Rethinking cookie cutter websites: ugc ugc ugc
It’s a truism that cookie cutter websites are bad things. Poor knock off copies. Mercado Libre vs Ebay, or just about anything yahoo does. Take somebody else’s idea and do the same thing, with your own twist.
It’s the kind of thinking you get from folks hiring elance and odesk developers. Fast cheap, and kind of like what joe was doing over there. Back when i was working on Odeo somebody posted wanting to pay $1000 for a clone of the site.
But if we think about it a little more we can realize there is some value there. Really nothing we do is original or new. We’re always riffing off of each other. When somebody does something which is NOT copying and adapting from others, then things don’t work. An idea which is “ahead of it’s time” is perhaps an idea which is to original and insufficiently derivative.
We live in a world which places the truly original, paradigm shifting ideas above others. The lone Einstein who goes off and reinvents the world. It wasn’t Ted Nelson’s hypermedia that changed the world, but the community of folks who mashedup gopher and hypertext decades later. We need people working on crazy reinventing the world ideas, but mostly those folks fail. Even if they do come up with great ideas, they will be ignored.
Most of the creative work we do is copying and deriving from ourselves. It’s a community of people who come up with ideas and build things together. Sure one person might do the design, another the coding, it is their work, but the ideas floating around can’t really be owned. We’re derivative and that’s ok. Relevant work, useful arts, are derivative. A user interface must be derivative for it to be useful.
And websites?
So, how does this get back to websites? Websites are my craft, they are what i create. Sure i actually work on the code behind them, but the goal is to create websites for people. Even things like Fire Eagle, which mostly get used by software to talk to other software, is really about people. I’ve been building websites for well over a decade, and will probably keep doing it, I enjoy what i do.
So then the question becomes, what kind of websites to build. Well we could do the standard cookie cutter idea, copy somebody else’s thing whole hog. Or we could do flickr for video, twitter for xyz, take somebody else’s concept and change the nouns.
But if we step back a bit we realize that interesting websites are about sharing things. Jyri says what’s being shared are social objects and while he has 5 steps, the important ones are what’s being shared how. The noun and the verb. I share photos by uploading them.
What does that look like? Well Matt Jones of dopplr says they are sharing trips as the social object, and the verb is to plan. Once you get the frame to think about it’s pretty easy to see what people are doing. So then you’ve got Platial, Mapufacture, and google maps are competing in the space creating and sharing maps online.
For me the idea that what we should be doing is creating a way for people to share something together, that’s what we’re doing in social media, has taken a while to become clear. Sure Twitter is a microblogging service, or a many to many message routing system, but really, most importantly, it’s a way to share what’s going on in my life.
Back to the cookie cutter thing
Instead of copying something which is already successful, I’ve been thinking about how to decide what’s interesting to work on. The first step is to find something people value, something they are sharing with others, and which makes them happy already.
Here’s an example, i used to play ultimate frisbee. Teams play in tournaments all around the world, and each one has a distinct culture. The way players used to find out about cool tournaments was over the rec.sport.disc usenet group and at parties during the tournament. Teams want to know what’s cool to go to, but everybody’s definition of cool is different. For example, the hyper competitive teams like UCSB want to play hard all day then get drunk at night. Other teams want play naked, smoke a bowl, and sample the field side BBQ. There’s no good way for people navigate that social space. A website which let people share about the tournaments would be very meaningful to the small world of ultimate frisbee. What they need, the sites, tools, information being shared, model of permissions and openness, are distinct to that community.
But isn’t that yahoo, friendster, myspace, facebook, twitter…?
Isn’t there a generic one size fits all platform which will do this? Perhaps not. Right now facebook reigns supreme, and it’s because it does a lot of the sharing right. It’s also because they are able to make things work much better having a semi-walled garden. What’s not at all clear to me is if it’s possible, or even desirable to have one big site. Even with the F8 platform, i’ve only got one kind of relationship. Is what’s good for keeping in touch with college and work buddies good for finding a cool fall tournament to go play frisbee at? Sometimes.
