Since Facebook bought FriendFeed several months ago, there has been much lamentation by the FriendFeed community. Reactions from members have taken several forms:

1. Declaring their support for FriendFeed till the plug is pulled
2. Continuing to post and participate as if nothing has happened
3. Leaving “quietly” by just no longer using the service
4. Spending their time posting about how FriendFeed is dead and everyone worth paying attention to has already left

Reactions #1-#3 are appropriate to various degrees, but reaction #4 is getting old fast. It’s insulting to the people who are still using the service actively and insulting to the whole idea of online community, and I would like to see it stop. I’m mainly making this appeal to Robert Scoble because he is the most influential person who is kicking FriendFeed while it’s down:

<plea>
Please, Robert, I know that you’re disappointed in what has happened to FriendFeed and you feel like you need to take out your frustrations on something, but it’s time to take your own advice and leave quietly if you’re going to leave. FriendFeed may not serve your particular needs anymore but your needs seem to be very specific, decidedly not mainstream, and difficult to comply to. That doesn’t mean that FriendFeed is not a valuable service to others with different needs. You don’t have to leave, but there’s no point in making things harder for the rest of us who support the service by trying to hammer the nails in the coffin while we are still pushing up the the lid for air.

You are actively fulfilling your own prophecy by chasing people away from FriendFeed and inciting people there to unsub and block you so that your feed is less and less interesting. And then you are insulting the rest of us by declaring that all the geeks have left when it’s your own efforts in sabotage (or lack of in pruning your feeds) that are making your experience worse, while claiming that you’re trying to spur someone into action to be FriendFeed’s new hero. But we don’t have that knight in shining armor to champion for FriendFeed and return it to its former glory. If anything, you were the most likely candidate. Now we just want to be left alone to use FriendFeed the way we are comfortable to using it. It’s time to stop the abuse.
</plea>

Yes, FriendFeed’s future is uncertain, even with vague assurances that it is not going away any time soon from its founders. And yes, there are frustrations because of the lack of attention to bug fixes, performance and innovation that were so much a part of the early days of the service. But there is still a community at FriendFeed, and a pretty cohesive one at that. Maybe it is a community that has a lot more “fluff” than Robert is looking for but that’s because it best serves a purpose that is not something that he is focused on: making connections on a personal level.

It’s all about your intentions online. Most intentions can be grouped into 3 categories: knowledge gathering, broadcasting and conversation. There are many services on the web that can potentially serve those intentions. It depends on your purpose as to whether or not a service brings you value. Scoble has talked about a “chat room/forum” service type, there is also a “blog/micro-blog” type, and a “knowledge repository/collaboration” type. In some ways these cross over, but they also have distinctions that make specific tools more likely to serve them than others.

The web started out as knowledge gathering tools for building archives. Websites, wikis, link repositories like Del.icio.us, an untold number of file archives, search, RSS and all the tools that bring it to you like GoogleReader… All that is the heart of the web. There is little personal connection in knowledge gathering tools though some of them have “social” aspects. They are not about community, but about sharing and collating information.

Blogs and Twitter (and Twitter clones) are about broadcasting. You post and presumably there are people out there listening and who might react to your post through commenting. You control all aspects of your accounts and who you interact with and therefore you are exposed to a lot less noise, but you also have a very limited audience, unless you are already popular. This model works fine for people like Robert, who, no matter what tool he picks, is going to have a lot of people ready to comment on his posts. But it can be extremely unrewarding for people who don’t already have a posse following them around. A lot of people don’t care: the model serves their intent of having a “presence online” and they are not interested in much conversation, just putting their own views out there.

Can some conversation occur on blogs and Twitter? Of course… but the conversation is a lot more limited and a lot harder to follow (especially on Twitter). If conversation happens it is more like the discussions in a lecture hall or classroom where one person is guiding all the other participants and seems to be less personal because of the inequality of the participants and dictatorial position of the poster which invokes the Snafu principle. Real conversation is the exception, not the rule for broadcast mediums.

Forums are about conversation. They are a place for people with a common interest to gather and share information or just share a bond based on that initial connection. Some services even support “Friend of a Friend” (FoaF) features that easily connect you to others who may have similar interests. There is a lot more drama, a lot more noise, a lot more fluff to wade through on forums but you also make stronger connections. When you interact with people through conversation (more than 140 character snippets) you actually get to know them. And you become friends, even offline. That’s the power and appeal of forums to a lot of people. It’s what makes tools that support it, like FriendFeed, more valuable to people who’s intent is conversation than tools like blogs or Twitter. For people who are looking to make those kind of connections with others, to seek out people who “get them” and who they can share their lives with (because such people may not be available to them in their physical location), conversation services are the best tool to support that purpose.

