Apple is held up as user friendly and simple. In many ways it is. However even Apple fails the test when it comes to abstracting technological underpinnings from the user. I love my iPhone, but frequently am unable to take photos with it. It tells me “There is not enough room to take additional pictures. Please delete some existing photos.”
The iPhone should free space for me. I should never know this happened. My iPhone knows that it is a cache, not a storage medium. It knows which photos I have saved to my computer and which are unique. It knows which songs I haven’t listened to in months. It could free space, but doesn’t. Apple simplicity for the loss!
In the “unforgivable sin” category: even if I delete a number of photos, my iPhone still claims there is insufficient space! Wait a minute - I know there is more space - I just deleted photos (that thing you told me to do so you would stop complaining!!!) Argh. :-(
Technology still sucks a lot. This is probably obvious to everyone, but as a technologist, I know exactly where the failings are and get more frustrated than the average person. Sure, you get annoyed when your wireless network doesn’t just work, but I actually know why it doesn’t work, see the terrible engineering decisions that lead to this outcome, and get frustrated and disappointed in humanity.
Ok so it’s not that bad. But we have far to go. An example: I can no longer get on my home wireless router, because a neighbor just added a router in their house on the same wireless channel. So the signals are competing. So I’ll have to change my router to a new channel. Which begs the question - why should I need to do this? The two routers know they’re competing, they can “see” each other, they should switch channels automatically. Little things, big headaches.
Sharing another personal success: my second launch at Google - real estate search! This has been one of my main focuses, and is great to get out there. Both Google Operating System and Lifehacker picked this up fairly quickly, though they both incorrectly come to the conclusion that data is not from Google Base (it is).
Just thought I’d share a personal success: my first launch at Google - mapped web pages! I am only a minor piece of the overall chain, but it has been fun to see it through. Even cooler is the fact that Google Operating System picked it up fairly quickly, with good things to say about it.
Update - I have a post at Google about this.check it out! Yep - I’m that same Abe Murray pretty cool, eh?
Winning isn’t about stickiness. Over the long term, the web services that win will be the best, winning by virtue of features and ability to please users. Businesses that try to win by trapping users like flies will lose to those that trust their customers to choose the best product, and trust themselves to provide the best product.
Example: disqus comment platform. I am using this on my Hidden Evidence blog, but not on this personal blog. Why? Because I am worried about data portability and the longevity of disqus. (See the first comment on this post testing the disqus system and voicing my concerns).
Disqus is awesome, it leverages the network effect for blog commenting, benefiting long tail blog owners (myself) and widely read blog readers and commenters (same me, different hat). As a blogger, I benefit from scale in commenting, user verification, and spam management. As a blog reader, I benefit from ease of commenting, and a centralized dashboard for my participation across the blogosphere.
Disqus is limiting and scary, it requires I entrust a critical portion of my blog (comments) to a third party, without any tools to switch between self management and hosted management. What if disqus goes away? Gets bought by someone else, who decides to charge, or degrades the service? They provide basic export tools, but that does me no good - I need the comments to stay with the posts.
Data portability should be designed in - if I knew disqus didn’t want my data as a tool to hold onto me, but instead wanted to earn my trust every day by being the best at blog comment management, I would jump on board in a heartbeat. Instead I’m testing the water, and have lingering concerns. Every web app should answer this fundamental need. Because if they don’t, others will come along that do. And they will win.
It’s all about trust - and trust must be earned, not won.
Why do most of us travel to work every day? Why do we work in large boxes removed from nature and family life? Why do we continue to propagate this system?
This all goes back to the Jefferson vs. Hamilton debate. Will humans be independent producers, masters of their own fate, creating an economy from many solid individual units? Or will we be grouped together into firms backed by capital, more efficiently producing in population centers and dependent upon banks and industrialists to provide for our jobs and life?
Hamilton won. And it made sense - there are costs to having a society of freelancers (read up on Coase if interested). Reputation is hard to assess if every work transaction is with someone new. Far easier if you are both employees of the same firm, etc.
