I spent the entire weekend (when I wasn’t at the Renaissance Festival watching acrobats and getting my niece’s face painted) coding up a website (Note: this link may expire at any time. The page being linked to is temporary.) It was fun work with a bunch of niggly css stuff that got to be a real pain.

But most of the especially tricky bits are finished, and now I feel bored.

Have I mentioned that I really enjoy the feeling of being productive? Especially when working in a team with others? It’s seriously fantastic.

Anyway, since I’m not really in the mood to do anything else at the moment, I figured I’d fill everyone in on the Imo thing, since at least a couple of you are actually paying attention.

First off, if you haven’t visited the site Dear Imo, where I apply in the most ridiculous way possible for the Community Manager position at Imo, you really need to. As I recap here, it’s pretty freaking sweet. And I managed to fix the clicky-hand issue!

Second, after having seen my manifesto, Megan, the nice Imo recruiter, contacted me. I went through two rounds of interviews and then got invited to come chat, in person, with the Imo crew. Needless to say, I was absolutely, stunningly amazing, and after performing numerous backflips and feats of strength, I was hired on the spot, given a salary of $500,000 a year, a budget of $3,000,000 a year, and a license to kill.*

Now coming to a theater near you!

*I bet you didn’t know employers could issue licenses to kill. Neither did I. It was both startling AND super duper exciting.

And then, of course, I woke up. Some of that is actually true. I went through two interviews and got invited to come chat with the team in person.  I was excited for this chance, because I’m excited about Imo.* I resolved to talk about three things while I was there. I think of those three things as my Proposed Imo Roadmap. When the time came to do so, I fell on my face a bit, but I’d brought along my two pieces of paper that outlined the three things, so – while I never actually pulled them out of the ridiculous purple folder in which I’d placed them – I was able to place my hands upon them and summon their magic talisman powers.

*Also, I’ve never been to the Bay Area and flying is fun.

Let me tell you about those three things.

After my first two interviews, I’d spent a lot of time thinking about what Imo was, what made it unique, what services it offered that you couldn’t find on Facebook, or Instagram, or Twitter, or Google+.

In the end, Imo provides a single killer feature. Imo is the ultimate provider of realtime communication. The last time anyone tried realtime communication, it was the late 90s, and people (teenage boys) were logging into AOL chatrooms, trying to score some free cybersex.

Since then, the next closest thing to a mass market real time communication solution has been Google Hangouts, which require video chatting and, while occasionally useful, are not very practical for everyday (read: at the office) use.

The big difference between Imo and AOL chats is the fact that there is nothing pre-built in Imo. Imo doesn’t try to come up with what a user wants to talk about before the user knows. Imo provides a little box, asks the user what is on his mind, and then lets the world weigh in on whether the topic is something worth chatting about. If it isn’t, it’ll drop down the list rapidly. If it is, it’ll wind its way back up the list, time and again.

It’s like an awesome combination of some of the best parts of Twitter, Reddit, and Facebook, with realtime chat incorporated into the mix.

Unfortunately, while the idea is truly fantastic, there are still clearly some teething issues, which is where my list came into play. I went into the interview with the relatively simple plan of saying that the software is revolutionarily awesome, but with some problems that absolutely must get ironed out as the user population increases.

Essentially all the major concerns stem from one simple concept: The Tragedy of the Commons. Right now, every single Open Communication platform* deals with the Tragedy of the Commons on a near constant basis.

*I quickly need to define some things. The current online social world is divided into two camps. In the one camp you have Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Instagram, etc. These are all Filtered Communication platforms. You start out seeing nobody and only get more info/chatter as you add friends/follows/etc.  In the second camp, you have Reddit/Gawker/Blogger/Wordpress/comment-systems/forums.  This camp starts out with everyone seeing everyone else’s comments by default, and requires the user to actively block other users.This camp is what I’m calling the “Open Communication platform.”

Needless to say, the first camp is somewhat more people based. You don’t care about the content, except as it relates to the people you are connected to. The second camp is content based. You don’t care about the people, except as they relate to the content you are reading.

If you happen to be a reader of GigaOm, you know that Nick Denton, the head of Gawker (aka that site with Gizmodo, Lifehacker, Jezebel, and Deadspin), has publicly stated that the current open comment system on Gawker is like “asking someone to go down to Occupy Wall Street and plunge into the mob and start shouting. No reasonable person is going to do that.”

How is Gawker going to fix their site? Honestly, I have no idea. If I had to guess though, I’d say they’re probably going to simple shift from an open communication platform to a filtered platform. The question then will simply be “How filtered will they make the comments?”

Ehem. As I was saying, any open communications platform deals with the Tragedy of the Commons, which is simply the idea that there is a common resource and people, acting totally rationally, will deplete that resource to such an extent that it no longer exists. In the world of the internet, the common resource is reading time. When two thousand people at once want to comment on a Huffington Post piece, absolutely no conversations will actually occur, because no one will have the time necessary to read all the comments that came before. So rather than read those comments, new visitors will simply ignore them and start their own discussion… which will then also be ignored.

Now, imagine that same problem, except add the cacophony of realtime communication. Right now, Imo is relatively sparsely used, outside the a/s/l cybersex crew and nigerian princes. Most of the people actively participating in the community (without trying to sell anything) actually know each other. That is going to change very quickly in the very near future. And when it does, the crew at Imo are absolutely going to have to beginning introducing filters.

The Three Items

Some filters let words out. Some filters keep words in, even those words spoken by Natalie Portman.

Which brings me to my first big item. Awesome filters. Imo can open filters by geo-ip location, by topic, by friends of friends, by… I mean, honestly, the possibilities are endless here. As an entirely new network, Imo doesn’t have to deal with a rabid user base that hates change. They can be interesting and unique and learn from the creativity of their forefathers in the social community. Filters are the only way users are going to willingly adopt Imo en mass, so why not make those filters awesome?

Imo could give the user the ability to create a chatroom that’s viewable worldwide, but only people within a certain geographic area could actually write in it, perfect for conferences, talks, and lectures.

Imo could give users the ability to create a secret password to speak in a room, attached to a totally open room.

Imo could borrow from Reddit, and create channels of interests or borrow from Twitter and create an incredibly powerful tagging and searching system.

Right now, the path is totally open, and something has to be done. In terms of massive enhancements, I have no doubt that innovative filters will be of preeminent importance over the next year.

A side benefit of this kind of filtering is that the scam artists and nigerian princes of the world should theoretically have less traction, without any additional work on the part of the Imo staff.

Did somebody say garden?

The second item on my wishlist is Internet open conversations. There may be a better word or phrase for that, but I don’t know it. At the moment, all Imo conversations happen in an enclosed garden. You can’t link to the conversation. You can’t use other social networks to advertise the conversation. You can’t go onto a show on Revision3 and say, “Join me in this sweet conversation” and then provide a bit.ly link.

It makes sense, while no filters are set up, that the conversations wouldn’t be linkable and indexable. In the long run though, this really needs to change. The Imo network is ironically an open communication platform that isn’t actually open.

"Why is everyone looking at their phones while I'm talking?"

The third item on my wishlist is much more social in nature. Once conversations become linkable, I’d like to go around the world/nation/etc and partner with various institutions to make Imo the official place to talk about something happening. I’d like to partner with various ComicCons to have open (possibly geo-ip limited!) chatrooms during panels. I’d like to partner with Expos to do the same for lectures, plus a big, open room for the show floor. I’d like to partner with news blogs and sites to make live blogging the next big Apple event exponentially easier for all parties, plus the ability for the conversation moderator to pull comments from one sponsored open live chat into another closed live chat.

The Remainder

So, while my path to talking about these three topics wasn’t a complete success, I think we mostly covered those bases. Beyond these topics, a few other issues were raised. The idea of reducing CP (points you earn that you can use to start/join conversations) if your conversations appear clearly to be spammer material was an interesting idea. Broadly, trying to solve weaknesses through social gamification was a fairly common topic.

Conclusion

After an hour or two, the interview was over. And now we are in the waiting period. Do I think I’ll get the job? I honestly have no idea. I haven’t thought this hard about any other position I’ve ever applied for, but speaking simply from an odds perspective (and the-past-history-of-Nathan perspective) I’m probably not likely to get the job. There are simply too many roadblocks for me to think it’s a done deal, from the fact that maybe I don’t come off great in interviews to the fact that I’m male (not a good trait in this particular kind of job) to the fact that I probably have less experience than other people that applied (though this seems like a job that’s unusual enough that experience, beyond a certain minimum level, might not be super useful) to the fact that I pretty clearly have strong opinions about where Imo needs to go, and those opinions may differ enough with the Imo crew that our working together simply isn’t tenable.

