// Internet Duct Tape

Delicious Links – 20 links – blogging, windows, codinghorror, amazon, shopping

Posted in Best of Feeds by engtech on April 26, 2008

Weekly Links

This is my weekly collection of the best stuff I saw on the Internet. You can follow this list of links as I post them on Friend Feed or on Twitter. Or you can get the weekly update by subscribing to Internet Duct Tape using RSS or using email.

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Delicious Links – 20 links – blogging, google, webdev, marketing, lifehacks

Posted in Best of Feeds by engtech on April 21, 2008

Weekly Links

This is my weekly collection of the best stuff I saw on the Internet. You can follow this list of links as I post them on Friend Feed or on Twitter. Or you can get the weekly update by subscribing to Internet Duct Tape using RSS or using email.

(more…)

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Who Moved My Cheese? The New WordPress Admin Interface

Posted in Programming and Software Development, Technology, WordPress by engtech on April 18, 2008

WordPress Tips and Tricks

Two of my blogging heroes and inspiration Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky have joined together on a new venture called StackOverflow: overflowing with awesomeness. They are also doing a weekly podcast, and you can download the first 45 minute podcast here (8 MB). In the discussion, Joel makes a great comment: Windows Vista gives you change without giving you any value. As a Windows XP user there is no compelling reason to upgrade because you’re going to have to relearn where everything is, but you don’t get any new and compelling features or applications to offset that.

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Best of Feeds – 14 links – security, gmail, google, testing, dns

Posted in Best of Feeds by engtech on January 01, 2008

RSS feeds are like cookies (that are good enough for me). Best of Feeds is a weekly collection of the best stuff I saw on the Internet this week. They’re saved on delicious and stumbleupon and cross-posted to Twitter and Tumblr as they happen and then collected together on Saturdays. I don’t blog on the weekend so read these links instead.Subscribe to //engtech to see this every week (or get it by email).

Legend

  • saves – number of people who bookmarked on http://del.icio.us
  • inbound links – number of blogs who linked to it (max 100)
  • diggs – number of people who dugg on http://digg.com

This Week at Internet Duct Tape

  • 7 Tips to Optimize Windows XP for Gaming — Playing The Witcher on Minimum System Requirements
    • One of the lures of the holiday season is to be able to hopefully squeeze in some time between eggnog, family and friends to exercise your vices. No, not heroin, but that other life consuming addiction: gaming. PC gaming is quickly going the way of the dodo, with console gaming taking over because…
  • Windows XP – Disable dumpprep when programs crash
    • One tip for improve Windows XP that I absolutely love is turning off that annoying “do you want to send an error report” message when programs crash. The sad truth is that those error reports rarely reach anyone who could fix the problem, so it’s a colossal waste of time — especially…

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Best of Feeds – 7 links – geek, humor, funny, games, windows

Posted in Best of Feeds by engtech on December 08, 2007

RSS feeds are like cookies (that are good enough for me). Best of Feeds is a weekly collection of the best stuff I saw on the Internet this week. They’re saved on delicious and stumbleupon and cross-posted to Twitter and Tumblr as they happen and then collected together on Saturdays. I don’t blog on the weekend so read these links instead.Subscribe to //engtech to see this every week (or get it by email).

Legend

  • saves – number of people who bookmarked on http://del.icio.us
  • inbound links – number of blogs who linked to it (max 100)
  • diggs – number of people who dugg on http://digg.com

This Week at Internet Duct Tape

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Why Open Source Software Sucks – Software Simplicity Isn’t Simple

Posted in Programming and Software Development, Technology by engtech on December 06, 2007

Programming Tips

Aside: Hosted software would be something like Gmail, while installable software would be something like Outlook. WordPress.com is hosted software by Automattic, but it is also available at WordPress.org where you can download it and install it yourself where ever you want.

There are a few “internet rockstars” in programming circles, and most programmers who read blogs will have heard of Joel Spolsky (one of the few people who writes entertaining tech books) and 37signals (the guys who made Ruby on Rails and Basecamp). The guys at 37signals recently wrote a post about how they prefer creating web-based software that they host vs software that a user would have to download and install themselves because it is so much easier for the software developer. When you don’t have to release your software into the wild you have so many less things to worry about: different operating systems, memory performance, installation dependencies, hardware dependencies.

“You have to deal with endless operating environment variations that are out of your control. When something goes wrong it’s a lot harder to figure out why if you aren’t in control of the OS or the third party software or hardware that may be interfering with the install, upgrade, or general performance of your product. This is even more complicated with remote server installs when there may be different versions of Ruby, Rails, MYSQL, etc. at play.”

Joel looks at his stats and points out that if he didn’t provide installable software then he’d be out of business, because it accounts for 80% of his revenue compared to hosted software.  He also makes a great point that software that people are willing to buy is software that solves a gnarly problem, IE: it deals with complicated stuff. Any other kind of problem can be solved by free software because its uncomplicated enough that one guy in his mom’s basement can churn it out over a weekend.

“The one thing that so many of today’s cute startups have in common is that all they have is a simple little Ruby-on-Rails Ajax site that has no barriers to entry and doesn’t solve any gnarly problems. So many of these companies feel insubstantial and fluffy, because, out of necessity (the whole company is three kids and an iguana), they haven’t solved anything difficult yet. Until they do, they won’t be solving problems for people. People pay for solutions to their problems.”

