Re: [Yogurt-devel] Yogurt status and upcoming directions

[KB <sa...@il...>]

hello Ricardo:


this all sounds like good news, thanks for sharing the history and view
of the future. as one of the two developers, what should i be doing now?

one main question i would have is who is going to be the main "project
manager" on yogurt. is it you? you and João? i'm not stating any
preference, actually i don't think i have one, but just wondering how
the management of the project will happen from now on.


thanks,
kevin

On Fri, 2005-01-28 at 23:03 -0300, Ricardo Staudt wrote:
> (note: this message is being sent to various locations at the same
> time, so it's not a message for you alone)
> (also note that my english is not very good, I'm doing my best)
> 
> Hello everyone!
> 
> I know I have made most of you wait, either for information or help...
> I promise I will be much more focused on Yogurt now that my vacations
> are over and my work at HP is lighter again, for the last two months I
> simply did not had time for Yogurt, thank god I'm finally back at full
> steam.
> 
> For those who have been trying to contact me without success, as
> aways, I'm available most of time on ICQ and MSN, just ask me for my
> number or screen name. Even when I'm too busy, I always reply
> (obviously, it might take a while).
> 
> First, a little background:
> 
> Yogurt has been on development (officially) since September, until now
> I was the only one on the development side, João has been giving me
> quite a hand at servers and everything that's not related to
> development so I could keep focused on the source code, the tool has
> grown really fast in two months (September-November) it has been on
> fast and active development early December., Since December, however,
> I was unable to add a single line of code due my lack of time (my job
> at HP caught me full time) and the problems with had setting up
> servers and everything that seemed to turn against us all at the same
> time.
> 
> We figured out we needed more developers since I couldn't keep the
> development running at a decent speed to avoid potential new Orkut-
> likes that seem to be popping out of everywhere, we couldn't be left
> behind. So we decided to look for new developers to help us add
> features and make it to our first stable release. Until now, about 5
> applied but none has yet started working on it. It's not that they are
> slow or unskilled, it's just that it's a pretty bad time (vacations
> and my lack of time to help) to start developing. We hope that at
> least 2 of them get work with us in the upcoming weeks.
> 
> At this point, since I haven't seen the source code for a while and we
> didn't really had any direction to go instead of just grow grow grow
> until we eventually could take on Orkut, we figured that we didn't
> really had any decent plan for this project, we were up to suggestions
> and spending some time in order to decide what direction to take from
> now on.
> 
> 3 days ago, I received a call from Bruce Douglas from San Jose,
> California that could not have been a better time, among a lot of
> things, he told me that his group was interested on the Yogurt project
> and told me about the how they have been planning to use this friend-
> of-a-friend-of-a-friend type of system on a more business focused
> model. That gave us a lot of ideas, in fact, it has helped us out of
> the Orkut-clone plan to something more elaborated and focused.
> The conversation with Bruce was very productive in a lot of ways, I
> hope we can trade more information and help on the future, I'm sure it
> will be very interesting for all of us.
> 
> So, on the last 3 days, João and I have been re planning this project,
> you might ask yourself why we haven't done anything of the sort
> earlier, the reason is simple, Yogurt came out of nowhere, but in a
> very short period we realized that it was just FAR too good for just a
> unpretentious hobby project, but not quite big enough to go face-to-
> face with google's Orkut, if that was to become our plan. So you can
> see there were no small steps in the project line, it was pretty much
> a huge jump from creation to market domination :).
> 
> I hope it makes clear for all of you the reason why we are re planning
> it.
> 
> With that in mind, here's how we see Yogurt and our plan for the
> upcoming months:
> 
> It's pretty obvious to me that if we want yogurt to grow as unified
> and centralized portal, we should not follow any the orkut-likes
> steps, it's a very unexplored system and there are many directions we
> can go. We strongly believe that the fact of being open sourced and
> free to the community will help to eventually centralize all these
> directions on this same tool. When I talk about directions, I'm
> talking about the possibility of using the Yogurt portal for both
> friendship and business.
> We see business (instead of just friendships) on the yogurt network as
> a strong turning point, in fact, this is the one features should be
> carefully studied in order to attract a new and different kind of
> audience to this tool. The friend-of-a-friend-of-friend system can be
> very useful when looking for services employees or jobs, just think
> about for a second... Big, isn't it?
> As far as those descriptions (how friendships and business will work),
> we will be discussing on the upcoming days, hopefully I will get more
> input on that from you guys, all ideas are welcome.
> 
> So Yogurt will not be developed as a big system anymore, in order to
> have all those features and to allow users to contribute, Yogurt is be
> splitted as a modular system. That means we will have the Yogurt Core
> and Yogurt Modules on different development packages, that, of course,
> requires some considerable re-writing on the code base... I'm working
> on that already.
> 
> A brief description of yogurt:
> (This text isn't good yet, just an early draft, help on writing this
> description will be appreciated... in fact, it's desperately needed,
> considering my bad English :))
> Yogurt is a social network application that allow the users to search
> and communicate with other members on a open network of friends,
> communities and services.
> Users can navigate on other member's friends list or communities in
> order to find new friends.
> Communities allow groups of users to trade information on the
> community forum as well as schedule events, anyone can create new
> communities at anytime over any topic.
> 
> Current Yogurt development to do list:
> - Modify the source for the core code base (until mid-February)
> Most of the functions (specially from themes) will suffer changes in
> order to improve refactoring and modularization. The draw_whatever_top
> () and draw_whatever_bottom() functions will be changed to
> draw_whatever(text), because of the multi-language support we no
> longer will use text directly, so we can reduce the code dramatically
> in that aspect. I indent to start it as soon as possible as it is an
> obvious first step in the development.
> 
> Phew, now that's a lot of text!
> 
> Until next time,
> Ricardo Staudt
-- 
KB <sa...@il...>