I definitely hope I get the task of managing the community of this realtime communication revolution, because, at the risk of sounding WAY too confident, I just don’t think there’s anyone else out there equipped and excited enough to push the project forward to best meet the needs of this burgeoning community. It won’t simply take a friendly voice on the other end of the complaint department. It’ll take vision to dramatically reduce the need for a complaint department in the first place.

Nevertheless, if the team decides to go in another direction, I definitely hope that they push forward along a roadmap that takes these major topics into consideration. I remain convinced that realtime communication in the modern internet remains a vast, unexplored area, and I firmly believe that Imo stands on the cusp of that huge region, ready to explode.

Let me begin by saying I’m not going to post this to XBMC’s wall, because it really has absolutely nothing to do with XBMC. This marks the first blog post I’ve written in quite a while where that is the case. If this bothers you, feel free to jump down to the bottom, where this go around, rather than a picture, I actually have a VIDEO of Natalie Portman!

A few days ago, I was speaking with Imo CEO Ralph Harik,* and an interesting topic came up.

*Thank you, thank you. Yes, name dropping is truly an art and I play it with crayons and fingerpaints. 

The idea was this: The single most incredible thing about the internet is the way it enables communication on a grand, almost universal scale. A lot of people talk about how Twitter and Facebook were a huge part of the Arab Spring, but that’s a lot like saying hammers are a huge part of building a house.

Don’t get me wrong. Hammers ARE a huge part of building a house, but in the end they are just a tool. The tools of the Arab Spring included Facebook and Twitter, but the magical thing that those tools accomplished was education through communication.

Rany Jazayerli, a baseball statistician and writer* who I admire greatly, wrote about the Arab Spring more than a year ago. Here is his entire piece on the Arab Spring, but the crux of the story is this:

“For the last 15 years, then, the Arab world has had the access that was denied them for so long. They’ve seen the truth about how oppressive and hypocritical their own governments are, and they’ve seen the truth about how messy and imperfect and yet ultimately how ennobling and empowering Western democracies are. (In the words of Winston Churchill, “It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government, except all the others that have been tried.”) And having already opened the barn door to letting the masses own satellite dishes, the governments of the region were mostly helpless to do anything about it. Baywatch, it turns out, was a Trojan horse.”

*For the record, Rany is actually a dermatologist who went to the U. of Michigan, but I’m fairly certain everyone who reads his columns cares very little about his dermatology practice, because WOW is he a good writer.

Before Facebook and Twitter…, heck, before the internet had reached these places, a far older tool was allowing for the nefarious communication of information to the people of a region. Citizens were being allowed to watch TV on their satellite dishes, because that TV was cheap. And then Al Jazeera decided to arrive on the scene and speak Arabic news for the first time. While Americans aren’t too happy with Al Jazeera on occasion, there’s no denying that, above all else, they provide a counterpoint to the state-controlled news, and that counterpoint effectively says, “Hey, did you know that in democracies, the state tends not to brutally kill its citizens?”

I think that’s why some countries are choosing to consider the internet as an inalienable right. Not because it actually is, but because, since the invention of the printing press, there’s never been a single technology that has better boosted the freedom of speech.*

*The freedom of speech brings up an interesting secondary question, by the way. I wonder if America, as a nation, would have been better off guaranteeing the Freedom of Communication, rather than the Freedom of Speech. Maybe that’s a meaningless distinction, but really, the purpose of speech is communication. The transmittal and free exchange of ideas. And I think Communication better defines that.

Anyway, what I’m slowly working my way back to is this. The reason I find Imo so interesting is because it does something that neither Facebook nor Twitter do. Facebook is very good at blast your ideas to your friends, and allowing your friends to share along those ideas. Twitter is very good at blasting simple thoughts and allowing the ENTIRE WORLD to share those thoughts.

Yet for all that Facebook and Twitter are incredible, and for all that they’ve made it so every single person can act as a news channel broadcasting over satellites to inform the entire world, they miss one crucial thing.

They don’t provide an avenue for realtime, public communication. Comments on Facebook posts sort of work for discourse. Twitter hashtags are another hacked up way of doing the job. But there is nothing that truly mirrors the realtime nature of public discussion in either arena.

Which is why the Imo.im network is so remarkable. At any moment, a person can blast a thought on the network and a realtime, always changing conversation can erupt from that thought. People can jump in and out of conversations. No idea is forced into an unnecessary category and no person has to wait for the website to refresh itself before hearing a response.

In my opinion, this is the next obvious step forward in making the world a giant, talking, communicating network. And I am excited to see what happens next.

As Natalie Portman says, before you can advance your cause, you need to Talk.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fp-pDvhdlwE

Last Friday, the 16th of March, I discovered that imo.im was hiring an Online Community Manager.  As a fan of the imo.im software, I thought this represented an awesome opportunity for me, and one I didn’t want to screw up.

As many of you know, I am the Community Manager, right now, for XBMC, which is an awesome job full of cool opportunities, but decidedly lacking in the pay area. Most of my actual income these days comes from relatively unrelated self-employment situations, where I do the html/css work of developing websites. I also act as the MODX guru, where being the guru doesn’t connect up too much with being the SQL guru. It’s an OK job that pays reasonably well per hour, but simply doesn’t draw me like being the lead online marketing/tech support guy* for an international software organization.

*In the era of Twitter and Facebook, tech support==marketing, as far as intelligent people are concerned. There’s a reason Apple outsources the hardware but hires locals to staff AppleCare phone support.

So I saw this job opportunity, and I thought about how nice it would be to do what I like doing for pay. I basically think this every time I see a similar job opportunity. The key difference, in this situation, was that I actively like and use imo.* Honestly, I do. Up until fairly recently, Trillian has been my instant messaging software of choice. Imo DESTROYS Trillian in the mobile realm, and their online software is leagues ahead. If I had one wish, it’d be for a desktop client, but it’s possible that there’s a good reason for lacking that, that I don’t know about.

*As a comparison, Wells Fargo is also hiring a Community Manager right now. While I have no problem with Wells Fargo, I also have no great things to say about them. I’ve literally never done business with the company. They seem like a decent enough bank, and I’m sure I’d have no problem doing good work for them, but the implicit awkwardness I’d feel at getting rejected by imo just doesn’t exist with Wells Fargo.

So here I am in an awkward situation. I like imo. I don’t want to not get hired and then feel weird about using imo after not getting the job (even though I totally plan to). So, I decided this go around I had better really, honestly try, as hard as I could, to get the job.

These thoughts crossed my mind as I was filling out the relatively brief application on LinkedIn. I had gotten through a decent portion of the cover letter before I realized I was doing nothing new. This felt exactly like any of the other times I’ve been ignored while applying to work full time in community management. So I paused in writing. I opened a new page. And I thought.

I thought about how other marketers got jobs. I thought about the news stories of “best application ever”s.  And I decided I needed to do exactly that. My plan was reasonably simple. Step one: make a video. Step two: make a website. Step three: convince people to share the site.

Step one: make a video.

I bought a MacBook Pro in January of 2012. To say that I’m not very skilled at iMovie is an extreme understatement. I’ve used it a grand total of 1 time, when we made a movie for XBMC on the Raspberry Pi.*

*A video which, btw, has over 300,000 views as of this writing!

This meant I needed an iMovie crash course. Fortunately, I’ve had some experience using competing software that behaves essentially the same way as iMovie, so I knew what to expect.

I grabbed some CC music from Jamendo. I pulled a few applicable pics from Google Images. I yanked a video I’d made of a pan cooking some sausage* using my iPhone as a sort of “let’s get cooking” backdrop. And I got to work.

*Long, weird story.

All told, including revisions, looking up how to do the traveling map thing, figuring out cross fades, syncing up music, and trying desperately to come up with a better ending than I had, the video probably totalled about 12 hours of work. If I were a professional video editor, I image it’d take 45 minutes, tops, and look 4 times as good. Still, it’s not the worst video ever. Hopefully.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tm0Lzk0cfYQ&feature=g-upl&context=G2bcb648AUAAAAAAAAAA

Step Two: Make a Website

As I’ve mentioned, while I’m a complete n00b at video making, I’m relatively experienced in the realm of website making. I’m no designer, but I can toss some html together when necessary. While the video took me 12 hours, the website took, at the outside, maybe 6 hours. And I did almost all of it extremely late at night.

