Merriton

Yesterday, after Randy, Kevin and Sierra left, Bree explained her project to James and John. It was some complicated thing that had to do with computer people talking to each other and showing off their pictures and stuff. Kevin’s idea to make the Internet faster made more sense to James, but Bree really wanted them to understand, so she explained it to them in private. Today, she was presenting to the rest of them. Randy’s skinny wife looked a lot better, but she seemed really embarrassed about yesterday. James wasn’t going to step in that minefield.

Today, Bree had some cool pictures on her computer to explain things.

“Right now, social networks are where IM was a few years ago. If you had an IM account with AOL, it wouldn’t contact your friends on Yahoo!. You had to remember which account each of your friends had or find some other way to keep track of them. Then came IM clients like Pidgin, Miranda, Jabber and Adium.”

A cute little bird was on her screen. He was flapping his wings and he had a number on his chest.

“IM clients could gather your friends from all the instant messaging services and easily tell you who was online and send you messages no matter where they came from. What Adium is to IM, SN-Connector is to social networks. With my software, you can enter one message and ALL of your social networking accounts will be updated easily. It works with Zerbitz (of course), Jaiku, Facebook, LiveJournal, MySpace, Pownce, Dodgeball, and…”

Bree was pausing. James had no idea why she was pausing, but she looked at Randy. He sat there with a blank face. He finished her sentence, “… and Twitter, I suppose.”

Bree breathed a sigh and continued, “Yes, and Twitter. My software is available for trial use for free and can be used with two social networks. If the client pays the for the $20 upgrade, they can use it with all the networks. I can host the downloads on my own server back home and payments will be handled by PayPal. I decided against Google Checkout because I have a longer standing relationship with PayPal. Any questions?”

Kevin was the first, “Social networks seem to go through fads. How do you plan to keep up with all the different ones out there?”

Bree smiled and replied, “Eventually, a few prominent leaders will stay and the others will fall by the wayside, just like the IM market did. SN-Connector will keep the original ability to stay connected with the older social networks, but eventually one or two will become the dominant leaders and the rest of the world will forget about the others. Until then, I’m dedicated to keeping SN-Connector working with ALL social networks.”

Kevin shrugged. “It’s a lot of work. They change their API every week or two.”

Bree replied, “I am the type of programmer who can keep up with change. Any other questions?”

James raised his hand, “Do people really do all this stuff? I never heard of any of those except MySpace. Why would people be on all of them? Are there that many people on more than one that they’d want to use your program? Heck, I’m not on any of ‘em.”

Bree breathed a deep breath, “Right now, this IS a specialized program that will only appeal to a few people who are really into social networking, but the longer this technology lasts, the more people will need SN-Connector. I’m not thinking about software for today. I’m writing this software for tomorrow.”

James said, “You just said that in the future there will be LESS social networks, so won’t your software be LESS useful in the future?”

Bree nodded. “By then, I hope to be the only social networking desktop program on the market.”

Randy cleared his throat and James noticed the panic on Bree’s face while he talked, “Speaking of competition, there are already quite a few products on the market that do this already, friendfeed.com, socialthing.com and iminta.com are the first ones that come to mind. What makes yours different?”

Bree took a big breath. “I reviewed all of those sites and they all have the same flaw. They are websites instead of desktop software. You have to log onto their website and upload from there.” She brought up the software on her laptop. She had shown this thing to James and John yesterday, but now it seemed to make a little more sense. “With SN-Connector running in the background, checking for messages from your friends on all the networks, you don’t have to log onto anyone else’s website. It downloads the messages, you can save them to read later and you can respond from this software without loading your browser window. It will be as easy as IM is today.”

“Those other companies are looking for Google to buy them. I don’t want that. I saw first hand where that path leads. I want to provide a neat, simple and easy to use software program to make people’s lives better. I’m not interested in a big sell-out.”

James saw Randy’s smile. It was pure approval coming out of every pore of his face. James thought to himself, “That’s what I want. He’s going to glow like that when I show him my project.” James barely heard the rest of Bree’s answers to technical questions and didn’t come out of his reverie until he heard Randy call his name.