"We need to connect with real people," Seinfeld says and reminds Gates that "you and I are a little out of it. You’re living in some kind of moon house hovering over Seattle like the mother ship. I got so many cars I get stuck in my own traffic."

The new ad explains that Bill and Jerry are on a quest to reconnect with real people, pretty much like what Microsoft is trying to do with this new campaign.

It’s definitely better than the first ad as there are some funny scenes and a clear message that actually makes sense  - Windows need to appeal to the needs of real people.

However, the Mac vs. PC took just one add to get you hooked and the message across. Microsoft can’t seem to compete with that…

Lets just wait and see what the 3rd ad will be like…

Tags: Bill Gates, Microsoft, Microsoft Windows, MSFT, Vista

I’ve received a lot of good feedback for my initial post about Chrome comparing its “Microsoft Killer” hype to the GTalk (now mostly defunct) launch a few years ago.

However, I’ve also heard from several folks who disagree (like Asaf for example).
The main point of the Chrome supporters is that advanced AJAX execution capabilities, coupled with Google Gears offlining capabilities and bundled in a browser provides a platform for next-gen web cloud applications that can seamlessly work online and offline.

The thing is, that no matter how much you optimize your browser’s rendering and JavaScript capabilities, underneath it all our entire web technology still based on old (even ancient in Internet terms) standards set almost a decade ago by W3C - a now defunct organization that is failing to keep up with the rate of technological changes.
Can you really believe that the future is in technology standards set by W3C and updated once, maybe twice a decade?!

It’s W3C’s inability to keep up that is driving companies to develop their own proprietary standards to lead today’s technological trends - Adobe with Flex and Air and Microsoft with Silverlight.

And maybe we’re going towards a browser-less future were we have AIR\Silverlight cloud enabled applications running on our OS?

The point is, taking Apple’s rendering code (apparently, not even the latest build) and putting it inside a featureless window while adding some optimized JavaScript VM is far from being innovative and light years away from the revolutionary expectations that we could hear about before and during the Chrome launch. Adding a few more horses to pull your carriage around doesn’t turn it into a car…

But hey, we’ve had the same story with a boring featureless (sorry, plain and simple) chat program a few years ago

Tags: Chrome, GOOG, Google, GTalk

It seems like Google is making comic books these days. Its also announcing a new browser - Chrome - which we haven’t and know nothing about except the fact that it’s (obviously, an antitrust waiting to happen?) bundled with Google Gears. This of course, does not prevent Michael Arrington from TechCrunch of making outrageous claims calling it a “Windows Killer”:

When combined with Gears, which allows for offline access, Chrome is nothing less than a full on desktop operating system that will compete head on with Windows.

I’ve heard about Google’s Window-Killing abilities before….  where was that?  ah! right! scrolling all the way back to August 2005 where a new Google App is just about to revolutionize the way we communicate, the world, and the very fabric of the universe:

keith.teare: “It’s almost as if Google is implementing the features Microsoft has announced for Longhorn - Sidebar; voice calls inside IM, RSS integration - but doing it ahead of Microsoft, by about 12 months.

A Google layer between Users and the OS.

Rendering the OS a commodity

GTalk… remember GTalk? Google killed Vista with GTalk and will now kill Microsoft entirety thanks to coupling Google Gears to a JavaScript engine (not just any engine… an optimized one!)

And on a more serious note - Google’s business is all about AdSense.
It’s entire products line revolves around AdSense and anything that doesn’t help its business grow - dies. Even Android, under all the open-source and Apple hating PR, it about serving ads to mobiles.
Having said that, I wonder where Chrome fits in…

Tags: Android, Chrome, GOOG, Google, Michael Arrington, Microsoft, operating system, Vista, Windows

Since my recent move to WordPress I’ve been crawling the web looking for useful WordPress tips and ticks. Below are my essentials for anyone using WordPress:

Security

Protect Your Login Page from Bots

The LoginBlock will prevent bots from continuously trying different combinations to crack your account. This is very similar to how Windows works if you’re in a domain environment.

