Archive for October 2006

Two Week Code Pushes: Fast or Slow?

I just finished reading a TechCrunch interview with Andrew Anker of Six Apart about their excellent new service, Vox. It’s a nicely conducted interview about a well-designed product that I think will be very successful, but this line struck me as a bit odd:

“Very early on in Vox’s development, we created a two week rapid iteration cycle where we made sure to push code religiously every two weeks. By doing that, we made sure that we were building a design cycle that was always two weeks away from fixing any problem.”

Do bi-weekly code pushes qualify as “rapid” these days? Even at Disney, we generally didn’t take much longer than that, and at Newsvine we push every single day. Multiple times even. We like the rapid pushes so much, in fact, that we even set up a machine to triumphantly speak out the filepath whenever someone pushes out code: click for a sample.

Maybe it’s because I’m impatient about site improvement and problem solving, but Andrew’s statement — if it were applied to me — would advocate a deliberate slowing down of the push cycle (perhaps for the better).

Does anyone else agree? With web technologies the way they are today, do you consider religious code pushes every two weeks a fast thing or a slow thing? Are scheduled infrequent pushes (meaning, much less than once a day) preferable to your development habits?

WURFL: Mobile device profiling

A good open-source database of mobile device capabilities… useful in detection

Buying in a Softening Real Estate Market

That’s a lot of “For Sale” signs! This condo conversion near the Newsvine Global Headquarters has been on the market for about six months now.

Up until last month, I had been happily renting a great condo in the Lower Queen Anne area of Seattle. I had owned another condo until 2003 but sold it because of an extremely loud construction project breaking ground next door (another condo building). Rent was extremely reasonable at about $1300 a month, and when compared to the payments on a presumed purchase price of about $360,000, it was a comfortable living situation for someone who had just taken a 50% paycut to start their own company. A couple of months ago, however, the owner of the condo decided to move back to Seattle from North Dakota and hence, back into the condo. I was given plenty of notice and looked feverishly for a place to buy during the following two months, but the Seattle real estate market just didn’t produce anything I wanted for under a half million bucks.

During the last couple of weeks of my tenancy, I found an extremely nice place to purchase. It was a condo in the newly converted Queen Anne High School building. It’s a historical building like no other in Seattle and the unit I put a deposit down on had a great view of the Space Needle and was well situated in the building. Truly a one of a kind if you place great importance on historical significance in your living quarters. There were two problems with the unit, however, which caused me to bail out only a few days before my 20-day contract-binding window: it was just over $400k for 655 square feet and it wasn’t going to be ready until January or February. So even if I was able to rationalize living in such a small place, I’d have to move into an apartment for a few months while I waited for the unit to be done. Moving once sucks. Moving twice really sucks.

It was a tough decision to bail out, but since that day several weeks ago, I’ve noticed some things in the Seattle real estate market which have convinced me I made the right decision:
→ Read the rest of this entry

Inman's 9th Incarnation

The Wolf has been acting out again.

Steve Bryant's New Reel Pop Blog

A great new blog about online video from one of the smartest reporters around.

Most Expensive Google Adwords

Mental note: Start School Loan Consolidation site

Moda Condos: How To Piss Off 1086 People With 1 Click

Mike Industries Poll

Given the situation in this blog post, would you ever sell the list?

So I woke up yesterday morning to an e-mail in my inbox from “Moda Condominiums”, an upcoming condo project in Seattle. I had filled out a form several weeks ago at the Moda website indicating I was interested in some information about the place.

To my shock, THE CC: FIELD IN THE MESSAGE EXPOSED ALL 1086 NAMES AND E-MAIL ADDRESSES FROM THE LIST.

I replied to the sender and asked how they could possibly make the mistake of taking private information and publishing it publicly like that. If I had received a response or apology, I probably wouldn’t be writing this blog post, but there’s been nothing but radio silence so far.

It’s bad enough when a friend forwards you a joke e-mail and there are 50 people CC’d, but this list has some serious value attached to it. 1086 qualified real estate leads looking to purchase a condo in Seattle? What’s that worth? $25 per lead? $100 per lead? $25,000-$100,000? Real estate and mortgage leads are extremely expensive/lucrative and everyone on the exposed list can only hope one out of the 1086 people doesn’t find a buyer. In fact, it’s likely that some people on the list are real estate and mortgage people.

