The people I want to follow on Etsy are not the same people I want to follow on Twitter. The people I want to follow on Svpply are not my Facebook friends. I don’t want to share my Foursquare checkins with everyone on Twitter and Facebook.

http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2011/01/building-better-social-graphs.html

• Relish in knowing you’re one of the few to be going to sleep before the countdown, albeit a ritual practiced by people generally over 65.
• Relish, and there’ll be alot of relishing in these bullet points,  in knowing you’re one of the first to wake up in your timezone, on the first day of the year. Then with your morning coffee in hand, you get to call up all your friends and wish them Happy New Years, knowing full well how hungover and asleep they are, and how annoying you get to be because you’re feeling 100% while they’re hardly a fraction. It can be fun.
• At 6am in the morning on 1/1, it’s the perfect time to go rob a home or break into a store and steal. 90% of the overworked police force from the night before is fast asleep. The unlucky few are just begrudgingly waking up for their shift. So it’s the safest time of the year to break the law.
• Relish in the fact, however subjective this may be, that you’re starting the year on a positive note for your mind and body. But to maintain this for the next few weeks, I find it helpful to have partied your ass off the night before New years Eve.
• Relish relish relish, because everything is better when you feel that hardly anybody else is experiencing what you’re currently experiencing.

Now go back to sleep, as I guarantee you’ll be napping before 10am comes around. This relishing business can only go on for so long until you start wondering about what you missed out on with your friend’s countdown party. So yes, go back to sleep before these tempting thoughts invade your proud sanctuary, otherwise, you’ll really gravitate to Facebook and feel left out when you read all the fun New Years Eve status updates by your friends.

But now for the title of my post.

I think New Year’s resolutions are absolutely necessary in life. As you get older and busier, the days go by without time to take a step back and think about the big picture that has always mattered to you. What other time during the year is it slow enough for you to think about this? Summers maybe? But summers are meant for you to enjoy and relax, and catch up on some readings. Not to get all gung-ho on yourself. Also, work for most office-desk strapped people is the slowest between Christmas and New Years. So I say again, set or renew some goals this time of year. Or even better, resurface some values you’ve lost. I recommend the latter, as goals are usually more self-serving and beneficial only to yourself (like mine, which is to lose weight, which really means I want to look good, which really means I’m just a vain mother fucker… how sad. )

And if you don’t? Well, then truly what does a New Year really matter? Nothing. It’s just another day that goes by, and you’ll speed through the year again without knowing what you’re really doing, just checking of task after task with little awareness of a big picture you’ve (re)envisioned for yourself.

So that to me, is the beauty and opportunity of a New Year. I hope I remember this for the next ones.

That notion of “Add as a Friend” has really changed. With social media and web 2.0, it’s the idea that people will Friend or whatever the button is called (Follow, Subscribe) with anyone they find a connection over. So If I read someone’s Tweet who I have no idea who the person is, but I found any level of connection, inspiration, interest, etc in one or two tweets, then I might immediately “friend” that person, or “Follow”.

And this really is the power of Social Media.  The web is not just a place for us to read information published from a central source, where we read, and we leave.

In my search, I had come across a reuse initiative called Pinax, led by James Tauber (www.pinaxproject.com), to create the standard social networking features and make it available for reuse. It was the only social platform built with Python and Dango framework  that I had come across during my search. Since my site was built on Python/Django, Pinax was the closest solution to letting me realize my product. So in December, I hired Kevin to move the site off GAE, and hired Darrel in February to get Pinax up and running on my server. Darrel has also finished the building of the first release of the running tools, much of which was built by Hugh starting in September. So on the development front, we’ve made significant progress and now have a clear timeline to launch. Pinax is such a feature-ful community solution that I’ve had to turn off more than half the features, to keep our site simple and relevant to our target audience. So I’m really happy with the decision for having moved onto Pinax. I can’t wait to see the continued progress James Tauber and core development team there make over the course of the year.