Every failed login attempt is recorded, along with the timestamp of the attempt and the IP address of the user. If a user tries (and fails) to log in too many times within a certain time period, the system then blocks any login requests coming from that IP range until the lock-out is released. The lock-out period defaults to 1 hour, although that can be changed within the admin panel. The number of retires and the time period that they occur within in order to trigger a lock-out are also configurable from the admin section, and admins do have the ability to release an IP block manually (assuming of course that they haven’t locked themselves out ).

Secure WordPress’s Folders
Prevent readers from browsing your WordPress files and folders by adding the following line to the .htaccess file on the main WordPress installation folder:

Options All -Indexes

Storage

Save Space - Turn off WordPress 2.6 Post Revision
WordPress 2.6 introduces post revisions allowing to save and access all the previous versions of a document.
This feature is mainly useful for blogs with multiple authors who work on the same blog post (editor corrections etc.) but its pretty useless to most blogs out there and unnecessarily increases the databases size.

To disable post revisions add the following line to wp-config.php:

add_filter( 'pre_comment_content', 'wp_specialchars' );

Change the Default Image Upload Folder
The default installation settings store your uploaded files under the wp-content/uploads folder.

As you can see in the picture above, you can change the uploads folder to any folder, and even use a subdomain to serve files.
This has several advantages:

• File URLs become relatively smaller
• When using a subdomain, the files URL is independent to their actual location on the server. You can easily move them or even host them on a service like Amazon’s S3 (if your traffic will grow) without changing the URLs in your posts.
• The WordPress installation folder becomes small and manageable.

Promote Your Blog\Be Sticky

Conversation is what makes a blog interesting, it also gives readers a reason to come back to your blog.
The following tips will help you make your blog a little bit more sticky to the readers:

Allow Readers to Subscribe to Comments 

When an occasional reader makes a comment on your blog, chances are he’ll never remember to go back and check for responses. If he does, it will only be through a short period of time.
Subscribing to comments helps the conversation flow, which is what blogging is all about. People are genuinely interested in knowing what others think of their comment and this feature saves them time having to manually check for new responses.

Subscribe to Comments is probably the most important plugin you can install on your WordPress. It adds a check-box below the comment form on each post, and when checked by a commenter, they then receive an email update as soon as someone adds a new comment after theirs.

Support Social Bookmarking

Help your readers promote and share your posts by using ShareThis or Sociable to provide quick links for posting into sites such as Facebook, Digg, etc.

Promote OpenID

OpenID is a win-win for blog comments.For the comment author, it means less information to type. For the blog owner it means that comments have a real identity behind them. Simply install the WP-OpenID plugin and you’ll get support both for OpenID comments and for OpenID WordPress login.

Be Mobile Friendly

With the introduction of SmartPhone, and especially the iPhone, more people are now browsing for content using their mobile devices.
When browsing from a mobile device users expect a simple listing of blog posts in a reverse chronological order. If they’d like to read a post, they can click on the title and get a mobile friendly version of the post.

The easiest way to support mobile devices is to use Google Reader.
Google Reader generates an excellent mobile view of your RSS feed without any effort. All you have to do is append your feed address to the following URL and your mobile blog is ready:

http://www.google.com/reader/m/view/feed/<feed_address>

For example here’s how it renders DeveloperZen’s feed (http://www.google.com/reader/m/view/feed/http%3A%2F%2Ffeeds.feedburner.com%2Ferankampf):

You can call this link “Mobile View” and place it at the top of your blog design so mobile phone users will notice it instantly and switch to the mobile view. Alternatively you can map it to a subdomain like m.yourblog.com and points mobile users there.

I’m using WpTouch to support iPhone devices (its good for most mobile devices, not just the iPhone). Its easy to install and configure and looks absolutely great..

Optimize for Search Engines

The SEO All in One plugin lets you easily optimize your your titles, meta tags and headers rather than being limited to WordPress’s defaults.

