In today’s world, the best thing is collaboration. You’ve got to collaborate. From open source to open books to open wikis to open video to open pants, everything’s gotta be open.

Now it’s all nice and well, it allows people to work together and therefor work less. Cause let’s face it, it’s not about working better. A couple of people working on a document doesn’t make it better, it just covers each other’s asses and all they do is ask each other’s feedbacks.

It goes down to this. Do we pee collectively? Does that make our pee better? Does that help anyone anywhere? Do we pee faster? Doesn’t that cause all sorts of issues, such as ‘dude, where is my paragraph?’

Collaboration, my ass. Having someone else working with you on a piece just makes the piece slower. It makes people assume each other’s responsibility, producing something of an average impact. Did Nasa ask collaboration of the Russian when sending people to the moon? No. Why? Because it’s a race. Collaboration does the opposite of competition. Instead of each other going on our own and working our ass off quietly to get it out before the other, or better than the other, we’re meant to work together like sheeps, watch each other’s so called qualities and be polite and all, for what? An average result, half-assed, sharing credits and blaming each other.

Granted, two brains work better than one, but that doesn’t mean the end-result is better.

Another mess-app released: text flow. Yay to collaboration.

Textflow

I’ve got a solution. Take two people meant to collaborate together and get them to compete. Same piece, same deadline, same technology. At the end, get the better one. The loser will look at the other’s piece and be forced to improve to not get beaten next time, instead of taking half the credits while the other one is pissed off for having done most of the work. That will help the schmilblik.

Air, when it came out, was like most technologies sold today: “this thing is going to be huge, it’s going to change the way we look at planet earth and it’s going to revolutionize your pants”.

It has been a year now (March 19th) that Air is in our lives (first under the name “Apollo”), and where is that big revolution?

Like any other dream, especially marketed ones, it hasn’t quite happened as they sold it. It is not huge, nor changing our bias on technology or changed anything to my pants.

It’s just a tool.

A technology, a computer, an idea is just a tool and by itself, it just sits there and will not produce anything or change the world. In other words, a technology is only as good as the adoption rate and the creativity of the people using it.

Papervision 3D, another framework, rogue, made by enthusiast, is quite a different story. People love it and the early adopters have blown our minds in term of the possibilities. Many big brands have adopted 3D in their site and are using a beta framework even though it could disappear of the earth faster than it came. Suddenly, Flash 10 promises us 3D integration (of some sort).

So why is it that something like a desktop development framework pushed by Adobe, a big software maker, can fail (I wouldn’t call that a success), while a rogue 3D framework made out of geekery makes it global and changes so much the internet?

Well, it seems that Adobe and a lot of the ‘Web2.0′ world believed that the future of the internet was to integrate the desktop with the browser and somehow get away from the browser. I’m not saying that they failed at predicting the future but they did fail at realizing it.

Is this growth only slow or is there growth at all? How has Air changed your life compared to 3D in websites? How could millions of dollar fail while geekery succeeds?

Time will tell.

The strategy department in technology companies should get closer of stabbing in the dark rather than telling people what the future is. I will always remember that t-shirt I saw recently that said: “dude, where is my flying car?”.

Twitter, the biggest life-waster medium (media?) on the planet has a cool little deviation (twist’).

Twistori parses and filters twitter to find strings that begin by I love, I hate, I think, I believe, I feel, I wish.

The result is a pretty cool mood’o'meter of the internet (of ego-centric people with no life).

Tag Galaxy is a pretty cool little app using the flickr api.

I’m not 100% sure that it’s anything but cool.

Slide rocket is in private beta and I’m still waiting for my invite. It seems very promising from the look of it.

Anyone got an invite for me?

I think we have a winner.

Just brilliant.

Check it out.

Spectra is a visual rss reader of msnbc.com made in Flash and using I believe Papervision 3D.

It’s visually very impressive, 3D, quite usable, but buggy as hell!

For starters it wouldn’t start in my Safari for some reason (buggy JS?), then clicking the carrousel elements kept getting items from the same feeds in Firefox 3, and so on.

However, it looks very promising…

Less flat than my Digg UFO, for sure!

It has been a while since I’ve seen a documentation that a company can be proud about.

The Facebook Developer Documentation is one that gives me hope. it seems that web2.0 means documentation2.0 too.

Spend some time in Adobe’s documentation, or any web framework and you might find yourself with a wig soon enough.

Facebook’s documentation is clear, to the point and well explained, with multiple options. Also good documentation examples go to Mozilla’s Gecko DOM reference and Proce55ing’s.

CushyCMS is a good execution of an old idea: have a CMS that integrates within the content of a site, rather than define how the content of the site should be handled.

Simply add the cushycms tag to your content divs and off you go.

The only problem I imagine is the fact that the pricing hasn’t been defined therefor making clients very uncomfortable with the idea of using such product. They like to know how much things are going to cost and plan the website around that. That simple fact renders it a toy rather than a tool.

That said the simplicity of it makes it a definite product to watch closely…