I started this blog about a year ago. Initially, I just wanted a place to stick things so I’d be able to share them with friends and so I’d be able to find those things again later. From there, I started posting longer articles on products and services that I was really happy with. In December, at work, we launched TIBCO ActiveMatrix and I wrote about that a few times. Slowly, folks found my site and the traffic grew to about 70 unique visitors per day and 50 feed subscribers. Co-workers found the site and people started to mention it when I ran into them in the hallways.

With all this attention, I took a look at my site. Frankly, I was a little embarrassed. The site was painfully slow, the design was awful, and the content was all over the place. Looking around at some of the other sites out there, I had some ideas. I didn’t have the time or knowledge to do what I really wanted, but I did manage to improve things. The major changes include:

• faster web host
• latest version of Wordpress
• new site design
• separation of content into “sub-blogs”

As a result, things should work properly and I’m happy enough with the site that I’m comfortable posting content here again. Looking at what I was writing about, and looking at what people were interested in, I divided the site into three “sub-blogs”: (1) SOA, (2) Technology, and (3) Random Junk. If you’re interested in my technology related posts, just check out rourkem.com/tech. If you liked the SOA and TIBCO related posts, check out rourkem.com/soa. If you really want to read my food and travel related posts, there’s always rourkem.com/random. Of course, there’s always rourkem.com if you really want to read all of the above.

For each of the above sub-blogs, there’s a corresponding feed. Take a look at the above-listed pages and shift your subsciptions if one of the specific feeds is more appropriate to what you’re interested in. If you’re currently subscribed to the main site feed and only want the latest SOA posts, for example, go to rourkem.com/soa and subscribe to the feed listed in the sidebar on that page.

I’m not very happy with the theme, but it’s an improvement. Given the time, I’d love to build a new Wordpress theme based off Sandbox. For now, though, this should work.

• Category Based Permalinks with Wordpress
• Segmenting My Personal Blog - Why?
• Standalone List Items in IE and Firefox
• Feed to Email Service Roundup
• Feed Hacks: FeedShake and Feedcatch

I’ve always enjoyed french toast, so when I saw the Toast Modern episode of Good Eats I figured I’d give making it a shot. The very first time I made Alton’s recipe, though, I was shocked at just how well it turned out. It was so good, in fact, that I poked around and looked at other recipes to see what made my amateur rendition of Alton’s french toast so good.

There are three things Alton suggests that aren’t generally described in french toast recipes. Both of these differences require that you do some prep work the night before you intend to breakfast on french toast.

First, you need stale bread. Really, you want the bread to be stale around the outside but still fresh on the inside. As per Mr. Brown, I made some fresh bread stale by cutting it appropriately and leaving it out over night to go stale. In order to have the bread go stale quickly enough, I placed the pieces upright in the wire rack from my toaster over (see picture, middle left).

After setting up the bread to stale, I prepared the “custard” that I’d dip that bread into the next morning. Allowing that custard to age in the refrigerator overnight enhances the flavor considerably. The custard takes no more than five minutes to prepare, and then you’re ready to go to bed while it sits in the ‘fridge.

The next morning you need to start by preheating your oven to 350. You’ll use this to finish the french toast rather than cooking it completely on the oven. I set up an assembly line on my counter: soak in custard, move to drying rack, fry both sides, place in oven to bake.

Do follow Alton’s recipe, but make sure you allow the french toast to cook slowly over a medium low heat — do not raise that heat out of impatience. Trust me. All this extra work is worth it, as it somehow ends up generating exceptional french toast. Now that I know I like the results from following this method I’d like to try mixing things up a little and making stuffed french toast, or cinnamon raison french toast.

Both times I’d tried this recipe it has turned out really. Both time I used bread from Acme Bread Company. Of the two different breads I tried, I definitely prefer the Pain de Mie to the Challah. I highly recommend picking up some Pain de Mie and trying Alton’s recipe with that bread. You won’t be disappointed.

• New Waffle Hardware
• Overnight Raised Belgian Waffles
• Real Popcorn Tastes Better
• Waffles, lots of Waffles
• Peanut Butter Eggs

To serve two hungry people you’ll need:

• small can of Spam
• half pint of heavy cream
• two cloves of garlic
• pinch of salt
• freshly ground black pepper
• pinch or two of cumin
• 1/2 lb of angle hair
• sauteed onions (optional)

Prepare the pasta al-dente and set it aside. It’ll cook a little further later, so don’t overcook it now. Cool the pasta with water and toss it in olive oil so it won’t stick together.

