The Black Box of Development

In my first year as a web developer, I remember the VP of content at my company telling me, “You guys are kind of like auto mechanics: you just tell us what work is needed and how long it will take, and since we don’t really have any idea if you’re full of it or not, we just agree to it.” Yeah, that’s pretty much true, but she made it sound so sinister!

I certainly see how things can be confusing. I envision a request to change some text in an HTML page, versus having to change database driven content with some strict database access regulations. As far as the requester is concerned, it’s text on a web page. Why does one have to be sent to a DBA, and the other doesn’t?

Of course, then there are those who assume because the presentation of content is similar, that you are full of it when estimating these things. That can be frustrating, and it usually gets more frustrating when you try to explain it to them. It seems like (in my experience, at least) these are also the type of people who’s eyes tend to glaze over at the first utterance of ‘HTML’, effectively tuning you out completely.

Anyway, as an homage to our wonderful clients, I thought I’d share this classic (circa 2000) tidbit I ran across on del.icio.us this afternoon. I haven’t read all of these, but my favorite so far is this one:

A recent client my company got.
Client: “We want a website that can play DVD quality video, but we don’t want to use streaming video and the load time must be zero.”
Designer: “That’s impossible. Everything has a load time. DVD quality runs about 100 megs a minute.”
Client: “We’ll take our business elsewhere…”

Enjoy.

The Reckless Web

“Creating Passionate Users” has been a must-read blog for me for quite some time now. I don’t know of any other resource on the web which provides such valuable information in such a thought provoking and entertaining way (bold statement, I know). This morning, on my way through my feeds, I ran across Brian Oberkirch’s post about a horrible string of events which have plagued Kathy Sierra. I’m constantly surprised by what some people are capable of when shielded by the protection of anonymity.

Mob mentality has always been very puzzling to me. I’m not terribly versed on the psychological aspects of it, but I suspect there are certain evolutionary drivers of the phenomenon (protect the village, survival of the fittest, acceptance by the group, etc). Regardless, I’m amazed by the fact that everyday individuals who would normally never break the law are capable of utter lawlessness when caught up in a group behaving in this manner. Anyway, back to the issue at hand. As apophenia pointed out, the incubation of the hatred directed at Kathy was promoted through the creation of a website named meankids.org:

The brief story is that three prominent bloggers got annoyed at another female blogger for not permitting mean-spirited comments in her blog. They created a site called meankids.org as well as a spin-off. These blogs encouraged people to say terrible things about others and it spun out of control. The content by the sites’ creators (again, prominent bloggers) was completely unacceptable – misogynistic, racist, and horrid speech. Their words were bordering on hate speech so it’s not that surprising that anonymous commenters took it one step forward.

And now we have the equivalent of the cyber-mob: an anonymous group of individuals completely abandoning their sense of morality and causing others to feed off of it. Lovely. Combating this type of thing in your standard social medium isn’t terribly difficult. You either have explicit moderation, disallow anonymous comments, or have the community police it for you (i.e. X number of people indicated that this comment offended them so it’s automatically deleted). But when you have a website that’s purpose is to embrace this type of behavior…well, that’s a whole different issue. As the web becomes more and more ubiquitous in our everyday lives, and continues to evolve and leverage our personal information to provide valuable products and services, maybe the shield of anonymity will slowly disappear, effectively abolishing this practice. Wishful thinking, I know, but one can hope.

Health 2.0

The cost of health care in the United States is raging out of control, and although our elected officials in Washington seem to all express great concern over it, I’m not exactly optimistic about their ability (or desire) to affect change. Call me cynical, but there’s just too much money to be made by keeping things the way they are. Sure, there might be some small “improvements” pushed in various election years, but dramatic change?–I’m not holding my breath. Ahh, but there’s still hope. This is, after all, the age of the new media, and the door has been opened for some very exciting prospects for innovation in this area.

One glaring problem in the health industry is related to the inability to establish and maintain reliable medical histories. Imagine an overweight individual with diabetes, a history of heart disease, and an allergy to penicillin. If that individual suddenly needs to change health-care providers (by changing jobs, for example) it’s likely that his medical history will not be transferred over to the new provider. That means the patient’s entire health history has to built up again from scratch, greatly increasing the risk that appropriate treatment steps will not be taken to address that individual’s needs.

