Photo by Felipe Bachomo
This post was initially made on the Anahitapolis™ Atrium group, but with the suggestion of our good friend Mr. Johan Janssens from the Nooku project, I am blogging it.
Myth No. 1 – Anahita™ is not finished yet.
The birth release of Anahita was made available on late January 2011. A birth release is a stable release, however Anahita will never be finished, because it is an open ended project.
For a software project, finished is another word for as good as dead. That means the project is no longer capable of growing, evolving, and keeping up with the changes in the ecosystem.
By not being finished yet, sometimes people refer to a software that isn’t packed with all sorts of features for customizing using point-and-click tools. In reality products that reach that state end up becoming bloated and slow. In long term they become buggy, insecure, and hard to maintain.
That is why rather than packing Anahita with lots of point-and-click customization tools, we provide customization options in form of APIs, recipes and code examples. Anahita ™ social networking engine and apps are shipped only with features that most social networking projects require.
Myth No. 2 - Anahita™ is not a polished product.
Anahita was never meant to be a polished product. Polished products are made to function in a limited and specific context. Anahita is aiming to provide the generic building blocks for all sorts of social networking projects. As a matter of fact, you will be the one polishing it off before launching your project and by doing so, you will be saving tremendous number of hours and resources by not having to start building from scratch.
That is why Anahita is very similar to a box of Legos. You can build many business and hobby projects with the Lego bricks and constantly rebuild and refine the design. On the other hand, some kids are just happy with a shiny red truck that provides some customization options and it basically does only one thing: being a shiny red truck!
A red truck gets you started faster than a Lego project. You get to go around and show it off, it is shiny and red, but you can’t go far with it. The lego kids will always have a new game to play and they are often a lot more creative too.
Myth No. 3 - Anahita™ is about to change their underlying infrastructure entirely.
All the foundations of the Anahita™ framework and platform are in place, however in every new release we will be constantly changing, rebuilding, and improving the technology based on what we have learned from using the previous releases. Sometimes we have to implement an architecture in multiple stages and gradually walk the community through the iterative updates and get them to the destination.
So the constant changes are just a permanent part of the evolution and growth of the project. The only thing that doesn’t change, is change itself.
Myth No. 4 – There are no instruction manuals for Anahita™
When you become a Premium member we don’t give you an instruction manual. We do however provide help on the Premium support and project groups. You interact with other people and the core team on a daily basis. You must be committed and willing to learn something new everyday in order for us to be able to help you.
Seriously! If you really think that you can just read an instruction manual and put together a business idea or project of significant value on the web that grows and scales up, you are being naive! You are being very naive! You will be wasting time and resources of your own and others.
If you don’t believe me, there are already several point-and-click products out there that are crafted to entice people using long feature lists built on top of naive architecture or no architecture at all. Some of them come with instruction manuals too. Please do give them a try! If you liked them, then you have found your match. If not, then you have enough reasons not get distracted by them as much. Your mind will be free to get in the community and start learning the knowledge from your peers.
Myth No. 5 – Anahita is not for the none-technical users
If you know how to install and configure a Joomla, WordPress, or Drupal, you should know just about enough to install and configure a social network using Anahita ™ social networking engine and apps. If you know how to code, you can go far beyond that!
We have learned that people who benefit most from Anahitapolis.com services are:
- Hackerpreneurs (Hacker + Entrepreneurs) who have experience and knowledge in both technology and business development. These are the deadliest warriors in the technology world. You future competitor is very likely a hackerpreneur.
- Future Hackerpreneurs: People who don’t have all the technical skills, but have the ambition and commitment to use Anahitapolis.com as a social learning environment to improve and nurture their technical and community management knowledge while we give them the basic building blocks for launching their projects.
- Any combination of the last 2 who have software development resources. i.e Companies, Startups, and Integrated Project Teams who are either founded by Hackerpreneurs or have hired hackers in their group.
