RoadsAfar

I’m currently out in North Carolina working on yet another web startup. It’s been a wild week of work so far and I still have about a week left. We’re hoping to launch a beta on October 29. I’ll post it here when it goes live. It’s gonna rock.

I’m happy to announce that my new Facebook application, SpaceLift, has gone live. SpaceLift allows Facebook users to browse any public profile on MySpace from within Facebook while converting the profile to the wrinkle-free Facebook layout. We’re hoping to reduce world-wide exposure to animated GIFs by 10% by the end of the year.

It’s still “Pending Approval” so it can’t be searched for in the Facebook Application Directory yet. Fortunately, since you are reading this, you can go there directly and start browsing MySpace.

Writing and launching a Facebook application has been an easy and pleasurable experience so far. We’ve gotten a decent amount of press from the likes of Mashable, Valleywag, and even a French and German blog.

Enough blathering. Go forth and make MySpace a cleaner place. Add SpaceLift.

So it is no secret from my last post that I’m not a big MySpace fan. To work on the Facebook application that I’ve been cranking away on, I had to sign up for a MySpace account and set up a profile. I found MySpace even more repulsive through this experience. And yet it is enormously popular.

What would happen if you could somehow bridge the gap between MySpace and Facebook? This is something I’ve been thinking about and hacking on for the last week. And I’m just about ready to share my work with the world. It could be pretty interesting.

So I started tinkering with the Facebook Application API just last night and was surprised how quickly one can get an application up and running. The documentation on Facebook’s developer wiki and website are remarkably complete given that this service has only been available for a short time. Facebook really gets it. They have a great network with a lot of users, but they also realize that attracting developers is very important. The Facebook Platform goes a long way towards making life easy for potential developers.

MySpace, on the other hand, is a very different story. The Facebook Application that I’m writing, which I’ll talk more about later, is pulling data from MySpace. It is absolutely appalling the amount of disarray that makes up MySpace profiles. Not only does MySpace not offer any sort of public API, but the profiles themselves are a mishmash of haphazard CSS and HTML that make the US Government look efficient and lean. I’m shocked that they are still the largest social network out there at around 100 million users compared to Facebook’s 20 million. Even so, I’m still placing my bets on Facebook.

RoadsAfar is back with a new design and even less relevance than before. What is relevant is that I’m taking some time off from doing academic stuff to do business stuff. The descent from the ivory tower has been somewhat unexpected but nevertheless delightful. I leaped out the window of the tallest room in the tallest tower a few weeks back and I’m plummeting rapidly to earth waiting as long as possible to pull my chute. I’m glad you could join me for my first basejump.

The site is all new with fancy new Wordpress installation, a new theme, flickr photos, and even a new web hosting company. Pardon the mess while I tidy up over the next few weeks. Not that any of you out there are reading this yet anyway. The site will start to look better and be less broken over the next few weeks, right under you widdle noses. That’s the great thing about web software right? New features, no installation.