Blogs | Social Signal

Facebook: so marvelously designed, so magnificently conceived, so amazingly successful... and yet...

...so peppered with irritants. And one of them is, well, is.

Does YouTube make people into exhibitionists? Does Facebook stunt teenagers' social skills? Does 43Things help people realize their dreams?

Journalists, academics and web surfers have been arguing over whether the Internet is Ultimate Good or Ultimate Evil long before the social web (a.k.a. "web 2.0") came along. But blogs, social networks and other kinds of online communities have raised the stakes and intensified the debate. Social web sites are more intensively interactive, and more socially connected, so they offer users an experience that is potentially more compelling (or in the view of Internet skeptics, distracting/disengaging) and (in the view of Internet boosters) more elevating, because they realize the Internet's potential for forging and deepening interpersonal and community connectedness.

When you're a company looking to make your first foray into the thickets of social media, building your own online community from scratch – and taking on everything from usability issues to platform selection to how you get that critical mass of people to sign up in the first place – can seem pretty daunting, and with good reason.

Here's how I think it all went down:

• I posted this cartoon about employers blocking Facebook in the workplace.
• I thought Shel Holtz would like it for his Stop Blocking blog.
• He did, and posted it there.
• Beth Kanter saw the cartoon and blogged about both it and Stop Blocking.
• So as not to draw on Shel's or my bandwidth, she posted the cartoon (which is Creative Commonsed up the wazoo, so all is kosher) to Flickr so she could link to it there, and tagged it "socialsignal".
• We have a Flickr photostrip on the front page of this site, which randomly selects Flickr photos tagged, you guessed it, "socialsignal".

And tonight, this is what I saw (click to enlarge, and look in the lower right-hand corner):

And the circle of life continues. 

The brutal crackdown in Burma is following a familiar pattern, including the severing of lines of communication with the outside world – particularly two very modern technologies: mobile phones and the Internet.

Into that information vacuum steps a technology whose time I'd honestly thought may have come and gone: shortwave radio.

Radio Netherlands (a station I listened to religiously when I was a teenage shortwave radio geek) is going far beyond the boundaries you usually associate with a state-owned broadcaster, and using their shortwave service to breach the Burmese border with messages of support from the outside world:

Our frequencies, transmitted from Irkutsk in Siberia, Madagascar and other sites, have not been jammed and for three hours a day we offer an alternative to the military junta's propaganda. Internet may be down but via Short Wave we can punch a hole in the information stranglehold.
Pro-democracy dissidents are having their say and we've broadcast the comments of world leaders telling the military junta to stop its attacks.

You can have your say too

Let us know what you think of the push for democracy as people in Myanmar/Burma confront the military dictators.

We'll publish your comments here on our Internet page. Please include your phone number too so we can call you back to record your comments as we prepare a special 'Shout via Short Wave' programme.

It warms my heart to see this happening... partly because of the impact of this initiative and the hope it will bring to a country that needs it so badly, and partly because of what it says about technology and communication.

The Internet is famed for its ability to route around obstacles, accidental or deliberate. But that capacity may be just as much an attribute of the human values of compassion and solidarity. And it's good to remember that the expression "information wants to be free," which we usually think of purely in the context of the Internet, applies much more broadly. 

I've been looking into options for improving task management with Basecamp, given my frustration with Basecamp's lack of due dates or task details.

Basecamp is what I need to manage the big picture of projects, keep in touch with clients, and assign tasks to my team, subcontractors, and client staff. I wrote up a pretty detailed picture of how we're doing this in my post about our Basecamp workflow.

But Basecamp is not a good tool for personal task management. That's why I use -- and quite like -- Remember the Milk, a very sophisticated yet intuitive task manager. RTM lets you categorize tasks into categories (lists) of your choice, tag any task, associate tasks with locations, assign priorities and due dates to tasks, share tasks with colleagues -- basically anything you might need to do to manage your tasks effectively. And it has lots of nice add-ons, like an iGoogle widget that you can even use to view RTM tasks in your Firefox sidebar.

As it stands, the combo of Basecamp and RTM is pretty unsatisfying. I have to manually copy my Basecamp to-dos into my RTM lists. And then when I complete a task, i have to mark it complete in both places.

Since many of my tasks are independent of particular client projects, it doesn't make sense to manage all my tasks from within Basecamp (especially considering the limitations of the Basecamp task system). What I really want is to create and manage most of my tasks from within RTM, but still be able to include my Basecamp tasks in the RTM system.

I'm hoping the RTM team will make this possible by building a bridge to the Basecamp API. Ideally RTM would first introduce nested lists, so that each Basecamp project could be an RTM list (tab). A basecamp to-do list could become a nested list on that tab, with tasks listed inside the nested sublist.

It's a little trickier without nested lists, but I'd still settle for a dump of all my tasks in a given project, directly into an RTM tab/list of the same name. I'd lose the in-between layer of to-do list names within Basecamp, but I can live with that -- especially if completing a task in RTM marks it complete in Basecamp.

The RTM team is the obvious gang to take this on, especially since they are looking for value-added options that would induce people to pay for RTM Pro (I'd happily pay more than $25/yr for Basecamp integration, myself -- I could imagine $10/month as a fair pricepoint). 

But the RTM folks are busy, busy, busy. So I'm hoping there are other developers out there -- people who could use the RTM and Basecamp APIs to build this sync function without the official blessing of either service. If this sounds like you, let us know how we could help make this happen. And if this mashup sounds like something you'd want, leave a comment so we can figure out whether there's enough interest to warrant a development bounty.