Today was day 2 of major announcements in technology, Apple’s iPhone 3.0 Software Preview (video of full announcement should be up on that link soon).  For me, the past two days have been quite busy on multiple fronts with all the announcements being just one of them.  When days like this occur I end up finding interesting sites and leaving browser tabs open until my computer starts to scream “no more!”.  So I’m hitting things in reverse and posting some thoughts on the Apple announcements before I post my thoughts on yesterday’s Cisco announcement (then I can close some of my browser tabs).

First, if you don’t want to sit through the video of the Apple Preview, check out the archive of live comments from engadget (scroll to the bottom on work up) or Don MacAksill’s live twittering.

Second, I have to classify myself as a business-geek users of my iPhone and my comments will flow from this classification.  I use it primarily for business items like monitoring exchange email, moving between meetings in my exchange calendar, and doing more calls that I care to admit in a day.  But I love it for the fact that I can all my geek stuff on it as well because it is an application platform (much like my old Palm Treo was).  Using applications like a Twitter client, WordPress client,  Webex client, Netflix client, and others social networking clients allow me to interact will all the web services I want or need.  And then all the photo applications to allow me to extend my photography addiction to the phone.  All that being said, it’s the business side of stuff that really drives my use (not to mention pays the bills for the iPhone).

So, here is a list of the major pains that I was hoping would be fixed in 3.0:

• The ability to click on a phone number in emails and outlook calendar invites to dial a number!  Since copy/paste has never been available, I always expected at least this feature, especially considering my blackberry could do this…
• Landscape mode in email and all apps I need to type in.  I have fat fingers, the portrait mode keys on the iPhone are small.  And the spell correction can be annoying with the combination of both.  (Fixed)
• Fix the lag with larger Contact databases.  There are times when opening or working with my contacts just hangs.  When 2.0 was released I heard that it was because the system wasn’t designed for large contacts lists.  I work in sales, I have thousands of contacts in my phone and I never know which ones I may need.
• Fix the contact search feature.  This scrolling to find someone is such a waste of time.  The search feature works much better because after typing 3 characters I usually see the person I’m looking for (see previous bullet item).  But the search area scrolls off the screen.  Allow me to lock it to the screen so it is my default view.  My Treo excelled at this.
• Tethering:  there are still times when I need to have my laptop connected to the internet to accomplish something while I’m out and mobile (though less frequently now that the WebEx client is available), give me this safety net.

So, from what I can tell…25% of what I want is in 3.0.

Here are the other items I think are important from this release:

• Copy/Paste.  I don’t buy the excuse of “security was an issue” as to why it took so long to have this.  This has always been a black eye on the iPhone.  BTW:  I still want clickable phone numbers in calendar invites…and I want it to auto dial the passcode for conference lines (since I’m asking).
• Landscape mode (as mentioned above)
• universal search.  But what would be nice is if you could build search filters that could be linked to a button on the spotlight home screen.  Maybe I want to search just contacts and calendars when I type something in to cut the huge list of results.  Would be nice if I could just have a customized filter button below my search window..type the text and then my custom filter button to see my results.
• Voice Memos:  this is nice, but will need to see how this is different from other voice recording apps currently available (Jott, Evernote).  Now this is where Apple needs to be careful not ot add built in apps that will alienate their app developers.

I should be interesting to see how app developers use the new APIs and features..I can already see some interesting things coming with the peer to peer capability.  Can’t wait for the free upgrade.

Tuesday was the primary election here in California. Luckily, my polling place is litterally two blocks from my house in a neighbor’s garage. On Tuesday morning, as I waited in a line of 3 people at 7am for the wonderful folks who run the polling station to figure out how to turn on the optical scanning machine, I realized what could be the greatest risk to our Democracy.

Technology and electronic voting machines.

If you were to take a survey of the age of the people who volunteer their time to run most of the election polling places in America, the vast majority of them would fall into the category of senior citizen. This, in its own right, is not a bad thing. But, think back to the challenges that most of the senior citizens you know have with setting the clock on their VCRs. And that’s not even taking into account much more recent and sophisticated home electronics like the latest TVs or DVRs.

