What is gdgt?

Wait, you haven’t heard of gdgt.com? One cool thing about joining gdgt (pronounced “gadget”) is that most of my friends have already heard of it. It’s a social network for consumer electronics; a place where people can create lists of the gadgets they have/had/want, and find out more about those gadgets. With the latest redesign there’s a focus on Q&A and Reviews (who do you trust more than your friends?). You can ask or answer questions like “Should I Switch to the Verizon Iphone?” or “Is Netflix Worth it on the Wii“, or read reviews on gadgets your thinking about buying. I’ll let Veronica take it from here…

Why the change?

I’ve always wanted to work for a company who builds a product I use. Haven’t you ever used a product and been like “damn, I wish it had this feature!”? Or better yet, if your a developer “I wish I could just code this feature for them!” (god bless API’s btw). If you can find a company to work for that’s building a product you would have liked to create anyway, something you can be passionate about, then work doesn’t feel like work any more.

That’s what drew me to gdgt, I used the site since they were in beta. I even went to their launch party in ’09 (watch TWIT at gdgt Launch Party) – I just so happened to be interning in SF at the time and got a chance to attend with my friends Frank Leng (checkout his blog), Jaime Wheeler and Tom Hill (check out his site RigSmith). The event went over so well by the way, it spawned a whole events side of the business (upcoming events on the gdgt Blog).

Anyone who knows me knows I’m pretty addicted to social networks, I’m on just about all them (or so my friends tell me) and have always been fascinated by the social web, so being a developer, getting the chance to help develop a existing social network seems like a great fit.

Joining the Startup Scene

I’ve always wanted to join a startup, it was one of my main reason’s for moving from Canada to SF, and this is the time in my life to do it (I’m young, no wife, no kids, no major debts, less risk). I’ve worked for corporations all my life (Web Developer at QuinStreet, Data Warehouse Architect at IBM, SharePoint Developer at Cognos), all jobs I’ve been lucky enough to say I’ve enjoyed and learned a lot from, which I’m thankful for and is often not the situation when working for 500+ employee corporations. I honestly don’t believe I’d be able to say I’m at where I am today without what I’ve learned at those companies. In particular I learned a lot while I was a web developer in the education vertical at QuinStreet (they run hundreds of high profile websites like schools.com, worldwidelearn.com and onlinedegrees.com), both from the projects I got to work on (including a new found love for PHP Framework CodeIgniter) while I was there and the amazing co-workers I now consider friends.

My parents thought I was crazy at first, “why would you ever give up a reliable job at a successful corporation?!”, but they came around and my family’s been supportive of “going after your dreams”. They understand times have changed since they were my age, it’s not about the “9 to 5 and get out” lifestyle anymore, there’s less of a bridge between your work and personal life now-a-days, so you better find a job you enjoy.

I’m going to get the chance to work some amazing people; founders Ryan Block (former Editor-in-chief of Engadget) and Peter Rojas (Co-founder of Gizmodo and Engadget), and a team of great developers and designers.

How It Happened

Now here’s an story for you; an example of how people can end up getting jobs in our industry has changed. Like I said before, I was already a user on gdgt and I was getting a lot of emails (gdgt sends you an email when one of your friends does something on the site like asks a question – it’s actually a great feature), so I posted in the feedback section that it would be great to have settings for bulk email notifications, like once a day, or once a week (quite an entertaining post now).

Ryan replied to my feedback, that night, at like 11pm (how many founders do you know are responding to feedback at 11pm on a Saturday?) and said it was on the roadmap “but we’re constrained by how hard it is to find awesome developers to add to the team. Did I mention we’re hiring? Even Canadians, Mitchell!”. I was impressed, that he was willing to do a little background check on me had caught my attention. Ryan pulled my email out of the system (not sure if they’re allowed to do that, but I won’t tell Ryan ) and contacted me directly. I fired off a link to my LinkedIn resume, we had a phone interview and an in-person interview with the team, and the rest ladies and gentlemen is history.

