Photo by xmatt on Flickr used under Creative Commons

Paul, Rich and Chet are big fans of Jason Fried, the founder of 37 Signals.

Although I’ve happily used several of their apps (Basecamp, Highrise, Campfire), until recently, I had never read their company blog, Signal vs. Noise, which frequently has interesting observations from Friend, DHH and others.

Today’s installment by Fried, called “I’m a tailor“, addresses a issue I think we all have when we’re asked what we do by a non-technical person. I’ve struggled with this personally for years, and some refer to it as the “parents test”, i.e. can you explain what you do to your parents.

Paul recently applied the doctor analogy to product management, which works pretty well, and one classic analogy for software development is comparing it to building design and construction, e.g. architect (my old title), engineer, etc.

Even though these map pretty well to what we do, one problem is that these professions all require rigorous certifications to attain, making the comparison a bit disingenuous. I once had a colleague back in my consulting days go off the reservation about how software developers should not be called engineers. That was a fun lunch.

For a while, I thought using the phrase “I solve problems with software” would be a good one to use. Then I heard myself say that and wanted to vomit. Turns out it sounded a lot more pretentious out loud.

So nowadays, I duck the question completely, usually with a “do you really want to know” or something similar. Since most people are only making polite conversation, they give up pretty quickly. The downside to this approach is that I come off as a jerk, not that I wouldn’t anyway, but more so.

Anyway, I like Fried’s characterization of his role as a tailor, but the garment construction analogy may not have enough roles for all of us. I suppose a large firm has both designers, who sketch the garments and possibly make patterns, and people who do the actual construction.

Unfortunately, this model brings to mind a sweat shop, and I’m sure the developers wouldn’t appreciate their role in that analogy.

This discussion reminds me of the classic Office Space moment when Bob Slydell, consultant, asks Tom Smykowski very pointedly, “What would you say ya do here?”

For now, I’m sticking with architect as the real world analog of what I do, but I’m open to other suggestions.

So, how do you describe your technical job to non-technical people?

Find the comments.Possibly Related Posts:

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Photo by davidseth on Flickr used under Creative Commons

Since last week’s post on the interwebs and fear, a couple other un-related posts have come across my reader that have me pondering the future of our beloved intertubes.

First was Chris (#mrhashtag) Messina on “The death of the URL“, followed by Tim “What is Web 2.0″ O’Reilly on “The War For the Web“.

Both are well worth the read and both have a very clear takeaway in common, i.e. keep the Web open and independent. They also have Facebook and the App Store in common as examples of how freedom has been eroded in favor of a sanitized and monitored experience.

The App Store is a pretty common target for this argument, since Apple decides which apps make it (and more famously, which do not). Facebook isn’t as common, but last week, they were in the news because links were removed from the News Feed for a time.

This was reported as a bug and fixed, but the new part, at least for me, was the injection of a happy little Facebook warning about clicking short links. As Messina puts it “on the internet, thar be dragons”.

I rarely use Facebook at all and definitely not for finding links, so this may or may not be a new thing.

Anyway, the point is increasingly valid. As more companies produce sanitized and dumbed-down interfaces, the power of the Web diminishes because these interfaces could be used to censor the Web at large, and as people use these interfaces, they may not even know (or care) that they’re getting a censored experience.

Case in point, what if the war of ads between Verizon and AT&T leads to filtering out of each other’s sites, i.e. if you’re on AT&T’s network, you can’t view the YouTube video of Verizon’s ads or visit their web site.

The one thing that has been protecting the independence of the Web is the browser, but as interfaces take away the ability to view the URL of a given web page or app, that power is lost.

Looking back, the URL itself has always been under fire. From the beginning of the WWW, mainstream sites have tried to collect links and index pages to make finding information easier because those pesky URLs were too hard to remember.

Anyway, in my post last week, I advocated training for n00bs to protect them from the dragons, but even if this were the right answer (and I’m not convinced it is), it would fail because sanitized interfaces do this for you. Most people will gladly accept a smaller amount of freedom for an easier interface because it’s, well, easier.

But is there anything wrong with that?

I don’t think so, as long as people know what they’re getting and why. More importantly, the Web needs to stay accessible to those of us who are fine with the existence of dragons.

What do you think? Find the comments.Possibly Related Posts:

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Here’s another installment in the “we’re-a-for-reals-product-team” series.

If you’re interested in WebCenter, but don’t have the time or resources to download, install and configure it on your own to kick the tires, you should sign up for a WebCenter Test Drive.

Basically, the test drive will give you a hosted sandbox environment where you’ll have your own group space with full functionality. In your group space, you can do whatever you like, invite whomever you like and go nuts with WebCenter.

No fuss, no mess.

Right now, they’re collecting email addresses in anticipation of the private beta release. So, sign up and wait with baited breath for your invitation.

Here’s Tom Quigley with more details.

Check it out if you’re interested and feel free to share your thoughts and experiences here.Possibly Related Posts:

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If you’ve been reading here lately, you’ll know we have a crush on foursquare for a number of reasons: it’s fun and engaging to play, it’s a new shiny object, it applies game mechanics to solve a problem, etc.

On Monday, they officially announced their API.

I had heard around the way that there was a buggy and totally undocumented API that people were using, and the announcement essentially confirmed this by including a list of existing applications already using said API.

There are some neat apps on the list, one of them is a Wordpress plugin, which I won’t subject you to, and one, Last Night’s Checkins implements something I think foursquare itself needs to own.

It puts your checkins over a time period on a map.

This is a huge win for IRL tie ins with venues. Essentially, foursquare can implicitly plot my tendencies and spending habits, over time, which is fantastically useful for local merchants, whether I actually checkin there or not.

The venues I go to can reward my patronage. Venues nearby places I frequent can lure me in with deals.

This is the kind of advertising gold that sounds ludicrous in a business plan because somehow you have to get people to tell you this information. Foursquare skipped right past that huge obstacle and now has the ability to mine all these data and print money.

Make no mistake, geolocation is the next big thing. Cases in point: Twitter will be rolling out geo-tagged tweets very soon, Snow Leopard includes rudimentary geo-features that could easily be expanded, Facebook recently rewrote their terms, foreshadowing location-based features.

What remains to be seen is how people will react to updating location, which again, is where foursquare excels.

Anyway, every web app worth its salt has an API because as Tim O’Reilly said way back when, “Data is the Next Intel Inside“. Exposing one makes a huge amount of sense for foursquare.

They’re small and can’t possibly build every feature. They’re committed to aggressive crowdsourcing, empowering their users. Their user base is highly geeky and motivated, at least for now.

I’m excited to see the community build up around the foursquare API. Assuming Twitter is a good case study, there will be lots of great apps, many of them coming from the same people who built apps against the Twitter API.

Plus, as apps emerge, there will be those obvious ones that make the core service better, e.g. like Summize did for Twitter, that will lead to acquisitions.

