How I Connected with Europe

I have developed products as three companies over the years.  I started with JennisMedia.  It was a modest start up that I was fortunate enough to create a product concept that had a market.  It was 1996 and I found IRC chat rooms the easiest forum to connect with others who were doing the same development work I was doing.  It was within IRC that I met two very important contacts that held the key to tapping into very inexpensive developers in Europe.  The first contact I met was Jergen Groesbeck, a developer from the Netherlands.  Jergen immediately started introducing me to other fellow programmers in the Netherlands.  Through this network, I was able to build a strong contact list of designers and developers in Netherlands, Belgium, Germany and beyond.   The other contact was Slava Vorotaev.   Where Jergen was strongly connected in Western Europe, Slava was the man amongst developers in the old Soviet Bloc.

Outsourcing

Quickly, I found myself presented with the option of outsourcing significant amounts of development to small development groups located in countries like Poland, Ukraine and Estonia.  Several of my early development partners went on to work for a little start up called Skype  (I’m not one bit jealous about it either.  Ok, maybe a little).  It was a very successful process for me.  I opened myself up to the idea of not having 100% control and in return I got products that were well built and matched specs.  Now, many will knock this method of getting the work done, but when you’re a entrepreneur on a budget you have to look for every competitive advantage available.  Working through cheap overseas was the price I was willing to pay to get ahead.  And get ahead I did.

The Fall and Rise

For several years, it felt like shipping work over the Eastern Europe was a dying trend.  I was convinced it was dead the day I learned of European shops outsourcing their work to Bangalore.  But, with the rise of the Euro and Eastern European countries still on their old currencies, their money suddenly didn’t go as far as it once did.  Combine this with the fact that Twitter’s success has brought developers from around the world into conversations that they would never had participated with otherwise and outsourcing to Eastern Europe is on the rise again.  Its easier now to procure talent from overseas than it was when I first started doing it over a decade ago.

Getting Connected

If you really want to connect with cheap global development options, here is how I might go about doing it in 2009:  The first step has to be getting involved in Twitter.  Finding developers who seem to share a common development philosophy is a huge first step.  Once you’ve connected on Twitter, Skype is an absolute requirement.  You may user Google Talk/Grand Central, AIM or another IM product, but the overwhelming majority of European programmers are on Skype first and foremost.  Skype also provides a cheap communications tool to those countries where you might otherwise rack up huge phone charges really quick.  The third tool you must have is PayPal.  You have to pay them somehow and even though they lose 3% with PayPal, they know its about the only way to securely get money into Eastern Europe, especially Russia and Ukraine.

Now that you’ve connected with some developers, if you want to have a long term relationship where everyone is on the same page, then pack your bags.  The face to face meeting is essential to the success of any long distance development partnership.  It always help if you’re a seasoned traveler who doesn’t appear out of place when you meet your new contact in Moscow’s Red Square or by Charles Bridge in Prague.  You’re new contact will be impressed that you’ve traveled the distance to formally secure the relationship, but doing so like a tourist will be a sure sign of how green you truly are as a global developer.

Finally, don’t be afraid to reach out if you are an entrepreneur looking to get ahead.  Nobody’s going to fault you for doing what you have to do to succeed.  Once you have succeeded in your venture, that is the time to start bringing more work to people in your backyard.  You may decide that you would rather have everything local.  You have a better chance of maintaining full control over your projects.  It will come at some cost though.

If your interested in making European connections, check out my first European partner @groesbeck on Twitter.

I received an invite from a colleague and proceeded to sign up and invite other Twitter followers with little hesitation.  I understood this type of invite could turn some followers off and they would unfollow me.  I sent it to people I thought would be interested and if some unfollowed me, too bad.  I probably wasn’t contributing enough to their daily feed to be worthy of a follow anyways if all it took was a silly invite to get an unfollow.

I did get a few unfollows.  I also got some follows from the game from people I was attacking.  It turns out that I actually gained some really cool followers from this who are in the tech industry and share similar backgrounds.  You can never have too many birds of the same feather.

Game Review

It has been about 48 hours since I started playing the game.  The first thing I did when setting up my profile was to disable updates and most direct messages.  The game gives you extra currency for actions taken if you allow it to tweet notifications for you regarding your activity.  By no means does disabling these features hinder you in playing the game.  It does take a little longer to achieve goals without the notifications.

It is a shame that the service wants to be so heavily integrated with Twitter updates.  The turnoff for most revolves around the fact that having a few friends who have notifications turned on can hijack your feed with a ton of #spymaster posts, which for all purposes are useless for those not playing the game.  For a follower who is not playing the game, an update that states “I just acquired a safehouse in Berlin #spymaster” is the equivalent of tweeting “I just scratched my ass”.

