The individual devices have great UX. But as I move from one form factor to another most apps make the UX feel disconnected.

Example: I use an IM application on all devices. But if I start s conversation on my MacBook and then pick up my iPad to go into the living room, or my iPhone to run to the store my conversation is broken. The chat history does not follow me, and even worse, multiple devices will remain logged on so a new IM will register on multiple devices.

I think with all of the new and innovative form factors now finding adoption momentum, there is a good opportunity for frameworks to be built to support the movement of the UX in a seamless way across devices.

Pushing data into the cloud, or having a good sync system is a great start, and I’d love if my various apps had better sync capabilities. But can we sync the UX of applications. Can product developers break out of the paradigm of an application living in a single instance of a process. Can UX be elevated to it’s own entity with app instances being merely a view into the current session.

Should my word processor always start from zero when I open it? Or should it return to it’s previous state? If I’m editing a blog post on my laptop and I decide to move to my iPad, should I dare to expect to continue where I left off seamlessly?

It’s a hard problem to solve from a logic perspective, and its a lot of plumbing to write for app developers. Maybe someone will think through the business rules and create a framework we can all build on.

If you are that person, I’d love to talk with you and support you. What do you all think?

Unfortunately, I don’t think blogs are as grassroots as we think. The blogosphere is not set up to be egalitarian, it is set up for competition. The blogosphere is a competitive landscape between publishers, viewers, and advertisers. These elements are common with traditional media; media many consider corrupted. And it’s these common elements that will lead to the corruption of the blogosphere. And it’s already begun.

A few of the problems:

• Blog searches use voting systems of pingbacks just like PageRank. These systems cause certain sites to bubble to the top and stay there.
• Pay per post services. These services pay people to write content and to link to other pages.
• Advertisers paying for product reviews. Self explanatory.
• Advertisers driving content, indirectly. Write the correct content, key words and key phrases and you’ll get popular ads on your sites.
• Search Engine Marketing. Again, write the correct key words and key phrases and you’ll get better search engine placement.
• Advertising networks that have sprung up to join blogs under a single banner.

There is a scale of user generated content, and where your service is on the scale means different things. Here’s how I think of it.

Contributed content type.On one end of the scale is metadata on the other end is original content.

Metadata is about the categorization and ranking of data. Services like Digg, or StumbleUpon, or del.icio.us. The content is not generated by the community. The community provides metadata around the content such as ranking and categorization. The content being ultimately consumed is not generated by the community, the final consumed content is external to the community. 

On the other side is original content. This includes blogging in all its forms and services like Flickr, YouTube, Craigslist, and Wikipedia. Original content is where the target consumption is generated by the community. Often times, such as the case of YouTube, the community generated content also includes user generated metadata.

Dynamic nature of the content. Content generated by a community can be very dynamic or very static.

Static contentis characterized by content that is generated once and never changed. This includes most type of content that is generated by communities. Ranking systems, photo sharing, and video sharing. The target consumed content is very static, only the metadata is dynamic.

Dynamic contentis characterized by content that is in continual flux. A wiki such as Wikipedia is a great example, where the target consumed data is always changing through community modification. It can change slow or fast, but the target content changes. Potentially, some social networks can fit into this category as the target content to be consumed is a user profile and people are continually updating their profiles with new information and messages.

Governance of content and community.There are two sides to governance and control of a community. On one side is totalitarian, with a strong centralized administrative group. On the other side is community governance.

The overall trend is moving towards community governance. With user reporting systems and the ability to change content at the forefront of many new web applications. There is still a central administrator to most user contributed content web communities and that may never change. Craigslist is a great example of community governance. Even MySpace with the ability to report a message as Spam utilizes community governance.

Direction of communication.It is often said that Web1.0 is a one way conversation and Web2.0 is a two way conversation. User generated content follows a similar concept. With user generated content the conversation is characterized in two ways: One to many or many to many.

With user generated content the community is both the source and the consumer. Either it’s one user providing content to the community or it is a collection of users generating the content for the community. Static content is one to many, dynamic content is many to many.

The world of user generated content is exciting. It decentralizes the generation of content and provides inherent mechanisms for editing and governance. It empowers users to direct their own experiences. It can be the ultimate in democracy of content.