I’ll keep you guys up-to-date of course, follow me on twitter for more real-time posts, and don’t forget to add me on gdgt.com!

My sister Sheri-Lee McKenna recently helped publish a magazine with some breath-taking visuals of PEI for Prince Edward Island Tourism Advisory Council’s (PEITAC) new tourism strategy – Strategy 2015. Check out the rest of the visuals and the entire magazine at www.peitac.com/2015.

This year, I’m giving my birthday up. I’m turning 23 years old, and instead of asking for gifts, I’m asking for $23 or more (or less, even just $5 because every donation counts!) from everyone I know. It’s not going to me, though. All of it is going to build freshwater wells for people in developing countries.

With the help of charity: water, one of my favorite charities, and one that I’ve been following for years, I’ve started a birthday campaign where I’m asking people to donate for my upcoming birthday on August 6, 2010. Charity:water is a non-profit bringing clean and safe drinking water to people in developing nations. You can check out my charity:water page at mycharitywater.org/23forMitch.

For my 23rd Birthday
I’m asking you to donate $23
So we can raise $2300
To give 23 families clean drinking water
That’s clean water for almost 123 people!

Most of us have never really been thirsty. We’ve never had to leave our houses and walk 5 miles to fetch water. We simply turn on the tap, and water comes out. Clean. Yet there are a billion people on the planet who don’t have clean water. It’s hard to imagine what a billion people looks like really, but one in six might be easier. One in six people in our world don’t have access to the most basic of human needs. Something we can’t imagine going 12 hours without.

They are very real, and they need our help. They didn’t choose to be born into a village where the only source of water is a polluted swamp. I invite you to put yourself in their shoes; imagine carrying 80 pounds of water in yellow fuel cans every day, digging with your children in sand for water, or lined up at a well waiting 8 hours for a turn.

Could you imagine what it would look like if we had to gather dirty drinking water right here in our cities in North America? It might look a little bit like this…

Now, make a decision to help. It’s not a grand solution or billion dollar scheme, but instead, simple things that work. Things like freshwater wells, rainwater catchments and sand filters. For about $20 a person, we know how to help millions. Start by helping one.

Check out this inspiring video on how charity:water started, and how birthday campaigns came to be…

You can read more about the founder Scott Harrison and how Charity:water got started here. They recently made it to the $2 million mark but still desperately need our help to reach their goal. They supported haiti (for a 2nd time!) after the disaster that struck them. It’s a charity that Adrian Grenier (Vincent Chase, Entourage), Alyssa Milano, and many others support. They have even leveraged the power of twitter by starting Twestival in 2009, an annual fundraiser for charities hosted all over the globe, and raising $250k+ that year for drilling wells in Ethiopia.

One of my favorite qualities of Charity:water is their ability to inspire others (hell, they inspired me to do this didn’t they?), with their powerful imagery, well designed ads, and creative campaigns. For example, check out this powerful promo video featuring “Time Bomb” by Beck which has some pretty staggering facts in it.

I implore you, please donate, and better yet, give up your birthday this year, start your own charity:water campaign, I’ll be the first to donate.

The end of a gaming era. Six years ago, Bungie showed off Halo 2 for the very first time. Let’s see… 2003, that would make me 15! In February 2010, Microsoft had announced that they would be dropping online support for the multiplayer aspect of Halo 2 and that day finally arrived on April 15, 2010.

Halo 2 was basically the key reason Patrick and I went halves on a xbox back in the day (halves? hilarious, I know). Halo 2 was how I spent much of Grade 11 and 12 back in high school. I’m just now realizing this is probably the videogame I’ve played the most… in my life. I remember often pulling all-nighters with Jimmy, Spencer, and Matthew as we “schooled N00BZ with our L33T SKILLZ” into the wee hours the next morning.

In honor of the game, on April 15 9pm-2am EST developers at Bungie went online to play a couple final rounds with the public, to give it a fitting send off. “See you on the battlefield, Seventh Column. One last time”.