And yet, once we start rolling out electronic voting machines, these will be the same people who will have to run them. In general, I feel confident in saying that the technology industry as a whole doesn’t have the best track record for making things easy to use. So, even thought I have not ever seen nor worked with any electronic voting machine, I feel that we (the technology industry, voting machine manufacturers, society in general) may be setting up our democracy for a huge failure.

One of the common statements in high tech revolves around describing what you do for a living: “Describe it so that your mother would understand it.” So, on a similar note, our future electronic voting machines need to be designed such that our mothers (and fathers) could not only cast a vote on it, but also set them up and deal with any production issues that may arise.

This is why I think Apple should make a voting machine. The common statement from nearly ever modern day Mac owner is “it just works”. If Apple can do that for something as sophisticated and mutli-purpose as a modern day computer, image what they could do with a single purpose voting machine!

An Apple voting machine combined with an open source voting software would be a stellar combination.

Which brings up an interesting point. Are there any open source voting software solutions? We never hear about this topic in the media. We only hear about which states have decertified which voting machines or which voting machine was recently deemed ‘hackable’.

Interestingly, after a quick search, I came across the Open Voting Consortium (which I had never heard of before). They describe themselves as a not-for-profit organization dedicated to the development, maintenance, and delivery of trustable and open voting systems for use in public elections. The interesting thing to note is that they don’t seem to be developing an open source voting system. Neither does VoteTrustUSA nor their parent organization Verified Voting Foundation.

In the true sense of democracy, we should have our voting systems be completely transparent. So that anyone who was interested could look in and see how it worked, including independent experts.

I’m shocked that there doesn’t appear to be a true open source voting software initiative yet. But then again, I’m sure Apple isn’t working on their own voting machine either. Probably for the same reasons…just not enough money to be made by making either of these two items in the fashion that has our society’s best interests at heart.

It’s been a long ten years, and oh how you have grown…

A few days ago, I welcomed back into my life the Mac. It was time for a laptop upgrade (what does it say when you have worn half the lettering off your keyboard?) and I was ready for a change. Like most, I wasn’t that excited about a laptop with Vista on it. And my existing laptop–an IBM ThinkPad which I absolutely admire–was starting to show it’s processor age as well as strange OS level behavior (like at times it wouldn’t be able to resolve DNS names which essentially made it useless online…after hours of trying to fix that, I finally just gave up and rebooted it when it occurred!). It was time to make a change for the better…for the betterment of my productivity. I bought a new PowerBook Pro.

Since I had it customized (maxed out the memory and added the larger/faster hard drive), I had to wait a few weeks for the computer to arrive. That wouldn’t have been so hard if it wasn’t for the fact that the software I ordered with the Mac (Parallels and MS Office) kept arriving at my door in separate boxes. Finally, I got an email saying that my new laptop had left the factory. Like a kid waiting for Christmas Eve, I kept checking back to the FedEx tracking website to keep tabs on my Mac. There is something perverse about watching the delivery progress of something built half way around the world:

Then, the same day I’m to leave for a business trip, I see that my Mac has been loaded on the truck. Oh, the pressure! I don’t have to leave for the airport until Noon, if the laptop arrives at 10am, do I have time to get it functional so I can take it on my trip? I sure was going to try!

So after about an hour and half (I had a half hour interuption to deal with a work issue), I had the Mac booted up for the first time, configured, installed my needed software, and connected to my mail account to start syncing my mail. I don’t think I would have been able to do that with a PC. In the end, I wanted time to get re-aquanted with my old friend (my first laptop was a PowerBook 510 which I bought 12 years ago and replaced 10 years ago). And what better time than on a 4 hour plane ride? So I ended up packing up both laptops and headed off to the airport. So, seven hours after it left FedEx’s Oakland facility, the MacBook Pro was back within sight of it’s arrival point.

I brought the ThinkPad along as a backup and to transfer over my work documents. That night at my hotel, I set up a peer to peer wireless network between the two machines, connected the Mac to my shared documents folder on the ThinkPad, and copied over all my files in an hour. I have tried many times to get a peer to peer wireless network to work between two Windows laptops and was never successful. Worked first time with the Mac.

