I’m currently reading Wikinomics and finding it incredibly engaging. I’ll write a fuller review when I get to the end of it sometime later this week, but I’m that enthusiastic I had to give people a bit of a heads-up before the weekend. The full review is likely to be long. This post won’t be.

To date, the only truly successful wiki has probably been Wikipedia - it’s probably the only one that the mythical ‘man in the street’ can name. In Wikinomics, Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams document an emerging trend and show that it’s not just wiki software that is describing the new spirit of collaborative development, but blogs, UGC sites like YouTube and social networks. It is the interactive element that adds value into the business, not the technical definition of what a wiki actually is.

Where the really interesting things are going to happen though are where collaboration happens between end customer and producer, and the middle men who connect half a dozen businesses to a single customer desire.

Outsourcing has reached a point where an industrial designer and a marketeer can design a product over coffee, firm up designs overnight, have prototype units being developed by a Chinese company within a matter of weeks, and support provided by an Indian company the day the unit goes on sale. The flexibility of this kind of out-sourcing is allowing start-ups to get very big, very quickly.

Some are beginning to realise they can even outsource the product design to the customer. It’s not just small companies either - major companies are seeing the value of a porous membrane between internal R&D and the rest of the World.

Vagueware obviously has a vested interest in this model. I haven’t quite worked out the dynamics, the money side of things and how we go about making developers take notice, but I’m hoping that others who like the idea of open collaborative design in the software industry will help work that out with me. I’m currently toying with ideas on how to reward those outside my business who directly add value to it. If you have ideas on how that can happen, you know what to do

I’m not alone. We’re about to enter an era of real businesses with real products being built this way. The knowledge economy is going to be very flat, with each of us having the ability to act as independent agents working on the ideas that interest us. Economically, this is going to be fascinating.

From what I’ve read so far, Wikinomics is a good introduction to how this new World is starting to unfold, and I think if you’re interested in these new models or if you’re interested in what the next 2-3 years of web application development is going to look like (if you’re a bespoke developer or designer, your future clients are either reading this book already or will do soon), you need to grab yourself a copy.

You can buy it from this link if you’re in the UK or this link if you’re in the US. Enjoy!

Apparently (and interestingly):

“The goodie two shoes, jocks, athletes, or other “good” kids are now going to Facebook. These kids tend to come from families who emphasize education and going to college. They are part of what we’d call hegemonic society. They are primarily white, but not exclusively. They are in honors classes, looking forward to the prom, and live in a world dictated by after school activities.

MySpace is still home for Latino/Hispanic teens, immigrant teens, “burnouts,” “alternative kids,” “art fags,” punks, emos, goths, gangstas, queer kids, and other kids who didn’t play into the dominant high school popularity paradigm. These are kids whose parents didn’t go to college, who are expected to get a job when they finish high school. These are the teens who plan to go into the military immediately after schools. Teens who are really into music or in a band are also on MySpace. MySpace has most of the kids who are socially ostracized at school because they are geeks, freaks, or queers.”

Or so says Danah Boyd in her essay “Viewing American class divisions through Facebook and MySpace”. Please note the title of this post is a pun on a famous political rebuttal, not a comment on the intelligence of Danah Boyd or her thesis.

The idea there is a class divide online is an interesting thesis, but her argument as to why this is happening is a little… strange.

“Most teens who exclusively use Facebook are familiar with and have an opinion about MySpace. These teens are very aware of MySpace and they often have a negative opinion about it. They see it as gaudy, immature, and “so middle school.” They prefer the “clean” look of Facebook, noting that it is more mature and that MySpace is “so lame.” What hegemonic teens call gaudy can also be labeled as “glitzy” or “bling” or “fly” (or what my generation would call “phat”) by subaltern teens. Terms like “bling” come out of hip-hop culture where showy, sparkly, brash visual displays are acceptable and valued. The look and feel of MySpace resonates far better with subaltern communities than it does with the upwardly mobile hegemonic teens. This is even clear in the blogosphere where people talk about how gauche MySpace is while commending Facebook on its aesthetics. I’m sure that a visual analyst would be able to explain how classed aesthetics are, but aesthetics are more than simply the “eye of the beholder” - they are culturally narrated and replicated. That “clean” or “modern” look of Facebook is akin to West Elm or Pottery Barn or any poshy Scandinavian design house (that I admit I’m drawn to) while the more flashy look of MySpace resembles the Las Vegas imagery that attracts millions every year. I suspect that lifestyles have aesthetic values and that these are being reproduced on MySpace and Facebook.”