Beyond the value of apps, I’m excited to see foursquare’s business model advance as venues tip to how valuable the data they collect are.

This is going to be fun to watch and even more fun to play.

What do you think? Find the comments.

Update: Another happy announcement came on Thursday as foursquare expanded the game to 50 new cities. Now, you can play in over 100 cities around the World, which will definitely make the API more attractive. Win!Possibly Related Posts:

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Simplicity by Eric Burke

Eric Burke published this cartoon back in early 2008, and it’s stuck with me for a long time as something that is simultaneously hilarious, sad and maddening.

I started my career in development building those eye-chart apps with fields and labels all over the place, complete with the obligatory button bar. Enterprise apps are complicated.

Whether or not they need to be is fodder for discussion.

When we started this team a few years ago and began building web apps like Connect and Mix, we tried to make them as easy to “walk up and use” as possible. For the uninitiated, “walk up and use” is a design principle that assumes something is so intuitive it does not require training for first-time users.

But even after several years of tweaking the interface, I still get requests for training and documentation.

This could mean one of two things. Either the app isn’t as intuitive as I think it is and needs to be redesigned, or people are generally hesitant to walk up and use any new application without some training.

I suppose it could also be a combination of those two.

Web apps are generally accepted to be simpler and therefore easier to use than enterprise apps, but even so, I’ve heard people complain that applications like Facebook and Twitter are hard to learn. At first blush, this sounds nutty, but I suppose there are areas of each that could use some redesign, e.g. Facebook’s privacy controls and Twitter’s @ replies.

Obviously, some apps are developed for the literal scenario of “walk up and use”, namely self-service, kiosk-type apps like Redbox DVD rental or airline self-checkin. Again, as with web apps, I’ve been in situations where people have asked for help with these apps.

So, if even the simplest apps have users asking for help, maybe “walk up and use” is a myth.

If you assume it’s a myth and regardless of what you build, you’ll need to train people, why worry about design at all? If the app is functional, who cares what it looks like?

That’s a rhetorical question because it does matter. I’m just throwing it out there.

One interesting factor to consider is the intersection of play and work, Paul’s favorite area for noodling. If your app is engaging and fun, users are more likely to go farther to learn how to use it, instead of falling back on training immediately.

Back to Burke’s cartoon, I think it was more a funny observation than a broad brushstroke conviction of enterprise application development. Like I said, it’s funny to me, as well as sadly spot on and a bit maddening because it feels like an impossible trend to reverse.

The comments are interesting and worth a read if only to observe the reactions he elicited.

Generally speaking, most apps are used by very few users, call it a long tail of usage, which hinders the advancement of their design. Almost 100 million people in the US alone use Facebook each month. How many people use your company’s Accounts Payable application?

If design is driven by use, apps behind the firewall will never attain parity with consumer-facing apps.

So, I don’t think “walk up and use” is a myth, although no example fits 100% of the time. I still think it’s a desirable attribute for all apps and possibly attainable, through unorthodox methods like game mechanics.

What do you think? Find the comments.Possibly Related Posts:

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I mentioned a while back that I’m using my iPhone more frequently as a game console, and I know I’m not the only one.

The iPhone makes a perfect gaming device for me because it’s portable, to entertain me wherever I go, and it’s already another device, meaning I don’t have to lug extra gear.

I’ve never been much of a gamer, so I don’t care about the small screen size, lack of standard controls or any of the annoying things that would bother a real, hardcore gamer.

Over the weekend, I treated myself to Rock Band for the iPhone, which just so happened to be on sale (might still be) for $6.99. I’ve been excited for Rock Band since it came out about a month ago, but the original price ($9.99) seemed a bit high.

Think about that for a second. Rock Band 2 for a gaming console costs about $20, not including the fancy controllers. I’m sure you get more tracks, whereas on the iPhone you pay $0.99 for extra song packs, but still, I’m betting the iPhone version provides about as much utility as the console version, for less than half the price.

In that light, $10 for Rock Band feels like a bargain, and $7 is an absolute steal.

So, knowing how many hours go into building software and based on what games sell for on regular game consoles, I wonder if the iPhone has totally up-ended the economy for games, at least on its platform.

Further, I wonder how long large gaming companies like EA will pour resources into iPhone/iPod Touch game development.

Granted, I have to make some assumptions, like:

1. Units sold for the iPhone/iPod Touch are a fraction of what are sold for the major gaming console platforms.
2. Even if development is cheaper for the iPhone platform, it’s still not cheap in terms of cost.
3. The iPhone platform isn’t a skillset  possessed by the average game developer, which means training, outsourcing or hiring, maybe all of them.
4. All things considered, the cost-per-unit-sold is higher than other gaming platforms.

I’m a n00b here, so these assumptions could be totally wrong. They’re based on what I’ve read and heard from various iPhone and mobile developers I know.

Maybe it makes more sense to focus on the platform. When Apple launched the App Store, the goal was adoption. So, most apps were free or a nominal $0.99. I suppose the rationale was that since the phone cost $500 plus a service agreement with a two-year contract that the apps should be cheap to drive adoption.

Makes a lot of sense, but even after two billion downloads and 85,000 plus apps, the App Store is still full of free and cheap apps, and there’s no indication that iPhone users want to pay on par with apps for other platforms.

Case in point: the Tweetie 2 upgrade launched recently, and despite being heralded by many as the best Twitter app for the iPhone, many users, including one famous one, were up in arms about paying $2.99 for the upgrade.

Nevermind the fact that the developer refactored the entire app and built-in support for new Twitter features like lists and geo-tagged tweets, making it truly a 1.0 release despite the name.

Over the last year, it’s become clear that many large game shops feel they must have offerings on the iPhone/iPod Touch, regardless of the cost. Not coincidentally, Apple has shifted focus a bit to emphasize how awesome their platform is for gaming.

Is this good for gamers, since they’ll have access to cheap titles on their iPhones? Or will it hurt those who prefer traditional consoles as publishers try to increase margins for games on other platforms?

Or maybe I’m way off in my assumptions about costs?

This is an interesting topic to me, and I’m hoping to get some discussion going.

Please use the comments to enlighten me and share your thoughts.Possibly Related Posts:

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From the “we’re-a-for-reals-product-team” department, comes an announcement: WebCenter 11g Patch Set 1 has just been released.

Peter Moskovits has a rundown of all the new features over on his blog, and there are plenty, including the introduction of the People Connection service, which adds the social networking layer to WebCenter. This service was at least partly inspired by our work on Connect, and it’s great to see it reaching customers.

Another new feature that I’m excited about is REST APIs for several of the services. We plan to investigate these for our work on the internal rollout of WebCenter; if you read here, you’ll know I’m a big proponent of  ”any interface” or “zero interface”, which essentially opens data to use by any client interface.

