Um…

By Bryan Woods | November 14, 2008

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Graphic depictions of the English usage of my twitter “tribe”

By Bryan Woods | November 13, 2008

It’s 2:30 am right now and I’ve hit the Twitter API rate limit for a while, so for now I hope you enjoy these images.

I’ll blog tomorrow on what they mean and why I think they’re awesome.

Make yourself at home by clicking to enlarge.

Throtted at 100; results skewed

Throtted at 100; results skewed

Pretty revealing twitter clusters

Pretty revealing twitter clusters

Read More »

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Classmates.com User Sues and I Hope He Gets All The Money in the World

By Bryan Woods | November 13, 2008

I just came across this juicy tidbit from ABC News that seems like it should be hot of the presses from Techfaux.

But unlike the headlines from Techfaux, this story’s actually true.  Apparently a man signed up for an account at Classmates.com after one of their infamous online ads told him his former classmates had been searching for him on the site.

Good for him.

I mean that, and I hope he sends Classmates straight to the spam hell they’ve earned a spot in.

And here’s why.

Every day you hear more and more about things like “social media” and “revolutions” and “technology tying people together” etc, etc, etc and on and on and on.

But the problem I’ve always had with this mindset is that it gives so much power to machines over people.

What I mean by that is that the internet has two ends: on one end there are millions of real human beings, and on the other end are real businesses.

In between the two ends of the spectrum are machines.

Stupid thoughtless emotionless humanless machines.

And for some reason it’s these dumb pieces of wire and plastic that people think have “revolutionized the way we communicate,” “bridged the long-standing gap between brand and consumer,” or whatever the buzz phrase of the week is.

The telegraph didn’t reinvent the human condition, the telephone didn’t cause us to become a world of antisocial basement-dwellers, and the internet hasn’t either. And obviously it never will.

I think this is exactly the problem I have with people putting so much stock on things like telecommuting and working “virtually.”

The problem with these people is their assumption that since we’ve migrated to a new machine to handle our communication, our connections are somehow more lifeless. As if working virtually puts me further out of touch with the real human beings on the other end of them.

When you finally come to realize that a computer is just a dumb machine placed between you and a real human being with real thoughts, feelings, goals, beliefs, and virtues and businesses with agendas, bottom lines, and goals of their own, it becomes increasingly difficult to either put too much stock in the dumb machines or to brush off the value of the real human beings you communicate with and connect to in your cloud reality.

So back to Classmates.

They didn’t break any kind of cardinal rule of the internet.  They aren’t violating an unwritten machine ettiquette either.

What Classmates did, by telling a man that long-lost friends were seeking him out when they in fact were not was screw with the very real feelings, dreams, nostalgias, and hopes of a very real human being.

And I hope they receive the punishment they deserve.  It’s not Usenet and IRC anymore, folks.

And even when it was, it wasn’t, really.

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Your mobile device has encountered an unexpected error (0xE800003A) during the install phase: Verifying application

By Bryan Woods | November 10, 2008
unexpected error (0xE800003A)

Unexpected error (0xE800003A) == Death by Coldplay

Are you about ready to jump from the top of an extremely tall building after encountering this error?

Well, you’re not alone. I struggled with this monster for about two weeks before getting my test application to run on my device, and the way I solved the problem was different than what I had read elsewhere online.

Check Keychain Access. Your certs are there, right?

Great, but you knew that already.  So check one last thing.

Do you have two certs in keychain that could possibly be overwriting each other?

That’s what turned out to be the case for me. I deleted the unnessecary cert and the app magically installed itself on my iPhone.

Hopefully this helps!

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iPhone Hotness of the Day: Baked-in Drag and Drop of UITableView Cell Items

By Bryan Woods | November 10, 2008

So you want to add drag-and-drop functionality to the items in a UITableView Cell, eh?

Head over to your app’s equivalent of RootViewController.m and check out all the cool stuff commented-out and at your fingertips.

Somewhere in that file you should see

RootViewController.m
/*
// Override to support rearranging the list
- (void)tableView:(UITableView *)tableView moveRowAtIndexPath:(NSIndexPath *)fromIndexPath toIndexPath:(NSIndexPath *)toIndexPath {
}
*/

Go ahead and uncomment that bad boy. Congratulations on your new drag-and-drop interface!

Your previously-boring UITableView that used to look something like this:

Boring UITableView

Boring UITableView

Is now the envy of the whole neighborhood:

UITableView

UITableView

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Another Thought on Free

By Bryan Woods | November 10, 2008
pay

It's almost too simple to work.

There’s a growing trend among the early-to-relatively-early adopters in my community: we’re actually paying to use web and mobile apps.

Personally, I pay a monthly fee to use Github for source control and distribution on my code projects, and pay a monthly fee to Bluehost to keep some of my Wordpress-powered blogs running.