But he then follows through with a great point that the gnarly problem that 37signals’ applications solve is the problem of design. 37signals might be building fluffy Ruby-on-Rails Ajax sites, but that’s beside the point of the problem they’re really solving: how to design a great looking user experience that makes people happy.

I think this draws a great parallel to what’s wrong with free software: it’s created to scratch a certain itch, and that’s usually all it does. Compelling user interface? Joy to use? Nope, it solves the original programmer’s problem and that’s about it. And before you get all uppity that I’m attacking open source software, let me clarify that I’m talking about the open source software I create.

The problem is two-fold: I have a natural tendency to over-complicate things and I have trouble sharing the customer’s pain (stepping away from the code, and seeing how a stranger would view the end result). Jeff “Metal” Atwood asks “When was the last time you even met a customer, much less tried to talk to them about a problem they’re having with your website or software?”

This hit me last week when I sat down with another engineer to show him an internal tool I was building for him. He started poking a usage case that confused him. It wasn’t in the spec, and it didn’t follow the way he thought of the flow. It was an artifact of the internal data structures I was using that I was exposing to the user. This happens too often. It’s the opposite of opinionated software [1]: pushing the decision making on to the user. [2]

Of course, writing open source software has its benefits because quite often there’s no barrier between you and the people who are using your software other than computer screens. You are your own quality assurance, and you are your own customer service. You have to explain to the users why they should install your software, you have to deal with the installation headaches your platform choice created, you have to explain any complexities with how to use it, and you have to help them when problems occur.

My open source software might suck, but its helping me explore the solution to a gnarly problem: how to solve problems in a way that is easy for other people to use.

Related Posts

Footnotes

1 – There’s an interested essay to be written comparing opinionated software to considerate software.

2 – This programming talk might bore you, but the problem of simplicity in design is cross-discipline and applies to any blogger.

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Best of Feeds – 13 links – geek, marketing, blogging, software

Posted in Best of Feeds by engtech on November 17, 2007

RSS feeds are like cookies (that are good enough for me). Best of Feeds is a weekly collection of the best stuff I saw on the Internet this week. They’re saved on delicious and stumbleupon and cross-posted to Twitter and Tumblr as they happen and then collected together on Saturdays. I don’t blog on the weekend so read these links instead.Subscribe to //engtech to see this every week (or get it by email).

Legend

  • saves – number of people who bookmarked on http://del.icio.us
  • inbound links – number of blogs who linked to it (max 100)
  • diggs – number of people who dugg on http://digg.com

This Week at Internet Duct Tape

This Week at IDT Labs

  • [AKISMET] Akismet Auntie Spam v2.09
    • I’m done. I swear. Not going to touch it for a month. Promise. 2007/11/15 version 2.09 – bug fix: vanilla WordPress and WordPress.com return spam results a little differently 2007/11/15 version 2.08 – bug fix: fixed a stupid debug statement that was breaking 2.07 – added menu option for…
  • [AKISMET] Akismet Auntie Spam v2.07
    • Because why shouldn’t a new release happen within hours of the last one? 2007/11/15 version 2.07 – bug fix: improved slowness of displaying hidden comments – added menu option for checking for updates right now – added menu option for configuring how much spam to download at a time for modem…
  • [AKISMET] Akismet Auntie Spam v2.06
    • Our favorite Auntie has a new version. 2007/11/15 version 2.06 – optimized, optimized, optimized – only displays 5000 comments per page to avoid stressing slower computers – will work for any language (not just english anymore) – any additional slowness is because of a bug on the WordPress end that…
  • [YAHOO PIPES] Yahoo Pipe Cleaner v1.1
    • Yahoo Pipes changed their website on me and I’ve fixed Yahoo Pipe Cleaner so that it works with the new site. Now it also removes image thumbnails that were popping up. It might not run on all Yahoo Pipes because some pipes now have custom URLs — let me know if you are having any problems using…

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Digest for October 2007

Posted in Monthly Digest, Technology by engtech on November 07, 2007

Monthly Digest

Every month I publish a digest post collecting the best of Internet Duct Tape. You can also see the Digest for September 2007. This month marked a big milestone for IDT — hitting the 2 million page view mark.

One Year Ago

Here are some articles that are still timeless.

Monthly Digest

Blogging Tips

Working for the Man

Geeking Out

Best of Feeds

My weekly best of the net link round-up.

Popular Posts

What’s hot this month.

IDT Labs Software Updates

IDT Labs is where I track free software I create.

Digest for September 2007

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Overtime Considered Harmful

Posted in Getting to Done, Technology, Workhacks and High Tech Life by engtech on October 29, 2007

(or I’m Too Lazy to Think of a Better Title)

Time Management

In the past month I’ve worked over 100 hours of overtime to ensure that a project deadline was met when unforeseen issues put the entire project at risk. When you’re a high tech worker then this can happen often enough that it feels like a way of life. What I find strange is that I’ve caught myself bragging about the hours I’ve spent tied to my job. In what sick world should living off of food from Styrofoam containers and an intravenous espresso drip be considered an admirable accomplishment?

If anything it’s a sign of monumental failure in project scheduling, design, delegation or personal time management. Spending two thirds of my waking hours at work isn’t a sign of dedication, it’s a sign of screwed up priorities where I’m willing to push everything else in my life to the side to satisfy the SNAFU I find myself in. The sensible decision would be to get my resume in order and find a way out of this mess.