I plan on documenting my experiences transition from the PC back to the Mac over the course of the next few weeks. And I’ll start off by stating a few of my first impressions:

• Apple definitely has the entire user experience down! From unpacking the laptop from it’s briefcase like box, to the bare essentials presented to you when you remove the styrofoam. The laptop itself even came in a nice protective sleeve. It is quite an experience.
• The small usability things that Apple focuses on do make a huge difference. Something as simple as a well designed power supply seems so trivial, until you have one. I was expecting to have to buy a second power supply–I have 5 for my ThinkPad and they are strategically placed around my entire house–but the design with the unfolding prongs which can be replaced with a longer power cable is ideal. I leave the power cable plugged in at my desk at home, and just take the brick and the unfolding prongs on the road.
• The lack of the Intel Inside sticker was something that I completely overlook until I saw this article today.
• The fact that the machine comes out of sleep mode in under 5 seconds is amazing. I was getting jealous stares from other windows users on the plane tonight as I opened the laptop and started typing within 5 seconds! It’s shocking how much time you loose waiting for the windows machines to come back to life. I does take longer for the Mac to go to sleep, about 20 seconds. I think that is due to the 4 Gigs of RAM in my machine that have to be written to disk (I used a 2 Gig model that did go to sleep faster). Regardless, this is still about half the time or less that it took my Windows XP machine to go to sleep…and about 20-30x faster than waking an XP machine up!
• So far, I have not encountered any issues with any of my documents from the PC. Since I have office installed (needed that so I could connect to my companies exchange server for email), all the docs that I have needed opened right up. I’ll be watching this closely over the next few days.
• It has taken a few extra moments here and there to figure out how to do something that was second nature to me on a PC…like right clicking on a mis-spelled word to fix it! But, after a few seconds of experimenting with the FN, CTRL, and OPTION keys on the keyboard, I figured out the right combination to replace the right click action on the PC. There are a few things that I already think will take me time to get used to, like the lack of a dedicated page up, page down, and backspace key.

All in all, I’m glad I spent the extra money and moved back to a Mac. Cool factor aside, I can tell already that I am able to be more productive with this machine. The learning curve isn’t that great. And I doubt my previous experience has much to do with that since a lot has changed in the past 10 years. I’ll continue documenting my experiences here on the blog over the next few weeks.

I used to roll my eyes back a bit when I heard other people say it, but it’s true.. the Mac OS just works. What a novel thought!

While helping a colleague out with LinkedIn today and I created this short list of immediate things to do with LinkedIn to start getting the most from it right away.