While paying for web hosting might seem like an old animal (it seems to be one of the few business models to not have reverted to free for whatever reason), it now comes in new forms, as I pay to use Amazon Web Services on a per-use basis as well.

My girlfriend has recently embraced another freemium web service, paying a nominal annual fee to host her Flickr stream.

And these are just the web applications I currently pay to use. Over the years I’ve paid to use 37 Signals’ Basecamp and several others.  Which brings us back again to the mobile web.

While I force myself to be far more frugal with my App Store purchases than I know I could be, glancing through my phone right now, I have paid to use Bloom, FakeCalls, GL Golf, RJDJ, Word Party, Ocarina, Slate Poll Tracker, CityTransit NYC Subway, MovieMaker, and several others that have since been removed my phone.

Considering the fact that I’ve been using the web for about twelve years and have only had my iPhone for about a month, there is one clear assumption that can be made: there is a great revenue opportunity for mobile developers and it comes in the form of paid applications.

But something even more important is percolating to the surface: early adopters are paying to use web and mobile applications more and more over time.

At least in the early adopter community, this means the idea of actually paying real money to use software is no longer foreign. Applications aren’t assumed to be free just because they’re web-based.

And while this might come as no surprise in the world of early adopters, think for a second of what this means to the public at large.  In two or three years, will it really seem so crazy to see your users as customers (and charge them money to use your application)?

The trend’s already there, and I’ll put down my 99 cents that paid applications will have a much more natural fit to the tech ecosystem in a few years.

So what does this mean for development teams and startups? Don’t be afraid to charge your customers. Provide great software and give great support. It might seem strange now but it won’t soon enough, so why not start turning revenue now? There’s no time like the present.

And, just for the hell of it, here’s a list of web applications I would happily pay to use (if the companies would simply let me):

  1. Twitter
  2. Heroku
  3. Facebook
  4. Gmail / Google Docs / App Engine
  5. Myspace (with ecommerce)

Further reading:

A radical business plan for Facebook - Slate

Essential viewing:

David Heinemeier Hanson Startup School The Secret To Making Money Online

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iPhone Developers: You’re doing it wrong.

By Bryan Woods | November 8, 2008
Are you fucking kidding me?

Are you fucking kidding me?

Just like that, the mobile web has become a regular part of our daily lives.

And even still it’s nearly impossible to fathom just how important Apple’s App Store and Google’s App Marketplace truly are to the tech startup ecosystem and mobile web economy as a whole.

But one thing’s for certain.  iPhone Developers are doing it wrong.

The irony of people calling web-based products and services “new media” is, of course, that the web has been mainstream for a decade now, and for the most part, the conventions and best practices of creating a profitable web based business have been cemented and understood for years.

You have two options: Charge for your software or stick advertisements on it.  And if you stick advertisements on your software, you can give it away for free, and everyone’s happy, right? Wrong.

Web 1.0 fucked up royally.

Web 2.0 fucked up royally.

So why can’t anybody figure out how to make money on the internet?

Easy. They’re afraid to charge money for their software.  It’s an ass-backward nuclear arms race, where the goal is zero rather than something, well, higher than zero.

And then came the App Store.

Not only can third party developers build upon a popular mobile platform, but the platform provider has built-in a business model.

This is the greatest time in history to be a small team building small, elegant, smart, simple software. Simply develop it, test it, and right away upload it to a vast audience of real people who are not only starving for more mobile software but also actually willing to pay real money for it, and it’s hard to not see that something huge has happened.

So why then, are we, the iPhone developers of the world, making the same mistakes that caused the stock market to crash at the turn of the millennium and caused startups to “actively pursue a business model” in Web 2.0? Are we really that sadistic? Or are we just afraid of money?

You see it happening with every idea that gains popularity in the App Store:

  1. Great application makes App Store debut at $1.99, rises to top 25 in popularity.
  2. Lesser application copies great application, charges $.99. Gets moderately popular but brings down the great application’s popularity.
  3. 5 copycat applications of the lesser application spring up for free.
  4. The application from step two lowers their price to free.
  5. The first great application lowers price to $.99, is ridiculed for not being free.

Reminder: Apple has baked in a business model to their sweet Apple pie.

Reminder: This is a good thing.

Reminder: 1 million installs of your free application equates to less money than 1 single install of your 99 cent application.

Reminder: Popularity != Revenue

Reminder: Revenue is good.

So please, enough with this arms race. Let’s start providing each other with more documentation, with more pointers, with more sample code, and with more frameworks that allow us to not only delight the consumer but also put real money into our pockets at the same time.

We have the unique opportunity as software providers to learn from the mistakes made by our industry in the past and to adapt. Apple’s practically giving us the golden key and a firm handshake.

And always remember: When you release copycat software on the App Store for free, you release copycat software on the App Store with Hitler.

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