The beauty of FriendFeed is that it can really serve all three intents, if you want it to:

• If you want to use it as a knowledge gathering and archive tool you can create your own private room and share posts to it, clip web snippets to it or store links in it.
• If you simply want to broadcast, then you can use groups and set them up so you are the only poster. Only invite people that you want to hear from. You can delete comments you don’t like in your threads. It’s very similar to a blog. Your experience will be limited to only the people who you want to interact with (who reciprocate). None of that pesky FoaF stuff, but all the conversation limitations that blogs offer.
• If you want to use it as a forum, just create an account, subscribe to interesting people, and you’re ready to go.

I’ve said before that FriendFeed is not dead, it’s just an orphan. I stick by that assessment. Yes, there is a void in leadership for it right now, but it will find it’s own way and grow into a nice, healthy adult (a productive citizen, if not a super-star), if only people will stop beating it over the head. I’m constantly reminded of the plague scene in Monty Python and the Holy Grail. FriendFeed is saying “I’m not dead yet! I feel fine! I think I’ll go for a walk”. So quit trying to throw it on the cart!

Now that I’ve had a chance to play with Google Wave a bit and to hear what other people have to say about it I’ve noticed that a lot of people are disappointed and it seems to me that they have missed the point.

Google Wave is a platform, a framework, an infrastructure. It has a front end, but that’s not really what is impressive about it (which is a good thing considering the complexity and bugginess right now). What is amazing is that Google has developed a real-time communication framework that can work in a federated environment. Why is this cool? Because it means that I can use it at work behind firewalls, at home for my family and personal projects, set it up at school with the right privacy to comply with child protection laws and also participate in it publicly on Google’s servers or anyone else’s I prefer. And it will still work in real time, across these servers transparently to me or securely within them. It won’t be “a Wave clone” that I have to beg everyone else to sign up for. It will just be Wave on a different server. All my contacts can be shared and my communications flow as freely between them, or I can create a walled garden. The choice is will be up to me.

People aren’t getting it right now because they’re expecting the beta to all be about polishing the User Experience. But it’s not about polishing: it’s about defining. This is similar to the introduction of Microsoft Surface: here is a great big flashy table with a powerful computer in it that responds to touch. At first exposure it sounds awesome, but what can you do with it? How will people be most comfortable interacting with it? What practical tasks can it facilitate? What fun can be had with it? The potential is there, but the only way to really know how it should best be used is to have a lot of people attempt to interact with it, without preconceptions, to figure out what the natural ways to interact with it actually are. There have been a lot of surprises as more and more people are able to play with it. A whole new set of gestures and user interface elements have been developed for Surface and refined as more and more people actually use them. I had the opportunity to participate in part of that process and it was fascinating.

I see Google Wave’s release as very similar to Microsoft Surface’s. There is a really powerful back-end underneath the UI that is capable of some amazing things, yet there haven’t been enough people exposed to it for the development team to really know the best way to provide efficient interaction with that engine. I think that is the purpose of the closed beta, to figure those things out. But people have these unrealistic expectations based on the misuse of the whole “beta” concept that what Google has is just a tiny step away from being ready for release to the world. That’s just not the case. That doesn’t mean there isn’t a ton of potential in Wave, and, to those of us out there than can appreciate the magnificence of the accomplishment of the platform that Google Wave is built on, it is very impressive indeed.

To all you fellow beta testers out there: give it some time and give Google some feedback and you will see Wave become much more intuitive to use (as well as less buggy and more performant). Developers will build alternative clients and more and more widgets for it. Waves will become just one more format for communication that we won’t even think about, we’ll just use in the way that’s most appropriate for the type of communication we need at the time. There will be “client views” for particular tasks based on who you are communicating with and their accessibility. If they’re offline you will use an email-like view to compose messages to them. If they’re online, you’ll use something more akin to IM or Twitter. All the stuff that is currently confusing and gets in your way (scrolling down huge waves just to find the new messages) will be fixed to no longer clutter your experience. And you will eventually be able to customize your client to make it even more efficient for how you want to receive your information, not just how you create and share it. These things will come as more people are exposed to Wave and see the potential and write their own solutions to the new problems that are becoming obvious now that there are enough other people to interact with on the service.

It’s new, and in closed beta. It’s not fair to write it off as “over-hyped”, especially when the hype has been coming from people who were interpreting screen shots or didn’t really understand that Wave is a new platform and not really a new UI to “fix the problem of email” or become the next social media magnet site. Google let us beta testers try it out to figure out how we’re reacting to the new communications capabilities Wave’s framework offers. Give Google the feedback they need to make it better for everyone.

Wave offers us a new way to communicate digitally that is adaptable to our immediate situation and needs. Wave is not out to replace Twitter, Facebook, IM or email: the point is to render them obsolete. That will happen without a lot of protest once someone figures out the ulitimate client for the already amazing platform Google has built… it will just seem natural.

Over the past few months I have become an addict of a service called Evernote. It was originally created a few years ago as a note keeping application as an alternative to Microsoft’s OneNote and other similar software. In mid 2008, Evernote’s creators revamped the application so that it kept a duplicate of your note data on their web servers and automatically synced the local copies of the notes. Subscriber data is accessible both via the Evernote web interface and the local machine client, which can be installed (and synchronized) between as many computers as the subscriber wishes.