Stats

Tracking your blog’s statistics lies at the core of any well thought out marketing campaign for your blog. Why jump back and forth between Google Analytics, FeedBurner and various other tools when you can simply put the summary data in your WordPress administration dashboard?

• Wordpress Reports - This plugin gathers and displays data from Google Analytics and Feedburner to display a comprehensive report of what’s been happening on your blog for the last 7 days. It also comes with a Most Active Content allowing you to display your top content on the sidebar. Since it gathers information from Google Analytics and FeedBurner it doesn’t add tracking codes to your client code and increase server load.
• StatPress is a real-time plugin dedicated to the management of statistics about blog visits. It collects information about visitors, spiders, search keywords, feeds, browsers etc. and displays live and up-to-date information in the administration dashboard. It also comes with a StatPress Top Posts widget.

Sneak Preview - Nuconomy Blog Stats

We’ve been working very hard here at Nuconomy on a plugin for WordPress and WordPress MU. It’ll soon be public but for now here’s a sneak preview:

Tags: WordPress

Amazon’s shares jumped by more than 9% following Citigroup analysts Mark Mahaney predicting its Kindle to become the “iPod of books”:

In a report to clients, analyst Mark Mahaney said Amazon could be on track to sell as many as 380,000 units of the Kindle this year. This would match the number of sales for the iPod digital music player in its first year on the market, leading the analyst to predict that the Kindle “is becoming the iPod of the book world.”

Mahaney predicted that the Kindle will likely top the lists of holiday “gadget gifts” this year. He warned that his projections do not account for a possible launch of an updated version of the device.

Personally, I want one! I just can’t wait for Amazon to release a Wifi version that’ll work world wide and will save me delivery costs and time when ordering my books.

I’m exactly the kind of person the Kindle appeals to - a techie who reads lots of books (mostly tech too) via Amazon.
I don’t think its a very large niche…  at least, not as large as the iPod’s target market…

I find it ridiculous comparing Kindle success to the iPod simply because of one people fact: People don’t read anymore!

Apparently, I’m not the only one holding this opinion:

Today he had a wide range of observations on the industry, including the Amazon Kindle book reader, which he said would go nowhere largely because Americans have stopped reading.

“It doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is, the fact is that people don’t read anymore,” he said. “Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year. The whole conception is flawed at the top because people don’t read anymore.”

By the way, the US is ranked 18 in literacy rate…  Just a fact worth mentioning…

Tags: Amazon, AMZN

Designing for scale is one of the greatest challenges when building when building web applications for the Internet. The huge scale of the Internet and the amount of potentials users requires applications to be able to handle huge amounts of data and traffic.

Today’s Internet applications has to be design with large scale in mind:

• It has to be able to accommodate increased usage
• It has to be able to accommodate increased data volumes.
• It has to be maintainable

While the need seems obvious, implementing a working solution seems is not trivial, and so we see a lot of new companies that fail to handle the load (Cuil, Twitter, ….)

Joining Nuconomy’s ranks recently has opened me to the world of web scalability. And so, I’ve had to do quite a lot of reading the past couple of weeks.

I’ve compiled a list of the best resources I came across:

• The following presentation by Cal Henderson provides a detailed overview of common patterns and approaches when building application for high availability and scale (you might also want to check out his book his book) :

SlideShare Link
(removed their player embed as it was throwing internal exceptions. So much for SlideShare’s QA…)

• The High Scalability blog features lots of interesting content on the topic.
  Be sure to check its featured overviews over the technology behind the top Web 2.0 sites:
  • Amazon
  • Google
  • YouTube
  • MySpace
  • Twitter
• Another series of posts worth a reading is Tim O’Reilly series on Web 2.0 and Databases covering the data strategy of major Web 2.0 companies:
  • Google File System and BigTable
  • Flickr
  • MySQL
  • Second Life
  • Findory and Amazon
  • Craigslist
  • Blogline and Memeorandum
  • NASA World Wind
  • O’Reilly Research
• Google’s Paxos implementation. The Paxos algorithms is a set of protocols used for developing fault tolerant distributed databases. Google’s Paxos Made Live – An Engineering Perspective (1052) is a very well written and easy to read paper, written by Google’s engineers, describing their experience implementing Paxos in the creation of Chubby, a system used by BigTable for keeping replicas consistent in case of failures:

We describe our experience building a fault-tolerant data-base using the Paxos consensus algorithm.
Despite the existing literature in the field, building such a database proved to be non-trivial. We describe
selected algorithmic and engineering problems encountered, and the solutions we found for them. Our
measurements indicate that we have built a competitive system.

