Yes, I know that it is one of the mascots of the 2010 Olympic games. I thought it would be so cool to make use it, long before the rest of the world associated it with anything other than me. But now, as the date (February 2010) approaches, I wonder when – or if – I should replace it. I’d like it to be a gradual process – but that is not usually the way these things work. You replace one image with another. Whoosh. Done.

And so I ponder. But as I ponder, the Games come closer. And with the date getting closer, it impacts The Locals more and more. To house and feed and transport that abrupt influx of humanity that is The Games, there must be changes. A streamlining of transport. A building of hotel rooms. A “regooding” of the now-deemed-blighted sections of the city. A streamlining of the food establishments, to cater to the oh-hey-theres-a-Starbucks-right-there crowd. Consistency is chosen, time and again, over flavorful melange.

But these Locals speak our language – by gosh they’re almost ‘mericans! Some, like the quirky observer William Gibson, use a delicate turn of phrase to create new words for the process that is unfolding. Others, like Tim Bray of the Urban Geek persuasion (no, I don’t know what that phrase means either) point us toward articles detailing the decline of the locals under an onslaught of progress and, later, of the fights and Pyrrhic victories. How soon until we see articles about the replacement of family owned businesses with multinational conglomerates? And do I want to be associated with all that through my avatar?

Stay tuned!

The context for this discussion is a website (nameless, sorry) that I’m interested in working on. The startup site, yet another type of social network, holds the promise of allowing for some very interesting and powerful interactions – but unnecessarily limits its users as it guards scarce server resources and data security. Furthermore, and I’m going out on a limb here, I suspect that these mis-perceptions are one of the reasons this startup has had difficulty in raising much-needed funds. Some examples:

• Users are automatically logged out after a few idle minutes, with no option of changing the time period before auto-logout (or choosing “Keep me logged in” for single-user computers). This seems a bit draconian given that there is nothing accessible on the site that couldn’t be gathered in other ways – no bank statements, social security number or mother’s maiden name.
• A PDF document containing the public profile data for your social circle can be generated for off-line access, but only by a subset of the social circle and only for a short period of time. I think this is intended both for security and to guard scarce resources (such as server time and bandwidth). The former concern is misguided – anyone receiving the PDF can circumvent security by immediately sending it to bad people – which is unstoppable once you provide off-line access). The scarcity of server time or bandwidth can be overcome by delegating it to someone else such as Amazon’s ECC or S3 services.
• New people can be invited to the social circle, but only by a small initial set of users – and those invitations expire relatively quickly. Its unclear why this decision was made, but I suspect it was due to some perception of scarcity or security. All it appears to do is add yet another unnecessary barrier to entry.

In spite of these issues, and others, I’m still captivated by the underlying ideas that it represents and by what it could become in the future. Hopefully I can rapidly prototype my vision for an improved site and use it as a starting point to land a dream job.