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Full disclosure. I'm building a poll & survey app.
Take this poll if you're interested!http://bit.ly/3wNEmBThanks :)
I'm founder and tree-planter at Curious Forest.
In my previous life I played violin in a symphony orchestra, worked at one of the world's largest advertising agencies, then started and sold a popular recipe website.
Gaming Vernacular
Interesting little chart.
When Doom was released in 1993 it became so popular that it spawned a whole genre of video games. People called these video games "Doom clones", which was eventually replaced by the more generic term "first person shooter" that we use today.
That's not to do Doom a discredit. Behold:
Doom was released as shareware, with people encouraged to distribute it further. They did so: in 1995, Doom was estimated to have been installed on more than 10 million computers.
10 million installs. This is back when there was no file sharing networks. If you wanted to share a game with someone, you gave them a bunch of 3.5-inch pieces of plastic in a box. There will only be so many games like this in my lifetime, I think. Games that become so popular that they define genres, are ported across countless formats (sometimes commercially, sometimes just for teh lulz) and end up on my mobile device as a wireless download 16 years later. Doom for iPhone is good times.
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Why Posterous instead of Sweetcron
Various people have asked me this so I thought I would write something here. Recently I switched to Posterous from another platform called Sweetcron.
Sweetcron is an open source lifestreaming application that pulls in and displays content you post across the web, like your tweets, flickr photos, youtube vids etc. Ordinarily it wouldn't warrant an explanation when some guy switches platforms for his personal site. The difference in this case is that I am the author of Sweetcron. Here are a few reasons why I switched. I prefer hosted servicesI am willing to trade a lesser degree of flexibility (flexibility that I don't particularly need) in order to outsource to a convenient, hosted solution. This is a trade-off you begin to make more and more of as you get older, I think. I no longer want to mess around with installing software for my personal blog. I just want to let someone else take care of it.
Also, since I make my own hosted software now (Peashoot and the upcoming Seashell) it feels good to support the movement :)
Lifestreaming seemed very impersonal
If I'm honest, I started lifestreaming for me, not my audience. There's definitely a strong value proposition for blog owners who are thinking to switch to a stream - it's maintenance free. No more writing blog posts! That value doesn't translate into audience value so well, though. I think my audience quickly got bored of seeing blurry food snapshots or out-of-context quips from my Twitter feed. Your mileage may vary.
Ironically, whereas a lifestream was supposed to be an intimate, personal insight into an individual's life... the lack of real audience interaction meant it ended up as quite an impersonal experience.
Posterous is totally awesome
The Posterous team have built a great product. I was in love 10 minutes into using it.
So where does that leave the Sweetcron project?
That's the magic of open source - it can be taken anywhere. The code will live at Google Code indefinitely. Fork it, repackage it - you can do anything. I just won't be updating it anymore.
Will I be abandoning Peashoot and Seashell too?
Absolutely not. The SaaS model has been a very good fit for me and I'm 100% focused on it now. Ideally, I want a family of 3 apps by this time next year, which I will run as a going concern for the foreseeable future.
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Business Model Generation
I didn't know what to expect when I bought this book. It's only available to purchase online, but the reviews seemed very positive.
It's like a business book for your coffee table. It is at once beautiful to look at and filled with useful information for those who are either running or thinking of starting a business. Some of it inspirational food-for-thought, some of it more pragmatic and to be used and applied immediately.
This should be on every entrepreneur's coffee table.
Available to buy here.
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44 Billion Dollars
Warren Buffet bought the US Railroad for $44 billion on Tuesday. That's the kind of money where you stop understanding what it means. It's just a lot.
But allow me to illuminate you. With $44 billion, instead of buying a railway company you could...
- Consume 1.23 billion Big Macs
- Plan, build and run 1 Beijing Olympics
- Buy a Lamborghini Gallardo for you and 220,000 friends
- Fill Yankee stadium 100 times over with cornflakes
What would you do with $44 billion? If you have that much spare, could you please buy me some milk for my stadium-sized cereal bowls. Thanks.
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PHP vs. Rails
Sometimes I get asked by friends or colleagues,
"Should I build my app in PHP? What's this Rails thing?".
