Innovation in Software - The Vagueware Blog

Smeet Me & General Online Dating – A Review

2009-07-09T13:13:22Z

About 3 years ago a prospective client came to Vagueware and said he wanted to build an online dating site. Not a bad business decision given that the niche is now closing in on $1 billion in revenues per year, and with more than 20 million paying customers visiting a dating site every month.

However, where there’s money, there’s competition. My client asked me to go around all the sites I could find with different models and evaluate them. He paid for the accounts and some of my time, I gave him a report.

I actually got a girlfriend for a while out of that experience. If you’re ever offered a similar gig and you’re single, take it! I still don’t know if I was meant to declare her on my taxes…

Anyway, a few conversations over the last few months have prompted me to re-think my analysis of the sector at the time. Not least, one of my ex-colleagues is behind the scenes at Smeet Me which allows for singles (or couples) who know each other in real life to flirt anonymously in order to see if there is chemistry there.

It’s a really interesting take on online dating. Typically if you like somebody in real life, you already know something about them but you just don’t know whether to risk asking them out – something smeetme could potentially help offset.

The games are quite simple tasks designed to promote the flirtatiousness of the situation: you set a series of challenges such as making a video or audio clip, providing an extract of a favourite poem or book, pointing to a video online that makes you laugh, take a quiz, etc. And as the recipient completes each stage they get a reward: a picture or video, an invitation to an event or even a gift.

The same underlying engine could be used by marketeers for viral ad campaigns where you want to promote interactivity, but I love the idea that they decided to try it with the dating scene first. The ability to print out unique codes onto business cards and hand them out in clubs could allow for it to go viral, quite quickly.

This all assumes of course, you’ve met somebody and have the ability to ask them to play your game. However, how do you go about meeting people in the first place if you’re a social pariah?

Traditionally online dating has had the flaw people may be lying about who they are or what they are. Sites that have basic profile information – in my analysis – were ultimately going to lead to a lot of resentment because they made it so easy for people to misrepresent themselves. These sites make up the bulk of online dating sites, including many of the branded sites that are almost certainly being driven by WhiteLabelDating.com or one of their competitors.

There are however a couple of sites that did things a little differently, and made it virtually impossible to pretend to be something you aren’t.

The first is OK Cupid, which is 100% free but does take some time to get into. To be frank, give yourself an hour or two to build up a profile in there. The wonderful thing is though, the simple mathematics of how it works means it becomes uncannily good at matching people up. I spent several months hanging out with a girl from “OKC” (as its fans like to call it), and within half an hour of our first meeting it was obvious that our sense of humour clicked, our values were similar, and that we were two people who liked each other.

For me, on finding OKC and evaluating it, it was game over. I told my client to give up unless he was going to reinvent it. The only flaw in the model is that right now it’s way too US-centric.

Since then though, a few other models have sprung up, with perhaps the most interesting being eHarmony and their “personality profiling” system. It seems rather over-burdening to go through dozens of questions, but the result is relatively accurate from what I’ve seen. It suggested I, for example, normally take care of other people, am curious, “sometimes steady, sometimes responsive”, flexible and sometimes outgoing and reserved at other times. Quite vague stuff really, but it’s not how many people would perceive me unless they’d known me for a while.

One other notable site in the “traditional” market is My Single Friend which is heavily promoted as being owned by Sarah Beeney who has spent much of the last decade convincing people to risk their entire savings on property development. Hmmm.

The great thing about MSF is that because its friends who are providing the review, you know the person you’re seeing probably isn’t a stalker and slasher. Sure, they could have created a free webmail account and written their own review, but in 99% of cases you’ll spot that a mile off. The only downside is if you asked me to write up a review of you on there, would I really point out you seem to belch an awful lot, and quite frankly you get a bit over-whelming after a couple of drinks? Probably not. It’s all upside, but at least it’s honest and perceived upside there.

The rest of the sites out there, to be honest, should be given a bit of a wide berth. Yes, there are exceptions. I know people who have found somebody on other sites, but they seem few and far between given the number of people paying to use them. As we say in geek circles, YMMV (Your Mileage May Vary), but good luck with whoever you go with.

