Puzzlepieces – 2007

I’m not going to get into all the aspects of the issue, just wanted to make one point.

To improve success at getting people to do stuff, you need to show them the consequences of their actions. Maybe that sounds obvious, but is it? It needs to be direct, personal, and specific, so that it hits peoples’ hearts and minds. Even if it is (almost) a lie; for example those adopt-a-third-world-child programs. While your donations help the lives of a third-world community, I very much doubt that they benefit only the child you have “adopted,” leaving neighbouring children in the dust.

To take a specific example, blood donation, which is in my mind since I recently did so for the first time, and it was being discussed on the radio yesterday. If you got a phone call today from someone who told you that your specific donation was the one that saved their life… do you think that would change your likelihood of giving again?

hmmn… feeling Godin-like now

dougmccune.com » Blog Archive » Not Your Mamma’s Maps - a very slick app for browsing geospatial data. Their screencast shows input through a geoRSS feed, but I am guessing that will not be freely available. Via Mikel.

Long Bet Winner: Weblogs vs. The New York Times | Workbench - this is rather amusing. I remember back in 2002 when Dave Winer made this bet for 2007, a date which seemed impossibly far away. Of course, nowadays the “we” in weblogs is almost always dropped.

The conclusion is that technically blogs beat the New York Times, but at any rate Wikipedia beat both.

Via Sam.

mySociety » Blog Archive » Please Donate to help us expand TheyWorkForYou - mySociety does fantastic work. Unfortunately for me, it is mostly UK- and Eurocentric, but hopefully they’ll get some volunteers from elsewhere over time.

Path Intelligence Monitors Foot Traffic in Retail Stores By Pinging People’s Phones - this is actually fairly cool. not all analytics have to be online-based.

Pattern Finder: Standards Work Doesn’t Have to Be Contentious - I’ll second that. DeWitt has been doing great work with OpenSearch.

Ask.com Unveils Search Privacy Tool: Users Control Their Search Data - Ask.com has been making smart moves, for the most part. Being in fourth place, the onus is on them to differentiate themselves and take risks.

Privacy specifically, I think has, just in the last few months, finally hit mainstream consciousness. More and more “normal” are telling me about their online privacy fears.

In a related vein, Facebook really screwed up, and I’m not sure they’re done screwing up. I praised them a lot in some recent blog posts… it never occurred to me that they could have possibly not learned any lessons from when they released newsfeeds and minifeeds.

scottberkun.com » Buy nothing for Christmas - I definitely agree with this. Not so much the title, but what he actually writes.

It is hard to get somebody a good gift, and I would rather give or receive nothing than something unneeded or unwanted.

Via Jeremy Zawodny’s linkblog.

so I think I have semi-solved my question of where to post things. now everything I tag with “forfb” on this blog will also show up as a note on Facebook. That way I can post things on one, the other, or both, without having to write them twice. Of course, there will still be comment splitting…

YouTube - Waterloo Flash Mob - Pillow Fight Official Video - very cool, I forget why I didn’t participate. ah well, next time

I don’t do enough product endorsement on this blog. Of course, most of that is due to the fact that there are very few products I’m willing to endorse.

Anyhow, for sandwich containers the best I have so far found is Tupperware Sandwich Keepers. Link goes to Amazon since Tupperware’s own site lacks permalinks. Most so called “sandwich containers” are neither the right size nor shape. This one is both, and no more, as sandwich + container have a negligible difference in both mass and volume from sandwich alone.

One of my original ones did get a broken hinge, but they will replace that and it seems to have been a random case.

On the downside, they seem to only be available in one colour now, without paying more for fancy cartoons on it, which makes it slightly less useful when preparing sandwiches for multiple people. Interestingly, Tupperware’s Australian site does have permalinks for sandwich keepers where they are available in different colours.

I also took this opportunity to add this to ProductWiki, a site built by my friend Omar in Waterloo. Then I was going to mark it up in hreview when it occurred to me that ProductWiki probably did that already. Turns out it doesn’t, so get to it Omar. I did at least add rev=”review” though.

PHD Comics: Seminar Appeal - heh so true. I’m glad a friend got me on to PHD last year.

On a related topic, I had a hard time deciding where to blog this. I used to use my own blog for everything, but for the last while I use notes on Facebook for things that are more pertinent to my friends than to everyone else. This one is tricky though, as now none of my friends will see this, since few subscribe to my general blog…

The Waterloo Conference on Social Entrepreneurship took place this weekend, although I missed out on Sunday’s portion. The first thing that amazed me was finding out that the idea for this conference occurred less than two months ago. The opening keynote was by George Roter, co-founder of EWB. EWB is quite active here, seeing as it was founded by UW graduates, but I learned a lot that I didn’t know, and I was very impressed with both George and EWB. Another presentation I attended was on how to talk to the media (sending press releases, etc.) which was quite interesting.

