Simplicity Rules

Since June I have been answering an email from myself almost daily. I have been displaying the results inside a box titled “Life in numbers.” This is part of a proof of concept for a side project I’m working on.

Along with how I rate my mood and recording the number of hours I slept, I also have tried to write a haiku every day. As I groggily wrote today about coffee, I wondered… how much have I written about coffee?

Printed out postcards
I’ll send them to coffee shops
WifiPDX!

Living on WiFi
Nice to get out and about
Coffee also good

Coffee beans taste good
Made into powder and soaked
Simple recipe!

Coffee makes me move
In every possible way
Sweet dependency

Neck feeling pinchy
First cup of coffee at two
All for some towels

Sit and watch football
The kind they play in Europe
Coffee, computer

Three coffee shop day
I feel like a jet-setter
But without the jet

Time to take a nap
Or time to drink some coffee
I wrote this before?

Things I have learned from a long Thanksgiving weekend watching Twin Peaks and working on little side projects…

1. Who killed Laura Palmer.
2. Focusing on the basic framework of an idea leads to a fast solution.
3. My comfortable limit of red wine is just under a bottle.

They may not be ranked correctly, but each of these is an important discovery that will help me for years to come.

Ooo! I found one in my title. That should be “typos.”

From time to time, I’ll read a site and find a misspelling or typo. If it’s convenient (email address nearby, or they’re a friend of mine), I usually let the author know. As this has happened over the last year, I’m reminded of an idea that Matt Haughey had to let a trusted group edit his posts for errors. This seems like a widget that someone could add into extensible frameworks like Moveable Type and Wordpress. A non-exhaustive search shows that nobody has worked this up yet.

Matt later expanded his idea to include letting anyone make edits. This seems like the natural progression and where typo-removal might be easiest. To avoid misuse, there would be a certain threshold, so that folks couldn’t make changes willy-nilly, rewriting entire posts. And there would have to be a way to revert changes… this is sounding more and more like a Wiki.

Like any software project, I can certainly see feature creep taking over this little widget. Anytime you give up even a tiny piece of control, it will probably be used differently than you imagined. For each nasty thing someone cooks up, there’s a piece of duct tape to make sure it never happens again. But how long can that dance go on? As I’m thinking through problems and their solutions, it’s moved from a simple little widget to a more involved solution to what wasn’t even that big of a pain in the first place.

The issues that arise out of this typo corrector are the same ones facing the many Wiki programmers. In general, I believe in people to do good. And I believe in the simple solution. However, wiki-izing the entire web would probably not comfort most people.

I’d love to come to some sort of conclusion, but I’m not sure there is one yet. Any ideas? If not, I suppose you can keep emailing me those “ttypos.”

Adrian Holovaty just announced the Post Remix, which he is also calling Mashington Post (ie, mashup of Washington Post). The site is meant to encourage innovative uses of Post content.

A couple of my projects have been highlighted:

• World News Maps
• Today’s Arts quiz

Everything mentioned in Adrian’s post looks pretty cool. I get the feeling this is only the tip of the iceberg.

I wrote about a couple of new services recently and quickly received comments from their creators. Wow. The Internet is sure making it easy to administer the PR from product launches. No doubt the people in charge of the services I mentioned in Year of the Password Manager and So Many Private Betas are subscribed to a service that tracks keywords.

So, I have put aside my modesty and signed up for a number of phrases at Technorati. As usual, Mike Duffy was months ahead of me.

In the summer of 2001, I wrote that addiction to coffee is emotional, not chemical. At the time I didn’t have much of a regular schedule, aside from the one the Giants gave me. Now I have a pretty set schedule, including a trip to a coffee shop to pick up my morning cup.

I find the experience of purchasing, holding, and walking with the coffee gives me the effect one expects from consuming the beverage. Sometimes I glance at my cup around noon, thinking I should refill it. Then I pick it up to find most of my previous drink still available, albeit cold.

So I down the chilled coffee and rush out to get some hot stuff. It’s not about drinking it, it’s about feeling it.

In the Year of the Password Manager I complained about sites that require registration. Honestly, it’s not a big deal to me. I am the sort of geek that usually is making the decision to require registration, so I’m not really a good example of the average user.

1. The average user is worried that I’ll spam them
2. The average user doesn’t want to take the time to fill out a form
3. The average user wonders whether it’s worth logging into their “spam account” to get my confirmation email for a service that might just suck

If I really think I have something, shouldn’t I lower the barrier for entry? Shouldn’t it be less about getting my email and more about showing me all the functionality possible without an account? I think so and I think we should make 2006 the Year of the Optional Registration.

In the case of Rollyo, let me create a search without creating an account. Let me even share the search. Just set a cookie so if I decide to sign up you can make sure I get credited with my searches.

Riffs - let me give thumbs up to Lindsay Lohan. Heck, even let me write a review, but tag me as anonymous. If I want to stand up for my opinions, I’ll do it later by creating an account.

There are two reasons I can think of why so many sites would require a membership:

1. They want to have a hook in me so they can email later and say, “hey–remember me?”
2. Every else does it

And I have two solutions:

1. Make your stuff so good that I’ll never forget you
2. Everyone else will do it if they get on board with the Year of the Optional Registrations

So, what do you say, are you in?

During 2005 I have probably registered for accounts on two times the number of sites as the ten prior years combined. With a month and a half remaining, I feel comfortable calling this the Year of the Password Manager.

In August, the simple-minded folks (that’s a compliment) at 37Signals asked the question URL or Username and Password? I appreciate how user accounts can enhance a site, but I also think they are often unnecessary.

Example 1. Rollyo lets me create my own search engine by telling it what sites to include in a search. While they have a number of advanced features, there should be no need for me to be a member to create a search. Unfortunately, registration is required.

Example 2. Riffs, billed as a better epinions, looks pretty cool. I tried to give a thumbs up to Lindsay Lohan and they told me to login. C’mon. I know you don’t want ballot-stuffers, but there are other ways around that. Plus, it’s not like this is presidential politics or a scientific poll.

Update: I stop the ranting and offer a few suggestions in The Year of the Optional Registration.

Let me first sheepishly admit that I recently started reading Donald Trump’s blog. He has a post about focus that really spoke to what I’ve been thinking and reading about lately. If execution is more important than ideas, then focus is what it takes to succeed, right?

I recently mentioned, as an aside, that RSS might be more of a geek thing. It seems most people, especially the everyday internet user, visit web versions of sites rather than read RSS feeds. Indeed, almost every non-blog website (including most of mine) don’t have an RSS feed.

One part of the problem is that the entire concept (including its acronymic name) is pretty geek-centric. Another issue is that it’s not simple enough to subscribe. Mike’s solution is an intermediate description page. It gives an introduction to RSS, as well as instructions for how–and where–to subscribe.