This isn’t a good thing.

It’s time we cut some calories out of our information diet. For me, the network with the biggest problem is Twitter. Updates are a mere sentence or two, like a 4-calorie Tic-Tac, so you feel like you can handle a lot of them. But before you know it, you’ve binged and are in a situation where a tweet comes in every second. My twitter following count quickly reached hundreds of people soon after starting a few years ago, as the service makes it easy to follow everyone you’ve ever heard of and more. But with 500+ following, the service became largely unusable for me. I couldn’t hope to keep up with it all.

This meant that I wasn’t able to keep up with the people I really cared about and knew in real life though, because they were all just buried in the noise. The result was that I simply stopped using twitter for the most part.

Recently I decided to do something about it though, so I set out to change the way I use Twitter. I took inspiration from a personal policy I have of having a fixed number of clothes hangers, and pulling an old shirt out of the closet any time I buy a new one, so my wardrobe remains fresh and compact (important when living in San Francisco!).

I decided to do the same thing with the people I follow on Twitter. So I started removing a lot of hangers from my twitter account, so to speak, by unfollowing everyone I could stand to unfollow. I was ruthless: post more than 4x a day? Unfollowed. Can’t remember ever seeing a tweet from you? Unfollowed. Post nothing but trite nonsense? Gone. Can I live without knowing every update? I already am, so I might as well unfollow.

I took my list down from about 500 to less than 100. The remaining accounts are close friends, a few news sources, a few journalists or notable industry commentators, and a few others I find interesting or entertaining. The result has been dramatic! I can check twitter just a couple times a day and pretty much stay on top of what’s happening with everything I really care about. I don’t have a new tweet showing up every few seconds begging to distract me from whatever I’m doing. I actually reach the end of unread updates, look up from my phone, and take part in the real world more.

The Challenge

I think Twitter has done themselves and their users a big disservice by encouraging users to follow as many people as possible. At a certain scale, it is really detrimental to the experience. So I’d like to challenge everyone to a new way of using Twitter: Limit yourself to 100 follows. Concentrate your experience, and force yourself to have the discipline to only follow the really quality accounts. Want to follow #101? Go through and unfollow someone less interesting.

This could have a meaningful impact on the quality of the Twitter community. It means that when you follow someone it’s a high compliment because you don’t simply follow everyone. When someone with <100 follows starts following you, it means that they’re likely to actually see and read your posts. And if everyone is limiting their follow lists, it encourages better quality content, knowing that there is competition to be worthy of a spot on other’s follow lists.

So if you’re feeling overwhelmed by Twitter these days, and its just a firehose that you can skim at best, try taking the #twitter100 challenge, and encourage others to do the same (with a tweet, natch). We’ll all be better for it in the end.

(And of course, I’d be honored if you chose to follow me: @BrianScates)

Last week, my company (Selligy) was competing in a startup competition against 7 other teams. We ended up winning, but barely, with tough competition coming from the only female founder in the group, Kati Bicknell at Kindara.

Kindara is a mobile app for women to track fertility signs, with the goal of conceiving quickly and successfully. It’s a big problem, and one that a woman should be behind solving. Before Kati’s presentation even started, however, it felt like many of the men in the room suddenly reverted to Junior High.

As the event’s host introduced Kindara as an app to help women get pregnant, someone in the audience shouted “I can’t wait to see the demo!” Comments and puns continued after the pitch, many from the all-male panel of judges: “Fertile markets”, “market penetration”, etc., with a pretty giggly audience.

It was all pretty juvenile. Clearly Kati’s startup was taken seriously, as she almost won, but it’s one more thing to have to play along with and endure. Kati chuckled along with everyone else, but I think that’s just a defense mechanism she’s employing. If I were Kati, what I would hear in those jokes is a discomfort among the men in the room when it comes to a woman talking seriously about a sexual issue, and I don’t think it’s a problem a man would face.

Women are a big market, maybe the biggest, and women founders and engineers bring a unique and needed perspective to female-specific pain points. We need them involved, but any women in the audience for the pitch listening to the juvenile wisecracks probably felt discouraged from doing something like this. Why would they want to put so much effort into starting a company if that’s what they would have to endure in front of hundreds of people every time they want to promote their business?