And seriously, if there is somebody you like out there in real life, think about setting up a game in Smeet Me and trying it out – there are a couple of games in there that aren’t too challenging, and right now it’s quirky and fresh enough that people will think you’re interesting and on the cutting edge of online stuff.

Linking & Impact on (Newspaper?) Traffic/Audience

2009-07-06T15:37:24Z

Simon Owens dropped me a line to point out that when Huffington post linked to him, his traffic rose dramatically

In other words, I was right the other day when I pointed out that links are currency.

This played on my subconscious a little more than normal, having read the story about Murdoch in this month’s Wired UK magazine. I am becoming increasingly certain of something that would have sounded ridiculous a year ago and might still sound insane. However, you may quote me on it:

News Corp will file for bankruptcy/bankruptcy protection within five years. Probably less.

Putting content behind a pay wall is an action designed to kill audience. Without audience, they will fail. And if News Corp can fail, so can anybody else who has a similar business model and cost structure.

All is not lost however. I think I’m starting to see how the next breed of media organisations will emerge and take over from the old guard has let down society. More on that later in the week.

Who The Heck Are You?

2009-07-06T15:09:49Z

Here’s a few things you might not know about this blog:

Since its inception it has had nearly 30,000 absolute unique visitors
Nearly 20% of them (about 5,800) had no referrer set. They had the site bookmarked or typed in the URL (or perhaps were blocking referrer on purpose for giggles)
Over 2,000 people return at least once a month with around 180 or so subscribing via RSS. Plenty more never return (makes us sad), and we get deep visitors often, so there are between 10k-20k page views/month
However, I have met less than a dozen people who have told me they read the blog. In other words, there are at a guess somewhere between 2,000 and 5,000 people reading regularly who I know absolutely nothing about. Well, apart from the fact that they clearly are intelligent, gorgeous and have exquisite taste, natch.

That causes me some problems. With comments only recently being enabled again, I’m kind of at a loss as to who the heck most of you are and who I’m writing for.

A few months ago I asked for you to fill in a rather lengthy survey, the size of which meant the response rate was kind of low. It was still incredibly valuable, and we’re working on the ideas suggested from that exercise, however there are a lot of you who decided not to bother.

Now I have a special 4-question survey that would take a complete moron less than 30 seconds to fill in. In the honest expectation you are not a moron I expect you to do it in a great deal less time than that. All questions are optional and at the very least you’ll get extra followers on Twitter and via RSS from now on.

Take the “Who The Heck Are You?” survey now and win… nothing, to be honest. Other than praise and thanks.

Incidentally, if you decide to provide a postcode or other specific location information, it will be treated with the very strictest of confidence, I’m only interested in aggregate data (it will be separated from the rest of the data before I look at it, promise), I’m not interested in stalking you. Much.

More on the Business Models of Journalism

2009-07-02T01:31:57Z

Back in February I had a little rant about business models in the news industry. A couple of things have prompted me to come back to this story. I want to be more positive and less ranty this time.

First, let’s get the something out of the way. Before this continues one more stupid, misguided step, I want to address the “linking is theft” attack being supported by some newspapers. Even my brother-in-law is starting to get worried about this, and he rarely shows an interest in the inner politics of online business.

Richard Posner has stipulated that linking to copyright content without compensating the publisher who paid for the content to be created, is the culprit of newspapers failing.

At first read, his argument seems almost sound. Almost.

It roughly breaks down like this:

Newspapers have fixed costs (staff salaries) that must be reduced if advertising revenues fall
Online news websites (as well as general economic conditions), are taking a slice of advertising revenues, thereby harming newspaper revenues
These new-comers are only able to operate because they piggy-back on the newspapers content
Ultimately this means newspapers go out of business, and the online operators will rake in the cash as consumers have no other source

The flaws are subtle and hard to spot unless you understand a couple of key points:

Online, linking is the only currency that counts
Linking is currency. It’s like cash. It’s why we trade it.
Linking to somebody is like paying for their advertising
Currency, online? It’s called linking

I had never heard of Richard Posner before he posted his article. Many of you won’t have, either. Yet there’s a link to his website up there. If you click on the link – the link I gave him in my blog article, without permission and without charging him a penny for advertising his content – I am sharing my readership (you, my valued friend!), with him. He gains. You may choose to subscribe to his blog. He may offer to sell you a t-shirt with a witty motto on it that you buy. I have given him the first thing you need to succeed in business online: audience.