Halo 2 was the most popular video game on Xbox Live, and even held that title until the release of Gears of War for the Xbox 360 nearly two years later. By June 20, 2006, more than 500 million games of Halo 2 had been played and more than 710 million hours have been spent playing it on Xbox Live, and five million unique players on Xbox Live. Halo 2 is the best-selling first-generation Xbox game with 8.46 million copies sold worldwide, with at least 6.3 million copies sold in the US alone.

Check out this post where Bungie asked some of their key developers from Halo 2 to share some of their fond memories of the game.

Montages such as the one below have been cycling around the interwebs where gamers have put together some of their favorite memories from the game.

WordPress 3.0 is projected to be released on May 1st, the same day as WordCamp San Francisco. Since I recently moved to San Francisco, I’m hoping to attend again this year!

Merge of WordPress + WordPress MU

WordPress MU is a similar platform to WordPress except it allows users to run multiple sites under one installation. WordPress.com is running on WordPress MU code base. Founder Matt Mullenweg announced the merge news during WordCamp San Francisco 2009 (I was there!)

What does this mean for you?

You can now have multiple sites in one installation. Say you have 10 different sites, you don’t need 10 different installations of wordpress. Particularly handy when upgrading. WordPress MU users will now be able to use all WordPress.org plugins without hacking them.

Search Across All Your Sites – If you do decide to have numerous sites under one install, cross network search would be a very handy outcome of this, it’s not in the core yet but it may be in the near future. You can use the plugin to make it work for now.

Preview:

Custom Post Types

This feature will allow you to have different type of posts for example Portfolio listings, Products, and then Normal blog posts. Combining Post Types and Taxonomies will make WordPress a much more robust CMS option. Check out First Impression of WordPress Post Types by Frank of WPEngineer for more on this.

Better Navigation Menus

Custom Woo Navigation will be included to the core in this release in order to allow for better menu management. This menu system has the drag and drop ease of the widget management screen. It also allows the ability of re-ordering, along with submenus, and hiding specific Pages or Categories from the menu altogether. Kudos to Woo Staff for contributing this system to the core.

Preview:

New Default Theme 2010

Bye Bye Kubrick Theme! Welcome 2010. WordPress 3.0 will come with a new default theme known as 2010. From this year on, the goal is to have a new theme for every year! Wondering what the new 2010 theme would look like? (Just click on the image below to see the live version.)

Custom Background Support

Kind of a twitter-background like feature. Support for custom background can be called by adding this line in your functions.php: add_custom_background();

You’ll see a screen in your admin panel to upload a custom background image which will replace the default grey background (only works on 2010 theme & others that support this feature for now).

Author Specific Templates

In WordPress 3.0, you can create specific templates for each author. The function get_author_template(); has been expanded in wp-includes/theme.php.You would be able to name files like author-syed.php.

Ability to Choose Username When Installing WordPress

As of now, WordPress automatically assigns the first user with the username “admin”. If you have read any articles on WordPress security, you know the importance of this feature. Now the hackers cannot guess your username because it will no longer be “admin”.

Canonical Plugins

Have you used a plugin that you loved, and the author stopped providing support. No bug fixes, no upgrades, and the plugin eventually breaks in newer versions. Canonical plugins are developed by a community instead of one developer, so if one person steps down, the plugin does not die. Using the open source development model basically.

[via wpbeginner.com]

Today Google announced a new “social” part of Gmail called Google Buzz. I find this a strange coincidence after just last week I was discussing if we should just give up on Google as a “Social Entity” – turns out, Nope.

Features:
1. You will automatically follow the people you e-mail and chat with on a regular basis.
2. You can share content from around the Web, including YouTube, Picasa, Flickr, and Twitter.
3. You will be able to share your thoughts in a public way and in a private way.
4. You will get social updates in your inbox.
5. Google will help you find only the stuff that matters by recommending popular content.
6. The mobile version of Buzz can figure out where you are and show you nearby buzz posts.