To put it in user experience terms, some men in the room were adding unnecessary and unfair friction for women founders.

When I related the above story about Kati’s presentation to my good friend Lauren Roth, I could see her heart sink. Her voice lowered as she told me how humiliated and discouraged she would have felt, and that she’s faced the same thing herself.

Lauren is an awesome hacker, and has been highly involved in the Drupal community. She organized Drupal events in Austin for years, and helped organize the largest and most profitable Drupal conference to date in San Francisco after moving here. She has since, however, sidelined herself from those gatherings. This is not due a lack of interest in the industry, but because of how she’s treated as a woman.

Lauren is attractive and fashionable, and as a result attracts a lot of attention. But that’s not what should define her. Unfortunately, for many in the community, they can’t seem to see past her face, even when she’s next to them in a conference hall, in front of a computer, typing away.

At conferences and meetups, she is constantly asked what she’s doing there. Men are always asking if she’s in marketing or PR or something, and nobody seems to takes her seriously as a hacker, at least not upon first meeting her.

As an introvert, it’s already difficult for her to attend events like this, but to then have to put up with everyone asking if she’s there with her boyfriend, or hitting on her, and not accepting her as one of their own because of how she looks makes the experience intolerable. She is now disengaged and working on her own, away from the support of the community. That’s a real shame, because Lauren is one of the coolest people I know, and would make any organization a better place.

Kati and Lauren aren’t alone. Even women at the very top have to deal with this. How many hours did it take for Marissa Mayer’s pregnancy to be on the front page of every tech blog and news outlet? And within minutes, there were already rumblings about her ability to cope with the job and her hormones at the same time. We really need to grow the fuck up.

I think many women don’t speak out because they expect to be told that they have no sense of humor, or that they’re being over sensitive – so let me just say that I don’t think that is the case. I’m speaking out because this affects people I care about.

I’ve spoken to several female friends about this issue this week, both inside and outside of the tech community, and every one of them has stories to tell. Some of them are horrifying. With those experiences always in the back of women’s minds, is it any wonder than even little jokes can make them feel like outsiders who don’t belong in the room?

For all you geeks who need data, check out NPR’s recent report on ‘stereotype threats.’ The research focuses on why women are leaving scientific fields, but it absolutely applies to tech as well. It’s eye opening, and something we need to be aware of. I think it’s fair to say based on my conversations with women that most of the ones in male-dominated industries like technology have a little voice in their head telling them that they don’t fit in, and they don’t belong, and they frequently have interactions and experiences with men which reinforce that idea. Overcoming that is a challenge most men can’t really appreciate.

I don’t mean for this to be taken as a criticism of any events, organizers, all the men out there, or as a patronizing defense of women, who have proven they can take care of themselves despite all this nonsense. But for the guys, you all need to be aware of the effect our words and behavior have on our fellow females in the field. It may be subtle (and sometimes not so subtle), but it’s real.

The first step toward fixing a problem is recognizing that there is one. If you’re a guy reading this, you may be thinking “I’m not sexist! I treat everyone equally!” Maybe that’s true, but it’s more likely you just haven’t noticed. There is definitely a problem here of which we need to be self aware. I’m sure I’ve been guilty of it myself in the past, but I’m coming to realize that the little behavior changes men have when a woman walks in the room are noticed, and have a big impact.

We all need to do what we can to encourage everyone to be a part of this wonderful community we have here in the bay area. This is an incredible place full of opportunity for people of all backgrounds, and that’s something we can all be proud of. Our work is not done yet, though. Next time you see a cute girl at a tech conference, don’t ask her about her boyfriend, ask her what her favorite technology stack is. Next time a woman is pitching a female-targeted business, treat it seriously and help her feel like she really belongs. And maybe a few female judges wouldn’t hurt either.

And for all the women out there – keep up the good work and please don’t get discouraged. Our world will be a better place with more of you in the game.

Note: I would like to thank Kati and Lauren for both their input on this article, as well as their courage to let me share some of their personal stories.

