Maverick Conceptions

Player.icio.us

Lynn Wallenstein — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 08:21:27 +0000

I think too many people underestimate the power of the human touch. I, like many, use google as my primary search engine. I just never found the quality of results from other engines, like Yahoo, to be the same as I get from Google. This is GREAT if I know what I am looking for. Now I am not talking about AI to do things like give me search terms I may not have thought of, but what if I am looking up concepts like “inspiration”, “examples of good design”, “good work music”. Google just can’t find me that… it requires the human touch. Unfortunately “human” based directories have never quite lived up to my expectation either. They are either controlled by an elite few, never updated or full of paid links making the results completely unreliable.

Enter social bookmarking.

Delicious and Magnolia have an unbelievable resource of information of human classified quality resources. It is a giant listing of sites that people have thought were worth saving, categoriezed by tag and updated with the freshest sites. Social Bookmarking is the future of search directories.

So to show my love for delicious and magnolia, Dan and I created Player.icio.us. Player.icio.us is basically a little app that plays bookmarks like a movie. Type in a tag word and it will “play” for you the most popular sites for that tag. We even extended it to include user names so if you want to see what your friends or fav internet celeb is up to, type in their delicious or magnolia user name and check out their latest saves.

I apologize in advance for my cold that makes me sound crazy nasily… that and I am from Jersey so, you get what you get.

As always feedback is appreciated… it is a little rough at the moment and we are working some of the bugs out, but would love to hear what you think.

How to Freelance from Home… My Take

Lynn Wallenstein — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 19:12:41 +0000

I have recently read a ton of articles about freelancing and working from home and how to get yourself motivated. Some of the common advice I keep hearing is keep your self clear of distractions, tell your family not to bother you, get dressed in work clothes so you know it is “business time” and I can’t help but think “why are these people working from home?!??”. I say this as I sit in my sweats, some Billy Ocean blasting over the speakers, Fable II is playing on the XBox earning me some Fable cash and I am planning my afternoon of talking a walk with my nieces and my dog.

Now I am not saying this works for everyone, but you have to think if you have to make your house like an office, why are you working from home and not an office? There are so many coworking options available for freelancers who require structure that I just don’t see the point. I myself drop on my IndyHall in Philadelphia once a month or so (keep in mind I live in Baltimore) when I need to work with others, but the majority of my work is done from my living room. For me it is pretty simple, when I am in a work mindset I will work and get my work done and “distractions” just don’t distract me. If I am being easily distracted then I am not really in a work mindset and my clients are going to get subpar work. You can’t force creativity… it just happens.

Freelancing is not for everyone…. infact it isn’t for most people. You are your own salesman, marketter, collections, work staff, boss and janitor. For those of us cut out for freelancing it really boils down to two reasons, money or freedom (and if you are lucky both). Either you can make more money freelancing then you can at a steady gig or you can work less then you would have to at a 9 to 5.

Either way you aren’t punching a clock.

I say Pffft to all that freelance advise:

Check your email whenever you want to… middle of the night? If you feel up to it go ahead!
Work in your jammys? Why not… keep a sweater and a hairbrush handy for those web cam calls.
Do chores in the middle of the day? Go ahead! Maybe you will be inspired at 7pm to work and you can do it knowing your laundry and dishes are done.

If you have the inability to let your work effect your life, your problem is not defining rules so that you have a life, your life clearly is not more exciting then your work… so either you need a therapist or you just have a really awesome job.

In the end of the day, do what makes you happy and if you aren’t happier freelancing then you are at a job, then get a job… it isn’t something to be ashamed of, I myself can’t work for others, I just am bad at it… we all need to follow through on our strengths.

HEAD Conference Day 1

Lynn Wallenstein — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 21:54:16 +0000

THIS IS ALL WRITTEN FROM MY PERSPECTIVE AS SOMEONE ATTENDING FROM MY HOUSE WITH FIOS BANDWIDTH SO I AM SURE EXPERIENCES VARY IF YOU WERE AT A HUB

So I just wrapped up my first day of the Conference. I really really think an online conference is a great concept and I think for breaking a lot of ground, is doing great. That being said, there are many many many things that I would improve from the speakers, the organizers and the software perspective.

The Speakers

I pretty much watched all speeches for at least a little while and the ones where the speaker directly addressed the web cam were so much better then the speakers who were speaking at hubs. They were easier to hear, they seemed less distracted and they were more intune with any issues then the hub speakers. Ironically I think the speakers who addressed the web cams directly would probably be percieved as less professional speakers as they didn’t have these set out agenda like speeches, they instead were having an interactive conversation.