He may choose to ignore that opportunity, but that’s his right.

Handily, as he has a trackback URL, some of his audience might discover me as well. See how this works for everybody? Incidentally if you’re reading this after clicking a link on Posner’s blog, would you like to buy a t-shirt? No? OK, back to business models of newspapers then…

It’s reckoned that Google through its search and news operations drives between 30%-50% of traffic to online newspapers. Imagine what would happen if it switched that traffic off tomorrow, unable to find a way to pay the fees newspapers demand of it. Imagine if the only way you could enter the news industry online was to pay for advertising. Imagine if not one piece of your archive would be available through traditional search. Imagine if in addition to your staff costs, you now had to pay out a couple of hundred thousand a month in advertising on Google, on billboards, on TV, or wherever you could. How does a sharp increase in costs help a business facing sharp decline in revenues survive?

Well, it doesn’t, does it? Quite.

What is worrying is that according to the Guardian he is well respected on the legal scene, and somebody, somewhere, might think this is a good idea. I have a horrid feeling newspaper owners are amongst the crowd cheering him on. I sincerely hope they fail – not only would it kill off online news, it would kill off news, period. I am constantly left astonished at how bad the thinking behind major institutions is. These guys help form societal opinion on major issues? Time to step aside…

Imagine my pleasure then, when another story came along that suggests, somebody, somewhere has got a clue.

Chris Anderson – editor of Wired magazine – was cited as stating:

With newspapers debating their future, the argument has been pitched as free versus paid-for models, but Anderson argued the real decision was free versus “freemium” – not about whether to charge, but choosing carefully which specialised content people will pay for.

[...]

Instead of working on growing the audience more, he believes publishers will need to grow their offerings. Right now, Wired provides three pricing tiers: free content on the web, about $5 for a magazine and 80 cents for subscribers. In the future, he believes Wired will have many tiers.

Even so though, the linking-is-evil campaign was stalking around at the back of the room:

Guardian editor-in-chief Alan Rusbridger asked about Google’s role in this freemium world; 40% of the traffic to its sites comes from Google.

Anderson said: “I consider that a gift, but papers consider it theft.” Newspapers could exclude Google from indexing their sites or could band together and charge Google to index their content. But it might be a self-defeating move.

“Newspapers need to be part of the conversation” on the net, he said. In the end, Anderson thinks that the democratising effect of the internet is a good thing, which will lead to a richer society, but, he added: “I don’t deny that it will get messy.”

Messy? Sounds good to me. Revolutions that have lasting impact normally involve guillotines and blood. Sorry newspapers, but your middle management strata are starting to look a little like the French royal court sometime around 1789, and we peasant revolutionaries are eyeing up your Bastille.

So, freemium, what does that look like?

Well, to be frank it’s going to be a bit strange for newspapers to get used to. Getting rid of most of their ad sales team is going to hurt, and to those working there I am sorry, but the bubble has burst and it’s time to move on. Advertising might bring in some revenue over time, but it’s likely to be more cost-effective to outsource that sales component to an external agency dedicated to online ad sales.

They then need to start thinking about what content they can get away with charging for. Strong candidates include going deep on content, say something like a standard news story of 400 words is available free, the longer 1,500 word version is available to paying subscribers or on a per-story charge basis. Content people are genuine fans of like crosswords could bring in revenues too.

However, there’s more than just content, there are service limitations to lift too.

For example online software applications normally give a free option away with limitations and then offer to remove those limitations in return for cash. It may be a project management tool where you can – for free – have one project and 2 users, but if you want to move all your projects and team onto it, you stump up the cash.