…

We used the Paxos algorithm (“Paxos”) as the base for a framework that implements a fault-tolerant
log. We then relied on that framework to build a fault-tolerant database. Despite the existing literature on
the subject, building a production system turned out to be a non-trivial task for a variety of reasons:
While Paxos can be described with a page of pseudo-code, our complete implementation contains several
thousand lines of C++ code. The blow-up is not due simply to the fact that we used C++ instead
of pseudo notation, nor because our code style may have been verbose. Converting the algorithm into
a practical, production-ready system involved implementing many features and optimizations – some
published in the literature and some not.

Got some more interesting scalability resources to share?  feel free to leave a comment…

Tags: Google, Internet applications, Scalability, Web 2.0, web scalability

I’ve been having mixed feeling for quite some time now regarding LINQ.
Sure it can make working with data sources a lot easier and it can definately save a lot of code…
But, what happens with the following C# foreach statement

List<KeyValuePair<string, string>> resultList = new List<KeyValuePair<string, string>>();
string[] paramsArray = parameters.Split(new char[] { '&' }, StringSplitOptions.RemoveEmptyEntries);
foreach (string p in paramsArray)
{
    int index = p.IndexOf('=');
    if (index > 0)
    {
        string key = p.Substring(0, index);
        string value = p.Substring(index + 1);
        resultList.Add(new KeyValuePair<string, string>(key, value));
    }
}

IEnumerable<KeyValuePair<string, string>> result =
    resultList.Distinct((p1, p2) => p1.Key == p2.Key);

Turns to this query:

var distinctPairs = (from keyValuePair in parameters.Split(new char[] { '&' }, StringSplitOptions.RemoveEmptyEntries)
                     let index = keyValuePair.IndexOf('=')
                     where index != -1
                     let key = keyValuePair.Substring(0, index)
                     where !string.IsNullOrEmpty(key)
                     let valueText = keyValuePair.Substring(index + 1)
                     select new { Key = key, ValueText = valueText })
                             .Distinct( (p1, p2) => (p1.Key == p2.Key) )
                             .ToArray();

I don’t know about you but I find the first version a lot more approachable, readable and quicker to understand. The same code in LINQ is not shorter and looks simply looks Evil.

LINQ is like the force… It can be used to wonderful code that is simple and functional, but it also has the potential of producing cryptic code that’s hard to maintain.

Use it wisely and don’t be tempted for its dark side…

Tags: LINQ

I’ve recently decided to move my blog from dasBlog to WordPress. The reason for this move is mainly because dasBlog really lacked several features that were important for me and I found WordPress to be much more mature platform with a wide community support.

Moving the blog to WordPress turns out to be not as complex as I thought it would. However there are some pitfalls that are important to avoid in order for the process to really be as quick and simple as possible.

When moving our blog we have two main tasks: migrate all the blog’s data (post’s etc.) and ensure that the old blog redirects all calls to the new blog so that we don’t loose search engine links\ranking and confuse readers.

Migrating Blog Data

WordPress does not support importing from dasBlog out of the box and there’s no available plugin that does that. The best way I could find to migrate the data to WordPress is to use RSS import. The only downside here is that comments will not get imported

In order to migrate dasBlog posts to WordPress using RSS perform the following:

1. Setup dasBlog’s RSS to contain all your data. On dasBlog’s configurations page, under Syndication Settings, increase the number of items in your RSS feed to cover all posts.
   

   Also, turn off FeedBurner support so that when trying to access dasBlog’s RSS feed it will not redirect you to FeedBurner.