The Evernote team has added a feature recently to premium subscriptions allowing the attachment and “in-note editing” of any type of file. I think this is the step that may make Evernote the first full realization of Cloud storage for mainstream consumers, and may put them on the road to be to personal data what Google is to public data.

For years now we’ve been told that it won’t be long until our digital life is completely “in the Cloud”, and that’s been something I have anxiously awaited. The Cloud means different things to different people, but some of the basic definitions include the ability to store our data somewhere decentralized so that it is accessible from anywhere that has an internet connection. I have always visualized the implementation of Cloud storage as relieving me from worrying about where my data is, or whether it’s safe and backed up, and being able to access it wherever I am on whatever device I am using.

The promise of the Cloud:
There are several ideas that come along with the Cloud storage promise such as -

• agnosticism about what type of data (and metadata) we’re storing
• redundancy (automatic backup or sync with multiple stores) of our data to ensure consistency
• the ability to share our data with others and control what’s shared and how
• the ability to easily store any data that we create immediately
• the ability to easily search for and retrieve that data when we need it again
• the ability to interact with our data from any platform as long as it has a pipe to the Cloud

Until now there hasn’t been a single service available that addresses all of these issues. There have been plenty of products and services that provide partial solutions which are divided among the lines of the type of data (and metadata) they allow you to store, the format of the data and/or the method of access. There are 3 main categories of these services and most of them cater to specific types of data:

Online file storage/sync/backup/sharing:
Amazon S3, Dropbox, Mozy, Carbonite, Flickr, YouTube and lots of other services to store our data in the Cloud. They offer services for packaged data (files) to backup from your PC, synchronize multiple computers, store and share data online or any combination of these things. Some of them (synchronization and backup services typically) do things in the background so you set them and forget them. Others are cumbersome to use (Amazon S3) but provide more flexibility in how your data is stored and retrieved. And some only allow you to store specific types of data (Flickr, YouTube) which, while allowing more focus on the content and communities around it to develop, is inconvenient for the individual because your data is spread around multiple services. Services that are data type agnostic usually don’t allow you to choose what metadata you want to store with your files or group related files for intuitive retrieval, while the file-type specific sites generally do.

Bookmarking:
There is copious amounts of data on the internet, but it is all transient. Websites, blogs, discussion boards, aggregators: there is terabytes of data being created on a daily basis for us to consume. Many people spend a good part of every day wading through that information to find pieces that are relevant to them, and it’s a natural idea to keep a copy of that hard-won data once it’s found. A multitude of services are available to create an archive of links to that data so that you can find it again such as Del.icio.us, Diigo, Ma.gnolia, Clipmarks and others. These services have popularized the idea of tagging information with metadata to make it easier to find and share with others. But they are flawed in that they don’t save copies of the data you find, or if they do, only parts (the non-binary parts). When the source goes away, your links become worthless.

File Systems and Databases:
Since most software is designed to consume data from files or data sets, file systems and databases are still the most popular ways to store data. Cloud storage will eventually be a major factor in making dependence on particular flavors of operating systems to manipulate your data irrelevant. And it’s been coming for a while… In 2003 I attended Microsoft’s Professional Developer Conference. The attendees were presented with visions of the next version of the Windows operating system that would offer users file storage built on top of a database. Of course that never materialized, but the idea is still a great one. The advantage of databases is that they can be set up so that with indexes to search them quickly. Data structures can be defined to store data and metadata in the way that makes the most sense for the data itself and relationships between the data defined. The data itself is not constrained in a way that it is by storage in a file system file and the user has control over what metadata is stored and how the data is organized. Cloud storage, because it is a service that runs on a web server somewhere lends itself to being a large database with all the benefits a database offers. Currently most people keep the majority of their data on local hard drives, and are subject to all the limitations that imposes.

So we’ve got Cloud services and products, what’s the problem?
As much as some of us take advantage of online file storage and bookmarking services, they have yet to appeal to the majority of folks in the mainstream. To use them effectively generally takes a lot of time, discipline, dedication, effort and, in some cases, technical knowledge. Most late-adopters don’t want to have to learn how to use something, they just want it to work and work intuitively. And if it doesn’t make their life easier in the short term then it’s not something they’re going to use.

But now we have Evernote. Evernote is the first comprehensive realization of Cloud storage that is intuitive enough for mainstream consumers.

What is so great about Evernote?
Evernote covers all the bases of Cloud storage:

• It doesn’t care what kind of data you put in it, it supports any file type as well as raw text.
• It is storage online and an automatic backup of local files.
• It is available online and offline.
• It allows you to edit your from “within” the application (even files, when opened from the interface).
• It is a bookmarking system that allows you to organize all your data with tags and retrieve it via search or browsing.
• It keeps a full copy of any data you find interesting on the web that you can capture through a bookmarklet.
• It allows you to structure your data in a free form way, and keep meta data about the data with the data.
• It allows you to share your data with others, either in bulk (through public notebooks) or in batches (exporting notes).
• It is accessible from clients on platforms that people interact with almost constantly which makes it available to gather your created data from wherever you are and whatever format the data is in.
• It is extendable through it’s developer API so that third-party clients can be written against it to manipulate your data from even more platforms and combine it with other services that you already use to collect, create or modify data (with the ability to auto sync with those services).