You can visit the EFF Blue Ribbon Web Sitefor detailed information. As a new blogger and long time blog reader it seems that a lot of the concerns are not yet material. And searching Google I’ve found no real blog rights violations in the US, definitely questionable things in other countries though. But, as with everything regarding civil rights we should be vigilant and pay attention. I think the spirit of the effort is worth supporting. As such this site is now displaying the blue ribbon campaign logo.

If you have any news articles or resources on the topic, please comment and share.

There is a spectrum of published content from micro-blogs, to blogs, to something closer to traditional publications. Let’s look at it graphically.

The spectrum goes from short posts to long posts; less research to more research; less formal to more formal; fast post rates to slow post rates. The sweet spot is right in the middle, it provides valuable and desired information frequently, in a short enough posts that do not deter user attention.

The center of the spectrum is where the popularity lies. It’s what the majority of the blogosphere is and you can see by the top Technorati blogs that it’s the frequently updated popular news blogs that dominate the top rankings. Bloggers who write traditional blog posts (meatier than micro-blogs but less formal than a researched article) gain the highest rankings and most page views.

To be a popular blogger you need to be in the middle of the spectrum. Keep balance… medium length posts, a mix of pop news and insights, clear writing but not stingy, concise but not boring, authoritative yet friendly.

There is a lot of competition in the blogosphere; but maintain a balance by posting original content promoted by pop subjects and you are on the right track.

Here’s some examples of recent horizontal players:

1. Facebook, MySpace for horizontal social networking
2. Twitter, Pownce for horizontal micro-blogging
3. YouTube, Revver for horizontal video sharing
4. Google, Yahoo for horizontal search
5. Flickr for horizontal photo sharing
6. Scribd for horizontal document sharing
7. Del.icio.us, StumbleUpon for horizontal bookmarking and site discovery
8. Digg, Reddit for horizontal blog discovery
9. Wikipedia for horizontal information archiving

And I’m sure you can name many others.

With players applying this Web 2.0 community based concept to so many horizontals, it begs two questions for the entrepreneur. One, are there any horizontals left without established players? And two, are there any vertical that are under served by these general, horizontal solutions?

Interesting, I think that there are still large opportunities in the vertical segments. Most of the services listed above do not have broad appeal outside of the technophiles who are in the know. There are millions of consumer and business Internet users who have never heard of some of these companies and services but who can get value.

My suggestion, find an under served vertical, maybe something you already know intimately and see if any of these new technologies can fit. Ask, can I use this for that?

I was inspired by a comment I got on my post about Microsoft, Linux, and being professionally pidgeon-holed. The commenter brought up the point of “lock-in” when using Microsoft.

I agreed, and responded that people, like myself, are willing to be “locked-in” if the product or service provides some value, real or imagined. For example, look at the recent iPhone distaste about the AT&T contract. Look at the iPod and DRM. Look at your car and any modifications you purchase. Look at your gym membership. Though they create artificial ways of locking you in, all those products and services continue to flourish!
Corporations look to lock you in and create switching barriers to keep you loyal. They do it with termination fees (such as gym memberships), with investments in proprietary equipment (such as digital gadgets), by holding your data hostage (such as iPod/iTunes).

As entrepreneurs and developers we need to make these decisions all the time, do we use proprietary protocols or open standards? Do we use a third party proprietary software because it’s cheaper and faster? Do we follow our philosophical views and stay away from closed software and standards? Do we make it difficult for customers to switch?

Switching barriers are an important part of the competitive landscape. Look for barriers that you can create and figure out how to break down the barriers of your competition. Think hard when developing your business or your software, what barriers are you willing to create? What barriers will your customers tolerate?

DJGGP, BBSing, War Dialing, Modems, Math Coprocessors, Coleco Adam Computers, Legend of the Red Dragon, and the Lynx portable; all items that evoke my nostalgia of being a youth discovering technology.