Sometimes not. When communities get big they tend to regress towards the mean. The way you share one kind of information, and with whom, is not how you want to share other information.
Take Flickr for example. Most people use flickr to share snapshots with their family. Some people use it to become better photographers and show off their stuff. Others use it as liberated space for their own very niche subcultures, often sexual or deviant. The same space, properly segregated works pictures of your kids and eroticized pictures of 6 inch tall women. The reason it works is that flickr is very good at creating spaces and knowing how to create a space for a self managed community. It’s only by knowing a LOT about sharing photos, the reasons people do it, and the spaces they need, that you start creating something wonderful. The Facebook photo gallery on the other hand is really great for sharing the kinds of photos you’d take at a party, on a trip, visiting friends. The ability to mark up and link to who in which photo is amazing. It’s something which would actually hurt members of the tiny women fetish community.
So, one size fits all doesn’t work for political reasons, it creates incredible centralization of power. But if it were just politically bad, that wouldn’t be enough to stop it. The ways and with whom we share things are contextual. I’m sure the tiny women folks would rather not use their real names, like facebook requires, perhaps for good reason. The rules of the game, the constraints, matter. What you can do, how you share, what you share, all of these things are which there can be no universal solution. It is this dynamic which will keep facebook, or anything else, from taking over the whole of the web.
So what should i build?
I’ve been thinking about this question a lot since I left Yahoo Brickhouse. At brickhouse we spent a lot of time discussion what to build, how to go about building innovative things. What made sense for us, for yahoo, for brickhouse. Now that i’m not working for big purple any more, i’ve got to answer the same question, what do i do, what do i build.
One option is you do consulting, and you build what the client wants, not what they say they want, but you talk them through discovering what they really want. These days everybody seems to say they want facebook. That’s being to cookie cutter. Copying the image of what works elsewhere without understanding the underlying meaning. Facebook lets people share what’s going on in their lives and present an image of themselves through that. Clients say they want facebook, but really they are trying to achieve something else, and they don’t know how to ask for it.
People want to share. If you are an Oracle DBA, you want to learn about and share information about your work. Server configuration, optimization, and stored procedures. Sharing and learning, creating community in the context of Oracle DBA’s means solving their needs, knowing what they need to share and how. Some of that might be snippets of SQL, but some of it might be sharing how hot shit they are, and how when they are looking for a new job you should hire them.
What will i build?
The ideas i’ve been mulling over, hacking on, and playing with are how to share things i’m personally interested in doing. Places where you see somebody is already sharing, but in a broken way. An example i like is Localism, it’s a realestate website, but instead of sharing property listings, it creates a space for agents to share information about communities. It’s the hidden knowledge that real estate agents have, and creating a site for it helps some agents show off how damned well they know their beat.
Find something which needs to be shared, which is being shared but poorly, and build a new way of doing it which better serves the sharers. To share is a fundamental human need. It’s why solitary isolation is considered a horrible punishment. We live in a world where we have a multitude of different identities, and every one of them is reflected in a community of others. In thinking of what to do next, i’m trying to find out how to server individuals participating in their communities.
Git: You are in the middle of a conflicted merge.
So i’m not a git expert. But i’ve been using it for about a month and i’m mostly really happy. The only time it drives me crazy is when i get this damned message.
~/code/tt (master) $ git pull
You are in the middle of a conflicted merge.
It’s like this swamp in the gitverse. Normally merging is fine everything goes along with tons of merges branches for each feature which i merge back in. I really like it. But when merges fail git does not provide any path out of the swamp. Your magical merging technology has failed you and now you must find your own way out. Every command leads to the same damned message. “You are in the middle of a conflicted merge.” Well i know that! Trying git resolve doesn’t do much, that’s not even a command.
~/code/tt (master) $ git resolve
git: 'resolve' is not a git-command. See 'git --help'.
So what to do, well first resolve the conflict in your merging program of choice. Almost always for me it’s just textmate, open the damned conflicted file and edit it. FileMerge and others work too, but we’re just diffing shit, it’s not too hard.
Now here’s the trick, once you fix the problem, add the files which you’ve had to edit, and commit them.