This is the promise of the Cloud - being able to access and store any data you have from wherever you are whenever you want.

Evernote isn’t perfect. Currently the full Cloud storage enabling features are only available to paid subscribers, and subscribers can only upload up to 500mb a month (storage is unlimited once the data is uploaded). There are some improvements to be made in both the features to create data within Evernote and to share that data with specific people, but the team is continually releasing enhancements so the potential is there to be the one-stop Cloud storage application.

If Evernote addresses the ability to store more data in subscriber accounts they could have a chance to become the biggest player in the consumer Cloud storage market. With nearly 2,000 notes and 100s of files in my notebooks in a few months, I am already addicted to Evernote, and riding high in that Cloud. I don’t plan to come back down and I think that many others will be joining me and the other more than half a million new Evernote subscribers in 2008. If they build their user-base quick enough, offering a very addicting service that quickly becomes indispensable, in a few years Evernote could become just as important as Google in people’s daily lives.

omg, I just thought of something. I prefer to communicate with people at my own pace. Online, people tend to state their points / bottomlines in a more organized manner, kinda cutting the BS small talk out of the way? So, perhaps, I may be an extrovert-introvert? - Mona N.

I’ve seen a lot of conjecture on FriendFeed (and elsewhere) recently from some of the more active participants in the realization that they spend more time interacting with their “friends” on FriendFeed than in meatspace and in many cases seem to enjoy those interactions more than otherwise. Despite the fact that many of these people are just now realizing they feel this way, I don’t really think this type of behavioral bent is new. It’s just become more apparent because FriendFeed’s combinations of features is the first that’s come along in a long time that enables that behavior extremely well. It fulfills a need for a lot of us and that may be one reason why it’s so successful. It may also be one reason why FriendFeed might never be mainstream in the near term but eventually (it and other tools like it) will be the defacto standard communication protocols in an emerging evolution of the introvert.

Dissection of a meatspace introvert:
The majority of the people in the world don’t feel connected with other people unless they spend time with them in person. The majority of time that human civilization has been around the only means of communication was face-to-face (verbal and non-verbal). When you aren’t good at that real-time, direct, intense type of communication it’s not an easy world to live in. Introversion is really just a lack of being comfortable with meatspace communications. Introverts seem to withdraw because it’s much easier to avoid looking like a fool if you remove yourself from situations where you have to communicate directly with others. But that doesn’t mean that introverts need connections with other people any less.

A brave new protocol:
Introversion can be “cured” by changing the protocol of communications. With the emergence of every new communications technology networks have sprung up and virtual communities have formed. Before the telnet and BBSes on the internet there were HAM radio networks and previous to that there telephone switchboard operators who chatted when the lines were free and even earlier there were social networks of telegraph operators who would “chat” with each other when they weren’t relaying official communiques. These steps enabled the emergence of a new kind of relationship between people, a connection that though asynchronous and virtual is just as real and prolific as extrovert connections in meatspace.

FriendFeed, the enabler:
Channels such as FriendFeed (and even Twitter) give introverts an incredible amount of control over their connections with other people and lack of that control is what is intimidating about meatspace interactions. Introverts feel very comfortable (sometimes even more comfortable) with those connections being virtual because it gives them control of the intimacy of their interactions to a very high degree. Interacting on forums like FriendFeed enables that control by allowing them to handle communications…
…when it is convenient…
…at a comfortable pace…
…with no penalty for slow response…
…with no penalty for avoiding conversations that are uncomfortable, uninteresting or not useful…
…to deal with other conversations in the priority they prefer…
…and the ability to carefully craft their interactions to make the highest impact on those with shared interests.
They become adept at deciphering context that would normally be transmitted in meatspace by verbal inflection and body language. They become proficient at multi-tasking and participating in many different conversations simultaneously on different topics. They find that there are many more connections out there for them to make than they’d hoped for. Once they’ve dipped their toes in those waters and found them pleasant, they jump in the pool with full extroverted abandon.

An evolution:
Social-media introverts are training themselves for the future. We have found our place in the world. We are the ones suited for a future where the standard is that virtual connections will outnumber meatspace ones. We are the early adopters who test the limits of each new offering to see if it will give us an even better way to handle these connections more efficiently. This is why something can generate so much buzz within the “early adopter crowd” but remain out of the mainstream.

