Simplicity Rules

Adam DuVander on keeping it simple

My New Gig: Editing Programmable Web

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Big changes for me. My mapping API book goes to the printer this week. And, at the end of the month, I will join Programmable Web full-time as Executive Editor. I will manage a staff of freelance writers and do a bunch more reporting myself. We cover APIs and mashups of all sorts, with a healthy amount of mapping in there.

I’ve been calling this my first real job. I’ve never had benefits (other than from my own company) or actual vacation days–the sorts of things that most people are used to. Of course, it’s not “real” in the sense that I’ll work from most anywhere and have flexible hours.

I’ll also have a big challenge on a tiny team trying to do huge things. That’s exactly where I like to be.

The Simple Solution That Stopped Wandering Patients

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“Occasionally people slip out the front door and then they wander.”

That was the problem facing a senior center in Germany. Their patients, afflicted with dementia or Alzheimer’s, would walk away in a desperate search for a reality that only exists in their heads. The story is told in fifteen minutes on an episode of the Radio Lab podcast:

“He sat on an advisory board at the senior center. And one day he came up with this idea. It’s one of these ideas that’s so out there and yet so simple that you think it just couldn’t possibly work.”

Install a bus stop. Or, more appropriately, a fake bus stop. That’s all it took to stop the wandering patients and give the staff a chance to notice they’ve slipped away.

Do you have a recurring problem with your website, business, or personal life? Perhaps you need a fake bus stop, something that works with the other party rather than against them… and still ends up giving everyone what they want.

Unrut Yourself: My Six Week Side Project

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Almost every day I walk down to a local Mexican restaurant and spend at least an hour there. The same restaurant. Every day. I may have mentioned this before. If there is anyone who needs out of a rut, it’s me. That fact gave me an idea for a new side project, which I started work on in early December, six weeks ago.

Unrut Yourself - Portland pizza places

It’s called unrut and I think it’s a good example of a version one product. I included only basic functionality–there’s a lot of room for improvement. But instead of spinning my wheels as I attempted to finish a marathon list of features, I kept things simple. Users can search for places and then mark them as visited. What remains is a nice little organized list of places to try.

Using only cookies, the site remembers what you’ve marked as visited. So, if a place comes up in a subsequent search, you won’t have to mark it visited again. Would it make more sense to include user accounts, so that the site would work no matter what computer you are on? Yes. However, I trimmed this from the feature list for two reasons:

  1. It is not a necessary feature in order to get feedback from people on the concept
  2. Every site should let you sample, registration optional, so the cookie functionality will remain even after I include user accounts

And how about incorporating location-sharing sites to automatically determine where you’ve been? Yep, that’s a good idea. But creating a first version is about pointing your ship in the right direction, not necessarily sailing it all the way to your destination. Use the two simplicity paths to figure out the core and just launch that. You can always add stuff later.

Since posting a message about it on my Twitter feed this morning, I received good feedback. Some people asked for the things I already knew I needed. Others have said things that didn’t occur to me. That’s the power of getting a side project out there.

We all have side projects and I’ve written about many of mine on this site. I’d love to hear about your side project. And if you want help getting it done in six weeks, let me coach you.

Resolve to Finish Your Awesome Side Project

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SIDE project, not siding projectI’m lucky. I get to see many side projects from talented people, such as through my role as organizer of Portland Web Innovators. We have a recurring event, Demolicious, to share what people have been working on. In fact, there is one next week. If you’re in Portland, please attend.

There is something else I see often–side projects that don’t get finished and languish in a half-complete state. Or worse, they become trapped as unexecuted ideas. It’s nobody’s fault. Life takes over, priorities are forcibly skewed. Side projects, which are often passions, hit the back burner.

That makes me sad. And I’d like to help change it by starting my own side project as a side project coach.

Update: I am no longer accepting new clients, but always am interested to hear about your ideas and point you in the right direction.

This is part of my continuing campaign to help others create on the web. I’ve written tutorials, a book and over 100 articles on Programmable Web. These are passive methods. While rewarding, they don’t provide much connection with those I am helping. Side project coaching, working one on one, will help me work toward my goal much more actively.

It’s a new year and it seems like a perfect time to pounce on those cobwebbed projects. If you have a side project, resolve to finish it in six weeks. If you know someone I can help, send them my way.

Social Software Needs More Context

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Connect with friends on thousands of social networks - Photo by basibangetI have a problem: I don’t remember who you are. Okay, maybe not you, but in my travels around the Internet, I sometimes become connected to someone on a social website that I don’t remember. I could use a little context, some help triggering my memory.

Has there ever been a time when the average person has maintained contact with more people? Has it ever been this easy to make these contacts public? Between Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and scores of other social sites, many of us see over lists of hundreds–or more–of individuals.

A study showed that we can’t maintain more than about 150 relationships. I’d agree that it’s tough to be real friends with more than that. But I’d also counter that contacts on social websites aren’t always exactly like the “friends” we keep in the offline world. This is especially true when contacts are more casual, such as on Twitter or when reading blogs.

The following are issues I’ve noticed with social software where I believe a little context would be useful:

  • I don’t remember why I subscribed to your blog. I’m sure you wrote an awesome post that was linked from someone who I respect. Now you’ve written three posts about topics that don’t interest me and I’m struggling to remember our common interest. Google Reader, which I use for tracking blogs, lets me use folders and rename the feed. Those can help, but that often doesn’t tell the whole story.
  • I don’t remember who you are or why I followed you on Twitter. You can see this is largely about my memory. As a simplicity practioner, I purposely expunge many details from my brain. This is another example where the software should help me out. Yet, there is very little to go on: your user name, your real name (which may not be set) and your bio. That’s often not enough.
  • I can’t decide whether I should follow you on Twitter. Again, I only have so much information to go on. Hopefully you’ve included a link to your website, which helps a lot. Twitter, being a casual social network, skips the whole “friend handshake” thing where you request a friendship and then I approve. I like it this simpler way, but one bit of context that is lost is the message where you tell me why you want to be connected. That can be immensely helpful.

Got Any Ideas?

I see a few ways social software could help us out and I’d love to hear your ideas.

  • Let me create a private note that I can use to remind me why I followed you or subscribed to your blog. LinkedIn actually has this feature (see embedded video), but it’s relegated to a paid feature. And LinkedIn Pro is over-priced at $25 per month.

  • Track how I found you by remembering the blog post I read when I subscribed, or the retweet I clicked on before following you. Web analytics for publishers has come a long way, but similar software doesn’t exist to help consumers. I believe it is the job of whatever software I use to track content to help me make sense of it.
  • Show me our friends-in-common. Facebook does this, of course. On Twitter, I need to go to a third-party website to figure it out. And for blogs, we can share individual posts, but there isn’t an easy way to share the feeds. If there was, I might be able to tell why I subscribed to a blog from the context of which of my friends also subscribe.

Have you noticed these problems, too? What solutions do you have?