I think the point we were discussing today was that it doesn’t really make sense any more (if it ever did) to seperate our personal lives from our professional lives, in the sense that during the day we interact with one social circle, and after hours we interact with an entirely different and non-overlapping circle. Salesforce vs. Facebook. But the world is changing, and these worlds are colliding. What we do and say in one circle is going to impact the other. You can’t write a personal blog post and not think about how it will be seen by your company, employees, investors, or the press. So the circles are forced to overlap in a Venn sort of way.

We use CRM tools like Salesforce to manage all of our customer contacts – who they are, how to contact them, notes and interactions, etc. Companies spend enormous amounts of money organizing all that, but nobody gets particularly excited about it. It’s dry, its dull, its “enterprise.”

But in the event that I need to contact a friend, where do I go to look for their phone number if it’s not already in my phone? Where do I go to see what a friend has been up to lately? What city they’re in? What they’re interested in? Facebook. Or what I’m going to heretofore refer to as FRM (Friend Relationship Management). CRM requires you to input data about others, FRM lets others do it for you. CRM is work, FRM is fun.

Does it have to be that way? Why can’t CRM be more like FRM? Why do they need to be distinct circles anyway? Much like our personal and professional lives, it seems they are destined to merge.

—

My apologies to the design gods for my 5-minutes on the train venn diagram above. I would have used Comic Sans to seal the deal, but I’ve erased it from my computer.

“TVs are ultimately about picture quality. Ultimately. How smart they are…great, but let’s face it that’s a secondary consideration. The ultimate is about picture quality and there is no way that anyone, new or old, can come along this year or next year and beat us on picture quality.”

Talk about not getting it. If that’s their roadmap for TVs, they just painted a giant “kick me” sign on their back for every other electronics maker, Apple included.

Few people can discern the picture quality differences between a $500 TV and a $1500 TV. They’ve reached that point where there’s little to distinguish them from each other but price and brand names. They all work roughly the same, with the only somewhat interesting developments being in “smart TVs” that integrate Netflix streaming, and usually not in a terribly elegant way. It’s red ocean territory, and another business that’s just asking for someone like Apple to come in and turn it all upside down.

GoDaddy

GoDaddy has been the big-daddy of domain registration for years, aided by obnoxious and tactless super bowl ads which, despite all due criticism, made GoDaddy the registrar who everyone had heard of, and which many people used. They’re like the Wal-Mart of domains and hosting – if you only care about price, GoDaddy has been the go-to registrar.

They’re at the top of my list of companies itching for a takedown right now because of the recent dust up over their support for SOPA, and the ensuing exodus of domains from tech-savvy customers, but GoDaddy has been on my radar for years because of their horrible user experience. Something as simple as purchasing a single domain name turns into a dozen-page nightmare of confusing forms, aggressive add-ons and upsells designed to trick users into buying things they don’t need, and a miserable interface that would make Gandhi want to stab someone in the face. After you’ve registered that domain, managing it is often just as difficult, and despite being a relative pro when it comes to these things, I’ve had to call their phone support multiple times to figure out how to change something. God help you if you have other services with them as well.

SOPA issues aside, and those are certainly valid, GoDaddy has a huge vulnerability when it comes to user experience. Whoever comes up with a “mint for domains” will win a lot of converts, even if the price is slightly higher. I moved most of my domains out a year or so ago after being fed up with GoDaddy’s nightmare of a site, but I have yet to see someone really do it right yet. I expect soon I will. The reality is that domains and hosting and other services once the domain of the tech elite are now being sought by the mainstream, and the experience for purchasing and managing them needs to be updated accordingly.

Craigslist

Many people use Craigslist, but does anyone particularly LIKE Craigslist? The interface hasn’t changed in a decade, and while their interface decisions made sense in a world of dial-up connections, it’s 2012, and we all have broadband. Amazon, the world’s largest e-commerce site, has a homepage weighing in at 1MB+ and it doesn’t seem to be hurting them much.

But interface issues aside, the real opportunity here is to carve out niche’s from craigslist and create purpose-built applications. I foresee Craigslist declining as a destination, and becoming more of a repository for the fire hose of information. Padmapper.com is a perfect example of a site that adds enormous value to Craigslist apartment listings by showing them on a map, and letting users sort them by bedrooms, rent, pet allowances, etc. I expect to see a lot more sites like this showing up.