Step one was to install MODX, which I am always a huge fan of. Step two was to apply a grid system that I’ve been curious about called 1140 CSS grid. It’s a new fluid grid system (referred to as “responsive web design”) that’s nifty (in short) because it can handle being squeezed better than many competing grid systems.

After that, it was just a matter of tossing up my content and cleaning it up with some CSS as necessary. The CSS cleaning was absolutely my favorite part. Typically, I take somebody else’s (or, worst case scenario, my own) photoshop design, pull apart the pieces, and then stick them back into the resulting website. Because I didn’t want to mess around with Photoshop, I decided to lean exclusively on html5 and css3 for the pretty-fication of the site.

So I whipped out the CSS3 dropshadows and rounded corners. I also added a neato Google hosted font. And I was nearly done.

I only had one problem remaining. Because I was no expert in iMovie (or in how Youtube decides which video thumbs to show), I had made the error of creating a video using an ugly thumb. This would not do for my clean site.

My initial method of fixing this was relatively simple. Youtube videos show up in an iframe. My plan was to simply stick ANOTHER picture in the iframe first, and then link that picture to the Youtube video. From the user perspective, it would look like the white picture had turned into a video. Awesome, right?

And it WAS awesome, right until the moment a friend told me he didn’t see the picture in ie8. Now, ordinarily this wouldn’t concern me. Who still uses ie8?

But I’m randomly a perfectionist, and this happened to be one of those situations. What if the one person who was going to watch my video never had the chance to see it? I couldn’t take that risk.

So I quickly taught myself javascript.

I kid. I kid. I’m decent at html/css. I’m often at least able to read php and write the occasional blurb. It’s just that I’ve never had any luck with javascript. I don’t know why that is. It could be that I’ve simply never NEEDED javascript before.

This situation changed that lack of need.

And so, even though I’d already made the page public, I made a hidden test page, duplicated the code, and got to work.

In the end, it really wasn’t that hard to hardcode in a picture onto the site, and replace that picture with an auto-starting youtube video when a person clicks on the picture. The only detail I foolishly left off the plate was making the picture look like it was a link, where the cursor would change from an arrow to a pointing hand. At this point, fixing that little mistake is probably pointless,* but I wouldn’t rule out fixing it, given my random acts of perfectionsm.

*Ha ha.

Step Three: Convince People to Share the Site

Sadly, this may be the point where my entire plan falls apart. I’m pretty good at growing fanbases with limited resources. XBMC had 6,000 facebook fans and something like 2 or 3,000 twitter followers when I started managing those presences. Now they’ve blossomed to 22,000 and 10,000 fans, respectively, without any help from our main website. But as good as I am at promoting others, I’m TERRIBLE at promoting myself. That’s probably a prime reason why I’d ultimately make a bad actor or author. I feel weird promoting myself and doubly weird asking other people to promote me.

Anyway, if you like me or hate me or accidentally ended up on this page by doing a search for Natalie Portman, I’d really appreciate it if you checked out my job website Dear imo.im and shared it with all your influential friends. I even stuck some buttons on there to make it easier! You can do it with your computer, or, like Natalie here, eat an entire box of donut holes and share via mobile!

Conclusion

I started this application Friday night. I finished it at about 4AM Monday morning, after spending much of Saturday with family and most of Sunday watching basketball (including one of the most exciting games I’ve ever seen KU play). In the end, I may not get hired by the imo people, but I’ll at least know that I can make this kind of thing happen on an extremely limited timeframe.

I love adventure. I love tight deadlines. It’s possible that my ideal world would be one where every weekend was a crunch weekend, where all my coding friends and coworkers got together to really make things happen, and where life and the workplace was one big roller coaster. Of course, for that to happen, I’m going to start needing some actual coworkers.

Babysteps.

For example, let’s say you are the manager of a struggling major league baseball team. You just read an article that says that if you get rid of your short stop and center field, and replace those positions with two half-center outfielders who always play close, your defense will improve, automatically, by 75%. Rigorous testing and research back up this statement. The facts are definitely clear. Now, all you have to do is face ridicule if you are either wrong or unlucky, and your team could win 25 more games a year than they otherwise would have.

If you are like most major league managers, you will choose to ignore that article. Sure, you might win more games. But you might also suffer massive shame both in and out of the community and eventually lose your job. The odds are better for the first possibility, but the results are much worse for the second.

Historically, this has happened numerous times. The most famous example in recent years is the decision whether or not to “go for it” on fourth down in American football. In almost every circumstance, statistically, going for it is a better idea than punting. Yet zero coaches are ever actually willing to go that route, due to fear of ridicule.

I bring this up because XBMC is at an awkward stage in its life cycle right now. The program and organization have been around for nearly 10 years.*

*December 14, 2002, y’all!

In many ways, we are no longer the angry kid in his parents’ basement, screwing around with broken Xboxes. Now we have nearly a million active and regularly online users. We are being ported to numerous devices. Companies are actively contacting us to get XBMC working with their devices.

Mmmm, Raspberry Pi is delicious!

It’s an exciting time for members of Team XBMC, but it is undoubtedly a time of change and reflection as well. Consider, on March 18th, 2004, we ran this article on the XBMC front page asking for donations to buy Frodo an Xbox.* Today, Cory (theuni) and I, the two most frequent front page authors, would never even consider running an article like that. The front page of a site visited by 780,000 unique visitors last month is simply not the place you go to beg for cash, even if it is in the spirit of development.

*Interesting fact: The XBMC forums date back to Oct. 1, 2003. They existed before then, but the dates on those earlier posts are janky. One of the earliest posts from that time was a discussion of currently available GUI actions between two relatively new XBMC guys (new in the sense that they weren’t founders) named Pike and Jmarshall. Today, Jmarshall is our Foundation president, and Pike is our boss-man Project Manager, who was one of the major pushers for getting the Raspberry Pi to SCALE. It’s sort of amazing how long people stick with this project.

Why is that we act so reserved about asking for tax-deductible non-profit donations? I think the answer is different between Cory and myself, because our jobs are slightly different. It is Cory’s task to court businesses and organizations that are contemplating opening up their hardware to XBMC. Such organizations would, one presumes, be nonplussed to see a call for donations coming from a software group they were looking to connect with. I come at it from the entirely different realm of the user. I’d rather let the user come to us to donate, rather than having the Foundation come to them.

Regardless, XBMC is a much more established organization now, and this reality leads to awkward editorial discussions. How do we want to represent ourselves to the world? Recently, we wrote a post on the SOPA blackout. The first draft I put together included the following:

We believe this “choice” is not a choice at all. We believe that SOPA is terrible for small businesses, for private and public foundations, for non-profits, and for every person’s freedom of speech around the world. We believe our job is to act as software developers, not copyright police for the MPAA and the RIAA. We believe that SOPA and bills like SOPA are censorship on a vast scale that will ultimately destroy America’s already fragile economy. We believe that the entire justification for SOPA is based on statistics that are, at best, overblown and wholly inaccurate.

The final draft, on the other hand, replaced the above lines with:

We, the developers of XBMC, believe this “choice” is not a choice at all, and as such, we oppose this Bill.

We recognize that many disagree with our stance on this subject, and invite all to examine the text of the SOPA Bill, the coverage of the SOPA bill performed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation and whatever sources you trust on this topic, before coming to your own conclusions.

Needless to say, things changed. Did they change for the better? It’s hard to say. I can say for certain that they changed for the “more professional.” We didn’t write an anthem. We didn’t cover any areas in which we had no expertise. We cleaned it up so that we were simply informing the public that a decision had been made. In so doing, we made the statement much more acceptable and possibly even more believable for those who don’t actually agree with us.

And we cut the heart out of the statement.

5 years ago, assuming we said anything,* I have absolutely no doubt we’d have gone with the first message. Today, we ended up running with the second statement.

*A lot of effort five years ago was spent on keeping our heads down and avoiding getting sued by Microsoft. The rumor these days is that such a lawsuit not only was never going to happen, but numerous MS employees actually used XBMC on their own Xboxes. Who knows how true rumors like that are?

Even Dr. Horrible had XBMC (presumably)!

Was the decision to go with the second statement correct? I honestly don’t know. I didn’t know then. It was definitely safer. It was more respectable. It was probably a good message for people who weren’t ardent users of XBMC.

And maybe that’s the trick. Maybe our decision to go with the safer message falls neatly in line with the decisions of professional American football coaches. Whether you are crafting a message or making a 4th and 7 decision, when you are under the spotlight of a big stage, you don’t care whether you are doing it right. You care whether the message you are throwing out into the world is going to be accepted by the largest number of people. You care whether you are going to keep your job, or keep people using your software, or keep companies interested in expanding to your software, more than you care about the message you are sending right now.

