Hawkee Touted as ‘Myspace for Geeks’

Wouldn’t it be great if there were a ‘MySpace for geeks’, with troves of source code and rampant developer-speak in place of flashy band pages? If you were thinking about creating such a forum for keyboard geniuses, too bad. Someone’s already beat you to the punch. The ball has already been jumped. The - ok, I’ll stop.

Hawkee’s the name; social coding’s the game. It’s a budding baby, and I must say, I got lost pretty quick when digging through the PHP, Ruby, and mIRC divisions. There have been hundreds of thousands of script downloads so far, and I would not be in the least bit surprised to find Hawkee soon charting submissions in the millions. mIRC looks like it’s in the lead in terms of code snippets and such, with PHP, TCL, and Ruby following behind.

The UI is laid out in simple developer-ese – at least I assume so. For someone still tackling some of the basics, the majority of talk flying to and fro on Hawkee goes right over my newbie head. Hey, aren’t comments often as interesting to read as the content they succeed? Hawkee’s trail is downright daunting. You can shorten the reading lists by choosing a specific area in the ‘Comments’ section. Some areas are still at a measly 20 posts. Others are cranking at 8,000+.

Hawkee’s a great place for wannabes and veterans alike to spend some time scouring during those bouts of caffeine-inflicted insomnia the world’s bracket hounds can’t seem to steer clear of, but my guess is that once you’re hooked, you’re hooked. Just don’t let your boss catching whittling away your work hours looking talking to folks and trying to wean suggestions from the Hawkee masses. Unless, you know, you’re part of the Hawkee project, in which case you’ll likely be praised for abundant team spirit.

You’re probably looking at Hawkee and wondering why developers of developer forums can’t seem to design well for their own pleasure. But I must say, even with the relatively drab black and gray theme they’ve got going on here, they’re still ahead MySpace’s chaotic whateveryoucallit.