I hope the title of this blog post is the last thing I ever read that sounds like that. sadly, this will not happen

frequent blog posts on the same topic? how odd of me

Anyhow since there’s an infinity now written about the Facebook advertising stuff that I talked about in my previous post, I need to of course correct all those misinformed people . As I said, Facebook is doing a great job with this new stuff. One lame thing that they did, which is something that I see happen with all these companies that start going big, is that they got a small number of big players (the short head, if you will) on board so that they can feel all special about it. So these lame companies go into this with lame ideas (if Coke’s plan isn’t the stupidest idea ever…). None of that matters. They might get smarter, or they might not (hardly possible). More importantly, the non-huge players (fine, fine, the long tail) are what will actually make this work. It may take a while to get there, but it will certainly happen.

Why Facebook Shouldn’t Fear OpenSocial - I’m supposed to be studying, so of course it’s a good time to do some blogging.

Anyhow, I agree with Josh that the idea that the competition now being Facebook vs OpenSocial is silly. Facebook is doing an absolutely amazingly fantastic job pleasing users, developers, being innovative, and soon, generating profit. Their upcoming “Beacon” plans seem as brilliant as their previous ones. The only bad thing I have to say about them (from a business perspective), is that they have been way to slow getting their advertising products out. In the long run, that may not make much difference.

OpenSocial is not competition in any sense of the word. It’s just a little specification to standardize some web services, which is a good thing. And assuming it gains the traction it is expected (the supporters actually follow through), then Facebook will just join it too, and they haven’t lost anything, really. In fact they’ll have gained additional developers and applications.

Facebook would have to be really stupid to act any other way, and from what I’ve seen, they are anything but. Except their HR, I’m not so in love with that.

Is it just me, or is MySpace sitting on their laurels? Just copying Facebook isn’t going to do it, and besides, they don’t seem to be copying them very well or quickly. I thought being the major player was supposed to count for something, like having resources.

One last comment on OpenSocial… while it is certainly good for developers that there will be a common API, let’s not forget that this simply means it will be easy to have an application run on multiple websites… separately. Having an application that seamlessly uses more than one social website simultaneously will still be an enormous headache. So there’s plenty more to be done there.

Update Nov 5. After reading a few things elsewhere, maybe myspace isn’t doing nothing, they just decided to let Google deal with all their advertising, and hope to make enough from that. But since that will likely be almost all of their revenue, might that not be a bad idea?

StartupCamp Waterloo was last night. I was surprised at the crowd, a number of people came up from Guelph and Toronto, including Mr Toronto DemoCamp.

First up was Ali Asaria (of well.ca), whose honest presentation about his own abilities and knowledge was fantastic. I love when people are real, rather than some fake presentable version of themselves. Ali’s stories of dealing with VCs were great.

This Camp was well-sponsored, which was great. Nothing beats free food. Except maybe the awesome door prize I won, thanks to Tech Capital Partners. I’ve been hearing good things about them (especially their ability to make the right investment choices), and I’m not just saying that because of the prize.

Avery showed us all how easy a Windows app can make installation. I think it made a fool of every single other piece of Windows software. One-click, that was it.

Simon Clark presented on his neighbourhood website (for his and hopefully other neighbourhoods), which was nicely done, and I’m very interested in that sort of thing. Does everyone on a street really need a huge ladder? (hint: the answer is “no”). He also did well by pointing out that it’s not just the technology but needs to be lead by an enthusiastic community member.

I presented to talk about Zimride. Simon was managing the presentations and asked everyone a few things, including what we hope to get out of presenting. My answer of “to turn everyone in the audience into evangelists for Zimride” got a lot of laughs, although that wasn’t really the intention . I was presenting using Jesse’s computer, so there was a mildly embarrassing minute when I went to Facebook and realized Jesse was already logged in. Hopefully I didn’t show anything too sensitive from his or my own .

The Facebook hype (as we all know, of course) is completely insane. Two people immediately came up to me afterwards asking if I could build them a Facebook application. I’m not going to do that, but I think I can find them someone who will. Thats what’s so great about these events, I definitely made some good connections, and may have convinced one or two people to attend the Web Clinic events I run.

Robert Barlow-Busch (of UX Group) proposed some sort of UX Critique Camp, which I and many others seemed to think was a really good idea, so hopefully that will happen at some point.

Monish (link to his startup since he has no site yet) seems to have decided to start a blog listing Waterloo tech events, which is a good idea. There’s no real centralized place for that now, although there are a variety of obstacles.