I tested these waters personally when I moved to San Francisco this summer, and decided to sell most of my belongings instead of moving them. Listing 250+ items to craigslist and then fielding all the emails from interested users was not going to be practical, so I instead set up an e-commerce site for all my stuff, allowing users to pay online and pickup later. It was a sort of virtual garage sale hybrid which worked brilliantly. Shopify even blogged about it. Everyone who purchased something from me commented about how great they thought it was, and how they wish they had done the same when they moved, or about how they had a closet full of stuff that they’ve been holding for years that they wish they could unload.

First company to replicate this and make it easy for anyone to set up a store and accept online payments with local search capabilities will steal a big chunk of classified from Craigslist. Think Etsy for local second hand goods, and garage sales are just one of many possible niches to carve out.

Ticketmaster

Does anyone really think a $17 fee added on to every ticket you buy online and print yourself is “convenient”? I sure don’t, and event venues who are losing customers don’t either. Whoever can take down this virtual monopoly in the event space will kill. Venues are getting savvy to the internet, marketing concerts and other events effectively via social media. Give them an easy way to sell tickets online in a self-serve low-cost way and they will pile on. Ticketmaster is a relic that should be sharing bin space with Blockbuster.

PayPal

PayPal is a bit of a cautionary tale and a victim of their own success. Early on, PayPal experienced a flood of fraud and money laundering through it’s service, which forced it to lock down everything that looked suspicious, including a lot of false positives. I have heard at least a dozen stories of people having their PayPal accounts locked, money frozen, and business disrupted by over-eager fraud detectors. Then to add insult to injury, PayPal service representatives seem less than willing to get accounts unlocked. In fact, I was concerned that a sudden influx of thousands of dollars in my moving sale might trigger this, but I had no other choice.

We need another choice. Square and Swipe and others are popping up and have interesting offerings, but nobody is really taking PayPal head on. There’s an enormous opportunity for whoever can properly balance fraud protection and customer service, giving consumers confidence that they won’t have their account locked down as soon as something they’re selling gets popular and successful.

Enterprise Software

All of it. 2012 is the year where companies start to embrace “bring your own devices” in the workplace. That means lots of personal iPhones instead of company Blackberries, lots of SaaS instead of on-premise, and it represents a huge opportunity to start building B2B apps aimed at the workplace that don’t require a giant PO from the CTO. Employees will take it upon themselves to buy software personally, and simply expense it. This is a sales model that traditional enterprise software companies do not know how to manage, so expect them to stumble. This is also where I’m placing my personal bets this year, with Selligy.

Looking ahead, what industries and models will be in decline in 2013 and 2014?

Post script: Who isn’t ripe for a take down?

Facebook. Forget about it. They’re still on the upswing, they haven’t peaked yet. They’ll need a few more years to get big, slow, and bogged down in bureaucracy and legal entanglements. If you want to make a Facebook killer, now is not the time. Wait for them to look more like the companies above, then take aim.

I’m not sure if he actually believes that, or if it’s just what he has to say because he’s the CEO of Google. In either case, I think he’s wrong.

Market Share

Schmidt is arguing that because there are more Android phones than iPhones, it only makes sense for developers to focus their efforts on the larger platform. He’s right in that Android currenty has almost twice the market share as iOS, and marketshare is a big part of the puzzle (just ask anyone thinking about building a Windows Phone app), but market share doesn’t tell the whole story.

The other metrics

I recently took a position as Creative Director at a Silicon Valley startup called Selligy, and we’re building an app for mobile sales professionals, so we’re in the middle of this dillema. Like many others, we’ve decided to focus on the iPhone first, and Android later. When we look at how the Apple vs. Google camps actually use their phones, we find a striking contrast. For example, here’s what the story looks like if you look at mobile browser statistics:

iOS users are using their smartphones to browse the web a lot more than their Android friends. The contrast is even greater when we look at how many apps each respective user is consuming:

Looking at this from an apps perspective, iOS is starting to look like Pac-Man, devouring all others with a whopping 75% App share to Android’s 10%.

