1. links for 2006-04-01

    March 31st, 2006

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  2. 50 Reasons Why More People Aren’t Using Your Website

    March 31st, 2006

    I don’t usually link to X things about Y posts, they seem to meme-out well on their own, but Scott Heiferman’s list is more than just laundry: it gets the point across.

    1. Because they don’t want to generate content, they want better life
    2. Because it solves a problem they don’t have
    3. Because it won’t help them with their problem
    4. Because oprah didn’t mention it
    5. Because everyone they know isn’t using it
    6. Because it doesn’t let them spy on people they care about
    7. Because they just don’t care about what they see
    8. Because nobody at work said they should use it
    9. Because it’s not fun enough
    10. Because it doesn’t make them smile

    And the rest of the list. (Via Seth Godin)

    Posted by Assaf Filed in general 2 Comments »

  3. links for 2006-03-30

    March 29th, 2006

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  4. links for 2006-03-29

    March 28th, 2006

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  5. The pragmatic’s guide to Web architectures

    March 27th, 2006

    There’s a big battle of words raging on to define what the hell we’re doing and why we’re doing it all wrong.

    Are Web services on the Web, or do they have to use SOAP? How is low REST different from high REST? Does XML/HTTP work better if we call it POX? When is AJAX not AJAX? Who owns the semantic landscape?

    There are also a lot of people building applications, that don’t have time to argue how you call it or what it means, just as long as it works. We call them, “the pragmatics”. This post is for them.

    When it comes to designing Web services, there’s a few choices of architecture style, and stacks of technologies to choose from. It’s still undecided which one will rule them all, the race if far from over. Most people who write about that stuff hope their horse is the winning one.

    I’m no exception. So I’m going to play pundit and tell you which architecture style I think works best for the Web, which technology stack I prefer to use … Read the rest of the post here.

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  6. links for 2006-03-26

    March 25th, 2006

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  7. At the risk of flaming …

    March 24th, 2006

    5060569_f01a017abd[1].jpg

    James Gosling responds to all those who took him to task on his previous comments. And in response he makes some strong, compelling arguments. I just don’t understand what he’s arguing for.

    That PostScript is not a good language for writing interactive shoot’em’up games? I think we sensed that. That by inference Perl and Ruby and Python are not good languages for writing Doom VI? I think we came to terms with that. That Java is a great multi-purpose programming language? No doubt.

    Java is great, don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. But what makes it so great, and Gosling is great at capturing that, is also it’s Achilles heel.

    If I’m building a help-desk service, a yet-another photo sharing site, or a financial application, I only need to worry about one thing. The application I’m developing. It doesn’t help me that the language can do games and interplanetary navigation. In fact, I’d rather it didn’t.

    A language that does interactive games needs a lot of optimizations. In most applications those optimizations are irrelevant, but you pay for them: the language is verbose, strict and hard to work with. All those premature optimizations you want to avoid in your design, are built into the language itself!

    A language that can run on anything from cell phones to spaceships needs a lot of abstractions. But when I’m building my help-desk app, I don’t want to work extra hard just to make a simple SQL query. I’ll never port it to a cell phone, and I’ll never send it flying into space. Do I need all that complexity?

    One could argue that if you only learn one language … well, if I only learn one language than I’m not doing my job. Being a productive software developer is not about learning one language and using it to hammer every nail. Being a productive software developer is about learning the best language to solve the problem in front of you.

    All I can say, given the new reality of software development, Java is a hard language to defend. I’m glad that’s not my job.

    Sci-fi photo by Simon Zirkunow.

    Posted by Assaf Filed in general 4 Comments »

  8. Authenticity is the side-effect of being small, Redux

    March 23rd, 2006

    A few clarifications in response to Tara’s post and comments on her post.

    When I talk about size and scaling, size is not how many things your produce, how much money you’re making, or how many people are in your community. Small is the distance between the people setting making change, and the people asking for it. Small is the least number of tiers of management and procedures, all of which turn great ideas into bland experiences.

    Firefox is small, because the distance between users and developers is zero. You don’t like a feature? Help make it better. Or e-mail someone who can make it better. So do small companies like Opera. You’ll notice that in any company where the CEO responds to their customers in person. Open source has the advantage that it can stay small and scale big.

    MySpace is small. Who’s your first friend when you join MySpace? Can you think of a new feature before they go and add it? Can you control your space by changing how it looks?

