Hans Across The Interwebs

Former TV-host and allround ‘famous ‘Internet Guy’ Chris Pirillo is starting a community CMS project based on Drupal, and I’m joining him. It’s going to be fun and interesting and it might just be another great equalizer in the social web space. But I also have some serious ponderings I’d like to explore. I can’t help it: I’m a project manager, so after seeing the opportunities comes managing the risks.

But first: “Drupal”?

Well, Drupal is

a free and open source modular framework and content management system (CMS) written in the programming language PHP. Drupal, like many modern CMSs, allows the system administrator to create and organize content, customize the presentation, automate administrative tasks, and manage site visitors and contributors. Although there is a sophisticated programming interface, most tasks can be accomplished with little or no programming. Drupal is sometimes described as a “web application framework,” as its capabilities extend from content management to enabling a wide range of services and transactions.Source: WikiPedia

Such a mouthful. Think of it as WordPress, LiveJournal, Joomla, or whatever Web CMS you happen to know. Drupal is like those, only more powerful because of a virtually limitless model for extensibility. And less powerful because of hardly any pre-configuration.

Drupal’s power has made it very attractive for power users, and less so for casual web builders. Just look at that description above. Great for geeks. If WordPress is a regular car, Drupal is a unicycle, bicycle, motorbike, car, truck, tank, trailer, houseonwheels. Most people just need a car. But not everyone.

I’m a big fan of Drupal. I created the Community website Wordsy using Drupal; my business site also runs on Drupal.
(I understand there may me some confusion as to why this blog is running WordPress. I have a very simple reasoning for this: I didn’t want to do any messing with it. It does what it does - giving me the power to actually blog instead of tinker.)

So what’s this project about?

So this Pirillo guy is also a big fan of the Open Source Web Site Management System called Drupal. On my TechCrunch feed I found an article about what he’s planning to do:

What he’s looking to achieve is delivering a multi-faceted, open source, easy to use end CMS. To break that down further: imagine installing a package on your web host that immediately delivered Digg style functionality, or photo sharing, a community forum, a blog, a social network ala Facebook, or even a clone of the growing number of FriendFeed style sites, or a combination of all or any of them. Here’s the important difference to existing solutions: imagine that you wouldn’t have to touch a piece of code to activate the various aspects. Imagine that a color change made in one module automatically applies across all module or as specified, without the need (again) to touch code.

I immediately emailed him of my wish to join and help and he twittered and emailed me back saying ‘great’ and redirecting me to a guy called Adam Kalsey and the site where we’ll be working together.

My thoughts on the project

I consider myself part of the project, but not yet empowered to freely edit the (wiki) front page of the project site…So I’m posting these as suggestions to myself and others.

1. Do not fork Drupal (agreed)
2. Forgo Glory. Instead make Drupal better. Where you can, involve and empower the existing Drupal Development Community.
3. Sure, creating an easier technical install (the ftp-way) is important, but also create a wordpress.org / .com ecology. The easiest install is a one click install. (I volunteer, just say the word).
4. One of the greatest barriers for a nice Drupal site is not the availability of modules or even installing them. It is the integration of different modules through css/dhtml/javascript/ajaxy wizardy (which completely eludes me too). We need to create great looking cool themes - NOT for a standard empty drupal install - but for completely configured and installed applied community concepts. A nice font, some colors and a sexy image header will NOT do.
5. Understand that any code you create needs to be maintained. New modules should be kept to a minimum, kept as granular as possible (to enable yet newer, as yet unenvisioned possibilities) and pushed into their own maintenance projects.
6. Google is also a big fan of Drupal. Can we do something with Google’s summer of code
7. Find other sponsors, big and small.
8. On the project site it is currently stated that ‘The hope is to integrate OpenSocial, OAuth, and OpenID.’ It is my opinion that these things are absolutely essential for a futureproof Community project. It could finally lead to being completely in charge of your own community profile through our project / Drupal. Let’s be ambitious here.

So those are my thoughts so far. More to come as they pop up.

What do you think?

British Social News network Bebo was bought this week by America Online. The big question on everyone’s mind: why? What is the added value for AOL? Where is the synergy?

AIM is still the biggest Instant Messaging Service in the US, but in a time of Twitter, Facebook and MySpace – what does that even mean any more? My guess is: not much. People seem to be moving away from IM, at least for non-work situations, and instead choosing their social network of choice. It’s no coincidence AOL is opening up their IM Service: there’s not longer anything to be gained from keeping their service closed. They’ve hit the ‘open up or become irrelevant within one year’ flag pole.

It’s my belief they are planning to roll out Bebo Services throughout their AOL membership, and to be sure this wouldn’t be a bad strategy. They won’t out-facebook facebook, but the web userbase is still growing into among more mainstream, less tech savvy people: AOL has a lot of those. So who knows where this is going. For sure, they have to try to activate and engage their userbase, because the alternative to do nothing and just give up. One big caveat of course remains: let’s hope they’ve wised up to web 2 point 0 and don’t kill this thing right away. Let’s face it, that’s not too far fetched.

There is one more perspective on this: why Bebo, and how did AOL manage to buy it? Jason Calacanis’ question on popular tech podcast TWIT keeps going through my mind. I’ll paraphrase, but he basically said that Bebo has been looking to be bought for more than a year. And when there’s Google and Microsoft with unlimited funds out there: why didn’t they buy it? I don’t know the answer, but if you do then please let me know in the comments.

The big buzz on the web for the past week has been Yahoo’s Digg Killer, aptly named Buzz. This news site – launched on february 25th - caught everyone unawares by suddenly launching droves and droves of traffic all over the web, impressing even the most unimpressable of bloggers, Techcrunch’s Mike Arrington: “it’s clear that a link from Yahoo.com blows away anything Digg or any other competitor can offer.”, said Arrington.

Salon.com and the Huffinton Post, to name a few, reported significant traffic increases in the many hundreds of thousands.

No Revolution here?

But Yahoo Buzz is no social news revolution, and it’s not bringing the Digg concept to the masses as some would have us believe.

Don’t think you’ll be posting your next blog post (probably something like “10 things to think about during a boring subway ride while picking your nose”) on Yahoo’s Buzz anytime soon: it is invite only. The stories therefore necessarily only come from bigger, more mainstream sites. And that leaves nothing but a watered down, castrated version of Digg, a digg.

That’s not to say this thing isn’t big, but Yahoo was always getting lots of traffic. Once they decided to point more links outward, any model they chose was going to creat massive amounts of traffic. As does Buzz.

Meanwhile, Microsoft still wants to buy Yahoo; Yahoo still doesn’t want to get bought but is in talks with Microsoft anyway; and Yahoo is trying to bring up its price by stating they will grow 73 percent in revenues in the next three years. They failed to indicate why they’d be able to do in the next three years what they were unable to do in the past three years. Maybe it’ll be through Yahoo Buzz.

I do know one thing: I just can’t wait for Buzz to get really big, so someone to think of a next generation app to replace it: The Buzz Killer! (ahem)

So what do you think about this Buzz thing?