In Which I Channel My Inner Jason Fried

Pulse is the latest news aggregation application exciting people on the iPad. (Is Flipboard not cool anymore? I can’t keep up with these things.)

Reporting on the quick success of the application, The New York Times tells us:

The company will also announce that it has raised $800,000 in venture capital, the first step in moving along the path from building an app to running a profitable business.

The first step, eh? But what about the… wait, wait, hold up…

So far, Alphonso Labs has made enough money selling apps to run the business, hire six other employees and have some cash left over.

Ah, right. Okay, I think we have some terminology confusion here. Don’t worry, this jargon can be confusing, but we’ll soon set it straight.

See, in the business world “cash left over” is what we call “profit”.

Now, I know what you’re thinking. “But Chris! How can you have profit before you have venture capital?! Venture capital is the first step to a profitable business!

I know hon, I know. It’s okay. Take a deep breath. The world is not upside down. This is normal.

See, what Alphonso Labs did was (now stay with me here) they made a product people wanted (still with me?) and then they sold it to people. For money!

So, strictly speaking, the first step these gents took toward running a profitable business happened a little bit before someone gave ‘em 800 thou. It had something to do with making a good product, which had something to do with writing and designing and building something people wanted.

Or at least, that’s how the process has worked out for me. My company gets to enjoy this “cash left over” thing, and we didn’t have to go asking anyone for money to do it.

If I ever did need an extra 800,000, I have a feeling I might end up just getting a boring old bank loan. Probably wouldn’t get profiled in the New York Times because of it, but hey, me and my cash left over can live with that.


Edited at 5:54pm EST to add: Hey look, 37signals was annoyed by this too. Except it was Matt who wrote it up, not Jason.

Silly Saturday Project

Well, here’s a thing that didn’t exist this morning:

The End.

Toolbox: Flip camera, Final Cut Express, ScreenFlow, Soundflower, WireTap Studio, and QLab.

Music: Hey Pocky A-Way, The Meters. (Amazon, iTunes)

Your theater has a place. Why doesn’t your website?

This morning I was reading this piece by Baltimore theater-maker and all-around-deep-thinker Tim Boucher.

It reminded me of a story.

A few years ago, my alma mater Carleton College rolled out an extensive redesign of their website.

The design was driven not just by the aesthetic taste of talented designers, but also by extensive research.

When you visit the site, something might strike you as odd:

There are no students.

Not on the home page, anyway. Not on the primary “welcome” screen, where they expect everyone to begin.

That’s weird, right? That’s completely different from almost every other school website you’ll visit. If they show photos at all, they are almost always photos of happy, smiling, multi-cultural students, right?

What gives?

Well, Carleton did some careful research, and they discovered:

Prospective students unanimously disliked pictures of people.

Specifically, they found that:

High school students are extremely cynical about people pictures. Typical comments were:

  • “Everybody has the same pictures of students studying under a tree.”
  • “They look like models.”
  • “The people look posed.”
  • “This doesn’t tell me anything about the school. It could be anywhere.”

We saw this reaction consistently, whether we were testing first impressions of competing college web sites or testing early versions of our own design concepts. The first thing our prospective students seem to want is a sense of place, and that means campus photos rather than people.

At the time of the redesign, I read a great article about it (which I can’t seem to find online at the moment) describing how they further discovered that students wanted to imagine themselves at Carleton.

You can see in the homepage design they created, everything guides your imagination to placing yourself in the scene. On top of that, they find places to slide in the spirit of the school — a sense of silliness alongside deep curiosity.

So what?

Thinking about this today, I started to wonder:

What if the same forces are at play for theaters?

It seems like every theater on the planet makes websites showcasing actor photos. But do we know that’s what people want to see? Has anyone ever asked them?

What if people would actually rather see the building? What if people really want to imagine themselves in the space? What if they care more about imagining the way the seat feels, than the way the star looks?

What if all those actor photos look the same? (They do!) What if people want to know what’s different about your theater? Could your theater be anywhere? No! Can you tell it from your website? …Probably not, right?

For an art form built so very deeply on a specific place, there sure are a heck of a lot of nearly placeless theater company web sites.

