4 days ago
Last January I took apart my computer desk and rebuilt it at standing height. I've been standing at my desk every workday since. Just in my 2011 travels, I've seen standing desks everywhere from the offices of San Francisco startups to the White House.
Over the past 12 months, standing desks went from popular life hacks meme to eyeroll-inducing sign of a certain type of tightly-wound techie, similar to emptying your email inbox. Several people have asked me if I'm still standing. The answer is yes. Here's what I've learned from 365 days of being a professional stander.
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The Week We Stopped SOPA
1 week ago
Anil sums up the history and future of web protest as we wrap up the week we stopped SOPA. I had chills on Wednesday, the day the web went black in protest of SOPA, because we were all witnessing—and more importantly, participating in—history in the making. I'm so very glad to be alive during these exciting times.
2 weeks ago
"Bloggers are famous enough to have stalkers, but not famous enough to have bodyguards." —Danny O'Brien
Everyone thinks they want a million Twitter followers and a million pageviews a day on their blog and the incredible high that it must be to walk around in the world knowing you're "internet famous." Yes, being famous among dozens has its privileges, but it also has a flip side netizens rarely discuss.
I passed 200,000 followers on Twitter this week. I'm not a celebrity. I've written books and made apps, but I've never been on primetime TV and I wasn't on Twitter's suggested user list during its heyday. I am an early adopter, a dedicated self-promoter, a daily user, and a leader in two large internet communities. All these things translated into an outsized follower count on both Twitter and Google+. Nowadays, when someone notices my follower count—and many people do, because it's a status symbol which indicates which echelon of web society you belong to—they get wide-eyed. "Wow, you're famous," they say.
Reality check: Lady Gaga is famous. Bloggers are not famous.
I'm not famous, but I have an outsized audience. I can ask a question and get hundreds of replies, reshares, and favorites in a matter of hours. If I want a lot of people to see something, I can make that happen in a few keystrokes without any help from a PR firm or media outlet. I've mentioned my follower counts and blog stats in book deal and paycheck negotiations, because people who hire me are often buying my ability to market my book or project.
But you know what else happens when you have an outsized audience?
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2 weeks ago
If you're sending Gmail messages from anywhere other than Gmail itself, they may look like they're phishing attempts. Up until today, whenever I sent messages using my Google Apps account with the From: address set to my vanilla Gmail address, my Gmail-using recipients got an alarming, bright red message at the top which said "This message may not have been sent by [who it appears to be from]. Learn more Report phishing." Make sure this doesn't happen to you.
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2 weeks ago
There's a vast difference between software you can use for free and apps you pay to use: different customers, different business model, different commitment for developer and user.
When you price your mobile app, for example, it doesn't really matter whether you make it cost $1 or $2. The majority of people who want your app and are prepared to pay something for it won't balk at two bucks versus one. But making your app cost anything at all puts up a hurdle much greater than 100 pennies, especially in new markets.
Android Market users have paid for significantly fewer apps than iOS/iTunes Store users. My own numbers confirm this. This isn't because Android users are inherently freeloaders, it's because they're not prepared to buy apps, psychologically and practically.
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3 weeks ago
After a year of starts and stops and some flailing and nail-biting, we finally shipped. The Todo.txt mobile app is now available for iOS. Get it for your iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad in the iTunes Store now.
Just like the Android app, Todo.txt for iOS is open source and built by a community of contributors. It's priced at $1.99 to defray the costs of running the project and help me fund its continued development.
Making this app was a whole new experience for me across several axes. As a Java developer and full-time Android user, I was a stranger in a strange land, learning a new language and a new culture. I wasn't familiar with iOS usage conventions, not to mention its technical aspects. As such, I did more directing others who know much more than I do than I did actual coding. We modeled the UI after the existing Android app, and added in a few iOS specific features where UI conventions didn't align. (For example, iOS doesn't have an ever-present search button like Android does, so you pull down your to-do list to reveal a search box.)
The app has been live in the iTunes Store for just over 24 hours, and it's gotten 11 five-star ratings and one one-star rating, and eight reviews, all positive with one exception. But what about sales compared to the Android app's launch day?
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3 weeks ago
Codecademy's Code Year is a weekly lesson for people who want to learn how to program. Over at Slate, Farhad Manjoo explains a few good reasons why you might want to do that at all, with a quick quote from me. When Manjoo emailed, he asked, "What are some good reasons for people to be more familiar with programming?" I replied:
First and foremost, learning to code demystifies tech in a way that empowers and enlightens. When you start coding you realize that every digital tool you have ever used involved lines of code just like the ones you're writing, and that if you want to make an existing app better, you can do just that with the same foreach and if-then constructs every coder has ever used. Learning how to code also makes you respect the incredible accomplishments of all the engineers who came before you, the importance of good data, and the systems and services we all take for granted every day, even mundane things like the software that runs an elevator or processes a credit card.
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The maker makes: on design, community, and personal empowerment
3 weeks ago
Jeffrey Zeldman:
The first thing I got about the web was its ability to empower the maker. I say “it made me” but I made it, too. You get the power by using it. Nobody confers it on you.
