Well, it was a fun ride; I’ve moved on from Lolapps, and as of this posting, a week from starting a new gig at the big G (really, that’s Google, not “grad school” as someone had guessed…). The experience has been enormously educational:
- working for a startup since its infancy;
- growing the company in scope and size;
- building apps on top of a rapidly iterating and emerging platform in the Facebook App ecosystem;
I’d easily recommend any aspiring entrepreneurs, engineers, or web-savvy netizens to try their hands on similar opportunities. That said, after having fought the battles and learned the lessons for the better part of two years, I realized it was time for me to bow out of the system and return to more traditional software products.
Here’s why.
The next web revolution – Web 3.0 – is going to be centered around real-time data and search, so say the tech media mavens. Leading the charge is of course Twitter (now available in your search in both Google and Microsoft form), but everybody else is jumping into the fray too, saying how awesome it is to report locations, in real-time, and otherwise leave a conspicuous digital trail ripe for exploit.
When CNN and Fox News are holding regular news segments that consist of nothing more than reading prescreened online posts, you know traditional media is desperately trying to speed up the news cycle too.
I say it’s going in the wrong direction.
I just read this article in the current issue of Wired about how Craigslist is run by a seemingly nonchalant founder/customer support rep., and how a completely engineering-driven company tries to only listen to its users when coming up features and enhancements. Hence the circa 2000 look, cluttered interface, and minimalist functionality; they still grow because they started huge and take over online classifieds for cities one by one.
As someone who spent months in aggregate designing his own blog, works at a Silicon Valley startup, and specializes in front-end web development work – it’s a pretty sober reminder of the power of the network and steady momentum. CL doesn’t follow any of the rules of a what makes a “successful product” or even entrepreneurship, but somehow dominates its market. It’s a lesson in user behavior.
One of the ways I de-stress from all the mortgage crap is by working on this site. For me anyway, there’s an inherent satisfaction in telling the webserver exactly what you want and shuffling elements 2-3 pixels until everything looks dandy…as opposed to, say, trying to lock down an interest rate fluctuating to reactions in the marketplace about some government bailout of financial companies.
I finally got around to integrating the Pictures page with the rest of the site. This blog runs WordPress; the pictures are hosted with help from Gallery2; the glue is a little plugin called WPG2. I made the theme, and since it’s not the most flexible in the world, I’ve been shoving the default Gallery2 interface into the mess. A bit of CSS scrubbing and PHP code hunting, and the Pictures section looks like it belongs with the rest of the site.
Anyway, yay to me.
Yet another lesson in the law of unintended consequences, the malleability of statistics, and the stupidity of robots.
Courtesy of the Counterize II plugin for WordPress, I’ve been trying to analyze traffic charts like this for the past few months:
Could it be that, in addition to the lack of coherence embodying this site’s namesake, I’m also providing five times more value to my readers? Maybe MSN Live () is providing subtle commentary on the value of incoherence?
After kicking Internet Explorer 6.0 – the most popular and one of the most bug-ridden and standards-defying browsers in existence – in the proverbial crotch a few posts back, I wasn’t ready to give up; the stats proclaim 32% of visitors here do so within the confines of IE6, and I wanted to provide a good UI to all users, misguided as they are. I needed to clean up a few things anyway, so I went about rewriting large parts of the site () using the same design and graphics, tweaked slightly to make IE6 happy.
