There’s a Vancouver Product Hunt Meetup happening this evening at the WeWork Burrard Station office. Looks like a number of new products will be demoed from 6:30–8pm, followed by drinks and networking. Hope to see you there!

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I was invited to join Dribbble on January 19, 2010 by Phil Coffman. The pitch was simple: show and tell for designers and developers. Initially closed to the public, this nascent community of creative professionals allowed access to view and publish content via invitation only.

In an interview in the inaugural issue of Offscreen Magazine, designer and Dribbble co-founder Dan Cederholm discussed how this strategy not only helped to keep support and scaling costs to a minimum, but also ensured the quality of the content. Unlike Twitter or Facebook, Dribbble was a closed community of creative professionals who shared, critiqued, and learned from one another.

Around the same time I became a full-time freelancer, Dribbble opened its doors to the public. Though the ability to post “shots” was still limited to those who had been invited to do so, anyone could come and view the work that was being posted. While this change in paradigm upset those who enjoyed Dribbble’s private nature, it also gave designers, illustrators, and other creative professionals a simple way to promote their work to a larger audience.

Later that year, I received my first recruitment call from Aol. Having seen the work I was posting on Dribbble, their recruiter reached out and invited me to Palo Alto for a 3-day job interview. Though that job didn’t pan out, a year later it led to my introduction to Danny Robinson, CEO of Perch, who would end up hiring me for my first startup job. It was this opportunity that allowed me to move cross-country from small-town Ontario to the city of Vancouver, British Columbia.

In 2011, I attended my first Dribbble meetup in Brooklyn, New York. Held during that year’s Brooklyn Beta conference, the meetup was my opportunity to meet people like Drew Wilson and Jonathan Christopher, as well as Mr. Cederholm himself. It was one of my first opportunities to finally meet people I’d looked up to from afar. Dan especially was incredibly kind and generous, a quality he’s continued to show in his interactions with people who participate in the Dribbble community.

When I was hired as the Design Director at Brewhouse, I encouraged the team to sign up for Dribbble. It was during this time that I got to meet the world-famous Meg Robichaud, whom I would later contract to design the iconography for the Mountain Conditions Report app for Arc’teryx.

Last night, I attended my second Dribbble meetup, this one hosted by the folks at Metalab, a Victoria, BC-based design agency who in the last year or so have opened a beautiful new office in downtown Vancouver.

After writing my name on my name tag, I set off to find someone to chat with. Rory and I first crossed paths with an awkward smile and nod as I made my way back to the name tag table to return the Sharpie I had stolen, but on our second pass made eye contact and struck up a proper conversation. Rory is a Scottish product designer who just recently came to Vancouver following a two-year stint in Australia. He currently works for a remote product team building email marketing software. Rory and I were joined by my friend and occasional collaborator Allen Pike, co-founder of Steamclock Software and creator of Party Monster, a DJ app that refuses to play Nickleback.

As the night progressed, I got to chat with Jonas Caruana, an athlete and entrepreneur, Mearl Morton, an illustrator and print designer, Eliza Sarobhasa, a developer, project management student, and photographer, and friend and colleague Kenny Grant, whose company just launched a helpful tool for previewing how links will look when shared across multiple social media and mobile chat platforms called Lookout.

After 8 years, I still find myself in awe of the people who make up the Dribbble community. Dribbble, much like Twitter before it and blogging before Twitter, has had a direct and profound impact on my life. I’m so grateful for the community that Dan and Rich started and Andrew and his team continue to steward.

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All the money ever does is “sits”. It never “moves”. Switching ownership is instant, so “sitting” takes 100% of money’s activity. If your money burns a hole in your pocket, it is not because “money must move”, it is because you have shitty money.

—Oleg Andreev

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My brother just sent me a link to a page that aims to profit off my mother’s obituary.

From this page, you can buy flowers for $269.99 CAD and have them sent to the funeral home that buried her over 3 years ago.

The thing is, our family didn’t ask to have her obituary used in this way. We were not asked permission for her name and likeness to be used to market flowers or for anyone to “light” anything for us.

When writing about my mother on this very blog, I have never once asked anyone for donations or to purchase anything (though, I do ask you on every page of this site to sign up for my newsletter — I’m guessing the 7 of you who have done so feel pretty upset about my hypocrisy).

As of this writing, Afterlife’s FAQ page leaves much to be desired:

Afterlife does offer a page to submit a request for removal, which states the following:

This publication is used to honor the deceased, show respect and support to the families, and allow anyone to contribute to build a beautiful memorial page.

*cough* bullshit *cough*

We understand that some families do not want loved ones to be shown here.

Translation: We know you’re gonna be pissed at us but we don’t care.

If you have the approval of the family, you may fill out the removal request form below. Note that up to 3 business days may pass before the removal.

But you didn’t have our permission to publish this page in the first place…

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The CBC is reporting that at least one funeral home in Calgary has received over a dozen phone calls asking why the personal information of a loved one was being used in a commercial manner without consent. The funeral home was not only unaware of the initial infringement, they had already asked for the information be removed only for their request to be left unfulfilled.

I just got off the phone with the funeral home who handled my mother’s funeral. While they weren’t familiar with this specific site, the person I spoke to did indicate that this wasn’t the first he’d heard of such a site. Requests they’ve made to similar sites have also gone unanswered.

I also spoke briefly with a support agent (or maybe it was a bot?) from dmca.com. They can look into having the content removed, but their services aren’t free and there’s no guarantee that the site owners won’t simply move the content to another server.

Afterlife spokesperson Jordon Le Brun claims in the CBC article that the company is selling 1000 flower arrangements per month. Based on their lowest and highest priced flower arrangements, a rough estimation would put their sales somewhere between $59,990 and $229,990 per month.

Or between $700K–$2.76MM in sales per year.

I’m a capitalist who believes in ideas and in companies taking risky ideas to market. I even recognize and empathize with the fact that sometimes, people with the best of intentions can produce unintended consequences when delivering a project.

This, however, was not a simple oversight. Someone had to write the code to scrape the obituaries from countless funeral home sites and other databases in order to present them in this way with the only goal of generating profit.

Perhaps I’m a bit biased because I’m personally offended in this case, but that’s fucked up.

Companies like this are why people don’t trust the Internet and those of us who make a living working in and on it. This type of news reflects poorly on everyone who participates in the online economy, making the work we do even more difficult in the future.

Not to mention the pain and suffering of having to unwillingly and unexpectedly relive the loss of a loved one.

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