REST APIs will make this possible, and we have some interesting integrations with email, IM and SMS that we want to test.

So, if you’re interested in the latest and greatest, head over to OTN and download Patch Set 1.

Update: Also, even though they’re not officially certified, I’ve successfully used Patch Set 1 with the latest Chrome developer builds and with the Chromium nightly builds with no issues.Possibly Related Posts:

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There’s a very scary story floating (h/t Gizmodo) around about a man framed by a virus that compromised his computer, then downloaded child porn and acted as a server, all unbeknownst to him.

The Wallet Inspector (I can't believe that worked!) from Simpsons Episode 503

Let that sink in for a minute.

The man was eventually able to clear his name, after spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on his defense. Computer forensics were able to show that the computer was visiting sites and downloading material at an inhuman rate of speed, making it impossible for a person to be driving it.

Apparently, it’s common for courts to skip detailed computer analysis like this due to high cost. Yikes.

Stories about the perils of the Internet are incredibly common in all forms of media, and I’m sure everyone has at least one personal story about a virus or a scam that nabbed you. The open nature of our beloved intertubes has created a dangerous place where the uneducated can really get hurt.

So, how to fix this, assuming it needs to be fixed?

I think it’s safe to assume that sometime in the next decade, anonymous online activity will virtually disappear. Court precedents over the past few years have shown less tolerance for people hiding behind anonymity.

Right, wrong or indifferent, it’s only a matter of time before the old joke about nobody knowing you’re a dog goes extinct. Generally speaking, I’m in favor of educating people, rather than creating a police state to protect the innocent.

Along those lines, I’ve often thought that people should have to take a course in general interwebs safety before they can do any damage to themselves or others. The natural extension of this is a licensing process, just like the one every teenager goes through to get a driver’s license.

There are a lot of moving parts here, and I haven’t got it all figured out yet. Still, this feels like an issue that’s going to get worse before it gets better, which usually means sweeping action of some kind.

Am I wrong to think this is a problem that needs a solution of some kind? Most people are hopelessly uninformed about what can happen to them online, just from harmless browsing. Case in point, Chet’s post about his neighbor’s virus problem.

But maybe this is a survival of the fittest case, i.e. if you don’t keep you machine updated and take reasonable precautions, you reap what you sow.

So maybe it doesn’t need to be fixed.

What do you think? Find the comments.Possibly Related Posts:

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So, now that we’re really a product team and all, rolling into WebCenter development and working full-time on enhancements to the internal rollout of WebCenter 11g, I thought it would be a nice change of pace to add real content from time to time.

I’m hoping that as we learn more about WebCenter and use it that we’ll be able to share useful tips that can benefit anyone working with WebCenter, which incidentally is available for download from OTN should you choose to follow along at home.

Anyway, I know Rich installed JDeveloper for the first (second) time yesterday, and I’m sure his experiences will be interesting, since his development tool of choice for Ruby is TextMate (oops, it’s VIM). Bit of a difference jumping from TextMate to a full-blown IDE like JDev.

Thinking about JDev got me all nostalgic about development environments.

I first used JDev back in its 9.x versions to build mockups for EBS using the UIX framework. Being in a mostly functional (vs. technical) PM group that was accustomed to using Visio templates for mockups meant I did mockups for other people too.

I started out using my old pal Wordpad (yes, I ran Windows back then), and even though I was only using a fraction of its capabilities, I stuck with JDev because it provided both access to UIX templates I needed as well as glad-to-have features like tag checking and auto-complete, indentation, and color-coding.

Although I’ve not used JDev in many years, I do still use its cousin, SQL Developer, another free OTN download, from time to time when I need to hack out queries. SQL Developer runs quite nicely on the Mac and on Ubuntu, and as with JDev, I’ve been using it for many years, actually since its birth.

I can still recall the sendmail we got when it debuted, reminding us to discontinue use of TOAD and SQL Navigator.

Back in my consulting days (i.e. ten plus years ago), I used TOAD for database app development, along with a collection of tools, including SQL*Plus (natch), the Forms and Reports Builders in Developer/2000 and Wordpad.

If you’re wondering, that was Forms 6 and Reports 2.5 so no fancy color-coding on repeating frames or any of those crutches. I’ve been around Oracle so long, I even used the old Query Builder in Designer/2000 at one point.

But, if you read here, you know I’m old school Oracle, what with my yen to resurrect Oracle Power Browser.

And back then, I had to start up my NT 4.0 box with a hand-crank. Kids these days, no respect.

Feeling that get-off-my-lawn, nostalgia yet?

Anyway, today’s IDEs are way more awesome and do a lot more to support developers. Aside from JDev, I’ve had a brief look at Eclipse, due to a short dabbling with writing Flex, and it’s insane how much IDEs have advanced.

Projects like Bespin, Mozilla Labs’ code-in-the-cloud project totally amaze me. It’s a great time to be a developer, what with the plethora of languages to learn, the support of gigantic open communities for collaboration and assistance, and the readily accessible deployment platform that is the interwebs.

So, what is your IDE of choice and why? Is your preference based on workplace environment, i.e. everyone uses the same IDE? Is it based on language choice?

Find the comments and regale us with your IDE thoughts and any get-off-my-lawn nostalgia, which is always fun too.Possibly Related Posts:

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Augmented Reality (AR) is a phrase you’ve probably heard lately, and you’ll probably get tired of hearing over the next few months.

For the uninitiated, AR apps install to your mobile phone and layer content to views of your, erm, regular reality. Sounds weird, right? There have been several iPhone apps released over the past few months that might help color the picture for you.

Yelp’s latest iPhone app version has an Easter Egg view called the Monocle that according to Marshall Kirkpatrick over at RWW, “uses the phone’s GPS and compass to display markers for restaurants, bars and other nearby businesses on top of the camera’s view”.

Presselite produces two public transportation apps, Metro Paris Subway and London Bus, that both layer information about local businesses as the user walks through the streets.

AR is booming, as companies are quickly sprucing-up their apps to include AR, and AR-specific companies are emerging, like Layar, whose app adds a layer of geo-tagged content from the web to your regular reality.

For me AR is a non-starter, since it requires a 3GS iPhone, or an entirely new brand of phone. Neither option is viable or desirable. However, I’ve been watching the developments in AR with interest, waiting for a killer app, or at least one I would use.

Friday, a tweet from Jason Grigsby revealed that app, the IKEA, how-would-that-furniture-look-in-your-house app.The app, created to launch a new line of furniture in Germany, simply allows you to superimpose a scaled image of the furniture pieces over the camera view of your mobile phone, meaning you can visualize how new furniture would look in any room of your home.

Oh, and take a picture of the finished arrangement to preserve your buying lust on the way over to IKEA.

All it needs is in-app purchasing to complete the cycle of awesomeness.