Worth Asking

I don’t claim to know whether the research of a small liberal arts college should be applied to a theater. It would be unwise to assume it does.

But it does seem like an interesting possibility, no? Maybe worth trying to find the answer?

 


My favorite caption on Carleton’s site might be the bubble that marks the spot where you’d find a “Web team running out of clever caption ideas.” It’s in the library, if you’re curious.

Columbia University thinks journalists should be able to program their own tools

Well son-of-a-gun.

This morning I finally got around to reading last week’s New York Times Sunday Magazine. Turns out the day I was busy building Seymour was the day this article appeared on my doorstep:

And now, the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism is starting a dual-degree master’s program in journalism and computer science. [...] One goal of the Columbia program, according to Bill Grueskin, the dean of academic affairs, is to produce journalists who will “take it several steps beyond — to where they’re creating a lot of their own new tools.” That means learning enough computer science and software engineering to be able to design tools for information gathering, synthesis, analysis and circulation — or enough, at least, to see what technology can do for journalism. Henning Schulzrinne, a computer-science professor at Columbia, says he hopes students will also leave the program with “tools to assist in gathering, processing and presenting news.”

Emphasis mine. Full article here.

Today I improved the layout of SeeMoreB.com when viewed on an iPad. (The photos are larger, and the header is simpler.) I also went ahead and signed Seymour up on Twitter.

Scott requested that I share the code for Seymour. It’s nothing special, but once I have a chance to clean it up and put some kind of open source license on it, I’ll put it on GitHub and let you know.

Here’s a Thing I Made This Weekend

All this talk of news sites and product design and user experience… it got me thinking: Wouldn’t it be fun to have a sandbox to play in? Wouldn’t it be pleasant to try out some ideas?

This summer, in the depths of my obsession, I had a few conversations with Adam Bachman and Jesse Kriss. I posed the observation: “Okay, I really care about this stuff. If I wanted to put some money where my mouth is, could I actually make a constructive contribution?”

After a few cups of coffee, a few paper sketches, and a whole lotta talkin’, one of the fun ideas someone suggested was: Why not just, you know …do it.

Just create a news product. A minimally viable news product, to be sure. Not a proper, full-grown news product. Yet, nonetheless, something with a minimal semblance of reality, built under real life entrepreneurial pressures.

Is that crazy? How might one build a news entity from scratch? What if you had to create the whole thing, from start to finish, in a single weekend?

One couldn’t get too ambitious, certainly. You’d need something extraordinarily simple, with simple demands on your time and money. But it would also need to be, in some sense, real. A thing that someone, somewhere, might actually, you know, dig.

That’s the fun of a minimally viable product, right? It can be useless to almost everyone, and therefore make no money, but if it costs you almost nothing to build, and almost nothing to tend, then, well, if it’s cool to just a tiny number of people, it could be the seed of something bigger and better. Right?

Here’s the Idea

The simplest news site we could think of that might still be worthwhile is something along the lines of Boston.com’s The Big Picture. It’s simple, it’s beautiful, and it’s compelling.

Maybe Baltimoreans would like to see our own city in pictures like that. The daily pictures of our life in this city — maybe that’s a compelling thing. Maybe I’d like to sit with my iPad in the morning and flick through a page of big, beautiful, Baltimore images. Snapshots of my neighbors. Not some ice sculpture contest in Sweden, but the new graffiti by that amazing street artist who works up and down Greenmount Avenue, or the kids that were hula-hooping at HampdenFest, or the view from the stands at the latest Raven’s game.

Okay, so we have an idea.

Here’s the Implementation

In the spirit of building a “real” thing in a weekend, there had to be a comprehensive plan. It wouldn’t do to say “okay, design an ideal site, then hire some photographers, then….” No! Too much time! Too many resources!

Instead, we’ve got to find some pieces that already exist, and figure out what we can do in one weekend that would bring additional value.

Friday Night

Now, the reason I got on a kick this weekend is because Friday night was the night I stumbled across the new WordPress template by Information Architects.