2. Disable Aggregator Bugging. dasBlog can add an image to your RSS item that is used to gather feed usage statistics. You don’t want those images to be part of your WordPress posts.
   To disable feed bugging simply go to the dasBlog configuration screen and uncheck the Enable Webbugs for RSS checkbox in the Service Settings section:
    
3. Save the RSS as a file. Load the RSS into your browser by clicking on the RSS icon on your blog’s home page or by navigating to http://<blog url>/SyndicationService.asmx/GetRss.
   Save the displayed XML to a text file on your local drive.
4. Fix content formatting in the RSS. You have to remove end-of-line characters from the file, otherwise they will be transformed by WordPress during import to line breaks that will mess up your posts layout:
   1. Open the file in Microsoft Word, press CTRL+H to open the Find and Replace dialog.
      Click on More->Special Characters->Paragraph Character. Replace it with nothing (an empty string).
   2. Replace all double spaces with one space character.
5. Import the file to WordPress. In the WordPress Admin Dashboard go to Manage->Import (or navigate directly to http://<blog url>/wp-admin/import.php). Click the RSS link and browse for the RSS file you just edited. Click Upload file and import button to import your content to WordPress.

Redirect Requests from dasBlog to WordPress

If you’ve been using your blog post title for your post’s permalink than you’re going to have a relatively easy job redirecting all the requests made directly to a post on your dasBlog blog to their new location on WordPress (some coding is required though). Handling the other pages - archive, date and category pages - is a bit more complicated.

First, configure WordPress’s permalinks to use the post’s title like dasBlog. In the WordPress Admin Dashboard go to Settings->Permalinks and choose the Day and name option so that your permalinks will look as follows : http:// <blog domain> /2008/08/04/sample-post/

Now we have to redirect the requests from the old blog to WordPress. I couldn’t find a way to perform this without editing dasBlog’s source code. To be honest, I’ve been running my own customized version of dasBlog for a while now so I’ve had the code ready for use and I didn’t invest much time in looking for alternatives.
In the newtelligence.DasBlog.Web.Core project, open SharedBasePage.cs and add the following code snippet at the end of the SetupPage method:

// *** Redirect to WordPress
string redirectUrl = "http://<blog homepage>.com/";
if (!this.IsAggregatedView)
{
    // We're looking at an indevidual post so we can redirect directly to
    // that post's new location
    Entry entry = DataService.GetEntry(weblogEntryId);

    redirectUrl = string.Format("http://<your blog>/{0}/{1}/{2}/{3}/",
        entry.CreatedUtc.Year,
        entry.CreatedUtc.Month,
        entry.CreatedUtc.Day,
        entry.CompressedTitleUnique.Replace('+', '-'));
}
else
{
    if (Request.QueryString["category"] != null)
    {
        // We're in a category page
        redirectUrl = string.Format("http://<your blog>/redirectFromDasBlog/category/{0}", this.CategoryName);
    }
    if (Request.QueryString["date"] != null)
    {
        redirectUrl = string.Format("http://<your blog>/{0}/{1}/{2}/",
            DayUtc.Year.ToString(),
            DayUtc.Month.ToString("d2"),
            DayUtc.Day.ToString("d2"));
    }
    else if (Request.QueryString["month"] != null)
    {
        redirectUrl = string.Format("http://<your blog>/{0}/{1}/",
            Month.Year.ToString(),
            Month.Month.ToString("d2"));
    }
}
this.Response.StatusCode = 301;
this.Response.Status = "301 Moved Permanently";
this.Response.RedirectLocation = redirectUrl;
this.Response.End();

Compile dasBlog and then replace newtelligence.DasBlog.Web.Core on your dasBlog’s bin folder with the modified version.

