There are good reasons for some start-ups to run in stealth mode for months or years of their early existence.
I was reminded of a few as I was reading Chris Maxcer’s review of Joost for the iPhone. Check out this gem, about the desktop version:
I had briefly used Joost’s client-side Mac video viewing application in its early days, back when Joost had very little content … then forgot about it.
The dilemma is harsh: you want to launch as early as possible to:
start the buzz machine
stake your claim to the space
tantalize current and potential investors
maybe, possibly, potentially, hopefully start to pull in some small amount of revenue
and, of course, reassure your mother that you have a real job, actually work, have prospects, and aren’t aimless, drifting, shiftless, and just too stubborn to admit it
But the problem is obvious: launching too soon can blow your buzz as users eat your dogfood and throw up … never to arrive at your dinner table again.
That’s exactly what happened to Chris. In this case, however, Joost is lucky enough (and, frankly, has enough market momentum) to warrant a second look – occasioned by the release of their app on a new platform: the iPhone.
The question is: have they learned their lesson? Apparently not, as Maxcer reports:
The 1,813 reviews on the Apple App Store seem to agree with me: Joost has lots of promise but it fails miserably. The average rating is two stars. Many users, though, noted that they were basically waiting for a non-buggy updated version from Joost.
Flickr dropped PayPal support in June 2007. I had always paid for my Flickr Pro account with PayPal … some extra cash that I get from ads on this site, in fact. So when they dropped PayPal, I dropped Pro.
Just now I discovered that PayPal was reinstated as a payment option only a few months after – and I totally missed it.
This morning I visited Flickr, saw a special upgrade offer to go back to Pro, thought I’d check it out, and lo and behold, Paypal is back in all its glory.
OK, so you’re on Twitter and you’re telling everybody the minutiae of your life. Thanks for the one about the toenail gunk, by the way.
Or, you’re a little smarter and you’re actually providing meaningful, relevant information that other professionals like you would find interesting and useful. This, actually, with just a dash of personal info, is the way to be successful on Twitter and gain legions of followers. (Whether “being successful on Twitter” is a meaningful goal in your life I leave as an exercise to the reader.)
Be that as it may, there’s definitely a way to be unsuccessful on Twitter and to get yourself un-followed … and that is posting too often.
The “Duke of SEO” has an unbelievable posting frequency:
4 minutes ago
11 minutes ago
20 minutes ago
27 minutes ago
….
Let’s get real: there’s a ton of noise on the web. Sorting the signal from the noise is the great challenge of using the web effectively. I use Twitter to stay in touch with people that matter to me. People like Phil Gerbyshak, Matthew Ingram, Tara Hunt, and many more. Some I know personally; some I don’t. But they all do interesting things and talk about them in interesting ways.
When someone posts as often Duke of SEO, it’s like a neighbor has his 5000-watt stereo turned to Devastatingly, Unmeasurably Loud. No one else can speak. No one else can communicate. Even when the 5000-watt stereo has good things to say … sometimes you want to listen to other voices.
I’ve been hearing more than a few things about Malcolm Gladwell’s new book, Outliers.
Wayne Hurlbert (gotta love that last name) just read and reviewed it on Blog Business World. As a good Canadian, he pulled a good Canuck anecdote out of the book:
Malcolm Gladwell begins his book with the seemingly innocent observation that elite level hockey players share similar birth dates, clustered in the first three months of the year. With this data in hand, the author discovers a pattern that has gone unnoticed by others. While coaches, selecting eight and ten year old hockey players believed they were selecting talent objectively, their selection bias favored older and bigger players. As a result of their being chosen, the players received better coaching and more playing time. By they time they reached adulthood, as a result of this self fulfilling prophecy, the players were better than their slightly younger cohorts.
I recently saw this snippet as I browsed through my old files from a previous job:
There’s a story about Robespierre that has the preeminent rabble-rouser of the French Revolution leaping up from his chair as soon as he saw a mob assembling outside.
“I must see which way the crowd is headed,” Robespierre is reputed to have said: “For I am their leader.”
Some people are so desperate to lead they don’t care where they’re going …
A few weeks ago I went searching for a simple, quick image annotation utility.
I annotate images and PDFs every day, multiple times a day. And most tools currently in use for it are expensive or user UNfriendly, or both.
So I couldn’t have been happier when I found Skitch. Skitch is a dead-simple utility that allows you to edit image files, quickly annotating them with circles, squares, text, and arrows in a variety of sizes and colors.
Oh, and did I mention it’s drop-dead gorgeous? Seriously, if I can say this without losing all my card-carrying guy credentials, how many apps have an icon that beautiful? Here’s the good part: in this case, the beauty is not just skin-deep.
I happen to use Mac OS X’s built-in utilities for screen captures, or in some rare cases, Snapz Pro X. But Skitch can handle that as well.
One feature that has completely saved my Canadian bacon is Skitch’s history. In the course of a day of architecting software, creating wireframes out of pieces of this and pieces of that, I go through a LOT of screenshots. Being a bit of a neat freak in terms of my desktop, I tend to delete them just as quickly as I create them … sometimes too quickly. But fortunately, Skitch has a memory, and I’ve been able to retrieve images from Skitch that would otherwise have taken me multiple minutes to re-create.
An interesting add-on: Skitch is trying to make sharing screen caps a social activity: sharing them. I’m not too sure how big this will become – it seems a bit of a stretch – or if they are simply angling to be acquired by one of the bigsocialnetworking sites. In any case, since most of my shots are work-related, I can’t post them to a public site.
