With The Band

Alex and I have been dating two years today.

I made the WhyGoSolo Facebook Application, which just launched. If you join WhyGoSolo, you can have any events you create or sign up for show up on Facebook automatically, so you and your Facebook friends can know what you are up to.

We’re planning on adding a lot more functionality to it in the future. Our main focus is bringing what happens on the main site into Facebook.

If you haven’t heard of WhyGoSolo, they’ve built a social network targeted solely towards offline meetups - NOT FOR DATING! So if you have an extra ticket for a show, are new in town, or want to find someone to go golfing with you (my personal use case), you can post a listing on WhyGoSolo and connect with someone who will do it with you.

I’ve come to know the founder, Ann Bernard, and her CTO, Keith Casey really well over the past couple months - they are both amazing people and an inspiration for any entrepreneur. I really want to see them and WhyGoSolo succeed like everyone knows it can. They also blog everything.

I’m thinking about starting an open source project, based on a need I see. I’m working on fleshing out the idea a little bit more, and recruiting some local PHP developers I know to help me. I don’t have time for this, but who does?

One of the great things about developing third-party applications on Facebook and other platforms is that everything related to user authentication is handled for you.

$user_id = $facebook->require_login();

All a developer has to do is toss in that one line of code, and all user authentication is handled for you.

When building web applications, I’ve spent way too much time dealing with user authentication, profile registration, logging in, logging out, etc. There are lots of tutorials for this, but in the end, you always have to figure it out yourself.

I want to start an open source project that will create a dead-simple user management system, so all a developer has to do is call one line of code, and everything else will be taken care of for them.  I’m calling it the Picket Fence Project.

I also want it to be easily configurable, and it to allow you to log in (optionally) with:

• OpenID - which is way too complicated to implement on your lonesome
• Facebook - If they can log in with their Facebook account, great
• Anything else - whatever other auth systems become available.

Of course, if this is already out there, great. Just tell me
And if you are a PHP rockstar with some extra cycles, let me know.

Sorry for the week delay… hard to post when you’re in the middle of a mountain (literally).

WidgetDevCamp was awesome, thanks to everyone, especially Peter Corbett and Justin Thorp.

Here are my slides:

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I gave a presentation about Facebook development, and afterwards they asked to actually see an application being developed, so I did just that. The WidgetDevCamp application. I learned the hard way that Ubuntu and projectors don’t mix, but Joe LeBlanc was kind enough to lend me his Mac for the presentation. I feel like I’m going to end up going the Mac way soon.

Joe wrote about it. So did Peter. And Justin.

Jess3 posted some nerd-tastic pictures of me.

I found this breathtaking - not just that they endorsed someone else, but that Giuliani gets completely torn apart. These three paragraphs disassemble the image of Rudy as “America’s Mayor.”

Primary Choices: John McCain - New York Times

The real Mr. Giuliani, whom many New Yorkers came to know and mistrust, is a narrow, obsessively secretive, vindictive man who saw no need to limit police power. Racial polarization was as much a legacy of his tenure as the rebirth of Times Square.

Mr. Giuliani’s arrogance and bad judgment are breathtaking. When he claims fiscal prudence, we remember how he ran through surpluses without a thought to the inevitable downturn and bequeathed huge deficits to his successor. He fired Police Commissioner William Bratton, the architect of the drop in crime, because he couldn’t share the limelight. He later gave the job to Bernard Kerik, who has now been indicted on fraud and corruption charges.

The Rudolph Giuliani of 2008 first shamelessly turned the horror of 9/11 into a lucrative business, with a secret client list, then exploited his city’s and the country’s nightmare to promote his presidential campaign.

Let’s pretend for a second that the writers weren’t on strike, and we had decent TV on.

Watching TV is enjoyable, right?

It’s also fun to watch it with others. In college, we’d always get together to watch the latest episode, talk about it, etc. A shared experience is always better than sitting alone on your couch. But nowadays, I come home from work, and by the time I’m done with the gym, dinner, etc, the last thing I’m going to do is haul over to a friend’s place.

TV Chatrooms is my idea.

That sounds so AOL 1.0, but hear me out.

You’d go on, select your show (off of TV Listings), and be put in a chatroom (or you can set up private ones with your friends). So while the show is running, you can talk with others who are watching the same show.

Have to have some kind of on-demand watching capability for DVR, web video, etc.

Monetization: Advertising. Media networks can use it as a live focus group on their shows. Could be used as a way of interacting with your viewers (you could have writers + actors watching with them).

It looks like TV listings aren’t a free dataset (WTF?).

Whaddya think?

I’ll be at WidgetDevCamp this weekend.

I’ve planned to talk about developing Facebook applications and how they “work”, with a particular spin on developing widgets. I may also be collaborating with one or two other people on some other topics - we’ll see how that plays out.

I’ll post slides after.

If you are there, say hi.

362 days, 6 hours, 41 minutes.

In 362 days, we’re going to have a new president. We’re mired right now with candidates of both parties yammering about their platforms, attacking each other (since when did being called a Muslim get considered an insult?), and telling us what we think is important.

But what do you think is important? I was told of a site, On Day One, that asks you just that. People can submit their ideas for what they want the president to do right from the get-go. Pretty cool use of technology to assist politics - now if only someone would start paying attention.

Here’s what I wrote.

As I’m browsing through the many submissions, one thing really resonates. Almost all of them are related to undoing the actions of the past seven years. Did this happen during the clinton years? The previous Bush years? Have we ever, in the history of our nation, been so looking forward to the current president being out of here that we started trying to figure out who will replace him more than two years before?

362 days, 6 hours, 32 minutes to go.

I’m now #2 on Google for “zvi”. I can make it.

Many believe that Israel is a perfect country for testing electric cars, due to the short distances between major cities, its entrepreneurial prowess, and its unique geopolitical needs.

Will Israel be the first country to be fully electric? Israel is already leading the way in solar technology. Story here and here. See more about Project Better Place. I think this organization could have real power in the coming years.