Archive for the 'www' Category

Long Sign-Up Forms Considered Harmful

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Phil Crissman
on June 24, 2008
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Considered useless, maybe, would be a better title.

Of all the various trends that have accompanied the wide range of the “web 2.0″ school of applications, the one feature that sticks out, that I really like, is the minimalist sign-up form. Whether they call it signing up, registering, creating an account, the trend has been:

  • To ask you for less
  • To make it quicker
  • To give you options (login with OpenID, Twitter, Gmail, Yahoo ID, etc.)
  • To make any further information optional

It used to be that any time you “signed up” on a new website, it seemed that you had to go through a long form, including your address (what?), telephone number (you’re calling me?), username, first name, last name, email address, password (twice), favorite color, inseam measurements, and so forth. And for awhile, because that was the norm, I think people online simply accepted that.

No more, thank God. New web applications, if they don’t accept OpenID or an existing ID from a different service, generally just ask for an email address and a password. There’s no particular reason you can’t use an email address as a User ID for many applications, so why make it another field? If you want to have the option (for privacy reasons… not a bad idea), you can always allow people to set a username after signing up. Make it simple.

I can’t speak for anyone else, but as a result, my tolerance for old school, long, multiple page, sign up forms has dipped below zero. If I visit a new service and click “sign up”, chances are I’m just considering checking it out. If click “next”, and see Yet More Fields to fill out before I’m able to get into the application/web site… I’m liable to just close that tab and forget it.

It’s a Conversation

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Phil Crissman
on May 29, 2008
in www
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Interesting discussion going on on FriendFeed, started by an email Bob Bly sent to Scoble.

Now, because I spend a ridiculous amount of time browsing almost every section of the bookstore, I know exactly who Bob Bly is. He’s the author of a list of books about copy writing as long as your arm, and several other topics as well (though mostly related to that sort of thing).

In a nutshell, Bob asked Robert (pretty respectfully, I thought) why the heck he gets so excited about everything he writes about (Twitter, FriendFeed, so on). Robert’s answer… was maybe not quite as civil as one might expect. This was pointed out in the discussion on FriendFeed, and Robert asked (reasonably enough) — Well, how would you answer the question?
Continue reading ‘It’s a Conversation’

The New OS

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Phil Crissman
on May 28, 2008
in www
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Dave Winer recently wrote:

Twitter is the new OS. For the moment. It’s like the Apple /// in the days before the IBM PC. Remember the Apple ///? (Not many do.)

I think that’s a good insight, and I like the comparison to the early days of the PC (really the pre-PC). But I don’t think Twitter is it.

What I think is coming is going to be more like a jumble of Greasemonkey and Shiftspace. Though I don’t think either of those are “it” — at least, not yet.
Continue reading ‘The New OS’

On Why FriendFeed Makes A Twitter Replacement Unnecessary

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Phil Crissman
on May 21, 2008
in www
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Every so often you see rumbles on Twitter about the likelihood of someone building A Better Twitter, with the idea that everyone will jump ship after getting fed up with Twitter’s downtime. Arguably, Pownce already is a “better” Twitter in some respects — yet the jump hasn’t happened.

I could be wrong (sources say this has happened before), but I think FriendFeed makes a new, improved Twitter… well, basically unnecessary.
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Google’s Friend Connect == “Openbook”?

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Phil Crissman
on May 20, 2008
in www
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I’m signing up for a “sneak preview” of Google’s Friend Connect, and it’s looking an awful lot like the Openbook I just described in a recent post.

So what would this mean? Hopefully I’ll get to look at it pretty soon. I’m not stuck on the idea of building something from scratch, so if what Google is attempting is moldable into the same sort of scenario I described as “Openbook,” I’d be more than happy to piggy-back on their efforts.

Of course, there is again the potential problem of who has the data and exactly how much you can do with it. Google’s Friend Connect and OpenSocial seem promising, though, and I don’t see any reason why the data that interacts with their APIs couldn’t be on a non-Google database server, or an Openbook-style social network which simply plays nice with their APIs.