There’s a few assumptions that I think we take for granted that’s lost on most people: 1) privacy is an illusion, 2) we’re all interconnected, 3) we spend an acceptably large amount of time online. No matter how true those sound to us, for most people, there’s a lot of pushback. Which is why, when Facebook goes crazy with the privacy restrictions, we go “what the hell” when the rest of the world goes “thank god.” So I think anything that appeals to privacy, close networks, and saving a person’s time online is going to go over hugely with mainstream people. I think to ignore one for the sake of another is the wrong way to approach it. - Mark Trapp

Because the mainstream (by definition, the majority of the people in the world) are extroverts who are comfortable with the slower pace of meatspace. Is that to say that all early adopters are introverts? No. But since meatspace introverts are naturally drawn to these new opportunities for communication and more likely to actively seek them out it stands to reason that the majority of early adopters are meatspace introverts.
The introverts of the world have found their medium and as the pace of information generation continues to grow expanding the need for enhanced communication we will eventually be the norm instead of the oddity.

A conclusion:
So, all you fellow meatspace introverts out there in wonder of your new-found extroversion in social-media, consider yourself blessed that you’ve got the natural inclination to not only handle but enjoy those relationships. The world is changing and it’s about to be our age. We have the capacity to thrive on the virtual connections that so befuddle those people who are limited to meatspace interactions, and, barring any disasters that throw civilization back to pre-technology, your virtual interaction skills will be the skills necessary to be successful in life from this point forward. Enjoy your new found status. It’s about time the introverts had a chance to shine.

Image via Wikipedia Lucky me! I had the opportunity to attend another presentation by Merlin Mann of 43Folders fame on time and attention management called “Who Moved my Brain” at an event my company sponsored this afternoon.

Merlin seems like the kind of guy that I would love to hang around if I had the chance. He endeavors to make every moment of his life meaningful by getting rid of the clutter using his quick wit and the ability to cut through B.S. immediately to what’s important. If you ever have the chance to see Merlin speak, make the time to go. It’s always entertaining, enlightening, inspiring and worth your time.

Here’s some of the quotes and ideas that resonated with me today. Some of it’s out of context, but I think it may even be more interesting that way (you’ll have to use your imagination… not a bad thing to promote!).

• Attention managment is a first-world problem

• We all behave like there’s going to be an end to the need for our time and attention.

• How much of your box is full of really stupid blocks?

• Always leave room in your box for awesome.

• I’m not a “time burglar”! [meta quote from an episode of The Simpsons]

• Sometimes you need to get out of “grizzly-bear mode” and make some s’mores for your family.

• Always qualify “yes”.

• That’s what being an adult is: making trade-offs.

If you can’t attend a talk, you can find Merlin all over the web in several blogs and his Twitter account. Subscribing to all his channels might be against the principles of time and attention management but exceptions can be made for things you enjoy!

Image via WikipediaMy employer is performing the annual round of security training over the next couple of weeks and everyone received an email announcement today about it containing the following advice:

To help protect your personal financial information, you should have a different and unique password for all online services that you use. Remember, the best passwords use a combination of upper and lower case letters and numbers. An easy way to create and remember a unique password is think of a catchy phrase, and then use letters and numbers from the phrase to create your password.

While most would think that’s great advice, my immediate thought was “that’s insane! I have accounts on more than 100 services on the web! How can I possibly remember unique passwords for each one??”

I am a ravenous beta web application junkie, and I probably use at least 10 web services (email, rss, bookmarking, etc.) on a daily basis which all require passwords. And of course there are passwords that I use at work to access various systems, account passwords on the home computers and network, account credentials for my sidework clients (who depend on me to keep up with them!) and many more I’m sure I’m not thinking of right now.

I replied to the email and asked for suggestions of how to apply the advice in my situation. The response: try a password manager. But I’ve looked at those before and there’s a flaw - they can only store and retrieve your passwords on the computer you install them on. It’s not as if I only would only access passworded accounts from one computer. I have a computer at home (actually 4 to choose from at this point!), a computer at work, a Pocket PC phone, and a wi-fi enabled iPodTouch (when I borrow from the hubby), not to mention I do occasionally go places with computers I don’t own like my family’s houses. If I install a password manager on one computer then how am I suppose to use it on any of the others? Passing this on as a reply to the reply got no response.

My applied solution to the password overload problem has not been elegant. I hadn’t planned this method but it’s what I’ve fallen into. I basically have about 4 “levels” of passwords with about 10 total variations. That’s about as many as my brain can keep up with. Whenever I sign up for something I ask myself a few questions and pick a password:

Level 4

• Attributes: Short, very simple
• Variations: 1
• Typical scenario: usually on a beta service signup
• Questions answered “No”: Do I trust this service to keep my password? Will I ever use this service more than a couple of times?

Level 3

• Attributes: Longer, still simple
• Variations: 1
• Typical scenario: on services I’m likely to use more than once or were highly recommended so I “trust” them.
• Questions answered “No”: Will it be the end of the world if someone figures out my password and logs in as me?

Level 2

• Attributes: Longer, with complicated numbers, symbols, capitalization
• Variations: 3: chars with number, no symbols; chars with number and symbol; chars with number, symbol and capital
• Typical scenario: a service that requires me to use passwords that meet their criteria
• Questions answered “No”: Will this dang thing let me sign up already with level 4 or 3 passwords?