Another Friendfeed Clone

It’s a little surprising to see how identical Buzz is to FriendFeed. There’s still a lot of users using Friendfeed (and one of my favorite social networks), but since being acquired by Facebook it’s not keeping up with integrating new services or innovating. The Buzz team has also been able to lift some of the best ideas from FriendFeed. You can “like” items, comment on them, and you can see who liked a post. Which looks identical to FriendFeed’s implementation of this feature (see RWW‘s screenshot below).

Sadly Buzz is missing one of Friendfeed’s best noise cancelling features where you can ‘hide’ certain types of posts. This features is quite handy if you don’t wanna see someone’s picasa posts, a custom RSS feed, or a noisy twitter user for example, without having to necessarily un-follow them.

Another vital Friendfeed feature Buzz is missing is Groups (previously known as Rooms). With Friendfeed Groups you can see updates related to specific topics of interest to you. For example, one can follow people posts related to Apple, Web Design, Google, Facebook, etc. This includes posts from people you aren’t currently following. This means 1) You’ll be able to find new friends of common interests and 2) When you post to a group, people who aren’t following you (but are following that Group) will see your post as well, giving your post more exposure. In Buzz, you can post to a group of friends you create in a friends list, but you can’t follow other people friends lists, so Buzz is missing out on this great social feature.

Focus on Mobile
Unlike Friendfeed however, Google Buzz seems to have a focus on mobile.

Google Reader

Just last week I was chatting with my good friend Dylan Blanchard (over a game of pool) about Google’s failed attempt at making Google Reader social. It’s almost impossible to build a conversation around the items you share. But Buzz might give Google Reader the social features we’ve all been waiting for.

Anything you share in Reader will automatically be posted to Buzz. Comments are even shared between both products, so you can view and participate in the conversation wherever you’d prefer.

A shared item in Reader (background) and Buzz (foreground)

And don’t worry, you don’t have another list of friends or followers to manage. The people you follow in Reader are the same people you follow in Buzz – those you’ve already chosen to follow in Reader, plus the people you email and chat with the most in Gmail.

via The Official Google Reader Blog

Open Standards

Some great news for the other lifestreaming and open standard fanatics out there…

Over the next several months Google Buzz will introduce an API for developers, including full/read write support for posts with the Atom Publishing Protocol, rich activity notification with Activity Streams, delegated authorization with OAuth, federated comments and activities with Salmon, distributed profile and contact information with WebFinger, and much, much more.

via http://code.google.com/apis/buzz/documentation

The Flaws

1. One major mistake I believe is that they’re introducing Buzz as part of Gmail. If they introduced it as it’s own service at http://google.com/buzz , and adding it into your gmail was just a feature, it would be far more successful.

2. Although most people have a Google Account, this will not be useful for the many people who don’t use gmail for their email client. As well, these users will also have minimal existing google contacts.

3. This could also be quite annoying for people who try to keep social networking noise separate from email, especially with all the emails that people have cc’ed you on a post, liked or commented on one of your posts. (Edit: This can be solved with the use of a Gmail filter)

4. For those who use gmail for professional and business connections, they may need to have a different GMail account for their social connections. (Buzz uses Google Contacts where you can define various friend lists for services like GTalk & Reader, so Google may be able to solve this problem that way).

Have you ever wondered what goes into the making of a superphone? Some products are in development for years before actually hitting a retail store. Google filmed a series of short films documenting the making of the Nexus One on the Nexus One YouTube channel where they shared an episode a day (last one posted yesterday). They detail the process of building a cell phone which include Concept & Design, Display & 3D Framework, Testing, Manufacturing, and Nexus One: Day One. Ironically, to me, the videos have a little bit of a Apple-esque feel to them.

The following documentary from 2000 is about the open-sourcing of the Netscape code base and the Mozilla project which gave birth to Firefox. This played a crucial part of the Internet’s history and I highly recommend you watch it and share it with your friends. The copyright to the film is now available under Creative common licence vers. 3 for anyone to download and use as they wish.

