…and more.
Update: this post contains mixed serious and not serious stuff which may be misleading to some. Adding some markers for readers convenience 
Update 2: we know baby’s father .
Apple’s always full of surprises
Apple, Podium and copyright trademark gone bad : How to make the coolest products in the mark for years and loose your dignity in 10 minutes. [serious]
Why create a community ?
Jono Bacon let slip out one of the most unfortunate statements of 2009:
Finally, irksome economic times have resulted in very real consequences for small businesses. Executives have been forced to re-assess how they can achieve their goals and ambitions with a more painful awareness of the bottom line. Multiple Marketing and Engineering people can be expensive, a lot more expensive than a Community Manager.
Ubuntu’s community manager clamorously fails at explaining the values of having a community, or opening up to a community. The intent was (probably) good, the concept expressed terribly bad. I won’t read his book .
[just making fun of Jono]
Coolest screenshot of the week
Lifehacker’s Kevin Purdy publishes a screenshots gallery of Ubuntu 9.04 beta. Amongst the boring stuff something really shines:
I like to think that was on purpouse. [not really serious]
Mono based Instant Messenger borns already orphan
Single developer launches a new Mono based instant messenger. The photos on the official website look very slick, and the website itself feels quite professional. Not your average alpha-project website.
I didn’t tried the program, but the website itself looks a bit of overkill for such a project in such early status.
I thought this could have been a project sponsored by Novell (which would make sense) but I couldn’t find any reference to them on the website. Also the footer it’s one you would expect from Firefox, rather than a single developer:
All text and image content on synapse.im, unless otherwise specified, is licensed under a Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States license. This does not include the Synapse name, logo, or icon. This does not include Synapse source code, which is licensed under the GPL v3 license. Website theme based on Colourise by Theme Lab and Search Marketing. Portions of this website were inspired by the Do and Banshee websites. Valid CSS and XHTML.
After a quick look to the source, and the rest of the website, I couldn’t find anything to determine whom the name, logo and icon belong to.
Madame, the baby is beautiful, may we ask who’s the father ?!.. [not ser... uhm...]
Update: Eric answered to that in the comments.
If you look at the ppa’s supplied on the download page http://synapse.im/download/ you can easily find out that it probably belongs to eric buttler https://launchpad.net/~firerabbit
Also, if you do a whois on his personal site’s domain you can see where he lives: http://whois.domaintools.com/extremeboredom.net (having domains kills your privacy, I hate it).
Similar info for synapse.im: http://whois.domaintools.com/synapse.im
And he’s using wordpress for both site’s, that’s why they look so nice (wordpress rocks
)
@Bert_2: agreed, wordpress rocks !
.
Domain registrar does not solve my curiosity about the logo and (trade?)name property
Hi Stefano,
Can’t help but think that although you bring some interesting things to the table you could have done without the attitude. I feel this borders on FUD, and we all love FUD don’t we?
@pel: well, yes, maybe. Writing in a foreign language makes it a bit difficult to modulate the tone. I definitely look forward to improve.
If you had checked out his github profile: http://github.com/FireRabbit, all your questions would have been answered.
@all: it’s not that I dislike Synapse. It seems quite nice. It just brought to my head some thought I then decided so share. Also, I don’t see how am I making any kind of fud, rather than – possibly – being victim of fud myself.
My take is you all are taking this thing a little bit too much seriously. I mean, I could have asked himself directly if it was that important. Instead, it’s just 2 paragraphs inside a round-up post.
@Hans: I don’t see any answer to my questions in such page. Could you cut-paste those answers here ?
Stefano,
I don’t understand what your issue is with my quote: my point is that from the perspective of many businesses and organizations you can see how they are justifying community managers now, with economic times being one of them. Of course, I am not saying that lower development and marketing costs are the reason to have a community manager, I am merely stating some of the justification that some businesses have. I think my previous writing has supported my perspective of the importance of community in an organization.
As for the book, well if you are going to base your perspective on just this, too bad. I hope you check it out in the future.
Jono
@Jono: that wasn’t mean to be a serious critique, just a funny quote. Really !
(same for the book)
Apologies
Hey everyone, I’m the creator of Synapse. I added a quick “Team” page, good suggestion. Of course, so far it’s still just me
http://synapse.im/team/
The copyright footer was copied from the Banshee website, which is a Novell project…maybe it’s too much. Any other suggestions for how to make the site seem less corporate?
As far as the site looking too nice for an alpha… I’ll take that as a compliment
.
Thanks for the feedback.