Dice the Spam and saute it over medium-high heat until it is a little charred and has a crispy outside. Spam is cooked, so you don’t need to worry about undercooking it. Spam is indestructible, so you don’t need to worry about overcooking it. Crunchy is nice, and takes about 15 minutes. Remove the Spam to a bowl for later.

Crush your garlic and saute it in a little olive oil until fragrant. Bring the heat up to high for just a minute and add the cream. De-glaze the pan (scrape the bottom while the heat is high, just after the cream has been added). Bring the heat back down to medium and allow the cream to come up to a simmer. Add the salt, pepper, cumin, and spam to the simmering cream and stir. Allow to simmer for another five minutes to reduce and so the cream picks up the spam flavor. Optionally, add the onions at this point.

Add the pasta back to the cream sauce and mix/toss until the pasta picks up the cream and the Spam is well distributed. Plate and enjoy.

• Smoked Salmon Pasta
• Overnight French Toast
• Closer to Buckwheat Crepe Perfection
• New Waffle Hardware
• Wheat Crepes with Gruyere and Lamb Sausage

Apple juice is the most basic and versatile liquid you can use for making smoothies. Any berry smoothie will work well with apple juice, including banana-berry smoothies. You won’t get much in the way of flavor out of apple juice, but it will add sweetness.

Orange juice is excellent in more tropical smoothies. I use orange juice with mangoes in particular, because the acidity cuts the chalky flavor that you find with that fruit. Peaches and pineapple also work well with OJ. For a unique taste, try banana, strawberry, and orange juice. Make sure you’re using enough sweet fruit, as orange juice is quite acidic.

Coconut nectar goes really well with pineapple. Pineapple-coconut smoothies were a favorite of Jen’s until I started using soy milk.

Any milk will work in a yogurt smoothie, producing a very creamy, right smoothie. Soy milk is one of the healthier options and produces excellent smoothies. The first couple of times I had a soy smoothie the flavor seemed a bit odd to me, but its definitely something that grows on you. I’ve tried a number of different soy milks and found that they vary quite a bit. My favorite for blending is the Silk Vanilla, in the blue bottle.

Berry and banana-berry smoothies work well with soy milk. Jen’s overall favorite smoothie is just pineapple, yogurt, and soy milk — so simple and yet so good.

Protein mixes work okay, but the taste of your smoothie definitely suffers. If you really need the protein then I’d recommend adding whey powder to your smoothie instead. The taste will still suffer, but not as much.

This isn’t a complete list. Try whatever suits your fancy and see how it works. Leave a comment below if you find something that you really like.

• Practical Smoothies: The Fruit
• Practical Smoothies: The Basics

ESB implementations (ESBis) are manifestations of an enterprise design pattern intended to simplify the interconnection of services in a given environment. Most enterprise architectures today include some form of ESBi. Many SOA reference architectures include some form of ESBi. A few years ago ESBi was purely theoretical, but today there are mature implementations that cover the complexity gamut, from simple to very complex. I’d like to examine the different levels of ESBi in the future.

ESB products (ESBp) are designed to help companies build ESBi. The ESB market is mature and the definition of what makes an ESB product (ESBp) has been made clear over the course of 2006. This year has seen every major SOA vendor release of refine their ESB offering or offerings. Most of the analysts have released ESBp reports that score or compare the products. A number of magazines, including Network Computing and InfoWorld, have released ESBp round-ups and reviews. Folks, as 2006 ends we finally have a clear definition of what an ESB product is.

First, lets eliminate some of the confusion the acronym causes: not all ESBp offerings include a “bus” or messaging technology. Most companies already have some form of messaging technology and are best served by using an ESBp that does not tie them to a specific messaging product, but instead allows them to build out their ESBi using the messaging technology they already have. If you don’t have an enterprise-grade messaging technology already, then either purchase an ESBp that includes messaging, or purchase a best of breed messaging product in addition to the ESBp you select. Do not rely on a sub-par messaging technology simply because it came bundled with your ESBp.

At a minimum, an ESBp must provide for mediation on several levels, as listed below. This allows you to use that ESBp to onboard services to your ESBi. To facilitate collaboration and to facilitate re-use of the services you onboard, a good ESBp must integrate tightly with the version control systems and registry products in your environment. In most cases, registry support just means UDDI support. In order to deal with routing, cross referencing, and exception handling, a good ESBp will also have lightweight process support.