Level 1

• Attributes: Relatively unique, using the whole “sentence as a password” thing to make something really strong.
• Variations: about 5
• Typical scenario: work credentials or a service that could expose my financial or other sensitive data
• Question answered “Yes”: Would it be devastating for someone to get access to this info?

But there’s still all the services that insist that you change your password every cycle (especially at work). I’m guilty of putting a number at the end and incrementing those so I don’t have to remember something new.

There has to be a better way to deal with all this stuff. I’ve thought about keeping a list online somewhere but that seems inherently vulnerable. And, no, OpenID can’t fix this for me. So how do you manage account/password hell?

I’ve been inspired recently to resuscitate my months-neglected Twitter account as an experiment because I’ve been seeing a lot of discussion on various blogs and FriendFeed touting all the benefits of being active with Twitter such as crowdsourcing, socialization and meeting new people with common interests. Most of these posters list their favorite Twitter services in a “quickstart” guide and seem to heavily imply that it’s easy to get set up and quickly reap the benefits.

But the Twitter evangelists seem to be either social networking A-listers who generate massive, nearly instant audiences in whatever service they sign up with or they are people who spend several hours a day cultivating their networks by actively monitoring and responding to tweets and putting a lot of original tweets out themselves or both.

The problem is that Twitter can be a pretty lonely and discouraging service if you don’t have any followers and the people you’re interested in don’t follow you back. You can’t have a conversation if no one is listening to respond. How do you even reach out to people that you’d like to have conversations with if they don’t follow you? You can’t direct message them and there’s not even a guarantee that they’ll see your @replies. To be successful at Twitter you have to spend a lot of time making a reputation for yourself and hope that the people you follow notice and return the follow. Chances seem slim unless you put incredible amounts of persistence and ego stroking into it to capture their attention.

And that’s why Twitter won’t ever be mainstream. Early adopters are techno masochists but other people aren’t. We’re often willing to put in an amazing amount of time and effort into new services and put up with a lot of frustration from them with even the smallest amount of perceived benefit. But everyone else is more sensible. They don’t have the time or motivation to build a successful Twitter network, and they never will with its current implementation. I see some of the same problems with the social aspect of FriendFeed, despite opinions to the contrary.

I’m going to keep trying for a while, with some good advice on the how instead of the why, and see if I can get my tweets out of the echo chamber, but I couldn’t honestly recommend Twitter to my coworkers or family members at this point because I know they wouldn’t be willing to spend the time and effort to make it benefit them. I see value in the idea of the service. I think eventually, once we get filters and intelligent agents to be our attention guardians we’ll be able to have good two-way conversations without the whole follower/followee model. At that point, Twitter will just have turned into a framework or protocol, but obviously it’s going to be a while before that happens.

Maybe I’m missing something and the Twitter-ken can tell me what I’m doing wrong. Please feel free to enlighten me!

Lesson reinforced this week: If something sounds too good to be true, it probably is. Case in point: Dreamhost’s supposed 500GB hosting plans entice you with the promise of lots of space for cheap (about $11/mo) but you can’t use that space for file storage.

I have been trying to make up my mind about an off-site backup service for more than a year now. I kept looking at Amazon S3 but, as cheap as it is, it still seemed expensive, especially because I have around 350GB of data I need to backup. Most file backup/storage sites only give you a tiny amount of space (who only has 5GB worth of data to back up these days??) or charge you hundreds of dollars a month for as much storage as I needed. The main options that were even partially affordable were hosting by Dreamhost or GoDaddy, or Amazon S3.

We have had an account with Dreamhost now for a few years and while it hasn’t been 100% uptime we hadn’t had many other problems with them in general. We have 5 live websites on the Dreamhost account but we’re only using a tiny fraction of the almost 540GB (growing weekly) of available space. I couldn’t justify paying for S3 if we were already paying for the space on Dreamhost.

So I uploaded about 80GB worth of pictures. Within a few days I got a notice that the files weren’t directly related to website hosting and I had 3 options: remove all the files, change the account to a file storage account for $0.20/mo/GB or do nothing and have the account suspended. Doing a bit of research turned up that there was some fine print in the ToS that says they have the option to charge you extra for files that are hosted and not related to website hosting.

I rolled my eyes and started the week-long process of ftping up to my Amazon S3 account instead. It’s actually cheaper by $0.05/mo for storage than Dreamhost’s rate. But it was a busy week and I forgot to remove my files from the Dreamhost account until about 10pm on the deadline day…

Dreamhost suspended our account, cutting off the live websites we were hosting. Now maybe we deserved that for not making the deadline but their reply system for the support emails kept bouncing back our requests to delete the files and restore our account. We supposedly had call-support with the plan we were on but there’s no phone number on the site for you to get in touch with anyone. We were scrambling till we finally thought of submitting a ticket on the website instead of trying to reply to the original suspension email again. Our sites were down for about 24 hours and we are not happy campers.

