Ruby on Rails
So everybody’s talking about Ruby on Rails. My first glance, I didn’t like the language. And still, I don’t like the punctuation-heaviness of it. But that’s okay, I guess – it should make writing it easier, right? Fewer characters.

My problem is that I have nothing to actually use it on 🙁 My last big project, AppsLink or NetServOS or whatever you want to call it, took a lot out of me. Making optimizations that work for writing code rather than running it makes sense – computers are cheap. People are expensive. My main NetServ server cost me around $1.5 grand. Imagine if I needed twice the horsepower ($3g) but could have developed in half the time? Hell yeah I’d take that.

But what? In this Web 2.0 world, what do I need to write? I dunno. Nothing feels to me anymore like it needs to be written. I still like the one unified thingie that gets all of my stuff online – but – there’s really no market for it.

The problem with all of my ideas about server based computing is that a laptop is just better. Sure, backups suck, sure, laptops cost money, but in the end they’re a more compelling value than paying x$/mo. for services. Even for pretty small values of “x”. Hell, even for 0.

I just tried to give my seat to a lady on the train. and she said,”no, I get off, one stop – 71st and continental – thank you, though.” See? all of the good feeling of doing good for free!

What if I repositioned AppsLink-style services as a social networking thing? When I was first messing with it, the Weaselfolk did put files and links up to share – I could do that again.

See in one post I say mean things, the next I’m talking about social interfaces.

So, you could have multiple “circles” I thought – each of which can contain (non-exclusively) people. Maybe you can split circles up hierarchically too, I dunno. Or non-hierarchically.

And I guess then you can throw shit up there that everyone can look at. And maybe a “public” thing too.

Maybe different circles are federated server-thingees? Dunno.

The types of crap you’d put on there would be the usual – url’s, files, text, contacts, calendar stuff, etc.

The viral nature would/could be something where you can invite people to join and enter a circle.

And, let’s see, we need revenue model, funding, time, and it isn’t necessarily a good idea.

Anyways – you need to make new ‘circles’, invite people into them, give out read-only, read-write, and redistribution privileges – I imagine sharing out chunks of data cross-circle could be cool, right?

And it’d be a good use for RoR. Roar.

I haven’t posted this, I just let it sit in my Drafts folder for ages. So I’m posting it now.