If the future of online news is to become more interactive and newspaper business models become more like those of applications, the limitations are available to exploit all over the place. For example, plenty of people would pay a small charge just to guarantee they’re getting the latest content: delay it for an hour to free users and see what happens.

Online applications have been playing this game for years. If you’re a newspaper exec, go and take a close look at the adult film industry online: they’ve perfected making money in a world of competitive free content. Follow their lead, and you have a proven model. Yes, it might seem distasteful, but that sector are masters of exploiting the audience into paying money without playing tricks on them or insisting nobody ever links to them.

I’m amazed it’s taken so long for an industry insider to spot it. I thought it was obvious, but didn’t mention it because I assumed everybody else had realised that this was the way to go. Boy, do I feel dumb right now.

Perhaps I’m wrong, I’m biased: it is this freemium model that is the basis of the Kagtum business model

We’ll aggregate, link and provide the ability for you to add/edit stories for free. But there will be areas you want to go into a little deeper or tools we can provide to make your life easier that will be available for a small fee. We think you’ll be compelled to want to hand over some cash for those tools and content because of their quality, and then we become your news source, not our advertisers.

“Ah”, you say, “but Kagtum isn’t live yet, is it? Come on, Paul, when is it launching?”. My lips are sealed. Sooner than you might think, but not as soon as I want. Watch this space.

What to Expect in Rails 3.0

2009-07-01T21:03:16Z

Vagueware is a Rails shop. I have written less than 1000 lines of code in languages other than Ruby (assuming you don’t count SQL as a programming language) in the last 3 years. That’s going to change sooner than expected (hello C my old nemesis), but obviously I have an interest in Rails and Merb and want to see what is happening. Because of workload, I’ve not been able to keep up to date as much as I’d liked, which I’m now redress.

This evening on Twitter Will Jessop pointed me to the “What to Expect in Rails 3.0″ at O’Reilly:

It’s not for the newbie – you need some knowledge of the inner workings of Rails to be able to understand what some of Yehuda Katz is talking about here, but in short, simple terms:

In case you didn’t know, Merb and Rails are merging with what seems to be a goal of “best of both Worlds”
Agnosticism in relation to several components, so if you don’t like ActiveRecord and you love jQuery than that becomes simpler
Rack is the future to give all sorts of goodness you can read about over at the official website or even better this introduction blog article
Lots of refactoring and performance increases (I didn’t realise quite how big an effect callbacks had on performance)
What seems to me to be a much cleaner way of handling JavaScript in various parts of your app
Better Extension support through an API

All good stuff, and the launch later in the year should result in some really interesting changes to some applications being possible.

Firefox: The Next Generation

2009-07-01T16:03:51Z

There’s a reason why less than 10% of readers of this blog use Internet Explorer: it is not innovative, flexible or stable enough for Alpha Geeks. And this blog, if it’s for anybody, is for those of us in society who are constantly looking around the corner snatching a view of the Next Big Thing in software.

The trend-setter in the browser industry over the last few years has been Firefox, with some notable thinking coming out of Safari and Opera. Firefox though is where the really clever stuff seems to happen first, and it’s gaining pace. Everybody is obviously raving about Firefox 3.5 that was released yesterday, but yesterday’s release is of no interest to us.

I was rather piqued instead by Firefox.next (aka “Namaroka” or possibly Firefox 3.6), that Mashable.com pointed out to me. From the wiki:

Namoroka will focus on the following areas:

Performance

Observable improvements in user-perceptible performance metrics such as startup, time to open a new tab, and responsiveness when interacting with the user interface. Common user tasks should feel faster and more responsive.

Personalization & Customization

Simplify the development, discovery, installation and management of browser customization and functional extension. Where possible, provide a custom fit user experience based on a user’s interaction history. Act in the user’s interests, leveraging existing knowledge about their identity and browsing habits.

Task Based Navigation

Allow users to organize their tabs, history, downloaded files, and other resources according to the task they were attempting to accomplish. Provide support for executing common web-based tasks, mash-up style, without having to visit a website.