• transport level mediation, at least:
  • HTTP
  • JMS
• message format mediation, at least:
  • SOAP
  • POX (plain old XML)
• security mediation (in the form of SSL and WS-Security)
• message format mediation (in the form of XSLT/XPath)

Performance, scalability, and fault-tolerance are assumed. An ESBp acts as part of your communications infrastructure, and any downtime will translate into service downtime. Any latency issues will translate into service latency issues.

Even an entry-level ESBp must include a complete SOAP stack with support for all flavors of SOAP. If everyone exposed their services via WS-I compliant services there’d be far less need for ESBp’s.

The above requirements are the absolute minimum for a product to be considered an ESBp. In addition, more advanced ESB products (sometimes called ESB Suites or Integration Suites) will also have many of the following features:

• auditing of messages
• logging of messages
• MEP mediation (request reply : pub/sub)
• a rich set of transports
  • TCP
  • MQ-Series
  • TIBCO RV
  • Java RMI
  • SMTP/POP3
  • FTP
  • IIOP
  • COM/DCOM
  • etc
• a rich set of message formats
  • Cobol Copybook
  • EDI
  • fixed format and delimited file formats
  • .Net data marshalling
• rich collection of adapters to provide zero-code access to:
  • application operations
  • application metadata
• advanced monitoring and management
• integrated debuggers

Service composition and service orchestration capabilities are often bundled with ESB Suites and Integration Suites. There are advantages to having these capabilities tightly integrated with your ESBp, as this allows you to easily invoke functionality as well as providing for superior performance due to fewer SOAP hops.

As Rich Seeley points out in this article, the current trend is for people to pile more and more into ESB Suites. Many such suites have grown to include even BPM capabilities. It isn’t clear that buying BPM technology as part of an ESB is a good idea. ESB Suites currently have the best enabling technology for service composition and orchestration, but the best BPM offerings are still the standalone BPM products.

Rich’s article suggests that people might start using the term “fabric” to describe larger ESB Suites which include BPM. Only Webmethods and the Burton Group have begun to do. Expect this to catch on only after Gartner and Forrester change their language.

A number of people have predicted the impending death of ESBs. These predictions don’t make sense to me, given the fact that the world isn’t 100% WS-I compliant SOAP. Frankly, we wouldn’t want the world to be all-SOAPed up because of the complexity and performance issues that would imply. There are quite a few ESB products on the market today because there is a need for such products, and there will continue to be a need for such products for the foreseeable future.

• Design for Performance Applies to SOA
• TIBCO ActiveMatrix Press Round-Up
• TIBCO ActiveMatrix: One Container to Rule Them All
• Pay Your Managers and Architects for Re-use
• Who Pays for Reused Services?

What sort of chocolate will people pay $250 for?

Knipschildt Chocolatier was founded in 1999 by Fritz Knipschildt, who got his culinary education as a chef in Denmark. The most-expensive chocolate he sells–a $250 dark chocolate truffle with a French black truffle inside–is available on a preorder-only basis. It’s made of 70% Valrhona cacao, which is blended into a creamy ganache with truffle oil. The truffle is then hand-rolled with a dark truffle on the inside and dusted with cocoa powder.

I really enjoy savory dishes made with small amount of black or white truffle, but I’m slightly alarmed by the idea of eating such a large chunk of black truffle.

All that aside, I highly recommend Richard Donnelly Chocolates in Santa Cruz. Donnely has the worst packaging and marketing of any major chocolate producer, but he makes some of the best and most interesting chocolates out there. If you happen to live in northern California, stop by and visit Richard’s shop in Santa Cruz. It doesn’t look like much, but you’ll probably get to meet Richard and try a chocolate before you even buy anything.

Related Link: Expensive chocolate gift have to be fresh, you should also be able to choose the chocolate to fill your own chocolate box. Fast Delivery to the recipient is also important.

In traditional application development, architects could get away with ignoring performance concerns when the application in question had very minor load and latency requirements. In the world of SOA this isn’t an option. The service you write today for a low load application will be re-used tomorrow in a high load environment.

In many cases you will discover that there’s a tradeoff between strict architectural elegance and adherence to standards on one side, and performance on the other side. Tradeoffs of this sort will exist at the enterprise architecture level, where you need to consider the highest load scenario your enterprise is likely to encounter. In many cases you will need to have two ways of doing things, the right way and the fast way.