• Clean Up old profiles: You should only have one profile on LI, If you have more than one, invite people from your old profiles to re-link on your new profile. Then Contact LinkedIn support to delete your old profiles. In the future, as you change jobs, emails, etc., just update your profile, don’t create a new profile.
• Flush out your profile with quick info about past positions. This helps you connect with others who you might have worked with there who are on linked in and helps them find you. How far back you want to go is your choice. Just be honest! This is the backbone of networking. If you totally lie about a position, someone will find it and it will hurt you.
• Add all your current active emails addresses Under Account & Settings > Email Addresses. This allows others to send you linkedin requests and for LinkedIn to find you in the network based on any of your email address. Choose one as your primary address, this is where LI will send all notifications to (like when someone wants to connect)
• Set Your Privacy Settings (IMPORTANT)
  • Account & Settings > Advertising: I set this to no, there is enough blind info about me being passed around already. No reason to make the advertising companies jobs easier (Kuddo’s to LI for giving you this option!)
  • Account & Settings > Connection Browsing: Set to no. Your network is your asset, no need to share it openly with everyone. People can still search and find people in your network through you, but they can’t go to your profile and see a list of everyone you know.
  • Account & Settings > Profile Views: this controls a new feature of LI that shows you who has looked at your profile. This setting controls how LI shows you when you look at someone’s profile. I choose “anonymous profile characteristics”. (Another Kuddo for the LI team!)
• Install the LI Toolbar on all systems you use (both work and personal). Most importantly, this will put an icon in the upper right hand corner of all your emails telling you if the sender (or others on the email list) are members of LI and are in your network. Secondarily, it will scan your mail to create a list of people you might want to send LI invites to based on your email correspondence.
• Start sending out invites to those you want to link with
  • Decide how you will use LI. There is one school of thought to link with anyone and everyone to build as big a network as possible. Another is to link with those who you have actually worked with and know you in some fashion. I choose the later, as I feel it’s important when requests to make introductions come along that I actually know one of the two parties involved. Otherwise I feel it starts to erode your networking value…
  • Always personalize the LI Invite text to increase the likely hood of a link (and it’s just polite)
• Under My Contacts check out “Colleagues” and “Classmates”, to have LI search for other LI member who you may know through companies you were at or where you went to school. Even if you don’t know there email addresses, you can send a LI invite to them and re-establish some old connections.
• Consider upgrading to a Paid account. This will give you more access to the LI network for searching as well as more ways to reach people (introductions and InMails), as well as greater reference search capabilities. (I upgraded to a Business account back when hiring for a position so I could do more searches based on companies and key words and could then contact them directly. This is essentially what most of the no-value add recruiters today do…and the business account costs were much less. (Disclosure: I’m not affiliated with LI in any way other than being a happy and enthusiastic user!)

Hope this helps others as well!

When you think about the “cool companies” in the technology space that are working on “cool things”, Microsoft is usually not the name that first jumps to everyone’s mind. And yet, yesterday I learned about something Microsoft is working on that made me say “Wow, that’s cool”.

My colleague William Henry mentioned Microsoft Surface in a recent blog posting; I hadn’t heard of Surface before and checked it out based on William’s recommendation. The concept behind it was quite impressive and I agree with William that this is the type of thing that I would expect ot see from Apple, not Microsoft.

Image an entire table top (about the size of a coffee table) that is a touch sensitive computer screen. What ever gets displayed on the screen can be interacted with in a iPhone sort of way. If there are photos on the screen, they look like a bunch of photos just tossed on a table. Grab one and it moves to the top of the stack; drag your fingers at opposite corners and resize the photo; grab a corner drag in a half circle to rotate the photo to show to your friend sitting on the oppose side of the table; touching the photo and flicking your finger tosses the photo aside.

Now take that same table and integrate it via bluetooth with you cell phone, iPod (of course on the Surface website they use that Microsoft music player…), camera, or other portable device of choice. Lay the device on the table, and the table now displays options for interfacing with the device and accessing data on the device. If it’s a camera, the photos display as in the example above. If its an iPod…er…music player, songs are displayed from your collection as well as from the phone. Dragging the songs from your collection to the music player transfers the songs.

The other example Microsoft gives is in a restaurant where your menu is displayed on the table. After you order via Surface, the table changes into some hip night club psychedelic screen savers. Or, as more apt to happen in our modern age, it might start displaying advertisements.

The concept of Surface is intriguing and has a lot of potential behind it, some that aren’t even imagined yet. It completely removes the interface device aspect of working with a computer. The interaction has the potential to be much more humanistic and nature. Has the potential. There are some aspects about Surface that are a bit ahead of their time. Like how quickly photos could be transfered from a phone to the Surface via wireless connection (it takes me many minutes to transfer my photos to my computer today via a high speed USB port). Not to mention the interoperability issues with all the different phone, camera manufacturers.

If Surface ever becomes a reality, the key to it’s success will depend on the development community. The iPhone has been out for just about two weeks now, and there are already a rush of new software applications coming out for it. Someone was smart enough to have a iPhone developer boot camp the weekend after the phone was released (sad thing is that it appears that Apple wasn’t smart enough to sponsor or get involved in it). This type of network around Surface would be sure to generate some really amazing things. Of course, when it is actually released.

