For anyone who wants to see them, I’ve finally managed to upload the slides from my SXSWi talk “Taking over the World: the Flickr way”, a broad-sweep view of some of the issues and solutions we encountered whilst taking Flickr from an English-only site to supporting multiple languages.

You can find them over at the talks page, along with the details of my next scheduled talk at XTech in Dublin on May 5th 2008.

(Photo of me by Gareth on Flickr, used by permission)

One day - one day - I’ll actually find a coherent theme, and a workflow which means that I post here regularly, and it’s interesting, and people are so enthralled that they actually subscribe to the RSS feed.

I’ve started vague plans in that direction which will hopefully coincide with my rapidly-approaching 30th birthday.

But in the meantime, I’ll be at South by Southwest in Austin TX from this Thursday. The interactive portion of the festival will mean actual work for me, schmoozing with people who make me feel tremendously stupid in comparison, and speaking a couple of times.

If you want to see me and my new haircut fumbling their way rustily through public speaking, you can catch me at the following times:

Monday March 10th, 7-9:30pm - 20×2 at The Parish, 214 E. 6th St., Austin TX

Tuesday March 11th, 5-6pm - “Taking Over the World the Flickr Way“, Room A, Austin Convention Center, 500 East Cesar Chavez, Austin TX

The second event is the one which has me stressing manically over slides, being an hour-long presentation by little ol’ me on exactly how we turned Flickr from an English-only colossus into a globe-spanning 8-language slightly-bigger-colossus.

I promise that, as much as such things can, it’ll be fun.

This is long and ranty. I haven’t done long and ranty for a while. Take it or leave it.

It was one of those “blinding light” moments - the moment when you finally turn to acknowledge the feeling that’s been kicking around for many months and realise “oh yeah!”

I finally discovered that I really hate Facebook.

It’s not like I’m the first - the most famous incidence being Jason Calcanis’s decision to declare “Facebook Bankruptcy” back in July, an event which trickled by without actively triggering my own epiphany. My realisation was prompted by a conversation with someone who recently heard a talk by a Facebook developer. The salient point, from the horse’s mouth, was that Facebook believe that their application is compellingly relevant to its users “because everyone you add on Facebook is someone you want to hear from.”

Evidently no-one on Facebook staff is being bombarded with the constant “Zombie requests”, Quiz requests, “rate your movies” requests and other effluvia which, post-trumpeted-API-launch, have become a veritable Face-tsunami. Furthermore, no-one at Facebook seems to know anything about psychology, social networks or the interaction between the two.

There are two major problems with the “all your Facebook friends are relevant to you” hypothesis.

Firstly, social networks tend to morph under the weight of human psychology into a Pokemon-like popularity contest - “gotta catch ‘em all” - you add everyone you’ve ever so much as exchanged glances with, and anyone with less than 50 friends looks like a lonely loser.

Secondly, it’s very hard to deny friend requests since it’s obvious that you’ve done so and it’s a pretty blunt snub. Even if you don’t care much about the latest “addee” in your stream, few people want to be seen by their former schoolfriends as an unfriendly snob, and even fewer people want to upset a professional contact who may be a key ally at some point in the future…

…which is why everyone’s contact list balloons over time - for many months I had only 8 contacts on Facebook; by the time of last night’s revelation, that had grown to 125. There are only three possible answers to this -

1. Bite the bullet, and reconcile yourself to the idea of coming across as an asshole.
2. Add people until your “Feed” looks like a cross between Toys’R'Us and a warzone.
3. Get the hell out of Dodge (my current preferred solution).

I’m periodically fascinated by how people view online life, and the differences in the boundaries that they set (or perceive) on the internet, versus that “other” life with the blue ceiling and the third dimension.

My curiosity was piqued again this weekend when one of my posts here attracted a totally unrelated comment asking a Flickr support question.

I’m astounded that someone managed to take a path from my recent occasional stints helping out on Flickr’s support forum, all the way to this place which (save for occasional posts where my personal interests or life experiences overlap with work) is totally unrelated to my place of employment.