~/code/tt (master) $ git add lib/im/response.rb
~/code/tt (master) $ git commit -m 'I hate failed merges'
Created commit 34d2648: I hate failed merges
That’s it. I’m writing this blog post because i keep forgetting what to do, and when i search on google for the error message, You are in the middle of a conflicted merge. i get some damned message on the kernel dev list about the development of git.
So here the steps are:
- Pull the update from master, or whereever – git pull
- See the dreaded merge failed message
- Edit the files which failed to merge correctly cleaning up the code
- Run your tests / specs just to make sure you caught everything
- Add and commit the manually merged file. git add path/to/file.rb; git commit -m “work damnit”
- Go back to pushing and pulling in peace
Git’s an amazing piece of technology with some really broken parts to it’s interface which makes learning how it works hard.
To me it’s similar to the differences between the GNU stack and Solaris. I came to know about the GNU tools through Linux, it was just how everything worked. Then one day i had to use Solaris, and the commands had all the same names, and worked. But not as well. The GNU tools have really amazing user interface and interaction design. Seriously. Read GNU Standards for Command Line Interfaces and you’ll be amazed, that’s what we all think of as linux and unix. It works, it’s standardized. It makes it easy to guess what’s next and discover how the application works. It’s not given credit, but that document, and the extensive toolset like readline, built on it, is what makes the internet work. It’s discoverable, it’s built on the idea that you can pipe information from one program to another, and that they will all work. If you don’t believe me, just look at DJB’s amazing, but far from standard apps.
So what should git do? Well it should suggest a solution. Or make a solution documented in the examples of the man file. It’s pretty damned simple, fix the merge, add the file, commit, and you’re done. Instead it locks up and prevents you from doing anything until you intuit your way out of the problem. Insanity.
PS. Yes i’m lazy and should submit the fix myself, people are submitting contributions to git all the time.
The Open Web Foundation - Why Do It?
So i’ve not been involved in the newly launched Open Web Foundation but i have been following along as various folks i know worked on OpenID and OAuth. Is it a great idea, or yet another structure? I’m not sure.
Here’s my understanding. Most standards traditionally have been heavy vendor driven processes. Even when you don’t need $$$ or to be a big company to participate, you do need to have the resources to fly around the world to the meetings, like IETF. It’s painful and nasty.
There are a series of standards which are created using more open source / hacker / collaborative ways which are emerging from code, like extracting a framework from your application, you extract the standard from your work and best practices. It’s easy, lightweight, great, works.
Some of these extracted open sourcey standards get picked up and big companies want to start implementing them. This is great, just look at how OAuth has gotten adopted all over the place.
But there is a problem, these big companies have lawyers and their lawyers are both stupid and evil. Lawyers created the stupid and evil system of intellectual property. These lawyers all seem to have adopted a particularly brain dead view of what my happens with related to participation and patents and intellectual property rights.
They think that unless you have a magic paragraph which says you don’t grant patents and intellectual property rights just by participating in a standards process, or even USING or READING a standard, the big corps loose their rights to enforce their patents.
Yes it’s super stupid, but that’s what you get when you let lawyers run your world.
So the Open Web Foundation is about creating something which will shut the lawyers up and let these bottom up, extracting standards folks still work without having to die the death of a thousand meetings with legal.
Beyond REST? Building Data Services with XMPP PubSub
Kellan and I gave a talk today at OSCON about some ideas we've been playing with around how to make web services work as things keep getting bigger and faster. Apparently it was well received.
UPDATE: There's a great write up by Robert Kaye about the talk by on O'Reilly Radar and Joshua Schachter confirmed similar use / abuse pattern for delicious.
Does genuine tech innovation happen better in a recession?
I know this may sound a little counter intuitive, but bear with me. There are some important kinds of innovation in technology which require a recession and not full employment. In the late 90’s there was the huge dot.com boom, everybody who could code at all was working from dawn to dusk. Some people made huge amounts of money, some also lost it, others just worked endless hours.