This is a really smart app, one that I want to make sure my wife gets at some point. Let’s face it, if she’s going to buy new furniture, which she is at some point, at least I won’t have to move it around the house all day.

In the past, she’s used home design software to model how furniture would look, which saved me tons of sweat and cursing, but an AR app would be so much easier for both of us.

Buying furniture has always been problematic because you can’t visualize how it will look once inside your home.

Case in point, back in the late 90s, I worked on an ERP implementation for a dot com whose business model was to sell furniture online. Eventually, one of the reasons they failed was that people were hesitant to commit to a big-ticket item without even seeing it in reality, let alone in their own homes.

This is beauty of the IKEA app.

I wonder if car companies will jump on this gimmick to let you see how a new car will look in your driveway, or parked at your office. Not as useful, but it might be fun.

Anyway, this is the first really solid use case for an AR app that I’ve seen, at least solid enough for me to want the app.

Find the comments and share your thoughts about AR.Possibly Related Posts:

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The release of Twitter lists and the new “listed” metric has me thinking about reputation and how its applied to people in consumer web examples.

I had an interesting chat with my pal Kelly (@verso) about the listed metric Friday. She doesn’t see it as immediately useful since there’s no way to determine the impact being on a list has on followers, e.g. she is listed on Robert Scoble’s (@Scobleizer) “iphone” list, but has no way of knowing if that has directly impacted her followers count.

Photo by anne.oeldorfhirsch from Flickr used under Creative Commons

I suspect Twitter clients and one-off sites will explore the reputation aspects of lists, but it does seem like an impossible task to track the impact of lists on followers. Somehow I doubt the Twitter API would provide that type of granular information.

Lists are still very new, so ways interpret their effect on reputation are evolving.  Twitter must have planned for lists to influence reputation. Otherwise, why include listed as a profile metric?

Anyway, lists have me thinking about the other metrics that are commonly used to establish a baseline for consumer-web reputation, i.e. followers/following on Twitter, size of network on classic social networks like Facebook, and subscribers to a blog.

I’ve noticed a critical mass lately, and yes, it’s lately because I honestly don’t track this stuff with much regularity.

My personal Twitter account (@jkuramot) has been hovering between 800 and 900 followers for several months after growing much more rapidly prior to that. Followers are a fickle bunch, but my tweets haven’t changed much to warrant either a large drop or rise.

I’ve noticed similar behavior in traditional social networks (Facebook, LinkedIn and Connect), and oddly, my networks on each have all reached about the same size, about 400 friends on Facebook, 300 contacts on LinkedIn and 400 connections on Connect.

Again, I can’t recall anything that would have caused a spike or valley in these synchronous networks.  They just seem to be settling in that 300-400 range.

Finally, this blog has been around for about two and half years. For a long time, we were adding about 100 subscribers every couple months; then, a couple months ago, shortly after FeedBurner added FriendFeed to its count, we’ve plateaued at between 1,500 and 1,600.

It’s odd to me that all these metrics seem to have hit their ceilings after sustained growth over the past two to three years.

Maybe this can be attributed to my behavior, i.e. I don’t do much promotion of this blog and don’t seek followers or connections. So, maybe I’ve hit the ceiling of organic growth, at least until (or if) the content of my tweets and blog posts changes to attract new (or repel) people.

For Facebook and LinkedIn, I know why I’ve hit the ceiling. I barely use them anymore, other than to accept requests (and ignore Facebook game requests). With Connect, we’ve changed it into a public information source, de-emphasizing the networking aspects, so I get why I’m topping out there.

I’m curious to know your thoughts and experiences. Are you hitting the ceiling too? If so, maybe this is an early adopter thing. If not, why do you think your metrics continue to grow?

If you don’t care at all, be well and thanks for reading all the way to here.Possibly Related Posts:

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Foursquare

Also titled: “What I learned from FourSquare.”

A few years back when we started exploring new technology, one of the ideas that seemed to stick with me was around gaming.   The processes that made something enjoyable seemed to be an essential, yet elusive ingredient in business software.

In truth, I felt there was something magical about games, even if I could not articulate it.  For many people, games are an escape – a respite from the day to day.  A chance, even for a moment to be someone, or something, they are not.  Whatever the call, the reality is that millions of people choose to spend their precious free time paying to game.  If you don’t believe it, you can look to the hundreds of millions of game consoles currently out there (DS, Wii, XBOX360, PS3, etc) or the recent online examples like Zynga and their 50 million daily active users playing casual games.  Zynga is especially interesting since users actually pay for virtual goods.  They amass hundreds of millions of dollars from people buying better (virtual) guns in MafiaWars or more productive (virtual) tractors in Farmville.  Think about that.  People pay real money for stuff like hairstyles for their avatars. If that doesn’t blow your mind you should exit at this point.

Still here?  Cool.  Now, let’s contrast this to work.   Work is a place where employees provide a function for a certain amount of pay.  Of course there are exceptions to every rule, but this is the general model.  I hire you to do a job.  You agree to do that job in return for compensation.  Repeat.  Work is the OPPOSITE of a game.  In fact, if you even hint at the idea of work having the potential to be a game (or at least gamelike in some small way) you are relegated to the padded corporate room never again allowed to send an email to your bosses boss without your bosses careful review.  No promotion for you!

One of the problems here is a genuine lack of respect.  It is hard to take people’s ideas seriously when you don’t respect them.  If we don’t appreciate games for the amazing things they do, we will never pay attention long enough to actually learn.  As software developers and product managers of “valuable” software we could use a bit of humility, and perhaps games can be a great source of inspiration.

Games are the highest form of application development.  They have tackled extremely challenging problems that would cause most software developers to wake up in a sweaty mess.  Take Halo as an example (a game several years old).  Incredible graphics…sure.  Real time interaction…got it.  Physics modeling for gravity, destructive environments… done.  How about connecting people from across the world, as if they are in the same room, fighting an alien race, in real time, while talking on headsets to each other…why not?

And the web software world is abuzz with an ajax pop up menu?

Games are not trivial technology, but more interestingly, they are not trivial in how the do what they do.  The magic is that they get you to return again and again to do things THEY want you to do while thinking it is what YOU want to do. Does this sound like it may be useful for work?

Indulge me in a walk down memory lane…Remember that old school tabletop/cocktail pacman from the local pizza place?  Remember how much you wanted to get to the top of the high score list?  Remember how you wanted to express your originality with a cool three letter handle? (Hey self-expression wasn’t so easy back then!)  I always went with the boring “PDP”, but maybe if I made it to the top I’d have been emboldened to go with “ACE” or “XXX” or something else my 14 year old self would have found cool.

