Corvus Consulting

It didn’t take long to do the math as Steve Jobs unveiled Ping, the social music recommendation engine baked into iTunes 10. In one deft move, Apple brought itself into the social networking market with a near-instant enrollment of up to 160 million. And did you catch that they also have credit cards and a history of trusted purchasing with those members?

You could almost hear the gasp in Palo Alto.

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This spring I offered a coworking desk in our shared office as something of an experiment. I got to spend some time working alongside people I know, and interest had started to filter in from people I didn’t know just as the sub-lease on that desk expired. It was hard to give up that growing seed, so when some extra space came up in the same office this month I grabbed it.

The upshot is that I have more space to work with people I contract to help out on larger jobs, which is happening more often, AND I can offer the coworking desk as a permanent feature.

So if you need a place to hang your hat and set down your laptop for a day, the desk is back and it would be great to see you. More information is available on the coworking desk page.

People in the tech world are a-talking, and the words on their lips are straight from a hot headline: WHOA: Google Android Outsells Apple iPhone in US. Like a lot of people, my first thought was that this took a lot less time than I would have thought.

There’s no doubt that mobile is shaping up as a two-horse race between Android and iPhoneOS while RIM dithers in front of a mirror trying to figure out what it wants to be. But figuring out just where each horse is on the track requires a depth of reporting that the tech press isn’t inclined to provide. To help them out, here are a few simple questions about the Android vs. iPhone numbers:

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Starting tomorrow, I’ll be offering a coworking desk to the Vancouver tech community for the next few months. The details are written up on their own page, and I’m keen to see how it goes and to see some old friends from around town and to make some new ones.

Like many, I watched the iPad announcement on Wednesday and then went straight to discussion forums to see what people were saying. As with any disruptive product, there’s a mix of reactions ranging from lust to uncertainty to outrage. What gets missed in the excitement for or against is the comprehensive and disciplined innovation strategy that Apple has used three times now, most recently in the iPad.
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Things are moving fast these days.

Only a few weeks ago (er, make that months), I wrote that major search engines were finding themselves ill-equipped to keep up with rapidly-emerging trends, while Twitter and other social networks were becoming good at this realtime reporting. I also thought that Twitter’s major business direction had been set straight for search given the focus on search throughout its website experience, and that they were bound to collide somehow.

After a long hot summer and into autumn I read that new deals with Twitter allow Bing and Google to include tweets in search results. Bing scores a second time through Microsoft’s stake in Facebook by also drawing in status updates from that community. These deals help solve for the search engines’ the problem of knowing what parts of the web are changing so that they can index significant changes almost immediately after they happen.

But this post isn’t really about what I got it right. Rather it’s about what parts I didn’t see coming, and what can be gleaned from that, which turns out to be more interesting.

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Vancouver’s tech community learned yesterday that the beloved coworking facility Workspace is to close its doors tomorrow. Jayson Minard, who took over the business from founder Bill MacEwan less than a year ago, emailed members with the bad news, and a shocking imperative to clean out any personal belongings before the end of August 21.

I planted myself at Workspace part-time for two years, joining before the doors opened on the basis of an idea and a tour from Dane. I made new friends, enjoyed what was still Gastown’s best cup of coffee, and got things done against the view of peaceful mountains and the busy harbour. Though I worked more on remote projects, Workspace made me feel like I was working in the Vancouver community. Last last year I needed to change things up and ended my membership, but was still in there every two weeks for meetings. I have one last meeting there today at 4.

Workspace showed what the upper bar in coworking looks like, but more importantly it was a fantastic hub for Vancouver geeks and a symbol of innovation. It doesn’t sound like there will be a chance for a closing party to give it a proper sendoff.

Speaking of losses, the wider world of geekdom saw another one on the same day with the disappearance of the anonymous uber-coder _why. Not being a coder, I never knew much of _why, only that the work under that name was widely-respected and packed with personality. John Resig’s tribute sums up the value that _why brought to the community, and touches on the ephemerality of our works:

If there’s any analogy that I can make about _why, his online persona, and all the works that he’s produced over the years it’s to the Tibetan Buddhist tradition of the sand mandala. After a mandala has been constructed – and displayed – it is ceremoniously deconstructed – which is meant “to symbolize the Buddhist doctrinal belief in the transitory nature of material life.”

It’s a fitting theme for those who work on digital products, which can have less durability than fresh sushi. Nick Sweeny recently wrote about the durability of things written down hundreds and even thousands of years ago, and the durability of what narratives are created by communities that form and live online.

Technology and business are relentless in the pursuit of tighter cycles, and the urgency can fool us into forgetting too easily what came before. I don’t think that the space left by the disappearance of _why or of Workspace will be so forgotten, as they live on in the better coding and better relationships that came out of their existence.

So, here’s to the life of things done well, all of which have their own ends.