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    Quality, a word that deserves a post of its own, measures how well something meets expectations. It’s easy to scale zero defect quality, but zero defect quality works great with average products. Just ask Toyota.

    A small coffee shop is not necessarily better than Starbucks, most of the small coffee shops I know are worse than Starbucks. Starbucks gives you the zero defect quality, it always taste the same. But Starbucks doesn’t give you taste or service quality. That’s because shop owners have to go through training, executive approval, corporate standards and performance reviews. They all have to be the same, they all have to act average.

    A good Starbucks shop has more seating space, stays open until late and has easy parking. A good Starbucks shop doesn’t serve better coffee than any other Starbucks shop (it can’t), doesn’t play better music (it can’t), doesn’t respond to what you want it to be (it can’t).

    A small coffee shop can do that. A passionate owner that can interact daily with passionate customers. One on one. They can make the experience better without going through layers of red tapes. People don’t like the music? You change it. People like smaller tables? You change it. People prefer darker roast? You add it to the menu. You never have to stop and think “how do I get this though management, and plan a release in 6 months over 1,000 nationwide stores”. You just respond.

    And what it gives you is quality that is personal, quality that people can feel but can’t quantify into working procedures and performance reviews. Quality you can’t put in an Excel spreedsheet. That’s the authentic quality, the in-person quality, and that one doesn’t scale.

    And I leave it as an excercise to the reader to find out how this is all related to Pinko marketing and “get out of the way”.

    Image by King Seven.

    Posted by Assaf Filed in general 3 Comments »

  9. links for 2006-03-23

    March 22nd, 2006

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  10. Authenticity is the side-effect of being small

    March 22nd, 2006

    I can’t believe he said that:

    Are we ever authentic? Is fresh goat cheese made in tiny batches (bought on a farm in France) any different from huge vats of goat cheese produced by Kraft somewhere in Wisconsin and delivered weekly to your local supermarket? What if you couldn’t tell them apart in a taste test?

    I love Seth’s blog, it’s brilliant. But this time, he took his thesis a bit too far and damn the reality.

    For the record this all starts with toothpastes, Colgates buying Tom’s. I don’t think it will make Tom’s any less authentic, unfortunately I don’t think it will make Tom’s any better. Aquafresh is my preferred choice, they make the best tasting toothpaste ever. In a blind taste, the one that tastes less like mint-covered sandpaper wins.

    But back to Seth’s thesis.

    To answer the question: yes.

    espresso[1].jpg
    My favorite coffee shop, the owner has hand selected the best coffee beans in the world, bought the best coffee machines in the world. They also eat their own dog food so to speak. They taste drinks made by their barrista (each and every one, as often as they can), they sit down and receive service like every other customer.

    You can’t scale that.

    No matter how much you try, the key ingredient doesn’t scale. It’s called taste and preferences.

    Starbucks can buy the best coffee in the world, can purchase the best machines in the world, but can the owner taste ever barrista’s drinks? Can they sit at every store and experience the service? Will they remember every employee by name? Can they pay enough attention to the details to keep quality?

    When your business is about taste and human touch, it starts out as either great, bad or bland. It’s all up to the owner’s taste and preferences. When you franchise, you add more owners, you split the workload across people of varying tastes and preferences. And all of a sudden it’s no longer great, bad or bland. It’s just average.

    Because part of scaling is making sure that the store in Cleveland is no less better than the store in Pittsburg. When you can’t let one store be worse, you can’t let other stores be better, and all of a sudden everyone plays on the average scale.

    Do they lose authenticity? Maybe. But that’s irrelevant. Authenticity doesn’t make great products, authenticity is a side effect of great experiences.

    Your local sandwich shop may be better than or worse than Subway, because there will always be opportunities to be better or worse than average. Would you hype the local authentic bad sandwich shop? Or would you only hear about the local authentic great sandwich shop? You see, authenticate is not better, but better is authentic.

    What we hype is something different, something better, something personal you can’t quantify but can only feel. And what you can’t quantify can’t be franchised of merchandised, because there’s no system in the world that can mass produce the untangible. What we call authentic is that untangile thing we can’t quite describe that makes all the difference, the little difference in taste or aroma that only a few people know how to make right.

    Incidentally, that thing we call authentic doesn’t scale.

    Update: More here and here.

    Posted by Assaf Filed in general No Comments »

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