Scoble also mentioned Friendfeed as a potential Facebook replacement. I can see this working, also — in a sense. Not necessarily FriendFeed as it exists on their site, but more as an API or a platform that you could build a client for. I has sort of neglected to use or think about FriendFeed for quite awhile; Paul Buchheit said this at Startup School (approximately 23 minutes into the talk), which made me reconsider:

I don’t really consider FriendFeed as an aggregator. It performs aggregation… in the same sense that an email client aggregates SMTP traffic. So… it’s a different experience; it’s a different product.

The ability to import feeds makes it a lot more useful than… if it didn’t do that. Just as an email client that couldn’t receive email wouldn’t be as useful.

This drew a big laugh, of course. But the fact that Paul described and thought of the product in that way definitely made me want to take another look at it as something more than just a mashup of a bunch of feeds.

At any rate, I do think the concept of an “open,” distributed social network is something that would be of value. Whether or not Google’s Friend Connect has the potential to be a major component of it probably remains to be seen.

(Gosh I hate ending blog posts that way. I’m not writing a throwaway piece of crap for WIRED or something. How many retarded say-nothing magazine articles all end “whether or not X does Y still remains to be seen.” Yes, we know it remains to be seen. It’s in the future. It hasn’t happened yet. That is why we call it “the future”. Um, okay. Rant done. Maybe. It remains to be seen.)

We Need an Openbook

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Phil Crissman
on May 19, 2008
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Reading Scoble’s post on Facebook & Microsoft, and I have to say, it sounds like something Microsoft would do. It sounds like an offer FB would be crazy to refuse.

My first thought is that we need an alternative to Facebook that is not only open architecture, but open source. Ideally, it would be distributed.

I’m thinking of Wordpress as an example; I host my Wordpress blog on my own server, but because I have an Wordpress.com account, I get some benefits of being automatically connected to Wordpress.com: stats, akismet, the rest of the Wordpress network, etc.

What if we had a distributed social network? That is, a social network a la Facebook or MySpace where you could be connected to everyone you know who is using the system (or a compatible system)… but you could, if you wanted, host your personal profile on your own server. If you were to have ads on your profile page, you would make the money, not Facebook or MySpace. It would be just as connected, just as networked, using API’s, maybe OpenSocial to play nice with others… whatever. An… Openbook, if you will. Though it could be called anything.

I’m not building something like this yet, but I’d be happy to talk and work with others who’d want to. I think it’s technically feasible, and given the possibilities of a closed Micro-face-soft-book, sounds to me like a really good idea.

Use Dreamhost’s Web FTP client for any server

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Phil Crissman
on May 16, 2008
in www
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So the other day I wanted to get to an FTP server from work. Nothing awful or time consuming, just wanted to edit and move a couple files. However, the proxy at work block FTP traffic to external servers. What to do?

I had a hunch, so I tried going to Dreamhost’s ftp client; Dreamhost has a web-based FTP client which you can use to do most ftp-like tasks for your site right in the browser. It’s maybe not quite as nice as a real FTP client, but it does the trick. However, the ftp server I wanted to go to was NOT on Dreamhosts’s servers.

As it turns out, it doesn’t matter.

Net2FTP is real FTP client, albeit web based, so it can go anywhere. Just visit http://webftp.dreamhost.com/ and enter the credentials for the FTP server of your choosing, and you’re in.

*Note: the “Blue” theme is normally the default, and is a bit more user-friendly, IMHO.

How I Got To Startup School

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Phil Crissman
on April 9, 2008
in Education and www
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I’m not there yet, of course, but it all came together.

Here’s the backstory: I saw the startupschool.org pitch, and always assumed I couldn’t go. After all, I’m in Minneapolis — it’s at Stanford. Besides which, you need to apply and be accepted… well, I thought, I could apply. What could that hurt? I probably wouldn’t be accepted anyways.