To really appreciate Surface, you gotta check out the demo movies on the Surface website. Regardless of how real the technology is right now, the concept is killer. After the last movie, I got bit by the sci-fi aspect that Surface could have. How about placing a stack of documents on it, having them get absorbed into the surface and digitized. Then send those documents to another Surface user half way around the world only to have the stack emerge from that Surface so the receiver can pick them up and walk away. Might be a bit too Star Trek for now, but we’re getting there.

Side Box: Actually two really cool things from Microsoft. The other that has recently come out of Microsoft in conjunction with some research conducted at University of Washington is Photosynth. This is an amazing fast and unique way to interact with photos and view associated photos as they relate to the real world. You are given a 3-D view of something and can zoom in and out of photos of that thing taken from different angles. The killer aspect is that those photos could all be from a public archive like Flickr and taken by different people. The best way to understand Photosynth is to watch a killer demo of this from TED2007 and play around with a demo from Microsoft Labs.

Ever had one of those days where separate conversations from the day collide into a similar theme? Today was one of those days for me.

A co-worker and I were talking about the trials and tribulations of working remotely as part of a larger technology team. We were sharing horror stories of the disconnection from your co-workers because everyone relies on email. Where if you didn’t block off Noon to 1pm on your calendar you were likely to have a co-worker schedule an important call during that time (like I have to block off my lunch hour?). And to boot, they scheduled the meeting at 11:50am via the shared calendar system and then get upset when your ten minutes late (yeah, like I just sit in front of my computer waiting for email all day). If you can’t tell, this is a pet peeve of mine…email is not instantaneous, guaranteed communication method. If it’s urgent, pick up the phone and call me!

My co-worker was describing how his last job had him working from 6am till midnight due to the fact that there were people all over the world and they were all work-a-holics (or the company culture/expectation was that everyone was). Sure, it’s nice to have the flexibility of your work schedule to go to the gym in the middle of the day to blow off some steam or run an errand or two, but not at the cost of not being able to step away from work.

Then, this afternoon, I heard a story on NPR’s All Things Considered that talked about a home recorders dream, playing with pros online. It was a story about a guy who’s passion was playing the guitar and recording his music in the evenings. With a laptop and about $1000 he was able to build a home recording studio. The kicker was that there are numerous services available online where he could send an MP3 of his recording to someone, do a short call with them, and then for a flat rate they would record background tracks for his song (drummer, beat track, background horns, etc.). A few more MP3s would be passed back and forth and in the end the home musician had high quality tracks he would download for his song and mix it himself at home.

To those of us long time technology people, you’re probably yawning saying “so what, that’s not new”. But it is for the music industry. When you look at how music is made, all these musicians are usually in separate rooms, just listening to the other tracks when they record their own. Technology and the internet has enabled the studio musicians and singers to go independent, live geographically where every they want, and work on their own schedule. Everyone is happy, right?

Again, all of this isn’t new to those who have been doing this in high tech, but I look at this in a different way. How many of these people have the self-control and discipline to work in this fashion? More importantly, as we have the next wave of employees coming out of school, how many of them are being prepared for the challenges of balancing your life in an always-on economy?

If you can work in that situation, great for you! But, I have heard rumblings about the always-on economy from many people from all different areas of business. The difficulty of having family time because you work retail and have to be in the story during the holiday sale. The difficulty of taking a vacation and having to check your email or blackberry constantly. The difficulty of getting work done becuase of the constant interruptions from IM, Email, or the phone. Regardless of whether a worker can work in this type of environment, is it efficient and healthy?

My co-worker is expecting to see more of a revolt toward the remote working situations. We might see a new wave of self-help gurus who will help you learn how to work remotely and still have a balanced life.

Here’s my advice from what I try to do regularly to balance out my work/life and deal with the always-on economy…and it won’t cost you a four easy payments of $49.99…

• Take time each day for thinking. No phones, no email, no IM. Those are tools, learn to turn them off. Just take some quite time to review and focus on topics from the day (for me, I follow this with time for writing).
• Set aside focus time to accomplish more detailed or creative work. Turn off the communication tools. Give yourself time to concentrate and work.
• Take a real vacation at least once a year. No cell phones, no email, no connection with work. If you can’t leave your business to let it run on it’s own, then it’s not a real business. (or if your boss won’t let you take a vacation where you can’t be reached, then they’re not a real boss.)