The takeaway? Despite the lower market share of iOS, it’s a far more valuable ecosystem for developers.

So what is it about the iPhone that drives such high usage? It’s hard to say definitively, but I’ll offer a few thoughts:

• iPhone owners value and will pay more for a premium device with a premium experience.
• Android is often a users first Smartphone device, and they are still thinking of it as a phone first, and are not actively looking for apps to extend its functionality and features.
• The iPhone App Store, while not without its problems, is far easier to use, and easier to discover and purchase new apps.
• iPhone apps can offer users a superior experience in terms of animation, responsiveness, and smoothness. Android does not yet match iOS in these areas (compare, for example, Path on the iPhone and Android).

In my experience, Android users tend to fall into two camps: First, the hard core techy types who want control over every aspect of their devices, and therefore shun Apple’s closed system. And second users who are coming off of feature phones, who want something that does Facebook, and are swayed by all the marketing that shows Android devices to have superior features to the iPhone. They have no idea what LTE is, except the guy at the Verizon store says it’s awesome. In my experience, the guys selling phones in carrier stores and big-box stores aren’t big iPhone fans.

The ‘feature phone folks’ are more likely to be buying on price, and less likely to be interested in purchasing apps in the Android store, hence the lower metrics for Android apps, despite the greater market share.

He who controls the developers…

Beyond the economics of the two platforms, however, I believe developers will continue to choose iOS first for much longer than the next 6 months. Why is the iPhone more attractive as a developement platform? More developers use iPhones as their personal devices, and prefer to develop for the devices they actually use. The developer tools for iOS are easier to get into, and have a great support network. But perhaps the biggest reason is that with more android devices comes more devices!

Android has a serious problem with device fragmentation. Lots of different manufacturers building phones with countless different configurations, screen resolutions, features, and operating system versions. It’s nearly impossible for Android developers to test across all the different devices, and apps must make compromises to work properly across a variety of screen resolutions and hardware capabilities. iPhones are a known quantity, with a mere 4 models to support, and two screen resolutions to account for (that are the same ratio x/2), and at this point just two versions of the OS to test for (4.3 and 5). The stability and simplicity of the iOS ecosystem means developers can spend more time polishing their app so it’s incredibly fluid and fast instead of just making sure that it doesn’t crash on one of 50 different handsets.

What this means for startups

So if you’re thinking about writing an app, or building a startup in the mobile space, what does all this mean for you? Well, it depends of course. Android is a powerhouse platform, which is only going to continue to grow and dominate into the forseeable future, and it only makes sense to support it. Whether you support it first or not probably won’t be the biggest factor in whether or not you’re successful.

I recently discussed this with my friend Alex Muse, who’s the CEO of Big in Japan, makers of the popular ShopSavvy price comparison app. They started with Android, and later released iPhone (and Windows Phone) versions of their app. He told me that despite the larger numbers of Android devices (500,000 activations a day!), the iPhone version of ShopSavvy has an equal number of downloads each day to the Android version (and they’re the #18 app in the Android marketplace).

Bottom line: start with what you know, and grow from there. But recognize that iOS is probably going to remain the developer favorite for some time. My prediction? Two years, not six months. And by then Windows Phone 8 may be a contender, who knows!

Follow me on Twitter.

Further reading on the subject:

John Gruber (Daring Fireball)

MG Siegler 

Sources:

comScore Reports September 2011 U.S. Mobile Subscriber Market Share

Browser share: Net Market Share

App share: Mobile App Stores to Take In $3.91 Billion for 2011

My building was built in the ’50s, a classic mid-century modern skyscraper, and I would bet that despite renovations and improvements over the years, the elevator interface has changed very little in 50 years. Why not? Someone spent several hundred million dollars converting a skyscraper to apartments, thinking out every luxury detail, but neglected the thing we all have to touch to get in and out every day.