Web Application Support

Blur the distinction between web and desktop applications, providing web developers with the tools required to create rich application experiences for a user who is connected or disconnected from the Internet. Act as the intermediary between web applications and the user’s OS desktop.

System Integration

Integrate with the look and feel of the host operating system, including data-level interactions with existing system services such as dictionaries.

That’s a pretty lofty set of goals for what is meant to be an incremental release. I’m liking the focus on performance with some pretty solid goals set out in the priority list:

[P1] achieve dramatic, human-perceivable (>50ms) speed increases on common user tasks

opening a new tab

loading a bookmarked page

autocompleting a location in the Awesomebar

play rich media content

Wow. To be honest, I hadn’t noticed it takes more than 50ms to do those things right now but a quick test shows it does take a little longer than I’d thought. Firefox.next is going to be quick for most people then.

What most people are really going to notice though is the UI changes in relation to personalisation, customisation (how cool does “provide a custom fit user experience based on a user’s interaction history” sound?), and the task-based navigation. The ability to see what a user is doing in software and respond to it is something I have spent a lot of time tinkering with in the Vagueware labs, and I’m loving the look of their jumping off point, the new “about:me” page:

Pretty. Of course, this means that for real utility to occur, managing what you delete out of a browser history is going to be important – many users might not want certain sites showing up in here, but will not want to nuke their entire activity if it means the browser has to learn from scratch how they work, and where they work.

Lastly, of course 2010 is going to be the year web applications become mainstream. You thought they were already? Nowhere near. Very few people in B2C or B2B environments right now are developing desktop software, everybody from CIOs to users want the application to live on the web. The drawback through is that not everybody is connected all of the time, so however Firefox.next deals with that issue it needs to do it better than good: it needs to fly.

So what about 4.0? Nobody seems to be talking about that yet, but if you have ideas, that comment form below just loves your attention…

Pirate Bay Sold. Goes Legit.

2009-06-30T09:52:58Z

Well, actually, that’s a little premature, but it’s hit news wires and is shaping up to being an interesting story:

According to gaming company Global Gaming Factory X, it is in the the process of acquiring The Pirate Bay for $7.8m (SEK 60 million). The acquisition is scheduled to be completed by August and will see the site launch new business models to compensate content providers and copyright owners.

Well, that’s surprising and rather intriguing. More so given it’s not the only acquisition that they’re after according to EuroInvestor:

GGF has entered into an agreement to acquire the shares in Peerialism AB. Peerialism AB is a software technology company with its origin in KTH Royal Institute of Technology and SICS, Swedish Institute of Computer Science and which presently is owned by the employees. The owners as well as the employees will continue to work for the company. Peerialism develops solutions for data distribution and distributed storage based on new p2p- technology. The access to the technology is secured by the acquisition. The consideration amounts to in aggregate MSEK 100 [$13 million] consisting of at least MSEK 50 [$6.5 million] in cash and up to the equivalent of MSEK 50 in newly issued shares in GGF (according to valuation during a period of ten days after the announcement). The share part of the purchase price should not exceed five percent of the total number of shares in GGF after the transaction. In addition GGF has undertaken to make initial investments of MSEK 25 [$3.25 million] in the acquired business.

There is however, a catch. Isn’t there always?

Completion of the acquisitions are primarily subject to GGF obtaining financing for the acquisition, that any necessary resolutions are adopted by a General Meeting of GGF, and that GGF and the Board of Directors consider that the acquired assets can be used in a legally and appropriate way. GGF intends to issue new shares in order to obtain the necessary financing for the acquisition. The acquisition is deemed to be completed in August 2009.

Well, what does it all mean? Quite simply that The Pirate Bay, is no longer going to be quite so Pirate-y. In fact, so worried are some people that TPB had to respond to make sure people calmed down a little:

If the new owners will screw around with the site, nobody will keep using it. That’s the biggest insurance one can have that the site will be run in the way that we all want to. And – you can now not only share files but shares with people. Everybody can indeed be the owner of The Pirate Bay now. That’s awesome and will take the heat of us.