Please Note: I am using the term Hacker as Paul Graham uses it which is a complement amongst our type of species.
These 3 categories are worth investing in, because they are the ones who will most likely be impacting our future lives! If you look at many of the projects on the web that changed our lives (Facebook, twitter, Apple, Google, Amazon, Flickr, WordPress, or Drupal) they have been founded or co-founded by people who fit in one of those 3 categories.
Another question is: Why not build Anahita™ packed with point-and-click features? After all if we ever want to have any chance of success, we should serve the none-techie/none-coder/business-developer/idea-person! Right? Wrong!
- People who think by reading an instruction manual they can launch a game changing online business are unlikely to make it happen, but they waste lots of time and resources throughout the process.
- If a customization can be done with 10 or 100 lines of code, it will take thousands of lines of code to be done the point-and-click way. Now if you want to build a software that is packed with many point-and-click customization features, you will end up with with a software packed with hundreds and thousands of lines of code. Such a software does not scale up well, it is slow, does not evolve, and more likely to be buggy and insecure.
So neither the product nor the people who will be using it are going to have a significant impact on our future. Sorry idea folks! It is just how it’s going to be. We think it would be unethical that we grab your money and give you false hopes. Unless you are interested to learn the knowledge.
Todays Internet is powered with software and as Marc Prensky says in his article, “As programming becomes more important, it will leave the back room and become a key skill and attribute of our top intellectual and social classes, just as reading and writing did in the past. Remember, only a few centuries ago, reading and writing were confined to a small specialist class whose members we called scribes.”
Thank you Mr. Johan Janssens for pointing me to this great article.
Jennifer Tibbo and one other person are discussing. 
james are discussing. 
William Tower 7:57 pm on June 17, 2011 Permalink
This is a great article Rastin. All the points you make are valid and I agree with all save one.
Point and click features, to some extent, are necessary. For example I still cannot figure out a way for users to post and image with their posts. Videos are auto embedded but I cannot seem to find an easy way to associate an image with a post as easily as you can a video.
Maybe I am missing something?
Rastin Mehr 8:04 pm on June 17, 2011 Permalink
@William I agree with you. Some point and click features are necessary. The ones that are used most of the time in most projects. My intention was mainly customization using point-and-click tools rather than programming methods. I should perhaps update the article.
Jennifer Tibbo 11:18 am on June 18, 2011 Permalink
Once again you guys have helped me to have an aha moment through just being an example of how to build a community. For me and my project, interacting with the developers and the community on Anahitapolis has been as valuable as the code. Anahita Social Engine is powering my site, but Anahitapolis powers my community. Thanks again guys!
Jon Martin 8:31 am on June 19, 2011 Permalink
Beautifully put Rastin! As a premium member we can verify the importance of being part of the paid community. The help and resources are excellent, even if there isn’t a traditional user manual.
Your philosophy on the future of Anahita is exactly what drew us to becoming premium members. The framework is there, the rest will follow with the right attitude, and you guys have exactly that
Rastin Mehr 11:47 am on June 20, 2011 Permalink
Thank you @Jennifer in Anahitapolis.com we are aiming to nurture and grow tomorrow’s community managers, social software developers, and Hackerpreneurs. I love your quote: “Anahita Social Engine is powering my site, but Anahitapolis powers my community” that is indeed true. I think you should tweet that
Rastin Mehr 11:57 am on June 20, 2011 Permalink
Thank you @Jon Martin, true there are many dimensions to Anahita and it can never be summed up in an instruction manual. Entrepreneurship and Hackerpreneurship cannot be done by reading an instruction manuals. It takes ambition, knowledge, creativity, and intuition. Anahitapolis.com is aimed to provide an environment to nurture all those aspects through peer support environment. That goes beyond just developing software and providing support for it.
The Anahitapolis community and tribe members have been very appreciative and supportive. We are very fortunate and thankful for that.