I sing in a Georgian music choir called Nateli, and we have a performance coming up next Sunday. It’s a 30-40 minute set of songs performed in small (3-6 singer) ensembles. The performance space is rumored to have excellent acoustics for our music and I’m rather looking forward to this concert. If you’re in the area, check it out.

Night Prayer, 30 minutes of chant, prayers and meditation
Sunday, February 11th at 8:30 PM

Episcopal Parish of the Messiah
1900 Commonwealth Ave
Auburndale (Newton) MA
617.312.8328
map

Maybe this would be a good project for DevHouse Boston.

You have a cell phone. But you’re visiting family and don’t have an alarm clock with you. Why not schedule your wake-up calls via the phone?

Or suppose you remember you’ve got to start preparing lunch at 12:45. Why not have an automated reminder service call you?

This is just about the simplest possible VoiceXML service, but it’s still not done well on the web. The closest thing I’ve found is ifbyphone.com, which has basically the right services and business model but an interface that’s about 50% more cumbersome than it needs to be. They’ve taken the approach of offering as many options as possible, and thus it takes a while to find the free 10-day trial. When you call their number to schedule a reminder you have to wait through the greeting, say “wake up calls” (probably more than once), and then choose the day (say “Tuesday” or dial 1, say “Wednesday” or dial 2, etc… you can’t just say “today” or “tomorrow”) and enter or say the time. Then it asks you for your time zone, even though you entered a time zone during website registration. And finally it requires you to choose the phone number, since it’s soooo likely you’ll want to schedule a reminder call to a phone other than the one you’re using.

It should go like this:

IVR: Hello Shimon. Thank you for cal…
me: wake up calls
IVR: When should we call you?
me: today at twelve forty five
IVR: We’ll call you on Tuesday, November 21st at 12:45pm Eastern Standard Time. Hang up now to finish, or say “timezone” or “start over” to make changes. You can also say “note” to add a voice note, or “recurring” to make this a recurring reminder.
me: <click>

Blending prompts together, and allowing revision rather than requiring confirmation, reduces interaction time in half. Blend this with a simple web interface and you’ve got a self-contained, obvious product that I’d wager people wouldn’t mind paying $5/mo for.

Why not just use your cell phone’s built-in alarm or calendar? I think this would be significantly faster to use, and it would have a consistent interface across different phones. But maybe that’s not enough to make this an idea worth pursuing. I’m not sure.

In a conversation with the Count, I learned a new word:

habernasher (n): one who is in the habit of eating men’s clothing.

Don’t ask. But feel free to suggest your own new made up words!

Over on Reddit, there’s been lots of buzz about Erlang recently. Yet Joel Spolsky didn’t even mention it in a post today about languages for enterprise web apps. This must be because it’s so thoroughly proven, respected, and well-established that you should use it for everything.

After all, I think there are some Swedish phone companies using it for some phone-related apps. And phone-related apps involve zillions of messages per second, so it will definitely be scalable.

Plus I saw this chart where YAWS is red and Apache is green and blue, and red does way better than green and blue. I’m not sure how the test methodology relates to anything you’d actually see in real life, but at least there is quantified evidence that erlang does better than apache at something.

See, the important thing is that you know it’s trustworthy because they made the critical parts so memorable, rather than concentrating on the complex and confusing methodology. After all, what indicates enterprise-readiness better than the existence of an executive summary?

P.S. Someone told me 37signals is developing their next webapp in Erlang. Pass it on!

Josh and I have shut down Frassle, a blogging system we built in 2003 and 2004. Now at frassle.net there is a static mirror of all blogs having 7 or more posts. (A new frassle blog came with 5 posts explaining the system; if you made two additional posts, you qualified for inclusion.) We also set up some redirects so that URLs registered in search engines or linked from other sites should still work reasonably.

I’ve imported my posts into this new blog, and will continue blogging here. Welcome!

A few months ago I gave up working on Frassle, the experimental blogging platform that hosts my blog and a few others. Frassle was a fun and rewarding project: it put me in touch with the very vibrant world of bloggers and social software development, it gave me a reason to present at OSCOM in Switzerland, and it even earned a few passionate users. But I ultimately decided to cease working on frassle. A couple of people have recently expressed interest in picking up where I left off, and that's given me reason to reflect on what I've learned and where it might lead next.