So of course, being a designer, I set to work to do better. First things first, lets look at what we’re working with:

I have been told by guests that they have been confused by the elevator, because the numbering is inconsistent. What’s really going on is that there isn’t a button for every floor; it skips 2, 3, and 8. Of the 4 elevators, only 2 of them go to the basement floors and the 35th floor, so the experience is inconsistent elevator-to-elevator as well. It’s a giant mess of buttons in a grid that you have to study to find the right one, especially if you’re a visitor. Lets take a closer look at what all these buttons do:

In this image I’ve highlighted where all the buttons go. Most are to residences on floors 10-35, others to parking on 4-6, some to common amenities, like the fitness center on the 9th floor, and the pool on 35. The biggest problem is that all the buttons look identical – there’s no thought given to how people use the building, where people go most often, or what buttons need to be easy to see.

How often have you been in an elevator and seen someone trying to catch it as the doors close? It happens a lot, and if you’re like me that person sometimes misses the elevator simply because the ‘door open’ button was too hard to find in a hurry. Ever pushed the alarm or call buttons? Probably never – so why are they right next to the buttons you use all the time, burying buttons like ’1st floor’ that are much more important? And why in many elevators, including this one, are there redundant numbers on buttons, and labels next to the buttons? It just makes it that much harder to read.

So here’s my suggestion for improving the elevator interface in my building with ideas I think could be applied to most buildings:

I’ve done several things here that I think make this much more intuitive and easy to use:

• I’ve eliminated the redundancy of labels next to the buttons, and consolidated everything onto larger buttons. I think having the braille on the button itself is probably more accessible as well, as there is no guessing whether the braille applies to the button to the left or right of the label.
• I’ve rearranged buttons so that less accessed ones such as the maintenance floors and emergency buttons are distinct from the main interface, and are not interfering with primary controls for the top 95% of users.
• Added labels on and next to key buttons and button groups to assist new visitors to the building, making it clear what the key floors are for things like the leasing office, parking garage, fitness center and pool.
• I’ve given a hierarchy to the important or most common buttons, such as ‘open’, ’1 Ground’, ’9 Fitness’, and ’35 roof’. I realize that there are some efficiencies in having standardized sizes for the buttons, but surely we can mange 3 standard sizes instead of just 1.
• I’ve added color to provide hints, as well as emphasize or deemphasize different functions. For example, highlighting the ‘Open’ button in green to make it distinct from the floor buttons, and adding color labels around maintenance floors and emergency buttons separates them as well.
• I’ve organized the floors so that the intervals on the left are at common steps of 5, which will reduce floor hunting and make it easier for users to immediately identify the row of floors they’re looking for.

I would argue that these sorts of changes are worthwhile, and can even have an ROI. The time saved per trip in button hunting multiplied over the hundreds of trips per day, and hundreds of thousands of trips made over years will add up to serious value for the users of the buildings, not to mention a reduction in wear and tear on the elevators due to reduced mistake trips. In larger buildings, it may even add up enough to reduce the need for so many elevators. If nothing else, any elevator manufacturers and designers who make use of good usability will have a serious advantage in a field where I suspect elevators are designed with this process: “Hey Bob, how many buttons do we need? 38? Ok, I’ll make 38 holes.”

Additional thoughts

I haven’t mocked it up, but even the buttons used to call the elevator could use some improvement. For example, if you’re on the first floor, there are 2 floors below you (1 which is maintenance only), and 34 floors above you. So why are the up and down buttons the same size? 99% of the time users will be hitting up – so make that the big obvious one. About 1 time in 20 I accidentally hit down. Conversely, if I’m on my apartment floor, 95% of the time I’m going down, so it should be reversed.

Hopefully this can spark some additional ideas – there are probably things I’m not taking into account here. Have your own elevator interface idea? Send it to me and I’ll add it here. Chime in down in the comments with additional ideas for improving elevators, and other common interfaces that could use a fresh approach.

I disagree with Steve that the success of many/all startups was due to stunning technical achievement. While that’s important, and indeed at the heart of many startups, I think design is too often taken for granted. Perhaps I’m a bit bias being a designer myself, but nobody would want to use your awesome new app if there wasn’t a designer on the front end designing a quality UI. In the case where developers are left to their own devices, usually the app is ugly and unusable. Google as the example of a company that doesn’t need designers or marketers is disingenuous. Google is really a case where they are successful despite poor UI/UX design simply because they are reliable and free. Google Analytics, for example, has serious usability problems and a pretty steep learning curve, but it’s popular because it’s free. If it were not free, it would have a big vulnerability from a competitor who invested in a good UX designer, and it’s one of the reasons John P over at Woopra has a business that can compete with free.