The Film
Code Rush. The year is early 1998, at the height of dot-com era, and a small team of Netscape code writers frantically works to reconstruct the company’s Internet browser. In doing so they will rewrite the rules of software development by giving away the recipe for its browser in exchange for integrating improvements created by outside unpaid developers. The fate of the entire company may well rest on their shoulders. Broadcast on PBS, the film capture the human and technological dramas that unfold in the collision between science, engineering, code, and commerce.

The Project
Under the creative commons license, the producers of Code Rush, which aired in 2000, are making available all the original footage shot for the film, over 100 hours, along with searchable transcripts.

Via: clickmovement.org

I thought it was pretty cool when I found out the United States Department of State had choosen to use open source lifestreaming service Sweetcron to power a collective Haiti news site.  The site is hosted on their Office of Innovation Labs site at http://lab.officeofinnovation.org/haiti/.

As some of you may know, I used Sweetcron to power my lifestream on my website. There had been some controversy recently when the founder of Sweetcron decided to switch his website over to a Posterous blog.  Many worried about the fate of Sweetcron, but that’s the great thing about open source projects – anyone can pickup the code and run with it. Even though Yong Fook is busy pursuing other ventures, the Sweetcron forums are still active and a lot of people are still developing on it on their own. Some are even talking of creating a fork with several of the dedicated developers.  That’s why, as someone who’s invested in the open source project, it’s exciting to see new and creative ways people have found to use Sweetcron.

I’ve actually been thinking about this a lot recently. Came across this article from the99percent.com when Thor Muller (Get Satisfaction – @tempo) tweeted about it (I’ll be reading a lot of articles from this site if their anything like this one). Seems our attention span grows smaller and smaller as we get spread thinner and thinner across the various internet activities; instant emails to our phones, thousands of tweets, thousands of blog postings, text messages, social networks, etc. We begin to only skim through articles, never get around to doing that programming, put off writing that blog post, and offline hobbies get pushed off until we “have time”. You get a constant feeling that “there’s something going on online that your missing out on”.

Guess the lesson is to limit your internet activity around your goals and remember to get offline and step back from it all every once in a while.

Let me begin by saying that I love the Internet more than anybody I know. I love that it keeps me connected, I love that it keeps me informed, and most of all, I love that it helps me blur the lines between business, pleasure, and complete mindlessness. Yet, after a veritable orgy of web browsing over the holiday break, I began to debate the pros and cons of unfettered access. While I was constantly searching for ways to become more efficient at work, I was idling away my free time with trivial eBay pursuits and constant email monitoring. Could an online cleanse be in order?After some soul searching, I decided to take a two-week leap into digital darkness – limiting my internet, TV, and cell phone access to working hours. Here, I document the journey – the acting out, the anger, the eventual acceptance – and a few realizations I had along the way. Not surprisingly, it reads a bit like the journal of a recovering addict…
 
DAY 1: Begrudging Compliance
I awoke in the morning slightly annoyed that I was unable to view those 43 pending emails that glowed red on my iPhone as I was turning off my alarm. But, alas, I had a new life to live! While walking to the subway, I felt great about an undistracted opportunity to soak up the sights. I actually noticed things I had failed to see on the route I’d been walking for a year and a half. Not a bad start.
 
As the day wore on, I frantically switched between my Google Reader, personal mail, IMs, and Twitter, and pit of dread began to settle in my stomach. What exactly would I do after left the office? And how could I possibly leave all of this work unfinished?
 
The evening seemed to drag along in slow-mo. Although I had a stack of books at my disposal, I was unable to focus on them. I flitted between several activities: rearranging the apartment, dipping into magazines, and exercising. None of them seemed satisfying or complete. Had years of blog-reading ruined my attention span?
 
