The basic idea of Foreign Relations is to provide a bit of Risk, Civilization, social networking, all that stuff, while remaining simple and in-browser. No plugins. No fluff. Casual.

I never worked on it. Seriously. It's 2007 and it's not even at alpha-quality yet. How sad is that? I'd really like to see it, you know, come to fruition at some point though, and probably the best way to force that is to: a) put it out there, b) get people to try it out, and c) tell me how much it sucks. Brilliant plan, eh? Even if it's a little old and crufty. Even if a lot of the code embarrasses me. At least get something out there.

So, here we go. Want to try the "alpha"? Sign up here.

Basically this version allows you to sign up, create a nation, buy different military units, communicate with other nations, and attack and defend other nations. Not a whole lot, but this is the framework on which the rest of the good stuff is built. The good stuff being: general obvious improvements to how things like attacking and defending work, make the various choices you make when you create a nation have an effect (economic system, political system, etc), formalized enemies/allies, resources that your nation creates and needs (trade), spying, maybe a United Nations type thing? But the real core of the game that hasn't been built yet is: a random event that would occur every 2 turns, requiring you to make a decision. And your decision would obviously have consequences.

What am I looking for if you try the game? Mostly, I'm looking for ideas. What kinds of decisions would you like to have to make? What should happen? What should the economic and political choices do? Does attacking/defending work well? What could make it better? Does your nation make money too fast? Too slow? That kind of stuff. Feel free to post your comments here, or in the forums there, or email me. And if you don't like it at all, tell me that too.

Update: The game that I played in college and couldn't remember the name of earlier is Planetarion.

These are the things I worry about.

Have you seen Twitter? It lends itself well to short, train-of-thought things like this. Plus, I'm in love with Ev, so.... check it out!

Like a country boy going to the city, I'm positively giddy about riding the train to work. Except for when it hits a car and it takes 3 hours to get into the office.

1. "Sorry, no pets" are the three most disappointing words in the english language.
2. Nobody can spell gardener (gardner).

On September 11th, I start work at Flickr the best photo sharing, social networking, web 2.0 starting site on the planet. I'm super silly excited for the opportunity to contribute to something so highly used and well respected, and I'm honored to work with some of the smartest, goofiest, and creativest people around.

Right now we're planning, packing, cleaning, freaking, and grinning.... wildly. Expect extremely light posting until then. See you on the other side!

So far they're a little light on the Sci and a little heavy on the Fi, but you can tell that they're at least trying to make things as real as possible while keeping the premise of a town full of geniuses, advanced science, and military-grade weaponry believable. And there's enough backstory to keep the interest high from episode to episode. On top of that, the production values are almost ridiculously high, especially for the SciFi channel.

It's not the best show on TV, by any means. But it's summer, and there's nothing else on (not that that's the only reason I'm watching this show -- it could compete well in the fall). It will certainly do while I wait (until October! Frak!) for more BSG. If you're interested in catching up in time for next Tuesday's new episode, you can probably find the first three episodes on your favorite P2P network, or let me know, and I can send them to you.

I come across a lot of neat stuff on the web during your average day, but find it difficult to write an entire "post" about them. I've always wanted a little section of links ala waxy, but didn't have room in this design for a sidebar of links. Kottke's way of integrating his links in with the main body was more like what I wanted to do, but I had no idea how.

Turns out all I had to do was a simple Google search and 20-30 minutes of work setting things up (would have been less if I had already upgraded MT). So now I have a separate link blog integrated with the main one -- and the feed integrates them too. Yay.

These are the people you change the world with: moms and dads, grandmas and grandpas, "regular" people (for lack of a better term). People are busy. They prioritize their time. For some of us, checking out the latest web applications is how we spend our time. Others put that way, way, way down on their list. So for them to adopt something like Flickr, you need to give them features that make it obvious and simple for them to pick up. Here are some (free) ideas I've come up with:

1) Email subscriptions
Flickr offers RSS feeds for all sorts of things: individual photostreams, specific tags, groups, etc. For those of us in the early adopter group, this is great -- I love the RSS feed of my contacts' photos. But my mom, for example, doesn't want to, and shouldn't need to, install an RSS reader or use Bloglines just to subscribe to my photo feed. All she wants to know is when I upload new pictures of Connor.

