Breakfast was a gathering of the tribes around great oranges and bad bagels.

Rael Dornfest kicks it off by reviewing all the ways we’re remixing our stuff. (Well, not all of it is strictly speaking ours.) Remixing content, services, applications, IT. It’s a good metaphor: Hacking takes things apart and puts them together in new ways, including with new components.

Tim O’Reilly wonders how design patterns (Christopher Alexander, A Pattern Language) might affect Internet applications. He is going to find prescriptions based on situations. E.g., “A successful open source software projects consists of ‘small pieces loosely joined.'” Therefore, architect your software or service in such a way that it can be easily incorporated in multiple projects. Here are some others:

You don’t have to own all the components of your application. Therefore, glue together pieces from others, and keep it open.

Net applications are never done. Therefore, release features incrementally. Perpetual beta.

Let users add value to shared data. But only a small percentage of users will add value. Therefore, make participation the default, aggregating user data as a side-effect of their using your application. (E.g., Flickr’s default is make your photos public.)

PCs are not the only networked device. Therefore, design your app from the get-go to integrate across multiple platforms.

Social networks are a by-product of social apps. Therefore, fapture and share the social fabric under your app.

Standard size packets is key. Therefore, understand the optimum “packet size” for your app domain — up a level up from IP packets. E.g., web pages or books.

Other things on Tim’s radar:

Ajax (Asynchronous JavaScript + XML)…the return of Javascript. They use it for Google Maps.

Hardware hacking, including collaborative hardware hacking — shared hw development to mirror open source sw dev.

Ruby on Rails.

Visualization — Fllickr color wheel, IBM’s history flow, tree maps, baby name visualizer …[Sorry, they’re going very quikcly and not giving urls or much explanation]

VoIP

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