The main reason I stopped working on frassle is that I started putting my time into other projects like voo2do (an easy-to-use online task management application, much more popular than frassle ever was) and my day job. Frassle also has some performance problems: the database structure has too many triggers and a seriously slow full-text search system. The frassle studio—which I think is a good idea that still hasn't been done well—turned out to be perform incredibly badly when implemented on top of a relational database, but could perform wonderfully on a custom sort of publish-subscribe DB. These issues left me in a spot where I felt I'd need to do a lot of rebuilding before I could add nifty, user-visible features.

Yet overall, the core problem with frassle is that it tries to do too many things. It makes conceptual sense to integrate blog publishing, aggregators, republishing, and semantic correlation. But it doesn't make practical sense. In trying to tackle all of these issues at once, I was never able to be the best at any of them. That weakness almost completely prevented users who tried frassle from ever coming back, because when a user is trying a web app, they're not looking for long-term conceptual potential. They're looking for tools that solve a specific problem or make life noticeably better in a matter of minutes. If an app doesn't walk a user through a pleasant experience in the first 5 minutes, that user will not come back. And if you can complete the experience in less than 5 minutes, you will roughly double user retention for each minute saved. I didn't fully appreciate this adage until voo2do, which took a lot less novel thinking and implementation time than frassle, got more users in a week than frassle had in two years.

So what would I do differently if I could do it again? Probably one of the following three mutually exclusive goals:

1. Focus on the inter-blog category mapping feature set only. Create a form where you can paste a blog URL and get content from other blogs that is relevant to the given blog, or specifically relevant to categories within that blog. Use the algorithms from
http://frassle.net/help/welcome and a huge database of RSS feeds with a custom aggregator/analysis layer; a relational database would even work OK.

2. Build a better Frassle studio. Everyone produces RSS now; sites like Pageflakes and Netvibes and Google Customized Homepage are a dime a dozen; but none of these sites let you weave content from multiple sources into a new community website. At some point the people making these tools are going to realize that they're awfully close to fulfilling a non-solipsistic need, and Google Customized Community Website will be born (or bought). Just mix together the tiles-of-content model with the ability to create custom message boards, and you'll have a community website contruction system that offers more power than the average blog, but isn't much harder to user.

3. Social intranet in a box. Now let me partially retract my earlier advice. The one market that *would* be well served by an integrated suite of blogging/sharing tools, even if they weren't all best-in-class apps, is the intranet market. There are tons of LAN-connected collaborative organizations whose members don't want to communicate on the public internet. If you can give these people a bootable CD that they can pop into a spare PC, turn on, and instantly start using as a collaborative intranet server, they would line up around the block to worship you. Nobody gives much thought to usability in intranet applications because the sales cycle is slow, expensive, and managed by IT departments who never use the software and thus don't care if it's excruciating. But if you made bootable CDs that tech-savvy non-IT folks could pop into a spare PC, you could seed a revolution in intranet apps that don't suck.

Sometimes I feel like frassle was my big chance. It had some of the ideas of tagging and social bookmarking even before del.icio.us, and if I'd thought to focus on those parts, maybe I'd have a top 500 site, a yacht from Yahoo!, and 15 million blog groupies. But if frassle fell short because my practical skill didn't match my creative vision, I can only hope that I've learned enough to be get things done without sacrificing much of that vision. I'll just have to work and see.

link

MicroMagic.us is a scam! Read all about it!

I've been scammed by an online computer parts store called MicroMagic.us (a.k.a. MicroMagicPC). I'm not the only one — reports abound at review sites I should have checked before pulling out the credit card. Today I spoke with a detective in MicroMagic's claimed hometown of El Monte, CA, and he is investigating.

It's an interesting story, so if you want to learn more about my MicroMagic.us aka MicroMagicPC.net RAM Scam, I've written all about it on a special web page.

I'm not a huge fan of fireworks. Although fire is cool, expanding smiley faces in the sky don't impress me anymore. But when my girlfriend Nicole proposed that we watch the world-class Boston fireworks from a two-person kayak on the Charles river, as close to the launching barge as police would allow, it seemed like the superlative fireworks experience. Besides, even if the fireworks sucked, I'd get to zip around the Charles on a kayak and take some pictures.