The point is that I pumped quarters into that thing for the street cred and lavish lifestyle that a high score would inevitably bring.  But the rabbit hole is deeper.  It’s not just about the leaderboard and the praise that would have most surely been showered upon you.  It’s HOW you got there in the first place.  You had to pick up dots,  throw the javelin and hit the albatross, or get the second space fighter to drop to double your firepower.  Every game had its own little tricks to up that score – unlocking secret levels, extra lives, and more.  The game designer kept you exploring, learning, developing, growing, wanting.  Not a moment was work.

I bring that up to express that there is in fact an art to game design.  A balance between ease of use and depth.  The interplay of challenge and frustration.  I once read an article by a member of the Bungie development team (of Halo fame).  He basically noted that all shooters have to get a single experience right.  That moment when you happen upon a group of enemies and dispatch them with extreme prejudice.  That simple act, repeated over and over, has to be fun.  You can do a million other things, but that one thing must work, and work well.  Said another way, if jumping barrels in Donkey Kong, no leader board would save it.

Back to the present day.  If you have been following the location based services out there, you have no doubt heard of FourSquare.  They are in the same game as earlier rivals such as Loopt, Google Lattitude, Dopplr, and FireEagle.  All of these bring their own flavor to the concept of broadcasting your physical location, but Foursquare was the first that made me want to play.  In fact, for years I have been bearish on location since I really didn’t want to publicize where I was at all times.  Why did FourSquare work for me when the others did not?  Foursquare is a game that happens to feature location.

Let’s look at a few examples of how FourSquare is a game:

1. Collecting: You get points for various actions like providing your location (ie. checking in), checking in multiple times at a venue and more.  You can earn badges (eg. medals) as well.  Examples include a local badge for checkins in a given area or you can become the mayor if you check in enough at a single given location.

2. Competitive: The game puts leaderboards in an easy to reach place.  This gets you to strive for being the top point earner among your friends or your geographical area.  What do points do for you?  Nothing, just status.  Prestige.  I am not sure why you want em’, but trust me, you want em’.

3. Powers: Everyone starts with basic abilities like checking in, but you soon gain more capabilities depending on your “level”.  So you can do things only the experienced can.  Feeling special is cool.  Ever wonder why they have that velvet rope and a line at empty nightclubs?

4. Shared: The game is not played alone (much).  Solo games are OK, but the great games include others.  How fun is reading Trivial Pursuit cards on your own.  “YES!  Nailed another Arts&Leisure – Sweet”.  As an aside, what was the last “business” app you “played” with someone else?  Bueller, Bueller?

5. Expressive: Foursqure allows users to co-create.  You augment the reality.  In FourSquare you can add venues or badges.  You play a part in crafting the experience for other players.  Truthfully, this is FourSquare getting the masses to do their work for them, but you don’t care cause you get to show off a bit and express your greatness.  People like to brag.  Who knew.

6. Purposeful: You don’t think about it, but games have a purpose.  Save the princess.  Eat the little dots.  In FourSquare it is to check in.  That is the goal above all else.  They get you do do that over and over again, willingly.

7. Surprise: Every time you check in you may be the “mayor” of that location.  You may also find someone you know there already.  There is some exploration going on.  The element of suprise and the search for the unknown keeps you coming back.

Of course this is not a complete list of game mechanics, but they were the most obvious ones I saw in FourSquare and I thought they were implemented well.

So let’s return to the world of business software for a moment.  Hopefully I have convinced you that games are serious stuff and that we can learn a lot from them.  The challenge is that it takes courage.  I say courage because all product development is the application of resources to create a solution that you hope people will use and pay for.  Given that perspective, you begin with a problem like “people can’t track billable hours” or they “need to manage accounting”,etc.   People don’t start with “we need a game that can do accounting” – for obvious reasons.

That means that if you want to make a game you need to put the game first (like Foursquare did).  It needs to be a first class citizen and in the end, FUN must be a design principle.  If I was building a task management application I’d have to be asking “is it fun to add a task” as much as I’d consider things like categories, sorting, due dates, owners, and milestones.   This is extremely tough.  Adding gaming means something else does NOT make it.  Resources, scope and time are a zero sum game. I’d have to ask myself, do I create yet another task management application with the “features customers are asking for”, or do I create something that will really inspire (a few).  Do I accept the fact that most won’t like it or understand it?

Incremental is without risk and real innovation is definitely not for everyone.   Snapping a leaderboard on your application is fake innovation for those who want credit from others.   Real innovation means you must say no to a lot of things that everyone will tell you are a must have, but if you want inspiration it’s the only way.  Find that core of what your application is.  The one reason it lives (eg. adding a task, tracking time, sharing a file, whatever).  Find it.  Honor it.  Strip away the noise.  And then work like hell to make it FUN.

If you do that you will most surely be laughed at.  You will almost definitely fail, but you will have pushed the needle of innovation a wee bit ahead.

Until next time.Possibly Related Posts:

• Mayor of Simpleton
• Foursquare Launches an API
• Learning from Entertainment
• OpenWorld Manifest: Days 0 and 1
• Oracle Gets Social

Right, wrong or indifferent, we all use the following and followers metrics to make quick judgements about a person’s reputation, and now, Twitter has provided another dimension, the listed metric.

This added dimension provides a much needed, albeit flawed, way to determine a user’s mojo. I use mojo here loosely to represent a user’s authority, something Twitter lacked in the past.

The number of followers or the ratio of following to followers were the only ways to get an idea of a person’s authority before, and these numbers could easily have been functions of popularity (ahem, celebrity), laziness or strict following rules (e.g. only following people met IRL), rather than authority or real reputation.

Listed allows you to size up how other Twitter users feel about a specific user, which adds some semblance of authority, i.e. being listed by lots of other users might be more meaningful than having lots of followers.

I’m using mojo here because the listed metric is still flawed for measuring authority. I suspect that lists will follow the same curve Twitter itself did; early adopters will use lists for reputation and authority, and everyone else will use them for other purposes, completely borking any reputation calculations.

Not that it matters, but I’m interested to see the evolution of the listed metric. Twitter’s inclusion of it on the user profile tells me it has some purpose related to reputation.

Anyway, now that lists are available to everyone, I figured I should show some love to you guys and add to your listed metric.

I created a “friend of appslab” list, including all people we’ve met over the years at conferences, here on the blog, at work, etc. It’s not complete by any means, and I’ll be adding to it.

I also added a nifty little widget to show tweets from the list right here (look to the right). The list widget is another new Twitter feature to support lists. For some odd reason, it’s not streaming any tweets behind our firewall. Not sure why, investigating.

Anyway, what do you think of lists? Does the listed metric help you apply reputation? Think it’s a fair way to do that?

Like the widget?

Find the comments.Possibly Related Posts:

• Critical Social Mass
• Twitters Lists Land, for Some Anyway
• Measuring Influence and Reputation
• 90-9-1 Rule Skews the New Web
• AppsLab Events Widget

There’s been a fair amount of debate among the early adopter crowd lately about the place of syndicated content in relation to Twitter.