I’m disgruntled with Dreamhost for several reasons:

• Not making it completely clear on their hosting plan description pages that you can’t use the space for file storage, which resulted in me wasting my time uploading all those files in the first place. Who the hell has 500+GB of files related to their website to host?? Are they really going to let you do something like your own YouTube on a $11/mo web hosting account? I’m tempted to try it just to see if they suspend me for “legitimate” web hosting of that much material.
• Not having some kind of way to contact them by phone in an emergency, especially when we were supposed to have call support on our plan. We found out that it’s really “call back support” meaning you email or submit a ticket and they’ll call you when they get to it. That doesn’t cut it when your sites are down.
• Not having their email support system working for replies. It was barfing on the format of the subject line that was generated, not something we would know how to fix to make sure the email got through. When email is the only means of contact it’s important that the system be robust enough not to bounce back replies to your support tickets!!
• And, as a side issue, I’m still upset that they consolidated all their hosting plans into one option that is half as expensive as the plan we were on but with only minor differences in features, but they didn’t bother to notify us of those differences or that we could be saving money by switching. Since we just always go directly to panel.dreamhost.com and don’t bother to go look at the plan options on the main site, we didn’t know about the changes. We were paying double what we needed to for almost a year.

It’s frustrating because when we’re actually able to GET support from Dreamhost they’re always nice and helpful. It’s just too hard to get someone to respond in a reasonable timeframe from an email or when the email system is not working.

I’m using S3 for backup and after this experience we’ll be looking for a new host soon as well. For all those people who have debated about whether you should use Dreamhost or S3 for backup, the answer lies in a new take on another old addage: “You don’t get what you don’t pay for”. Amazon S3 is the way to go.

Yesterday a friend of mine coined a new term that will be one of my favorite words for a while. I was doing some testing of a functional area of the website we’re working on and found some unexpected behavior that at first I thought was a bug but on more thought, and realizing that it had some benefits, determined it might actually be a feature that we just didn’t document very well for the user.

I IMed my friend who’s managing the project and explained my thoughts…

Friend: interesting… what’s the cross between a bug and a feature? beature? fugture?
Lindsay: heh.
Lindsay: I like fugture
Lindsay: or fug for short
Lindsay: beature is too much like beautiful… and a fugture is anything but beautiful!!

So it’s all Fugtures now, baby!

New terminology can make old problems into their own solutions! Instead of spending hours working out the fixes for the mile long list of change requests you inherited with maintaining someone else’s old code, just tell the client that it’s fine the way it is…call it Fugture-Rich!

Too bad it doesn’t really work that way… oh well, back to searching for some more fugs to squash.

I read a great article by Kathy Sierra of “Creating Passionate Users” fame this morning. She brought up the point of how glib talking people usually get their way more often then their less-articulate counterparts. While it is not always true that the fast-talkers are wrong, the problem comes in when the deep-thinkers are overlooked when they might be right.

Kathy’s article was in the context of making business decisions, having meetings about development issues and deciding on a course of action. But the discussion made me think about another conversation I had recently with a developer friend about interviews for development jobs.

It seems as if technical interviews are definitely stacked in favor of the glib. Considering the fact that many of the best developers (at least in my experience) are often the introverts and don’t like to rush into things headfirst, they are at a disservice with the typical method of interviewing.

It usually goes like this:

• You get the “Tech Screen”: a 30-45 minute phone barrage of very specific (to the point of “Trivial Pursuit”) questions on code syntax, platform terminology and even IDE menu options. Under pressure, its often difficult to recall that kind of information, and questionable whether much of it is worth knowing off the top of your head. That’s what Google, intellisense and your ability to point and click are for. Frankly, I’d be suspicious of people who do know the name of the 3rd item under the Tools->Debug menu as either being obsessive compulsive or “cheating”. And just because you do know all of the trivia doesn’t mean you have problem solving skills.
• If you can get past that stage you’re typically brought in to interview in a conference room with one or more people warily (or wearily, depending on how many interviews they’ve already done that day) staring at you from across the table who briefly explain some super difficult business problem that has plagued them for several years and expect you to come up with a watertight solution with about 10 seconds of forethought. Either that or you get the “Mensa from hell” type of “logic” problems involving gas stations and blenders that you may or may not have the worldly experience to figure out in the limited amount of time you have to spit out your answer. Cross your fingers, turn on the glib and buzzwords and hope your stream of consciousness answer is somewhat acceptable.

It’s amazing that any introvert developers get hired!

A developer’s job is about solving problems, but not instantly. Its about learning new technologies and methodologies to solve those problems if you don’t already have the appropriate knowledge. Its about becoming aware of your environment and working within those constraints. And its about efficiency: using whatever tools you can find to save you time, reusing things you and other people have developed to keep you from reinventing the wheel and leveraging whatever knowledge resources (search, books, friends) you have available to you to get the job done. But all of that takes time, and those skills are not accurately measured in the typical kinds of interviews that I and other developers I know have been exposed to (or given!).