This is going to sound unethical (and it almost certainly is), but if someone offered me $100,000 to simply forward them that e-mail, I can’t say with 100% certainty that I wouldn’t do it. And I can say with 100% certainty that at least one person on the list would. I’m just being real here.

Note: Until I hear otherwise, I’m going to assume the responsible party is Moda’s sales and marketing firm “Urban Pacific Real Estate”. If this is not the case and someone comes forward indicating otherwise, I will gladly post a retraction.

UPDATE: According to Jared, a list like this is worth at least $20,000… or $20 per lead. Good info Jared!
UPDATE #2: Well, it looks like Geoff George (geoffg@axisfinancial.net and geoffgeorge2@comcast.net) is the first Mortgage spammer to commandeer the list for his own personal gain. He just sent an e-mail pitching his firm to all 1086 recipients. He *also* put everyone in the CC field (unbelievable) and included his phone number as well.
UPDATE #3: Iolanthe Chan-McCarthy of Urban Pacific Real Estate has just sent out a public apology to everyone on the list and to me personally as well. Apology accepted. You’re not off the hook, but at least you’re honest and you’re owning up. No apology from Geoff George yet, but Iolanthe has reportedly contacted him as well.

The High-Def Holy Grail

Oh happy day. Happy, happy day. Tonight, I dropped $799 on the new Series 3 Tivo and I couldn’t be happier. See scientific diagram below:

Yes, there are similar products like Media Center PCs, cable company PVRs, and Myth TV, but if you’re willing to spend the extra cash, nothing beats a Tivo. This thing is spectacular and after only a few hours with it, I couldn’t imagine going back. If ever there was an interface worth $800 a pop, this is it. For more info/motivation, check out the New York Times’ David Pogue’s text or video review.

UPDATE: Oh this is just too great:
  1. Wake up this morning.
  2. Read Kottke’s “don’t you dare miss this” review of Eyes on the Prize.
  3. Search for Eyes on the Prize on Tivo Central’s web site.
  4. Hit record.

And we’re done. Didn’t even touch the TV. Now all I need is a contextual menu plug-in with “Find this item on Tivo”.

Shared

Hundreds of headlines wash over us every day. And part of why many of us engage in this flow is because we have faith that over time, this torrent of episodic knowledge is going to cohere into something more significant: a framework for genuinely understanding an issue. And we live with it ’cause it sort of works. Eventually you hear enough buzzwords like “single-payer” and “public option” and you start to feel like you can play along.

But mounting evidence indicates that this approach to information is actually totally debilitating. Faced with a flood of headlines on an ever-increasing variety of topics, we shut off. We turn to news that doesn’t require much understanding – crime, traffic, weather – or we turn off the news altogether.

- Matt Thompson on why the way we report and consume news is precisely wrong. Matt is, of course, precisely right. If you’re at SXSW next week, I don’t know how you could justify missing this talk.

Cameron’s Colosseo letterpress poster is now available: The only question is, black or white? The black is oh so tempting!

Jon Stewart Skewers Media’s Obsession with Chat Roulette: Funniest Wii Craps reference ever, as well. It’s really interesting to me that Chat Roulette is getting this much “attention” when TinyChat has been around so much longer, essentially does the same thing and more, and is much more useful to the average person. Just goes to show how viral public sex acts can be.

"Add features and customers forever and rake in the dough.":

The 2005 email that spawned Picnik, Google’s latest buy. If you’re thinking about launching a startup, you should study this e-mail carefully. It’s a perfect example of exactly how a crazy little thought becomes a big idea, and even on its own, it’s better than most “official company business plans” people present to VCs.  I gave a talk at Webstock in New Zealand a couple of weeks ago about creating a startup and I wish I had this to dissect at the time. Really good stuff.

