Now what?

Coming soon to your Twitter feed - tweets from people you don't follow

Sun, 15 Nov 2009 21:44:24 -0800

via Ev Williams, in his post describing the ReTweet feature:

“The perfect Twitter would show you only the stuff you care about—relevant, timely, local, funny, whatever you’re most interested in—even if you don’t follow the person who wrote it.”

Determining the stuff I care about is going to be quite a challenge, especially with the character and metadata limits that currently exist for each tweet. Location and Retweet (and maybe Lists) awareness will definitely help, but I’m wondering if the secret sauce is yet to be added to the Twitter stream.

I think Flickr’s “interestingness” is the best example so far of implicit curation - and what Flickr has that I don’t know if Twitter does is a concept of “views”…sure a person may have a lot of followers on Twitter - but does that mean their tweets are actually being read/seen? Beyond Retweeting, I think Twitter could benefit from having a more highlighted “favorite” or “like” feature…or any other additional features that sort interesting from uninteresting in as low-friction a way as possible.

"Before there’s a market there’s a community."

Wed, 28 Oct 2009 22:55:55 -0700

““Before there’s a market there’s a community.””

- via me (after being inspired by a post from John Battelle).

How to get where you want to go...it's as easy as 1, 2, 3

Tue, 27 Oct 2009 23:08:00 -0700

Inspiring stuff from Doug Dub, talking about how he got his job at Twitter:

“Alex, I have noticed you are running what amounts to a one man show on the API front, and tend to a lot of developer relations when I assume you would rather be developing. That said, is Twitter looking for someone to help manage the developer community (answer API questions, serve as liaison to development, etc…)? …”

1. Get involved with the community

2. Notice specific ways you can help out

3. Take a chance, prove your value, and hold on tight.

Later, Rinse, Repeat.

How would David Foster Wallace explain the Twitter phenomenon?

Mon, 26 Oct 2009 23:22:00 -0700

While reading Infinite Jest and Eating the Dinosaur, I stumbled upon two quotes that seem to do a pretty nice job of explaining why Twitter has become such a phenomenon…

First up, David Foster Wallace in Infinite Jest:

“you get to believe you’re receiving someone’s complete attention without having to return it.”

Then, on the train home today I came across this from Chuck Klosterman:

“Observing someone without context amplifies the experience.”

Both authors weren’t addressing Twitter specifically, but it’s hard not to see the parallels (Wallace was talking about the telephone and Klosterman was talking about the movie Vertigo). Also, ‘amplifies’ doesn’t always mean better, but I think it captures why people can become so caught up in seemingly meaningless babble from people you hardly know.

ps: That tagline’s all yours if you want it Twitter.

John Carmack on making games

Sat, 31 Jan 2009 16:06:58 -0800

Lots of solid advice from John Carmack (of id fame) in an old Slashdot thread:

“There is not a hell of a lot of difference between what the best designer in the world produces, and what a quite a few reasonably clued in players would produce at this point. This is the “abstract creativity” aspect. This part just isn’t all that valuable. Not worthless, but it isn’t the thing to wrap a company around.”

“The real value in design is the give and take during implementation and testing. It isn’t the couple dozen decisions made at the start, it is the thousands of little decisions made as the product is being brought to life, and constantly modified as things evolve around it.The focus should be on the development process, not the (initial) design.”

“The games with 500 page design documents before any implementation are also kidding themselves, because you can’t make all the detail decisions without actually experiencing a lot of the interactions.”

Any definition of success is bound up with time.

Fri, 30 Jan 2009 14:11:42 -0800

From an interview with Demetri Martin:

We live in time. So any definition of success is bound up with time. With other things you can say, “Can I yo-yo? Can I juggle?” Usually you have a pretty small window in which to get your answer. The question is - “Will I enjoy this?”

Because by enjoying it enough, now I have a nice big window. You can suspend judgment and make that hole very big. If I make my window ten days for stand-up, the conclusion is that I failed and that I’m not good at stand-up. If I make it ten years—if I just wait (and work at it) —the conclusion might be something totally different.

"We’re living in a world where the ability to imagine and generate new ideas with speed and to..."

Wed, 21 Jan 2009 18:22:00 -0800

“We’re living in a world where the ability to imagine and generate new ideas with speed and to implement them through global collaboration is the most important competitive advantage.”

- via Thomas Freidman.

This quote is probably the main reason I got into product management in the first place. If you are a person who’s capable of helping people make things (either dreaming things up or making existing things faster, better, etc…) then your skills will always be in demand.

ps: I’m also hoping this is a good example of making fundamental vs. instrumental career choices (jump to slide 47 for more)

"That’s why most designers make awful team members. It’s why, when the biz dev guy says “this is how..."

