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July, 2006 Monthly archive
By: Fred Oliveira
28-07-2006
Business, CSS, Culture, Design, General, Standards

Weekly inspiration – 28th July 2006

Christina Wodtke of Boxes and Arrows fame writes “The Elements of Style for Designers“, an article connecting Elwyn Brooks White’s “List of Reminders” in the end of his book “The Elements of Style” to practical rules of advice for designers. Some really good points. Have a look.

Gene Smith over at Atomiq.org has a great post about a Nomic Digg. He wonders what might happen if the community, apart from submitting stories, also had the opportunity to vote and change the ruleset of the website itselt. Tom Coates points to an article he wrote about the same kind of system with self-reflexive rulesets.

Rashmi Sinha posted yesterday a great piece on findability on systems that rely on tags. The recommended solutions to facilitate findability are (if you’re in a rush and can’t read the article): facets, clustering and pivot browsing. But seriously, go read it.

Molly’s funny (or is it?) reply to John C Dvorak’s post on “the problems with CSS code“. This quote speaks for itself: “In fact, I’m going to make you an offer that would fully and totally break my heart if you refuse. The offer? I will come to you and help you learn CSS. (…) You will be able to float, position and even hover in ways you probably never imagined possible.“

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By: Fred Oliveira
26-07-2006
Development, Rails, User Experience, Web 2.0, Web-Applications

Goplan updates

Goplan Since we announced the Goplan beta, we’ve been getting a lot of email from people asking questions and submitting their names for the list. We honestly would love to get back to everyone individually, but given the (really high) number of requests, it looks like we’ll be unable to. This being said, this post is for those of you who want a little more information on what Goplan is, why we built it, how you can get in on the beta and other miscellaneous details.

What is Goplan?

We want to make sure everyone is on the same page as to what Goplan is. In fact, we want everyone to be on the same page on projects in general – and Goplan is exactly that: project management software focused on communication and collaboration. But, instead of feeding you marketing blabber, here’s a few examples of how you might use the application:

  • If you’re working with your colleagues on a new web-application (you’re our kind of guy), you can use Goplan to keep track of project tasks, support tickets, calendar, files and chat amongst yourselves if you work remotely.
  • If you’re a blogger, you can use Goplan to keep track of your ideas, posts, and digital assets (like photos or documents).
  • If you’re publishing a magazine and need to keep in touch with the rest of your staff, you can use Goplan to manage the team’s input on the publication, as well as manage deadlines, production details, tasks and (if it doesn’t strike you as a distraction) to chat live with everyone else.

So in short, by easily turning features on and off, you can have Goplan as simple as possible or as sophisticated as you need it. We built Goplan because we were unhappy about the current solutions for project management out there – either they were limited (not that that’s always a bad thing) or too bulky for our needs -, and because we know people who identify themselves with that problem.

Beta details

We didn’t forget you. If you didn’t get an email to get in, its not because you’ve been left behind – we just haven’t invited anyone in yet. There are several reasons for that – we’re currently focusing on scaling the application and preparing the servers to run it on (we have some “funny” hosting stories to tell you, but that’s a whole new post). Plus, we want to focus on the user experience for a few more days to make sure you don’t get disappointed.

Screenshots, what else

If you really need to see the application now, head on to Flickr and see the Goplan beta set. We’ll be adding more screengrabs in there soon – plus, we might throw in photos from some of the bug-crunching nights we’re having (you know, instead of having vacations and other regular-people fun).

Got questions? We’ll be happy to answer them in the comments, so feel free to ask!

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By: Fred Oliveira
19-07-2006
Business, Culture, Web, Web 2.0

If you can’t build a community, buy one

Netscape According to several sources Jason Calcanis, who is leading the Netscape effort at AOL, is offering $1000/mn to the top news posters at Digg and similar sites to start posting news at the new social news website Netscape.com. This is an interesting move, but there’s a few things to say about it:

You can’t build a community with money

Everyone knows its been tried before. The money is going to make some news editors move, but it won’t either guarantee quality (heck, it’ll force periodicity, which goes exactly against it), or community growth. Jason, you need to remember people participate in sites like Digg not only for the news but the huge mass of people who are already doing active editing and commenting on them.