But like bad movies and bad relationships there’s a sickening desire to stick it out until the end. The sunk cost of time invested seems more valuable than the future cost of staying in this downward spiral. Despite having a university education with a strong background in numbers I can’t do the math and see that the grindstone of a doomed project damages my health and completely destroys my ability to respond to new opportunities. If I’m going to spend a significant portion of my life on work, shouldn’t it be something where that time has a chance at being rewarded?

If the project success depends on a Hail Mary pass to the end zone then chances are slim that things will turn out well for the project in the end. There is no room for heroes on large multi-team projects. For large projects success comes from putting in consistent effort over time and crossing your T’s and dotting your I’s. One last hard push to get it out the door isn’t a valid project management strategy. There is no doctor waiting in the sidelines with a chemical cocktail to induce labour.

I’m lucky that I don’t have children, because this isn’t a life blueprint I’d want to pass on to them. Success that comes from time stolen from the other aspects of your life isn’t success at all.

Interesting Links

Related Posts

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Best of Feeds – 34 links – programming, google, lifehacks, ruby, funny

Posted in Best of Feeds by engtech on October 07, 2007

RSS feeds are like cookies (that are good enough for me). Best of Feeds is a weekly collection of the best stuff I saw on the Internet this week. They’re saved on delicious and stumbleupon and cross-posted to Twitter and Tumblr as they happen and then collected together on Saturdays. I don’t blog on the weekend so read these links instead.Subscribe to Internet Duct Tape to see this every week (or get it by email).

Legend

  • saves – number of people who bookmarked on http://del.icio.us
  • inbound links – number of blogs who linked to it (max 100)
  • diggs – number of people who dugg on http://digg.com

This Week at Internet Duct Tape

  • Distraction Free GTD: 32 Todo List Web Applications
    • Web Runner is a tiny site-specific web application that runs using less resources than Firefox or Internet Explorer. The whole idea behind a site specific web browser is that you want to access a web application without being tempted to access other sites. You want to access a site without being…
  • Magazine Review: October 2007 Issue of Inc. Magazine
    • I came to a rather startling discovery in the past month: magazines are just blogs with the added luxury of being able to read them while on the toilet or in the bathtub (but hopefully not both). I picked up the October issue of Inc. magazine because Joel Spolsky of Joel On Software has joined the…
  • Blog Tip: Create a Link Post in 3 Seconds
    • One question I’m frequently asked is “how do you build those Best of Feeds weekly links?” The way I do it is pretty complicated, but I’ve found a much simpler way that I want to share with you all.
  • Digest for September 2007
    • Every month I publish a digest post collecting the best of Internet Duct Tape.
  • Best of Feeds – 30 links – programming, productivity, code, socialsoftware, socialnetworking
    • Tags: adsense, advice, blogging, career, code, design, development, firefox, gtd, lifehacks, productivity, programming, ruby, rubyonrails, socialnetworking, socialsoftware, tips, web2.0, webdesign

This Week at IDT Labs

  • [AKISMET] Akismet Auntie Spam v2.04
    • Our favorite Auntie has a new version. 2007/10/04 version 2.04 – Fixed (some) memory problems with v2.03 – Still slow, I need to get it working with a profiler, none of the hacks for Greasemonkey + Firebug seem to work.
  • [DELICIOUS] Delicious Link Builder
    • Build a list of links using your delicious account to bookmark them. Works great with my Yahoo Pipe Cleaner script . Example : [BOOKMARKING] toread – an email-based bookmark service Simple service to use to track stuff ‘to read later’. They store the top 10 for each day. It’s like…
  • [RSS PIPE] Stupid Credit Builder
    • This is a clone of Stupid Feed Rewriter that backdates the entry to January 1st, 1970. Useful for adding a credit link at the end of a list.

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Magazine Review: October 2007 Issue of Inc. Magazine

Posted in Book Reviews, Startups and Business, Technology by engtech on October 05, 2007

I came to a rather startling discovery in the past month: magazines are just blogs with the added luxury of being able to read them while on the toilet or in the bathtub (but hopefully not both).

I picked up the October issue of Inc. magazine because Joel Spolsky of Joel On Software has joined the magazine. I’m a Joel fan-boy. Internet Duct Tape was inspired by Joel on Software. Here are some random thoughts from spending a rainy Saturday flipping through the pages. Can this possibly be entertaining or of value to my readers? I have no idea.

I’m going to give each article a +1 or a -1 based on whether or not I found it interesting and discuss it with a short blurb. You can read along with me on the online copy. Follow the bouncing ball.

-1 Editor’s Letter, Contibutors, and Reader Mail: I can’t help but think this stuff should be at the end of a magazine instead of at the front. Below the fold, if you will. Give the reader the most useful tidbits first instead of burying it in the middle.

-1 People Who Were Inspired by Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged: It didn’t sell me that the only entrepreneur’s name I recognized was the one from Doubleclick. Instead of a biographical tidbit about Ayn Rand, tell me what the book was about! How did they miss that there is a 2008 movie with Angelina Jolie in the works? Is Wikipedia the new Coles Notes? Where was the tie-in that Atlas Shrugged inspired the current hit Xbox 360 game Bioshock?