Then there was a collapse, huge numbers of geeks were unemployed, hundreds of thousands in the san francisco bay area alone. Out of that collapse there was time for people experiment, play with stuff, do things which were not required for meeting the next deadline. That recession and massive underemployment of geeks created blogging as we know it today.
It also laid the groundwork for the small agile startups which optimize the whole web 2.0 thing. Ludicorp which could go from building a multiplayer game to photosharing site. Design shops who have time to roll their own web framework in an obscure programming language from japan, and the like.
When you are busy and having paying clients banging on the door, you don’t have time to focus on exploring new areas, discovering the depth and meaning of your medium. When i was working at odeo we were all heads down, coding, fixing, building, getting the damned thing done. There was real competition, apple and yahoo were both wanting to crush us with their huge legacy advantages of userbases and platforms. It was only once we realized we’d lost, that Odeo wasn’t going to be the podcasting platform we’d envisioned, that Ev decided to do a series of hack weeks, play with new ideas, see if there wasn’t something new which could be created. That playing around seemed like floundering to me at the time. I was frustrated and burned out. But that process is what helped Jack pickup some ideas he’d had floating around in his head for years, but no time to work on. Those ideas became twitter, called twttr at the time.
The dot bomb wasn’t the only time when many techies were underemployed. I was reading a review of Matz’s keynote at Ruby Fools in denmark a few months ago and something jumped out at me.
“The recession in Japan meant that Matz – while not unemployed – didn’t have many assignments at work, so he secretly started to hack away at Ruby at the office.”
Not only was blogging the result of industry wide underemployment of geeks, and twitter the result of a similar thing within a single company, but Ruby was created in a very similar environment during the recession in Japan in the 90’s.
To the vast majority of programmers, it’s a job, they’re the %80 who are vocational programmers. They program during their work day, and go home to do other things, on the weekend they aren’t working on their own projects. Then there are the people who are obsessed, the geek’s geek as it where. We believe in learning a new programming language every year.
Real innovation in software seems to happen when we have underemployment of the true geeks. Either inside of companies where the geeks are allowed to explore, or outside of companies through economic forces. Long hours and tight focus is often needed to get a startup going, or ship software, but it’s not what creates something really new.
It’s ironic, the very forces of modern capitalism which praise the internet economy as being the ultimate in friction free globalized markets hold back real innovation. It’s the down cycles, either within companies or in the broader labor market, which give the innovators space to risk walking down dead ends. It’s a cliché to say that you need to be able to fail if you are going to take real risks. When geeks are free to hack on their own then no deadlines, just interesting spaces to explore. It’s then that we see real innovation.
I spent a year working at Yahoo Brickhouse, we were supposed to be yahoo’s ‘inner startup’. We were going to find a way to create new stuff, employed to wander in the woods and come back with amazing ideas. We were told that it was ok to fail 9 times out of 10. We built several things which never made it out the door, two which made it to beta launch, Bravo Nation, and Fire Eagle. I’m not sure what the future of Bravo Nation is, but i know Fire Eagle is going to launch and it’ll be a major part of making location based systems interoperate. Fire Eagle was a project which was started by Tom Coates, Paul Hammond, and Simon Willison, they were working from London and largely ignored by everybody at Yahoo. Before they could finish they were taken off of the project to finish higher priority things. Then Yahoo Research Berkeley said, oh there are some neat ideas here, and they played with it for a while, they were also ignored by the larger yahoo who focused on shipping things rather than playing with interesting concepts. Eventually Tom talked Brickhouse in to joining in on this crazy location broker idea and it took another 6 months of work to get a beta out the door. The whole process went round and round all the while yahoo was doing it’s own internal soul searching. At the end of the day Brickhouse had to make either BravoNation or Fire Eagle succeed or it was getting restructured in to who knows what. The day of the big layoffs back in February, Brickhouse lost it’s director, Salim Ismail, and his boss yahoo vice president Bradley Horowitz. Caterina, who had the brickhouse idea in the first place, had already left on maternity leave. Chad Dickerson was left in charge and did amazing work to help fire eagle get out the door and support Yahoo Live. Clearly we weren’t actually allowed to go off and fail 9 times out of 10 in the process of coming up with a crazy new and important idea.