3 weeks ago
I missed last Wednesday's 2011 Year in Review episode of This Week in Google because I was on an airplane somewhere over New Mexico. That doesn't mean I don't have a list of things I'd like to see Google do in 2012.
In no particular order:
Release a killer tablet. Price this tablet head-turningly less than the iPad, make it run Ice Cream Sandwich flawlessly, and offer completely sandwiched-out apps that absolutely scream for the big screen. Forget trying too hard not to offend other Android device manufacturers. Googorola should get this tablet exactly right, down to every last ever-loving detail, with the hardware and the software teams living, breathing, eating, and sleeping together on it. Get at least a few third parties who make apps that cover the major categories of things people do on tablets (news browsing, gaming, social media) to play along before launch, like the NY Times, Twitter, Angry Birds. Google has their core apps covered: Gmail, Calendar, and Maps already appear to be upgraded for ICS and therefore should look fantastic when they unfold on a tablet screen. Don't use chase scenes and explosions or even robots in the advertising. Cash in on Google's brand loyalty and recognition and market it simply as "the Google tablet." The messaging should be: If you use and love Google, this is your tablet.
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3 weeks ago
As a teenager, my biggest fear about becoming a grown-up was less that I wouldn't get a job and more that I'd get a boring job. With the notable exception of my mother, most of the adults in my life modeled my worst-case scenario. They got up before dawn, put on a suit, and trudged off to a soul-crushing, paper-pushing black hole, every day, every year. The idea of that being what you got post-graduation absolutely terrified me.
Looking back at the last 12 months, I know that 16-year-old me would be pretty psyched about the kind of stuff 36-year-old me gets to do. 2011 was mostly great, at times I-must-be-dreaming fantastic, and at others deeply difficult. One thing it sure never was: boring.
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November 15th, 2011, 3 comments
The software I've been building for the past two years, ThinkUp, left beta today. Download ThinkUp 1.0 to install on your web server, or launch ThinkUp on Amazon EC2 in under 60 seconds. Here's a rundown of what ThinkUp is, what it does, and why it's important.
Every day, internet companies like Twitter, Facebook, and Google mine your online social life to advertise to you more effectively. Those companies host and control your data, and you don't. Case in point: if you've tweeted more than 3,200 times, you can't page back to your earliest tweets on Twitter.
The conversations you have online are worth capturing, keeping, and referring back to over time. In fact, the things you share and the conversations you have about them gain weight, perspective, and importance over time, not just the moment you post them. Think about the time you announced you were getting married, or posted a photo of your newborn, or launched a project that changed your life on a social network and the conversations that ensued. That's content you want to keep.
I've spent the last six years publishing observations, inquiries, and just bits and pieces of my life on Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, Foursquare, and now Google+, and having conversations with my friends and readers about them. That's why I built ThinkUp.
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Clay Johnson’s Information Diet
October 31st, 2011
My information diet consists of a cap of 6 hours a day of total, proactive information consumption. That means everything that requires my explicit attention that doesn't involve another person—television, movies, the Internet, email, social networks—if it involves a URL, a mouse, or a remote control, that goes into that 6 hours. It doesn't mean anything physically social or stuff I have no control over, like advertisements on the subway, or music in the grocery store.
Of that six hours, I spend 2 hours on entertainment and 4 hours on work related research and communication. Sometimes that changes—on weekends, for instance, I spend the full 6 hours doing whatever the heck I want, as long as it's not more than 6 hours. By capping it at 6 hours, it also forces me to do things like go for a long walk with my wife, or cooking a good dinner, or producing information. That's been a heck of an improvement not only on my productivity, but in my marriage and on my overall health.
I've read the manuscript of Clay's upcoming book on this topic, and I wholeheartedly recommend preordering it.
The Jobsian fallacy
October 31st, 2011, 4 comments
Scott Berkun:
I’m sad Steve Jobs is gone. I’m sadder still to see the vultures of shallow thinking circling his name. There is a fallacy around great men, a notion we can learn best from their behavior on how we ourselves can achieve. But that’s only true if we study them with an honest eye. When writers are clouded by mythology and hero worship, they do more harm than good, as sloppy thinking is often the mortar used to put men on pedestals.
Out of Curiosity Comes Everything
October 5th, 2011, 1 comment
“I’m a big believer in boredom,” [Steve Jobs] told me. Boredom allows one to indulge in curiosity, he explained, and “out of curiosity comes everything.” The man who popularized personal computers and smartphones — machines that would draw our attention like a flame attracts gnats — worried about the future of boredom. “All the [technology] stuff is wonderful, but having nothing to do can be wonderful, too.”
—Steve Jobs, 1955 – 2011
Our Mobile Planet (by Google) offers a ton of data about global smartphone usage and tools to chart it every which way you'd like. The chart above shows how many smartphone owners don't mind advertising in return for freebies or special offers, split by gender and age. (I created this chart assuming 50+ users would be more interested in special offers, but I was wrong.)
October 5th, 2011, 1 comment
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