Tiago Matos’ Nest

Facebook is set to begin testing an expansion of its Gift Shop, for third-party developers to begin selling items to users for Facebook’s virtual currency. The really interesting part about this is that these developers can sell physical merchandise, not just Facebook gifts.

via The Dawn of Real Facebook eCommerce | WebProNews.

In my opinion, Posterous stands out in three areas; 1 its use of email as a content publishing form; 2 its use of “lazy registration” principles; and 3 its elegant design.

via Sexy Widget.

It is no coincidence that we (the society) have both (1) a widespread aversion to anything that makes us uncomfortable and (2) a high percentage of people who regularly feel frustrated, unfulfilled, lost and miserable. Ironically, it is our aversion to working against resistance that stops us from growing, learning, evolving and adapting.

via Google Reader (1000+).

Google, for its part, has attempted to disrupt Apple’s iPhone in its apparent area of weakness: its closed nature. Google open-sourced the Android platform and invited the world of third-party developers to flock to it.

They never came.

via Little can save Google and Nokia from mobile failure | The Open Road - CNET News.

Google offers a fine Linux thing running in a not-so-fine hardware and Nokia bought a worse-than-fine thing running in a also-not-so-fine hardware… who wins? Steve Jobs?

The easiest thing for Zuckerberg to do was simply dismantle News Feed. But he refused. News Feed was not just any feature. It was the infrastructure to undergird the social graph. So, three days after the feature launched, he posted a 485-word open letter to his users, apologizing for the surprise and explaining how they could opt out of News Feed if they wished. The tactic worked; the controversy ended as quickly as it began, with no real impact on user growth.

via How Mark Zuckerberg Turned Facebook Into the Web’s Hottest Platform.

Your Eclipse installation may coincide with the creation of a new PHP project, but it is more likely that you already have existing code you want to use within Eclipse. This is where most people get a little stuck—if you know the magic incantation, the process is easy.

via Eclipse and PHP | Tiger Heron.

Hello CouchSurfers!

On every CS profile, members share their personal missions.  Whether it’s to “take a road trip through Australia,” “enjoy my new job,” or even “figure out what my mission is,” CouchSurfers share their goals and aspirations with the community.  I’m excited to announce that now, everyone can also read about the mission and vision of CouchSurfing as an organization.  Our new statements (available on our About page) provide our community with a common understanding of our future and our values.

Many of you are familiar with our previous mission statement, “Participate in Creating a Better World, One Couch at a Time.”  While this line provided a great slogan for CS, since it was released in 2006 we have realized that we also needed a stronger, more detailed set of directives to provide guidance to our growing group of volunteers.  As CS grows, some members have expressed concern about the future.  Will CouchSurfing preserve its identity as it becomes larger?  These documents are a guarantee that our core values and ideals will not be lost, even as our community expands.

Word cloud from member testimonials
The process began with research.  Volunteers and I hit the books and conducted surveys.  Over time we decided on a plan to create a full set of cornerstone documents, rather than just a new mission statement.  Our vision would describe our ideal future for the world.  Our mission would describe what we do as an organization to achieve our vision.  Our guiding principles would shape the culture of our organization by affirming the shared values of our staff and volunteers.

Then it was time to create the documents themselves.  With a group as diverse as CouchSurfing, finding a vision and mission that could represent the goals of our community was a big task.

We began by interviewing volunteers and members.  We wanted to know what CS meant to different people, and what role it had played in their lives.  Then we carefully read 1,000 member testimonials and 100,000 personal mission statements.  From this huge bank of information, we pulled out the words and concepts that seemed to be the most universal amongst CouchSurfers.

We found that while the words they used varied, CouchSurfers from all different backgrounds seemed to come back to a core group of concepts when talking about CS.  These concepts became the basis of our documents.

From there, it was on to a careful process of writing and rewriting.  Each time we developed a polished draft, we sent it out to CouchSurfers for comments and reactions.  With each successive round of testing, we re-evaluated our statements based on the feedback we’d received, and made changes as necessary.  With each new version, the number of members and volunteers who said that they “agreed” or “strongly agreed” with the statements grew.  By the time we reached the final versions, the percentage of those surveyed who fell in that category was approximately 90%.  Go check it out!

I’d like to thank all of the volunteers who worked on the development of these documents over the years.  I’d also like to thank the hundreds of CouchSurfers who sat for interviews, answered surveys, or provided feedback on drafts.  Without your help it would never have been possible to find common goals for our diverse community.  Thank you!

Sincerely,

Casey Fenton

CouchSurfing Founder

YouTube - Hollywood Video advert 1.

YouTube - Validation.