I think she’s almost right. The problem is, the kids don’t know how to verablise what they mean and she doesn’t know enough about Human Computer Interaction to name it.

I don’t think it’s aesthetics that makes the difference, but ergonomics. Yes, it’s possible to customise MySpace pages to an endless degree and make it look gaudy, but most people don’t or when they do tend to keep it low-key (a point that Boyd brings up, and further analyses in terms of social divides).

However it is the ergonomics of the software that marks the real difference between the two sites.

Facebook is a simple, structured application. The control of the interface and how it works is in most part in the hands of the developers. The users are not invited to ‘improve it’ outside of the Developer API. MySpace allows the audience to tinker to their heart’s content but doesn’t allow the structured ‘plugging in’ of 3rd-party applications preferring to keep everything home-grown.

I would argue that Facebook is more ‘left brain’ and MySpace more ‘right brain’ in their approaches. Facebook supports a sequential way of thinking, learning the interface step-by-step and ‘climbing up in knowledge’ as they go. What you think of as ‘Facebook’ might be different to what I think of, as we will have taken different approaches in building up our knowledge of what it is, and what it is capable of. MySpace on the other hand is more ‘holistic’ and supports the notion of understanding the general concept in one go straight away and then learning the specifics. It is unlikely that we will have different understandings of what MySpace fundamentally is.

I would have predicted therefore, that those good at languages, mathematics, science, analytical thinking and structured learning would be drawn towards Facebook. Meanwhile, musicians, artists, those who like to daydream and imagine would be drawn more towards MySpace. Both have a place, both have fans and critics.

How to explain the class divide? It’s there but it’s a correlation, not a causation. It may be that children from higher-income households are likely to have genetically inherited structured thinking: the household is higher-income because those skills are more richly rewarded in the job market.

It’s also likely (given we’re talking about teens here) that peer group pressure is going to determine choice: who wants to be the only kid in the group on one social network when everybody else is on another? If you hang out with people who like to conform, they’re likely to be on Facebook. If you hang out with people who like to write poetry, they’re more likely to be on MySpace. If you want to carry on hanging out with them - especially in the cruel World that is governed by US High School cafeteria politics - you’d best turn to the same page they’re on. Or else.

This ‘where my friends are’ factor is critical in this space, for reasons that should be obvious.

Either way, I think it’s way too early to make a clear call on this: whilst teens are dominant on the networks right now, they’re going to grow up and it’s what happens then that is going to give us a better idea of causation and correlation around application choice. Right now, peer pressure within the demographics Boyd is talking about is too big a factor to call it a fair and even fight.

Reading Wired these days is a bit like being punched in the eyeball by a lack of self-identity. I don’t really know what that means, but if you remember what Wired used to be like, you’ll get what I mean.

This month one of the first interesting articles I’ve seen from them in a while has appeared, discussing how Second Life really isn’t working the way advertisers wanted it to. Quel surpise.

Second Life is not what the hype says it is. It is not the future, it is just the latest incarnation of the MUD games those of us who meet a certain demographic once wasted our teen years trying to work out. This reality is slowly dawning on the people putting the most money into the place. From the article:

Then there’s the question of what people do when they get there. Once you put in several hours flailing around learning how to function in Second Life, there isn’t much *to* do. That may explain why more than 85 percent of the avatars created have been abandoned. Linden’s in-world traffic tally, which factors in both the number of visitors and time spent, shows that the big draws for those who do return are free money and kinky sex. On a random day in June, the most popular location was Money Island (where Linden dollars, the official currency, are given away gratis), with a score of 136,000. Sexy Beach, one of several regions that offer virtual sex shops, dancing, and no-strings hookups, came in at 133,000. The Sears store on IBM’s Innovation Island had a traffic score of 281; Coke’s Virtual Thirst pavilion, a mere 27. And even when corporate destinations actually draw people, the PR can be less than ideal. Last winter, CNET’s in-world correspondent was conducting a live interview with Anshe Chung, an avatar said to have earned more than $1 million on virtual real estate deals, when Chung was assaulted by flying penises in a griefer attack.

Just what you need as an advertiser - doing a PR launch where giant penises attack your in-World presence would make Janet Jackson getting her norks out family-friendly in the eyes of the demographic most advertisers are chasing.