I’m getting the feeling that I’m not the core audience for this magazine.

+1 Netflix vs Blockbuster: Blockbuster proves the adage that startups are R&D for bigger companies by one upping Netflix’s business model. Bad advice from other entrepreneurs follows.

  • “Netflix should court CDs” – iTunes and digital downloads are already trailblazing the future of this industry, going up against iTunes on their existing strengths isn’t going to help Netflix. Isn’t CD by mail subscription also going up against Columbia House?
  • “Focus on being #1 service without lowering price” – Good, if obvious, advice.
  • “Focus on obscure films” – Every company needs to have a passionate minority at their core if they hope to have any success. This would have been good advice if Netflix was starting at a grassroots level, but they already have that core smaller audience from years ago.
  • “Hookup with a cable company” – I completely agree that they need to move to digital downloads. Always build the product that will kill your current product. But getting in bed with CableCos is courting the devil.

+1 Investor’s Guide to Inc 500: Bug VCs with the previous issue’s top 500 startups list. Bonus points for mentioning Massage Envy masseuse franchises that are a lawsuit waiting to happen. Bill Me Later is my pick from the list. They act as a proxy between your credit card info and other companies for people who are afraid of buying on the Internet. I also like Vocera who do star trek style voice communicators for hospitals.

+1 Even CEOs Have to Apologize for Screwing Over Workers: I appreciate the message, but felt there was a bit too much emphasis on assigning blame for why the bad decisions happened. Kudos for stepping up to the plate, admitting mistakes, and keeping the team in the loop.

+1 Applying Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs to Companies: Someone’s written a book about the idea that companies need to fulfill more of an employee’s needs than just the paycheck. Interesting: customers are promiscuous meaning that even if they’re perfectly satisfied with service they might still switch to a competitor they’re also perfectly satisfied with. Article is fluffy, wonder if the book goes any deeper? No mention of creating fulfilling work, just increasing employees self-worth and attitudes towards themselves.

Is this like that bogus psychology from the 80s that encouraged self-confidence without merit and created a generation of self-entitled people who don’t understand why life isn’t handing them the success they deserve?

-1 Estate Planning: I pay someone to pay attention to this stuff for me. That might be stupid on my part.

+1 Is My Social Network Startup Worth Investing In? 55 Alive: Investors get to rip into a young startup. Startup wants $250k but most investors are advicing between $1 to $20 million. I love the VC who points out that common interest ties people together, not demographics like age group. We had a conversation about this last night at a dinner party discussing the people you knew in elementary school and high school that you reconnect with but it goes no where — because where you went to school is no indication of common interests. Same guy tells them to generate their own ad revenue without investors.

More good advice that they need to focus on building up local features. So true, what makes social networking sites work is if they become a communication tool for an existing friends group.

+1 Internet Video Beyond YouTube: Some good discussion on interactive webcasts, livecasting, and promotional videos. HelloWorld is officially my favorite company name ever. I’m so surprised there was no mention of Will It Blend or CommonCraft.

+1 Web Polls: Not enough information on the individual web polling companies, but the use cases of how businesses are incorporating them are phenomenal. Conclusion: don’t manage statistics gathering by hand, but be careful who you go with because it can go from $1,000 to $10,000s of dollars.

+1 Using Marketing to Improve Old Business: One man’s guerilla campaign to revitalize the NY Metropolitan Opera. My favorite example of traditional businesses embracing new media is the Brooklyn Museum’s Flickr page. I liked the idea of giving free tickets to the last dress rehearsal to create buzz and simulcasting the operas onto outside monitors.

+1 Update: An older story of a company in trouble and the advice the Inc. experts gave is updated with the results. Great proof that the magazine advice works.

+1 Questions and Answers: Inc. recommended a survey business support myspace, but ignore Second Life. Unfortunately, no mention of SL’s flying penii. They also give the sage advice that the average person sees 3,000 ads a day so advertisers have to work that much harder to be in the 1% of ads that people notice. Good advice with “do you even know who your audience is?” Huge bonus points for mentioning Made to Stick, one of the best books I’ve ever read.

How to maintain corporate culture: build stories around your brand, have bigger goals than “making money” and fire people who don’t fit with the culture you want to have.

+1 Money Management for Entrepreneurs: Good tip that you should have two financial advisors, one primary and one secondary so that if one doesn’t work out then you can transfer to the other while you look for a replacement.

0 Joel Builds a Shipping System: Reprint from Joel on Software.

-1 Entrepreneurship is Passion: all fluff, no content.

-1 Inc. Gear: hard to believe that this isn’t product placement.

+1 Pandora Story: Cover story about the Pandora music recommendation service. Turning your customers into fans will help you overcome all kinds of roadblocks. But what about your international customers?

+1 The Way I Work: The best interview question is to find out how someone copes with stress. Article focuses on stress management and using external creativity to unwind — maintaining relationships with your support network is more important than the job.

-1 Corporate Retreat: The usual on breaking down people to build a team.

+1 How I Did It: Success story in billboard advertising. Become an expert and buy advertising space that people aren’t using.

-1 Inc. Classifieds: Spam spam spam. Penis enlargement, asian brides, and buy my e-book. It’s like they have blog comments printed right in the magazine.