I can very well imagine the route they took - they saw my posts on the forum, followed them to my profile, and followed the link from there to here before posting. But…

Bit quiet on the posting front this week - mainly due to my traveling around Asia for the second leg of the “24 hours of Flickr”/International promotion tour.

I’m trying to keep photos up to date on Flickr - the Collection will give you a good overview of the weird and wonderful experiences we’re having out here.

In the past week, I’ve…

• …attended 2 Flickr launch parties.
• …given a talk to Korean developers.
• …luxuriated in the second best hotel room I’ve ever stayed in.
• …been to a Crazy Bar.
• …visited to the Korean DMZ
• …frequented a bar where all the waiters are dwarves… with a guy who’s dwarf-phobic.
• …eaten Balut.

A quick bit of site update news - I’ve added a Talks page in the uber-optimistic hope that I’ll be giving more presentations on Flickr, Internationalisation and related topics in the near future. For now, it just contains one set of slides from the Korean talk, notable for the fact that the lovely folks at Yahoo! Korea translated all the text into Korean, to make things easier for those developers who didn’t have perfect English.

The talks page is here:

http://hitherto.net/talks/

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to fly to Kuala Lumpur…

This is not a new observation, but it’s something which just popped back onto my radar, sitting as I am in a hotel in Seoul, Korea.

Google really did introduce a horrible flaw when they first internationalised their site; one which hasn’t been corrected to this day.

The flaw is simple: they assume (seemingly by IP detection and nothing else) that the country you’re in is the language you speak, and that you will get a site localised in that language for as long as you’re surfing the web from there.

Whilst only mildly annoying when in, say, France, this is utterly disastrous for most western travelers to places like Korea, because we have no idea what the page is saying. Even worse, there’s no obvious way to navigate back to the English site, barring a small link on the site homepage (which you won’t see if you’re visiting the results page from a browser plugin; and is still bloody useless if you’re, say, German).

It’s always interesting when a company like Google - feted for their flawless execution, makes a schoolboy error like this, because it tends to reveal interesting things about that company’s culture.

Apologies in advance for the multiple threads this site has recently developed - there are 2 active topics which I consider to be “ongoing” right now - productivity and finance, and I’m brewing up more tasty mind-beverages on those topics even as I type this.

Veering onto another topic entirely, though, today’s major preoccupation is international in nature. Right now I’m working n a talk I’ll be giving soon to a bunch of Korean developers in Seoul, regarding Flickr’s API. What’s interesting about this is the peculiar challenges it raises.

Firstly, I’m not 100% confident that my inevitably-slightly-manic English presentation will be all that understandable to a diverse group of Korean speakers. I’ve brewed up something of a defense against this - designing slides for the presentation which contain both an English component (so that the presentation matches the talk, and I know what’s going on, more-or-less), and a Korean translation. Hence the hurry to get the slides done - so that a Korean co-worker can translate! Nevertheless, it means that every design has to be somewhat “symmetrical”; and that there’s half the usual space per slide for any given concept.

But the really weird thing is how much uncertainty a foreign culture injects into the process of building entertaining presentations. In the circles I move in (amongst my fellow Flickr-ites, for example, and other talented presenters such as the lovely Mr Coates), the Done Thing these days is to illustrate one’s slides with somewhat-relevant photographs, usually as a background to the slide.

The approach makes a lot of sense for the Flickr team (we are, after all, in the business of hosting awesome photos), and has taken off in general due to the ease with which anyone can find good creative-commons licensed imagery through Flickr.

Using photography in this way also has the advantage of making the presentation immediately more visually appealing, and allows for a host of sly (or not so sly) jokes in the form of tangentially-related imagery, or flat-out visual punnery.

Okay, so I broke. It took twelve days, but in the end I just couldn’t wait any longer to get an iPhone into my life.