One suggestion would be if you were going to speak at an hub and weren’t going to be infront of a screen, you should have at least one person in your audience who is monitoring the online conference. Keep in mind this is SUPPOSSED to be an online conference, if you had to put a priority, in my mind was advertised as a “stay home attend a conference thing” so the online people should be first. One speaker unfortunately gave his whole speech with no sound for anyone online and because he was speaking to a room also he didn’t check the screen where we were all saying “noone can hear you!”

The speakers should have familiarized themself with the system before hand, of course I am not sure if this was a problem from the organizers if they didn’t give them access, but the audience seemed to know more then the speakers and ended up telling the speakers what they needed to do (”Don’t forget to hit record”, “click over there to start”. There was an issue with the speakers could change the slides on their screen but it wouldn’t change their slides to the viewers… some speakers were fortunate enough to have slide numbers, but even them calling them out was annoying and some speakers it was really just a description (”the slide with the picture of the boy”).

Also randomly some speakers just decided to start early (randomly 15 minutes before) because they figured it was being recorded and I dunno, maybe they had something else to do… yes we aren’t face to face, but I don’t want to get into a speech 1/2 way through and I planned on this time to watch these speeches, not another day.

The Organizers

I think I have the most problem with the organization, and I don’t mean a problem with the people, but I mean I have had the most problems literally.

The schedule was messed up time wise… something with the translation from GMT to the multiple time zones. I had speeches on the schedule to go at the same time, but the speakers speaking at two different times and both were thinking they were on the right time. This is HUGE if you actually wanted people to actually attend. I enjoyed actually participating and watching the chat logs as the presentation went on. Honestly if I just wanted to watch the videos later I would be out playing video games and hanging out with my family on Friday night/weekend.

There was no like general chat area, so therefore there was general chat questions all through out the speakers chats. Infact the other “meetup” options for online people were Second Life and Qik.. which don’t get me wrong, the Second Life looks awesome, but on my laptop that isn’t something that I can easily switch to and from the browser presentations. I would have loved to have seen some Campfire esque chat (hell even IRC) or even another room that just was announcements or something. The other options of things like Qik is cool too… IF you happen to have a phone that uses that. I would have loved to have seen a more lifestreaming approach to and people could add in whatever content they wanted from whatever site (someone did put together a FriendFeed room, but since it wasn’t official it got the support of all of 7 people).

There needed to be a tutorial video for the conference UI. There is a lot of functionality like muting people, coming out of full screen, applause, etc that you just needed to play around with to find. There was a lot of “customer service” going onto new users through out the talks.

The titles of the presentations and the speakers weren’t updated on the speeches so if you switched between multiple browsers you really had no clue who was who unless you recognized a face.

There was no ticketing system so even with all these problems/requests I had no place to complain… complaining puts me at ease… hence this blog post.

The Software

I am not sure if the software (Adobe Acrobat Connect Pro) problems I have are because of incorrect use, workflow/setup bugs or just bad design.

UI is fixed size and couldn’t resize to take advantage of my screen
Mute sometimes just stops muting
Chat window was only three lines if slides were on
No way to flag questions so that they don’t get lost in the seas of chatter
Need to be able to create groups so you can chat with your friends/collegues inside chat without it being everyone or to a specific person at a time
When speakers ask questions like “how many people X” there should be a raise hand feature… not a sea of “yeses” in the crowd filling up

It’s Still Well Worth It!

After all this is said and done… I think the conference is still worth the 99 bucks I paid and I hope to see many more function this way in the future… I think most of these things are just growing pains. The feeling I get from is not that the people are lazy or that the software is bad, it is just noone really knows what to expect and it is cutting teeth in a lot of areas.

Seeing Both Sides… Agreeing with Neither

Lynn Wallenstein — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 15:44:01 +0000

I find myself often going back and forth between working to live and living to work. As a freelancer you have the ultimate flexibility to just work when you want and not work when you don’t want, but at the same time you see the direct finacial benefit to busting your ass. It is not only what you put into it, but what you get out of it.

I recently watched a great video from FoWA which is a sort of two sided view of Work/Life Balance presented by Jason Calacanis and Tom Nixon:

This video got me to thinking… which side do I relate to more. Now I don’t think I will ever think I will me making millions of dollars a year, but I do love what I do and I don’t really see the problem with working 14 hour days/7 days a week, as long as it is on my terms, doing what I love to do. At the same time I have recently grown to appreciate spending more time with my family, socializing with people other then the people I work with (my tolerance for “normal” people stupidity has seemed to go up in my old age) and in general just taking the time to “smell the roses” of life.

