Ripping Out Our Guts
April 17, 2008 – After a week of discussions, Geoff, Scott and I have decided to rip out the guts of our permission system and go down a different path. It wasn’t an easy decision given the long hours that we (a.k.a. Geoff) spent building it. It works great. Events can be shared with multiple people and on multiple timelines. Each person or timeline can have various edit and viewing rights. Events and timelines can be shared publicly or privately.
Unfortunately, after using it for a few months and putting a couple hundred events up, we have come to realize that it is too difficult to explain to people, and it’s too hard to keep track of which events were shared with whom and who has edit rights to what. Another problem is that we allow public and private events to be mixed on a timeline, which introduces a unanticipated level of complexity for the user. And our timelines are rigid (i.e. they are things to which events are attached), which we now see is a significant flaw. We want timelines and maps to be dynamically created to give the user unlimited ways to slice time and space. We’ve decided we need to build a private shared workspace where group members can contribute content, such as photos, videos and text, to events.
Back to work.