I think there is a frustration level simmering beneath the surface of the working world that we have created. For our own and the greater good, we can’t ignore it.

A few weeks ago my good friend Jon Hodgson was visiting me over the weekend (my previous posting Visiting With a Performance Tuning Guru has more details). We spent a good deal of time getting caught up on the details of what we have been working on recently…the kind of catching up that you can only do in person regardless of how often you talk on the phone). We also spent a good deal of reminiscing about the past and how the experiences we had when we worked together at Resonate still affect us today. The keys to technology loyalty and success were one of those experiences.

Anyone who has had the pleasure of working with Jon is familiar with his signature phrase when dealing with technology features: “Someone who was raised by wolves would know better!”. He used to use this phrase a lot while we were at Resonate working on the early versions of Central Dispatch and Commander. We were constantly providing feedback to product management and engineering (sometimes you have to cut to the source to get stuff done) about the little things in the products that annoyed our customers and us [Pre-Sales] Systems Engineers. (The intrinsic link between a stellar systems engineer and customers is something that most companies tend to not understand or at least not give adequate credit to.)

We agreed that those early experiences reinforced by our experiences since are the source of our shared belief that these little usability items are what create and help sustain technology loyalty amongst users. Users can and will usually overlook small usability issues during the early stages of a product. But if those issues don’t get resolved or fixed as the product grows and matures, you eventually end up with death by a thousand paper cuts.

These small items can be as basic as user understandable configuration names instead of techie/programmer like names. Configurations that are intrinsic in nature; help that is there to explain it in detail if it’s not; or small little UI features that save time. One of Jon’s that I really agree with is that a product should be easy to install (and I add easy to configure in our new Web 2.0 world).

For most tools, if a user can’t get your product up and running within 15 minutes you most likely already lost the sale. We are all busy; what should they expect from a product that wastes their time with a bad install? Most of the time users won’t waste more time to find out. This extends into the configuration of service based applications. If I can’t get basic functionality up and configured within 15 minutes, it’s too long. Sure, there can be more advanced features, but keep them hidden until I ready for them.

In today’s social based technology world, this is even more important. There are numerous web based applications that I hear real users willing to sing the praises of because of how easy they are to configure or use. With every product out there having multiple competing products vying for attention (many of them free or open source), customer loyalty and involvement with the product is key.

It still amazes me how few technology companies really understand this.

This morning I went to my neighborhood mega-corp coffee shop (they get enough press the way it is, so I’ll give you three guesses to figure out who I’m talking about…and the first two don’t count.) I was having a nice relaxing coffee with my wife and our dog, when all of a sudden my coffee cup started talking to me!

I thought that what is had to say was important enough and relevant enough that I wanted to share it with you. Here is what my coffee cup said to me:

The Way I See It #225 (…figured it out yet?)
“People don’t read enough. And what reading we do is cursory, without absorbing the subtleties and nuances that lie deep within — Wow, you’ve stopped paying attention, haven’t you? People can’t even read a coffee cup without drifting off.”-David Shore
Creator and executive producer of the television drama House.

I find this relevant because I have spent the past 6 months in deeper exploration and participation of the blogosphere…man do I hate that term…the world of self-published content. What I find so interesting about this world is the same thing that most professional journalists originally complained about: the lack of depth within the majority of content.

How many blogs have you gone to where the majority of the postings are just a few sentences that refer you to another posting. Recycled content with no added value. There is nothing wrong with pointing your readers to something that you find interesting, but explain what and why you find it interesting, don’t just say “this was cool…” and provide a link. I don’t even bother looking at, let alone reading or even scanning, blogs like that. That’s the quickest way to get me to unsubscribe from their feed.

