—

If I were smaht and I worked at Microsoft, I might consider the freebie that Apple’s put out in Bootcamp as an opportunity to really stake my claim on the future. Think about it — the most proprietary hardware in the world can now run Windows. Boy I’d take that software — the Windows OS that is — and give it away for free.

Think about it — the browser market’s price was set at zero many years ago, leading to Microsoft’s monopoly. If you give your product away (as Google does) can it be considered a monopoly? Furthermore, the value of an OS, ignoring the cost of development, is rapidly diminshing as more apps migrate to the web.

So why not do something totally whack and just give it away, interupting the whole OSX onslaught? I mean, I’m not much good with math or economics, but could it really hurt at this point?

Slap my PowerBitch up

SlapBook Movie

I’ve been a fan of VirtueDesktops for awhile but had only used hotkey shortcuts to switch screens.

Apparently I was thinking way too Interface 1.0 because now you can literally “slap” your PowerBook to switch desktops. It uses the anti-drop to detect … what else? … sudden motion and relays that information to SlapBook.

Download it now and start expressing your frustration… productively!

A declaration of independents

Ben Metcalfe

And then there were three.

I’m tickled positive to announce the third addition to the Citizen Agency team: Ben “bullshit” Metcalfe. Tara’s got most of the details, but it’s important to spell out a bit about where we’re going with this thing we’re creating (because there’s where we are and where we’re going and yes, they are two different things)…

Ben will be filling out the technical side of Citizen Agency, serving as our Grassroots Architect & CTO (a title he chose for himself). This is, of course, in addition to my experience with product development, experience design and strategic visioning and Tara’s awesome chops at grassroots cultivation and community marketing.

From the standpoint of services offered, we’re aiming squarely at the next generation breed of startups and organizations that “get it” — or have fixed desires to “get with it”. Not only will we be literally building out tools to support startups, but we’re also going to be kicking off a developer network, spearheaded by Ben (owing to his experience at the BBC), along with other services and surprises along the way.

So there’s three of us so far, and I’d like to top it off with two more to round out the team, keeping it small but having enough talent to make a real difference regardless of the challenges that confront us. And what we’re doing long term (remember I mentioned where we’re going?) is building out the environment, the conditions, the tools and the situation that will allow us, as independents, to do the work that is most satisfying, most gratifying and most of all, most meaningful to us. This won’t happen overnight, but we’ve already got a good jump on the competition, and with tremendous advisors and an excellently small group of agents, I think we’re well on our way to setting the stage for the real Declaration of Independents.

Teh end of an era

Self-serving posers

You might have said it was a long time in coming, but today I moved all my shyte out of Teh Langpad and into the HorsePigCowFactory, thus bringing to close an era of debauchery and scantily clad Andyfaces.

A few select shots (there’s many more to choose from) from the period when Andy and I first moved in (only a little over two years ago! Oh, how the bubble has grown!):

Walt & Chris Group hug Niall is a happy boy Starfishing

Oh, and Tara totally rocks for helping me move not just today, but last month… in the midst of everything else that’s going on! Talk about all all-star girlfriend…! I would totally be living in my slobber and eating out of a can if it weren’t for her. Getting civilized, boys, it’s totally worth it. (But good luck finding one like I’ve got — they don’t come around but for once in a generation).

This is BarCamp (video)

This is BarCamp

Ryanne Hodson and Jay Dedman put together an awesome video that describes BarCamp — featuring campers Ryan King, Tantek Çelik, Tara Hunt, Enric Teller (who has his own video), Eddie Codel, Nima Dilmaghani and Jay Dedman. Footage was camptured at the recent BarCampSanFrancisco.

The video is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License.

The State of the Agency

Citizen Agency markIt’s been a mad dash these past couple weeks getting things sorted and started out on , the startup that Tara and I founded just about two weeks ago.

We’ve incorporated (in Delaware, of course), had four tremendous individuals agree to be our advisors, found a third agent, begun to work on the underpinnings of our Developer Network (aka CA DevNet) and already have signed up a number of clients and a very cool project that we’ll be talking about over on the new blog (working on a theme for that as well). Oh, we found a lawyer (as Ted said, the only thing that still hasn’t changed in business).

We’ve had some help with our identity and are still working out the kinks, but the business cards that we produced a day before seem to have gone over pretty well so far.

So there’s much more to come and much more to get ideas and advice on, but at least the foundation is beginning to solidify… oh, and if you’re not sure what we’re going to do, y’know, to make money and stuff, well, hold tight, we’re still figuring that one out too. “Go after what you love doing and the rest will follow” seems to be our operating assumption at the moment. We’ll see how it goes.

TechMeme hacked… again!

It’s fun to get the echosphere to play together, isn’t it?

So when Chris gets up to kick off Gnomedex and asks us to link to this post to upset the TechMeme robots, well, I have to call party foul and mention that this party trick isn’t exactly new.

In fact, it was done last year, and there was even a screencast produced explaining how it works.

If you’re going to hack the echosphere’s radar, man, at least provide proper attribution!

What’s next for Firefox advocacy?

Photoshop Tennis for SFX Theme with JoshI can’t help but notice that not much has happened with Spread Firefox since I left, even though my good friend Jamey continues to feed me mockups and possible redesigns of the site (note: the photo at right isn’t Jamey’s work but an early redesign attempt between me and Josh Jarmin).

And though the Firefox Flicks Campaign was a considerable success, it didn’t seem to arouse the same kind of passionate support that the New York Times ad campaign did in its time (though it did drive a considerable amount of traffic). It seemed isolated and somewhat self-congratulatory… preaching to an audience that was already aware of and promoting the open source browser, rather than those who wouldn’t be able to separate the “Internet” from “MySpace” from “the blue E”.

And don’t get me wrong, this isn’t a criticism so much as something I’ve been stewing on for some time, trying to figure out, y’know, what comes next?

When I was at (and I continue to champion this idea mind you) I wanted Flock and Firefox to team up — to work together to show their collective usefulness across a wider and more diverse community — one that a single browser simply wouldn’t be able to appeal to as effectively as two designed with different intents. In fact, with Internet Explorer 7 on the horizon, incorporating many of the features that have set Firefox apart, I wonder whether either Flock or Firefox will have much of a chance at widespread adoption without a concerted effort to spell out more clearly the benefits of both platforms — and how developers can leverage their work across both simulataneously.

This is the challenge as it stands and as I see it. As the features that formerly set Firefox apart become standard fare in modern browsers, one way to form the question is to consider whether Firefox has served its purpose — causing Redmond to wake up and to change its flagship browser. If so, then ok, keep building it out and improving it, but tell the fans that they can go home until next season.

If the fight or the battle or the … non-violent conflict … is only beginning, then I guess I’d like to see a clear declaration of intentions. I’d like to see Mozilla stand up and declare the principles, ideas, dreams and ambitions that set it apart and keep its proponents up at night, dreaming of ways to get the story out there to an ever-widening audience. Anything less, and the juggernaut will bowl us over, diminishing the effects of the incredible achievements that have been made in the past two years. I’m looking at this as a ten-year struggle — as a hugely powerful Hydra that must be faced on each branch, what I’m talking about is the future of the web and the tools that we will use to navigate, explore, publish and own it with. In order to stay in the game and continue to participate in the conversation (or ever set the tone), we need a strategy, we need a plan, we need people and we ought get started now.

I’m open for ideas, have a few of my own, but mostly just want to know: What’s next for Firefox advocacy?