The snippets redirects requests to blog posts and archive pages (day pages and month pages) to their new destination on WordPress using permanent redirect status code (301).
Category pages cannot be handles automatically as, when moving to WordPress, you will probably play around with the category hierarchies, names and slug.
Therefore, the code builds a category URL that points to the WordPress blog and guaranteed to get a 404 error. We can track 404 hits on WordPress and manually configure where to direct them…

Track and redirect 404 requests on WordPress. A WordPress plugin, called Redirection, allows you to track 404 errors and manage their permanent (301) redirections:

Redirection is a WordPress plugin to manage 301 redirections, keep track of 404 errors, and generally tidy up any loose ends your site may have. This is particularly useful if you are migrating pages from an old website, or are changing the directory of your WordPress installation.

Install the plugin and then you can go to Manage->Redirection on the WordPress Admin Dashboard and manage redirections from the fake URLs created by the code we added to dasBlog to real destinations on your new WordPress blog.

That’s it! If you’ve reached this far you’re covered…
All the posts have moved to their new WordPress location and all links are correctly forworded to the new location. As mentioned earlier, unfortunately, the only thing left out are the blog comments.
If you know of a way to get the comments migrated to WordPress too please do tell…

Tags: dasBlog, WordPress

At least if everything goes as planned, your RSS reader should keep on getting regular updates without any work on your part (thanks FeedBurner :-))

I just retired the good old dasBlog on ekampf.com for a branch new WordPress 2.6 blog on www.DeveloperZen.com.
The ekampf.com is still up and running, forwarding all traffic to the new blog (even old blog permalinks are redirected to the correct post under DeveloperZen.com) so you can still use it if you’ve got existing bookmarks, subscriptions, or if just feel it’s easier to remember.

The move to DeveloperZen.com brings along a brand new design (still in the works) and a renewed commitment to blogging - I’ll be working a lot harder on the DeveloperZen brand from now on.

Please let me know if you have any problems moving over subscriptions, finding stuff or getting old links to work. I’ll also be happy to heard comments or suggestions regarding the new site.

MyBlogLog unveiled their new design yesterday:

Don’t worry, we still got all the features that you can’t live without; your stats, your widgets and, of course, the New With stuff. Only now everything is framed with shiny shadows and rounded edges! Also notice that on your profile we have moved the most recent visitors module, up on top, not down below the fold so you can quickly see who’s been checking you out.

If you’re a DeveloperZen reader and part of the MyBlogLog community (or just have a Yahoo ID), please join the DeveloperZen community on MyBlogLog.

Tags: MyBlogLog

According to various reports from Reuters and Rediff.com, nine bomb blasts have rattled Bangalore, which hosts offices of some of the technology industry’s biggest players- Texas Instruments, Intel, Qualcomm, Infosys, SAP…

Low intensity blasts in a span of one hour in six different places rocked the IT capital of India on Friday afternoon in which two people died and several others were injured. While the first seven blasts took place between 1.30-2.30 pm, the eighth blast took place at Hosaguddahalli, near Gopalan Mall, on Mysore road at around 5.30 pm and the ninth blast took place near the R V Engineering College on Mysore Road at 6.30 pm. The Bengaluru police have termed it as an act of terror.

Om Malik notes that these attacks are likely to reverberate through Silicon Valley. Beefed up security procedures will probably follow and companies with operations offshore will probably have to review their business continuity plans. It will probably also accelerate diversification away from the city…

In any case, I do hope all of my colleagues, people I have dealt with and reader over there are fine.
I would love to hear updates from anyone reading this post…

Tags: Globalization, India

Consider the following (imaginary) conversation:

Programmer: What if a user will want the ability to sort the values in the report grid by columns?

Manager: We don’t need a dynamic grid for version one.

Programmer: But someone might want to sort the values! Users will expect to be able to sort values by clicking on the column headers…

Manager: We don’t have time to add this feature to our schedule. Can’t we consider it for a future release?

Programmer #2: I don’t think sorting makes sense here.

….

Sounds familiar? If you’ve been part of a product development team you’ve probably encountered this kind of feature debate before… maybe even quite frequently…

Programmers are trained to think about possibilities and logic terms, that’s why the logic of what “might” happened is irresistible to the programmer.
Alan Cooper describes this behavior in The Inmates are Running the Asylum:

Programmers call these one-in-a-million possibilities edge cases. Although these oddball situations are unlikely to occur, the program will whenever they do if preparations are not made.
Although the likelihood of edge cases is small, the cost for lack of preparedness is immense. Therefore, these remote possibilities are very real to the programmer. The fact that an edge case will crop only once every 79 years of daily use is no consolation to the programmer. What id this one time is tomorrow?