Overall Score: +7

After an underwhelming start I found some good content in the middle of Inc. Magazine and I’d read it again. Every blog is a self-run small business and every blogger is an entrepreneur, so it isn’t that surprising that I liked the magazine.

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9 Techniques to Promoting Your Social Web Application

Posted in Software, Startups and Business, Technology, Web 2.0 and Social Media by engtech on September 21, 2007

Social Software and You

This is a continuation from The Problem with Social Web Applications.

“web applications are created as social software where you have a friends list, collaborate on a document with multiple people and it is easily to share information and communicate. The downside is these networks consume a lot of attention and too much time is wasted building profiles and adding friends – for some of these sites building a profile and adding friends is the only utility they have.”

Putting the inherent problems of social web apps aside, how do you build a web app that has traction, gain users and hopefully explodes virally? I’ve been paying attention to this space for far too long and this is a round-up of the tricks and techniques successful and not-so-successful social web applications use to promote themselves.

I’m completely excluding any technique that relies on spending money. It’s a given that you can buy traffic and attention through various mean. Instead, I’m focusing on the self-powered techniques companies can use to build organic buzz and word of mouth advertising around their web application.

Technique #1: Beta Invitations

The easiest way to generate buzz for your social web app is to create an artificial scarcity for applications. You can email invitations to people every day and they won’t give you a second glance, but if invitations are hard to come by then the invitation becomes a valuable commodity instead of easily ignored spam. Gray market economies grow around beta invitation trading, even if the accounts themselves are seldom used.

Beta invite success stories: Gmail, Joost, Pownce

Gotcha: “Blog Friendly” Beta Invitations

The gray market beta invitation economy that you want to generate buzz is built off of the back of bloggers. Invitations are an easy way for bloggers to provide value (or the illusion of value) to their readers at no cost other than time. How bloggers feel about your beta invite campaign, and your application, will come from how easy you make it for them to send out invitations.

Medium lets me invite people by posting a URL on my blog. All of my readers who click on that URL can get into the Medium beta and are added as ‘friends’ with no effort on my part. Compare this to Joost invitations require a cut-and-paste of every email address into a desktop application. Sending a single Joost invitation will take me at least a few minutes because I have to load a desktop application. It could potentially take much longer if the desktop application needs to be updated.

Gotcha: Scarcity of Beta Invitations

One way sites screw up is by giving away too many beta invitations up front. If you are using manipulation to create buzz around your product then you need to create artificial value by implying that the people who have access to your service are more privileged. If anyone and their lolcat can get in then how do you create the false sense of hype that comes from people talking about a product you don’t have access to? It’s like the false economy around diamonds.

Technique #2: Social Engineering Trickery

A social engineering technique that works very well for getting people to accept their user account is to say “your friend created a profile for you!” It’s cheesy but it gets the invited user to sign-up. The easiest way to engage someone’s curiosity is to make it about them. People are always interested in themselves, and in what other people may have said about them.

Examples: Spock and Yahoo Mash

Technique #3: The Video Demo

A very effective technique for creating interest in your product before the doors are wide open is creating a video to promote the service and show how people can use it. The iScrybe calendar is a great example of a video that went viral and created a lot of buzz around a product that still hasn’t materialized (disclaimer: I’m a beta tester).

CommonCraft has created a business behind making videos that explain product in simple no-frill terms that somehow work better and remain more interesting than the flashiest demos.

Gotcha: Leaking Features to Early

The only problem with giving a video demo of a product doesn’t exist is you give your competitors that much more time to copy your features. By the time you release you’re competitive advantage might no longer exist.

Technique #4: The Press Release

I’ll let this video CommonCraft developed for PRWeb discuss the value of press release kits for generating buzz.

Gotcha: Spamming Bloggers with Press Releases

As a blogger, one of the dangerous of having your email address on your About Me page is the number of press releases you receive. I’ll reluctantly admit that I do occasionally write a blog post about a service that catches my eye. However, the method of contact has also made me ignore sites like CrossLoop.com that I later realized was very awesome and solves a problem I often have about how to fix someone else’s computer remotely. Why is your application different than any other of the many emails I have received?

Technique #5: The Address Book Import

Always make it as easy as possible for people to invite their friends to use your social web app. The email address book is the only existing workaround to the “social graph problem.” Make it as easy as possible for users to invite or connect with their friends using address book import and supporting the major webmail sites (Yahoo, Hotmail, Gmail) as well as instructions on how to upload from Outlook or Outlook Express. Plaxo even offers a free javascript widget so ANY social website can offer address book import with little effort.

Gotcha: Giving Out Your Email Password

Jeff very correctly points out that giving out your email password is ridiculously stupid, since a malicious site can hijack your login information for any website and potentially gain access to your credit card or banking information depending if you use the same email address for everything. There has also been more than one case of startups sending emails to your contacts without your permission (see SixDegrees.com, Quechup and RapLeaf).

Gotcha: Address Book Import with Custom Invite

If you are going to brave the address book import (admittedly I do it often) then it is imperative that the invite sender can customize the message to the invitees. Thanks to the wonder of “automatically add anyone you’ve ever had an email conversation with to your address book” technology, if you do full address book spamming you might be contacting people who have a very loose connection to you. LinkedIn does it right by giving the sender several precanned invitation messages that can be customized at will. Another technique is to limit the number of invitations someone can send at once to prevent spamming.