To be honest, I dislike that route. I dislike the cynicism that says people are unwilling to give the benefit of the doubt or unwilling to expand their horizons when challenged. I dislike that a strongly worded message will be taken to say more about the organization, than about how the organization feels about the message.

Yet we live in a world where information comes rapidly and from all angles, and in that world, it is incredibly difficult to filter for the things that matter. So we use our brain tricks. We don’t think about what a stop sign means; we see a red, octagonal blur, and our foot goes straight to the brakes. We don’t think about the message the group is trying to present. We think about the group making the message.

"Honey..., what did that sign say?"

…Unless, of course, we are road workers who really care about road signs, or we spend an unusual amount of time paying attention to the myriad voices coming out of our favorite groups.*

*I’m informed that some people even think all Dave Matthews songs DON’T sound exactly alike, which totally blows my mind.

And so, to bring it back around again, I conceded my more strongly worded arguments with regards to SOPA. In every draft of the letter, I included a line that essentially read, “we are programmers with no stomach for or interest in politics.” But to make that line true, I had to cut out all the politics, for otherwise the causal observer would not believe me.

Humorously, simply blacking out at all meant a wide variety of people didn’t believe our professed desire to stay clear of the political spectrum. It’s entirely possible that trying to keep it clean never mattered. We were judged regardless.

And, at the end of the day, we are still stuck at our crossroads. Do we want to be an organization that does as much as it can to steer clear of political dialog, or do we want to stand up and pick those fights that we think are important?

I still don’t know the answer to that question. Then again, when it comes to choosing words, I never claimed to be wise.

Any wisdom-ous words, Natalie?

Evidently not today.

To say that SCALE this year was eventful would be an understatement. Over the past three days, we performed releases, we hung out with open source hero Jon “Maddog” Hall, and we demoed hardware that virtually no one has seen before.

As is always the case when preparing for Expos, SCALE started for the team several months earlier, during the call for exhibits and speakers. This year, XBMC did not participate in any speaking events, though that’s certainly something I wouldn’t mind seeing change for next year. We did, however, decide to provide an exhibit.

Until fairly late in the process, our plans for this exhibit were reasonably limited. The previous year we’d demonstrated XBMC Dharma on two Zotac Ions, and we saw very little need to mess with a winning formula. Simply put, the NVIDIA ION htpc experience for XBMC is one of the best experiences around. Naturally, we planned on demoing XBMC Eden, but that was the only planned switch.

And then Raspberry Pi emerged on the scene. A great deal of internal chatter made it clear that Edgar (gimli) and Scott (Davilla) were making extremely rapid progress in porting XBMC to the little computer that could. Meanwhile, international attention turned to the British nonprofit foundation preparing to set the computer industry on its ears in a way that hasn’t been seen since, possibly, IBM sold a PC using interchangeable parts.

About two weeks before SCALE (around the same time as a certain eBay auction occurred), Pike and I proposed to Cory (theuni) that it’d be pretty cool to demo XBMC on the Raspberry Pi at the Expo. Cory agreed and contacted the fine folk at Raspberry Pi to see if we could get our grubby hands on one of their diminished supply of non-production alpha and beta boards. My major goal was not to step on any toes. If Raspberry Pi wanted to demo XBMC themselves, they were more than welcome to.

Yet Dom and the Raspberry Pi foundation was gracious enough both to furnish us with a working board that already had the most recent version of XBMC for RPi ready to go and to give us the opportunity to be the first to show off XBMC on the RPi to the world.

—

We all arrived Thursday night. Cory, Keith (keith), and I had an eventful trip to Denny’s. We also hung out with Keith’s friend and took this picture.

The XBMC Band: Keith's friend, Keith, Cory, and Nathan

The RPi board arrived Friday afternoon. we got XBMC up and running on the board in short order using the USB to Serial connection to connect it to Cory’s laptop. Keith provided a keyboard, and we were up and running. Below is the first public video demonstrating XBMC on the Raspberry Pi.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4NR57ELY28s

Keith walked us through the various functions. Cory kept an eye on the attached PC to make sure nothing glitched. And I recorded.

The impression we all had was basically the same. This is a $25-$35 ARM-based computer, made by a non-profit company, and worked on by two XBMC guys for probably less than two months. We are EXTREMELY early in the development cycle. Honestly, it would have been unreasonable to believe that XBMC could do anything more than startup without immediately crashing.

Yet it did much, MUCH better than that. We had no trouble navigating menus, playing back full 1080p h.264 encoded video, and even creating a library with our Blender videos and movie trailers. Everything was slower than, for example an NVIDIA ION htpc, but this was before any optimizing for the platform. Simply put, this is arguably the most amazing $25-$35 computer we have ever seen (also, the only non-used $25 computer we have ever seen). It’s going to be several months before we’ll know exactly how well XBMC will perform after being more fully optimized, and codec support may always be limited, but the future is certainly looking bright right now. Every single person in the open source community should be excited about this one.

Sean (Malloc) met up with us that evening with monitors to use on the Expo floor, and for the next two days, we displayed XBMC on our trusty NVIDIA Ion computer from Zotac, on an Apple TV 2, and on the Raspberry Pi.

From left to right: Sean, Cory, Gareth (SCALE Organizer), Keith, and Nathan

In that setting, it remains clear that the NVIDIA Ion computer from Zotac is one of several near-perfect XBMC HTPCs. It is smooth, clean, and fast, and it has no trouble with nearly any video content thrown its way, regardless of codec. The Apple TV is capable of only displaying at 720p resolution, even though it can decode 1080p content just fine. Meanwhile, the Raspberry Pi is still quite definitely in proof of concept mode. Actions are slow. Nothing has been optimized yet. Random things might break for no obvious reason. Nevertheless, XBMC on Raspberry Pi was the talk of the town (surrounding our booth) not so much for what it is, but for what it can be. At this point there seems to be little doubt that ARM-based computing with System-on-Chip video decoding, as demonstrated by Raspberry Pi is a big step into the future.

—

At the same time as all of that, the entire team was working feverishly to release Beta 2 of XBMC Eden. Numerous bugs were being hammered out. Last minute fixes were worked in. I spent a few hours slowly winding my way through our Github history trying to identify the items that I thought would most interest our user base. (Needless to say, my job was the least important.)

This was all made dramatically more difficult by team members also busily answering questions at SCALE and fiddling with the Raspberry Pi. What might have been a 24 hour process on any other given week turned into something closer to 48 hours. At one point, Beta 2 became available on some, but not all, planned platforms, and we were forced to semi-announce it on Facebook and Twitter before we were ready, simply because so many users had already pointed out to us that they’d found the download. If I haven’t said this before, XBMC has some of the most internet-savvy, die-hard users in the history of the internet, and their ability to find XBMC info is unparalleled.

—

Nevertheless, because we have one of the best unpaid development crews I’ve ever personally worked with, XBMC 11.0 Eden 11.0 Eden: Beta 2 was made ready and officially released on Saturday night at about midnight Pacific Time, during the SCALE conference, as planned. Likewise, SCALE went off without a hitch. We made some awesome new contacts. We gave those users who came to see us in person a unique show. All in all, this was a fantastic weekend. Thanks to all the people who showed up and all of our awesome users who downloaded Beta 2.

In my opinion, only one thing could have made the weekend any better. And if you are wondering, the answer is no. I did not see Natalie Portman while in L.A. It appears she doesn’t exclusively hang around LAX. A guy can dream though. A guy can dream.

Natalie doesn't always fly, but when she does, she chooses LAX.

SCALE, we’ll see you next year.

I’ve seen a lot of opinions over the past few days about whether UTV would succeed, and as I read these opinions, the big question in my head was, “What does ‘succeed’ mean, dawg?*”

*Seriously, bro!

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qi_AAqi0RZM

Two and a Half Men have averaged as many as 15 million (and more) viewers on a given episode, before repeats.* The Apple TV has sold over 2 million units. Roku has over a million users using its Roku DVP boxes. XBMC has slightly less than a million users.

*I weep for humanity.

That means that a not-very-good television series has between 7.5 and 15 times as many “users” as the ATV, Roku, or XBMC. Does that mean that all three players are “failures”? I honestly have no idea. I’m also vaguely curious how many ATVs were bought for the specific purpose of playing XBMC, but that’s probably a conversation for another day.

I’ll say this. There are a hair over 307 million people in the United States. If you can’t reach even 1% of that number in terms of active users, you are almost certainly a niche product, particularly given that XBMC, at least, is a worldwide brand, and there are about 7 billion people in the world.