The manager can’t advance the argument with the force of reason as he has no way to logically contradict this programmer and so he’s left with the choice of giving up or using his authority, which is usually how these kinds of arguments end up.

The programmers concern with the possible can easily obscure the probable by loading the program’s interface with controls and functions that will rarely be used.

The problem with this entire argument lies in the fact that arguing about what users might expect is the same as asking “What does Bigfoot like for breakfast?”

Users come in many forms and shapes. Some are proficient with computers, some don’t even like them. Some are used to Microsoft UI and some work mainly on the Mac. Some require advanced control with the expense of simplicity and should would rather give advanced control away in exchange for a quick and simple way to perform their goals.

In order to avoid this kind of dead-end feature debates its useful to change the team terminology and work in terms of personas and their goals. Rather than thinking of users as an abstract, difficult-to-describe, amorphous group of people, personas instruct us to talk about specific users who have names, personalities, needs, and goals.
Understanding exactly who the users are and what they do with the software is essential to determine if a certain feature is actually required.

Do we really need to allow sorting the column? there’s no way of telling…  but if you know that we’re designing for Jeff, a CFO of a large enterprise, who would like to get his report in a fixed predetermined format then its probably a requirement not to do so…

A very good example for use of personas can be found in Nikhil Kothari’s post about where he describes three personas that were used by the development division at Microsoft while working on Visual Studio 2005:

We have three primary personas across the developer division: Mort, Elvis and Einstein.

Mort, the opportunistic developer, likes to create quick-working solutions for immediate problems and focuses on productivity and learn as needed.
Elvis, the pragmatic programmer, likes to create long-lasting solutions addressing the problem domain, and learn while working on the solution.
Einstein, the paranoid programmer, likes to create the most efficient solution to a given problem, and typically learn in advance before working on the solution.

The description above is only rough summarization of several characteristics collected and documented by our usability folks.
During the meeting a program manager on our team applied these personas in the context of server controls rather well:

• Mort would be a developer most comfortable and satisfied if the control could be used as-is and it just worked.
• Elvis would like to able to customize the control to get the desired behavior through properties and code, or be willing to wire up multiple controls together.
• Einstein would love to be able to deeply understand the control implementation, and want to be able to extend it to give it different behavior, or go so far as to re-implement it.

Using the above described personas, Nikhil’s team was able to effectively design a set of .NET controls so that each persona will find them usable for his use:

All of these controls just work out of the box in implementing the end-to-end scenario of managing user sign-on. Coupled with themes, these controls can look pretty good as well. They go on to provide a whole set of properties to tweak their behavior, and appearance.

Furthermore, they provide the ability to flip into template mode for more significant changes to their content and layout.

Finally, they’re built on the provider-model in ASP.NET so an advanced developer could come along and swap out the built-in membership provider going against say the default SQL or Active Directory user database and replace it with one that goes against say an Oracle user database or some other custom store while keeping the UI functionality intact.

So, the next time you’re in a feature debate, stop and ask yourself “Who exactly am I designing this feature for? Why does he need it?”.
Describe a set of personas that your software will target and use them as reference in any design discussion or feature debate instead of referring to an amorphous group of “users” that might not even exist.

Don’t design your software for bigfoot….

Tags: Design, Personas, User Experience, UX

I was checking out my analytics page with Yosi the other day when I noticed this rather disturbing Unique Visitors graph:

I’ve been paying less attention to the blog the past couple of months and it shows… I’m loosing readership and I don’t like it…

As I see it, the most important rule for blogging successfully is to continuously produce great content for your blog. As Larry O’Brian best puts it:

My theory is that lead generation derives from Google rank and that the best way to increase Google rank is to be like a professional fighter: neither jabs nor haymakers are enough. You must be always jabbing and you must regularly throw haymakers. Blog continuously to keep your hit-rate and link-traffic high and write longer pieces, containing the high-value words associated with your niche, occasionally.