For the players, here is the catch about Spymaster initiated user updates on Twitter.  Watching others posting activity about their actions is the best intelligence to know when the time is right to launch an attack.  When another player has successfully launched an attack is the prime time to attack that player.  If you want to get into the game and play it properly, this is how you do it.  Twitter now gives you intelligence.  But, for the player who is savvy with both Twitter and Spymaster, turning notifications off is the best way to stay covert and avoid alienating your followers on Twitter.

UX-UI Review

I have yet to encounter a bug from the site, which shows that the site was tested well before it was launched.  The experience is pain-free, with all actions well defined, making it easy to make correlations between actions, consequences and prizes obtained.

The site runs an AJAX status bar at the top that shows time until next update, assets, health and energy levels.  Sure, it isn’t perfect, but it does the job pretty well.   The user experience is clean and feels like you’re involved in spy game, complete with dark facade, shadows and the lingo commonly associated with international espionage.

Room for Improvement

I have just two suggestions.  Games on Twitter will only work if you can play them behind the scenes without turning the service into an action log for the game.  Taking Twitter and using it for game communication instead of compelling person to person communication is not good for your game or for Twitter.  Finding a way to gather intelligence without getting hijacking Twitter feeds to do it is critical.

I would also suggest the ability to review revenue generated from safe houses.  Right now, this is a mystery to me.

Th virality of this game will probably serve as a good model for others who want to create a buzz through services like Twitter.  I would encourage anyone who aspires to use Twitter to create an immediate impact for a product or service to check out Spymaster and think of it as one of potentially many ways to create buzz.  Overall, I am glad I chose to play the game and also glad I started it on a weekend because its a productivity leech.  With Monday quickly approaching, I’ll have to cease my covert operations on Spymaster in favor of those that actually pay the bills.

Later in life I began to learn that my mother was the calming force in my life, the one person who put me and my interest in front of her own.  When I was struggling to find myself in my early 20’s, my mother was there.  Even when I was less than respectful or appreciative of her love, she never stopped looking out for me. 

There is no doubt in my mind that I am who I am as a result of my mother.  My drive to succeed is a trait I can trace back to her, with my understanding that there are consequences for everything you do and to make sure you are alway aware of the decisions you make.

For this I am thankful for my mother on this day and I hope that each of you are half as lucky as I am.

So, it get two of a newspaper that I consider not worth my time to read. You may ask yourself, why do they deliver it twice? Well, I have an oval driveway with two entryways to my street. So, I guess its the paperboy’s ingenious idea to drop a paper at the foot of each end of my driveway. Its a complete waste. I toss each issue, every week, in the trash without taking a second to take the paper out of its plastic sleeve.

Inefficient, impractical, and unnecessary… That pretty much sums up the greater issue.

Is this like the Sasquatch of Twitter error messages?  Its like an error message you get with the fail whale fails.  This is a combination 502 and 403 error.  In case you aren’t up on your HTML Server Status codes, 502 is the error message for a bad gateway.  This means the server responsible for taking your request and sending it to the proper servers for processing has failed.  The 403 error is a Forbidden Request.  These requests are denied when the server processing the request is instructed not to process the request.

I am curious, have you seen this error before?

After our little discussion last night, I have decided I will start setting aside some of my estate to my funeral.  Not to build on some big theatrical specticle, but to have a cash giveaway extravaganza.  Here’s how we’ll do it:  I will purchase a cash machine.  Then I will instruct the funeral staff to place me in the cash machine.

With 100 dollar bills flying around my corpse, funeral attendees can have 30 seconds to get as much of the cash as possible.  I think this is a wonderfully fun way to go out.  Thanks to @anneinreallife, @aduthie, and @fishwreck among others who helped me build this idea out.

As a disclaimer, I should confess, I come across hundreds of web sites every day. Most through my work as a product manager for a social network, but also as a user of social sites like Facebook and Twitter. Rarely do I come across sites that are less user-friendly for their audiences than local television web sites. Often, these stations pack too much information into their pages or overload them with ads. It seems like user experience is a secondary concern for these stations.

All of this leads me to this blog post. Rating these web sites is long overdue. We’ll start with the best and work our way down to the worst.

WKRN - Channel 2 (ABC Affiliate) Grade: B Review Breakdown Design: B Content: B Video Player: B+ Structure: B SEO: F

This web site’s is the tale of two homepages.  The top half of the homepage is clean and easy to navigate.  The lower half is jumbled, with uneven blocks of content that are a complete withdrawal from the clean theme displayed at the top of the page.  Over all, WKRN’s web site is as good a user experience as any local television web site in Nashville.

WSMV - Channel 4 (NBC Affiliate) Grade: B Review Breakdown Design: B Content: B Video Player: B Structure: B SEO: F

This web site’s layout is classic yet functional.  There is the obligatory banner ad right under the masthead of the homepage.  It is intrusive and breaks the flow of the web site.  It’s to be expected, since tv stations rely very much of advertising revenue.  The three column content layout is easy enough to navigate and the menu on the left is very easy to use.