The old crew is still around in different ways. We will also not stop being active in the politics of the internets – quite the opposite. Now we’re fueling up for going into the next gear. TPB will have economical muscles to let people evolve it. It will team up with great technicians to evolve the protocols. And we, the people interested in more than just technology, will have the time to focus on that. It’s win-win-win.

The profits from the sale will go into a foundation that is going to help with projects about freedom of speech, freedom of information and the openess of the nets. I hope everybody will help out in that and realize that this is the best option for all. Don’t worry – be happy!

In the final mix then, here are what seems to be the takeaway points:

GGF is buying up two new properties through issuing new shares. It’s not a given this will work, but they’re confident
If the finance is available they are going to take the technology from Peerialism AB that has some “new” P2P technology in its kit bag and ramp it up commercially
They’re also going to buy one of the most visited web sites on the planet and promise to “compensate rights holders” which it doesn’t at the moment
The Pirate Bay guys insist this isn’t in any way going to interfere with the site built on the premise that rights holders can go to hell
TPB insist in fact this is the start of a socialist utopia and will allow them to persue their political ambitions in the name of the users
The Pirate Bay users are already calling foul and looking to abandon them and go and create a new site somewhere else

I can’t see this working for GGF. They’ve walked into a political quagmire in the hope that there is some revenue in it. It seems the gambit they are taking is that Peerialism’s PeerTV product is going to fly when combined with TPB’s user base. However, it has several drawbacks including the need for a P2P CDN to be scattered across the globe at broadband operator’s expense (for which GGF is promising to compensate them), and for the TPB users to give up their insatiable desire to burn material to disc (perhaps to sell down the pub for £5 a DVD), and avoid incurring any charges or being interrupted with advertising. Doesn’t seem plausible to me.

This suggests then that the TPB users who already are screaming the words “betrayal” and “capitalists” from the roof tops in response, are going to move on somewhere else. This is a perfect example of how an innovative change in technology can produce the possibility of a new business model that the users do not want, but the investors don’t care and will plug on regardless.

However, it does create a new business model, with a new user base, that technologically and commercially is interesting. Watch this space.

A Fine Line On Reporting

2009-06-30T09:16:37Z

One of the problems with modern journalism is that some of the barriers taken for granted have broken down, and that can mean new ethical dilemmas being created every day.

Take the story of David Rohde’s kidnapping. Who he? You might very well ask. A reporter for the New York Times, he was kidnapped around seven months ago by the Taliban. You didn’t read about it in the papers? Well, no. Despite it being picked up by an Afghan news agency and being reported in some UGC news websites, the New York Times conducted a cover-up operation over the last seven months.

The only people who didn’t play ball the NYTimes were worried about were a couple (perhaps only one) of the Wikipedia editors who spent a reasonable amount of effort trying to insert one single reference to the kidnapping in Rohde’s Wikipedia article.

The Wikipedia team conspired to remove the edit and temporarily block the page from time to time. The New York Time have decided to point out how tricky dealing with this was by way of a free puff piece for Wikipedia and Jimmy Wales.

It’s an interesting case in how truth takes a back seat for a while, and raises some interesting questions for me about how exactly news organisations are meant to behave in a new era of constant information flow.

First, their reasoning for suppressing this information:

Times executives believed that publicity would raise Mr. Rohde’s value to his captors as a bargaining chip and reduce his chance of survival. Persuading another publication or a broadcaster not to report the kidnapping usually meant just a phone call from one editor to another, said Bill Keller, executive editor of The Times.

Well, that doesn’t seem very sound logic. Yes, if it had been splashed across CNN for a couple of news cycles because there wasn’t much going on that weekend, you’d have a problem. However, that wouldn’t happen. Even the original news stories that were published intimated journalists being kidnapped were not big news, and part of daily life in that part of the World.

In fact, the story not getting sympathetic coverage could well have caused more damage – why feed and keep a man who is worthless to you and his fellow journalists? If no ransom is possible, wouldn’t it be simpler to just kill him?

