Roll-on the new year!

No rest for the wicked

November has been another busy work month and I'm loving it.

I've got an agency contract that will keep me working until the end of the year and the project-based work has started to ramp up - to the point of having to turn people away (which I'm strangely not too happy about).

My plan was to take January "off" whilst I attend to the business areas of my new venture (rather than the fee-earning type of work) but that's not looking likely now; instead, i hope it's going to be the start of being "self sufficient" with project work.

Rooming with Carsonified

January will also see me 'moving into an office' in Bath! I was surfing some old bookmarks last week when I ended up on Ryan Carson's old blog, Carsonified (and now the new brand for his company). It turns out that they're moving into some new offices and have additional space (smart move) which they're going to be renting out, on a per-desk basis.

As I understand it there are 7 desks in the office available (of which I will be one) which are rented out on a flexible monthly basis for a very reasonable price. I'm not sure yet what the take up is like but it would be great if it creates a little hub of local freelance talent.

Professional Development

I just booked in two MySQL exams (dev1 + dev2) for the 18th of January. I've been meaning to take these for a while and booking the dates will give me a target to plan my study/revision against.

I've been looking at some other training courses (in the area of agile project management) but I think i'll hold-fire on those until february/march time. From what i've seen it's going to be a reasonable large chunk of change (~£1,000) but it's an area that I think would be worth investing in (I don't think it's the sort of thing you can "just pick up" from reading books / the web).


New Brand

I've set the business up as a Limited Company (for some tax and contract issues); but have been training with a temporary name - Agile Web Development Ltd. I needed the company setup fast and didn't want to rush the branding / picking the right name.

I was walking home one night after work and kept going over the ideas / concepts of what I want to do, when a possible name hit me: "Pluggable".

It fits in with the idea of writing nice modular code and also with offering "pluggable" services: ie I plug-in to my client's company / development team. At first I dismissed it, as surely it's obvious and the domain name etc will have gone...

... only to find that Pluggable.co.uk was available (oddly, the typo plugable.co.uk was not) I snapped up the domain and slept on the idea.

It's been a week now and I still like it: It's a single word, kinda fun to say, it describes my service and the domain was available. I've got a graphic designer friend working up the identity now, and I'm excited about trying to build a brand around it :-).

Bring on 2008, I can't wait!

Facebook gets gangbanged?

Is the enemy of my enemy, my friend?

The last week has been pretty amazing with Open Social leaking and quite coincidental with my last post. I'm still trying to figure out the implications, but watching The Other social networks ganging up together to put pressure on Facebook is fascinating.

From a developer point of view it's great but I don't understand what Google gets out of it (apart from it being ANOTHER service that they supply); what's the revenue model? How does it affect Facebook - does it even affect them at all?

With the W3C there is a (pretty much) altruistic motive behind their standards - but at $700/share I don't have that confidence with Google!

Certainly for "other" social networks joining up with Open Social is pretty much a no-brainer: they're playing catch-up with the whole developer-platform thing and it's very unlikely that any of their own propriety APIs would gain any traction. Even if they did give it a go history as shown us the inevitable angst that would have followed (see last post); so in that respect all Google has done is had the foresight and position to jump forward a couple of years and unify everyone with a common standard right from the start.

The more I think about it the more it seems that The Others aren't ganging up and circling Facebook like a pack of sharks looking to take bites out of them; instead they are banding together like a shoal of baitfish - for survival.

Not being open and allowing developers in will kill off their services: they won't have "the cool new apps" running on their networks and would have to compete with Facebook's huge mind-pool of independent developers (and not forgetting the long-tail that will inevitably form). Users would migrate AWAY from the likes of LinkedIn, to Facebook, where their data and network can be exploited and enhanced by the application developers (this is reported to be happening already).

Now they at least stand half a chance of standing up against The March of Facebook. Even if Facebook don't get on board with Open Social I bet that us developers would still write apps for them: one for Facebook, one for Open Social. But over time, would Facebook feel the pressure to fall into line?