I had a shock this weekend when I sent Yahoo Mash invitations out and my custom email invitation was never sent — instead they were given that spammy ‘engtech created a profile’ message. I went to the trouble to explain why I was sending the invite, what Yahoo Mash was about, and linked to a TechCrunch article about the service. This is what they saw instead:

Success stories: LinkedIn, Plaxo

Failures: Yahoo Mash, Quechup, RapLeaf, sms.ac…

Don't send out stupid invitations like this one

Technique #6: Leverage Existing Success

In all aspects of life success can breed success. Would Paris Hilton have been in the limelight if she wasn’t the heiress to a ridiculous fortune? When larger companies launch a new web application they need to leverage the success of their existing sites. A common complaint when Google or Yahoo launches something new is that it doesn’t integrate well with their existing portfolio of web applications. Use the success and lessons learned from existing applications to slingshot your new web application into stardom. This is much easier to do when it is the same small team developing the application.

Success stories: 37signals

Technique #7: Corporate Superstar

One of the easiest ways to get buzz about your web app is to hire someone who is well known in the industry. This can be a detrimental factor because their involvement can overshadow the product itself or bring too much attention to a product before it has had a chance to mature. However, I think there is always more of a positive factor because it is easier to improve a product than it is to build the kind of buzz these people bring to anything they are involved with.

Examples: Jason Calcanis, Guy Kawasaki, Kevin Rose, Marc Andreessen, Joel Spolsky, Aaron Swartz

Technique #8: Send Out the Bacn

Social sites try to keep you interested by sending ‘tickler’ emails whenever any little action happens related to your account on their site. These emails are functionally useless, but they drive you back to the site. It’s not spam, it’s bacn — useless emails from a website that you’ve given permission to contact you. It’s the worst form of permission marketing and smart sites will set a sane default where they only contact the person once a day at the very most. Stupid sites will quickly see their emails detected as spam since clicking the ‘Report Spam’ button is often much easier than creating an email filter or finding out how to unsubscribe or change notifications.

Very few sites get that if you’re going to email someone that they have a message, you might as well include the message with the email. Even fewer sites understand that people should be able to respond to the message directly from email. Improving the customer experience always trumps increasing page views or any other metric.

Sites that get it: Twitter, StumbleUpon

Sites that don’t get it: Facebook, Yahoo Mash

yahoo mash bacn spam

Technique: Don’t Require an Account to Try It

(update because I forgot it the first time around)

One of the absolutely best ways to promote your app is to let people use it without requiring an account to sign in. OpenID hopes to provide a universal account that you can use anywhere, but other sites like Geni and JottIt bring you directly to the application and only prompt you to create a user account when you want to store your information.

Technique #9: Solve a Problem

The easiest way to build buzz around your web app is to solve a real problem. Many “web 2.0″ sites are repeating what has been available in desktop software for decades. For the ones that do something original, it often serves no real purpose. Messaging friends? I have email and instant messenger programs. Writing documents, spreadsheets, calendars? I have office suite applications. Translating desktop software gives decreased performance with the ability to easily collaborate and access documents from any location that has Internet access.

There are very few web applications that solve a problem that desktop software never did well. They add real value to a user’s life in a way that is new and innovative. Desktop software never handled music discovery (last.fm) or photo sharing (flickr and now Facebook) as well as their web counterparts. Too many web applications are social for no reason or offer solutions without a problem to solve. As my blog friend Steven says:

Adding value to one’s personal pool of knowledge or giving to another’s doesn’t depend on vast numbers of useless contacts. Value comes from one to one communication and then following whatever paths that come from that conversation.

Bonus: The Yahoo Mash Report Card

Last weekend I had a chance to check out Yahoo’s “we were too cheap to buy Facebook, let’s get that egg off of our face” entry into the social platform war with Yahoo Mash. The experience inspired this post. How did Yahoo Mash rate?

+1 point for creating approximately 2 hours of ‘I want a beta invite!’ buzz
+2 points for convincing me that Mash invites had some value and I could earn some social capital by sending invites to everyone on my address book
-10 points for refusing to send my handcrafted invitation that explained what Mash is and why I was sending out invitations
-20 points for sending that ‘engtech created a profile for you!’ spam instead of my custom invitation
-3 points for being ugly
-2 points for not having any utility beyond creating a profile
+2 points for the ability to edit other people’s profiles — something different
-4 points for not leveraging all the other Yahoo services I use
+5 points for introducing me to Yahoo Avatars — much cooler than Mash

my yahoo mash avatar

Links You Can Use

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Best of Feeds – 35 links – design, programming, blogging, socialsoftware, javascript

Posted in Best of Feeds, Technology by engtech on September 01, 2007

RSS feeds are like cookies (that are good enough for me). Best of Feeds is a weekly collection of the best stuff I saw on the Internet this week. They’re saved on delicious and stumbleupon and cross-posted to Twitter and Tumblr as they happen and then collected together on Saturdays. I don’t blog on the weekend so read these links instead.Subscribe to //engtech to see this every week (or get it by email).