Then there is their attempt to change history that irks a little:

Two days after the kidnapping, a Wikipedia user altered the entry on Mr. Rohde to emphasize his work that could be seen as sympathetic to Muslims, like his reporting on Guantánamo, and his coverage of the Srebrenica massacre of Bosnian Muslims. Mr. Rohde won a Pulitzer Prize for his Bosnia coverage in 1996, when he worked for The Christian Science Monitor.The Wikipedia editor in that case was Michael Moss, an investigative reporter at The Times and friend of Mr. Rohde who has written extensively about groups like Al Qaeda and the Taliban. Like many Wikipedia editors, he adopted a user name that hid his true identity.

“I knew from my jihad reporting that the captors would be very quick to get online and assess who he was and what he’d done, what his value to them might be,” he said. “I’d never edited a Wikipedia page before.”

With his editors’ blessing, Mr. Moss had already made similar changes to Mr. Rohde’s “topic page” on The Times’s Web site, and in both cases he omitted the name of Mr. Rohde’s former employer, because it contained the word Christian.

Woah, there! That’s some pretty hefty editing going on there. First, Michael Moss edits the page to make Rohde look more sympathetic to Muslims, under a pseudonym. Then he edits up the NYTimes.com topic pages, all the while trying to get rid of the mention of his previous employer.

I have to ask, why? The most prominent article on Rohde found through Google before the story of his escape and this cover-up broke over the weekend, points out quite clearly who his previous employer was. This was, in essence, a futile exercise that did not take or remove any information away from the Internet that was already out there, and simply made the NY Times look like they were practising their Stalinist air-brushing techniques.

I’m disappointed in all involved. I don’t think Rohde would have been killed if things had been left as they were. I don’t think a short mention on the evening news would even have happened. A couple of small pieces in competing papers pointing out his work in highlighting issues Muslims around the World faced might actually have helped him gain an earlier release. Either way, if he was still alive after seven months, there was little chance he would be killed at any point by his captors.

Wikipedia might be the biggest boy in town when it comes to UGC news content, but it won’t be for long. You won’t be able to suppress stories in future that are based in fact, and the final line of the NYTimes pieces:

…the idea of a pure openness, a pure democracy, is a naïve one.”

Harks of naïveness in itself: journalists are no longer gate-keepers to truth. Yes, lives are involved and everybody is glad that Rohde managed to escape over the last couple of days. However the guys sat in news rooms – foreign correspondents whose lives are on the line, even more so – are going to have to accept this behaviour just isn’t going to be possible a few years from now. The real question then is should it be?

What would you want the web to do it can’t already?

2009-06-28T23:25:25Z

There’s a lot of interesting things happening out there right now. HTML 5 is about to make a whole suite of new applications possible thanks to:

Much better rendering of graphics on the fly
Client-side storage of application data
Drag-and-drop interfaces that make web apps feel more desktop-like

But there has to be something we are missing out on that is niggling us all at the back of our collective group-think mind. Perhaps watching the Google Wave introduction got you psyched about something that suddenly became possible. Perhaps the very way the web inherently works bothers you, and you envisage a new platform.

I’m interested in hearing about it now the comments are getting a little bit of love across articles. Go crazy. Throw them in there…

Overcoming Developer’s Block – 10 Tips

2009-06-28T22:41:55Z

Development is a creative pursuit. Whilst many think of it as a purely technical challenge, it requires a level of lateral thinking about the World that is a cross between doing a crossword puzzle, composing a symphony and having an argument with people who don’t exist. It’s not surprising some of us are a little eccentric.

It reminds me of the writing process a lot. You sit down at a blank screen after having conducted your research and you have to just dig in and find some way of making progress. Many a developer struggles with a blank IDE screen much in the same way many a writer struggles to find influence. When I was learning how to write properly, I was told that “a professional writer can not be like the poet who spends a morning taking out a comma, and the afternoon putting it back in”. We need to work hard. Same with code. A block then is a real problem.