But does being a niche product make you a failure? I don’t believe so. I’m a fairly big fan of XBMC, and, by my own above definition, it is niche software, but I certainly don’t think XBMC is a failure in any way, shape, or form.

Perhaps “success” and “failure” are not how we should define the relative reach of media center software.

Rather than focusing on whether UTV will be a failure or a success story, let’s look, instead, at what it takes for media center software to grow, gain a following, and ultimately explode into awesomeness. From there, we can make an educated guess about whether Ubuntu TV is following the path to massive growth or gross failure.

As far I can tell, there are only two necessary steps to reach Media Center Greatness.

First, by my reckoning, media center software needs to be not just easy, but incredibly intuitive to use. XBMC has a great deal of documentation for installation and rekerjiggering,* but ideally, it should need almost zero documentation for actual use. Two non-XBMC fantastic examples of relatively complex systems that are easy to use are the Xbox 360 Metro interface and iOS. Neither interface comes with instructions. On screen cues provide all the instruction needed. By those standards, Ubuntu TV looks at least as simple as any of the other systems out there.

*I’m fairly certain I just made this word up, but I bequeath it unto you, gentle reader, to use in all inappropriate and fantastical situations.

As far as intuitive content libraries go, I haven’t used Boxee in a long time, but back in the early days they took the very smart approach of totally ignoring where content came from. You were simply presented with a list of TV shows and Movies, and then given the option, after clicking the show you wanted, to choose your preferred source (e.g. local or Netflix or Hulu or Content Provider Website).

In my opinion, this is the ideal method of listing content. I don’t want to know that this show is coming from Netflix. I don’t want to click Netflix. I just want to be able to watch the show. If Ubuntu TV follows a similar path, it will be going down a good road. To some extent, XBMC is following this course with its improved library system. While this improvement is of very little interest to users, in my opinion, it is absolutely crucial for the further advancement of XBMC.

Second, ideally, the software needs to be “opt out.” This means, users of a particular service or hardware would get the software by default. In a perfect world (for a media center software provider), cable providers would toss their Scientific Atlanta* crap boxes by the wayside and form a partnership to make a given media center the defacto media center of the company. Imagine, for a moment, a world in which XBMC was the default media center for Comcast cable boxes. How AWESOME would that be?

*Interesting fact: Scientific Atlanta received a Tech and Engineering Emmy Award in 2008 for their work in Video On Demand and the resulting large scale VOD implementations. I guess the Emmy committee missed the fact that the Bittorrent protocol had been providing large scale VOD  for the previous 7 years.  I’ve said it before, but it is shocking to me how unwilling the MPAA is to embrace technology that would make the entire industry dramatically more wealthy. Seriously, MPAA execs and shareholders, there are 7 BILLION people on Earth. You have the opportunity to make SO MUCH MONEY off of these people. Why are you dragging your feet?

Comcast would get the huge media buzz of being a FLOSS supporter, would be providing a box that could tune all of Comcasts numerous stations, that practically begged customers to upgrade to a better internet service, and that could, potentially, finally give Comcast a means of competing with or leveraging Netflix. Meanwhile, XBMC would shoot from 1 million users to… well, a pretty large number.

Of course, I’d be shocked if any of that happened. I’d be doubly shocked if Comcast was the one to make it happen. It’s possible that there isn’t a less forward-thinking tech-based company in the entire world than Comcast. The actions of Comcast on the local government level make anything done by the MPAA/RIAA at the federal level look like kiddy games. I’d love to be proven wrong in this regard, but I shan’t hold my breath.

It'd be as unlikely as an orangutan having a pet dog! An orangutan, I say!

The alternative to becoming the de facto software in cable boxes is becoming the de facto software on televisions. In this regard, Ubuntu TV is right on track. The entire point of displaying Ubuntu TV at CES, as far as I can tell, was to get television manufacturers excited about replacing in house software with upscale Ubuntu TV software. Their success in this venture will tell a great deal about their success overall.

If you can’t get into TVs or cable boxes by default, you can still be fairly successful if you are on hardware that is cheap and competitive. You won’t have 14 million users, but, as demonstrated by Roku and Apple TV, you can certainly get 2 or 3 million.

If you can’t do that, you can STILL be fairly successful, but you have to be absolutely awesome with massive word of mouth support* (see XBMC and its derivatives Boxee and Plex). I don’t think Ubuntu TV is quite at that level. If I were to guess, I’d say most of the negativity to Ubuntu TV comes from this angle.

*Thanks, XBMC fans! You are awesome!

Honestly, if Canonical’s plan was exclusively to release Ubuntu TV into the wild as a downloadable and installable MythTV/XBMC clone, I would expect total and utter failure. I would expect the naysayers to be correct. Unity didn’t get a lot of love coming out of the box. Ubuntu is Linux only, which means it’d get about as much market share as Myth TV. With no plans to become a defacto Media Center, Ubuntu TV would basically just be Yet Another Linux Media Center, and would end up relegated to the ignore pile. Fortunately for Canonical, that’s not the plan.

Conclusion

That’s it. Two necessary steps toward Media Center Greatness: extremely intuitive controls that people are automatically comfortable with and opt-out preference. As far as I can tell, Ubuntu TV is making a push in both directions. Only time will tell how effective that push will be. At the very least though, they are not software to simply be ignored.

For you naysayers out there, sure, there are other things that will make the software more or less popular. Being able to control the look and select new skins without breaking the usability of the interface is nice. Having a powerful addon framework would be great and would almost certainly be necessary to move to the next level. But these are bonuses. They are why one person prefers Community over It’s Always Sunny (Or why a person prefers XBMC over Plex). None of them are on the level of why people watch Two and a Half Men 3 times as much as either more creative and funny show (or why people use Scientific Atlanta boxes 14 times as much as either XBMC or Plex htpcs).

Ostensibly, this has been a discussion about Ubuntu TV, but, honestly, all of these rules apply to XBMC as well. These are things quite a lot of XBMC team members have been thinking about for at least the last 12 months. I don’t have any personal revelations to make right now about these thoughts specifically, but keep an eye on the XBMC main page. With luck, many interesting developments are going to be cropping up, both in the near future and over the course of 2012.

My guess is that CES 2013 is going to look VERY different than CES 2012, both in the media center game generically, and for XBMC specifically.

Let’s keep our fingers crossed that I’m right. Just like Natalie!

Though, honestly, why you'd cross your fingers when you're already on the cover of Vogue is beyond me.

And that brings me to today’s topic: the Southern California Linux Expo (aka SCALE).

Last year was the first year I’ve ever acted as an exhibitor in an expo or conference. I have certainly BEEN to many Expos…

Yes, I met Felicia Day, the queen of the internet, at Comic Con. No, I never pass up an opportunity to show this picture off.

But I have never exhibited at one. So I was pretty nervous last year.

I arrived at about noon on Friday. I didn’t know what I supposed to do, so mostly I just brought along laptop-like things and prayed that I was going to the right place.

The first thing I discovered was that a magical rule of tech-heavy expos says we are going to forget at least one major detail. Last year, it was getting awesome content before the day of the show. Friday night and Saturday morning, we were frantically trying to load up content onto our Zotac ZBOX boxes.*

*Which were awesome, btw. Seriously, if you want XBMC on a full HTPC, there are very few boxes for the money that can compete with the ZBOX. Really, really good stuff.

In the end, we grabbed a few kickass trailers and Big Buck Bunny.*

*Fun note. Back when I was originally writing the XBMC Quick Start Guide, I needed an example movie, so I used Big Buck Bunny, because its CC license and multiple formats makes it a perfect example movie in almost every situation. However, I suddenly found myself in need of a SECOND movie. So, rather than using another CC film, I decided to invent THE GREATEST SEQUEL EVER MADE: Big Buck Bunny II: Rise of the Lepus. It should be noted, Underworld: Rise of the Lycan had just come out, so it was not a major leap from Lycan to Lupus to Lepus. I always sort of hoped that if the BBB people ever made a sequel movie, they’d use that title. I would absolutely give full permission (so long as I got some kind of credit for being awesome).

Then we shoved those trailers onto the external harddrive that I’d almost accidentally brought along on for the trip, loaded up XBMC, and boom, two days of awesome began.

I learned quickly that water (or other refreshing beverage) was absolutely critical for being an exhibitor. Cory (theuni) did most of the talking, but I did enough of it that I got thirsty VERY quickly.

To this day, I am grateful that for many years Cory’s day job was sysops for various companies running Linux, because, and here is where it gets hairy, I am not a Linux user.