At the service level, you’ll face the same issue, and you should consider how each given service is likely to be used within an appropriate time horizon. Choosing that time horizon is important, as “forever” planning is dangerous and wasteful.

David’s post raised many excellent points, but I’d like to call out two of them and offer specific advice from my experience:

Second, many services are built on top of more traditional legacy APIs, and as such the translations between legacy APIs to expose them as services may cause performance problems.

Third, use of too many fine grained services may cause performance problems. Indeed, you should not be afraid to leverage fine grained services within your SOA. However, you need to understand the performance issues with doing so, taking careful consideration of the network bandwidth and how other applications leverage the services.

Do not make everything a service. Things that are likely to be re-used should be services, everything else should simply be leveraged as efficiently as possible. For example, if your organization has many applications that need to check a customer’s credit score you should build a service that does exactly that. Let’s say that getting the credit score requires querying a database, checking a mainframe system, making a SOAP call against a partner, and then executing SAS operation. Do not wrap each and every one of those operations in SOAP and then build a BPEL orchestration around those SOAP calls. Simply build a credit score service that natively leverages those other systems and expose your credit score service over SOAP for applications to re-use.

The above applies in all cases, as this is both the fast way and the right way to build composite services that make specific use of existing assets.

• Who Pays for Reused Services?
• The Definition of ESB as 2006 Ends
• TIBCO's Matt Quinn Presents Service Virtualization
• Pay Your Managers and Architects for Re-use
• TIBCO ActiveMatrix Press Round-Up

The quickest mentions to appear were the short, high level articles that provided bit more depth and color than the press releases. These articles included Martin Veitch’s piece in IT Week, Paul Krill’s write-up in InfoWorld, and Antone Gonsalves’ article in InformationWeek. Antone’s article contains a quote by ZapThink that questions the usefulness of SOA related middleware in general. Antone and TIBCO touched base after the article was published, resulting in this blog entry questioning the value to end-users of SOA related standards. Antone makes some really good points, both of which deserve further inspection. In this entry, I responded to Antone’s article, explaining why ActiveMatrix is different from the class of middleware that he and ZapThink were referring to.

In India, ActiveMatrix was mentioned in CIO India and SDA India. These mentions were mostly in the context of some work TIBCO is doing with major Indian systems integration firms, including TCS. There were actually quite a few mentions of ActiveMatrix in publications outside the US, but I won’t mentioned anything that isn’t in English due to a limitation of the poster (I only understand English).

Early the week after launch, an article in Reg Developer took much closer look at ActiveMatrix and what it means to SOA developers. David Norfolk did a really great job explaining what makes ActiveMatrix new, valuable, and different. If you only follow two links, check out the Reg Developer piece and the Computer World article covered below.

That same week, there was a bit of buzz in the blogosphere around service virtualization. Computer World kicked things off with a great article discussing what Delta is doing with TIBCO’s ActiveMatrix product — Delta is an early adopter of ActiveMatrix, using it as the heart of Delta Nervous System 2. Joe McKendrick, on the SOA in Action blog, made the connection between the concepts Delta was talking about and some of the scaling related concepts that Todd Biske had just blogged about. Over at ZDNet, Joe summed up the talk about service virtualization in his blog post.

Joe’s post quoted a representative from IBM’s grid group who said that virtualization had nothing to do with SOA. On that same day another IBM rep gave a webinar entitled, “Virtualize Application Server Resources to Handle Spikes in Workload Demands.” The webinar expounded on the need for virtualization technologies in an SOA world. IBM even used the term “service virtualization”, but IBM was referring to dynamic addition of servers to an application server cluster based on load. TIBCO’s technology allows you to scale at the service level based on load on that service. Further, The ActiveMatrix technology doesn’t limit you to Java, while IBM’s approach certainly appears to.

Previous to my current role, I was the product manager for TIBCO’s BusinessWorks product. It was nice to see Andrew Binstock award BusinessWorks the highest score InfoWorld has given an ESB in his recent review. There’s a brief mention of ActiveMatrix at the end of the article, but the focus is on what makes BusinessWorks the best ESB available on the market.

A more general post that’s certainly related is Eric Roch’s article entitled, “IBM and TIBCO Dominate SOA Software.”

All in all, quite an exciting two weeks.

