It's easy to call something innovative. People do it all the time. They relaunch their site to include a +1 feature over a competitor and all the sudden they're hailing their product as innovate and new. Really, innovative implies something that hasn't been done before, and should imply something that pretty much makes the alternatives feel obsolete in comparison.

Google released AdSense, a truly innovative way to create an effective advertising network. It, and the ensuing copy cats, took over the advertising world and made publishing online for profit approachable by even the smallest, most obscure people. YouTube, as simple as it may be, made online video accessible and launched an entire genre of copy cats. Friendster, even if it was kind of lame and lacked a sense of purpose, kick started a million social networks. Blogger brought blogging to the masses.

Tough economic times seems to bring out the next generation of innovation. After playing with AppStore and some of the Apple dev tools for the iPhone, we may very well see a slew of truly innovative out of the box thinking come out of the mobile landscape. The stuff that's out there right now is fairly tame, nothing has really blown me away, but no doubt it's coming. It's probably waiting for approval on appstore this very moment. We'll see.

In thinking in terms of the "new web", are there other examples of things that are truly innovative, or are we building better and better variations of existing themes? Any thoughts on real world applications for mobile? I saw some stuff on crowd sourcing traffic data. That may not reach a critical mass, but that's a killer line of thinking in terms of applications.

I can't tell you how many people have tried to shove ruby on rails down our throats. I'll agree that its pretty looking code, and that its probably pretty manageable, but as of now it is an abosolute nightmare when it comes to scaling.

At SXSW, we had some dude freaking out about how we didn't know what we were talking about because his site could handle hundreds of thousands of users at a time.. It was cute, and almost not even worth responding too given our background with sites like Engadget, TMZ, Autoblog, Joystiq and the rest of the happy blogsmith users.

Anyhoo, one of the Twitter developers, Alex Payne, was interviewed and specifically asked about their experiences with the Rails framework, being that they are now probably the biggest Rails site on the net.

The common wisdom in the Rails community at this time is that scaling Rails is a matter of cost: just throw more CPUs at it. The problem is that more instances of Rails (running as part of a Mongrel cluster, in our case) means more requests to your database. At this point in time there's no facility in Rails to talk to more than one database at a time. The solutions to this are caching the hell out of everything and setting up multiple read-only slave databases, neither of which are quick fixes to implement. So it's not just cost, it's time, and time is that much more precious when people can['t] reach your site.

Full interview here

I have yet to meet a Rails developer who honestly thinks that Rails (in its current form) is a highly scalable framework, unless they come from a design background or a java background. Two backgrounds who ultimately shouldn't be allowed to discuss efficient, affordable scaling in any serious tone. ;)

(hat tip Gavin for the link)

What is it about applications that "feels" different than a web application?

And by "feel," I mean in terms of design and interaction. An example recently was when I was trying to find a web based alternative for OmniOutliner. It simply can't be done. Basecamp & Backpack, for all their javascripting goodness just don't have the same gratification levels. RememberTheMilk is the same kind of thing I guess. Something about the way I interact with OmniOutliner trumps it all.

Analyzing my use of OmniOutliner and trying to figure out what exactly it is that I like so much causes me to consider what it'd take to bring it to the web. It's certainly not features -- all I really use it for is my todo list. It's whatever feeling is generated by me using it that causes the satisfaction (and subsequent attachment). Is it the ease and speed of an application that does it? Is the browser the problem (as opposed to the delivery/protocol), or is it the style of widgets and layout differences? Actual net speed? I'm not sure.

It's almost like trying to define what "felt" right about the BBS world of the 80s/90s. Most who experienced it agree that something was fundamentally different -- better -- but hardly anyone can define it.

Any thoughts? Am I alone on this?

On Life...

We went out to our favorite Rib joint last night, I think I'm going to have to eat salad for the next three weeks to get back right. It's all about the beef ribs though.

The smog here (well, not Huntington Beach, but LA) is disgusting. I'm pretty sure the folks who say SoCal is the most beautiful place in the country really haven't been to that many places. It's Central Florida with a dash of Miami plus crime, pollution, traffic and smog. We saw a plane land last night and you could see the smog rolling off of the wings, no joke. Three cheers for asthma I guess...

We haven't hung out at the beach yet, though I'm sure we will. I'll try to judge it with an open mind, but as Wayne pointed out in a comment on an earlier post, the oil rigs really do kind of kill it.

We helped Kathryn get her office off the ground on Saturday though. We met a lot of great folks, including the Congressman from this area. He's a really funny, laid back guy.