Yes, my secret is out.* I use Windows. Lately I’ve been making a seismic shift from Windows to Linux Mint (the Windows of Linux OSes), and I am further considering shifting from Linux Mint to OSX (The Linux of Windows OSes), but my dark secret is that I acted as a primary exhibitor at Linux while knowing almost nothing about Linux myself.

*Actually, my dark secret was out with the opening paragraph, but I’m pretending like that opening paragraph doesn’t exist for creative purposes.

It was terrifying. Every once in a long while both Cory and Sean (aka malloc) would wander off at the same time. Enough people had come up to the booth before this and said things like, “So does this run in Gentoo?” and “What do you think about Red Hat?” that I knew if I was left alone with these Linux devotees that I’d definitely answer some question wrong and be found out as a fraud.*

*I personally prefer… Yellow Hat? Right? Anybody? That’s probably a thing, isn’t it?**

**Oh yeah?! Well, you’re a gentoo!!

Somehow, I came up with a brilliant stock answer that worked in almost every situation: “Oh, yeah? That’s (insert either positive or negative ejaculation here)! Oh, and you have a question? Do you know, I’m not actually sure about that one. Let’s wait until Cory gets back. I’m sure he’ll have a better answer for you!”

Boom. Situation resolved.

That night, we hung out with some Rackspace guys (Note: Rackspace is also awesome. XBMC uses Rackspace for a fair amount of internal web development. You should too!*) and I was introduced to one of the Boxee guys for the first time.**

*I need to figure out how to get paid for ad blurbs like that.

**Interesting small-world fact. I come from a small town just northwest of Wichita, KS. In about 20 years, it’ll probably be a suburb. I went to law school with a girl who comes from a slightly larger town just south of Wichita, KS. During law school, we became pretty good buddies. I even referred to her as “the coolest law student.” After law school, we both returned to Wichita. One day, I was talking about XBMC to her, and she said, “Hey, did you know I have a cousin who works for Boxee?” As only about 13 people worked for Boxee at the time, this was as unlikely as is humanly possible in this business. The Boxee guy I was introduced to at SCALE was her cousin. Small, SMALL world.

That was a pretty fun night. I ate oysters on the half shell for the first time (gross). I bought a giant cookie at a liquor store for the first time (awesome). And I woke up feeling NOT awesome (not awesome).

And this is where the story gets really cool.* This was my first time really interacting with  a lot of Linux people. We woke up that morning tired and out of sorts. We sort of stumbled to our booth and groggily prepared to meet all people who were excited to learn more about XBMC.

*This is also the part of the story that absolutely defines why am I unwilling to talk bad about our Boxee compatriots/competitors. 

As we looked out at the mass of people filing in, my Boxee buddy walked up to us, still wearing his sunglasses (cause he’s cool like that), and handed us an entire crate of water and a packet of aspirin. “I thought you could probably use this,” he said.

It… was… awesome.

Nothing like some water after a rough night, eh Natalie?

Tell me about it.

And in this way, SCALE 2011 went off with hardly a hitch. SCALE 2012 starts in only 11 days (January 20th, 2012). I am excited to be going again. This year, thanks to my very minimal knowledge of Linux Mint, I might actually be more useful. I’m planning on bringing numerous flashdrives loaded with trailers and Big Buck Bunny (and possibly other CC videos).  I’m looking forward to that incredible feeling when I look around me and I see that “nerd” is how you define cool.  I think it’s going to be a great time.

And I hope to see you all there.

—

2011 started off quickly and with much enthusiasm. On December 18th (2010), XBMC 10: Dharma had been released. To the outside world, we all behaved as if we were terribly excited about Dharma. Behind closed doors however, Davilla had been hard at work preparing for XBMC for iOS. The entire team was intensely excited about this release and waited anxiously as Davilla and gimli and amet worked tirelessly to turn all the A4 line of iOS devices into XBMC powerhouses.

My contribution to these proceedings was minimal. I didn’t own an iOS device. I didn’t write the announcement. Mostly, I just gave really big, invisible thumbs up to the developers and photoshopped an image of an Apple TV into the glasses of Davilla’s cat avatar glasses. But that was some photoshop job!

You see that Apple TV in there? That's art!

—

Immediately after the release, the team moved from SVN to Github. This move had been discussed ad nauseum at the XBMC Developers Conference (or so I heard). We’ve even established an award for the most hilarious Git error called the GitWTF award that will be presented at the next Conference.  For the record, I don’t know when or where this conference will be. My hope is that it will be soon. My presumption is that it will not be soon.

—

At CES, the big XBMC news actually came from nobody on the XBMC team. A company called Sigma Designs revealed that they had successfully ported XBMC to the SMP 8656. When last we spoke of Sigma, Cory mentioned that Sigma had expressed interest in working with XBMC devs to fully port the system. I don’t have any comment on what happened after that.

—

On January 20th, XBMC for iOS launched. In August, I got an iPhone. Last week, my particular firmware FINALLY became jailbreakable.

There was much celebrating.

—

February 19th was a very big day for me. Not an especially exciting day at the time, but big nonetheless. That day, I wrote my first XBMC blog post since July 11th, 2009.

And that’s where things get interesting. If you’ve been keeping up with this blog, you know that I wrote an article on February 8th, 2011 (11 days earlier) here on Hey Facebook, in which I talked about my journey from XBMC user to Forum Mod and Community Manager.

11 days later, I wrote the blog post for XBMC and began a steady march into an entirely new job for the Team. Several weeks passed. On April 1st, we surprised and horrified our users by declaring that we’d been bought out be Sony. Obviously, we hadn’t. And on April 7th I began writing “What’s Going On.”

“What’s Going On” wasn’t new in any way. Cory (theuni) had started using the technique back in February. The idea was to gather up lots of little stories that were fairly interesting, but probably not worth an entire blog post on their own, and then display those stories for all the community to see. That first time I admitted that the April Fools Day joke was a joke. I talked about the demo of XBMC on MeeGo. And I asked users to submit posts for this new idea I had called “Feature Friday,” where we’d highlight one setup every week.

The first Feature Friday was a post sent in from a pleasant fellow from the UK named Oli, who had repurposed an Acer Travelmate as an XBMC tablet.

As that spring and summer progressed, a transition was made, as I slowly took over more and more of the blog writing duties from Cory (theuni), while he took over more of the  coding duties and github management duties of an ever-growing program. We had a contest for our mascot,* we featured a wide variety of nifty programs, and I slowly got better acquainted with the devs.

*Zappy, incredibly useful, frequently panned, awesome mascot extraordinaire.

On June 2nd, about a month after I went over why I’d spent the past 8 months doing everything I could think of to grow the XBMC Facebook fanpage and demonstrated that now a link from the fanpage to the blog was resulting in unique visitors nearly as strong as a link from a Gawker site (and with far more page views per visitor), Cory, Jonathan Marshall, and I all did some pretty intense analyzing of Google Analytics data, and based on (probably fairly shaky) math, we determined, for the first time ever, how many active and connected to the internet XBMC users there are. Final tally: about 750,000. Just short of 1 million users. For reasons that I can’t really go into right now, I expect that number to dramatically increase as 2012 rolls along.

The summer rolled along. Before I got downsized, I made a call for additional writers for XBMC. We had several excellent entries, all of which I read through multiple times. And all of which continue to languish. The unfortunate fact of the matter was that at that time, I was working a 40 hour week, picking up additional web development work on the side, and generally keeping myself busy to the tune of about 80 hours a week. I didn’t have the time to also herd the cats* into making decisions and picking additional writers, and I didn’t have the inclination to make a unilateral decision.

*At the risk of upsetting my fellow devs, “herding cats” is pretty much the perfect way to describe a project manager’s role in open source software. Or, more specifically, freely developed open source software. There is no threat of being fired, because the developers were never hired. There is no threat of withholding pay, because there is no pay. There is only a VERY limited chain of command. This means that the ONLY way the project manager can get action to go in a certain direction is to coax and broadly attempt to push the flow in a specific direction. If you’ve ever tried to push a stream of water in a direction, you know the only real way to make it work is to get the water to go in the direction it already wants to go in.

Anyway, just as I was getting up the energy make some decisions anyway, the entire world changed. Davilla proposed Feature Freeze for Eden and getting some new writers became a secondary concern. If you’ve been keeping up, you know most of the rest of the story.

