kuniform

Ok, so I’m a year late to the party reading this post on startups, investors, and launching by 37signals’ code wunderkind David Heinemeier Hansson, but it’s still a darn good read, regardless.

The more that I understand about the business side of software, the less convinced I am of the value of investor money for many startup models. In one sense, it’s always nice to have validation of your ideas, team, self, etc., and people throwing money at you is definitely a sign that those folks think your idea/team/self is/are good. Having been at a few startups and having helped launch several others, it’s apparent that those folks with the cash are typically clueless as to the viability of your idea.

That is not to say they are stupid or didn’t do their due diligence, but the investor may not be an expert in the startup’s industry. They rely on the narrative the founders tell in the business plan, attempt to poke some holes in that, and then if they think there is an opportunity, they go after it. As an outsider Chicagoan who’s watched 37signals grow, they made a transition from a consulting services company to a software as service company with some consulting. I don’t know if this was something they planned on or something that occurred, but it is a fairly unique situation. If you were starting at ground zero, with neither a company nor a product, which would you develop first?

Hmm, I lost the thread of my thoughts. Time to go back to the research on accessibility and AJAX.

Since Tom Coates’ Native to a Web of Data is somewhat difficult to get to print or read given its format (exported from Apple’s Keynote presentation software) and is written for a fairly technical audience, Jeremy Zawodny translated it for MBAish Product Managers. Unlike this dusty ol’ blog, there’s a fairly lively debate on the value of many of these services. It’s a fairly interesting read, though many of the points he makes about hackable URLs or patterns of interactions are regurgitated from Nielsen circa 1999 or other sources, such as Welie or Tidwell, etc.

I don’t mean to denigrate Coates’ work; the presentation is insightful and there are interesting ideas in there. In particular, when he mentions charging cash for API services and correlates that to O’Reilly’s What is Web 2.0? memes on the culture of participation and the ownership of the format of certain types of data—calendaring, Amazon’s ASIN supplanting ISBN, etc., you can get some clear sense of how established players like Yahoo!, Google, or Amazon can get some hefty from this trend. eBay/Paypal already makes a big chunk of their change off their API by increasing transactions through other channels.

It’s been a long Monday, and maybe I’m just tired and cranky, but it begins to feel like there more hot air in the Web 2.0 bubble than gas to make it lift. O’Reilly calls Google the banner-carrier of Web 2.0, given the seismic nature of its IPO. That feels appropriate, as they created a new model of data and services to share it. Having been through the hype of Web 1.0, the 2.0 hype tastes a little more bitter for one reason: the last time around, there were clueless traditional companies throwing lots of money at young people to produce things they don’t understand.

Lots of ups, many more downs, and a pretty radical redistribution of wealth for many. Good times. This time around, though there are some pretty amazing things being created, flickr, del.icio.us, etc., most of them seem headed for a quick ramp-up and buy out. Good times for those folks, good times for the users of these services, but I look out at a bunch of web geeks out there and think they’re doing a Steve Ballmer over Web 2.0. Working themselves into a fervor over another slight incline in the usefulness of computers. Why did flickr get bought? Because it was all Web 2.0ish? No, because it is a great service at a reasonable price that provides value to the user. del.icio.us? You got me, aside from Yahoo!’s assumption that there is strategic value in the acquisition. Yahoo! has more bytes of user-formatted data than you can count in your lifetime. Unless you are Google, you don’t.

That may sound like a huge wet blanket, but the first application I hacked was Lemonade on an Apple II as a 7 year old, so I’ve seen a few of these bubbles before. Is the promise of Web 2.0 much greater than that of 1.0? Of the GUI? Of the microcomputer? Sure. I am getting tired of my third or fourth trip around the hype cycle. So, here’s to Web 3.1, when the multi-gestural direct manipulation interface arrives (thanks for the link Albert.

Finally, this post by Russell Beattie hits it square on the noggin.

I’ve spent my whole life living on Lake Michigan, and I’ve noticed many of the changes of the past few decades with great anxiety. Whether it’s Zebra Mussels, the frogs disappearing (I remember chasing them in the rain as a kid, and they would rise from the grass around you in waves), or the PCB in the water, we have to do whatever we can to keep these beautiful lakes as pristine as possible.

How else will we bottle and sell all that water? Check out the report here.

I began a post on this yesterday, then got busy and forgot to finish it or even save it as a draft. On ol’ St. Valentine’s Day, the folks at Yahoo! released their design pattern library, a user interface code library, and a blog detailing both efforts. Yahoo! kind to interaction designers, not so kind to Chinese dissidents. Ok, enough with the smart-assedness. That is an amazing effort put together by the Yahoo! team. Congrats to the authors of the blog, Bill Scott and Erin Malone on the design team side. Congrats to all there, but I am giving shout outs to those folks in particular since I’ve followed a bunch of their work in my own research.

This is a huge step forward in standardizing the web experience. Is Yahoo! positioning themselves to be the Microsoft of the web API? I believe that is how valuable these patterns, findings, and code could become if their usage is widespread. Owning developer mindshare cannot be overstated—look at how Ruby on Rails is thriving, or witness Joel Spolsky blogging about Microsoft losing the API war to get a sense of the impact.

Anyhoo, more on Ajax frameworks and integration, as well as an interesting Ajax architecture post in a bit. I am going to keep digging through this Yahoo! API today.

Oy.. First off, the header still says ‘2005’ How retro in a non-chic manner. Maybe if I wait 20 more years, it’ll be in. In any event, it’s 2/1/06, and time for a redesign.

I think most of the features will stay, but I will finally finish the typography up, and just create a new set of stylesheets.

Top features I need to add:

1. Accessibility statement. It’s more than due.
2. Jump navigation, and tightening of xhtml for compliance
3. Some Ajax. All the cool kids are doing it. Let’s see what’s changed since 2001 with it.
4. The long awaited content!