I have been doing 750words every morning this week, and now I have a text I feel could be published also here. It's not long, most of the rubbish I wrote in the original 750-entry has been edited away, but it has some interesting material concerning the yesterday's post. And I hope I'll publish more of them. The long text once in two months - method I've been doing here since discovering Yegge's blog hasn't been merciful on this blog, so I'll try to ape Swizec's way of writing shorter stuff at least weekly, and I'll try to wander outside the programming niche.
Last night I unveiled some new thoughts on this instant messenger - project I've been doing for a few years. I think the SMS is the best instant messaging technology we currently have, and I don't mean this as a compliment for those Nokia engineers who made this techonology two decades ago. I mean that as a compain to us fools who have had the microcomputers for three decades now, and the best thing for communicating with them is the IRC. Five years ago we also had the Live Messenger, which was barely better than writing SMSs alongside the coding, but the Microsoft killed the thing: first they created the Live Messenger 2011, which did have probably one improvement, but it also had dozens of stupid ideas, and the stupidest of them: after a year the thing was killed by Skype. Skype is somewhat usable as an AV-phone, but it is horrible with textual messaging.
From the mild attention I got (one, probably bot, more follower in twitter and one comment in the facebook) I can deduce this thing could gain some traction in the market. Unfortunately, if it gets, I really have to familiarize myself with the ad-networks, because I don't expect the free heroku-server to support more than five concurrent users. In the weird case I get the system to pay itself with the ads, I'll become one very happy panda (to utilize an odd metaphor). If the thing will generate revenue, I might also write clients for the three mobile platforms. There the ad-systems should be easier to implement than in the computer land, as would be getting the people to pay for the clients.
This project might also be applicable in the school. We have these weird classes known as the project classes, where us students are expected to come up with an idea (since we're too inexperienced to implement existing ideas for the local software companies, or something) and implement it. I think most of us will do some game or another, but since I'm not currently in the mood for developing such things, I'll try to get the yesterday's blog post accepted as a design for my first project. The only problem is: the projects are supposed to be done in groups with two or more people, and I'm actually a little afraid of opening my mouth on stuff that actually matters. So trying to sell this idea to one or two other people is hard, even if I was implementing my IM on more traditional tech. I imagine Clojure looks like ancient greece to guys who barely have their feet wet with C#.
I just asked in the facebook if anyone actually would be interested in this project. Let's hope someone responds out of serious interest, not out of "Feuer is ..." for some stupid reason, if I may add, "... deemed to be a wizard in programming. Let's hope the wizardness overflows to me also!" - feeling. For some reason the two (or three? or four?) people who I am certain would have any valid input (in either designing and programming sense) for this project don't even live in the Kymenlaakso.
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