So I applied. And then forgot about it, like you buy a lottery ticket or a sweepstakes ticket, and realism makes you compartmentalize the possibility of “winning” in the “that’d be nice but isn’t going to happen” part of your brain.

Only next, I received an email telling me, “Congratulations!” And I was accepted. Now what?
Continue reading ‘How I Got To Startup School’

Social Networking and the handshake problem

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Phil Crissman
on April 6, 2008
in www
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reposted from blog.philcrissman.com. Since I’m moving back here, I may repost a few of my last few months blog posts, just so they are all in one place.

There was a lot of discussion awhile back about Facebook and its limit of 5,000 friends. The discussion, in case you (mercifully) missed it, was largely driven by social networking power users like Scoble.

I didn’t think too much about it at the time. Between now and then, I’ve thought a few times about social networks, and how they are implemented. Not the front end, but the back matter; the model. The database; users and connections.

A social network is fundamentally a graph. Most social networks are analogous to non-directed graphs – that is, there is no distinction which “direction” a connection goes. If you are friends with someone in Facebook or MySpace, they are also friends with you. Pownce and Twitter have taken a directed-graph approach, in which friendship (following) is not automatically mutual. I could follow you, but you might not follow me. And so on.
Continue reading ‘Social Networking and the handshake problem’

Perl On Rails; everything on Rails?

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Phil Crissman
on December 1, 2007
in Code and www
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The BBC Interactive department writes about how they’re using what amounts to Perl On Rails.

For a short while, Rails seemed like it might be a lot of hype over something new, for the sake of something new. Then it started to seem like it might be a bit of a fad, then it became clear that it was a Good Thing that Many People wanted to use. Now I’m thinking we’ll look back on development in this first decade of the 21st century, and Rails will be among the highlights that looms the largest.

I suppose when we start porting Rails to other languages and environments, continuing to call it “Rails” is more of a convenience than anything else. We could just say “Rails-like code generation and MVC” and I think that, for the most part, we’d be saying the same thing. Not all the following are deliberate “Rails Clones” per se, but we have:

  • Django: Of all the alternatives to Ruby on Rails, this seems the most popular. Uses Python, a popular language with hackers and early adopters.
  • TurboGears: Another Python project. I haven’t heard much about this one, but it seems to still be active.
  • PHP On Trax: As the name suggests, this seems to be a deliberate port of Rails to PHP. Seeing the traction that PHP has, this is worth looking into. If you wind up in an environment where PHP is the prescribed platform, this might be a good framework.
  • Symfony: Not a Rails clone (I don’t think), but it advertises as having “simple templating and helpers, smart URLs, scaffolding, object model and MVC separation, and Ajax support”, so I’d say it seems to fall into the same family of modern frameworks. Also PHP.
  • Junction is apparently Rails for… Javascript? I know very little about this, so you’d best just follow the link if you’re interested.
  • Steve Yegge’s Port of Rails to Javascript: I don’t know if this project has a name, or if it’s available outside of Google, but this made some headlines awhile back.
  • Groovy on Grails: Yes, couldn’t forget Groovy on Grails. Groovy is a scripting language based on Ruby that runs on the Java Runtime Environment. Grails is… Rails for Groovy. If I’ve oversimplified this description, feel free to correct me in the comments.
  • JRuby On Rails: I don’t thinks there’s an official site for this; my understanding is that JRuby is compatible enough with Ruby that Rails is essentially still Rails… just running on JRuby instead.

And, of course, the aforementioned Perl on Rails. Wow! Quite a list, and I’m sure I missed some frameworks, both Rails-inspired and otherwise. I’m not interested in listing all frameworks, though, but specifically those with Rails-like features.

So, yes. Whether people choose Ruby or not, it seems pretty clear that Rails-like frameworks have caught on in a big way. Suits me fine; the more I learn about the framework, the more I like it, and it’s great to know that similar frameworks exist should I have the need to use an alternate language.