But its on the business side that I think the latest decisions have been quite exciting. Mario and Christian joined as business partners last month. Mario brings a wealth of business development and finance experience to the table, while Christian’s design and marketing chops will greatly help in the positioning of our product, as well as other design and marketing activities. Mario’s first order of business was figuring out what kind of revenue expectations my idea had, and the forecast was a gloomy one. His proposal was to go b2b, by offering fitness organizations our running tools for some kind of revenue model. I wasn’t completely sold on the idea, but Christian and Mario weren’t completely sold on Runaroo as a stand-alone social network either. It wasn’t until we talked to Sam, the CEO of another internet startup, that we got to some very promising ideas. Eventually, after some due diligence on the product side, we found a middle ground between the two ideas. Without giving away details until we launch, I can at least say that we are going to be a Saas community provider for fitness organizations.

Grabbing and Displaying RSS fed content
Retrieving content from an RSS or Atom feed and displaying it in a page is a fairly common need; many sites, for example, syndicate content from affiliates or partners, and simply parse a feed to obtain data which is then displayed in a sidebar as “latest headlines” or similar.

Retrieving generic content using criterias – get latest, get random, get specific

Turn plain-text entered by user into HTML
It’s extremely common to use some form of text-to-HTML conversion utility, such as Markdown or Textile, to allow plain text entered by staff members or users to be transformed into HTML for output

Comments moderation
Django’s bundled comments application is extremely useful on its own, but the amount of comment spam circulating on the Web today essentially makes it necessary to have some sort of automatic moderation system in place for any application which makes use of comments.

Contact form
Providing some sort of contact or feedback form for soliciting information from site visitors is a common need in web development, and writing a contact form and associated handler view, while relatively straightforward to do with Django, can be a tedious and repetitive task. This application aims to remove or reduce that tedium and repetition by providing generic contact-form functionality.

Exception logging
Logs Django exceptions to your database handler

Favorites picker
Allows users to pick favorites

Photo management application
Features

• Uses built-in Django administration interface;
• Tagging with django-tagging (optional);
• RSS/Atom web feeds (for photos, albums, tags and comments);
• Sitemaps support;
• Creates thumbnails on-demand;
• Django “sites” framework support;
• Django “comments” package support;
• Support for internationalization (available in English, Brazilian Portuguese and Italian);
• Pretty permalinks.

Friendship, contact, and invitation management
Features

• relationships between users (possibly with different types of relationship)
• sending and acceptance/rejection of invitations
• management of contacts who are not yet users (and notification when they become users)
• generation of FOAF files
• import of vCard and other means of importing contacts

Integrating Google Analytics

….. i think i’m going to look harder for a Community Platform that can be integrated on top of GAE. Seeing the list of pluggins there are, I’m realizing there are way too many use-cases to account for (mail queuing?? cron jobs?).

Why the hiatus, and why am I reviving it? First the hiatus..

1. Funding – I’m bootstrapping runaroo.com, and the money I’ve already put into it with my original team was forecasting to be way too much

2. Direction – with the way the site was turning out, I could not get excited about it. The features didn’t flow right and they weren’t addressing what I imagine the user needs would be.

3. Development – the more I learned, the more I realized there were significant web 2.0 developments that I wasn’t utilizing in my site. I saw them as strong differentiators for my site.

Revival….

1. Motivation through planning – i think this is self explanatory.

2. Starting from scratch – with where I last left off, I really didn’t like the site, and instead of looking at it to spark new ideas, I would end up getting frustrated. I decided to start from scratch, and ideate with sketches. I’d have a notebook and pen in hand, and whether it was in front of the television, or at work during downtime, I’d just start sketching wireframes. I used a Ideation workshop I attended through my f/t job to help me brainstorm at a divergent level and then at a convergent level, and it really opened my thoughts. It’s when you see progress that one starts to get excited and motivated, and that for me was taking form by the minute. So after a week, the sketches began to take fruition, and I finally realized them in more detail until they were in a spec and wireframe format.

3. Tapping into people – people at work, friends in the strategy realm.. I was talking to people who had expertise/knowledge that would help propel my momentum. I talked to developers about Ajax frameworks, Ad folks about the concept of Ad sales and revenue, friends in the strategy realm, and scouring message boards related to running.

So it has indeed taken alot of effort, especially since i’ve been going at this alone. Now that planning is intact, and I’ve started to execute on the plan, the momentum is there and it’s so much easier to move faster.