I can’t say I clearly identify with either of these… there is an aspect of me that lives to work, but I also don’t want work to be my only thing. I think perhaps there is a hybrid alternative that really boils down to your output expectations. If your goal for your work is to be rich, then you just need to put in the time and work hard, but if you are like me and find that money is a lesser drive then creating cool things and conquering problems and projects I find that I can usually take on these issues at a couple weeks/months spans at a time. I think this comes from the fact that I am a starter, not a sustainer. I can come up with ideas, implement great solutions and then left them out into the webosphere, but I have no real interest in sustaining business. The great thing about it is as a freelancer, I really only ever start things… very few of my jobs have a great amount of retainer quality to them and I don’t have to do the mundane tasks that you need to do to “run” a business. I can do a sprint style of work, working hard for 20 hours a day nonstop for a couple weeks, and then I can work 3 hours a day , 3 days a week for a month, nurturing my other needs besides work.

Perhaps as a startup you just need to find the balance of people that can acomplish all jobs and you don’t neccessarily have to have an all or nothing attitude.

Busy October

Lynn Wallenstein — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 14:25:29 +0000

Besides working on two client projects (Kiobo and Fiveruns), tons of family stuff and my normal social calendar, I will be sleeping even less then normal this october due to the Rails Rumble and the conference. Each event will eat up one of my October weekends, but neither technically don’t require me to leave my house.

Rails Rumble

Dates: October 18th and 19th

This is my first year entering the Rails Rumble and I think it is going to be really exciting, challenging and fun. I teamed up with Dan Ahern, Nate Ostgard and Will Harris (the usual suspects) and we have, what I think is, a pretty fantastic idea. I am excited not only to see our app come to life, but I also can’t wait to see how we deal with working on a super crunched timeline (48 hours). Although we aren’t allowed to start any code or design work till the contest beings, we are putting a lot of effort in spec’ing out the project, gathering resources (plugins), research and working on our development methodology. I am currently working on ideas on how to live blog the creation of the app between “time lapse photography” concepts, twitter and tumblelogging. Whatever the outcome is, it is sure to be a well caffeinated good time!

Conference

Dates: October 24 - 26

The Conference, formerly Singularity, is:

a web conference that brings together some of the most interesting and exciting developers, designers, creatives, and thought leaders from around the web to share with you their passions and expertise.

Basically it is a web conference for web designers and developers completely online… thats right people you don’t need to leave your house to attend. It is a great 3 day line up of speakers and sessions. Due to it’s online nature, the cost is fairly minimal (was 99 dollars for a while, I think it is now up to 149) and ticket price includes access to the live sessions as well as copies of the recordings of every session.

Now I know what you are thinking, “sitting alone in my house isn’t as fun as going to a real conference” and I hear ya. I find that the social aspect of conferences is one of the best parts, and is doing its best to setup live hubs for people to meetup up and “attend” the conference together as well as be social afterwards. Think coworking for conferences. I am hoping Indyhall setups a hub, but for now it seems most of the hubs are in the UK.

I am sure there will be some rough patches being that as far as I can tell it is the first conference to go really completely online, but I hope it all works out well, I would love to see more conferences function like this as I could probably attend one a month if I didn’t have to travel…. leaving the traveling for the big conferences (SXSW).

What the Hell Does 7 Mean?

Lynn Wallenstein — Sat, 27 Sep 2008 07:58:29 +0000

I have been using GetSatisfaction for a while now… love the service, if you haven’t signed up I strongly advise you join up and get in on the conversation. That being said, there are some elements of their UI that are confusing and I recently contributed to a suggestion to improve something that I personally had a hard time finding/using. The staff were quick to respond and even asked me for feedback on a change to address my point. I was very impressed.

One thing I still find confusing while using the site is the use of the 10 point Net Promoter Score (NPS) system.

Wikipedia: The Net Promoter score is a management tool that can be used to gauge the loyalty of a firm’s customer relationships. It serves as an alternative to traditional customer satisfaction research.

Now this gauge is fairly commonly used to by companies to determine how happy/loyal their customers are (How likely is it that you would recommend us to a friend or colleague?), but taking a step back and looking at it from a intuitive UI experience it is confusing both for the person voting as well as the person analyzing the data. Excluding the numbers 0, 5 and 10 … the interpretation for all the rest of the numbers are completely up in the air. I can’t actually think of 10 values for things for a poll like this, so I surely don’t know how I could distinguish voting for an item.