What’s more, the underlying architecture can not scale - they’ve built the system so that it will never reach the potential that self-titled futurologists have envisaged for it:

One of the things you never see in Second Life is a genuine crowd — largely because the technology makes it impossible. In Stephenson’s Metaverse, corporations established their presence along a bustling, almost infinitely long street that residents could cruise at will. Second Life is different. Created by an underfunded startup using a physics engine that’s now years out of date, Second Life is made up of thousands of disconnected “regions” (read: processors), most of which remain invisible unless you explicitly search for them by name. Residents can reach these places only by teleporting into the void. And even the popular islands are never crowded, because each processor on Linden Lab’s servers can handle a maximum of only 70 avatars at a time; more than that and the service slows to a crawl, some avatars disappear, or the island simply vanishes. “It’s really the software’s fault,” says Andrew Meadows, Linden Lab’s senior developer. “Way back when, we used to say, ‘This is not going to scale.’”

There is of course another way forward: embrace the limitations and the spirit of what the World is all about. Advertisers aren’t keen on doing that though - you’re the one meant to be embracing them, not the other way around.

That leaves them with the other rather obvious conclusion: advertising in MUDs, like advertising in games, isn’t going to work. Save your money and find something better to do with it. Advertisers are loathe to do this however. They saw what happened to MySpace, Facebook and the rest and they’re convinced that this time they’re going to be ahead of the curve. They don’t care if it isn’t popular, as long as it looks as though they’re doing something interesting. However, if I were a shareholder, articles like this would make me nervous:

The Coke build is expansive, elaborate, and of course empty. But Coca-Cola has a plan. It’s sponsoring a contest to create a Virtual Thirst vending machine that it hopes will become ubiquitous in Second Life, just as Coke machines are everywhere in real life. Jaffe professes to be overwhelmed by the number of entries, which he characterizes as “well north of 100.”

Suddenly, another avatar materializes. “Ah, there you go,” Jaffe exclaims. “Someone’s just arrived! I think she’s from Japan.” As he speaks, Dapto starts air-typing in the weird way that Second Life avatars do, trying to chat up the new Japanese girl. She looks around, then teleports someplace else.

Want to know how expensive? If you hire Jaffe there to sort it out for you, maybe put a couple of staff on the case of looking after it you’re going to need a budget of $500,000/year. Just think about that. This is a platform where if you get 1,200 people turning up, you’re a rave success. When your Madison Avenue crew is defining a cost of reach at $416/head as reasonable value and the audience leave within seconds, you know somebody, somewhere, is grasping at straws for new ideas.

via Erick Schonfeld

In an article in Harvard Business Review Johnathan Zittrain takes a look at the risks facing the Internet in the immediate and medium term and how best to tackle the issues.

It’s interesting to me that his argument can be boiled down like this:

1. Technologies that can be used unintentionally by others to build useful things (generative technologies) are great.

2. The PC is great because of this. So is the Internet.

3. Because they are so generative people are able to create technologies that are actually harmful.

4. In order to avoid harmful software being run on their PCs connected to the Internet, users may choose to use less generative technologies, and move to appliance-like systems or services (e.g. iPhone, or only ever staying within Google/Yahoo sites)

5. We need to stop them adopting appliance-like systems in order to keep the Internet strong.

He goes about spelling that out in a few thousand words, but his ideas on how to do all this are a little light and tucked up at the end almost like an after-thought. It’s ideas though that I’m most interested in here, so here they are:

• Netizenship

  He suggests that all code should be subject to a Wikipedia-like editorial process where self-chosen experts vouch for whether the code you download and run on your system is harmful or not.

  This sounds novel, but I’m concerned about how such a system could be gamed by nefarious types. It may be that you would need to establish a trust network with certain users, but this would require you to expose information about the software you’re running: giving up your privacy to people who can name you is considered a greater threat by many than giving it up to criminals.

• Virtual Machines

  You download software and you put it in a special “container” on your machine where it can destroy what it wants to: it can’t get out to destroy your precious data. Once it has been running for a while and you trust it more and more, you can move it over into the “special” area where it has more rights.

  One question: why would I ever want to run the software outside of the container? Why not just provide a proper security model for all applications running on the system and take it from there? Unix sorted this one out better than Microsoft ever has in the 1970s, and with jailed/container environments from the BSDs and Solaris likely to hit the desktop Unix market within a couple of years, this might have some traction.

• More help from ISPs

  Zittrain argues here that ISPs turn a blind eye to zombie machines because they don’t want to help their users. This is completely and totally wrong.

