To try and understand better, I decided to rewrite the example shown on the library page with regular class methods. Here’s the result (first file: with Morphine, second file: without Morphine):

After writing this example, it was more clear to me — the Morphine based code is more compact and clean. But on the other hand, it requires the reader of the code to get familiar with another library, where the class methods based example is straight forward to any Ruby developer.

What do you think? Would you use Morphine or go with class methods?

There are many factors to consider when you are evaluating whether to use the Freemium model or not. However, there’s one last secret that I didn’t share with you. During the study, while looking at the successful Freemium companies, a pattern emerged. They all had phenomenal products. All of these decision factors are useless if the product or service you are offering is nothing short of amazing. If your product is not creating great value for its users, no tactic in the world will make Freemium work for you.

The fact that the secret to success is having a phenomenal product that brings real value to your customers isn’t a surprise to me or you. But sometimes it’s nice to have a reminder.

In this example, stripTags is class method of the Utils class.
It took me some googling to find it, so I thought it’s worth sharing.

Installation is as easy as:
gem install terminitor
terminitor init
(assuming you already have Ruby and Ruby gems installed)

Then you create your terminitor setups with terminitor edit [name]. Defining terminitor setup is very is. Here is mine for one of my projects:

No more keeping all those servers running in the background, just because I’m lazy to open them again. Now restarting my working environment is just a single command.

In the end, it really came down to one incredibly genius idea: Dropbox limited its feature set on purpose. It had one folder and that folder always synced without any issues — it was magic. Syncplicity could sync every folder on your computer until you hit our quota. (Unfortunately, that feature was used to synchronize C:\Windows\ for dozens of users — doh!) Our company had too many features and this created confusion amongst our customer base. This in turn led to enough customer support issues that we couldn’t innovate on the product, we were too busy fixing things.

Isaac Hall (co-founder of Syncplicity) in an answer to the question: “Why is Dropbox more popular than other programs with similar functionality?” on Quora (this is just an excerpt, I really recommend reading the whole answer; the quote at the title is from that answer too).

Judging by the fact that I’m not the only one who received the exact same message today, I guess someone figured out how to harvest emails from GitHub repositories. Probably from the readme files people post or from some metadata in the repositories (the email address is part of the username in the commit history).

I don’t understand how the originator of this spam attack thought that someone will fall for that, but oh well.

Hopefully next time Gmail’s spam filter will catch this kind of spam.

Arik

And, like other disruptive technologies, it’s getting better all the time.

This, after all, is the typical pattern with disruptive technologies.  The disruptor enters at the low end of the market, providing a simple service that is cheaper and more convenient than incumbent alternatives and “good enough.”  The low end of the market adopts the technology–and the incumbent players, which serve the profitable middle and high-end of the market–snigger and point out that their products are “better,”

But then the disruptor improves its product, the way the Huffington Post has improved its product for the last few years.  And soon the disruptive product is useful to the middle of the market as well–and it’s still simpler and more convenient.  Soon, the incumbent player, under attack from below, is forced to migrate to the higher end of the market, seeking to preserve its huge profit margins.  Eventually, the disruptor takes over the middle of the market, and the incumbent player collapses.

(from: Five Years Later, The Huffington Post (And Online Media) Are Coming Of Age)

I really recommend reading the full article which talks about how the Huffington Post is soon (in 2-3 years) to become bigger than the New York Time in terms of traffic and probably revenues. And to think that the Huffington Post is a 5 years old blog and the New York Time is a 120 years old publishing house. It sure is a great example that disruptive technology is more about disruptive use of technology (I’m sure that in pure terms of technology NYT is better than the Huffington Post).

One of my clients is having connection problems between their application servers and the database servers. It looks like some TCP configuration issue, but I’m no expert in that so after trying to figure it out by my own, I posted a question on ServerFault. The question got only one answer which wasn’t that helpful.

Now my next step is to hire someone on ODesk to solve the problem. But what if I could just pay for someone to answer my question on ServerFault? For me that would be perfect, because that’s what I’m going to do anyway with the freelancer I find on ODesk, as I can’t trust him enough to give him access to the client servers.

I know there is a bounty feature on StackOverflow, where you can give someone some of your reputation (points) on StackOverflow if they answer the question. But the thing is – I’m not that active on ServerFault and don’t have enough reputation.

Maybe I should just create this marketplace, where valued users can offer paid answers and people can hire them. That might work, but after seeing what happened with the Twitter ecosystem I learned my lesson – no more filling holes for OTHERs. Because it is obvious that if my marketplace works, the StackExchange team will be motivated to create their own version.

What do you think?

UPDATE: Dan (who is too cool to comment) sent in his thoughts by email:

Google answers failed and it was a paid system. The main problem is the subjectivity of the quality of the answer. How do you judge that?

That’s a great point. I think that it will be basically the same as it is today with point bounties:

1. Once you put a bounty you already give in the points (or in my case – the money), so you have no incentive to “lie” and say that the answer you got isn’t good enough just to save yourself the payment.

2. You decide which answer is “the” answer and gets money.

If you don’t get a good answer, you can always keep it around or raise the bid.

Another concern someone might raise is the same that Joel & Jeff usually raise – what’s a good price for an answer? While many people don’t mind sharing knowledge for free, once you start attaching a price tag it becomes a whole different story. Well, I acknowledge that and I don’t think that the whole StackOverflow site should be paid, but it should have a paid option.

People will still have a great incentive to answer questions just like today (they increase their reputation), but this will give another option for those who ask more esoteric questions.

Now, what do you think?

All you need to do is to change the user-agent string of your browser to be the same as the iPad Safari:

Mozilla/5.0 (iPad; U; CPU OS 3_2 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/531.21.10 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0.4 Mobile/7B334b Safari/531.21.10

I’ve done it with Safari on my Mac with the developers tools enabled (after enabling the developers tools, go to Develop->User Agent menu and pick other). If you have other browser/OS, just google “[your browser] change user agent string”, pick the best result and follow the instructions.

Once you done with changing the user agent string, surf to gmail.com and enjoy. The iPad UI is less useful on a non touch screen, but it’s interesting to play with and see Gmail in two columns.

Obviously, this trick will work with most (all?) other iPad web apps.