On Work...

Netscape's going well, we just need to get that new hardware online asap. We have some servers on the west coast that are causing some headaches, but we can't take them offline until we get more servers to take their place. Catch-22. The big thing this will solve is the annoying sign in over and over stuff. It should only be happening to a very small percentage of users at any given time, but it's annoying as sin. The work around for it is to click the "remember me" option, at least, I think -- I can never seem to recreate the problem myself.

The dev team has been kicking ass and staying on top of the bug list. Tom and Andy are at it again doing some really neat stuff with the friends functionality, so stay tuned. That'll probably be the "visible" addition of the week.

Andy's also cleaned up the front page some, moving around certain items to make the design a bit less cluttered feeling. He's got some really slick design mocks of a "non-digg" look. Whenever we have a bit of time, we talk about different interface approaches. It'll probably be a little while before we switch to something different though, the masses can only handle culture shock so many times ;)

On Emurse...

We hit 1000 users sometime during the week, though we were too busy with Netscape (in addition to TMZ for Gavin) to notice exactly when. We're still sporting about a 67% active user base, which is stellar in my opinion. We're planning on unveiling some pay services for the site soon. The general functionality (what's already available) will continue to be free, since we really believe in offering as much to the user as possible, but we think it's important to start building out the business model early.

Expect to see a "plus" account with more features and resume templates, which is slated for $25 a year. Competing services seem to charge about three times that, but I mean.. A college kid who can really benefit from the service simply can't afford that kinda flow. We'll probably do a "premium" level account down the road, but I think $25 a year is more than reasonable coming out the gate.

We also have a review service (pricing is being researched now) that should be online in the next couple weeks. Gavin has already written the bulk of the backend, we just need to get the CSS straightened out so it doesn't look like poo (we're big believers in interface design, especially since we get to work with such a badass.)

If you have any suggestions for us, we're listening. Any insight into pricing structures would be helpful too ;)

Every now and then Gavin and I will spend a weekend teaching ourselves a new technology, basically by working on "something cool." We start projects, solve problems, examine market potential, code a little bit -- try to see if something is theoretically possible. Typical geeky entrepreneurial stuff I'm sure. It's a creative outlet of sorts. I can't speak for him on it, but I can't paint, can't sing, and suck at guitar. Creating software is one of the things that I do to address certain creative inclinations. I'm blessed in that my career is similar to my hobby, but it's not the same. All programmers need to work on their own stuff sometimes.

Anyway, coming up on a year ago, Gavin and I worked on a little side project to help people manage multiple resumes. Gavin was graduating from college, and I was working at a gig that while steady, wasn't the most exciting thing in the world. People are starting to discover it, and I thought it time that I start blogging about it. Here's the press blurb, ignore the multiple links, they're there simply to improve search engine traffic. And yes, we know "emurse" may look like a poor attempt at spelling "immerse", but it's a play on the letters in "resume." ;)

Emurse.com's mission is to improve your job hunt.

We believe that your job hunt is a continual process that starts with having an updated resume available at all times. Emurse allows you to easily create resumes and manage your existing ones. You can download them in any format instantly from anywhere in the world. Stay organized and save time by easily distributing your resumes directly from the site, keeping track of all their destinations and when they've arrived. When its time to update your resume, Emurse allows you to easily make a change to all of them simultaneously. We'll even help you turn your resume into a web page so potential employers can always have access to your most recent copy.

We're sporting about 200 users with close to 72% of them active. That's not bad considering we've never made any real marketing push. I imagine we'll start being more vocal about it now that the concept is starting to prove itself. We've gotten some tremendously positive feedback and tons of great suggestions. It's been fun.

You can actually see it in action on the top right of my blog, the resume links download straight from emurse. If you have a blog and are okay with mixing business and pleasure, try doing the same. I've been pleasently surprised at how well the resume has been indexed in google. It turns up in all sorts of job related searches now.

Anyway, check it out and let us know what you think.

UPDATE: We had a RAID controller fry in our DB server this morning. All is well now, and things should be humming along.

As you may have noticed (or read about over on Jason's blog), we pushed through a slew of changes the last couple of days. I'll briefly touch on them, and kind of outline the work that's immediately in front of us.

New Stuff

• Advertisements - The big blocky crazy distracting ones in the middle of lists? On comments and story pages? Yeah, those are gone. Replaced with clean, crisp, google adsense. Hopefully this will be a nice compromise. Andy is our designer, and is the man, by the way. He's been tackling most of the ad issues.
  