DJGPP	DJGPP is a port of the GNU development tools for C/C++. It included a compiler, various IDEs, and various libraries. Favorites of mine being RHIDE for the IDE and the Allegro graphics library. The web page is still here. These are the tools my good friend Tom and I used to learn C/C++ and develop some of our personal projects.
BBSing	Who here has dialed into or still does (gasp!) dial into BBS’s? Who here doesn’t know what a BBS is? Look at BBS on Wikipedia. Remember the days of discovering phone numbers with your friends, private messaging systems, file sharing, doors/games, and even access to the web throuhg a BBS? Those were the days, huh! I was even a sysop of a BBS I ran from my parents house at night over our primary home line… during the day it had to be available for voice, but at night… TGS BBS as alive! TGS=The Good Stuff.
Legend of the Red Dragon	If we’re going to talk BBSing then we have to talk about my favorite door. Legend of the Red Dragon or LORD by Seth Robinson, here’s the official page. For lots of fun with your friends, this was the game to play as far as I’m concerned. And remember when we got RIP graphics, for that matter, remember color ANSI! Oh man! BTW, my handle was HellSpawn.
War Dialing	This used to freak me out in middle school, dialing all those numbers that would show up on the phone bill. Fortunately they were all local. I did come across some unprotected Unix boxes though. Anyone still doing this? Anyone know what war dialing is anymore? Now do we all just use StumbleUpon to find interesting things to do?
Coleco Adam	This is a computer that my dad had in his office to word process with and for me to play Donkey Kong on. Countless hours wasted and princesses saved. Who remembers storing data on tape cassettes?
Math Coprocessor	With all the fast hardware acceleration we have today, especially evident in monster video cards, who remembers the math coprocessor? Remember with the Intel “DX” chips had the FPU on board? What is a coprocessor? Think of it as the first step towards the SLI nVidia cards you have running your desktop.
Lynx	I remember the first time I saw an Atari Lynx at my friends house and went nuts… so did everyone. Portable, color (the first portable with color), it could flip around, there was a surfing game. What’s not to love?
USRobotics 56K Modem	Well, I started with a 1200 baud Hayes modem that was some funky plug into the wall integrated thingie doohookie. Then we had the steps up and up and up. The fastest modem I owned was a 33.6K modem that got speeds of my friends 56K modems so I never upgraded. It was a nice external one. But, remember the ultimate in modems. That picture better bring up memories about USRobotics. I wonder what they’re up to now?

With all this stuff, I can’t say I miss the technology too terribly; messing with jumpers and IRQs, 100lb computers and 10lb cell phones, MSCDEX.EXE, HIMEM.SYS, and TSRs, and spending $400 for a 16MB SIMM. We’ve come a long way and things are very cool now. But, like my parents talking about the 50’s, these products remind me of “better times.” A time when things were simpler…. I do sound like my parents, huh! :)

Here’s to a time remembered, the 90’s, where we went from B.W.W.W. (Before the World Wide Web) to now, Web 2.0. And here’s to exploration, discovery, and the pursuit of knowledge: then, now, and in the future!

Here’s the lovingly way to approach your startup venture, whether it’s been started-up or not.

1. Love yourself. So I say the most important thing is to love yourself. You have to go in positively, confidently, with personal conviction and drive, and with an outlook that you’re doing this for you and not for any external reasons like fame and wealth (not that you shouldn’t expect and want those things, but they can’t be the only things). When you love yourself it saves your mental health, it draws in other people, employees, customers, investors, and it keeps you focused while getting bombarded with everybody’s 2 cents… figure out how to take those 2 cents times a few million people a month and that’s not a bad revenue stream. :) Love yourself, it’s contagious.
2. Love people. “People are your greatest asset.” I think I’ve read that in a few dozen business books. Well, at the end of the day it’s people who are going to keep you growing strong. Your partners, employees, investors, bankers, attorneys, and customers. People like to be loved. Love people and you set yourself up to be loved. Do it through positive interactions, through compliments and gestures, through bonuses and team bonding. Every small way you can find to love people the more you will get in return. And the most important part to loving people… be sincere.
3. Love technology. We’re talking tech ventures here. Find a technology, application, or problem you love. Use the technology, create the application, or solve the problem. Create a product or service that you adore. If you love what you do, if you love what you’re offering is, and if you love the technology you will stave off burn out and increase your longevity. If you build a product you love, it gives your customers a chance to love it to. Why would I use your product or service if you, the creator, don’t love it yourself? Keep loving technology, it’s what got us started in the first place.
4. Love life. So while this is at the end, this is definitely not the least important aspect. Why do we start startups? Why do we embark on these venture adventures? Hopefully it’s because we love it and want to find a fulfillment out of it. Hopefully it’s because we want a better quality of life. Hopefully it’s because we want to make some positive mark. During it all, remember to love life. Remember that life isn’t just work and work is not your only adventure. Keep perspective on yourself, on your family and friends, and on the world at large. There are lots of things to love about life, and creating an imbalance of work is all to easy. Love what you work on, but be sure to not deprive the rest of your life… it needs love to.

