lorsque l’on arrive sur le site, il ne faut que 5 min, pour comprendre le fonctionnement.

-         Le coté internationnal, contrairement a « copain d’avant » ou « friendsreunited », qui était les précurseur des réseaux sociaux grand public. Ou myspace qui se restreint malheureusement aux artistes ou créateur.

-         Lorsque l’on rencontre quelqu’un, on ne donne plus un numéro de téléphone, ou un email, mais un simple nom permet de retrouver la personne. On est alors libre de partager les données que l’on souhaite (à la maniére d’un blog), et de revoir ou non les personnes que l’on ne connais pas très bien. C’est une approche douce à un site de rencontre.

Potentiel d’évolution du site :

-         L’esprit open sources et la simplicité de développement des extensions est également révolutionnaire. Aucune autre API, pour un réseaux sociale n’est aussi simple a utiliser. Et on n’est, malheureusement pour ton analyse, qu’au début de la migration de très nombreuse application utile sur facebook.

-         En gros tout ce qui est possible sur le net, presque toutes les applications windows/linux peuvent potentiellement être migrés en quelques jours sur facebook, tellement l’api est simple d’utilisation.

-         L’équipe de développement est également très dynamique, et apporte de nombreuses innovations régulière sur le cœur du système, qui reste très simple.

-         Ceci permet de présager que facebook, n’est pas prêt de disparaître, et va continuer, non seuelement à évoluer mais progresser dans son adaptation.

Enfin, je dis ça… je dis rien… :o)