comparison

While I was at Acquia this summer I wrote a number of blog posts for Acquia. Check them out below.

Drupal Commons: Then and Now

A comparison of Acquia Commons at the beginning of the summer when I joined Acquia to the end of last summer when Commons was released and I wrote an analysis of it for Mediacurrent.

Status Streams in Commons

A sneak peak and overview of the status updates / activity stream features I developed that have become the centerpiece of Commons 2.0.

BrowserID: from announcement to Drupal module in under 24 hours

A discussion of how I wrote the BrowserID module for Drupal in under 24 hours since Mozilla announced the BrowserID initiative. This kind of effort can only happen in a large open-source community like Drupal's.

Commons 2.0 and Contributing to the Drupal Community

Throughout my time at Acquia, I made sure that I could contribute nearly everything I developed back to the Drupal community. As a result, any Drupal website in the world can now use status update and activity stream technology similar to the features that made Facebook so popular.

There's a revolution going on, and it's more than what people think. The new, social, virtual world in which we're increasingly finding ourselves has opened the door to a wide variety of physical extensions to that online reality. In particular, a slew of price and product comparison tools have arisen, facilitated by the rise in ultra-mobile computing (namely smartphones). Additionally, new sharing tools are allowing us to focus on the experience or result we want from a product rather than the physical object itself. When we share an item or buy collaboratively, we extend the life of the product and also get utility from it at a lower price than the physical object required to deliver that experience. In other words, we are increasingly buying the hole rather than the power drill, the movie rather than the actual DVD, the transportation to work rather than the car… perhaps one day the sleep rather than the bed, the home rather than the house. The possibilities for entrepreneurs are endless right now.

And yet…

Two days ago I wrote a blog post on my Mediacurrent blog comparing "Friend" modules for Drupal 6 social networks. It appeared on Drupal Planet. Head over there to get the full scoop.