By my reckoning, I have three jobs with XBMC. The first is Community Manager. The second is Marketing Manager (which is really just a fancy way of saying I write most official public-facing statements, whether in our blog or on our social networks). The third is…

—

Back on March 18th, I got an email from Jonathan Marshall. As you know, by then I’d already begun calling myself XBMC’s Community Manager, except in reality this was a totally unofficial designation. As I’ve said before, in open source, it’s much easier to just take a job and run with it than to wait until someone gives it to you.

That day, Jonathan asked me to become the third Project Manager for XBMC. I immediately balked at this suggestion. To make sense of this, I should probably back up a bit.

I do not come from a software development background. I have a master’s degree in social applied psychology (focusing on the cognitive processes that make stereotyping happen – turns out, it’s totally natural and incredibly useful in almost all situations save a very limited few). I have an unused law degree. The first software development organization I’ve ever directly worked with is XBMC.

In my mind, a Project Manager was a guy (or girl) who COULD code the entire project him (or her) self, but understands that there just isn’t enough time in the day to make that happen. My objections to Jonathan were thus, I have no real background in software development and I don’t know how to code anything other than html/css and some simple php. I’m really not qualified to be a PM.

Jonathan replied by saying that project managers are not coders. And coders are certainly not what XBMC is looking for in project management. Allow me to copy and paste a portion of his reply, as his response was fantastic.

“Rather, we … want someone who can give an overview to users, who can see the big picture of what users are wanting/requesting, who can articulate that vision to users, and who can highlight bits that don’t really fit into that vision and question their need, who can work with companies + drum up support there (financial or otherwise) and who can manage and maintain all the stuff that devs simply can’t do.”

As far as I am concerned, there may be no better writer on the Team than Jonathan when he is trying to articulate an idea.

So I thought about Jonathan’s description. I thought about my current role, and what I was already doing, and I decided that, at least in some ways, I was already a project manager. In fact, this single description totally altered my view of what a Community Manager is.

A lot of people, in my opinion, use community managers wrong. They think of them as bloggers, or social media experts, or overarching forum moderators. I am totally fine with using a community manager in those ways, but I think it is a huge mistake to view community managers as the voice of the organization, without also choosing to think of them as the ears of the organization.

A project manager is a person who tries to shape a piece of software. A community manager should be a person who tries to shape a piece of software by taking the input of the community and directing it toward the project.

So I became XBMC’s third Project Manager. And in my head, I merely got the official nod to do what I was already doing anyway. From that point on, when I did something like bitch about a self-imposed deadline passing, I felt a little less stupid about it.

—

As with any development project as open and democratic as XBMC, tempers will flare when different devs start walking down paths that don’t quite match up. I’m going to leave out almost all identifying information from the following story. If you still think you know who I’m talking about, I’ll ask that you keep it to yourself.

Sometime mid summer, a series of disputes arose between a lead developer for a particular XBMC project and the dev who was porting it to the platform that the lead developer didn’t have access to. The lead developer had chosen to take the project down one path. The porting dev totally disagreed that the path chosen was correct. For quite a while, these disputes occurred behind closed door, within the locked up walls of the private IRC room.

Unfortunately, one day the dispute erupted in the public message forum. The lead dev declared a public disavowal of all the project and certainly of the porting dev’s efforts. The porting dev replied very angrily and defensively. And then the fight returned to the private IRC room.

By that point, the damage was already being done. Users were suddenly aware that there was a problem and, MUCH WORSE,  they were starting to take sides.*

*It should be noted that it is impossible to be a forum user at XBMC or anywhere else in the known world without having an incredibly strong opinion about everything, regardless of whether you have any actual knowledge of the subject. The ability of forum users to suddenly become experts at any given area of trivia is invariably astounding.

It was at this point that two lead developers (who shall remain nameless) and myself were forced to step in. The two lead developers acted as referees between the combatants and ultimately did a really fantastic job at forcing the disputing developers to stop talking over each other and start acknowledging the good points they were each making. In the end, I believe we ended up going with the faster, but less perfect, solution to the problem, with the intent of ultimately switching to the better solution over time.

My job was a bit different. Allow me to theatrically recreate my speech.

Me: You idiotic bastards. The forum is NOT the place to have this fight. Combatant #1, what the hell were you thinking? You need to calm the hell down, right now, go back, delete your initial, way-over-the-top comment, and write an apology that lets the users know that nobody was 100% right or wrong in this.  Combatant #2, you need to accept the apology of #1, and then write an apology yourself. You guys need to act like professionals.* You are simply not allowed to have geek fights like that while representing XBMC.

*To be fair, they aren’t getting paid, so technically they aren’t actually professionals, but the point still stands.

THE END

That was a fun night. I don’t believe I’ve ever moved as quickly online to put out a fire as I did that night. Even today, I’ve momentarily hesitated about writing this particular story, but I challenge anyone working in software development to show me a piece of software that is universally loved by the coders where strong feelings about the CORRECT way to do something hasn’t resulted in some kind of dispute. People love XBMC, and they hate it when they perceive it is being handled incorrectly. I would honestly be shocked if I didn’t have at least one story like this. Also, for the record, to my knowledge the two combatants have been  entirely back on friendly terms since that day.

—

And that’s 2011. There are, naturally, a lot more stories to tell (like the time I published a Feature Friday from a hole in the wall bar on an island in the Carribean, or the time one of the Boxee guys brought a few of us XBMC guys an entire crate of water bottles), but some of them you’ve already heard, and some I need to keep around for a rainy day when I can’t think of any other stories.

Thanks for reading all the way to the end. Natalie, think this is a good place to stop?

If somebody didn't do it one day or another, I probably would have done it myself.

Oh! Alright, I guess I’ll take that as a thumbs up.

Wait, who are we talking about again?

What follows are entirely my own views and do not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of Team XBMC, any members of Team XBMC, or any partners and affliates of Team XBMC.

A few months ago I wrote a post describing my understanding of the differences between Plex and XBMC. Today I’ll probably do the same thing with Boxee, but first I’d like to say a few words.

To begin with, the relationship between Boxee and XBMC has always been a pretty good one. Boxee helped us set up our Foundation. Boxee paid for our very first developer conference. While there hasn’t been a great deal of code exchanged between the two communities, this has much more to do with the different coding methods a person will always find between a non-profit foundation whose income is not based on hitting deadlines and a for-profit company who absolutely must hit deadlines or suffer the wrath of the press and the public. That’s the nature of the beast and not much can be done about it.

As a non-profit, XBMC is likely never going to be in the position that Boxee has found itself in recently. XBMC is an example of an “upstream” project. We provide the code that can (and I stress can) be used by our users, but can also be by for-profit companies to make awesome boxes and software projects. Because we are relatively small (unlike Mozilla, for e.g.) and because the vast majority of code is provided for free by developers, we are not subject to market shifts and the realities of trying to make partners happy. If, for example, we partnered with Netflix tomorrow and six months down the line, they told us they didn’t like the fact that we used FFMPEG to decode non-Netflix material, we could simply shrug and part ways with Netflix. If, on the other hand, our livelihoods and profitability depended on the largess of Netflix, and they told us they didn’t like FFMPEG, we’d be in some hot soup indeed.

In this world of DRM and content locked up tighter than… something (sorry, I’m terrible at analogies), that’s reality. If VCRs had been invented in 2011, they’d be illegal. If CDs had been invented in 2001, iTunes wouldn’t exist, because DRM would have been included on CDs, iTunes would have been illegal, and the company that we all know and love called Apple would be a marginally struggling company known for cool computers and not quite as spectacular profit margins.

Put simply, public policy right now is in the hands of content providers who absolutely will not give up the imaginary ghost of content control until their proverbial hands have been squeezed so tight that all the remainder of the content has been forced from their fingers. Princess Leia would be chuckling in delight. Louis CK doesn’t understand that the MPAA doesn’t give two craps about whether a DRM-free world is possible and profitable. They only care about whether it is controllable and re-packageable. Congress doesn’t seem to get that, by slowly picking apart Fair Use and the First Sale doctrines, they are destroying the free market and creating a bubble economy based exclusively on rent-seeking income practices that hinder growth and destroy jobs. The idea that streaming a movie over the internet is legally a public performance, when, in every technological sense, it is exactly the same as playing a dvd over a really, really long cord, is the height of legal absurdity. I weep for the inability of the legal and rule-making profession in America to keep any kind of pace with technology, and I vigorously oppose modern laws designed to punish content consumers and content creators, so that a wealthy subset of content owners can profit enormously at the expense of all.

But I digress.