The debate has been renewed in light of the general release of Twitter lists, which allow people to create and follow bunches of Twitter users en masse.

Since many people use Twitter to share links to interesting information, Twitter has always been a great source for news and information, essentially crowdsourcing your intertubes reading, much like a feed reader, only with a lot more discovery.

Lists make it even easier to discover interesting content using tweeters as a proxy.

Anyway, two posts recently caught my eye, one by Robert Scoble (@Scobleizer) called “Why I don’t use Google Reader anymore“, the other by Louis Gray (@louisgray) called “Why I Wouldn’t Accept $25k To Stop Using Google Reader“.

There are a couple points munged together in these posts that are worth discussing, as much as anything here is worth discussing.

1) Twitter vs. feeds for information

2) Google Reader’s product direction

I’ll touch on both, even though they’re not obviously related.

Which is better for information, Twitter or feeds?
The short answer here is they’re equally useful, and better together, a conclusion shared by many when asked the question by Dawn Foster (@geekygirldawn) over at WWD. You’ll notice about as many said Twitter had replaced feeds too, so maybe I’m just pumping up my own side.

Part of the problem here is that feeds have never really taken off, and Twitter provides a much less geeky way to get information. Personally, I prefer taking feeds from Twitter and adding them to my existing feeds in Reader, and services like ReadTwit have helped scrape the links out of my tweet stream, essentially beefing up my Reader.

Interestingly, I’m not seeing feeds surfaced for lists, which would really help me. I wonder if this is strategic.

Anyway, guys like Robert and Louis consume factors of ten more information than we mere mortals do, so I can see why they have a preference.

I’m dodging the question though. If I had to choose one or the other method today for information consumption, I’d go with Twitter. Why? Because of the network.

The network has always been Twitter’s ace in the hole. Remember back in bad old days of early 2008 when Twitter’s uptime teetered below 99%, which is pretty sad for a web service, even a free one? There were movements afoot to jump to Plurk and Identi.ca and Jaiku and Pownce.

Heard those names lately? They never took off because Twitter had the network and recreating that was too high a barrier to entry for pretty much everyone. So, we all suffered and hoped for the best.

To Twitter’s credit, they have dramatically improved the uptime of the service.

Even though I really like feeds and continue to believe they are the best kept secret in tech, using Twitter for information is way easier. Cue the segue.

Where is Google Reader going?
Google Reader has been my feed reader of choice for years, and I’ve got a lot invested in it.

It’s funny to read Robert’s and Louis’ posts because they both hint at a problem I have with Reader, new features. Reader has been slowly socializing for a while now, but the most recent additions have me wondering.

I haven’t found much value in the social features, beyond Shared Items, and I have to agree with Robert’s assessment that Reader has become a bit slow due to the new stuff. One huge head-scratcher for me is why there isn’t a public API for Reader data; why build “likes” before that?

Anyway, Reader has deviated from what it does best–fast feed reading with great search. The easy assumption here is that Twitter and Facebook have pushed the Reader team to add social features, but at what cost?

Maybe it’s just me, but I want a feed reader to be a feed reader because I already have a Twitter client for the social stuff. So why not add feed reading features like a proxy setting for feeds inside the firewall or open source the code so it can be installed inside a firewall, since feeds are still the best way to follow information within the firewall.

Or maybe if the strategy is to go social, why not build a Brizzly-esque interface right into Reader? Maybe that could be part of the search deal Google just did with Twitter.

So, two areas of interest here: Twitter vs. feeds for information and why and what’s up with Reader and where should it go?

A bit disjointed, but these two are wrapped up together for me and others.

Find the comments.

Update: The widget actually works inside the firewall, but it takes a while to load.Possibly Related Posts:

• Connect Adds Keyboard Shortcuts
• What We’re Reading
• How Do You Get News Online?
• Found: Cool Stuff in Your Shared Items
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I’m finally getting around to penning that post on Brizzly I’ve been threatening for a week.

Not that anyone noticed. It’s been eerily quiet in the comments lately.

Anyway, at OpenWorld, Rich turned me on to Brizzly and provided an invite. I’d heard about it over the Summer, but for whatever reason, it didn’t stick.

Oh, I know why; Brizzly is a web client for Twitter, which sounds pretty dull, considering that Twitter.com already exists so why would I need a web client?

Turns out Brizzly has done a lot of the things I wish Twitter.com had done, and frankly, Brizzly is the web interface that Twitter should have built for Twitter.com.

Beyond the feature set, I’m ready to ditch TweetDeck, not for lack of features, but because Adobe AIR uses way too many system resources. I’m happy with TweetDeck’s features and continue to use it on my iPhone, but the AIR client is just too much of a resource pig.

This is more an AIR problem, than a TweetDeck one.

So, what’s the big deal about Brizzly?

Brizzly showcases some great interface design, which shouldn’t be terribly surprising considering that Jason Shellen, formerly of Blogger and the founding PM for Google Reader, is one of the founders of Thing Labs, the company behind Brizzly.

Shellen’s influence has brought a lot of thoughtful, Reader-esque features to Brizzly, making it much easier to consume a stream of tweets. I’ll hit the features I like best individually.

Links, media resolved inline
Brizzly resolves shortened links and shows media (definitely pictures and video, not sure about sound files) inline, which is a huge feature.

Aside from the whole “breaking the Internet” problem, shortened links lead to blind clicking in that you have no idea what’s behind them. Brizzly resolves the link to show the original URL.

In addition, if someone shares a video or a picture, Brizzly includes the content inline for viewing, something we included in our most recent redesign of Connect. It’s so much more convenient to stay on the same page, rather than bouncing all over the place. Not to mention that this keeps the focus on the stream of tweets, rather than fracturing my attention.

Navigational improvements
Brizzly has a couple thoughtful navigational features that I really appreciate: infinite scrolling and keyboard shortcuts.

Infinite scrolling is huge. What do I mean? Sites like Connect, Twitter, FriendFeed and Facebook all have long pages of activity, and when you reach the bottom of the page, you’re presented with a pager (old school) or a “load more” function.

Brizzly just keeps loading tweets as you reach the end of what they’ve fetched. So, you never have to signify that you want more content; it just appears, after a short fetch. Don’t be surprised if this soon becomes the de facto standard.

I’ve documented my love for keyboard shortcuts in the past. I love them in Reader and on Connect, and Shellen has brought this feature to Brizzly.

It’s surprisingly productive to navigate through a bunch of tweets using keyboard shortcuts and infinite scrolling.

The rest
Brizzly also has the features you’d expect from a good Twitter client–groups, multiple account support, saved searches and trends.

With the release of Twitter Lists, I wonder how groups will be handled. Brizzly’s groups are limited to five with a cap on members at 50. A bit odd, but I assume it’s a scalability concern. Every Twitter client with groups will face an interesting problem with Lists though, not just Brizzly.