• TIBCO ActiveMatrix: One Container to Rule Them All
• People are Talking about Service Virtualization
• TIBCO's Matt Quinn Presents Service Virtualization
• TIBCO Presents ActiveMatrix at Gartner Summit Event
• The Definition of ESB as 2006 Ends

If you scroll to the bottom of this post and click on the bottom screenshot you’ll have a good overview of the new interface. Move that window off to the side and refer back to it as you read this post and you’ll be able to easily see what I’m talking about.

All of the changes are to Smugmug’s picture gallery view, and most of those changes involve more use of AJAX. The biggest improvement, though, is actually not AJAX related — comments are now displayed on the picture pages by default. In the current production version of Smugmug’s galleries you have to click on comments to see them. Now those comments show up on the main page for each picture as you view that page. While a small change, this is a major improvement because it makes comments and user participation more central to the Smugmug experience. To make this feature complete, comments need to show up in the lightbox view — the view you get when you click on a picture, and the only view of a single picture that you’ll be able to email to someone.

I’d love to see Smugmug take this one step further and allow comments to be added to pictures without requiring users to click an “add comment” button. Blogs have comments set up this way. Yes, this would make the pages a little less “clean” looking, so perhaps this should be an option that users can control.

Smugmug’s display of EXIF information (metadata about photographs) has been a little clunky in the past, and this was one area where Flickr currently has the edge. The new Smugmug interface vastly improves handling of EXIF information. With this new interface you hover over a picture and toolbar appears. You then click “info” on that toolbar and a transparent element appears and hovers over your page. This element shows all the EXIF information for the image you’re viewing and can be moved around your browser window. The hovering EXIF element is really slick, but there are still some rough edges. The EXIF window shows far too much. At the very least, there should be a way to toggle between “basic” and “full” so you don’t need to see all of the information all of the time. Worse, though, is the fact that you can’t see this information when you click on a picture (enter lightbox mode) to get the larger version of that picture (see above right). If I’m interested enough in a picture to look at the EXIF information, I also want to see a larger version of that image than what you have on the default gallery view.

Smugmug caters to folks who are a little more serious about their photography than the crowd over at Flickr. Those same photographers are accustomed to magazines that list the aperture, shutter speed, and ISO in every photo’s caption. I wish Smugmug would do the same so I wouldn’t need to click anything to see basic shot information. I especially want to this information when I choose to look at a larger version of a given picture.

On a related note, I’d also like to have an option to view a version of pictures larger than “L”, or “Large,” version. I’d love to have a full screen view of images, even if it just gets my browser to scale the image down from an “XL” option. “L” images take up only a small part of my laptop screen (1400×1050) and “O” — for original — images are way too large.

The rest of the changes deal with modifying the gallery view so it requires fewer pageloads. This means that when you click on an individual image in a gallery it can grab that picture and show it without actually reloading the whole page. Individual photo pages load faster and everything seems snappier. The downside is that you won’t be able to copy a url out of your address bar and send it to someone to show them a specific picture. I’m really impressed with the fact that Smugmug made the lightbox view a permalink, so there’s a fairly easy way to send someone the url for a particular picture.

The one unresolved side effect of the new gallery view is the fact that you won’t be able to use a web site analytics service (like Google Analytics) to track individual pageloads.

Speed is important, and I really like the snappier interface. I’m also really impressed with the fact that you can now navigate using keyboard shortcuts. Arrow keys now move you forward and backward. I do hope, however, that Smugmug takes the required steps to give folks back what that snappier interface will take away. Enhancing the built-in Smugmug stats so there’s a list of “top photographs” will give users back the only valuable part of what they lost in terms of analytics.

Smugmug also improved the theme preview and theme selection for galleries. I still think the default Smugmug themes are the nicest, so I don’t really have an opinion on this feature.

I’m confident that the guys at Smugmug will clean things up some before this new interface goes from beta to full release. Overall, these changes are certainly taking Smugmug in the right direction and I’m very happy with the service. That said, I have a short list of items I’d love to see in a photo sharing and presentation service, including better access control, the ability to store digital negatives, and more ways to organize images.

Smugmug’s access control model is great for professional photographers, but its not as good for folks who want to share photos with family and friends. All of my photographs are currently open for all to see, but I’d really like the ability to lock that down so only my “showcase” photographs are public, and the rest (Christmas picture, vacation pictures, etc) are only viewable by friends and family. More and more, I wonder about the wisdom of leaving all of my pictures open to the general public. Sharegroups are not an acceptable answer to this problem.