• Frame Navigator - We weren't lying when we said it was something we planned to make optional. All the outrage from the technical crowd quickly made it a priority though. Shout out to Tom for getting it in over the weekend!
• Votes - Lots of little issues with votes, so allow me to get geeky for a second. We have servers. Lots and lots of servers. They're in multiple cities. Users are using different servers, talking to different databases, and pulling from different banks of cache (for now at least, each region has it's own distributed cache shared between servers). Each page load you make, things get cached and stored in memory -- this technique drastically reduces our database calls. Here's where it gets tricky. In some circumstances, we're caching the entire page, in others, only portions of the page. How do you keep the votes outside of what's cached, cached seperately so your not making a ton of unnecessary database calls, and distributed in a way where they won't fluctuate between servers? Now toss in ajax calls every 15 seconds that refresh the vote totals (sit on the page, and you'll see the votes change). I think we have this issue nixed, but we've only rolled it on in one specific place on the page -- the main list of stories. We can use this to monitor what's going on and test. If it appears to be working correctly now, we'll roll it out to the rest of the site. The other places should be accurate to roughly a minute or so. I can assure you though, all votes are being counted. It's just a display problem that we're working on.
• Formula changes - Part of the beta process is to figure out the right speed for the front page. We're not digg, we're a portal. We operate on similar principles, but we have a different user base and different traffic requirements. First, the formula was too slow -- the AOL copies Digg story stayed on the front page for days, which, if you're a fellow fan of irony, is simply rad. On the other hand, it's still "old news" in terms of the life of the story. Then we went to fast, and everything on the front page only had a few votes. Part of this is low traffic, part of it is the speed of the page changes. We're getting close though, lots of little tweaks -- Trey Long, just like Bow Wow, is a man amongst men. Even if he does prefer to be called "Baby Trey."
  
• Lots of little bugs: We had a crazy little bug on the comments page that would remove focus inappropriately as you were typing, we had a js error on vote handling that would show up from time to time, we had some advertisement bleed through that andy nixed, Craig introduced elements of formatting into Comments which I'm sure people will be thankful for, and a bunch of other stuff that I can't immediately think of..
  

Other stuff thats a couple steps behind...

• User suggestions - Most of the "cool" visible stuff will probably be based on user feedback -- we get a ton of it, and we read it all. When you log in, in the top right corner, there should be a "feedback" button. Use it and let us know what your thoughts are :) I'd still like to make the "pop up new window" thing an option, but depends on how loud people are about it.
  
• Better, more scalable multi-city approach - Craig's got some cool stuff prototyped in dev that should help us distribute this thing all over the US. What this means is faster response times and the ability to handle the onslaught of traffic thats heading our way when we switch to the full domain. The difficulty isn't so much in the premise of it, but in coordinating all the different folks that need to be involved.
  
• Better vote display - As noted in the above.. I'm hoping to roll out my crazy ass vote stuff all over the place.
• Other possibilities - If we can get the fires under control, we might be able to get Anchor Chat finished and online. The prototype in dev is, quite simply, friggin' amazing. Mad props to Christoph, Andy, Tom and Trey on it. They've done well.

Those that know me well are aware of my 'hobby' involvements.

I'm really into leadership, team dynamics, goal setting, personal development, and all that other 'soft factor' managerial stuff. I'm an advisor for a fraternity up at the University of Maryland, which is an extension of my earlier involvement back in my undergraduate days. One of the primary reasons I stick around is so I can do all those geeky activities at retreats. I'm not sure why, but I've always been into soft factors, and really love passing on the lessons of leadership to others (or alternatively, when someone passes them on to me ;)

Thats a big reason why I chose my masters degree (one day I'll find time to finish) to be centered on knowledge management (with a side focus on usability, but thats neither here nor there). I see a huge lack of software geared towards managing soft factors. Engineers, naturally I guess, may not have the social skills to see the potential applications.

Anyway, reading techcrunch this morning, I saw they had a write up on a site called Mecanbe. It appears to be more centered around personal development, but there is mention of a team aspect to it. Planning, charting and monitoring team performance is something that may turn out to be their money maker. Much of teamwork is simply getting (and staying) on the same page -- fighting for the same cause. That's where goal setting exercises come in handy. As more and more of our teams become virtual, the idea that we can take these activities online seems appealing, but simple chat room sessions just can't cut it.