  About a year ago I was in the ops center of a major multi-national ISP, sat with their abuse team watching how they worked. I was being considered for a contract to help them automate their processes (a contract cancelled as it was announced the ops team was to be relocated down South shortly afterwards).

  One of the jobs they took on was handling the automatic e-mails sent to them by AOL informing them of spam received by a machine on their network. They would then cross-correlate the IP address to customer records by hand, and give the customer a call and talk them through de-zombie-fying the machine. This *is* industry standard practice. ISPs who didn’t do this would eventually just find themselves being disconnected by their peers as they became more and more of a harbour for zombie machines.

  What would be better is more ways for ISPs to handle this automatically and to establish better trust frameworks. I also think that ISPs could relatively trivially prevent the most common spyware passing through their transparent reverse proxy cache boxes without causing major damage - the problem would be whether such action would be legal.

  I also think one area that ISPs could improve is education: a lot of people are pretty naive when they first get online and it’s only once the real story is told (or experienced first-hand) that users wise up. I think that at current rates enough people will be clued up enough to stop downloading spyware within a decade, but that’s a dangerous prediction, and there’s nothing stopping ISPs getting into the mix.

• Network neutrality for mashups

  This is an idea that sounds simple in practice, but actually defeats the point of generative technologies being adaptable, flexible, unregulated and novel.

  The premise is simply that if you write an application for a an API, your application is locked into that API’s vendor. They could withdraw service completely or just for your API key, or they could decide that they want to change the API at any time thereby breaking your application. In other words, if you invest time in developing to Google’s code base, you are suddenly beholden to Google: you can’t switch to Yahoo! or Microsoft APIs instead. This appliance-like style of development suddenly makes the “generative technology” of the Internet look quite stale compared to say the PC revolution.

  Zittrain argues that certain basic functions should be standardised so that once you write the application, it can work with similar services from other providers. If you write a Google maps mashup, changing it to work with Yahoo! should be as simple as changing a URL and an API key reference.

  It sounds simple, and standardisation is sure to come about over the next five years, but it’s actually a major undertaking. It would require all the major players to agree a baseline set of functionality, and that’s unlikely to happen with a group of commercial players.

  Where standards have arisen on the Internet - the IETF or the W3C - it has been a group of people acting in the spirit of non-commercial interest. Sure, the IETF meetings are dominated by Cisco, Juniper, Nortel and the ilk, but they are adopting a process first initiated by academics and amateurs: they’re second to the party, and are kept in their place by the tradition of open collaboration the IETF encourages.

  To create a standards body for web APIs now would require open source developers to somehow subvert the progress made by the commercial guys, or for the companies to stop behaving the way they have done for the last decade or so. It is an onerous task.

I think the error Zittrain is making here is that he believes these are problems that need to be solved in a way that is 100% efficient, or near 100% efficient. He also seems to be forgetting the human factors.

In terms of protecting users from harmful software, I believe this problem will go away within the next five years. It’s a dangerous prediction, but I believe that once users become more aware of the risks of software they are more likely to question where they source it from. It could be argued that without some kind of trust metric start-ups might find it hard to get traction, but start-ups have always benefited from the attention of early adopters who are clued up enough to know how to assess the risks of software like this.

In other words: if it’s getting good blog press, it’s OK to download. Most companies have woken up to the fact that you can lose every shred of credibility on the Internet within a day or less now, and credible company are not likely to push code that is going to harm your machine. By 2012, companies prepared to compromise their credibility will likely have no future. Zittrain’s assumption is a little like that of Cold War game theory: everybody is out to harm you, and the only right course of action is trust with verification, or outright suspicion.

As for the issue around APIs, again I think Zittrain is missing the human angle here. Yes, Google or Yahoo! could shut down their APIs at any point in time. Google have in fact stopped supporting an API or two in the past, but were careful in how they did so: they just stopped taking on new users for that API. If they were to leave developers high and dry, developers would feel the trust they had in the company had been broken, and they would make the effort to switch. Switching might be a pain, but it’s not impossible: most mashup apps out there right now are almost toy-like in their simplicity and can be recoded to a new API within a few hours. Once that happens, Google may as well drop all their APIs, and they know that.

I think eventually some form of standardisation is going to have to emerge, but all I can say about that with any degree of certainty is that it is unlikely to come from the commerical players.

I have had a love-hate relationship with O’Reilly for some time now. When I was first starting out learning Unix, sendmail, scripting languages like Perl and various obscure Internet technologies, there is no doubt that the familiar “Animal books” helped me on my way. I could even argue that the few hundred quid I threw at O’Reilly books between the ages of 18 and 22 did more for my career than the University degree I was supposedly taking at the time.

