I still don’t know exactly what it is, but I’ve posted about it a couple of times. Amazon has an eye for building an underlying layer of services to empower the new web. From their storage service (S3), to the Elastic Computing Cloud (EC2) - both of which we use on Goplan, our project management solution -, to the Simple Queue Service (SQS) and now their Flexible Payment Service (FPS). No wonder I think these guys rock (and Amazon stock does seem to agree).

What is the Flexible Payment Service

FPS allows you to accept payments ranging from cents to thousands of dollars by leveraging their API. Amazon is pretty much making their payment system (used to charge for S3, EC2 and the other services) available to developers, for their own apps. Here’s the rundown in the words of Jeff Barr (via the Amazon WS blog):

We’ve taken all that we know about dealing with credit cards, bank accounts, fraud checking and customer service and wrapped it all up into one convenient package.

In much the same way that S3 and EC2 allow developers to forget about leasing space in data centers, buying servers and negotiating for bandwidth, FPS shields developers from many of the messy and complex issues which arise when dealing with money. Once again, we take care of the “muck” and developers get to focus on being innovative and creative.

Some example uses for FPS

If you think about it, it’s really easy to think of ways you can use FPS to build really cool services that would otherwise be hard to bill for. Here’s a few examples, off the top of my head:

• Twitter could use FPS for a pay-per-use pricing model (hey, so they stop losing money every month). You would pay based on the messages you send. This is by no means my recommendation to twitter, but hey, it’s an idea.
• We could start using FPS on Goplan to charge people flexibly by number of projects and users, instead of the fixed plans we have now. Should make it much more interesting for people who want to pay based on usage.
• Online music stores could use FPS to help kids have music allowances that they could use to get new music whenever they wanted, easily.

There’s really a lot you can do with this kind of flexibility, and while I haven’t gone through the FPS documentation myself, if this is as flexible as S3 and EC2, I know this is a winner.

Concluding thoughts

Amazon kicks ass. This could be the only conclusion here, but I’ll continue by saying I’m both pretty excited about trying out FPS on our own services (and those we build for clients), as well as see what other people come up with.

Services like S3 have proven Amazon - despite being a retailer - is also the clear leader when it comes to infrastructure. These guys are helping other developers actually pave the way to new services, not just locking them in like others are. Very smart - definitely very Amazon. I love that company.

Other takes on this story by Robert, John Musser and Pete Cashmore.

Lets get straight to the point: there’s a big problem with social networks - the fact that there’s a new one every day. Now this would be all fine if people didn’t care, but that brings me to the second problem: people do care, and generally love to be a part of these things. The social network for music (wait, two), the one for contacts, the one with photos, the one for 43 random things - the list goes on (heck, there’s Ning packing over 80.000 of these). Crazy. But within the chaos, something in common - you and your friends.

If you’re like me, you’re tired of having to add friends or accept friend requests in all of these networks. It makes sense to connect to people in these services (that’s how you get the value out of them), but it’s really tricky to control it. It’s a huge burden to manage all this network structure - this needs a fix.

A potential fix to the problem

I’ve been thinking about how OpenId and Microformats could play into this, and apparently, I’m not alone. We already have the identification through OpenID, there’s hCard+XFN that can provide the necessary bits of information about ourselves (and our friends) to the network, why not create a mechanism allowing networks to save us the trouble of adding friends, accepting requests and setting up preferences?

Process: I want networks to ask me, right off the bat when signing up, if I already have a profile that can be imported in (through hCard+XFN). I type in the URL for my OpenID and the network gets my information (gets OpenID page, downloads hCard formatted information, builds my user information based on that). Then it can grab my list of friends from XFN formatted data. With one textfield (the URL for either my OpenID or a profile on a different network), it would pre-populate both my information and the information for friends I want to add. Sweet.

A good start: A few social networks already have microformatted data on user profiles (Last.FM, Dopplr, Twitter and Cork’d), meaning any other network could easily consume this data when you sign-up, saving you a load of trouble - which is exactly what Dopplr (being smart as it is) does. Now if other networks would tag along, that would be superb.

Because, really, we do love participating in these sites, and we love having fancy profiles with all our friends on there, but actually going through the trouble of setting that up every single time is crazy. Social network developers, help us out here, we’re going bankrupt. Thoughts? Notes of frustration? Suggestions? Feel free to leave a comment on this story.