Breaking it Down

So to prove a point, lets break it down:

0 = Not a chance I would recommend this to anyone, I hate it
1 = I wouldn’t recommend this product at all. It is garbage. i would only use it if I HAD TO due to price or lack of competition.
2 = This product performs bare bone functions and is an unenjoyable experience
3 = This product is tough to use and unituitive but does perform.
4 = This product works ok, although if there are other products/services that perform this function at this price point, I would recommend taking a look at them.
5 = I am completely indifferent to this product/service
6 = This product is satisfactory, it does what it says but could definately be improved.
7 = This product is good, couple things I would change, but overall does what is says.
8 = This product is really good, worth the money
9 = This product is great, I would advise everyone getting it.
10 = I love this product, I tell everyone about it, I am getting it for people for gifts.

Now as you can see I defined each of the 10 points for what they might mean to me… if you read through that, you can see it is quite an effort to evaluate and choose. Bundle that with the fact that I am sure each indivdual would define those 10 things slightly differently makes it not only a burden to the user to answer, but from a reporting standpoint sort of worthless (if each number really means everything).

Intuitive Questioning

So lets address the problem and come up with a solution. A company wants to find out what a user thinks of their product. We want this to take, at most, 3 seconds for a user to read, evaluate and answer. Ok first things first, get rid of the numbers and use descriptive words:

No
Probably Not
Indifferent
Probably Would
Yes

That covers it. Now I understand from a reporting standpoint you might want to find out a little more info… why don’t they like the product? what can we do to improve it? Thats fine, but lets not burden the user with those questions right off the bat especially since the combination of asking them about price, features, support, reputation would even turn those 10 choices to 30 or 40. So ask the original question with your 5 options and then have a tailored secondary question with multiple checkboxes for answers that are relative to their answer. “Yes”, no real need to ask those people anything… they love your product. For the people that probably would, ask the user “what they liked about the product”, these are your strong points… people that like product are already going to be focused on these, don’t ask them what they DIDN’T like, no real need to make them think about that. Indifferent, ask those people what you need to improve to get them to like the product. Probably Not and No, ask those users to tell you what they didn’t like about the product as they will be focused on the negative.

This allows you to get the most valuable information from the users that are thinking about your product/service in that frame of mind that they are in, without burdening every user with 30 or 40 questions. The goal is to make your users WANT to answer the question and not feel like they are being put through a huge process. Your average user can answer the question and check off a couple of options in 3 or 4 seconds.

So now your users are happy to give you feedback as well as your staff get valuable/useful information that is precise. This is really just an example of realizing bad UI and redefining, “what do I expect the user to do” and “how can I get them to do it without having to think”.

For more information about this topic, I highly suggest you check out Steve Krug’s Don’t Make Me Think.”Usability design is one of the most important–yet often least attractive–tasks for a Web developer. In Don’t Make Me Think, author Steve Krug lightens up the subject with good humor and excellent, to-the-point examples.”

Truth

Lynn Wallenstein — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 07:10:33 +0000

So Dan and I have been working on our latest Facebook app called Truth. Truth allows you to ask questions to your friends that they can answer completely anonymously. “What do you think of my haircut?”… “Should I breakup with my boyfriend?”… “Do you think I am selfish?”. The user creates the questions and answers and any of their facebook friends with truth will be able to answer the questions completely anonymously.. all the original poster can see is a graph of the answers, not who said them or even what the vote count was.. a simple percentage.

Its a very simple concept, but I think that is at the core of truely social web apps leveraging on things you can do in your social network.

In future versions we are planning on adding things like anonymous comments, allowing a user to share answer results with their friends, optionally allowing questions to not be anonymous (pre-defined).

Let us know what you think!

Development Communications Standard

Lynn Wallenstein — Sat, 30 Aug 2008 16:26:54 +0000

How many times has a company or developer gotten you excited about a new product or service only to drop off the face of the planet with no update? If your like me, it happens to you every day. It is not only frustating but potentially detrimental to your work as it effects purchase decisions if you decide to wait something out or buy something with the promise of SOON.

I am fed up.

Dan Ahern and I were talking last night, getting upset at a certain development house’s practices of going on their message boards and getting everyone all excited about features and release dates only to disappear for months and months and months. Dan had the brilliant idea of creating a standard, what I will call the Development Communications Standard, which a company or developer could be “certified” in and would require them to give periodic updates including future plans for product/service development, bug fixes and expected release dates.