However, there has been a niggle: O’Reilly rides the crest of the open source wave for free. They take the documentation of open source projects, effectively recast it in a new light (often it’s the person who wrote the original document who they hire as the writer), put some polish on it, and sell it for £30 a go. They don’t seem to give anything back.

Sure there is the occasional sponsorship of a conference they’re not running, but that’s just marketing. Any other publisher would likely do the same if only somebody would ask. The honestly brilliant trick O’Reilly have pulled is making themselves the first port of call.

I’m not saying they don’t have a right to make money from this perfectly legal and legitimate business, but it’s like they’re looking at the OSS crowd and constantly sizing us up.

It niggles me.

It bothers me even more that I don’t have much of a choice but to remain a loyal customer. The rest of the publishing industry is pretty dire in terms of quality in the areas I like to work in (Pragmatic Programmers aside), and we’re not yet at a point where people are collaborating on great material online and giving it away for free or cutting out the middle-man. There are exceptions, but they aren’t many. Safari is also an obvious choice if you’re flitting around technologies as I do all the time, simply because it saves so much money.

My latest mental battle in this relationship with O’Reilly is r2 - a kind of cross between academic journal and Economist Intelligence Unit publication focusing on Web 2.0 and related technology trends.

“Sounds interesting”, you say. What’s my problem? The price for starters: $495 per 6 issues. I know, for the academic-journal-meets-EIU-crowd, that might seem a snip. I’m sure if I was a huge multi-national or if somebody else was paying the bill it wouldn’t be a problem.

My problem is that we now live in a World where SMEs, individual entrepreneurs, hobbyists, amateurs and people without a spare $495 are the ones who are changing the industry. Why would O’Reilly exclude them from the party and pretend it’s the year 2000 all over again? Why is it that they don’t want the people who are building the industry to see what they are saying about it? Are they just stupid, arrogant or elitist?

If the content really is of truly exceptional quality, I can’t see why word wouldn’t spread like wildfire if it were being sold at a more reasonable price. I don’t know how many subscriptions they’re getting right now, but I’m willing to bet it would be 10x more if they dropped the price by 75%. Top tip: 10 x 25% of revenue is worth more than 1 x 100% of revenue.

And the really annoying thing is, I know I’m going to end up subscribing. I’m going to be really angry when I do it, but at some point I’m going to have to take that $495 I could have invested elsewhere in my business, and shove it into the hands O’Reilly whose business model is seemingly defined by taking and rarely by giving.

There is no doubt that 37signals have had a deep effect on the web development community. Most people didn’t wake up to their antics until relatively recently, but the truth is that they’ve been dishing out design tips and hacks on their Signal vs. Noise blog for a while now. In the last couple of years though, things have become a little… ‘funky’.

First, there was Basecamp a.k.a. the ‘anti-MS Project’ for project management. It was cute, handy, useful and for the market it was designed for (web designers) almost perfect. From that, they extracted the undercarriage and realised they had a framework for not just producing project management applications, but almost any web application - Ruby on Rails - which has gone on to be one of the biggest growing development frameworks on the planet. Vagueware (as in, me) now codes exclusively in Ruby and specialises in Rails development.

The products kept on rolling out - Ta-da, Backpack, Writeboard, Campfire - and the fandom got more and more intense. As a result there are now people known simply as ’37signals fanboys’ because no matter what the guys produce, there is a queue of people ready to hand over the cash. Sometimes people asked what the hell was the fuss about. Writeboard, is after all, nothing more than a text box with version control.

As a result of all this attention, expectations for their first venture into online book publishing as a company were a little mixed. Some people were thinking ‘same old stuff, re-hashed’ whilst the fans… well, let’s just say they were ready to replace various holy texts with copies.

You won’t find Getting Real in any bookshop. It’s available online-only as a downloadable PDF. Every copy watermarked with a ‘Specially prepared for (your name here)’ at the bottom of every page. This is an unusual way to enter the mainstream book market, but as their July 20 update shows, a more than profitable one.

So is it worth the $19 to buy? Well, I bought a copy ages ago, skim-read it, and didn’t get a chance to sit down and give it a thorough reading until this last weekend. I thought as I had finally given it some love, to share what I found.