Now imagine that same patient’s health information being available online. It’s started online, updated online, and all of this is done independent of care providers. Medical history information is centralized and maintained, language barriers can be more easily breached through proper use of technology, and treatment facilities can become more consistent with how they interpret and update information. All of this could lead to increased efficiency, ultimately driving down cost.

Enter the founder of AOL Steve Case and his new company Revolution LLC.

Case founded Revolution in 2005, and launched RevolutionHealth.com in January of 2007. The site offers a wide range of information and tools to learn about and manage your health and health history (and, of course, it also has social networking). In addition, it provides the infrastructure for the storage of a user’s entire health history. Now, where things get really interesting is when we put this in the context of Case’s other activities. Revolution LLC has been partnering with companies like Walgreens and Walmart to establish walk-in, round the clock health clinics within those stores. The potential behind a combination of centralized, easy access patient information with ubiquitous, convenient access care clinics is, in a word, huge.

Of course, these things always come with fine print. The main significant hurdle with this idea is the privacy concerns. I’ve had a handful of discussions on this topic with friends and co-workers and one of the consistent reactions that seems to come out is “I would never trust having that type of information online”. Since the concept of personal health information online is relatively new, this seems to be more of a fear of the unknown than anything else. That being said, security is certainly a legitimate concern (as it is with any sensitive online information), and one which needs to be addressed. However, as the younger, social media generation grows older I think these concerns will slowly disappear, as having personal information online continues to move towards the norm.

In any case, I hope for the best from this process. My libertarian friends would be proud: conviction in the prospect of the free market being able to solve problems that the government can’t (or won’t). At least in this case, I think that might be the case (so to speak).

Innovation » Success » Mediocrity (?)

Is it inevitable that the larger a company gets, the less innovative it becomes? Large companies mean more employees, and more employees ultimately mean someone, somewhere in the chain of decision making will take the safe path in order to stay…well, safe:

In their (admirable) desire to be strong and stable, the “branches” put safety above all else. What kind of safety? Sometimes managers are putting the best interests of the company first. That’s great–they’re often more experienced and have a better grasp of the bigger context. But (and it’s a really big but) sometimes they’re just worried about their own damn job. In other words, the leaf node/individual contributors often think about the effect of their work on users, while the mid-level managers often think about the effect of their work on their job. And whose fault is that? All those layers of bosses. Even one risk-averse boss in the chain-of-command can do major damage to innovation, spirt, motivation, etc.

I think that’s exactly right. It only takes one individual in the right position who would rather take the safe route to take a product or service from phenomenal to mediocre. And I don’t think this is only present at larger companies, it’s just that it’s more likely to be at larger companies simply because of the larger number of employees. Of course, the all to apparent irony here is that it’s exactly the willingness to not be safe that leads to success.

So does this mean that a powerhouse like Google will eventually feel similar effects as Microsoft? Time will tell, I suppose, although Google certainly seems to be aware of the risks associated with becoming too careful.

Kiva.org

For years now I’ve been a passive observer of the emerging social web (outside of the occasional role of curmudgeon on various right-wing political message boards) and I’d like that to change. With that being said, I’d like to dedicate one of my first blog posts to the non-profit microfinance website kiva.org.

For those who are unfamiliar with the site, it allows you to view various entrepreneurs in need of funding and donate $$ to get them off the ground. The amounts needed are often quite small, and you have the option of lending as much as you like. I’ve been a lender on a limited basis there for almost a year now, and I plan on doing so with increased frequency for the foreseeable future. I’m hard pressed to conceptualize a more noble use of the social web, and I would encourage anyone interested to donate.

I also have a certain bias though, as I’m also a childhood friend of Premal Shah, the president of Kiva. Looking back I don’t think I’ve ever come across anyone quite so dedicated to holding himself to ever higher standards of achievement, while still maintaining a “play hard” attitude. To this day, some of the most memorable stories from my childhood all the way through college and beyond have come from Premal and his fearless attitude towards life. Godspeed my friend. I wish you the best in your current and future ventures.