What i find truly ironic about the process is we did end up coming up with a pretty damned good idea. That of using oauth and webservices to broker information between other applications and services on the web while leaving the user in control and protecting privacy. Were we the only ones who came up with it? No, innovation is about a community of thinkers, there were many people involved who work at many places including twitter, pownce, magnolia, six apart, wesabe, flickr, many others, and of course yahoo and google. You see it now with interest in federated social network, the gnip project, and other stuff which is still in the works.
Shipping a product and being innovative are often not compatible goals. The innovation happens in the downtime, then once an idea has gelled, the innovation stops and the work of creating production code begins. Sometimes it’s the same folks, most of the time it’s different folks. Often there is a long gap between the ideas being created and somebody building something useful on top of them.
We need recessions and underemployment of the innovators for them to have time to do their work. In a more ideal world, we would support this just like we should support having artists in society. Until we change it, we’re stuck with dumb brutish capitalism which has lucked in to creating these spaces for innovation.
Update: I fixed some of the spelling and grammar problems, thanks. :)
Dear Lazyweb: What's a good prosumer soho wifi / router / access point?
So i’m sick of flaky wifi / routers / access points. I’ve had netgear’s, d-link’s, belkin’s, and linksys routers. To me they all were about the same, which is to say they worked some of the time.
Before i go back to getting one more of the same to replace my now limping netgear, i’ve thought, what if i got something more than the cheapest consumer class wifi router. I know that hotels, conference centers, and all sorts of other places have wifi which doesn’t need to be restarted on a regular basis, that doesn’t suck. Sure some have wifi which sucks, but some don’t. The same goes with companies, at Yahoo! there was good wifi coverage all over campus, their crazy vpn made it hard to use, but the coverage was there.
So then my question becomes, what are my options one level up? So far a little searching around i found the Cisco Aironet’s which start around $200 for the lower end models and the ZyXAL’s ZyWALL 2WG router which supports 3G as a backup connection in addition to being a wifi router at $250+.
Are those good routers? What are the alternatives in that quality range? Has anybody tried and used either of those?
Dear lazyweb, please help….
iPhones in Argentina, Uruguay, and Paraguay
So while everybody up north is getting ready for the introduction of the 3G iPhone, it’s also arriving down at the bottom of the world. Apple chose the mexican company, Claro, formerly CTI Movil, to sell iPhones in latin america, probably because they could go with provider and get the whole region.
While Claro hasn’t been very clear about exactly how much the iPhone will cost, when it’ll be for sale, or really anything except to say that it’s coming. I do have some information.
According to their prices posted for mexico the monthly plans will cost between $45 USD per month and $85 USD per month. The rumors for chile had similar prices. The phone will cost between $450 USD and $0 USD depending on contract, 8gb vs 16gb, etc… Taxes included, which in latin america are substantial, here in Uruguay the IVA sales tax is %21.
How many iphones are coming down south? Well i don’t know all the numbers, but Claro’s confirmation page when you request notice about the phones says that they have imported 20,000 phones to Argentina, Uruguay, and Paraguay each. On the surface that seems fare, each country gets a nice shipment. The problem is, Argentina is a MUCH bigger country than the guay’s. Argentina’s population is 40.6 million, Paraguay’s 6.8, and Uruguay’s 3.4. The data i found is from 2006, but Argentina’s cell phone penetration is better than %76. Uruguay’s is %67, and Paraguay’s is %47. So not only did Argentina get fewer phones, they’ve got more people are likely to WANT one. There are 13.5 times more iphones for sale when adjusted for the cellphone ownership market in Uruguay than Argentina!
Given that it’s a couple hour ferry ride across the river from Argentina to Uruguay i expect there might be a grey market of Argentines buying their iPhone from Claro Uruguay if Claro Argentina sells out.
There have been come claims that Movistar (owned by the spanish telefonica) also will be selling iPhones in latin america, but clearly it’s not at launch, because there’s nothing on their websites about it.
I’ll followup when they actually release their prices and say when they will start selling them.