First things first - there are 16 sections, each having between two to nine chapters, with an average of about seven or eight. Each chapter is quite light, and generally tends to expand a little on the title. As a result you could, in theory, just read the list of chapter titles and get a good idea of the best ideas from the book. Most chapters are less than two full pages long, and include quotes from Kathy Sierra and Seth Godin, so the real ‘meat’ is in the concepts, not in the writing.

In fact, I am reminded here of a part of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance where the principal character describes reading with his son. He suggests reading a sentence - just one - and then stopping and thinking about it. Talking about it. Dissecting, pulling, morphing it. At the end of it all, decide how you feel about it and then move onto the next sentence. After you’ve read that sentence, stop, and analyse that as you did the previous one.

I tried reading like this once and it was an extraordinarily hard process, however I got a real insight into the material I hadn’t thought possible before. If I’m honest, if you look at the list of chapter headings, do the above, and you’re probably going to be able to get the core concepts down in your head without spending $19. That said, that’s an option for the poor - it’s not a lot of money, and the lazy would do best to save their mental energy and just shell out for the book.

Project management theories are all alike in one sense: they are codified common sense. PRINCE2 is basically a book that could be re-titled “Common Sense for Idiots” whilst agile is a way of letting developers work their own way whilst keeping management happy - mainly because management don’t think programmers have any sense whatsoever.

Getting Real is no different in this respect. It’s an “Agile-light” that concentrates on user experience above all else. However, it also stretches the boundaries of project management and touches on how to run a web product company in general. Sections that wouldn’t normally belong in a straight PM book include staffing, pricing and signup strategy, and how to keep customers happy would not belong in a traditional book on development methods.

It is also a book that is not meant to teach, but rather help you evangelise. It comes in a site license version (which at $49 is quite reasonable) so that you may spread the word amongst your team and help get the company on the same page. And that’s what this book is about - getting your team pulled together and heading in the same direction.

Project methodologies often concentrate on how best to document a project and how best to present that documentation within the team so that all concepts are clearly understood. Getting Real sets fire to that concept and suggests there is only one thing the business needs to worry about at any point in time: code that does what the customer expects.

To get a team to the point where they no longer need the traditional software lifecycle can take time and energy, and in many ways Getting Real can help short-circuit that. Reading it through with real-life examples can help convince you and your team that it’s at least worth a go - and that’s the biggest obstacle in changing any working style.

Some of the concepts do feel a little strange in places. For example, they suggest you should always have three people on the team: one developer, one designer, one person who can straddle both. This is just arbitrary and doesn’t make much sense. One programmer with design skills (or the money to get some if he can’t use OSWD or similar) could easily pull a project together with hard work - I should know - and a programmer with a designer on their own could easily do it. Where the third person steps in, I don’t know, or why it would be so dangerous to have four people, I’m not sure, but I’m guessing this ‘three person’ set up is just the way 37signals handled things themselves internally.

Their staffing advice is also a little strange. How can you assess a designer based on a week’s work? I’d rather assess them on a lifetime of work. Same with a programmer, if I’m honest. I also understand the point they make in saying that good wordsmiths will be better communicators, but only if the primary form of commuication is written - if you’re spending most of your time coding in ‘alone time’ and it’s the pub conversations where the real team collaboration is worked out, the fact they can write in iambic pentameter isn’t going to help you one jot. I’d say: hire people who fit, regardless of wordsmith skills.

The overall push with this book is one of getting something out of the door as quickly as possible. Interestingly it suggests we develop simple solutions that work well instead of complex solutions that are in perpetual beta, and in this I find myself in wholesale agreement. We live in an age of Web 2.0 where getting anything that feels as though it might impress out of the door is seen as a greater acheivement than getting the right thing - just enough to get customers using the product and being surprised by it - out of the door.

Overall it’s a pleasant read, inspiring in places, and has practical knowledge that beginners could make use of if they’ve never worked on a software team before. For those of us who might be considered ‘old hands’ by now, I’d say it’s an interesting twist on how to get over the procrastination of starting your own software product line, and I intend to make use of a lot of the advice - but not all of it.

That said, you need everybody in your team to be signed up to it for it to work, and it will take time for people to adjust. For example, last week I had a discussion with somebody on a project who had read this book and wanted to work in the Getting Real style, but had to be held back from drawing an entity-relationship diagram as the first stage. It would seem that old habits die hard, and despite all the good intentions of Getting Real, might take some time to overcome even with the converts.

I’ve been a fan of Seth Godin for a couple of years, ever since I realised that if I was going to run my own business there was a whole bunch of skills I needed to pick up that spending my teenage years in front of a compiler didn’t prepare me for. Like, for example, marketing.