I’d rationalised against it for weeks before launch - “the keyboard looks like it needs some work”; “never buy 1st Gen Apple hardware”; “wait for 3G instead of EDGE”. But this thing seemed truly amazing - a whole new experience as far as mobile devices are concerned. Ultimately, I wanted in on the ground floor.

So I’m slightly late to the party, and possibly not adding much at this point (I really haven’t scanned the interblogwebnet to see what others are saying about their phones), but I wanted to write down some first impressions, partly for my own later reference, partly for any of the 5 readers of this site who might not have got their hands on an actual iPhone yet.

Getting the boring stuff out of the way first, yes, it’s amazing. The UI is fluid and responsive - the original MacWorld demo and the existent tutorials aren’t gussied up to make it look any better; it really works like that. It is, in short, a thing of utter beauty, and takes mobile usability to a completely different level.

There are several worries I had which have proved unfounded so far.

Battery life seems good. I’ve been using the phone exhaustively (hey, it’s a new toy) and haven’t run into any “argh, battery low” moments yet. We’ll see how it holds out in the long term.

The EDGE thing is less annoying than I thought it would be - the slight speed problems of the connection are more than made up for by the ease-of-navigation around networked content.

The keyboard is perfectly usable after about an hour of practice. In some ways tactile feedback would be nice, but… I’ve never found the teeny-tiny button keyboards on any smartphones to be any better.

All in all, if I was at Nokia, Sony Ericsson, Motorola or Samsung right now I’d be sick as a dog.

That said, here’s the problem with being Apple. Their products are often so very nearly perfect. You can tell that a lot of very dedicated people have spent a lot of time applying a breathtaking eye for detail. The downside of this is that the smallest details which are forgotten (and there will always be a few) stand out so much more.

So, with the basic assumption that the iPhone is jaw-dropping, here are the niggles I’ve found in the first few days…

*ahem*

So, this site fell a bit quiet again over the last… oooh, I dunno, nearly 8 months. Partly, that’s because I didn’t have much to write about, and (stubborn as I am), I refuse to contribute to the ever-expanding web of wiffle just so that my RSS feed contains some more entries.

But it’s also telling that the last blog post just about coincides with the time that I started planning the infrastructure needed to take Flickr from a 1-language interface to 8, a roller-coaster ride of a project which swallowed a lot of my thought-space and eventually time (I was working 16-18 hour days for the last 3 weeks), but which is finally done, and has been live to the world for a whole month now.

I’m proud to have done that, the minor glitches and post-launch issues (which won’t be discussed here, because this is my personal site) aside.

Immediately post-launch I was whisked away on a whirlwind tour (Paris for 24 hours, London for 5 days, Montreal for 3) during which I lost my luggage, had my camera and credit-card stolen, and spent a great deal of the scant “downtime” in interminable conference calls.

I wound up back in the Bay Area about 3 weeks ago seriously exhausted and disoriented, and have been slowly pulling my life back together since then. Which is where we come to this l’il update, and the (undoubtedly sporadic and random) resumption of me posting here.

In short, I’m back, baby!

Excuse me for a moment while I indulge in a bit of stating the obvious, but I’ve just had one of those moments where I stand back, look at stuff, and say “oh. wow.”

We’ve come a long way on the internet in the past 2 years. So far so fast, in fact, that when you’re living in the centre of it all and incrementally immersing yourself in it, it becomes easy to forget where you came from.

I was thinking along these lines because I was just tinkering with my account on Upcoming.org, adding a new event to the database and subscribing to some others. Having added the event in question, I linked in a freely-available mp3 by one of the bands. That done, I finally got around to adding the feed of my events on upcoming.org to my iCal calendar on my mac. And then I tagged some Flickr photos from Hack Day so that they show up in the event’s entry on upcoming.org…

In less than 10 minutes, I’d told the world about an imminent concert, filled my personal, portable calendar with events which I’ll want to attend, and shown people another angle of an event which happened last week. And none of this required any complex scripts, hours of screen-scraping or data-munging. It was all accomplished with a couple of clicks and a little bit of typing.