Brizzly also auto-shortens links and supports a Twitter picture client, not sure which one.

Saved searches are very handy. I used #oow09 quite a lot during OpenWorld.

Brizzly also shows the current trending topics, along with an explanation about why a topic is trending. It also adds a crowdsourcing element, allowing you to explain why a keyword or phrase is trending.

Overall, I’m digging Brizzly, and it’s replaced TweetDeck completely. The one drawback is speed, but it’s still in invite-only beta so I assume this will improve.

Last week, Brizzly announced Facebook account support, but I’ve yet to see that appear in my account, not that I’m in a huge hurry. I hardly ever use Facebook and doubt that a client would increase that; I fiddled with TweetDeck’s integration for about a week before turning off the Facebook account.

I would like to see Facebook Connect or OpenID support though. I’m so over having a new account for everything.

Anyway, if you use Brizzly, what do you think? If not, I have a few invites. If you want one, drop a comment.

Update: I still have a few invites left, and there are several people in the comments who’ve offered to provide invites as well.Possibly Related Posts:

• TweetDeck Adds Facebook, What’s Next?
• Twitters Lists Land, for Some Anyway
• Connect Adds Keyboard Shortcuts
• Sharing OpenWorld
• Now We’re on FriendFeed

Rich provided a sweet tip this evening that I wanted to share.

PuSH Bot, the weekend project of Mihai Parparita, combines the PubSubHubbub protocol with XMPP to create an easy way to subscribe to any feed served by PuSH via IM, meaning you’ll receive updates in your favorite IM client.

Sweet!

Oh, and there are a lot of PuSH-enabled feeds, like all the Feedburner, LiveJournal, TypePad, Blogger, Moveable Type, and Reader Shared Items feeds; check our previous coverage of PuSH, which is apparently the preferred acronym for PubSubHubbub, for more. PuSH is a big deal, and we’ve been noodling ways to use it for Connect, since we serve a lot of feeds.

The ability to read Connect content in IM is something we’ve wanted to implement for a long time, pretty much since FriendFeed debuted their IM implementation, which I really like. Probably the biggest barrier to wholesale adoption of Connect inside the firewall is the necessity to check it for updates; sure, we have feeds, but RSS will never get fully over the hump among enterprise types.

As I’ve said before, our most commonly requested enhancement is email digests, and when polled, nearly all the people who want email notifications would be happy with IM.

Anyway, I’m testing out PuSH Bot for a couple feeds to see how I like it. I’d love to get a PuSH installation going for Connect and install PuSH Bot to serve feeds by IM, assuming we can use it. Maybe Rich will tinker with the Ruby reference implementation of PuSH he just found.

It also occurs to me that PuSH Bot could partially replace (i.e. read, not post) the gone-but-not-forgotten Twitter IM client, which many of us miss terribly. Not exactly what it was, but pretty close.

Anyway, check it out and kudos to Mihai for this sweet PuSH-XMPP gateway.Possibly Related Posts:

• PubSubHubbub: Cool, but Hard to Say
• What We’re Reading
• Why Do Feeds Fail?
• What’s New with Connect?
• How Do You Get News Online?

So, finally, Twitter has finally dropped a grouping feature, called Lists, at least to some users, including @oraclemix and @theappslab.

Rich (@rmanlan) had them earlier in the week, too. Guess who’s out in the cold? Yours truly (@jkuramot), or at least I was when I started this post. Now, I’m in the club too.

I, among many others, have been quizzically wondering for years why groups weren’t in the app from the beginning.

The lack of a grouping feature has (happily) spawned several great client apps, including TweetDeck, which had them first, and more recently, Brizzly, which I know I promised to cover and will, eventually.

So, what’s the big deal? Well, Twitter needs groups because as you follow more people, your tweetstream gets more noisy, making it way tougher to find useful and interesting content, assuming you believe this type of content exists on Twitter.

Not everyone will agree, but for me, groups (or lists) have kept me using Twitter, even as it gets more noisy.

Anyway, if lists have been added to your account, you can create your own (public or private) to segment your tweetstream, see the public lists of other users to which you belong (a nice little ego-trip), and view the public lists of other users who have the feature.

For example, our pals at Oracle Mix created a list of the “official” Oracle Twitter accounts, which you can view and follow here (note: if you don’t have lists yet, this URL won’t work), and oh by the way, @theappslab is now an “official” account.

W00t!

Twitter has also altered profiles to add the number of lists to which a user belongs, right next to the followers and following counts.

If you’re interested, I’ve created a list for our little team, plus sometime-contributor Matt (@topperge) and the official WebCenter account (@oraclewebcenter). Follow if you like.

I wonder how apps, especially those that have added group functionality, will handle this new feature.

So, what do you think of lists? IMO, it’s about time. Find the comments.Possibly Related Posts:

• More Fun with Twitter Lists
• Posting to Twitter Now
• OraTweet Ready for Flight
• Last Week’s Mix Updates
• FriendFeed Brings the Firehose to IM

No one likes to admit failure, especially when duplicity is involved. The intertubes is rife with scams and hoaxes, and I’m pretty sure everyone reading has fallen for at least one at some point.

Case in point, today, I tried to download the bogus beta version of Chrome OS. Yes, it’s a hoax, so don’t get all happy.

Gizmodo’s feed had an item titled “Chrome OS Now Available, Go get It” (image), and intrigued to create a VM and geek out, I clicked through on the “Google” link provided at the bottom.

I suppose reading the list of featured software should have tipped me off first, but the site, which is a Google Sites URL and not one under the Chrome browser home (i.e. google.com/chrome) seemed fishy.

Even weirder was a list of previous beta versions to download. Something as big as Chrome OS going into beta would not have escaped my Reader.

The final straw was that the download was served from a non-Google domain. Mmm-k.

Had I only checked the footer, I would have seen:

Chrome OS is not related to Google. Service provided by SUSE Studio. See the license.

Oh well, at least I didn’t download it and go any further.

Twitter has been all abuzz (Chrome OS is trending), first with the news, and now, spreading the word that it’s bogus.

Apparently, it’s not a new site either and has been around a while. The Download Squad actually did a dissection of the install back in September, in case you’re wondering. Funny stuff and also a pretty clear picture of the comparative clout of Gizmodo.

A few places have reported the hoax. Interestingly, Gizmodo chose to take down its post, rather than update it, which is a bit odd since those of us reading the feed had no point of reference when clicking through for details.

This post from the WATBlog raises an interesting question, “Is Twitter making us headline junkies?” Apparently so, and I can vouch that RSS did that to me years ago. Discussion of this point warrants a full post at some point, but the short answer is in order to process the massive amounts of information, one must become a headline junkie.

