Now this is awkward. I’m giving a SocialMore update on my personal blog, not on SocialMore.com.
Have you seen the movie The Lone Ranger, the new one with Johnny Depp? Throughout the movie he’s always feeding his dead bird. That’s how I feel about SocialMore.
I started this project in late 2009. I brought on a couple programmers, one after the first completely bailed on me. We were supposed to launch on February 4th, 2011. My birthday. I wanted to share my birthday with a project I was passionate about. It also seemed like a good deadline. For reference, Google+ launched in June of 2011. Sporting some ideas that we’re designed to be in SocialMore. Their circles feature specifically. An idea I had actually gotten from Livejournal years ago.
To be fair, we did officially launch on that day and it has been running since then. It’s just never been anywhere near where I needed to be in terms of functionality.
After another year of work I lost my programmer. Personal life issues. He didn’t have time anymore. I don’t fault him for it it. It is what it is. I’m happy he spent as much time on it as he did with me.
After losing him, I took a long break. It’s been over a year now. Until yesterday when I started working on it again for eight hours. Giving it a fresh new look. Trying to simplify it as much as possible when still trying to keep the feature set the same. Sometimes it’s good to step away and get a fresh persepctive. Other times it’s good to step and away indefinitely.
It’s one of those projects I just need to let go of, consider it a failure and move on. I’m not a programmer. It doesn’t matter how much HTML/CSS I write or how many jquery scripts I patch in, it’s not going to do anything without PHP/MySQL behind it.
I even started taking a programming and database design class at college last year to try and learn it myself. I ended up dropping the classes  after about 8-9 weeks. Java not PHP. No collegs seems to offer entry level PHP classes to my dismay. Plus two programming classes for a newbie is too much. Especially with a full time job and parental duties as well. But that’s just an excuse. The truth is, I was discouraged. I had missed a number of classes for other personal reasons, got too far behind and it felt like I was drowning. So I backed out. I really need to go back.
This is one of those things man. Something I can’t just seem to put to rest. Like my screenplay for Alien Prophecy I’ve been “writing” since was 15 years old. Twenty years now! Â Rewritten countless times. Completely different each time but never a completed script any of those times. There was always some hangup. I didn’t know where it was going. Â Truth was there wasn’t ever really a story there. Just a handful of characters and a title I liked so much I kept working on it. Never satisfied with the story. Eventually it got to a point of legendary stature in my mind after so many years that no story was good enough for the title. Yet truthfully it’s kind of a b-movie title isn’t it? Something that took me till my 30’s to realize. So why did I cling too it so much? Because I had already put some much time into it and I didn’t want to fail.
There actually is substance to SocialMore and I still think it’s a great idea. But if it never happens, it doesn’t matter how great of an idea it is. Hover cars are a great idea. You can design some amazing hover car designs. But if you can’t make them hover, it’s all for naught.
You know what’s going to happen don’t you? That I’m going to pick up some programming skills here and there over the next eight to ten years. Then it ten years this thing is finally going to fully launch, fourteen plus years after I started it. One of those things that had I known how long it was goinng to take to do I would have never started it. By then, I would have either missed my window of opportunity or worse, find out after all those years that no one was ever going to care. That even if I got it working years ago it was never going to take off.
Wow this is sounding depressing, time to jump back on the optimism train I like to ride. No matter what, it gives me something to do. Even it it never gets off the ground or goes anywhere, at the very least I have something to toy with. Something to dream about. After all it’s not the end, it’s the journey right?