And, maybe these lovely rules apply to any professional life: employee, volunteer, intern, or other. Maybe they work in other industries. It’s just more pronounced in the high stress hi-tech startup world.

My advice, look at this list often for some perspective. Maybe write down the things that are important to you, work related or not. Look at this list and your list at least once a month. It’s so easy to get sucked into the startup world that it can be hard to see that you’ve sacraficed too much… too much because you forgot about the things you do love and the things you should love.

Good luck with the adventure!

I think there is a common denominator for this burn out. I mean, if we’re working in a field we love, technology, then why do we get burnt out?

I am recovering from this burn out and wanted to share my story briefly in an attempt to draw out some insights.

My Short Story

I was a technophile at a young age… starting in elementary school in the early 90’s BBSing into university systems, developing simple DOS games and the like. Taught myself assembly and C for writing DOS device drivers, bootstraps, and TSRs – in pursuit of developing graphics libraries for a mini-OS a friend and I were working on. In high school I moved into web technologies as well as systems and applications development on the Windows platform.

After high school I was offered a scholarship from the Sacramento State dean of computer science to pursue both math and computer science BS degrees concurrently. I did for two semesters. I was recruited out of the university to become a developer and eventual CTO of WebRaiser Technologies.

WebRaiser is where my first burnout occured. I was part of the founding team that led to WebRaiser being bought by Flextronics Intl. I personally wrote most of the WebRaiser software and was the architect of it all. I also was a key player in operations and a minor player in sales, marketing, biz dev, and all those other hats you have to wear in a small business.

Building WebRaiser through organic growth and non-institutional financing was rough. Small startup, small team, small funding. But we built a hell of a product suite, a million lines of code, and one of the premier software players in the industry… we won the industry awards and reviews to prove it. And selling the company was the final validation of our efforts.

So with such a success story, successfully exiting a startup, how come this burn out still occured?

Note: You can read some more on my About page or at Lowe*Software.

Some Burnout Reasons

I’m a fan of lists, so let me list the reasons I burnt out:

1. Narrow focus. In order to succeed you need to have laser focus. This means limiting yourself to developing within tight guidelines and specifications. Nothing frivolous.
2. Budget based development. Time is money. Engineers like to write software, it’s in our nature. But in business it doesn’t always make sense to build everything and you have to ask yourself that “Make or buy?” question. Often times the answer is buy. Software integration is not as interesting as building from the ground up.
3. Business beckons. Working in hi-tech is not all technology. Whether it’s management and administration or documentation and requirements there is an element of business that you simply can’t escape, even if your title is “Software Engineer”. It’s even worse if your title is “CTO”. Working at high levels and working on the business is fun, but it encompasses a lot of time that a purist like myself would like to use focusing on tech.
4. The time warp. Small business moves fast, technology moves fast, and markets move fast. The speed of these things is often overestimated. It is very easy to get caught to the point that you’re over working compulsively and always feel like you’re behind.

The Common Denominator 

So what do these four points have in common, what is the common denominator? For me the common denominator is I strayed away from my passion of technology and the immersion in that technology. I strayed without knowing I had. I have a passion for technology and I have a passion to learn and discover. My career, even beyond WebRaiser, put blinders on my and forced me to go in a single direction.

The overcommitment of time, the narrow focus, the wearing of multiple hats. All forced me to abandon time for me to fulfill that need to create, explore, and discover; the immersion in technology that I love.

Progressively through my career, for the reasons above, I phased out personal research, projects, and group associations more and more. The time commitment, competitiveness, and drive gave me a skewed view on what I needed to do to succeed (well, I’m sure all the airplane rides also were a part of the lack of time).

I learned an immense amount through WebRaiser and through my career so far. I know I’ll continue to learn. I wouldn’t trade the time spent there for anything; I made some great relationships (shout out to you Dave!) and learned so much.

What do I do now?

So what would I suggest now? Well, I would suggest making time, remembering why you got into technology, and don’t get caught up in the percieved speed of the startup. We need to work hard, but we don’t need to self sacrafice.

If you are going to overcommit yourself to a single cause, it is a great experience, but be cognizant of what’s going on. Don’t get lost. And keep your passions fed, whatever they are.