Tue, 13 Jan 2009 08:46:00 -0800

“

That’s why most designers make awful team members. It’s why, when the biz dev guy says “this is how our startup is going to make money,” our first inclination is to tear the living shit out of the idea.

But what designers need to understand is that nobody likes a negative blocker, and when we attack an idea, it feels personal to the guy with the idea, and invariably leads to us being left out, which is that last thing we want.

Fortunately the solution is simple: just force yourself to come up with an alternate solution. It’s a great mental exercise - think to yourself, “what’s the solution I want to see?” If I can’t come up with one, I won’t say anything. Better to be quiet and see how things progress than to be the negative blocker guy.

”

- via Derek Powazek’s “Things I Learned the Hard Way”

Work on Stuff that Matters (aka: how we can turn our economy around)

Sun, 11 Jan 2009 19:10:00 -0800

Tim O’Reilly’s got a great New Year’s themed post out, titled “Work on Stuff that Matters”. Here a few of my favorite quotes from it:

“You should regard money as fuel for what you really want to do, not as a goal in and of itself. Money is like gas in the car — you need to pay attention or you’ll end up on the side of the road — but a well-lived life is not a tour of gas stations!”

“Whatever you do, think about what you really value. The time you spend understanding your values will help you find the right kind of company or institution to work for, and when you find it, to do a better job.”

“If you’re thinking more about the competition than you are about customers and the value you’re going to create for them, you’re on the wrong path”

“You may sometimes find that others have made more of your ideas than you have yourself. It’s OK. If your goal is really big, then you’ll want your competitors to jump on the bandwagon and help spread the word”

"Every great business is founded on a thesis, a statement of what should be true. It’s then the..."

Wed, 07 Jan 2009 16:01:00 -0800

““Every great business is founded on a thesis, a statement of what should be true. It’s then the business’s job to go prove that thesis - in essence, the business becomes the argument that proves the thesis.””

- via John Battelle.

I think this could also apply to careers or individual roles. What argument(s) would you put on your resume?

How do you solve problems?

Sun, 04 Jan 2009 19:32:00 -0800

Came across an interesting post by Matt Gemmel on the decline of real problem solving among software developers (and probably our Google-ified society overall)

The problem is that this person’s problem-solving technique is to ask for the solution. Not to seek advice on how to approach the task, or ask for the names of likely classes to look into, or a link to an example - but to just ask for the code, fully formed and ready to go.

But problem solving skills are not a secret handed out at institutions of higher education, it’s just how things work…Here’s a secret: willingness and desire to learn are the true qualifications, not ability. If you want someone to spend time and effort (especially if it’s time they’re giving freely), then you’d better earn it.

So next time you’re considering asking a question, you’d better be ready with a convincing answer when you’re asked “What have you tried?”

If your answer amounts to “not a lot”, take my word for it: the next question you get back will be “then why should I help you?”

"Learn to make non-fatal or reversible decisions as quickly as possible."

Sun, 04 Jan 2009 00:41:00 -0800

“Learn to make non-fatal or reversible decisions as quickly as possible.”

- via Tim Ferriss

Once you have learned how to speak, what will you say?

Sun, 26 Oct 2008 15:26:00 -0700

Lots of great quotes and career advice from this talk, titled Beyond Flash, including:

You will become known for doing what you do. Many people seem to think they must endure a “rite of passage” which, once passed, will allow them to do the kind of work they want to do. Then they end up disappointed that this day never comes. Find a way to do the work you want to do, even if it means working nights and weekends. Once you’ve done a handful of excellent things in a given way, you will become known as the person who does excellent things in that given way.

Building Web Apps Together

Sun, 26 Oct 2008 14:59:00 -0700

Building Web Apps Together:

notes from the talk above:

•    technical wife and a design husband: and 9 months later a website is born
•    product development is more like sculpting not painting
•    must know the spectrum of technologies that we use to build the web
•    make revisions while the mocks are “easy to throw away”
•    we have to win lots of arguments as to why we make decisions
•    everyone responds well to having an interface presented to them
•    designers shouldn’t be afraid of developers
•    don’t hand them a spec and say “build that”….have collaboration early on.
•    “it’s difficult for me to respect something I don’t understand”
•    “developers know what’s possible more than designers”
•    everyone on this panel is a generalist
•    the voice of your product is something important for everyone to understand
•    “process is an anecdote to stupid people”
•    how can designers make themselves easier to work with? “show you’re working”, ie: share philosophical pretensions/beliefs, explain the models in their thinking.
•    learn SVN
•    the design quality of your prototype should reflect how done your actual product is

Overall, the talk was a high quality hour of discussion from battle-tested people. It’ll help to guide me on what I should be learning more of (“the spectrum of technologies that we use to build the web”, SVN) and how I should be interacting with people going forward.