Anyway, that’s my confession. I fell for the Chrome OS download hoax. I think at some point in the mid-90s, I fell for an attachment virus too. Oh, and way back in the day, I called an 800 number my friend said was a Sam Adams free beer survey. Turned out to be a gay porn line.

So, what hoaxes or scams have claimed you? Find the comments.Possibly Related Posts:

• Firefox Still Pwns the Field
• Hear Me Now, Read it Later
• Browsers Wars on Like Donkey Kong
• Feeds: Dead to You or Still Kicking?
• FriendFeed Brings the Firehose to IM

So, we’ve got a lot going on lately, what with the move and all. We’ll try to keep the content rolling despite real work.

Rich attended Startup School 2009 over the weekend, and although he didn’t find much to blog about, you could try to rally him into a post by commenting or pestering him on Twitter (@rmanalan). That might work.

Paul has been doing some deep thinking about foursquare, the latest shiny object. I’m hoping he puts them into a post. If you read here, you’ll recall he enjoys the intersection of work and play and has a lot of good ideas there.

Figured I should fill the dead air with something, so here comes a few tidbits I noticed over the last few days.

BART + foursquare
Just when you thought you couldn’t hear more about foursquare from me, BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) announces a partnership with foursquare last week at the Web 2.0 Summit. From the announcement:

“Foursquare will offer a BART-themed badge that can be unlocked by regular riders of BART, which provides train service in the San Francisco Bay Area. BART will award $25 promotional tickets each month for the next three months to riders chosen at random from all the riders who have logged Foursquare check-ins at BART stations, starting in November.

. . . BART also will look at other ways to coordinate promotions with new and existing venue partners, through www.mybart.org, its free service offering contests and discounts for entertainment, sports and other events.”

So, not only will there be IRL incentive for people to ride BART, but it sounds as though BART will work with other foursquare venues to create additional incentives, all based around a silly game that no one would ever play. Right.

When I read about this agreement, I immediately pinged Twitter with a plea to Portland’s TriMet to investigate something similar. Portland’s public transportation is much more cohesive than the Bay Area’s and, generally speaking, Portlanders use public transportation more frequently.

Plus, there are a lot of people playing foursquare here, so it makes sense. TriMet should be open to the idea, since they already offer web services free to developers who want to build transit apps.

Project Eagle Claw
From the it’s-about-time department, the Nigerian government has begun cracking down on 419 scammers, arresting 18 and squashing 800 websites. Apparently, this is just the beginning, as the project becomes fully operational in 2010.

Good news for the victims out there who fall for these scams and an about-face from the Nigerian government’s previous stance. I guess it’s bad news for the scam-baiters, who’ve provided quite a bit of humor, but in the end, I suspect they would agree it’s better for everyone to have fewer 419ers out there.

Windows 7 and Ubuntu 9.10
Windows 7 launched last week, and I’m mildly interested to take it for a test drive on a VM. I tried in vain to get a beta version; the in vain part was frustration with the download times and registration process.

Rich says it’s pretty nice, but has no intention of switching. I agree. It would take a lot for me to go back to Windows.

I’m much more excited for the GA release of Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala, which reached the release candidate milestone last week, coincidentally the same day Windows 7 launched.

I’ve heard great things about 9.10 end-to-end, and I just hope the upgrade process goes more smoothly for me than 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope did.

Let’s take a moment and consider how awesome it is that Canonical will be releasing not one, but two major OS updates this year. They did the same last year and have consistently done so for five years now.

Awesome feat. The Linux community rocks.

ORACLENERD goes gratis
Chet, recently unemployed again and looking for work, has decided to offer his services for free, which is an interesting model, especially considering the current state of the Economy.

It’s not as crazy as it sounds, and this business model has worked for centuries, i.e. give them a taste for free and sink the hook. Sound familiar?

So, Chet is offering his services for 2-4 week engagements, although the timeframe is negotiable, to clients in the Tampa area. His resume is here.

I wish him luck, and I’m curious to see how this model works for employment. He might be on to something big.

Floating airport?
And finally, from the crazy-ideas-FTW department, there’s a legit plan floating (no pun intended) around to construct a new airport off the coast of San Diego. That’s right, a multi-level, floating, oil-rig style structure that would be accessible by ferry or underwater light rail. Update: The plan calls for an entire city, not just an airport.

Sounds pretty sweet, except for that last bit. That sounds like disaster-flick fodder in an area prone to earthquakes.

Anyway, maybe Joel Garry can comment more on this crazy-cool architecture plan, since I think he’s from San Diego.

So, that’s about it for now. Find the comments.Possibly Related Posts:

• Who’s in Your Gang?
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A few weeks ago, I announced that our team was moving to WebCenter development.

Since then, several people have asked what our role would be specifically, many of you in person at OpenWorld. Now, I can tell you, since I finally know for sure.

We’ve been charged with the internal rollout of WebCenter 11g, which, we’re hoping, will become the de facto place inside the Oracle firewall to collaborate, share information, manage group projects and generally, you know, do work.

WebCenter 11g is currently hosted internally and available to all employees. Our mission is to bring what we’ve learned operating Connect to the WebCenter instance.

We’ll begin by making tweaks to the hosted instance to make it more like Connect, and eventually, Connect’s data will move to WebCenter, allowing our existing users (about 1,500-2,000 unique visitors per day) to leverage all the goodness of WebCenter’s backend services in a Connect-like interface.

Like what services you ask? Well, we’ve never been able to offer file sharing on Connect due to a number of reasons beyond our control, but now, with WebCenter’s UCM services, we can. That’s a huge win for Connect users.

But, we’ll not only add files, but we plan to add viewers so people can browse the content inline without having to bounce to another site, download the file and open it. We already do this on Connect for certain media file types, and it’s a huge time saver.

Don’t believe me? Use Brizzly for a day and come back to me. More on that tomorrow.

Anyway, this is our mission. To take the awesome array of services that WebCenter 11g offers and call them out in ways we know users want and will appreciate.

Overall, I’m excited for this venture. It’s not without challenges and risks, but it’s a great opportunity.

When we launched the IdeaFactory, which became Connect back in 2007 (full history), there were no social platforms inside the firewall, and many people didn’t see the value of a social platform inside the firewall.

Today, it’s a much different ballgame. We’ve learned a lot in the last 2+ years, and Connect has grown to be an everyday business tool. We’ve learned a lot, and Connect’s current iteration is much more about sharing information than about social features, which makes sense.

I like to think our work on Connect is what got the attention of the WebCenter team, since they have been thinking along the same lines we have for quite some time.

Managing the internal instance of WebCenter will get us exposure well beyond what we’ve had with Connect, which never had any marketing behind it and spread only through viral adoption and word-of-mouth.

All of this is good, especially for our little team. We’ve come a long way, and I finally feel like we’re living up to our tagline of driving innovation, at least directly.

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