Not that I agree with the way Digg stories are brought to the home-page – every single day there’s around 5 to 10 news stories that make me wonder why the powers that be over there haven’t changed the promotion algorithms. Still, the fact is Digg has critical mass, and its not because of the few top posters you’re trying to buy out.

Netscape.com has more problems than solutions

… and one of those problems is AOL. Jason, you know as well as I do that the image of a brand has a huge impact in the success of its child projects. And Netscape’s association with AOL stifles its potential for growth (because honestly, people couldn’t care less about it after being harassed for years with AOL offers).

And despite the AOLs brand image – that only people like you can change by giving the company a new dynamism – it is still a corporation: and social networks (the people) run away from those. Have you seen any direct impact of Fox’s ownership on MySpace? No, and the reason is people would get the hell out of there at the realization that a few select people were making all the bucks with their daily activity.

Anyway, there are more problems to Netscape – and even though AOL’s a big one, its definitely not the biggest. The main problem with the new site is the lack of information findability (even your channel navigation is between ad blocks on the right). Who is your target audience? Personally, I don’t really think you know. Because the way it works, the experience, is all about youth (with the quick votes, the loose comment-based community), but the brand (again, the brand) doesn’t scream “youth” at all.

Seriously, now

I hope I’m wrong about Netscape needing much more than paying $1000/month to a few people in order to get the community you want. Only time will tell, but here’s what I’d like you to keep in mind: Digg (and I could be using a few other examples) is the result of an untainted brand, a novelty factor (the way it works) and a specific initial target audience. Do you have any of these? This is where the money goes.

Further reading on Read/WriteWeb and Techcrunch.

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By: Fred Oliveira
15-07-2006
Business, Development, Web

On open protocols

Being open source advocates, we’ve always been fans of protocol interoperability – like on instant messaging, or voice over IP. Two pieces of news this week are interesting enough to point out and talk about: Yahoo Messenger and Windows Live Messenger interoperation and Skype’s protocol reverse engineering.

Instant messaging:

Yahoo! Microsoft and Yahoo! announced that their IM clients are now able to talk to each-other, exciting news given that together they target around 350 million internet users. However, the simple fact that they took this one step and refused to go all the way and allow Jabber (XMPP) interoperability – thus talking to Google Talk and a slew of other IM clients – is a little disappointing.

Considering the increasing adoption of Jabber by companies like Google or Six Apart with LiveJournal, it should be exciting for companies to be able to connect communities and tap into that – even if for marketing reasons. It’s rather strange that we don’t see more interoperation in the IM space.

Voice over IP:

Skype Skype is great – we all love it. However, the simple fact that it doesn’t communicate with SIP-based devices or software (like Asterisk) is a shame. Not that I don’t understand why Ebay would insist in keeping it as a closed protocol – they need to insure revenue through the client and maintain monopoly -, but given their status they might aim for the greater good instead of the greater wallet.

The fact that the Skype protocol may have been reverse engineered is interesting, though – off the top of my head I can think of a few ways the discovery could be used to benefit a global audience: like the development of Skype-SIP gateways, or the creation of new, open-source clients for the network.

Concluding thoughts:

Open protocols can have a similar effect to how APIs caused a stir in web development by allowing the quick development of mash-ups. Systems that can transparently communicate with each-other allow for a few important things like fast adoption, brand awareness and accelerated innovation. But, as we all know, money is still the big picture for most companies so things are unlikely to change.

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About Webreakstuff

Webreakstuff is a product think tank. We've worked with companies like Bell Canada, Techcrunch, Totspot, Sequoia Capital, MTV and Sapo on their own products, and we've built a few of our own (most notably, Goplan - an online collaboration and project management tool). You should follow us on Twitter.

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Bling

Bling is a platform where people share what they buy and maintain a wishlist of things they want to get. Users can also follow their friends and people they admire, or browse our explore pages - listing what people are adding across the site - for inspiration.

Bling

Back in 2005 we found a need for a great online collaboration tool to manage our clients and projects. We built one for ourselves, and then decided to open it to a greater audience. We turned Goplan into a full-fledged product, and we've been maintaining the platform since.

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