"What separates us from other camera companies is that the vision guy is the decisionmaker,” he..."

Sun, 26 Oct 2008 14:25:00 -0700

“What separates us from other camera companies is that the vision guy is the decisionmaker,” he says. “That was one of my biggest advantages at Oakley, and it’s the same at Red—I’m in the trenches, in the product development, and I make the final call.”

- via a Wired Interview with Jim Jannard

"The best measure of a blog is not how many people it reaches, **it’s how much it changes what you..."

Sun, 26 Oct 2008 14:06:00 -0700

“The best measure of a blog is not how many people it reaches, **it’s how much it changes what you do**. Changes in your writing, your transparency, your humility. What blogging has done for me is made me think. I get to think about how the outside world will understand something I’m trying to do, for example. This means, of course, **that you get almost all of the goodness of a blog long before you have a lot of readers.**”

- via an interview with Seth Godin.

The small things add up

Sun, 11 May 2008 20:04:00 -0700

via Joel Spolsky’s post on User Interface Design:

That’s what days were like. A bunch of tiny frustrations, and a bunch of tiny successes. But they added up. Even something which seems like a tiny, inconsequential frustration affects your mood. Your emotions don’t seem to care about the magnitude of the event, only the quality.

UI is important because it affects the feelings, the emotions, and the mood of your users. If the UI is wrong and the user feels like they can’t control your software, they literally won’t be happy and they’ll blame it on your software.

update on 1/11/09: see also “Retired by not forgotten”

Reverse engineer your job description

Sun, 11 May 2008 19:22:00 -0700

One of the best things I did during my recent job search was to collect key bullet points from my favorite job descriptions (see: http://jobs.37signals.com/categories/3/jobs.rss). Subscribing to the job feeds was an easy way to see what was out there, and it made my procrasting with RSS reading somewhat productive :)

Even better, if you’re lucky you’ll get asked what key things you’d like to work on at your new job, and you’ll already have a list waiting. And you can also use that same list to keep yourself honest and make sure you’re working on what matters to you.

Twitter is what Blogger wanted to be when it grew up

Wed, 09 Apr 2008 02:04:00 -0700

In thinking about what I want to do on the web (professionally and in general) I started reading thru a lot of the Evan Williams archives (hence all these recent finds) and a couple of things have crossed my mind so far:

Reading Evhead is a lot like reading a non-fiction version of Microserfs…only Microserfs was written in 1994 instead 1999 (well done Mr. Copeland).
The majority of posts so far are very Twitter-esque…well below the 140 char limit - probably could have saved himself a bit of time had he just created Twitter first.

Also, thought this was funny:

Evhead, circa Feb 2000:

The new dot-com business model (via Valley Talk): “‘We’ll probably make more on subletting our own space this year than on anything else,’ says Jeff Bonforte, CEO of i-drive…”

Inc magazine interview with Ev, Mar 2008

As a cultural phenomenon, Twitter is a comer…but its status as a business is nebulous. The 14-person company is unprofitable (its single largest source of revenue last year was the subleasing of half a dozen desks to three small start-ups at $200 a desk a month)

It's totally easy

Tue, 08 Apr 2008 13:16:00 -0700

Being both a follower of the tech scene and a non-coder can often be a painful combination. When reading the news about Google App Engine it’s easy to get really excited about all the potential for future apps and then very quickly get depressed when you see developers do things that seem quite challenging to you and yet they get described as being totally easy. Bret’s a good guy and I know it’s not meant to be an insulting comment, but it’s frustrating to be interested in this stuff and then slam into a brick wall when looking for a place to start.

A little background: my coding experience consists almost completely of making videogames in BASIC for my TI-82 calculator in high school and building a website with Notepad and MS Paint in ‘97. HTML was “totally easy” relative to BASIC back then, but since then I haven’t really dug into CSS, Javascript, Python, Ruby, PHP, XML, etc…hence the intimidation with the multiple barriers to entry.

The question that I keep facing is - what is the best use of my time, or how can I add the most value? Learn programming by starting at square one and get frustrated while trying to do totally easy things, or should I focus on idea generation so I’m not stuck building yet another CMS or chat system?