As a member of Team XBMC, I can afford to take a stand like that, because doing so doesn’t especially affect my livelihood. The employees of Boxee don’t get that privilege, because the moment they decide to step out of a corrupt system in order to fight it is the moment they get to start living on the streets. It is for this reason that I do not fault Boxee for leaving the HTPC by the wayside. It is for this reason that I do not fault Netflix for imposing hefty (and totally useless*) DRM on their video streams. The only individuals I fault are the rent-seeking content owners and the congressmen and women willing to debase themselves for campaign dollars.

*Seriously, the moment you can point to DRM effectively preventing a movie from being pirated in bit-perfect quality is the moment I’ll grant that DRM works. Until DRM actually prevents piracy, the ONLY thing it does is prevent genuinely appreciative users who actually want to pay for content from watching a movie the way they want to watch it. DRM is the modern equivalent of forcing users of Sony Walkmen to only use Sony Headphones. 

Nevertheless, as of December 26th, Boxee has decided to move out of the realm of HTPC software, and into the realm of SoC boxes exclusively, and so Boxee users want to know if XBMC is a viable alternative to switch to. Let me say to these users, “Yes, absolutely. As I have said before, using XBMC will make men (or women) want to be you, and women (or men) want to be with you. You will likely get awesome seats at awesome tables in exclusive restaurants now (if you are already rich and famous). And you will suddenly develop a taste for incredibly disgusting plants/fish eggs served on tiny crackers (probably).”

And, to answer your question in a slightly less sarcastic way, Boxee and XBMC are actually fairly similar programs (which makes sense, given that only 3 years ago they were the exact same program).  My understanding is that Boxee is slightly more forgiving about names and locations when scraping your local media.  XBMC is MUCH more forgiving if you don’t like the default look, as we provide a host of alternative skin addons (including one designed to mimic Boxee to some extent called Xeebo).

Perhaps the greatest difference between the programs, other than the skinning thing, is Boxee’s built in web browser. XBMC does not have one of those. This means, where Boxee could host numorous Boxee plugins that called videos from the internet by connecting using a built-in web browser, XBMC can host zero such plugins without the approval of the service provider.* Most XBMC users, however, ignore this limitation and simply install additional addon repositories that CAN connect to web streaming services. The most famous of these repositories is the bluecop repository. You can find a list of these unofficial addons at: http://wiki.xbmc.org/index.php?title=Unofficial_add-on_repositories

*Actually, to my knowledge, whether we can or cannot host such addons has not been tested in court, so nobody actually knows the answer to the question. I’m relatively certain that no one ever took Boxee to court over their web streaming methods, and so the entire process is a big legal question mark. We at XBMC figure it’s easier to be safe than sorry, particularly as our users are fairly bright and tend to have no problem installing an unofficial addon or two.

I hope that’s answered your questions, and I hope I didn’t upset anyone with my political rant. Natalie, what do you think about wealthy, powerful individuals seeking to destroy creativity and jobs in the name of control and wealth?

"Damn the man, save the Empire!"

Oh… um, I think we’re mixing our movie quotes here. (Also, our actresses who shaved their heads for a movie role.)

Update: Before any poorly thought out comments crop up, I would like to reiterate that I am not advocating piracy. In fact, if you read with any kind of thoroughness, you’ll see that I’m expressly advocating against piracy and, specifically, against the painfully useless means to fight piracy that are popular in the current day and age. Because this is my blog, I will have absolutely no problem deleting comments advocating piracy and will have very little tolerance for negative comments against either Boxee or Netflix. Fair warning.

At 3:21AM, Wiso gave the all clear.

At 11:49AM, Davilla added his agreement.

And finally, at 7PM, CrystalP gave the remaining thumbs up.

Unfortunately, in the seven hours between Wiso’s go-ahead and Davilla’s approval, developer Olympia threw a giant wrench into the operation.

It seems that at some point several months ago, an update for the TMDb scraper had been altered in a very innocuous-seeming way. It now provided the ability to watch trailers for movies that are hosted on Youtube.

There is one calamitous problem with this change. The Youtube addon is not shipped with XBMC and is not maintained by Team XBMC developers.

“Why is this a problem?” you ask? Well, I’m glad you asked that question. This is an issue for two reasons. First, we are working very hard to avoid including dependencies on websites that aren’t working directly with us. We REALLY don’t want to go through the weather provider issue again. Second, because the Youtube addon isn’t installed in XBMC at the outset, every single install of XBMC would, upon starting up, make a call to our server and initiate a download of the Youtube dependency, along with any additional addons that Youtube decides it needs. We have every reason to believe that XBMC will be downloaded several tens of thousands of times in the next few days. Imagine the incredible load on our servers that would occur as they coped with initial downloads and then the double load of automatic upgrades. It’d be like a ddos attack we performed on ourselves! It wouldn’t be pretty.

At 3:43AM, olympia pointed this problem out. And progress once again ground to a halt. For the next 18 hours, the team stewed on this difficult to digest information. The obvious solution was to remove the Youtube dependency from our TMDB scraper, and then create a script so that when a user tried to play a trailer for the first time, he was given the option to install the Youtube addon.

That was the obvious solution. Except it was Friday. Tomorrow would be Christmas Eve. Most development was set to effectively cease until Monday the 26th, at the earliest.

I was intensely frustrated. One of the many major problems with waiting a full year between releases is the first beta release will be a never ending host of minor irritations that are not problematic in the coding sense, but are hugely problematic from diverse other perspectives, whether that perspective originates from the eyes of the user, server, or developer.

We branched for Eden on December 11th. The ensuing 12 days were a nightmare of simple, but crucial, problems that had to be fixed. Cory, who acts as our primary github wizard, might not have slept for those entire 12 days. Olympia’s warning was likely the final problem in the line, but I deeply wanted to be able to release a beta by Christmas, and this problem singlehandedly prevented that.

And so I threw a tantrum.

Alright, not really. It was 11:30PM on December 23rd. 23 hours and 30 minutes after Cory asked for final sign off. I new this last problem was nobody’s fault, but I was so frustrated about the many delays that this one was the straw on the camel’s suddenly broken back.

I asked if it was really a major issue. I derided it as beneath our notice and something that could and should be punted for Beta 2. And then Cory calmly explained that if we punted this issue to Beta 2, I would be the one who got to explain to our host server why we melted their computers.

This calmed me down VERY quickly. But it brought up an interesting point. I just bought/got a new laptop for Christmas on the 22nd. In doing so, I finally made the switch to Linux Mint 12 (the first version of Linux that I believe is actually better, from an idiot user perspective, than Windows). Naturally, one of the first things I did was install XBMC. The thing was, I didn’t remember XBMC grabbing the Youtube addon.

I double checked. Truly, the Youtube addon was not installed in my version of XBMC. I pointed this out to Cory. He checked his copy. Sure enough, I was correct.

By merest chance, we had discovered a second bug. It seems, when an addon in the installed version of XBMC is the newest version of that addon, XBMC does not check the dependencies of that addon. And because it does not check dependencies, it does not DOWNLOAD those dependencies, even if the dependencies don’t actually exist in XBMC.

In almost all situations, this behavior is a bad thing, except – that is – when you want to release a software beta that doesn’t download certain dependencies! tMDB depends on Youtube, but because tMDB is the newest version, XBMC doesn’t give a crap and doesn’t download Youtube!

In XBMC Gold, such a bug would be totally unacceptable. In XBMC Beta 1? It’s a Christmas Miracle! So long as we acknowledged the bug in the announcement, it can be classified as a known issue and corrected in the near future.

And so, at 12:21AM on December 24th, Christmas Eve, Cory sent out an email informing the team that Beta 1 had been tagged and Billy the Buildbot was about to swing into action.

On Christmas Eve morning, the download came online.  The announcements were made. Our fantastic artist fkoch (aka da-anda, aka Franz) provided us with A Very Happy Zappy Christmas scene. The next two days were riddled with bug reports* (as is only just and proper in a beta 1). And I ate a whole lot of cake, cookies, and pie.

*By the way, one of the biggest bug problems has been freezing upon opening. That’s my self-imposed job for tomorrow. Time to roll up the sleeves and figure out how and why an upgrade from Dharma to Eden would cause a total freeze. My guess: a bad skin. We shall see.

In 24 hours and 13 minutes, disaster had been averted.

Well…, maybe not disaster. In 24 hours and 13 minutes, the combined genius of some of the best minds I’ve ever had the privilege to work with (plus one really big, really lucky mistake) ensured that thousands of XBMC users were gifted with a merry Eden Christmas.

Merry Christmas everyone. Your XBMC downloads may be found here. And, of course, Happy Hanukkah to Natalie (and my other Jewish friends, I guess).

Now let us dance!

Hava nagila, hava nagila Hava nagila venis'mecha!