But Jefferson’s world is superior, more in keeping with our natural state as humans. So while we may be limited to Hamilton’s world for the time being, we should be working for the world Jefferson envisioned. Technology can solve many of the problems that make firms more efficient, and enable us to shift back to a true capitalist society, where every single transaction, even at the level of individual daily production (even of knowledge work), occurs in a truly free market. Individuals only work if they so desire on a given day, and get paid effective market rates. Everyone would know and choose their contribution.
In this world, we wouldn’t need firms, or to live in population centers that strip us of our happiness and humanity. We could live in smaller rural communities. We could spread our efforts out between desk jobs and gardens, between the world of economics and production and the world of families and education and church. Behavioral studies find people are happier in smaller communities where they know one another. Why not shift away from urbanisation back towards communal groups that feed our souls?
Most importantly, we could all know how we fit, do what we were lead to do, and understand how the market rewarded it. The responsibility for taking care of ourselves (and of our local communities) would be more clear. I think we would all be happier and more confident in this world. I would, at any rate
I want to work to help this world materialize. Technologies that obviate the need for workers to be in the same place excite me. Hence doodleboard. Technologies that allow participants to trade knowledge work in a free market are exciting (Elance, oDesk, Etsy, and others).
I believe this world will come. If people didn’t have to work in cities, would they choose to? Where would you live if you could work from anywhere? I think about this all the time! So please - if you have thoughts on this, share them. Criticize, critique, or agree, I want to hear it.
Allow me to (re)introduce Shirley Bell Designs! Shirley is a longtime neighbor and family friend, and it’s been my pleasure to help appropriately showcase her beautiful artwork online. New site features include an improved image gallery, better information about the artist, and the ability to purchase her artwork online. We’re also doing some tentative marketing, to increase organic search results as well as generate paid search leads. This is actually a very interesting process - I recommend everyone try it for something.
I chose PayPal for a payment solution. The downside is the shopping cart isn’t perfectly integrated, and the prices are slightly higher than Google Checkout’s, however unlike Checkout PayPal allows purchasing without PayPal accounts, which significantly increases the number of potential customers.
My favorite bit is the “we believe ” section. A sample: “we believe in keeping our designs simple and clean, leaving room for the card giver to add a message the artwork may reflect.”
So it has been a while since I posted … have been very busy with doodleboard since the “Mid-Summer Update” post. Check the site out - it is very cool. Tijan and I have been pushing very hard, proved the concept, verified the market, built an alpha product, filed provisional patents. Currently doing our best to turn this into our jobs post-HBS graduation! Very exciting, we’re looking forward to getting a shot at it. Check the doodleboard blog out as well for more of a blow-by-blow of the business.
James and I updated our web host, and with him in Hawaii and I in Massachusetts, my backups got lost somewhere in between for a while… thus this blog was down (and thus the time between posts). Good news - he’s headed back to RI for this summer! It will be great to get the original rocketmonkey back on the east coast.
Finally, I’m going to be a daddy! Any day now - due date is April 11th… kind of crazy to be an expectant father, an entrepreneur, graduating with lots of school debt and no certainty about the future. But I am certain I will love being a father, that I love being a husband to Francesca, and that I can’t wait to meet our child! (Pictures will follow, as the little one arrives).
We are pressing ahead on doodleboard. Check out the blog and public alpha! Tijan and I have been working on this since the mid-summer update post below. I solved some tricky tech problems with drawing lots of things in the browser and maintaining a pleasant user experience… filing two provisional patents on that.
The doodleboard itself is pretty cool - we envision making it easier for distributed teams to actually collaborate remotely. Providing really simple collaboration, updating the whiteboard in all of our offices and cubicles for the information age, in a product that people will use. Check it out, give us feedback!
My neighbor Shirley Bell is a wonderful watercolor artist, and I just completed overseeing her first foray into the world of the web. You can see some of her artwork at www.shirleybelldesigns.com. Just thought I’d share! Some samples of her work are shown below, she also does greeting cards, giclee reproductions, and much more.
pretty cool, eh?