Seth is by no means unheard of, his name is now quite famous within marketing circles and he is definitely one of the few marketing geeks who the blogging crowd think “gets” what the Web is about. As a result, his books get widely read, widely commented on, and if you interested in the web as a marketing tool - and I’m talking blogs and user engagement here, not spamming - you should get familiar with his work.

Free Prize Inside is not a new book. It’s been published and in circulation since May 2004. So why am I reviewing it now? Well, because I only got around to reading it last weekend. :-)

As with nearly all business books, the amount of original thinking you’ll find in FPI depends on how widely read you are, how imaginative you are yourself, and how exposed you are to methods of innovative thinking as part of your daily work life. I can’t imagine many businesses embody innovation to the extent that I, or Seth Godin, would suggest it should be, but if you work for an ad agency you might find some of the content of this volume a little ‘beginner level’.

The core of Seth’s thesis is that soft innovation is an easier sell for everybody - your colleagues as much as your customers - compared to ‘hard’ innovation/blue-sky thinking. I’ve covered before how I think about innovation - push edges and boundaries, it’s quicker and easier and more productive - but what was startling when reading Free Prize Inside was that he had managed to put the time and effort into synthesising it into a series of basic tools.

The value for me in this book is this simple reduction to basic steps things I’ve always known - i.e. I now have a vocabulary I can share that explains what I’m talking about.

For example, the ‘fulcrum of innovation’ is basically a fancy way of asking yourself three questions before you take an innovation to colleagues, in order to determine how likely it is they’re going to support you:

• Is it going to work?
• Is it worth doing?
• Are you the one to get it done?

These are of course the questions running through people’s heads when you take them through any new idea you want to put in place, and by thinking through how to get a ‘yes’ to every one of those questions, you’re going to be in a better position to pitch your idea. You might be wrong, but at least you’ll have gone through a methodology before you start trying to pitch your idea. A simple technique, but worth learning.

In fact, pitching your idea is such an important aspect of innovation, Seth actually suggests you work out how to sell your idea before you actually come up with it. Selling your idea, he claims, is as important a step in making it happen as coming up with the idea itself. If you come up with an idea that isn’t going to work, isn’t worth doing, or nobody thinks you can do, there’s no point in trying to develop it past the scribble you just made on your whiteboard or notebook.

This is sensible advice, but I’m concerned this is going to stifle those people for whom self-doubt is the modus operandi of thought. Convinced that they can’t have an idea colleagues will think they can execute, they will refuse to actually try and create an idea at all.

That said, Seth’s methods of ‘edgecrafting’ (or as I called it in the past “evolutionary innovation”) lowers the barrier of resistance by allowing people to easily see how to improve a product so as to create an excitement in the customer. Seth specifically looks to try and give every customer a “free prize” or a bonus that they weren’t expecting. In actual fact, this isn’t about shoving a free plastic toy inside the box (well, not always), but rather is about finding the edge/boundary that you can push a product to. Doing more, doing less, treating people the same, treating people equally, whatever it is, find an edge and push your product there in a way your sector isn’t used to.

He also suggests brainstorming is the wrong way to innovate, but for different reasons I think it’s useless. He claims that within a group it’s too hard to get people to speak up and contribute ideas for fear of ridicule or that they’ll be asked to actually do some work. Instead, he claims, if you ask people to work individually on a problem the results will be better. I think the flaw with brainstorming is that you end up asking people to do the impossible: start with a blank piece of paper and re-invent from scratch. If instead you were to give people a set of constraints and asked them to push them around, it’s still perfectly possible in my opinion to come up with quality ideas as a team.

In general the book is filled with clever techniques, but I’m not sure whether it’s because I’ve read so much of Godin’s other work - and work by others - in recent years that it doesn’t feel particularly remarkable or original any more. That said, if you are struggling with innovation and how to make it happen within your own workplace, it’s an affordable shot in the arm that should get the creative juices flowing.

37signals posted an interesting article about the two sides of a consumer - the one who makes the purchasing decision (and wants features) and the one who has to live with the product afterwards (and wants ease of use)

In turn, they point to a paper on ‘Feature Fatigue’ which I think misses a point.

If you take their argument literally, product convergance is a bad idea because the aim is to put as many features into one device as possible. Thing is, we know that if the user interface is designed well, product convergence is a great idea.

