YGingras^.net

What I'm about to write will seem remarkably obvious to many but incredidly strange to others. Furthermore, I beleive that those who will find it obvious will still find it strange that it took so long for me to write it.

I closed my Facebook account.

I've never been a Facebook heavy user; I opened an account just to see what it was all about without looking to get in touch with anyone. For a time, it was all good, not terribly useful but peacefully pleasant, just like a barren snow field. Then I started to have Facebook "friends".

One big problem is the low barrier of entry to send a friend request. On Facebook, you get friend requests from people who could not care less about you and whom we've not talked to for more then a decade, from people whom you've only exchanged a glance with. On retrospect, the best thing to do is to ignore those, but that won't solve the root of the problem.

Most people suck at Facebook. It's not that they have bad intensions or that they are dumb -- I've seen incredibly smart persons suck at Facebook -- it's that Facebook rewards annoying behaviors. I won't say much about games, because it should be obvious to anyone that there is no way in hell that I should find it interesting that you've established and imaginary drug cartel on some imaginary island in the middle of an imaginary nowhere. If you think otherwise, imagine me calling you every time I solve the Rubik's Cube.

And then there's the status update. In the best case, it's used to broadcast irrelevant trivia about someone's life, which is annoying but not particularly harmful. But it does not stop there because the status update is a poweful tool to reach instantly a broad audience, and that's the root of the problem. As soon as someone in a particular network starts to use the status update to promote stuff, where stuff can be anything, and not necessarily stuff for sale, others see that opportunity and the wave goes on. From there, the noisy TV turns into a blinking billboard.

I decided that it was too much for me when I realized that I was doing the same. When you reach that point, it's clear that whatever benefit there is to Facebook certainly cannot outweight the damage that it does to you.

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It's conference time once again. In two weeks, I'll be attending PyCon, a conference that no Pythonistas should miss, then one week later, I will be at ConFoo, a conference that we are organizing at Montréal-Python along with other local user groups.

If you've been to a multi-track conference, you know the drill. As the speaker wraps up for his conclusion, instead of paying attention, you rush to unplug your laptop and to reach for your annotated program. Indeed, you've got only a moment to find out in what room the next talk that you planned to see is.

But this year is different.

One week ago, PyCon unveiled a very nice track selector application. It's very nice because it allows you to select in advance the tracks that you don't want to miss, to add them to you calendar application or to share your schedule with friends. That way, no more last minute rush to find where you go next.

I was really happy to see that so I shared the word with the ConFoo team, mentioning that it's the kind of things that we should develop for ConFoo 2011 next year. Well, it turned out that Anna, the ConFoo webmaster, really liked the idea and she came up with a schedule builder for ConFoo after only 48 hours. Both selectors have their own strengths and weaknesses but at least they get the job done. Hopefully more conferences will follow the trend of implementing track selectors; this is the kind of simple features that really improve the user experience.

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