Lets look at Flickr as another example. There’s nothing technically amazing about a photo sharing site (I’m sure there are some achievements in there for scaling and performance, but those apply to any large app), and Flickr wasn’t the first. What made Flickr work was design and marketing. It was EASY, you could make friends and comment on photos, and the result was a social network around a hobby. You wouldn’t need a team of MIT grads to build Flickr, but you would need a team of designers driving product development, making careful decisions about whats needed and whats not, where everything on the site goes, what the interface elements are, etc. Those are key advantages Flickr has over other photo sharing sites, and it’s why Flickr actually makes money while other sites struggle to attract members for a free service.

I’m currently working on a startup myself, 1FTP, where we’re rethinking how we can use FTP connections. FTP has been around forever, and has become a commodity, but it has a tender soft underbelly when it comes to usability because the only people who have been working on FTP products to date are developers. We have an awesome developer on our team, but technical achievement isn’t what’s needed to make a better FTP service. What’s needed is to make FTP simpler, easier, and idiot proof. It should be something that is natural to use, not something we loathe to use. Anyone who’s tried to walk an FTP newbie through the process of connecting to a server over the phone will understand where the difficulty is. The 1FTP team is 1 developer, 2 designers, and that ratio reflects the needs of the product.

I think it’s only natural for everyone on a team to view themselves as indispensable, and that is often the case. Design and marketing alone won’t take 1FTP anywhere without a developer. But in today’s market the inverse is also true – development alone is not enough to make a product people want to use, and designers are a critical part of a product’s success. If you’re building a startup for consumers it’s essential to make an investment in a good UI designer, and the earlier you bring them into the process the better.

It’s a very nice letter, and a lot nicer than what some of my photographer friends received from him when they blogged about him stealing their work in 2006. Back then he had a lawyer send them letters threatening a defamation lawsuit if they didn’t take down posts showing that he had stolen their photos. Of course they wisely responded by posting the threatening letters, resulting in a flood of attention to the matter that spread over the internet in dozens of blogs (see: Streisand effect).

Kevin felt the full wrath of the internet, and rightly so. He was blatantly taking credit for work he did not do, and then had the balls to sue those who called him on it. I commented at the time that this mistake would haunt him forever, and he’d likely have to legally change his name if he ever wanted to work in the creative industry. Looks like I was right, because here we are 4 years later and he’s still trying to recover.

Kevin’s email this morning asking me to help him put all this behind him stirred up a mix of feelings for me. One the one hand, I am not sure the punishment of a scarlet letter for the rest of his life is fair. We were all young and stupid once. I was actually guilty of plagiarism when I was young as well, but  fortunately for me I learned my lesson in third grade, not in college.

On the other hand, he really should have known better. He wasn’t in the third grade, he was an adult, and should have the foresight of consequences. It was a real dick move, compounded by the fact that he stole from really high profile people with really high profile friends. By all standards he deserves to have a hard time finding work in a field where this sort of thing is not just embarrassing, but potentially a multi-million dollar liability for an employer.

Crime and punishment on the internet is a strange thing. There’s no judge, no sentence, no debt to repay. You’re judged by everyone, perpetually, forever.

Crime and punishment on the internet is a strange thing. There’s no judge, no sentence, no debt to repay. You’re judged by everyone, perpetually, forever. I don’t think that’s really a good thing. Maybe Kevin deserves the consequences he’s served in the last 4 years, but does he deserve them in the next 4? Or 40?
So I still haven’t figured out what I’m going to do with my little piece of his sins. I’m not sure it should be entirely up to me. His punishment was doled out by the community, perhaps the community should be involved in lifting it.

So what do we think, viewers? Should Kevin get a fresh start, or should the scars of lessons learned remain as a reminder and as a warning to others? Sound off in the comments.