A few years ago when I first started getting into the wholeusability craze, one of the things that came up in my conversationswere the various metaphors used to interact with computers. The classic, most known metaphor is theconcept of a Desktop. I've seen ways to categorize information byit's meta-data and organize files in a Rolodex type of fashion aswell. Anyway, what if we were to invent a new metaphor with todaystechnology, now some 20 years after the creation of the desktop?Alan Kay andcompany are attempting just that.

Croquetis something I stumbled across way back when and its programmed inthe ever-so-rad Squeak. They've justreleased a beta available for download (its been in alpha for along time now). With it, you can basically create highlyinteractive 3d or 2d environments for multiuser applications. Inone example, an avatar is interacting with a 3d window. Thecontents of the window, are located on a computer that the spacebelongs to. The avatar is able to walk from space to space(computer to computer) interacting with different objects.

While this style of interaction is unlikely to replace the existingdesktop metaphor (3d spaces just don't do it for me), it highlightsan important step in creating the next level of applications. Onewhere the distinction between what is and isn't local is blurred inthe presentation, and the interaction amongst users issignificantly heightened. The ability for multiple users tointeract and manipulate objects (whether 3d or 2d), work ondocuments simultaneously, share information and work flows, arevariations of how the framework can be implemented.

I'll be curious to see if this shows up on the radar enough togenerate discussion (probably not). It's not about whether or notit's truly innovative, better than what we have, or anything else.It's merely about celebrating the fact that the creative processstill exists in this realm, and the hope that maybe someone willstumble across something better.

There's an interesting post on O'Reilly Radar regarding Mozes,a new SMS service.

Gavin and I have been playing alot with our cell phones. I'm a big java guy, so the idea ofdropping on an application to interface with some of our web applications is appealing. Once youget into all of it though, you uncover a world of mess. The cellphone space is a complete cluster-f of horribly supported,unstandardized APIs geared at allowing people to write yet anotherPacMan clone. On top of it, Verizon doesn't even use Java. They useBREW, which is basically an awful way of keeping people from easilydeveloping applications for their halfassed phones.

What I'm getting at is, SMS is really the only viable option for acell phone product right now. The location aware technologies thatare needed to do anything really neat are just too far away. Notjust that, they seem to cause so many ridiculous privacy concernsit's almost not even worth dreaming about. Hopefully the cell phonemanufacturers and the cell services in this country will get theiracts together at some point though, because thats "the next bigthing."

Anyway...

Mozes is a great idea. It'spainfully simple, and frustrates us to know how close we came towriting something similar in our prototyping. We built a reallycool SMS framework a few weekends ago to see if SMS could be aviable alternative to some of the things we're looking to build.The short of it is, yes, yes it is.

There's something to be said for developing for the least commondenominator ;)

How fitting. The first comment posted to this brand spanking new blog of mine is "Hey Alex! Bring back bored.cc!" Every couple months I get an email or an IM, or now a blog comment, with that same request. It's actually pretty cool, and I totally enjoy hearing from the bored.cc crowd.

I'd love to bring back bored.cc. Starting from scratch, I could make it such a better site. Seeing things like digg.com come along and basically do the same thing in a cleaner way made me understand some of the usability issues we never got past (while making me a tad jealous in the process.. though, I mean, Kevin Rose is the man, so... it's cool.)

For those who never had the chance to play around with bored.cc, it was basically a generic digg (not just tech) but was based around this whack ass RPG metaphor instead of votes (almost in a joking fashion, but it worked).

Users would submit stories, post comments, post jokes, create polls, participate in web cam rankings, etc. etc. All the while, they'd earn experience points for their participation. Naturally, they'd move up levels every so many points. The higher the level, the more moderation power the user had over the site -- approving/rejecting stories (more like slashdot in this fashion, which is what it was modeled after), etc. The entire concept was built around the idea that I, as the admin, would never ever have to do anything. It should run itself in this weird sort of communal way.

It ran for the majority of my college career untouched (literally, coded and rarely touched again, for years... not good practice, but an interesting experiment), slowly growing in users. Never advertised and only based on word of mouth and search engine traffic, we went down with about 1000 users (at one point we had more, but lots of them were spam/crap..so.. doesn't count ;). Traffic wasn't great, but it would have been nice to throw adsense on it ;)

At the end of it all, I guess I was looking for post-college jobs and knew if someone googled me, they might not get the most flattering returns. That was probably what drove me to shut it down. I should have just removed my name from it and let it run.

Anyway, stay tuned, who knows ;)