In my pocket I carry a voice memo recorder, mp3 player, FM radio, web access device, digital camera, mini flashlight, alarm clock, electronic diary and address book that synches with my mac and my mobile phone. Actually, I just carry my mobile phone, but it does all those things. It does most of them pretty well. I have no doubt that the next generation of Sony Ericsson phones - or even better the now semi-confirmed Apple Smart phone - will do them even better.

So we know packing a device with features works. The trick however is not to just leave them all dangling out there, but to provide a great way of using them. I don’t turn my camera on, for example, I just slide the lens cover back. I can assign shortcuts to functions I use often to the little joystick in the middle. I can easily find what I need after learning the interface for about 5 minutes. It’s a great tool.

From the paper’s abstract:

Because consumers give more weight to capability and less weight to usability before relative to after use, consumers tend to choose overly complex products that do not maximize their satisfaction when using them, resulting in ‘feature fatigue.’

And later on in the abstract:

Our results suggest that firms should consider having a larger number of more specialized products, each with a limited number of features, rather than loading all possible features into one product.

This is a flawed conclusion. If you go on to read the paper, you realise that what they actually mean to conclude is:

1. Some users buy features they don’t want, because to get the features they do want, they have to buy the bundle and this causes “stress”
2. Some users find a product with more features confusing because they don’t know how to use them all, even though they want to
3. Trade-offs have to be made to reduce product complexity, and that can impact sales

Well, the solution to that lot is not to reduce the number of features, but to reduce the complexity of using those features, and perhaps add the ability to hide features a user doesn’t want. In software in particular, tailoring a user interface to a particular user’s needs is a standard thing to do - if somebody logs in who would only ever need to see reports, why bother offering them a view of a load of data setup and configuration parameters?

The solution is not more specialized devices - I don’t want to carry 9 devices in my pockets, I like to travel light - the solution is to produce a better user experience for the converged device. To think through the problems of user experience is hard, but worthwhile. For my money, Sony Ericsson does this well, and I expect more product manufacturers will refine this process over time.

And I’m never buying a stand-alone camera again unless I plan to go pro.

This article at Dead 2.0 makes an interesting point about some stuff kicking around over Paul Graham’s comments in what is quickly becoming an infamous interview.

Paul Graham is a smart man, of that, there is little doubt. Seek out his essays, and you will be confronted with insight that it is rare in terms of its raw power.

But if his recent advice to start-ups is anything to go by, Dead 2.0 has called it, and he’s going to see a lot of disappointed kids in the near future. He will drive a bubble to bursting point, it will pop, and everybody will be covered with another 4 years of misery.

Look, I was coming out of a job in 2002 with nothing, just after the bubble burst. Because people with stupid, frothy, moronic thinking like “Business plans don’t matter” had just destroyed an industry I’d given my all to, I, a qualified and experienced developer and systems administrator, ended up having to wallpaper bathrooms for money to eat. I’m not making this up. Idiotic bubble-pushing statements like that almost killed the industry and almost killed me.

I am no longer going to listen to business advice from Paul Graham. Not that I was massively tuned into his ideas on business in the first place - his more interesting work came from his thinking on innovation.

Of course you need a business plan, you just don’t need a very advanced one. You don’t need to spend thousands of man-hours perfecting it. But what you need more than anything, more than any business plan, any seed funding, anything at all that Graham might tell you that you need is much harder to get:

A paying customer.

What Graham was trying to say, I suspect, but not very elegantly was this simple truth. Find a person with money who is prepared to exchange it for something, and then find them that something. If you can do that, you have a business.

I learnt this, what now seems obvious, lesson in business after picking up this book: Bootstrapping your Business. I discovered it about a year ago when Greg Gianforte (one of the authors) visited the University I was working with at the time - Manchester Metropolitan University - to talk to a group of Business Studies students.

The points he makes are simple - it’s not the read of the century, but it’s OK - and he makes more sense than Paul Graham’s frothy, silly nonsense. Start small, find something people want, sell it to them, find out what features they need, improve what you’ve got. If one guy wanted it, chances are other people want it too. Well done: you’ve just created a successful business, and you did it with nothing else other than a phone.

It sounds like a ridiculous way to do business, because it doesn’t involve years and years of R&D, but because it doesn’t involve all that expense, and because you deliver what somebody is prepared to pay for, you are able to fail cheaply. You are also more likely to succeed.

Saying that your business plan should respond to a clearly identified group of customers (Gianforte’s stance) is one thing, but to say don’t have a plan at all is just outright dangerous.

I really hope I’m not going to have to get my overalls out again.