I had already admired iA. They build news sites. They build really good news sites. And they do it based on principles in which I believe. Go ahead and check out their site. You’ll notice right away that it’s clean and easy to read. What you might not notice right away is that it’s been designed with much more care than first meets the eye. Not sure what I mean? Try resizing the window. You’ll find that this site has been designed five full times, to create the perfect layout for whatever screen size or device you might be using to read it. The same page will magically pop into a new layout as you resize your window. It’s really lovely. It’s really carefully done. And it’s really up for sale.

For, at the present time of writing, a measly 55 buckaroos.

Gentlepersons, we have ignition.

Saturday Morning

What’s a source of photography? I could pay someone, but I need something immediately. Well, there are a lot of photos on the web. Flickr has a bunch. They even have a bunch licensed into the Creative Commons — that lovely place where creative impulses go to live instead of die.

Let’s start with Flickr.

Now we’ve got a site template, and we’ve got a source of photography. Are we done? No. Why? Because the long term cost is still high. I could search Flickr every day, laboriously copying and pasting content from each page into my site. But the time it takes to do that would add up, fast, and the whole point of this is to try an experiment that doesn’t suck me dry while I figure out if it’s got any potential. I want good photos, but I don’t want to spend 30 minutes every morning collecting them.

The Tool

My answer to this problem was to make a tool. I spent Saturday building it, and I call it Seymour. Say hi to Seymour!

meet-seymour.jpg

What does Seymour do? Well, it automates the curation of images for my site.

When you launch it, it looks like this:

launch1.jpg

And what is it doing? Well, it’s loading up a search page of all Flickr photos uploaded in the last two weeks that include the word “Baltimore” and are licensed under an appropriate Creative Commons license.

That’s the default starting point. Then, I can start browsing. I can do so by clicking around, or by entering more specific (or less specific) search terms.

Maybe I want to create a collection of photos about the ships down in the harbor. I can enter the search terms up top and refine my search. So far this isn’t anything more fancy than a normal web browser, right?

But the helpful bit comes next: I click on a photo I like, and it looks like this:

launch2.jpg

Down at the bottom, you’ll find that Seymour has automatically pulled out all the information I need. Title, description, and author information so I can give proper credit to the photographer.

I click on that arrow button there, and Seymour files away this information until I’m ready to publish.

I do this a few more times. Click, browse, click, browse, “Ooo, that one’s cool, let’s use that one”, click, filed, click, filed, done.

Then I click the “Post Them!” button, and friendly old Seymour goes out to my WordPress site, talks to it in the language it understands (XMLRPC), and creates a new post with the photos I liked.

And that’s it! Takes a few seconds.

It didn’t take the entirety of Saturday to make, but I did have to figure out a lot of new Cocoa technology I’ve never used before, so it did become the day’s project. It was a lot of fun just learning new stuff.

Sunday Morning

Well, now that I’m this far, I might as well try to make the site look decent, right? It starts out looking just like the Information Architect’s site, because it IS their site. I don’t want or need to change it much, but it should have its own look.

I’m not a professional web designer, but I can poke around in a site without bringing it to utter ruin, and I did my best to customize this one. Well, the best I could do in a day.

And thus was born

SeeMoreB.com

A place to see large, lovely photos from in and around Baltimore.

Fun! (Well, fun for me at least!)

What happens next

To be honest, I’m not really sure. It’s the sort of thing I could actually keep updating for a few months and see what happens. That was, after all, the whole point of creating Seymour. The tool makes it easy. If nothing ever came of it, I’d be down 55 bucks for the template, 10 bucks for the domain name, and a weekend worth of work. Plus, of course, whatever little amount of time I’d spend actually clicking on photos I liked.

Would there be a reason to do that? I don’t honestly know. I certainly like having the site as a sandbox. If I tried to make it more than a sandbox, would it have a path to something more mature? I think it’s possible. If it did develop some kind of audience, a tasteful ad in the right spot might actually generate a dollar or two. Or maybe it wouldn’t. It’d be an interesting experiment either way.

Anyway, like I said, I honestly don’t know what happens next. If nothing else, or perhaps above all else, I’m open to suggestions.

 


P.S.: Thanks to luckydave for finding the picture of Seymour.