A programming language is a means to an end, I tell them. It is a tool.
A talented PHP developer can write cleaner, faster software than a lesser Rails developer - and vice versa.
If you have access to awesome Rails talent, build it in Rails. If you have access to awesome PHP talent, build it in PHP. If you know a guy who can build you a world-class web-based SaaS app using Fortran punch cards, build it in Fortran.
Apps, websites, web applications - whatever you want to call them - are built by people, not programming languages.
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The Dark Side
For the first time in 10 years, I have a Windows machine again. Don't worry, I still own (and love) 5 mac machines.
I needed something small and light that would enable me to perform development tasks wherever I am, but also be comfortable as something to just pull out in a cafe and check email. So I bought a netbook.
Apple doesn't do a netbook model. They have held back from stepping into the market - it would cannibalise their revenue and they know it.
I bought an Asus 1008HA which slips into my bag comfortably, gets good battery life and has a keyboard with sensibly-sized keys, for a netbook. It also comes with Windows. I bought it with the full intention of hacking OS X onto it, but you know what? Windows isn't so bad. I installed Windows 7 and it runs surprisingly smoothly.
The OS doesn't have the grace of OS X of course. There are some quirks of user experience that make me smile and say "ah, Windows", but as far as meeting the needs of a web developer on the go, within a few hours I had:
- Installed XAMPP for running a local apache server
- Installed IE Collection for doing IE testing across various versions
- Installed Firefox as the browser I'll actually use :)
- Installed E Text Editor to do code editing
- Installed Cygwin to take care of my terminal needs such as SVN / SSH etc
I am actually quite enjoying using it. It's a profoundly strange experience buying a whole computer for about $400, when I'm so used to paying $2000+ for Apple hardware.
That said, I will never stop being an Apple fanboy :) But Steve, do me a favour and don't bring out an Apple netbook just yet.
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Usability Jargon
Nielsen Norman Group have a new report out - 10 Best App UIs
It's worth a read, if only to escape the usual web echo-chamber for a bit. I had never heard of half the apps in the report and some of them are solving quite complex problems.
I did find something amusing though. The list of "Best Practices" on that page is so full of jargon. I can't be the only one seeing the delicious irony in usability best practices having such jargon-tastic titles, such that they become highly unusable.
Or did I just discover a universe-ending paradox?
Probably not, and there probably isn't a short, plain English equivalent for something like Progressive Disclosure.
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Menu Engineering
Rapp is a menu engineer. He helps restaurants maximize revenue by hacking common flaws in human decision-making. For example, by simply removing “$” signs from prices, people are less intimidated by them. And he advises against listing items from least to most expensive, because that focuses the consumer on price. Instead he mixes up items, making it hard to find their price — thereby encouraging the customer to emotionally commit to something before finding out what it costs. But my favorite strategy of his is that of putting some absurdly expensive item on the menu. Rapp doesn’t expect many consumers to buy it, but having it there makes expensive items appear cheap by comparison.
What a fascinating job. I imagine the perks must be good too.
I love learning about consumer behavior when related to information design.
Via Gigaom and there's more examples like this in the book Predictably Irrational.
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Sleep Hacking
I'm a morning person. Today like most days, I got up at 6am. My body just wakes up naturally. I haven't used my alarm clock in months.
At the start of the year after I sold my first startup, I gave myself a little more freedom than I should have. Waking up at noon, going to bed at 4am - all the while working on projects, but at the same time kidding myself into thinking that by living outside a normal sleeping pattern I was giving myself "time to really create, man".
In retrospect I achieved less than I do now, going to bed and waking up at times one would consider normal.
However, there is a difference between dragging yourself out of bed at 6am bleary eyed and incoherent, and being able to just stand up and walk out of bed at 6am and start working. I owe the ability to do the latter to a Sleep Hack, and here it is:
Don't close your curtains.
Or blinds, if you have those.
I simply leave my blinds open at all times. I wake up when the sun comes up. No need for a shrieking alarm clock to lurch me from my bed. Consequently, by the time midnight rolls around, I'm ready to go to bed. But that's ok with me, I'm a morning person.
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