June
Big Doings at Edison
Saturday, June 24, 2006 9:36 PM (permalink)
After several weeks of hard work, and with the excellent design assistance of multi-talented Mike Rundle, I managed to get two new sites launched for Edison at once: our newly redesigned main site, plus The Infinite Dial, Edison's new blog on the future of audio entertainment. Y'all come by and visit, now.
An Actual Joyent Workflow
Saturday, June 24, 2006 4:32 PM (permalink)
For the past few weeks I have been revisiting the Joyent collaboration suite as, at the very least, a brainless way for me to archive emails from my IMAP server at work, since it is very easy to add Joyent to Outlook and write a quick rule to send a copy of everything to Joyent's inbox. I got a Joyent account as part of my hosting package with Textdrive, but after some initial frustration with its earliest iteration, decided it just wasn't baked enough yet to be of use.
I checked back on Joyent last month, however, and was pleased to see that progress had been made, and while the app still feels like a beta, it is, at least, pretty usable and extremely flexible once you get under the hood. The Joyeurs have promised another update very soon which will solve the main problem--speed (GMail puts it to shame) but it works, and it works surprisingly well as a central tool to organize your workflow.
Let's say you are a devotee of David Allen's ubiquitous Getting Things Done, or GTD methodology, and you loves you some lists. Well, Joyent's flexible framework of notifications, smart mailboxes and tagging system actually works very, very well--much better than GMail, if your desire is to tie your central task list to your email.
Here's how I do it. First, I work primarily in two areas of the site: Connect, and Mail. Connect is the primary collection screen for Notifications, which are used as a collaborative tool to flag emails, dates or files for others in your workgroup and add tags and comments. But Notifications are also great when you are El Lobo Solo, an Army of One like me. I need to have two sets of lists--a list of actions by context (stuff I can do on my computer, stuff I can do while traveling, etc--fairly standard GTD here) and a list of my active projects. The Connect tab lets me keep the two lists separate.
Start on your Connect page, and start making yourself a series of smart groups by clicking the '+' next to smart groups, and entering a name (@Calls) and adding a tag of the same name. I have a bunch of these, all preceded by an '@', to signify an action I need to take.
Since this list is sorted by context, not priority, I also created an additional smart group, seen here as '@!!!', for things I have to do TODAY (I also tag them with the appropriate context as well). If I don't finish things in the @!!! the day I tag them, I suffer gastrointestinal distress. (No, really. You don't want an endoscopy if you can help it.)
So here is my list of smart groups;
Your mileage may vary. I also have a smart group for my travel itineraries--it's just handy for me. So now you have a bunch of context/actions in smart groups on your Connect page. Now it is time to click on the Mail tab, and start creating Smart Mailboxes, one for each active project, as opposed to context--this keeps everything nice and segmented. Here is my current list:
These are created the same way that Smart Groups were made on the Connect page--just hit the '+' sign, name the mailbox, and then add a tag for the project.
So now you are ready to work--and the workflow part is pretty easy. All you do is get your mail into Joyent, and then process it on the mail screen. I open each mail, and decide if I need to keep it. If I don't I delete it, but if I do or it triggers an action I tag it with at least 1 and up to 3 or 4 tags. The first tag is the project (which should be an active project, so it should already have a smart mailbox--you need to use the same tag.) If there is an action associated, you also tag it with the correct '@' context. So, in this example, I have an email related to my upcoming presentation at the Corporate Podcast Summit:
I tag it with 'podcastsummit' (which matches the tag I used to define my 'Podcast Summit' smart mailbox) and, because it is an email I need to write, I tag it '@computer."
This will put the mail itself archived in the right mailbox (which I can delete when the project is over--it is just a virtual box, after all--the orginal email and its tag persist and can always be recreated) and put it in my @Computer Smart Group on the Connect screen. If I need to add a clarification about what the task is, I simply add a comment at the bottom of the email in the Comment field, another great Joyent innovation.
Finally, if the email triggers an actual hard action that I have to do (as opposed to @Waiting For, @Someday or @TravelInfo) I take one more step--I add a notification:
Since I am the only user, I click on me (duh!) What this does is put the email itself into the main message list of my Connect screen, so it becomes a master task list of everything I have to act on:
You can see that I can click on the various contexts if I need to make calls, or collect stuff to take with me on my next trip, but the main screen lets me see everything I have to do, all at once.