This makes me think of a new social phenomenon that I have seen mentioned a lot lately…Twitter. Think of it as a micro-blogging service where you are forced to do short content with the goal of explaining what you are doing right now. Interesting social experiment, but I find it difficult to finding adequate time to write up the items that I really find interesting for here. I also am finding it harder and harder to have large blocks of concentration time to work on items. The last think I need is to break my time up into smaller chucks so I can tell the world what I just did (or didn’t do). Again, what is the value in snippets of thought or meaningless comments about “having lunch with my Grandma”? (Yes, that last one was pulled right from the Twitter website as I write this).

The English language is a wonderful tool that is full of subtleties and nuances that seem to have gotten lost in today’s world. I agree with the Professional Organization of English Majors that we are facing a shortage in this world. Did you see the nuance and subtle reference in that last sentence? As an English Minor, I put it there on purpose. I know that my co-worker would have caught it. The joy of working with him is the nuance and subtleties that he weaves into our every day interaction with clients and co-workers. Granted, being a film major I don’t always catch all the obscure references..but I appreciate knowing that their there. It’s one of the joys of the job. Something akin to the way Gail Wynand would write a world changing editorial on the fly.

I have seen comments in the technology trade rags stating that blogging will start to decline. That we have hit a wall on volume of self-publishing content. I sure hope not. I see self-publishing as a great way to leverage the true spirit and potential of the internet. The challenge that we all face is to not fall into the trap of condensing everything down so it can be easily consumed, turning it into just another puff of air into the hype balloon, and using it to drive readership for an increase in advertising revenue. Don’t get me wrong, I have no problem in monetizing your self-publishing to help you pay the bills, I’m a firm believer in needing multiple streams of income in today’s world. But don’t minimize the value in your self-publishing for this return.

I hope to see us use the self-publishing infrastructure to unlock the creativity and greatness that we all have locked inside of us. As I had mentioned in a previous posting, just keep your critical thinking cap on so you can see the true greatness through the rhetoric and propaganda.

That is, unless you’ve already drifted off…

Within the last few days, there has been a huge uproar within the Flickr user community regarding some limits that Yahoo was going to start imposing on Flickr accounts. For those that don’t know Flickr, it’s the original photo sharing community. Sign-up for a free account, upload your photos, share them with friends, family, and the rest of the world. Over time the system evolved to allow comments to be left about photos, building lists of friends and favorites, etc. Now that Yahoo has been the owner of Flickr for a while, they are starting to change a few things. In this case, they wanted to limit the number of friends that you could have (limit it to 3000) and the number of tags that are associated with a photo to describe it.

Thomas Hawk has done an excellent job of reporting of the announcement then description of the user reactions followed by his coverage of the slight modification of the new limits. This gave me flashbacks to one of the recent user backlash against eBay. I would have thought that Yahoo/Flickr would have remembered that little incident and taken a different approach to their limit changes.

What this just continues to exemplify is the need for community networks to think and act differently with regards to product management (actually any software company with the continuing movement toward online and community based products). Having spent over 10 years in the software industry working with customers and product managers (including some time as a Product Manager), I’m still amazed at how many crucial decisions are made without clear understanding of the customers or without doing something as simple as asking the customers.

I’ve seen product features be designed with no idea of how a customer uses the product. Products built based upon huge assumptions made from the ivory tower of the corporate office. Even a product manager sit in front of a large fortune 100 customer listening to them state their specific needs only to later say “I think what the customer really meant was…”. As someone who sells technology for a living, my job would be so much easier if at least 60% of what was built was what customers ask for. (I know there is a huge discussion that can be had about innovation here…but that’s for another time.)

Getting feedback from users has only gotten easier and easier over the past 10 years with new internet based technologies. You have internet based user forums, online surveys, user groups, etc. Mostly it’s the time to market pressures that the technology industry creates itself that prevents this from happening.

In the world of community network type services and products a totally different approach is needed. It’s the community that makes the product successful, so why isn’t the community used to drive the development of the product? Flickr, and most community networks, succeeded because of the evangelizing that is done by early members. These same members should be given the option of continuing to drive the success of the business. In the case of the latest Flickr changes, it was a Flickr early user who suggested the change to one of the limits that eased a lot of ruffled feathers.

All the advances and changes in the technology landscape, and yet some attitudes are so slow to adjust.