Update: Seems like Wired picked up on the need for open social networking platforms and published an article by Scott Gilbertson called “Slap in the Facebook”. Nothing you haven’t read in the blogosphere in the last couple of days, but still a good read. Go have a look if you will.

It’s been a while since I’ve mentioned a specific web-application on this blog, but I wrote a few notes on Pownce to send in as feedback and figured it might be interesting to post them as well.

If you don’t know what Pownce is, lets call it a spruced up Twitter (I know Kevin, Daniel, Shawn and Leah must be getting tired of the comparison, but it does sort of fit) that allows you to send messages, files, events and links. And it looks pretty good design-wise (no surprises there, Daniel keeps doing great work).

What it should do better

Grouping: I want (and I assume many others do too) to be able to send these content bits (the notes, events, links and files) to certain groups of people - in short, I want to be able to categorize, tag or group my friends so I can address them as a group. Twitter doesn’t solve this problem, even though many people asked for it, and Pownce doesn’t either, unfortunately. [Duane in the comments tells me this does exist (apparently it's called sets), which doesn't say a lot for me for not finding it, or Pownce for not being obvious about it's killer feature. I'm extremely glad this does exist!]

It doesn’t make sense for my friends in the US to get the same messages I send my friends in Portugal. This is particularly true for events, because those carry local context.

Findability: I had a really bad time with the friend-finding experience. Searching for friends one by one is not going to work if they number in the hundreds, and browsing friends of friends - which is usually the best solution - doesn’t feel right on Pownce either because they show names as “Firstname L.” instead of the full name or the nickname.

That name display issue and the fact that they show a limited number of people per page (unlike Twitter, that bombs you with icons for each person) makes you want to give up adding new people (I know I did). Fixing that means growth, people - come on!

All things considered,

Pownce is a very neat application. I’m still not sure how many people will be coming in from other services (like Jaiku or Twitter), but if they did the grouping I suggest above thing I’d be moving in a snap - and I’m sure others would as well.

Well, that being said, if you do try out Pownce, feel free to add me up - it’ll be interesting to converse with this blog’s audience (which is now way over the 12.000 people mark). See you there and if you have any comments or questions, feel free to leave a comment here.

If I were to ask most entrepreneurs working in the web-based application space (not just social apps - all the rage these days) what the process that brought them to their idea was, I suspect many would tell me “it was a problem that needed solution” but that only a few actually made a conscious decision to study the problem before moving to action.

Perhaps due to the old days writing about startups for Techcrunch, I love to know how people got to the problems they’re trying to solve with their companies - I love ideas but more importantly I love the process towards refining them. In several conversations with entrepreneurs working on their products, I noticed how many were out-of-touch with the real needs of their audience, and were set to please the early adopters, the 2.0 crowd, the people like you or me - clearly not the way to critical mass.

Enter ethnography

Enter ethnography - a method to look at user needs through observing people in their naturally setting rather than through research or, like we usually see in this space, guessing work. Ethnography allows you to design (in the broad sense of the word) products that are more in touch with your audience - to solve real problems, and not those you think people have.

Examples: How do you think Sergey Brin and Larry Page got to the idea of an improved search? Likely, by observing people (and themselves) use previous search engines and recognizing how lousy both results and the experience were. Or (to use a product design example) how IDEO realized how children toothbrushes needed to be thicker for a better experience because of the way kids grab them? Through observation. Ethnography.

Or our own example: we launched Goplan (our online project management and cooperation application) after realizing how competitor products were so poor in terms of user experience, and after realizing how new companies (particularly companies working with several remote people - clients or peers) need to spend less time on phones and more time actually collaborating. The need to build a product came out of observation of both the problems of other companies and our own.

“If you want to understand what motivates a guy to pick up skateboarding, you could bring him into a sterile laboratory and interrogate him… or you could spend a week in a skatepark observing him interacting with his friends, practicing new skills and having fun. Ethnography is observing people’s behavior in their own environments so you can get a holistic understanding of their world - one that you can intuit on a deeply personal level.” - LiAnne Yu, cultural anthropologist

Using ethnography in your own organization

You likely do part of it already - albeit not consciously. You probably notice problems (like that one time you had a hard time finding something on some website because navigation was poor) but ignore them. Try spending some conscious time observing and noting down problems - both in your own solutions and in those of others. Not only will you find issues, but you’ll likely think of great solutions that can evolve into products or new businesses.

Watch people interact with both your product or competitor products - again, not in the lab, but in their own environment - and collect data that can meaningfully guide you through the changes you need to make to bump your experience up a notch.