I then move the email to my Filed mailbox and get it off my mail screen. Job done.
When I complete an action, all I do is select the message on my main Connect screen, then de-select the @tag and the Notification (but I leave the project tag). It then disappears from my Connect screen and the @context smart group, so it is no longer a task--but it stays in the Smart Mailbox for the project so it is there to review.
When I am offline, I can either print the @Calls screen to take my calls on the road, or I can subscribe to the RSS feed for the smart group (everything has an RSS feed, another great feature) and access it on my phone from NewsGator Mobile.
Anyway, as you can see from some of these screenshots, this is a working system, and I have lots in it at any one time. As ad hoc tasks come up, I either just do them immediately or pretty soon, or I just send myself a quick email to my Joyent account and process it later. Works for me, maybe it will work for you.
Calendars, Startups and Buckets of Cash
Monday, June 12, 2006 2:54 PM (permalink)
I have written a smidge about calendar apps before, but recently another post on Business Logs(no, Mike, I am not cyber-stalking you) reminded me that there sure is a gigantic pantload of online calendars out there at the moment, and most of them seem to do about the same thing: underwhelm.
Mike Rundle wonders if the questionable design and/or usability of some of these calendar sites has to do with funding--in other words, why would a top-tier designer leave their cushy high-paying gig to take a flyer on a highly risky startup without buckets of cash? Well, I can't speak for top-tier designers (clearly) but I can speak as someone who once left a cushy six-figure job to do exactly that--take a flier on a very risky startup.
Now, my startup might have been a gigantic multimillion-dollar dot-bomb of legend, but other than an ulcer that never went away, I came out fine. It didn't take buckets of cash to lure me into a nearly life-wrecking 12-month fiasco (and lure me out of the country, to boot), but it did take the promise of a challenge, a business problem to solve, and the chance to be on the ground floor of something that could potentially have been of great value. While equity and the possibility of future buckets of cash was a factor, immediate gratification buckets of cash were not.
There are two ways, really, to attract top talent (as a non-founder) to a startup: the aforementioned buckets of money, or the aforementioned promise of future buckets of money. It really doesn't matter which you choose--both are dependent on the same thing: a really great idea that solves a business problem for a marketplace that sees value in the solution.
With this in your back pocket, you have a shot at one of two outcomes: a compelling, fundable business plan (which gets you the seed capital you need to hire top design talent) or an extremely compelling equity pitch for a talented designer with vision who can see the merit (and chances for success) of your idea. If your idea is half-baked, don't expect an A-lister to jump ship under any circumstances.
All of this is a convoluted way to get around to Mike's point. I am not sure that Mike is 100% right about the money thing for all startups--there are plenty of past and future entrepreneurs out there who will jump at a great idea, and despite tripping and falling pretty good at my last startup I would do it again in a heartbeat if I thought I had a line on a unique solution to a business problem. I would just make Mike's point in a more specific way--it probably would take a huuuuge pile of cash to lure a genuinely talented designer to one of these Calendar 2.0 sites--because most of them answer a question that nobody asked.
Read their support fora, blogs and message boards. You'll find vocal supporters everywhere, all of whom seem to be requesting essentially the same thing--help me sync your app with this other app I already use. In my case, I am saddled with Microsoft Exchange Server at work (and use a Mac at home) so I need at a minimum to sync (not export/import, but sync) with at least one of either Outlook or iCal, and preferably both. Folks on the far left of the consumer adoption curve may be willing to suffer inconveniences to use one of these apps, but that great bulge in the middle of the curve will not.
The larger issue with the Calendar apps, however, is that for the most part they don't see the big picture of customer experience. They focus on improving the mechanics of adding an event, or providing a cleaner interface, or social networking/ tagging/ Ajax/ blah/blah/blah but don't think through exactly how, when and why I need to update my calendar in the first place. A communication always triggers the need to schedule an event, and 90% of my daily communication is via email. When I get a meeting request from someone at work, and it gets automatically scheduled when I accept, that is about as much as I really want to think about my calendar. That is why Outlook, Entourage and now the GMail/Google Calendar work so well.
