What I Learned on My Summer Vacation
I am just returning back from a summer holiday (delayed by 4 days by a bad car in Indiana) and it feels like a good time to review what I learned this summer.
For me this was the summer of APIs and Facebook. We have been working to build our new Swift service for conference organizers and publishers. You can read about it here. As we were working on the user interface, Jaime Chamorro suggested that we use the Google API for managing our analytics and reporting. That suggestion opened up a whole area of exploration in using many web 2.0 api’s to manage all of the services that surround the core offering of a podcast directory. This is really a very new way to think about software. Rather than write all of these features into our platform, we are simply tying them in through their APIs (application programming interfaces).
As part of this process I’ve been actively exploring facebook and while it has some issues as a robust enterprise platform, it really is a very sophisticated communications and collaboration system. I like the way that when someone in my network adds an application or joins a group, I get notification of it through my facebook page. I look to others with more sophistication than I have to vet things for me and so when Andrew McAfee or David Cancel do something on facebook, I’m likely to explore it more deeply.
I also really like the group structure. Groups can be very easily formed and membership in them propagates rapidly across the network. I think this has a lot of potential for learning.
I’ve also really enjoyed working with Paul Fitzgerald this summer. I worked closely with Paul for over 10 years in the 80s and 90s and then he went off and bought an arts magazine which he has subsequently sold. He is now heading up the sales effort for Swift and it is a thorough pleasure to be working with him again. It makes such a big difference when you work with people you thoroughly trust and like so much. I’m glad to have Paul actively back in my work life.
