31fps by Sam Purtill A blog about business, technology, and life

Hard Lesson Learned Today

I have been coding for like 10 hours off and on today... I ran into a problem very early on in my day; I had to change how I was grouping all of my users by. I knew this was going to be a bit of a problem to re-engineer, but it was going to be worth it in the long run. So I began to start hacking the django.contrib.auth files, and realized about an hour into it that this was a really stupid way of doing things since I want to be able to update my auth without screwing things up when Django has makes it's new releases.

So I did something really stupid. I got frustrated and just started going through deleting files that I had written that had hacked the Django auth system. Should have saved it in another directory for backup at least. Anyways, I lost like 4 hours fixing everything I had broken. In the end, it was totally worth it. I have a completely new way of organizing my users, and it is so much more efficient and is not as heavy on the database. I am already glad I had all this crap happen to me today, I learned a ton about Django from making a big mistake.

They say in a startup, "everything that can go wrong, will go wrong." Yep.

And two phenomenal essays by Paul Graham that I read today - Microsoft and Why to Not Not Start a Startup.

Facebook’s Share is going to become huge

I think the Share feature, which barely any of my 130 friends on Facebook use, has the potential to become one of Facebook's most important features. I didn't understand it until I downloaded the Facebook Firefox Toolbar. I started sharing cool things that I found on the internet three days ago, and now I'm hooked. The reason why I think this could become so huge is:

1) Ease of use - it takes two clicks.

Digg and Reddit take longer, especially if the user hasn't embedded a "digg this" link at the bottom of their page.

2) You are broadcasting your favorite links to the people you care about

On Digg and Reddit, it is the masses that you are publishing hte links to. If someone else likes it, good for them, but they probably aren't going to send you a message or leave you a "Wall Post" thanking you for the great link

3) Facebook is quickly becoming the biggest news publisher in the history of mankind

I have heard Zuckerberg talk about this a few times, and it completely makes sense. Facebook aggregates the information about your friends and delivers you a daily News Feed. What's going on with my friends is much more interesting than what is happening in the world, simply because it's my friends, and I care about them. Not to say that what's happening in the world isn't important, but receiving news about your group of friends every day is something special.

4) Lets you have your data in an RSS or Atom feed

Facebook doesn't allow most of it's data to leave the Facebook system. I watched Zuck take a question about this when he was on a panel. Someone asked him how they were moving towards supporting the open flow of information; letting all his data be exported. The guy sitting next to him from Myspace said, "well, there's the Capitalism problem with that model." I totally agree, and I don't think that Facebook should export all of its data. That would allow other companies to capitalize off of Facebook. But letting users export their Share feed is really important; it allows people to have "link blogs", so they can share their favorite links with their friends that aren't on Facebook. The quickest way to solve this problem is everyone to get on Facebook, which I hope will happen in the near future, but until then, letting users export this is huge in getting this feature popular.

I think it will take the Share feature a few more months, and maybe even a year or two, before it becomes one of the most popular feature on Facebook. But that won't stop me from publishing to it every day.

And Zuckerberg's asking price of $2 billion is extremely cheap. In fact, I hope he doesn't sell and goes public. I hope he shoves it in the face of Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo that they missed out on one of the best opportunities of the decade.

To think that Broadcast.com got $5.2 billion for their crap... And Mark is only asking $2 billion for the biggest news publisher in the history of mankind.

Long live Facebook.