For Joe Six-pack Internet user to really use a calendar, it's got to be tightly integrated with email, not other calendars, and certainly not Del.icio.us or Google Earth. Calendar apps are like radios--useful, even enabling--but no one buys a radio. They buy a CD player, or an MP3 player, with a built-in tuner. I hold out more hope for folks like Joyent or Zimbra, because their calendars are tied to a communication/collaboration suite.
Let's set aside 37 Signals' nice-looking effort, because their offering is an add-on to an existing product--and one that their paying customers have been asking for. Take a hard look at this list again. They all have their merits, and many of them work quite nicely. But which one of them would you send 50 or 60 bucks a year to? 10 bucks a month? How many subscriptions are you willing to carry each month--especially if you have Netflix, a TiVO, TypePad, and a raft of other services giving your wallet the death of a million paper cuts? If the users of these services would evaporate when charged, then there is no there there.
Hoping to get bought by Google is not a business strategy. And developing a calendar app supported by Google AdWords, while Google promotes its own calendar app, is a lousy business strategy--not because I think it is impossible to beat Google Calendar or do a better job--far from it. You are RC Cola, and Google is Coke. You are essentially splitting your revenues with Coke without gaining access to Coke's promotional strength or distribution network of machines, distributors and restaurant sales. And Coke is selling their own soda on every street corner around you, except they get to pocket 100% of the ad revenue. Heads they win, tails you lose.
So, the bottom line for me is that I might again one day leave my (new) cushy job for another fling on the start-up-a-whirl, but it's going to take more than a calendar. I bet there are some designers out there--and some venture capitalists--who feel the same.
Tord Gustavsen Trio
Saturday, June 10, 2006 10:07 PM (permalink)
Is Anyone Home at Hotels.com?
Monday, June 5, 2006 10:07 PM (permalink)
On a recent trip to London, I wanted to stay a night at a hotel near Paddington Station, so I could be close to a train I needed to catch early on the second day of my trip. London is a city I know pretty well, having lived there for a year, but I don't know the Paddington area that well. While I generally use Orbitz or SideStep for my travel arrangements, I decided to try Hotels.com in order to use their advanced search to be sure my hotel was near the train station (and, hopefully, of a quality befitting the dignity of my station.)
I ended up having a terrible experience--the hotel informed me when I arrived (at 9 a.m., after an all-night flight) that my room was being renovated, and the repairs weren't finished. So I was moved rather unceremoniously to "one of their other properties," which turned out to not be a hotel at all, but a furnished corporate apartment over in Princes Square (and not at all near Paddington.) Sadly, I had prepaid the room through Hotels.com, so rather than eat the cost of the room (especially at our current exchange rate with the Pound) I took the room, but sent Hotels.com a polite but firm expression of my disappointment--surely someone could have called me the night before to tell me my room was torn apart, so that I could have had the option to make other arrangements.
Their response was to send me $60.00 (??) in travel vouchers, a figure which bears little relation to the amount I spent on the hotel, and appears to be someone's best guess at the value of my "pain and suffering." Case closed, at least as far as they were concerned. Well, not so much--especially since those vouchers will never be used.
Yesterday, you see, I learned that my personal data may have been stolen from Hotels.com.. High-tech hacking? A Mission Impossible-style highwire act in the corporate data center? Nope--left on a laptop, stolen from a cab. Now, I realize that the immediate blame for this falls on the Ernst & Young auditor who had the data on the laptop, but why in hell is my credit card information and personal data on some dude's laptop in a cab in the first place? Why isn't it locked away in some gigantic Hal 2000 behind a vault at Hotels.com? Why did it ever leave the building?.
Ernst & Young has offered everyone affected free enrollment in their credit monitoring service--a nice gesture, but one that really only serves to remind me that seemingly everyone can monitor my personal data for free except me, unless I have been wronged somehow. But these sorts of things are happening with much greater frequency lately, and it all comes down to what can only be termed as a cavalier attitude towards customer privacy. Hotels.com blames EY for this, and I suppose they have a point; however, someone let them put my credit card info into the back of a cab. Hotels.com sent me a nice letter--no $60 this time!--encouraging me to "take appropriate action" to protect my personal information. I have chosen to do so by notifying Hotels.com that I want my account information thoroughly expunged from their system.
Seriously, folks--vote with your wallet. It is the only thing that will ever compel change.