WZTV - Channel 17 (FOX Affiliate) Grade: C- Review Breakdown Design: F Content: C Video Player: F Structure: B SEO: A

The FOX 17 web site is different.  The content modules with blue backgrounds and white text set the tone, with orange elements offsetting the blue, its a different approach to a serious news web site.  Parts of the homepage are very professional, other parts are very campy.  The biggest downfall of this site is the lack of an integrated video player.  The absence of this feature really sets it back.  Of all the TV station sites reviewed, this web site actually hits the mark with their SEO efforts.

WTVF - Channel 5 (CBS Affiliate) Grade: D+ Review Breakdown Design: F Content: B Video Player: B+ Structure: D- SEO: F

It saddens me to put NewsChannel 5 at the bottom because it is my preferred station for news, but after spending an excessive amount of time trying to find a reporter’s bio, I realized this web site is a bit of a train wreck.  I noticed a common theme between WKRN and WTVF’s web sites.  Both use a content management service called WorldNow.  Both sites are using last generation markup for the site structure and overall design is a bit scattered.  The lack of a true sitemap only adds to the misorganization.  My biggest pet peeve with this web site is when the anchors say visit our website for more details about a story and you can’t find the story without scanning several pages.  This is a very poor user experience.  Add a true search, not the watered down Google site search.

If you have opinions about local television’s web sites, please leave a comment.  I would love to hear what you think of these four websites.

I can go on and on, waxing poetic about SXSW, but to save you any further revelry, I will outline some of the things I will take from this year’s SXSW:

• 10,000 tech geeks in a 10 block radius, 80% using iPhones will cripple AT&T’s 3G network
• Guy Kawasaki is now synonymous with spam
• A bigger Nashville presence this year than last (but we do have work to do)
• No controversy this year close to last year’s Zuckerberg-Lacy debacle
• I’ll get to speak on a panel next year
• The world is here (at least Europe, hello friends)
• The tech community is increasingly going Mac.  Last year was 70%/30% Macs to PCs.  This year is closer to 90/10.
• If you have either a client that you represent at SXSW, this is an excellent opportunity to get together in a laid back setting where all the layers can be easily cut through and you can establish much better conversations as a result.
• If you need a job and don’t mind moving, you could get one here.  A guy overheard my conversation and came up and within 5 minutes was trying to recruit me to move to Portland.  Sorry, I am neither A. Moving to Portland or B.  Interested in taking your job.
• The more times you use #sxsw on Twitter, the more envy you build up amongst your followers who did not attend.
• Zappos is a great company to work for and buy from, but when you attend a Tony Hsieh keynote, expect the same general discussion he always leads - customer service is #1, everything else follows.  Don’t be disappointed by this, its his deal, you should know to expect it…
• Seeing certain high profile technorati shitfaced on 6th Street is another experience unique to SXSW
• Crutches suck at SXSW - Just ask Scott Gordon (http://www.theantipimp.com)

Go ahead and make a commitment to be here next year.  And keep these tips in mind as you plan your 2010 SXSW experience:

1. Pay the extra coin to stay within walking distance on downtown and the convention center
2. Don’t forget your power cords (Phone chargers, etc)
3. Bring a powerstrip.  You will be everybody’s friend.
4. If you are introverted, find a way to be an extrovert for a few days.  It makes all the difference.
5. Use tools like Twitter to connect with fellow attendees before the conference begins
6. 1st day of SXSW is not mandatory, but stay until Tuesday afternoon
7. The accelerator event at the Hilton has tons of free Startup T’s - take full advantage

I hope you start planning your 2010 SXSW now.   I have already started mine.  How to see you here next year!

Twitter wants the user trust that Facebook has.  Twitter is increasingly appealing to spammers because you can reach a mass audience very quickly.  Phishing techniques and blackhat apps have also added some spam to the community.  Facebook is very successful in combatting these tactics.  The absence of this element has given Facebook a distinct advantage of former social networking juggernaut MySpace. Today, Facebook has functionality superiority over Twitter.  It would be much easier for Facebook to emulate Twitter than for Twitter to emulate Facebook.

So, will the changes that Facebook made to their homepage this week take them into the direction of becoming Twitter?  I don’t think so.  What I believe Facebook has to do to create a Twitter-like environment is introduce a new layer that allows members to follow other members without committing to a full friendship.  This would then create an identical environment on Facebook and through this new interface, a user could follow others that they may not actually know in real life and build an online friendship through this communication that could then progress into a full Facebook friendship.

I believe this is a practical approach to Facebook’s dilemma.  I am interested in what you think about the matter.