Lastly, I finally got around to adding a new feature to Quizify, touching the code for the first time in nine or so months. Yay.

I ran into Terrill yesterday at a Waterloo UX group event and it occurred to me that I hadn’t read anything of his lately. So I check and it turns out I wasn’t subscribed to his blog. Whoops. There’s a ton of interesting stuff in the last twenty or so posts that I’ve had the energy to look at.

It makes me think that I should really blog a lot more myself, since I do it so rarely these days. I guess I’m just lazy… a lot of stuff I bookmark on del.icio.us, but most things I just keep to myself, really. Or in some cases I complain to tons of people in person (such as about my school’s LMS software, which Terrill has written a great criticism of).

Terrill actually posted a screenshot of him using Quizify, a tool I made last year (and haven’t properly announced since it’s not quite ready) and keep trying to convince myself I will get back to working on shortly. I really want to, ‘cause it could be so darn useful, and I’ve got pages of ideas for it. I just need to get on it. Since I’ve already got a job (oh, by the way I will be joining Microsoft in Redmond around September), I’m thinking that at some point before then I will probably just open source it, so it has some chance of succeeding… I dunno.

Speaking of getting on stuff, back in March I had an idea for a Web Clinic at the University of Waterloo, where I book a computer lab for a few hours at the same time and place each week, and anyone who works on web stuff (any skill level and specialty) can show up, work on their own stuff, and help each other. Basically there is almost no web community at this school, and thanks to Jesse and a few others who started BarCamp here, there is something now, but I felt it needed a lot more. So this week was the second week of the Web Clinic. I’m proud of myself for actually following through with something (for once), and for trying to start a community (way harder than starting a website for instance). It is still just starting of course, and could easily collapse, but the turnout so far I’ve been happy with.

I’ve already met people I didn’t know at this school who are working on neat things. It’s funny how things come to you once you start things. Someone I didn’t know at all emailed me out of the blue to talk about his startup. I’m getting a couple of inquiries about people looking for employees, volunteers, etc. So hopefully before I finish school in April, this will have morphed into a real thing that can survive without me.

Inscribed in the living tile: Type in the Toronto subway (Joe Clark) - I read just about all of this, so I must be crazy. As much as I’d like the TTC to fix the signage problem (I wouldn’t mind trying to fix it myself, I’ve certainly had problems with it), signage seems to be the least of the TTC’s problems these days.

Just writing this post tells me that I’m getting way too old…

Anyhow, I graduate from the University of Waterloo around April/May, and had a vague idea that I should probably get a job sometime after that. Although I do rather like doing the internship thing, starting with a predefined end date, however I think that six months would be more useful than the four-month ones that my school uses.

“Unfortunately” I’ll be getting a really good job offer soon with much less time to accept or reject it than I would like. Which means that I may have to decide on all this quite soon, and thus I need to be looking at other options right now as well. Overall I would prefer to work in Toronto or Kitchener-Waterloo, but if anyone has any job opportunities or ideas they think I should consider (at any location), then please let me know by email. I’m interested in hearing all sorts of different ideas (from full-time to part-time, volunteer, etc.), and even if I don’t take you up on them, we can have a good chat

Kirix Strata: Access and Manipulate Data from the Web - this is quite cool, and it’s great to see a lot of data/stats/visualization stuff coming to the web these days. For their specific app though, it seems like it would have made more sense to act as a browser add-on for extracting the data, and not trying to add a browser and spreadsheet/database software at the same time. I know if I used this, I would generally copy everything over to Excel or other software rather than edit it within their app.

DeWitt Clinton » Blog Archive » Yelp search API - yesterday I decided I didn’t have the time to read through the whole Yelp spec and make my suggestions on how they be using OpenSearch. So naturally, DeWitt (independently) did exactly that.

Official Google Maps API Blog: Microformats in Google Maps - they could do a lot more, but it’s a good start.

Right to Dry - looks like someone in (sorta) my area has taken up the cause

Digg - Facebook Carpool: the First Useful Facebook Application - so the Facebook application I’ve been working on made #1 on digg. not bad.

By “working on,” I mostly mean giving my opinions and advice, as I don’t have the time to work on this right now, what with being back for another internship at Microsoft.

Someday I’ll write a longer post about this, but basically I’m really excited to be helping, even in a small way, with promoting a tool as fundamentally useful of this. Meeting new people, saving energy and money, etc.

Carpooling is a chicken-and-egg problem app. It’s only useful if there are a lot of people in the same place using it as well. Before being dugg, we had a lot of users in California and in Waterloo, whereas presumably these new users will be much more spread out. So it is a mixed blessing.

Anyhow, here’s hoping we change the world