This has been a really busy week. Last week I was on holiday, as you can tell
from my previous blog posts, I’m a Brit, who firmly believes in the EU, and so
was pretty distraught at the results of the referendum. During the vacation I
got involved in a number of Facebook groups who are attempting to help ensure
that the UK reconsiders leaving the EU. Its a long hard struggle, but I think,
if we can pull it off it will be the national good.

So this week has been spent trying to help some of the Facebook groups out. I’ve
written blog posts and offered my skill set to them. With the exception of a few
committed individuals, there appears to be a lot of good will, but a lack of
organisation. Coming from the professional world you can see this causing some friction between people. I guess that’s to be expected in the nature of these movements. It has been a learning experience for me.

In the midst of all of this, I returned to the day job. During my commute I
often listen to a podcast called Start Ups for the Rest of
Us. It’s a fantastically interesting
show and it tries to explain who two guys went from working full time as
employees to having their own companies and products. In “Launching 100
projects in One
Year”
Mike, one of the hosts, interviews Justin Jackson. Justin is in the middle of a
year long journey to discover what type of product and company he would like to
run. To do this he us experimenting with 100 startups during the course of a
year, that 2 or more releases every week! Justin’s called this project
“MegaMaker”. It was a really inspiring show, since then I headed over to his
podcast and started listening to the start of his journey, 6 months ago. I’m
hooked.

This has got me wondering about what I can do, what could I commit to delivering
in a weeks time.

Facebook Discoveries

Prior to all of my anti-brexitering engagement, and social media based protest
groups, I did not know about some of the features that Facebook has. A number
of the groups I’ve joined have a “files” section, where additional content is
stored and shared. My first thought was… “wait… Facebook supports files?!”.
Well yes, it does. It is a bit kludgy in user experience terms, but there are
files associated with groups. After learning how this worked, I met a lot of
people inside these groups who were confused when others started mentioning the
“files section”. Part of the problem is that inside the Facebook application,
which I’m guessing is how the majority of its users now access it, a Group’s
files section is hidden behind the group’s “information” button. You wouldn’t
find it, if you hadn’t been told that it existed.

As these groups start to organise themselves they start to look to move away
from just Facebook, and back out to more traditional channels, like Twitter,
blog postings (medium, wordpress), and from there to standard stand alone
websites. There are teething trouble during this transition as Facebook’s groups
don’t easily allow sharing of content, or integration with other products and
services. Here are some of the issues that I’ve encountered:

  • Pinning posts which shrink
    To try and address common issues, like letting people know where the files
    section is, or providing them with links to important documents, or
    important posts, we’ve tried pinning posts to the top of the group. They pin
    to their location ok, but the posts are always truncated, and have to be
    expanded to be read, and not everyone does that. It would be munch better if
    pinned posts, could be pinned open.
  • Group Authentication
    In a number of the groups we would like to securely share access to allow
    members of groups to access files on google docs, or post blog updates to
    Wordpress or Medium sites. Bu there is no way to do this. This then requires
    folks within the groups to try to create manual processes for creating and
    maintaining these external sites and services. This takes time and puts
    pressure on just one or two individuals in groups with thousands of members.
    It would be so much better if you could log into the external services, with
    your Facebook account, and because your a member of a predetermined Facebook
    group you get access to additional services. So as a member of one of the
    groups, I could log into, say WordPress and post new blog posts to my
    group’s wordpress site. But I’ve not found anything that would allow me to
    do that.

MegaMaker Idea: Group Blog Posting from Facebook to Medium / WordPress

This all got me thinking, is there something I can do to help here. What about a
web service that would log into Facebook, check a group and its files, find all
the files with names beginning with “blogpost_” and publish these to a Medium
or WordPress site? - could I deliver that in a week?

Waggling my Mouse in Frustration

I’ve a multi monitor, and laptop setup at work. In total I’ve three screens. It
is very handy, but have you ever lost your mouse pointer across three monitors?
- Damn it, it is annoying. The first thing everyone in the office does is to
“waggle” (shake) their mouse. The human eye spots movement quicker than still
images, so waggling the mouse pointer to spot movement is an undderstanable
reaction. But it seldom helps. I’ve made my mouse bigger, and added mouse trails
etc, but it doesn’t feel like it is helping.

MegaMaker Idea: Waggle My Mouse

I got the chance to try out Mac, and I lost my mouse pointer on that machine
too. However when I shook / waggled the mouse pointer… there it was! The
pointer grew in size as I continued to waggle the mouse. Now if only similar
functionality existed on Windows… Could waggling my mouse me another MegaMaker
idea?

The weekly Email update

I’ve really enjoyed the weekly update format used by Justin on his MegaMaker
podcast. I’m also a long time follower of a Twitter user called @Documentally aka Christian Pain. Christian writes a weekly newsletter in which he details what
he’s been up to each week. Now, he’s a much more varied life than me, with a job
that often takes him around the world. Not only do I enjoy his writing, but I
can see how after a few weeks of publishing his weekly thoughts he’s also using
them almost as a form of motivation.

Next Week

So, what should I work on for next week. I’m thinking I compare these two ideas
and select one to move forward with. I love both of them. In fact tonight I
spend a long while researching windows APIs for mice, and also looking at
Facebook APIs. I’ve also promise to help out with some of the 48% group.
Personally I’ve got some work to do on just tidying up the various web sites I
currently own, I’ve a growing bill from GoDaddy.. every time I get an idea I
purchase a domain… I don’t normally use it, but I have it…

Anyway,.. for now.. good night all.