Slashdot this weekend asked How to Get Out of Developer’s Block?, or rather a user asked:

I have spent the past six months working on a software project, and while I can come up with ideas, I just can’t seem to sit down in front of the computer to code. I sit there and I just can’t concentrate. I don’t know whether this is akin to writer’s block, but it feels like it. Have any other Slashdotters run into this and if so how did you get out of it? It is bothering me since the project has ground to a halt and I really want to get started again. I am the sole developer on the project, if that makes a difference.

The comments that follow in the thread that range from the sensible to the bizarre. I have a bunch of tricks I use when I’m struggling, so thought I’d put them together

Get enough sleep – you have no idea how sleep deprivation can mess you up when you’re trying to concentrate. When I’m working on code, I take a minimum of 10 hours sleep a night. Anything less, and I’m not going to be able to think in purely abstract terms for 8 hours straight during the day.
Exercise – and whilst those of you who know me might laugh, it’s important. I actually do get regular exercise when I’m coding full-time. Just a long walk at the start or end of the day can be enough. Something that gets the hear rate up helps though (perhaps explaining why I always code better the day after… errr… private stuff that gets my heart rate up!).
Don’t drink alcohol – this was something I got when I was trying to sort out my pilot’s license. When you’re going flying, I don’t drink for 24 hours before getting into the plane. I found my workload was easier, my writing got more fluid and my code went up a gear. On big client projects I don’t drink at all on school nights. If I’m drinking in the evenings whilst on a project, it’s because the project isn’t challenging me and I’m bored.
Clear your environment out – I’m currently sat at a desk with perhaps 150 items of paperwork on it. In this environment, I can not focus on code. My mental processes are cluttered because my physical processes are. Tidying up might seem like a stupid way to get out of a block, but I genuinely find that a clear working environment leads to much clearer mental processes. I don’t know how or why, it fascinates me, but just get your physical environment fixed up and suddenly your mental environment starts to fire a little better than before.
Write a trivial test – this is the code version of “free-writing” that I sometimes use to unblock on writing an article. Basically write a small test (or spec if you’re BDD) for something almost trivial and then get it to pass. Repeat. Now you’re back in the game.
Work on the design – it’s amazing how bad we collectively are at really thinking through a problem. Go and work on some wireframes or develop some sketches of the underlying schemas and try and simplify them. Reduce things down, and suddenly you’ll see areas you can work on right away outside of the problem you’re blocked on. If you’re not able to delve into design or architecture because of the nature of the project, quite frankly you need another bunch of guys to work with.
Try and find it done already – I once spent a lot of time trying to work out how to solve a particular problem. The answer was non-trivial to implement in my mind. I kept putting it off. I was scared of how bad I could end up making my solution. In a fit of procrastination I spent an hour digging around the problem area and eventually found an open-source tool that did exactly what I needed, out of the box. Well, that solves that problem…
Are you scared of success? It might sound like a stupid question because success is good, right? But when we succeed at something, we conquer some barrier we have worked to overcome for a period, things change. Suddenly people might look at you differently. Perhaps you end up having to work on a less interesting project. You might want your current project to be a success for other reasons. Ask yourself whether you really want this project to succeed. And then realise there’s no getting out of it: failing, or staying where you are is just as bad an outcome and harms you, your self-confidence and your reputation.
Find a SCRUM meeting somewhere – one of the very best things about daily stand-up meetings in SCRUM projects is that the meeting only has three topics of conversation: outcomes from stuff you agreed to do in the last meeting; what you plan to do today to further the project, if anything; and obstacles in your way. Not everybody has a team (and sole development is the hardest form there is, trust me), so find a SCRUM somewhere else. Use Twitter, your blog, a group of friends down the pub, anything. Just talk about what’s stopping you and see if anybody can help you in any way, or offer suggestions. Obviously asking a friend about a tricky problem relating to class inheritance isn’t going to yield results if they don’t know what you’re on about, but ask around more liberally than you have done to date.
Work on something else – we all have other projects on the go. If the above isn’t working, just go and get on with something else. Your subconscious is dealing with the problem and will come up with a solution. Just make sure you hit your deliverables schedule if you have one!

Now comments are back up, I look forward to hearing of any other tips people might have.