Quixotic Bravado

• @AntTheLimey Failed to put little warning on the side of the box didn’t they? They should have it right next to the one about seizures.
• The Twitterfication of the MQ office and alumni continues. This morning’s lesson: tweet by text.
• Catching up on podcasts; writing latest developer engagement manifesto.

• At the emergency vet with @tracibabe and her stupid dog. Think the Easter Bunny kicked her in the hip.

• Sweet! New Raconteurs CD out Tuesday! You must go buy and listen!

• @Hicksdesign Having recently changed over from FF to Safari, PimpMySafari=great, wish it had more dev. support though. 3.1 killed 3 plugins.
• Desktop is file free. 3 emails in inbox. Rock!
• sitting here with @antthelimey talking about @marcs3z
• Ahh colorwars. There’s nothing an community loves more than a common enemy even if they don’t know why. Somewhere a rainbow is crying.

Recent links for http://del.icio.us/quixado:

• Share Icon Project An icon to represent ’sharing’: posting to social sites, sending by e-mail, etc.
• Building Subversion (SVN) on Mac OS X
• Apple Mail plug-ins and tools
• Welcome to Conference 2.0 Social media is putting an end to the passive role attendees traditionally play at business gatherings

• Since I went to Safari 3.1, Gmail thinks a pop-up blocker preventing me from opening links, then opens them anyway.
• @thorpus Rock on! $5 dollars each if you work the words "FUJAX" and "chutney" into your speech. $1 for use of "kiosk." -$100 for "web2.0"
• Everyone is announcing things today! Announcements: I’m announcing that I have nothing to announce today.
• I’m with @gruber. Joining @verygreenteam to shut up @garyvee and empty hopes of free wine.

• Fun with Flex this morning. Maybe kick tires on Silverlight between meetings today too.
• @dweakl01 Probably. "Twitter me some stalkers."
• Three words I never expected to hear when talking my grandmother: "My car exploded."
• @icelander Hell, I worked out of the house today because of that scary green bowler hat you had on yesterday!

• Must…file…expense…reports! Oh, the humanity!
• Happy that I’ve crossed a ton of "to dos" off the checklist. Sad that I’m adding new tasks at roughly the same rate.
• The instructions say to bake on the "middle" oven rack; there’s six. Neither rack three, nor four look anywhere that look middle-ish. WTF!

Recent links for http://del.icio.us/quixado:

• CSS Trick: Creating a Body-Border - CSS-Tricks
• Yahoo! Search Blog: Making Sitemaps Easier to Manage and Scale a Sitemap can now be hosted on a different host and path than the URLs it contains. For example, say you have a Sitemap (sitemap-www.xml) for the URLs on http://www.example.com but you want to put that Sitemap on http://sitemaps.example.com.
• How to save money running a startup (17 really good tips)
• GCam 1.2 software download - Mac OS X - VersionTracker Record video clips from an iSight webcam/DV camcorder

My friend Justin Thorp posted a piece yesterday called “Our current biggest online revolution isn’t user facing…“. Go ahead and read it, I’ll wait.

I had a few other thoughts on this topic, some from life at MQ, some from projects at CD:

Developing “shiny objects” is tempting for organizations because it can be a buzz builder, the benefits seem visible, and is likely to quickly get slapped with a label as “innovative” or “game changing.” At the end of the day however, it’s usually the small and incremental changes — the “unsexy” functionality which is the most useful and provides the most value.

The important lesson for your organization is to find ways to make your stakeholders see the value, or “shininess” in the “dull” features, whether it’s your client, your bosses, or your board of directors. It’s very easy to fall into a trap of trying to hypnotize users into an trance-like state, sometimes fooling them (and yourself) into believing that you’re actually providing more value to the product than some “unsexy” tools of under-the-hood features. What’s sometimes hard is to stand your ground and make a strong case for features that do add value, but aren’t apt to get you a write-up on a tech-blog.

Here’s a quick example that anyone who has worked on the back-end has experienced: Tell your client that half of your development was spent on infrastructure — features that the client can’t make “tangible.” They don’t get it and want something they can “play” with and fight you. If you win, your work is thankless when traffic surges and the application scales without an issue. If you concede, the application grinds to a halt and now the client has nothing to play with anyway.

The next online revolution is distributed. This makes the argument even harder because now these already non-shiny tools and features aren’t serving some centralized application you can visualize, but empowering functionality to an army of decentralized applications and being used in ways a single organization could not conceive of or execute upon. In a fast-moving Internet, where companies are still slow to migrate from “page views” as a performance metric, making distribution shiny is going to take a lot of polish and elbow grease.