Me.dium's collaborative browsing vision

When we wrote about Me.dium over four months ago, we described it as 'social browsing'. Perhaps a refinement of this would be collaborative browsing, and that would be a more precise definition of what the company is trying to do. At the heart of Me.dium is the idea that by enabling real-time discovery and communication during browsing, this will enable people to get things done faster and in ways not possible before.

During my interview with the company founders, we discussed the typical scenarios for using Me.dium:

• You and your friend are trying to accomplish a common task;


• You are trying to do something on your own and meet others who are trying to do the same thing;


• You are observing the patterns of crowds nearby and so you are able to discover new things.

“Basecamp is so simple you can't do anything wrong. It's addictively easy-to-use.”

Let's face it. Most of us out here in the open source community are getting a very good deal. We are fortunate to have bright people building software for us at little to no charge.

If we begin to depend on these freely given gifts, we should never make the mistake of then assuming the one giving the gift is somehow accountable to us.

Gifts given should be received with gratitude and an expectation of nothing further. Nothing. And, if we aren't able or willing to help, the least we can do is try not to ruin the fun!!!

Thanks, Bèr! I appreciate your article very much.

This morning I found an email in my inbox telling me that I am a bad maintainer and that I am making people fork my modules. The mail was not meant to go to me, but the sender hit reply and thought he was moaning about me to someone else. Basically I was asking for my modules to be forked because I was too ### to release a new version. I don’t release a version unless I am confident it is release-worthy: when I have used it myself.

Not a big deal, but it gave me food for thought about maintainance and release of Drupal modules, in general. And about how to improve the general issue of not having enough time to dedicate to a contribution

In general, I think there are three reasons to maintain a module on Drupal.org

• You think it is fun or/and like to “give something back”


• It allows you to have your module improved without having to invest much time and money


• It works as marketing for you, as a highly visible portfolio: people see you, see your work and therefore might hire your services.