(Please note that I have withheld Kevin’s full name in the hope that this post will not add anything more about him to Google. If you know his full name, please just keep it to first name only in the comments. I’ll edit it if you don’t)

I had to admit that 400 wasn’t really that many compared to a lot of the people I follow, and we continued a conversation about how twitter and other social networks could fit into their marketing plan. In keeping with my new years resolution to blog more for clients than creatives, I thought this topic would make a good blog post – so here we go: how to use social media for your business (an introduction).

For my personal account, I’m not obsessed with growing my followers or think that my follower count gives me magic Whuffie points. I feel like I’ve found a pretty good network size for me personally – not so many people that’s I’m overwhelmed and it’s useless, not so few that it’s ever boring. I’ve built my list with quality in mind over quantity, and I frequently trim off people whose posts become meaningless or excessive. It’s a good resource for me as a creative professional to keep a good pulse on what’s going on in the world that’s relative to me.

If you’re doing this for your business, however, different rules apply. You want as many followers as possible, and you want to engage with as many people as possible, even those you don’t follow. So how do you get started?

Note: There are already tons of sites out there with the “how to’s” and “twitter etiquette” rules, so I’m going to focus on the business aspect.

The Tools

Twitter search for 'CloudProfile'

Think of Twitter like you think of email – its simply a communication technology. Like email, it derives a lot of it’s value from the services built on top of it which add functionality and make it easy to use. There are lots of twitter clients out there, such as Seesmic and TweetDeck, and even some targeted for business use like Cotweet (and CloudProfile too, as an aside). I like TweetDeck and CloudProfile, but they all share the big important feature that you really need: search.

The key thing that these tools give you is the ability to setup persistent searches that will turn up tweets about your business, your industry, or other key words that you want to monitor.

This week I was looking around for a better time tracking solution for our team, so I sent out a tweet asking for recommendations. In addition to friends providing recommendations, 4 companies that make time tracking tools responded to me within an hour, prompting me to check out their products. How did they find me? They had searches set up and someone keeping an eye out for anyone who mentioned “time tracking”. One of those companies now has my business.

If your business is local, and you want to cast a narrower net to find people who are geographically near you, then you will want to check out the tools in CloudProfile (disclosure – I have an interest in CloudProfile, but it really is a great tool for this!). One of the features of CloudProfile is searching for your business or keywords within a geographical radius of your location. For me personally, I’ve found lots of like-minded creative types around my city with this tool, and if you’re a small local business I think CP is worth the monthly fee for the ‘radar’ features alone.

Local Twitter 'radar' in CloudProfile

Engagement

So now you’ve found a bunch of people who are talking about your business or industry – how do you join the conversation? Authentically. Be aware that people are very sensitive these days to spam (aren’t you?), so when you engage with people on social networks, make sure you do so in a constructive way. Add value to the conversation, don’t just send everyone a boilerplate sales message. If they had a specific concern or question, give them a real answer. If they haven’t specifically asked for a product recommendation, skip the sales pitch and just be the expert who can answer their questions on the topic. Your goal here is not to link spam, but to build relationships. You want to establish yourself/your business as the expert in the field, and be helpful. People will figure out who you are and what you do, don’t worry so much about that. If they choose to follow you, consider that a victory.

Find the pulse of your industry and follow it

In the spirit of conversation, you want to be listening as much as you are talking. Use your twitter account to follow other thought leaders in your industry, high profile potential customers, as well as your customers themselves. Twitter is not just a marketing tool for businesses to broadcast to, but also a powerful listening device. You’re likely to hear breaking industry news on Twitter before anywhere else. Twitter is the biggest focus group ever, and it’s free, so take advantage of that.

There are lots of twitter directories out there that can help you get started, such as WeFollow.com. Do a search for job titles of people that are related to your business, and start following them; not just in the hopes that they will follow you back, but for the information they are sharing as well. Add your twitter account to these directories too with relevant tags.

So those are the basics – find relevant people, make it easy for interested people to find you, and have authentic conversations. With that you’ll be way ahead of most businesses when it comes to taking advantage of social media. Oh yeah, and the last thing you should do if you’re reading this is follow me