OK. A picture is a thousand words, so a movie must be at least a hundred. As soon as YouTube finishes crunching my screencast, I’ll embed a quick video here of Skitch in action …
It’s a little dated, but I ran across this today and couldn’t help but laugh:
Microsoft is clearly out to wed the Zune with Windows Mobile in a effort to get the two failures to prop each other up in its “I’m not dead yet!” fight against the iPhone.
Of course, it’s really only funny if you know the Monty Python skit the author is referring to …
“It’s like the first time in a long time he hasn’t spoken in Macworld,” said Samuel Wilson, an analyst at JMP Securities. “Why is he not speaking this year would be the question.”
Yes, the first time he isn’t speaking at Macworld in a long time is rather like the first time he isn’t speaking at Macworld in a long time. Startlingly so, in fact.
(I can’t point fingers too much – this language has infiltrated most of us to the extent that once in a while, we all use it.)
Usability is the new motherhood and apple pie: unquestionably good … and almost as hard to find.
Everyone agrees that software should be user-friendly. But what does that actually mean? I’ve been architecting a LOT of desktop software in the past few months, and I’ve been revisiting some of my ideas about usability.
While it’s true that there are a million different factors involved in creating software that people love to use, the five key measures that Nielsen and Schneiderman created stand out in my mind:
Efficiency
Learnability
Errors
Memorability
Satisfaction
Efficiency
Can users do what they want to do quickly, simply, and without a lot of fuss? Or do they need to fight your software and perform circus contortionist acts to do what they want to do?
Learnability
Have you designed your software, menus, buttons, and tabs so they are easily understandable, even for a first-time user? Or is a first-time user completely lost and unable to proceed without a manual or a training session?
Errors
This is strongly related to learnability – how many errors do new users make? Do they continually make the same or same kind of errors? If they make an error, how easy is it to reverse, correct, or undo the error?
Satisfaction
How do users feel while they are using your application? After? Is it frustrating? Do their stress levels rise? Does the software give them a feeling of competence and power, or ignorance and failure?
. . .
As mentioned previously, there are a million other factors that influence software usability. And it can be hard to measure – there’s usually not a binary yes/no answer.
But if your software scores high on these five attributes with users, chances are you have strong usability. And, chances are people will like the software well enough to use it, talk about it, and maybe even purchase upgrades for it.
There’s been a very interesting little “discussion” going around what we used to call the blogosphere.
TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington spent the previous week at LeWeb, in Paris, where in response to some questions, he said that Europeans love life too much to generate the biggest technology success stories. They have too many 2-hour lunches and too few late-night coding sessions. LeWeb’s organizer Loic Le Meur responded by asking – on his blog – whether Arrington should be invited back.
Meanwhile, Zoho Office blogger Sridhar reflects that Japanese work even harder … often 12 or more hours daily.
This issue is bulls-eye topical for me, as I’ve been working 12 to 14 hour days lately in my new job.
But … let’s be honest.
There can be times when you go way overboard and work mega-hours to pass critical checkpoints. But 99% of people will not be long-term successful (or happy) being out of balance all the time. The old saw about no-one wishing on their deathbed that they’d spent more time at the office is true. And realistically, almost no-one is actually effective spending that many hours for very many days.
As I mentioned on the Zoho Office blog …
I’ve also read first-hand accounts from ex-pat workers in Japan who said that a LOT of the office time was actually just face time … there was not a lot more work actually getting done. But people couldn’t leave, because that would have been see as slacking. So they stayed at their desks, doing a little online shopping, doing a little of this and a little of that.
Here’s the deal: I’d much rather work smart than work hard. That is where you’re actually going to make the major difference – where you’re going to leap-frog the competition.
For some unexplained and probably unexplainable reason I was thinking of Netscape this morning.
It was the time of the morning when unconscious sleep is inching reluctantly toward conscious wakefulness … and the subconscious has free rein to dream up all kinds of irrelevant nonsense.
I have to say, I felt some nostalgia for those days in the early 90s … the little satellite zipping around the globe while a page was loading slowly on your 28.8 kbps modem … the mostly-gray web with blue links.
This is a sad end to a technology that, with Mosaic, essentially created the web experience:
Given AOL’s current business focus and the success the Mozilla Foundation has had in developing critically-acclaimed products, we feel it’s the right time to end development of Netscape branded software.
What odd things come to mind in the small hours of the morning.
I knew it would happen in my lifetime: Google Calendar and Apple iCal syncing simply, quickly, effortlessly:
Google calls it Calaboration … and yes, that’s the way they spell it. The software is a thing of beauty. Download, install, enter your Gmail account information, and you’re done. In my initial testing on two Macs, it works perfectly and quickly.
It also completely reduces the need for Apple’s MobileMe. Now my calendar is everywhere I want to be, and it’s on my iPhone either through syncing (unlikely, as I only sync every couple of weeks or so) or through simply going to Google Calendar in Safari, and checking the latest updates.
Welcome to Sparkplug 9, John Koetsier's blog on technology and social media.
I'm a software exec who cares about UX and UI, scours web & social media, lives in Canada, plays hockey, uses a Mac (mostly). Oh, and I blog and speak at conferences.
Be that as it may, there’s definitely a way to be unsuccessful on Twitter and to get yourself un-followed … and that is posting too often.
For some unexplained and probably unexplainable reason I was thinking of Netscape this morning. 
Welcome to Sparkplug 9, John Koetsier's blog on technology and social media.