Legend

  • saves – number of people who bookmarked on http://del.icio.us
  • inbound links – number of blogs who linked to it (max 100)
  • diggs – number of people who dugg on http://digg.com

This Week at Internet Duct Tape

  • Using Mind Maps to Explore User Interaction
    • I’m “fortunate” to work at one of those companies where meetings are a way of life. Not only do meetings happen daily, but everyone and their dog is invited. Well, until one of the dogs bit an intern. Now the dogs are free to keep working on their projects, but everyone else is still…
  • WordPress.com Command Diagrams
    • I’ve created two useful diagrams for WordPress.com bloggers and more important for people who offer support in the WordPress.com help forums.
  • Digest for August 2007
    • Every month I publish a digest post collecting the best of Internet Duct Tape.
  • Do Anything: 3 Steps for Success
    • One of the strangest things about growing older is coming to terms with the idealism and certainty you had as a teenager compared to the reality of who you’ve grown into. I grew up in a house full of books on what I’d now refer to as lifehacks: books on happiness, psychology, time…
  • Canadian Marketing, Media, and Digital Blogs Tournament
    • Internet Duct Tape is proud to be a part of the 1% Army Canadian Blogging Tournament. I’m part of division A: Online/Digital/Tech/Web 2.0. As part of the tournament I need to submit a three example posts from 2007. Can you help me decide?
  • Best of Feeds – 37 links – lifehacks, tips, productivity, programming, blogging
    • Tags: advice, blogging, design, development, geek, hacks, happiness, humor, internet, lifehacks, paulgraham, productivity, programming, rss, search, software, tips, workhacks, writing

This Week at IDT Labs

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Digest for June and July 2007

Posted in Monthly Digest, Technology by engtech on August 01, 2007

Monthly Digest

Every month I publish a digest post collecting the best of Internet Duct Tape. Here you go!

One Year Ago

Here are some articles that are still timeless.

IDT Labs Software Updates

IDT Labs is where I track software projects I’m working on.

  • [WORDPRESS] Akismet Auntie Spam update
    Ever have one of those weeks? Akismet has decided that all comments from me are spam and there’s nothing I can do about it, other than politely emailing the blogs I regularly post to and asking them to go dumpster diving for me. I’ve updated my Akismet Auntie Spam script for Firefox to deal with some of the issues I’ve had.
  • [THEME] Preview of themes for the Sandbox Design Competition
    The Sandbox Design Competition as come to a close. I only managed to get two designs in under the wire. You can see previews here .
  • [FLICKR] Always search for CC licenses photos
    I’ve updated my script that forces the Flickr search box to remember that you’re searching for Creative Commons licensed photos. It fixes a problem with the advanced search box.
  • List of Software
    I’ve put together a list of all the software I’ve created. I’ve oh-so-intelligently organized it by the websites they interface with. Check it out if you haven’t already.

Monthly Digest

It’s All Geek To Me

Web 2.0

Blogging Advice

Quick Blog Tips

Web Design

Best of Feeds — Link Posts

Most Popular Posts for June and July 2007

Digest for May 2007

3 comments

Book Review: Programmers at Work by Susan Lammers

Posted in Book Reviews, Programming and Software Development, Technology by engtech on May 10, 2007

programmers at work susan lammers bill gates charles simonyi butler lampson jef raskin quote quotationsI heard about Programmers at Work in the blog buzz surrounding the release of Founders at Work. Programmers at Work is a 20 year old book (1985) that interviews some of the top programmers of that era about the art of programming. It is not widely in print anymore, but it was easy to find a copy at my local library. When I picked it up at the library I wondered how relevant would it still be? The only constant with technology is how fast it changes.

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Best of Feeds – 20 links – blog, development, programming, blogging, technology, hightech

Posted in Best of Feeds, Technology by engtech on March 31, 2007

Best of Feeds is a weekly series where I link to the stuff I found interesting from my feed reader. Links are sorted based on how many people have bookmarked them on del.icio.us. They are posted on Twitter as they happen and then collected together in a single post on Saturday. I don’t blog on the weekend so read these links instead.

Subscribe to feed Subscribe to feed
Subscribe to //engtech.

This time I have 20 links from: alistair.cockburn.us, angryaussie, logtar, codinghorror, copyblogger, landscape, mathewingram, mattcutts, nomorequo, northxeast, onemansblog, podtech, problogger, ryepup.unwashedmeme, sellsbrothers, sethgodin, surveylink.yahoo, webworkerdaily, worsethanfailure, zephoria

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SOAP and The Importance of Hallway Usability Testing

Posted in Internet Duct Tape News, Technology by engtech on March 17, 2007

Disambiguation: I’m talking about Business Blogwire’s “Scratch One Another Program” not “Simple Object Access Program”

Joel Spolsky writes that:

A hallway usability test is where you grab the next person that passes by in the hallway and force them to try to use the code you just wrote. If you do this to five people, you will learn 95% of what there is to learn about usability problems in your code.

A user interface is well-designed when the program behaves exactly how the user thought it would.

He writes even more on the subject in his free book on UI design. I’m one of those people who always comes up with complicated solutions and hacks. I find detaching myself from something I’m familiar with and looking at it with the mindset of a new user one of the hardest tasks. That’s why I love the idea behind sites like Hallway Testing and projects like SOAP.

(note: SOAP is looking for more bloggers to participate)

When it comes to website design the most important opinion is that of someone with a fresh view. And that’s why I was so happy at the quality response I got from Yvonne at Grow Your Writing Business. Now I need to get off my butt and SOAP Make It Great (as well as make the improvements from Yvonne’s suggestions).