Tumblr Finally Rolls Out Comments. Sort Of. Trolls Not Welcome. :

I actually really like how clubby it is.  Unfortunately it means I won’t be commenting on any Tumblrs since I don’t officially “follow” anyone besides via RSS, but that’s probably ok. Maybe the answer to the world’s wide-open commenting problem is something like this.

Episode 2 of Dan Benjamin's "The Conversation" is Live:

I was a guest on Dan Benjamin’s new weekly radio show last week, along with Merlin Mann, Christina Warren, Adam Keys, and Dave Nanian. Subjects discussed include Newsvine, keeping your own identity after becoming part of a big company, and the RADICAL concept of only publishing stuff to your readers and followers that is actually true.

LESS - Leaner CSS:

Given that pre-compiling CSS is an official “best practice” these days, why not use that compile step to extend CSS in powerful ways? LESS lets you use variables, nested rules, and other niceties at author-time to clean up your rules and keep everything tidy. I believe The Wolf made something like this a few years ago, but I haven’t heard about it since.

How 3D works, and why it's back:

Great article on the ins and outs of three dimensional imagery. Still doesn’t change my opinion that well-shot conventional cinematography is more impressive than the novelty that is Avatar.

The Importance of Removing Features:

This is one of the most useful articles I’ve read in a long time. As we work on focusing, strengthening, and simplifying Newsvine, the concepts discussed by Lukas ring true. “Saying no” has never been a strong suit of mine. It’s very helpful to remember how important of a quality it is. (via fullstopinteractive)

Newly released video of the space shuttle Challenger disaster: It was 24 years ago, I was in 5th grade, but I remember it like it was yesterday. School was stopped immediately and they wheeled out televisions in every classroom for us to watch the news footage. It’s great that this video has been released, but holy crap, how do you tuck something that away for two decades???

A nicely done british parody of 60 Minutes style video journalism. It’s easy to miss how formulaic our news is sometimes. (via B-Tizzle, originally via E-Chizzle)

Colosseo: This is why Cameron is a king and we are all just pawns in his world. I can’t wait to get my hands on this poster. I will point out, however, that the outro credits on the video need some kerning. Someone is going to lose their right hand for that.

Spezify:

New ways of searching are almost never as useful as old ways of searching. Spezify is pretty awesome though. It’s a visually interesting, never-ending, horizontally and vertically scrollable, topic explorer. I don’t think I’d use it for digging deep on anything, but to get a quick visually rich sampling of a topic, it’s quite fun (via tiff, a long time ago actually, over email).

Realism in UI Design:

Reminds me of my favorite logo design advice: “Never waste a stroke”. (via gruber)

Overshared
At the first Doughty show of the night at the Triple Door. If you're in Seattle you should come down for the 2nd at 10. Excellent!
This Kindle ad is cute and Applelike but misses the mark. Advertise what you do well: price and battery life http://bit.ly/cFBw70
@codinghorror Aliased Monaco 9 should be in the Smithsonian.
Why does the media continue to cover what Rob Glaser thinks about the future?
@Trenti Ummm, the Timex Sinclair came out after the VIC-20, beeeeeeeayatch! I will out-old you any day!
@paulsmith Wow. I love the user manual shooting out from Shatner's shoulder at the perfect angle. http://j.mp/am10eU
@paulsmith You have me beat by mere months there! I cut my teeth on a Practical Peripherals 1200 bauder.
@roblifford Probably a 10% chance I fly in at the last minute for a couple of nights. Other than that, planning to skip this year.
I can't believe @shauninman's first computer was a G4. I feel ancient. Mine was a VIC-20. http://5by5.tv/pipeline/5
Wow, how did I not know about Lala until now? Tons of great full albums, free: http://bit.ly/dBrdLw
Thanks for everyone who suggested Brizzly. Going to fire that sucker up again...
Is there a way to unfollow people but still allow them to DM you? Like a "mute" setting or something?
@levifig Burn-in was a bigger issue with first-gen plasmas. They are much better now. LCDs have their own lighting issues as well.
@horsedreamer The black isn't quite as good as some other top plasmas, but it's better than all LCDs. At an inch thick, I'll take it.
@levifig Isn't ghosting mainly an issue for LCDs? I've had a plasma for four years and no ghosting whatsoever.