Wouldn’t it make more sense if you were given a set of reasonable project requirements with the tools and environment you’d be using at your potential employer (see virtualization) and access to whatever personal tools you’d use if you were working there (ie, internet access, IM, phone, your library of code snippets, your favorite books), and allowed to take 8-24 hours to complete the project to the best of your ability. Then your potential employer could review your work and call you in for a code review so you could justify your choices. Someone who got through that process in good standing would stand a lot better chance of being successful in your company in the long run. It would give people a chance to be judged on what they DO and not what they SAY. And it would get rid of the fast-talking BSers.

“But what if you had your buddy code the whole thing for you?”, the interviewers might say. It doesn’t really matter if the code review process is implemented well. Since one more aspect of development is to be able to understand code that other people write, its still an appropriate test of someone’s ability. Who cares if you really wrote it if you can step through each part and thoroughly explain it to the interviewer’s satisfaction. If there’s still a question of aptitude, the interviewee could expand some functionality during the course of the interview. I have a whole network of developer friends with different areas of expertise that I call on when I need help with some concept I haven’t had to deal with before. And they call on me when I have knowledge that they need as well. We share code snippets all the time. It’s another tool. It’s another method. It’s just part of being a good developer. But in the end it’s all about whether the interviewee really understand the code that they’re presenting. If they didn’t write it this time but they understand and can explain it, they’ll be able to write it next time.

I would rather have someone come onboard at my company who had already demonstrated their capability with problems similar to what they will be expected to work with in my environment than take the chance that the silver-tounged person who knew all the answers can’t produce. That’s the risk you take with the standard tech interview process that’s all based on talk. Time for a newer approach!

I’ve been thinking about the Geek Divide after Pete’s post yesterday on it (from which I found Scott Karp’s geek qualification list list that inspired me to create my own).

This is a subject close to my heart, being what I am. But I often wonder, why can’t everyone just be geeky?? How come everyone doesn’t get excited about new technology? Why does the world have so many oblivious, uninterested or just plain ludditious people in it?

Yes, I am firmly entrenched in my little reality tunnel, but I often honestly wonder how people in this day and age can even avoid being geeky. I think it’s an age thing. Maybe things just move too fast for most folks over the age of 25…

I believe that most of the kids 16 and under will be geeks by default. Exposure to computers, the internet, cell phones and gaming consoles for their entire life can’t help but make it so. And it doesn’t phase them that it changes wholly in a matter of months. From their perspective, that rate of change is a normal part of life. And I think that’s a good thing because the rate of change is only going to accelerate.

TAD and I were very entertained by two “popular looking” high school aged kids at the Apple store the other night that were playing with an iLife on an iBook and had to call their friends on their cell and tell them to come see all the awesome stuff it could do. That never would have happened even 5 years ago. Every time we go there are gaggles of teenage girls ohhing and ahhing over iPods and cameras and laptops. It’s become fashionable to have geeky tendencies.

So maybe I’m biased (of course I am), but I’m thinking the Geek Divide, being more of an age issue, will resolve itself as the younger generation matures and starts becoming financially independent. These kids are used to putting time and effort into the things they use, they’re willing to endure the pain of the complexity over lack of features that most of us early adopters willingly go through now and they’ll take it for granted that it’s part of the experience. The issues that people have been talking about lately with “commercializing” Web 2.0 offerings will eventually just kind of fade away.

I’m not saying that “commercializing” isn’t important because it is, especially right now. Usability and feature value should always be major factors in the development of applications. Currently, and over the course of the next few years, the Geek Divide will still be a large chasm. But, I think that the level of user sophistication is going to go up radically after that. We’ll just have to be conscious of the needs of the geek-deficient and hold their hands until then.

I discovered Scott Karp’s blog today and the Top 10 List he created to evaluate yourself and discover whether you’re a geek or not…

Well, I definitely qualify if that’s the total criteria, but I think there are levels of geekness. Scott’s quiz defines the entry level. Here’s a quiz for the next rung of “You might just be a geek if…”

1. You have ever installed an open source blogging framework on a server and then proceeded to customize themes and write plugins for it
2. You have written a custom RSS aggregator and integrated it into your website projects and/or blog
3. You have arguments about what Web 2.0 is and what it isn’t with your friends. Bonus points if you argue with your non-techie family about it anyway.
4. You have ever stayed up past midnight playing with coding your new todo list with expandable priority sections just to say that “yeah, I can do AJAX”
5. You have ever done a happy dance when someone on your “A-list” blog roll left a comment on one of your blog posts, your digged article hit the front page, or your blog post got listed on del.icio.us/popular
6. You have 10 or more links in your del.icio.us archive that have the tag “daily” or “infodiscovery” (or eqivalent).
7. You have attempted to sell your attention data on eBay (ok, I haven’t done this one, but it’s an idea!)
8. You have made a podcast
9. You subscribe to RSS feeds that alert you to brand new beta sites and sign up for every beta you can. Bonus points if you try to contact the developers to discuss enhancements!
10. You were ever picked on by your tech-savvy friends for being a geek

Admittedly, two of these I haven’t done, so I’ll say if you score an 8, you’re at least as geeky as me and that’s pretty dang geeky. I’ll leave the next tier list to someone else!!