Of course plans change, but updates like this will enable users/customers to at least be kept in the loop and hopefully official published information will allow users to set expectations of how reliable a company/developer is … just like that friend who you know is always late… at least you have proper expectations when they say they will be there at 9pm you know it is more like 11.

The idea is still very vague, but I would think it would entail some sort of spec outlining the information that should be provided, the frequency of the information and a sort of badge or listing of companies that meet that requirement to help the users/customers make a more informed decision.

What do you think?

Getting Re-Excited About My Passions

Lynn Wallenstein — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 21:08:43 +0000

I spent this last Saturday hanging out with my 1 1/2 year old niece at the Jersey shore and then at a local town fair…. two things that really aren’t on any of my fun to do lists (sand doesn’t play well with my electronic life), but I found myself having fun through her, through her first experience with going in the ocean, through her riding a baby train ride and through her pigging out on ice cream and cotton candy. Looking at my flickr photos today of the events I found myself thinking, wow, who would have thought 5 years ago I would be having fun doing this. I then realized it was because I actually wasn’t having fun, but allowing myself to live through her and the excitement of a new experience… a phenomenon that I am sure parents are familiar with.

I was able to turn something that seemed boring and a waste of time into an adventure… despite the sunburn and sand in my bathing suit.

Sitting here, getting ready to do another long nights work of coding, testing and design, I started to think… how can I translate this into my professional career? Well the answer seems pretty straight forward… I need to figure out how to see my job through new eyes. I need to find a way to take the same spark I get when I am learning somethign new or working with something cutting edge and bring it to my more mundane/repetative work.

So this is sort of my declaration of sorts of my plan to get more involved with perhaps a mentorship for design/UI and or find ways to take what I do and perhaps make more projects out of them… contribute to a framework or two.

I will keep you all updated as to how this is going and any comments/suggestions/stories are greatly appreciated!

Reasons To Blog

Lynn Wallenstein — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 15:38:58 +0000

danahern.com

Do you ever find yourself giving advice to others that you should really be taking yourself? My colleague Dan Ahern has recently made the switch over to the mac platform and because the fact that he is going to have to relearn everything all over again I figured it was a prime opportunity to start breaking his bad habbits… particularly that of writing really kick ass applications for the web 2.0 world, but taking advantage of none of it. We are talking a man here who writes lifestreaming, clickstream tracking and delicious mashups on a daily basis but doesn’t use any of these services (we are talking not even foxmarks to syncronize books marks people).

So I figured we would start 101, I got him to install the delicious toolbar and started poking him about his blog. We got a decent looking theme installed and set him up with a little flickr rss. I imported the like 5 blog entries he has written in the last 5 years and told him to have a go at it. He did post his first blog entry this year, so we are congrats of that.

But like most starting bloggers he asked “what should I write about?”.

Well thats a good question. I think Dan falls into the same trap most bloggers start off with… they all read like 10 blogs about some topic they are interested in and are like “wow I want to make something like this and get lots of reader!”. I myself have struggled with this issue, should I do a topic based blog? Should I make it all about work? Should I make it all about my hobby? What do my readers want?

So here is my 10 cents on the matter.

Unless you are a professional writer with no other job you are not going to be able to put in the effort/attention/details needed to research and write out well thought articles at a rate that is going to keep readers interested.

That being said, I think everyone should have a blog/homepage. Think of it as your front lawn to your internet life house. If you “work” on the internet and publish any sort of content (code, video, music, art, writing), people are going to want to know a little about you and a little about the things you do. It is of course up to you how much of it you want to put out there, but I recommend trying to be as open as you can, (I am not talking your sex life schedule… unless you want to) commentary on things you learn, events you attend, links to sites you discovered… most likely if it sparks for you it will spark for someone who is interested in the things you do. I have also found a light sprinkle of personal interaction gives your reader a human touch. Again I am not asking you to necessarily share your entire life, but did you just go out and have drinking with some colleagues and discuss a cool topic… share!

Now I know what your thinking… what if I DO want to do the research and write really kick ass articles. Well I would suggest guest blogging on more popular established blogs. If you write a well written article and submit it to blogs for consideration, there is a good chance they will publish it and credit you and link to your blog… they get free content, you get bragging rights! You will definitely get more eyes then if you start fresh on your own, and you basically will build up a following. This method also allows you to diversify your interests without discriminating your audience, ie keep your programming life and your sculpting life separated ENOUGH that it gets the attention of the interested audiences and sucks them in!

So now that I have told you all this, time for me to put together some well written articles and share… gotta walk the walk.