I’ve been pilling up more than 15 posts on my drafts folder so it doesn’t seem like I have nothing to write about. Getting these drafts to a state where I’m willing to post them online is a different story…

As I’ve learned for the past couple of years, the best thing you can do when writing a blog is to pick a schedule you can live with and stick to it.

And so, I’m going to pick a two-posts-a-week schedule and see how well it goes…

What’s your posting schedule?

Tags: Blogging

(via Dor)

Tags: Humor, Twitter

Microsoft’s new R&D Center in Israel (ILDC) is going through a lot of recruiting and PR effort. It’s latest PR stunt - The Microsoft Friends Club which is open for “all students, studying for any certified degree in computer science, software engineering, communication engineering or electrical engineering in any academic institution”.

To launch this club, Microsoft announced on a series of free rock concerts - for students studying the above mentioned fields and their friends…

Now, I’m not a PR or a recruiting expert, but it seems to me like Microsoft is shooting in the dark with this campaign:

1. Unfocused audience - Yes, some of the attendees are going to be engineering students. I guess most won’t…. That’s hardly close to the “engineering students who are about to graduate and are looking for a job\internship” target audience. Even less if we change the definition to “geeky engineering students” who are the top talents Microsoft should really want on its side…
2. Unclear messaging/branding - Because free rock concerts really gives the “We’re a cool software company that drives innovation. We’re the place you want to be if you want to work on leading edge technology…”. At best, it gives a statement of “We have lots of money… if we through it away like that on students just imagine what we do for our own employees”.

It’s sad that Microsoft’s ILDC chose to ignore successful events and case studies done abroad for this purpose and chose to promote itself as if it was a cellphone company…

If anyone over there at ILDC is reading this post, if you really want an effective campaign for recruiting students just learn from the two  examples below. Both target a very specific audience which is exactly the type you’d want to recruit as a company, and by sponsoring such event you’re getting the right message across: “We’re a cool company that values and sponsors new technology and innovation and the people who create it”.

1. Microsoft Imagine Cup

The Microsoft Imagine Cup is a worldwide competition for students, held by Microsoft, encouraging students to submit new and innovative projects and compete with other students locally and worldwide. As summarized in the case study:

What: The world’s premier student
technology competition, in which
teams and individuals submit their
projects online or in person for a
chance to compete at the global
finals—like the Olympics of technology—
held in a different country each
year.

Why: To inspire young people
to conceive and build innovative
technology solutions to real-world
challenges.

Who: More than 100,000 university
and high school students from 111
countries are registered for the 2007
Imagine Cup.

How: Teams and individuals can
enter nine categories that include
software design, embedded development,
Web development, short film,
photography, IT, algorithms, and a
programming battle called Project
Hoshimi.

Where: The worldwide finals of the
2007 Imagine Cup will take place in
Seoul, South Korea, in August.

More info:
http://www.imaginecup.com

ILDC can encourage such activity via its campus activities. Sponsor a local Israeli cup, and more…

2. Google Summer of Code

The Google Summer of Code is an annual program, in which Google awards stipends to hundreds of students who successfully complete a requested free software/open-source coding project during the summer.

The program invites students who meet their eligibility criteria to post applications that detail the software-coding project they wish to perform. These applications are then evaluated by the corresponding mentoring organization. Every participating organization must provide mentors for each of the project ideas received, if the organization is of the opinion that the project would benefit them. The mentors then rank the applications and submit the ranked list to Google. Google then decides how many projects each organization gets, and selects the top-n applications for that organization, where n is the number of projects assigned to them.

In the event of a single student being present in the top-n of more than one organization, Google mediates between all the involved organizations and decides who “gets” that student. The slots freed up on the other mentoring organization are passed to the next-best ranked application in that pile.

Tags: ILDC, Microsoft, MSFT