DAY 2: Depression & Defiance
On the second morning, I became quite frustrated by the fact that I couldn’t access my computer for simple, non-browsing reasons. Needing to grab a document I had recently digitized, the only thing I could do was lug my laptop into work and view it at my desk. That cool new band my Dad told me I had to check out? Ditto on the lugging. Computers and the Internet are useful, important tools. This we know. I start to feel like my experiment has veered from an exercise in self-control into extreme Ludditism.
 
The evening was the worst. I pouted, I whined, and I’m fairly certain that at one point, I cried, “A life without the Internet is not worth living!” Instead of doing anything offline, I settled for bed at 9:30pm.

While I was constantly searching for ways to become more efficient at work, I was idling away my free time with trivial eBay pursuits and constant email monitoring.
 
DAYS 6-8: Acceptance & Insight
As my withdrawal symptoms started to subside, I settled into a nice pattern of dinner-workout-household project-reading during. I hadn’t been this productive or at ease in years.

Even so, I concluded that a tendency to procrastinate is not a symptom of Internet use. While technology can certainly amplify and enable a tendency to dawdle, every online time-waster has and equally effective offline cousin. Gossip? Grab an US Weekly. And what’s the true difference between a water cooler conversation and an IM session?

The trick is to identify which activities are truly important to you, and proactively shape your schedule around them. Then the activities that are not truly fulfilling just fall away. Admittedly, this becomes much easier when the lure of instant gratification on the Internet is off limits.

DAYS 8-10: Backsliding & Disillusionment
Since I’ve decided that weekend access is OK, I literally spring out of bed on Saturday morning to see what digital glories await. TV on, Internet up. Puzzlingly, I become bored after 45 minutes. Suddenly, I have begun to analyze my surfing tendencies. Is this information really enriching my life? Do I need to spend four hours searching for the perfect shoes, or can I settle on 30 minutes? The rest of the weekend was spent disconnected.
 
With the fortnight nearly complete, I’ve become much better at delegating my work hours. Now, I’m less apt to waste time, and I’m settling into a zone of focus more naturally. I’ve also become much more exacting in my personal communications – my Twitter feed was refined and useless newsletters were unsubscribed from.
 
I found that I was spending an inordinate amount of time on things that didn’t seem important when processed in small doses, but became a substantial time-suck when aggregated. I’ve definitely become more aware of what truly requires attention urgently, and increasingly, it isn’t much.
 
DAY 14 (and beyond): Surrender
As I wound the experiment down, I found myself dedicated to pursuing a myriad of new activities, and pleasingly I was able to devote attention to all of them. Being mindful of really investing yourself in whatever you are doing at that moment – whether it’s checking emails, reading a book, or lazing around on the couch – is a huge step. When you’re doing something, do it fully, and when you need to move on, do it consciously. You’ll be surprised by how little you “need” to complete a particular task at a particular time. I’ve found that most of the deadlines and time constraints I had been stressing about were pretty arbitrary.
 
It’s hard to imagine another two-week experiment that would offer so many lessons. A quick summary of the most notable revelations:
 
TAKEAWAYS:
 
1. Attention is elastic. Spending all my time online seemed to have narrowed my attention span. When I started spending more time away from my computer, I found I could focus for longer periods of time more easily.
 
2. Computers are actually quite useful tools, when used moderately and sparingly. As with any relationship, absence makes the heart grow fonder. When that relationship is with a computer, I would say absence makes the time spent together grow more productive.
 
3. The Internet doesn’t waste time, people do. Procrastination knows no bounds. It’s just as easy to waste time offline as on. However, I did find myself more likely to pursue enriching activities (e.g. reading, exercising, and catching up with family) when forced to spend time away from my desk.
 
4. Not everything is urgent. Connectedness helps breed a constant sense of urgency. When you take some time “off,” you realize that many of those pressing items can, and will, wait.
 
5. Mindfulness is important. It’s easy to drift through your workday (and beyond), sailing along on a steady stream of emails, web links, and phone calls. Remember that you call the shots, and spend your time (consciously!) according to what you want to accomplish.