Just a quick update this time, but an important one — at least to me.

After an eventful five-and-a-half years at OpenRoad Communications, I’ve decided to change things up a little bit and move on to a new opportunity. My last day at OpenRoad will be February 13th, and I’ll be joining Habanero Consulting Group’s User Experience Group as a developer on Monday, February 25th.

My experience at OpenRoad was excellent and I’d recommend it to anyone who’s looking to work on interesting and expansive projects with an talented, dedicated, and hard-working development team (yes, they’re hiring!) I’ve made some great friends there (and butted heads with some amazing developers), so it’ll definitely be tough to leave.

On the flip side of things, as the few of you who actually read this blog know (and I know who you are!), I’m pretty passionate about AJAX, community building, and emerging technologies. The ability to get to work in the area of software development where I feel the most creative on a daily basis is a rare treat. I didn’t go hunting for this — it somehow managed to land in my (semi-intoxicated, thanks Brian) lap in late December of last year; and after meeting with the impressive UE team at Habanero several times since, I figured it was too good of an opportunity to pass up.

I’ll miss everyone I’ve worked with throughout my years at OpenRoad, as well as Chris McGrath, with whom I’ve collaborated on ThoughtFarmer for what seems like eons. I wish them all the best. ThoughtFarmer is doing really well and I think the next year will be key to building it out — I can’t wait to see how version 3.0 looks (version 2.5 will be released this week.) At the same time, I’m hoping to make the same kind of friendships and continue to build my career at Habanero when I start there in three weeks. Cheers!

I’ll admit, I was an early Canadian Facebook adopter — once they opened things up for non-students in September of 2006, of course. I had looked at Facebook long before that (the popular web application had been around for over two years prior to opening up to the general public), and unhappily had not signed up as I wasn’t a student at a participating institution. As soon as I could, I created my account, filled out all the required and optional profile fields, and waited for the friend adds to roll in.

Of course, they didn’t for quite some time; Facebook only started to proliferate amongst non-student Canadians in early 2007. During that boom time, I logged in several times a day, checked my inbox, pokes, posted witty status updates, and added new friends as they signed up. The mini-feed kicked in shortly after, causing a lot of people a little bit of grief, then settling in for the long haul. It wasn’t a big deal to have one’s virtual life broadcast to others, was it? Life was good. Facebook thrived.

Then in May of 2007, Facebook launched its F8 platform. At first, as a software developer, this seemed like a dream come true. The first few applications out of the gates generated massive interest; millions of users signed up for the likes of Zombies, iLike, Scrabulous, Free Gifts, and Super Wall. Was this adding anything to the Facebook experience? I don’t know. I was a major proponent of Facebook for a long time, but now things seem to be going downhill on the user experience end of things. I’m sure Facebook is doing fine in general, as they appear to be signing up over 2 million new users a week (as well as causing a few minor privacy concerns.) They’re well on their way to passing MySpace as the top social network on the internet within the course of a year. But where does that leave existing users?

Times change. A scant year and a half after creating my account, and less than a year after the initial boom of new users smacked into Facebook like a Mack truck, I barely look at the thing. I log in infrequently, usually only to manage event invites. If Facebook has done one thing right, it’s in the handling of events. Having all (or at least a good 90%) of your friends available in one spot makes organizing parties a helluva lot easier. So long, Evite.

But on to the topic of this post: Facebook applications.

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I’ve gone and done it now. My old consultancy, surreallogic communications, is no more. After over ten years of staunch, loyal use, I’ve used the new year as an excuse to drop the name and web site (though the domain still works, for now.) I’ve replaced it with my new media company, Taunt Media.

I created Taunt Media for several reasons, primarily because I needed a new identity for my consulting aspect, but mainly because I have several mid-to-large scale web-based community projects on the go right now, including my recently launched collaborative writing site, Protagonize. The new company will act as a sponsor for all my upcoming collaborative web projects.

Also, it’s way shorter (and more pronounceable) than surreallogic communications, which was a serious mouthful. :)

I’ve setup a blog and some basic information over at the new Taunt Media site, and expect to me blogging regularly with progress updates on the various projects I have on the go.

After several months of part-time toil, my pet project is finally live. Yes, it’s been a long time coming, but Protagonize is now up and running and completely open to the public. Aside from being sleep deprived and having spent the better part of my Christmas holidays so far working on the site, I’ve still got a few tweaks to make, little kinks to work out, and a bunch of changes in the pipe that I’d like to get done before the new year. So far, so good.

The process of establishing the guts of the site now seems pretty trivial in contrast to all the polish I’ve put into it over the last few weeks. I managed to squeeze in several features that I hadn’t planned on having ready at launch (specifically, a whole whack of RSS feeds, a few usability enhancements, and some infrastructure niceties that should save me a lot of time deploying new releases.) I’m quite happy with the state of the site at launch — it’s more full-featured and stable than a lot of other products and sites that have been beta for months (or years, in some cases.) The hosting environment I have it on should do for the time being, but if I start generating even a decent amount of traffic on a monthly basis, I’ll probably have to move it to its own server somewhere. Time will tell.

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I was writing up some notes for my next guest spot on the Lab with Leo next week (which will appropriately be about comparing and contrasting AJAX frameworks) when I realized that I probably shouldn’t let all this research and paraphrasing work that I’ve put together go to waste. Most of it won’t make it on air, I’m sure, but it seems useful to make it available here in case anyone is curious. This also just happens to be relevant to (and also completely unrelated to) Brian LeRoux’s Vancouver AJAX & Beer meetup which is happening tonight over at the Irish Heather (and which I will be most enthusiastically attending as soon as I post this article.)

What my (non-scientific) research ended up becoming is basically a modified SWOT analysis. I did quite a bit of digging on the pros and cons of various AJAX frameworks that I didn’t have much experience with (most of my work has been with the YUI and script.aculo.us), such as MooTools, ext.js and Dojo. Not to mention the more highly-coupled frameworks out there like ASP.NET AJAX and the Google Web Tookit. During said digging, I failed to come across much in terms of recent comparisons between frameworks, so it seemed like a good idea to post up the rather high-level view of the different popular frameworks available that I’ve put together. Doesn’t hurt to let people comment if I’ve mucked something up or missed anything important, too.

Acknowledgements: Thanks to Steve Calvert (or nu-steve, as we like to refer to him here) at OpenRoad for his insight into working with MooTools, which I had very little knowledge of.

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