I Want to Give Six Apart My Money
Saturday, June 3, 2006 10:08 PM (permalink)
A few days ago, Mike Rundle wrote an interesting comparison of Movable Type vs. Wordpress over on the Business Logs site. Since there are many users of both, Mike's post generated a lot of passionate comments, many of them anti-Six Apart. I'm no designer, and little more than a hobby-ish developer--my day job keeps me busy enough. But I am a licensee of Movable Type, and I have used Wordpress for various little projects, so the technical aspects of Mike's piece don't fly completely over my head. There is, however, another decidedly non-technical aspect to Mike's comparison that bears amplification.
About a year and a half ago, soon after I joined Edison, I pushed very hard to get our website (a hideous, out-of-the-box Frontpage special) redesigned to make publishing content easier. Edison has grown into a thriving and profitable business, in no small part due to an aggressive thought-leadership strategy of continually putting new studies and analyses into the market. When I took on the task of turning our website into a more effective platform for these purposes, I turned to Movable Type to handle all of the static and dynamic pages of our site. If you visit the site now, the design may be a little kludgy (which is not the fault of the person who did the original stylesheet--anything that looks bad I probably did), but the site works like a charm, is well-optimized for search engines, and is dead easy for the folks back in the office to add columns and studies to.
The success of this modest redesign in 2004 has given me a bit more leeway (and budget) in 2006 to really spruce it up, and we have engaged the aforementioned Mr. Rundle to do the job (and I can tell you, it is going to look fantastic.) We had the option of moving to a new platform, and I am very cognizant of the increased traction Wordpress has with developers and designers. I am sure there are more Kubrick-themed websites out there than people who even know who Stanley Kubrick was. We chose to stick with Movable Type, however.
Now, I can give you a few technical reasons why. We are going to launch two auxiliary blogs to accompany the Edison site redesign, and Movable Type makes administration of multiple sites under one interface dead easy. The interface itself is very professional and just "feels" more robust than many of the other options I have tried. And, frankly, I know how it works, and inertia plays a role here, too. The biggest reason we are staying with Movable Type, however, remains the same as the reason we started with Movable Type in the first place. There is a there there, as one of my colleagues at work might say.
We have had three or four reasonably serious problems with the site in the past couple of years, and whether they were due to Movable Type or not, the support staff at Six Apart solved every one of them, generally within an hour of our initial ticket. We pay for that support within the terms of our commercial license, and the fact that there is a company there with a tech support function is 100% why we will continue to use Movable Type for our site. I am no Luddite, and am not afraid of getting my hands all code-y while I monkey around with my little hobby. But, again, I am but a dilettante when it comes to web design and development. I am not arrogant enough to think that the tiny bit of knowledge I have that enables me to get this article published on the web will save Edison from some kind of MySQL disaster. But Six Apart once saved me from a MySQL disaster, and got us back online in an hour. That's money to us.
Look, I know there is a huge community of developers out there who are more than happy to help out with Wordpress. If I am building a website for personal reasons, I might use Wordpress (have done), Tinderbox (this site) or even iWeb, for crying out loud, as I have done for my personal site (ugly URLS and bloated code be damned--there is currently no easier way to get my family photos out of iPhoto and onto the Web, and I am all about easy.) I really like Wordpress, for many of the reasons Mike mentioned. I also know that there are hundreds of folks out there who are available on a contract basis to fix Wordpress problems for a fee. What you have to realize, though, is that to a small business such as ours, retainers and hourly developer fees are "variable costs." A Movable Type license is a fixed cost. Fixed costs can be capitalized, predicted and budgeted for.
I have met some of the folks from Six Apart; I have even asked Six Apart's Anil Dash to be a speaker on a technology panel I moderated last year at the National Association of Broadcasters' Radio Show. They are smart people, and seem to have a business there. That is important to us. Again, NO disrespect to the Wordpress folks--and if we wanted a hosted solution, wordpress.com might have been a real option for us. But to me, there aren't really a lot of options for small companies like ours who don't have a full-time web development staff but want the stability of a license and paid support. So, for us, Movable Type vs. Wordpress is currently a non-starter (though Movable Type vs. Expression Engine is a more interesting comparison for our purposes.)
Wordpress is great--the more I play around with it, the better I like it. But unlike many of the folks who deserted Movable Type for Wordpress, I need to pay for it. If our site goes fakakta, we can't wait a day--we can't wait an hour.
