Simplicity Rules

The Portland Web Innovators have had a number of great meetings since Ryan and I cooked up the idea in February 2006. This year, especially, has had some great speakers and topics. Here are a few selected meetings from 2007:

• Firefox 3 preview with Dietrich Ayala
• Commoditization of Web Applications with Marshall Kirkpatrick
• Side Project as Resume with the Unthirsty guys
• OpenID and Digital Identity with JanRain
• Widgets with StepChange

We’re finishing the year with two more great meetings:

• November 7: RSS and Attention with Attensa
• December 5: Community with Dawn Foster

Web Innovator meetings start at 7 p.m. on the first Wednesday of every month.

I was honored to speak at the inaugural Ignite Portland tonight. The format was a quick 20 slides, auto-advancing after 15 seconds. It’s the essence of simplicity!

Below you’ll find my slides, a video of the presentation, and links to learn more about some of the topics I mentioned, and a little more about the three books I quoted.

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Links:
• Fast Matters: Google’s test with search results.
• The two simplicity paths: find the core
• POWER HOUR
• Seven Day Product
• Four day work week
• Early Amazon: Recommendations
• Global Rich List
• The experience is the product
• Productivity secret: letting go
• Phone in your to-do list

Books:
• Laws of Simplicity
• Founders at Work
• Bit Literacy

Update: Added video above

This will sound like a rant, but I think it shows how far the web has to go.

Yesterday evening I wanted to get my haircut. I looked at the clock and it was just after eight. So, I went to the website of my nearby big chain haircut place and found my location. Delighted and surprised, I saw they were open until nine.

I’m sure you know where this is going. The place was closed. It was only open until eight. The sign had obviously been changed recently. The “8″ sticker was newer than the rest of the numbers.

Not being able to get my haircut was one thing. What really bugged me was that a big company, with nearly 3,000 locations, made it easier to change the physical sign out front than one little character on a website.

It’s like my friends at Needmore say, always-current websites for everyone. When that happens, maybe we can talk about Web 2.0.

Amazon’s CTO, Werner Vogels, describes their product definition process of Working Backwards.

In essence, they write the press release, the FAQ, and the user manuals before a single line of code is written. They flip the timeline to make them focus on the end users. How will the new service be seen? How can Amazon communicate it clearly?

Vogel concludes:

“Once we have gone through the process of creating the press release, faq, mockups, and user manuals, it is amazing how much clearer it is what you are planning to build. We’ll have a suite of documents that we can use to explain the new product to other teams within Amazon. We know at that point that the whole team has a shared vision on what product we are going the build.”

Via Peat

The Web has been moving toward snappable content for some time. It’s the middle ground between a site owner wanting content and a content producer wanting exposure. The name we’ve given them, widgets, isn’t especially creative, but it does describe their most basic properties: small, usable, and interchangeable.

For example, here is a WeatherBug Widget showing the current conditions in Portland:

Last week the Portland Web Innovators had a great presentation/discussion on widgets. Kevin Tate and two of his fellow members of the StepChange Group gave a history, an overview, and discussed how they use widgets.

Though a widget can be a lot of things, the most interesting to me are the kind that are snappable web content, like the weather details above. I can easily include someone else’s content in my site. This content can come in different forms:

• Static. The content is the same as the day I picked it, like embedding a YouTube video
• Updating. The widget pulls in new content, lik the latest headlines, or a word of the day.
• Interactive. Visitors to my site can use the widget to find what they want.

There can also be combinations of these. For example, I might choose to show my favorite WiFi hotspot (static), but the widget also shows popular places in the same zip code (updating), while providing the visitor the chance to plug in their own zip code (interactive).

Along with making a widget useful to the visitors of a site, the key is to make them easy to snap in. Widget-making is about being a People’s Programmer. Make the technology simple enough, and anyone can share what you’ve done.

My friend John just returned from Chicago and has a summary of transit observations. That town really has this stuff down.

When I lived there for a month in 2000, I took trains and buses everywhere. One of my favorite things was the CTA card, used instead of fare.

Whether you had a monthly/weekly pass, or had filled it with money, it worked the same way. Before getting on a bus or entering a train station, you slide your card in and it spits back out. It’s fast, it makes sure people pay fare, and it’s always the same.

Something John found that I don’t remember are pictures of the street before exiting the subway.

What an elegant solution to something frustrating that happens to me all the time at Pioneer Square mall in Portland. I’m below ground and I want to know where I’m about to exit. I don’t know how many times I’ve ended up at the wrong side, disoriented.

My favorite downtown hangout, Blueplate lunch counter and soda fountain, is giving away free milkshakes when you go there for dinner during October.

They serve great American comfort food in a laid-back atmosphere. Their sodas and floats are something you can get nowhere else. And yes, the shakes are great.

At the very least, stop by for their cool shiny stickers. If you look closely at the picture above, you can see my reflection in the sticker from the computer screen.

October is breast cancer awareness month. Many sites are going Pink for October to show their support. Hopefully those sites aren’t linking to Susan G. Komen for the Cure outside of the strict guidelines the foundation imposes. In fact, I broke the agreement just by linking to it.

“Links may only be established to the homepage of the Komen website. Links to any main section page or sub-section within, and/or any featured area of the sites, are prohibited.

When linking to the Komen websites you may use either a text link or the pink ribbon graphic. You must use hypertext only and it must be in the following form: ‘Susan G. Komen for the Cure.’ Any variation without written consent from Komen will result in immediate termination of your rights to link to the Komen websites.”

To be fair, Komen isn’t the only organization to use this strange legalese. What the lawyers who drafted this don’t understand is that you can’t control the Internet. They can’t stop me from linking to whatever page I want, however I want. Further, they really don’t want to stop me.

The Internet is all about linking. You can’t control the terms, because you can’t control the Internet, and it works better that way.