For this, Flickr should offer email subscriptions. Anybody should be able to come along and tell Flickr: "Email me when this person uploads a new photo." No Yahoo/Flickr account required -- just an email address. It can even be made as complicated as all the feeds, where you can subscribe to email notification when someone uploads with a specific tag or adds a photo to a group.

The technical implementation of such a feature is non-trivial, but Flickr has a history of adding innovative, and technically challenging, features. Certainly there will have to be limitations in place so that Flickr can protect me from drowning in a flood of emails if I subscribe to all new Kitten photos -- and perhaps, in that case, protecting me from myself. Adding this feature allows people to remind themselves to visit Flickr -- and the more they visit Flickr, the more the greatness of the application's other features will become obvious to them.

2) Shared password private photos
Like many social software applications, Flickr allows me to set privacy options on my photos. In this way, I can either let the public at large see my photos, or just my "friends" or my "family" (or both). For a fair amount of photos, Erin and I have decided to make them private -- viewable only by Friends and Family. But for this to work, all my friends and family need to have Yahoo/Flickr accounts -- and need to be marked, by me, as friends/family. With an extended family the size of mine, this is... difficult.

Erin and I make use of Trixie Tracker to keep track of Connor's diapers, sleep, and nursing -- an incredibly valuable service, but not relevant and worthy of a separate post. But what is relevant is the fact that Trixie Tracker allows me to share our data by defining a password. I can then give that password to whomever I want, and they don't need to setup a separate account. In fact, with TT I can set up multiple accounts with different layers of permissions and hand them out -- no action necessary by the people who want to see my private stuff.

Flickr should adopt a similar methodology. If you know the assigned password, you can view my private photos. No Yahoo/Flickr account necessary.

3) Account-less print ordering
Flickr's print ordering is flat-out amazing. Easily the most impressive online ordering system of anything, let alone photos. It's too bad that for most of my friends/family, this is a feature that's hidden. That's because in order to order prints -- in order to even see the order prints button -- you need to be signed in to a Flickr account. In order to more easily impress the masses, the order prints button should be made available (perhaps I can configure this) to everyone. Then, all they need is a credit card to place an order -- again, no Yahoo/Flickr account necessary.

4) Turn-offable contacts feature and fake-friend feature
This is a feature that's not like the others. I don't think it's necessary for adoption by the masses, but it is something that I've always wanted. Like most social-software applications, Flickr has a concept of contacts and "friends". Also like most social-software applications, being added as someone's contact or friend bestows on you some extra functionality -- in Flickr's case, if you're my contact, your new photos show up in my Contacts feed. If you're my friend, I can see your private photos, and vice-versa.

And like the piece of social-software that we call life, dealing with people who think they're you're friend, but aren't, is... awkward. In real life, if that friend of a friend, or coworker, that you don't really like invites you over for dinner, or wants to hit a bar, you can always make up an excuse. But in the social-software world, things are more binary. If he/she sends you a friend request, it's either yes or no.

What Flickr, and other applications like it, need is some sort of "fake-friend" feature. That way, if someone requests to be your friend, but it would be awkward to turn them down, you can mark them as a fake friend. To them, it would look like they're your friend, but it would not be reciprocal. In the case of Flickr, their photos would not show up in my Contacts feed (because I'm not interested in seeing them) and they would not be able to see my private photos (they wouldn't even know I had any, so they wouldn't know what they're missing).

And in order to make Flickr more palatable to people who just want a place to upload and share family photos, and don't want to have to deal with random contact and friend requests, why not make that whole system an option that can be turned on and off?

As you can see, a lot of these have to do with not requiring accounts for various pieces of functionality. There's nothing wrong with accounts, per se, but they do often get in the way of people just trying out your service. Especially in instances where certain features... certain amazing features... are completely hidden from users just because they don't have accounts, they can be incredibly detrimental to massive adoption of your application.

Flickr has built what is hands down one of the most impressive web applications to come out in a very long time, and they deserve all the praise and awards they have gotten. Even if they stopped innovating and adding features, Flickr would still stand tall among all competition. But with some additional features, like the ones I've suggested and many others that I haven't thought of, Flickr would be well on the way to accomplishing their mission of changing the world.

More pictures at Flickr, constantly updated.