We started at Charles River Canoe and Kayak, whose Boston (Brighton) location is about 7 minutes away from my house. We got there kinda late, but not late enough. After waiting in line, indemnifying CRCK from responsibility for our certain deaths, and receiving a quick lesson on how to paddle, we set off into the Charles from their dock.

Kayaking requires a lot of arm and shoulder work. Unlike a canoe, your legs lie straight along the bottom of the kayak, and do nothing except anchor your butt to the plastic seat. But for these drawbacks, you get a fairly fast and maneuverable little boat. A two-person kayak sacrifices some of the speed and maneuverability of the singular variant, but in return you get help with paddling and, depending on where you sit, either the ability to hear your companion's voice or stare at the back of her head.

It's also important to paddle in a coordinated fashion. "Whoever can steer best should be in back, and the person in front sets the pace," they taught us after we selected a $1000 plastic pod to spend the next 5 hours in. After about hour 4.2, I think these lessons clicked in and we mostly went straight and didn't have any jarring paddle collisions. (It turns out the secret is to pay attention to what's going on right in front of you. That was never an issue on the single kayaks I've used before, because mostly you want to look away from the canoes you're ramming as their inhabitants may be tempted to splash you… while they still can.)

On our way to the fireworks barge, I got rather hungry and we came to a live-parking-only dock so I could get a hot dog. The dock was seething with young men and women, in little clusters mostly discernable by shared seating towels and spoken languages. I climbed over them, still wearing my silly little life vest (seriously, the water of the Charles is great stability control) and eventually found the sausage stand. I shuddered as the last tentacles of yuppiedom clasped around my neck, and paid seven dollars yes seven whole American dollars for a sausage with peppers on a bun. Oh well, at least it was a tasty sausage. And I could return to Nicole, who was sitting pretty on a kayak in front of hundreds of increasingly drunk folks ("does that thing have a V-8? heh heh heh"). On the way out, an hispanic guy offered us some seating space and vodka, and it seemed genuinely kind and friendly, harkening to a society and culture where young strangers don't need to be afraid of each other. Of course, we already had better seats planned.

Here's where we planted ourselves: video 1, 3.6MB .avi: In front of the barge.

The fireworks themselves were surreal. Closer than I'd ever been: the explosions filled my entire field of vision, and then some. Shockingly loud. And there we were, floating in the middle of hundreds of thousand of people, paddling backward so the current didn't draw us into the restricted zone. I don't have any more words for it, so instead see video 2, 14.5MB .avi: The most amazing fireworks I've ever seen.

How did it end? Two hours of strenous paddling, strapping a kayak on foam blocks to the roof of my coupe, and 5 hours of sleep before returning the boat and heading to work. In other words, a perfect urban adventure.

The choir I'm in, New Century Voices,
has a concert coming up this Sunday 6/19. It's at the Swedenborg Chapel
in Cambridge, MA. Swedenborg Chapel is located at the corner of Quincy
and Kirkland streets near Harvard Square. The suggested donation is $10.

New
Century Voices is dedicated to performing new works by local composers.
The performance will include the premier of Michael Veloso's "All
Natural Male Enhancement," a piece written on texts from e-mail Spam.
Other local composers represented will include Elizabeth Knight, who is
a student at Longy, Krishan Oberoi from Rhode Island and Jeremy
Jennings. We also include works of some better known composers, Randall
Thompson, Edward Elgar and Paul Hindemith; the "Six Chansons," on texts
by Rainer Maria Rilke.

If you like choral music, there is
definitely something here you'll like; if not, there are a few things
you'll at least laugh at. I hope to see many of you there.

A
reception will follow the concert. All proceeds go to the Swedenborg
Chapel. (The Swedenborg Chapel is the stone church on the corner of
Quincy and Kirkland streets, across the road from Memorial Hall and
Sanders Theatre.)

link

On 3 Feb 2005, a few Berkmanites including myself joined Greg Narain for some Beercasting — a podcast recording of people telling stories at a pub. It was fun. I think I'm on the topics titled Love At First Sight, Or Almost and Traveller's Tales: Stories From Near and Far.

Update: Steve Garfield has a cool video post about this.