Smugmug almost provides a great way to archive my pictures. Because Smugmug only allows me to upload JPEG files, though, I need to keep a mirror of my galleries offline with all of my RAW files, or “digital negatives.” The ability to link a digital negative — stored by Smugmug — to each JPEG would be a great feature. I’d be willing to pay extra for that.

As I upload more and more pictures to Smugmug, it becomes harder and harder to find things. Search is good, but the ability to put photo galleries in multiple categories would open up quite a few organizational possibilities. Smugmug announced a feature some time ago would use the data information in my pictures to help organize those pictures. I have no idea how this works because despite numerous requests to support this feature remains unavailable to me. Oh, well.

• What Makes Pikeo Different?
• PicLens Almost Fixes Slideshows

Jen actually reads her junk mail, so she noticed that her 55,000 US Airways miles were about to expire. We poked around a bit and discovered that transferring US Airways miles into any other program is nearly impossible. points.com will allow you to transfer miles out of a US Airways account, but your 55,000 US Airways miles will amount to less than 3,000 AAdvantage miles. On the other hand, award tickets are really flexible. You can buy a ticket today and change the time and date without penalty for up to a year (thanks, Jimmy).

As the Times article points out, though, you can simply donate a few miles or buy a magazine subscription and you’ll have another 18 months before your miles disappear. I extended the expiration on my Delta miles by getting Mary that subscription to Teen Vogue she’s been wanting.

Todd Biske posted an article on his blog that eloquently explains the need to scale services differently from web applications — the load characteristics are not the same. Todd refers to BEA WebLogic Server Virtual Edition as a tool that can help quickly bring up extra instances of services hosted in a traditional application server to meet load spikes, but ActiveMatrix Service Grid is an even better option. Last week TIBCO’s Matt Quinn talked about service virtualization at a Gartner event and specifically addressed the value in scaling services at the service level, rather than scaling an entire application server instance. ActiveMatrix Service Grid is the only product on the market today that allows you to do that.

Todd finishes his article by comparing SOA to a “virtual” or “distributed” mainframe. The analogy is interesting, because service virtualization eliminates quite a bit of the complexity that comes from smearing applications out across services, containers, languages, and geographies. On a mainframe you could invoke any functionality by making a function or procedure call. With ActiveMatrix you have ability to do that once again, even if the service you’re invoking is on the other side of the world, running on a different operating system, written in a different programming language.

On a mainframe you can control how much processing power goes to each component without having to deploy extra instances of those components on other machines; this gives you the advantage of co-location even while scaling the power given to that component. ActiveMatrix allows you to deploy many instances of a highly loaded service to scale that service, but you can deploy some of those instances co-located with the other services it needs to communicate with the most. In this way you get the in-proc collocation while still getting the scaling flexibility.

Of course, mainframes aren’t the desired end state. There are plenty of good reasons we moved away from mainframes, but if we can get back some of what we lost by making that move, all the better. Everyone wants to have their cake and eat it too.

Scaling aside, the abstraction that you get from virtualization appears to be the main reason Delta chose ActiveMatrix. Joe McKendrick mentions this in his SOA in Action blog. Joe also refers to Todd’s article but doesn’t specifically mention that you can solve both the scaling and abstraction problems with service virtualization.

• TIBCO ActiveMatrix Press Round-Up
• TIBCO ActiveMatrix: One Container to Rule Them All
• TIBCO's Matt Quinn Presents Service Virtualization
• TIBCO Presents ActiveMatrix at Gartner Summit Event
• Pay Your Managers and Architects for Re-use

Why the new service, then? Why the positive coverage from Techcrunch? Let’s say I run a softball league and I need a way to send schedules, results, and schedule change notifications out to all the players. Unless I’m particularly tech savvy, I’m not likely to think to myself, “why don’t I sign up for a blogger account, burn the feed using Feedburner, and then use the Feedburner email subscription option. Each of my posts will then be sent out to all the players who subscribe.” I am far more likely to use a service like Loopnote that is sold as a way to send notifications.

Loopnote not only makes it clear to the average Joe what you can do with the service and why you would want to do it, Loopnote also makes that one particular thing easy to do. They market to a specific use case and optimize the user experience to that use case. It makes sense when you think about it.

Solutions selling, in enterprise software, is exactly the same thing.

As a technologist, its too easy to fall into the trap of only looking at a given technology not the real world problems that technology solves.