I highly recommend participating in SOAP if you are interested in improving your web site design.

If you’re interested in reading the advice Yvonne gave me then click the link to read more.

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Getting to Simple – Engineers Have No Idea How Normal Human Beings Interact With Their Environments

Posted in Increasing Productivity and Simplifying Your Life, Programming and Software Development, Technology by engtech on February 20, 2007

One of the best known programming axioms is KISS — Keep It Simple, Stupid [wiki].

It is something I have incredible difficulty with.

kiss - keep it simple stupid - simplicity - gene simmons

This past weekend was filled with reminders of KISS. There were multiple comments on the complexity of my blog design. I was putting together a GUI for a WordPress.com tool even though I usually exclusively program for the command line. I finished off the weekend by reading Cory Doctorow’s “Eastern Standard Tribes” where the main character is a user experience guru with nothing but distain for engineers and computer scientists and their inability to grasp how non-geeks think:

“I spent the next couple hours running an impromptu focus group, watching the kids and their bombshell nannies play with it. By the time that Marta touched my hand with her long cool fingers and told me it was time for her to get the kids home for their nap, I had twenty-five toy ideas, about eight different ways to use the stuff for clothing fasteners, and a couple of miscellaneous utility uses, like a portable crib.

“So I ran it down for my pal that afternoon over the phone, and he commed his boss and I ended up eating Thanksgiving dinner at his boss’s house in Westchester.”

“Weren’t you worried he’d rip off your ideas and not pay you anything for them?” Szandor’s spellbound by the story, unconsciously unrolling and re-rolling an Ace bandage.

“Didn’t even cross my mind. Of course, he tried to do just that, but it wasn’t any good-they were engineers; they had no idea how normal human beings interact with their environments. The stuff wasn’t self-revealing-they added a million cool features and a manual an inch thick. After prototyping for six months, they called me in and offered me a two-percent royalty on any products I designed for them.”

It would be funny if it wasn’t so painfully true. I’d happily add features until I ended up with a monstrosity like this. My subconscious is a hamster in a wheel inside my head. He’s wearing black-rimmed coke-bottle lenses and a pocket protector. This is what he’s thinking:

I like coding.

Adding features means more coding.

Tweaking existing code that already works fine means more coding.

If I let something be finished then that means I’ll have to stop coding.

I like coding.

usb kiss hamster wheel keyboard geek

My favorite post I’ve ever read on the subject of simplicity is Joel Spolsky’s critique of the Windows Vista start menu: “each additional choice makes complete sense until you find yourself explaining to your uncle that he has to choose between 15 different ways to turn off a laptop.”

But even he notes that the answer to simplicity isn’t having less features. Having a sparse highly usable design is a feature in itself. The key is to have robust features without confronting the user with multiple choices. Simplicity is actually quite complex — which makes sense because otherwise Apple and 37signals would be the rules, not the exceptions.

John Maeda’s Laws of Simplicity provides some rough guidelines for Getting to Simple:

  1. Reduce - The simplest way to achieve simplicity is through thoughtful reduction.
  2. Organize - Organization makes a system of many appear fewer.
  3. Time - Savings in time feel like simplicity.
  4. Learn - Knowledge makes everything simpler.
  5. Differences - Simplicity and complexity need each other.
  6. Context - What lies in the periphery of simplicity is definitely not peripheral.
  7. Emotion - More emotions are better than less.
  8. Trust - In simplicity we trust.
  9. Failure - Some things can never be made simple.
  10. The One – Simplicity is about subtracting the obvious, and adding the meaningful.

Part of the reason why I blog is because it forces me to work on soft skills like this. It’s a subject I need to learn more about.

Related Posts

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How to be a Programmer with 10 Simple Books (GGG5)

Posted in Book Reviews, Geeking Out, Programming and Software Development, Technology by engtech on December 04, 2006

(Continued from Gift Guide for Geeks Part 4 – Comic books)
 (Start at Gift Guide for Geeks Part 1 – Tis the Season for Receiving)

Write what you know. In this case, what I know about is being a geek. Over the next few days I’ll be suggesting things that I liked. I’ll be giving ball-park prices (in Canadian dollars) and at the end of each post I’ll include a link to where you can find all of the items on Amazon.

technorati programmer at work
(photo (c) torek)

Unlike the rest of the posts in these series, I haven’t read most of these books. I’m basing the recommendations on the countless other lists on other tech websites, particularly Jeff Atwood at Coding Horror. These books are programming language independent and would make a great gift for anyone working in high tech.

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North America’s Next Top Blogger? – Be a celebrity first

Posted in Marketing and Promotion, Technology by engtech on November 14, 2006

GoogleBlogoscoped interviewed top bloggers about their most popular posts. Deep Jive Interests breaks it down into three habits:

  1. Breaking real news (or rumours that become news)
  2. Providing unique analysis and commentary
  3. Posting on something topical and sympathetic

Good to note. What I think is also worth mentioning:

  1. Innovating and started blogging when it was new (IE: get into vlogging now)
  2. Playing to their strengths / staying in their niche
  3. Applying their strengths to a popular topic
  4. Already having celebrity status for another reason

This is something that shouldn’t be played down. Quite often top bloggers are where they are because of preexisting real world influence.

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4 comments