The usual things I hear from students, graduates, and those in corporate environments (IT and hi tech software companies) is the following:

1. The technology taught in school is old, they still use Pascal or C++ instead of .Net or Java.
2. There is too much of a focus on the desktop and not enough focus on the web.
3. There is limited or no curriculum on security, systems administration, network management, or some other focused discipline that usually centers around a job title/work position.
4. The teachers are old dinosaurs and out of the loop on new technologies.
5. Many computer science students aren’t driven by a love for technology and got into the program because they know there’s money in the industry.

In my opinion the problem also includes some less-often cited reasons:

1. A majority of students who are interested in technology don’t really understand and appreciate technology to a deep level.
2. Students have a misplaced confidence in their knowledge and abilities and therefore look down on the professors teaching “old” technology.
3. Students want skills to get them in the workforce and there is a pressure on professors to teach job applicable skills.
4. The pure concepts of computer science are bastardized or forgotten in curriculum because of the pressure of corporate interests.

I think most techies blame the schools, hence the bias towards blaming schools and professors in the first list. Personally, I put some responsibility back on the students, hence the bias in my list against the students. In my view many of these items start with the students (and corporate money invested in the schools) and create a tension between the matriculating population and academia. I think there is a pull between what students want to learn and what academia wants to teach. I think this tension becomes unhealthy in that the compromise means nobody gets what they want.

 Let me elaborate on each of the points.

1. A majority of students who are interested in technology don’t really understand and appreciate technology to a deep level.

I think this comes down to a single fact… technology is easy to access and use relative to even just ten years ago. Okay, let me explain… it’s a great thing that technology is easier to access and use than ever before. In fact, I think we have a long ways to go still to make technology truly accessible to the rest of the world, the barrier to entry needs to be brought down. Unfortunately, with the lowering of this barrier to entry we have a new age of techies that haven’t had to go through the hard knocks and knowledge acquisition to pursue their computing interest. Yet, they are considered skilled and built up by themselves, their parents, friends, and teachers.

It used to be hard to get into computers, there were fewer of them, they were expensive, they were hard to setup, the were hard to use. We went from physical jumpers to plug and play, assembler to Visual Basic, text interface to graphical interface, BBSing to the Web, local resources to global resources, and several thousand dollar devices to several hundred dollar devices. Functionality was limited and it was a search to find a limited set of applications. To explore and have fun used to be a search down… to the lower levels of the system. Now it’s a search up… to easy to download applications and web sites. Technology enthusiasts now require a lower net understanding of the system to do things on a computer.

This isn’t necessarily right or wrong in of itself, but in the context of becoming a computer engineer or scientist it creates a lesser level of knowledge about computer science; about memory addresses and data structures, about co-processors and hardware, about interrupts and DMA, about machine language and high level language. Today there is more value placed by society at large and the techie sub-culture on what you can make a computer do, not what you understand about it’s inner workings. This leads to a diminished overall appreciation for the computer as an entity unto itself and the science that goes behind its creation and operation in the new-techie populous. Those that have a love and appreciation are becoming a greater minority and stand in opposition to the gray hairs in academia.

2. Students have a misplaced confidence in their knowledge and abilities and therefore look down on the professors teaching “old” technology.

The new-techie can do a lot of things with a computer with little knowledge, and the barrier to entry of computers is still high enough that he or she can look knowledgeable to the lay person. This knowledge sets the modern techie apart from everyone else and instills a sense of pride and understanding. Unfortunately this pride can become close to hubris. This has been the case for the history of modern computing. Hackers and crackers, hobbyists and academics have had a superior attitude against society at large forever.

In the past there was a greater basis for this superiority complex, by being able to get into the community you have already proven a level of competence. Today, the general techie community is very large, very easy to access, and very welcoming of new entrants.

So there seems to be a disconnect between the techie culture of old, of which is most of academia, and the techie culture of new. I’ve heard from many young people that feel the higher education computer science and engineering programs are poor because they don’t address today’s technologies, they choose to use Pascal or C++ over .Net and Java, systems development over web development. Or they focus on fundamental concepts and theory instead of application.

I agree, that if a concept can be taught in a more applicable market technology than an old one then academia needs to make the switch. But, I think a switch into ever higher levels of programming language can be a mistake too. The abstraction given be higher order languages necessarily mean that students are exposed to less, they’re taken farther from the computer. While I think this is an area of healthy compromise, I think professors resist change because they want focus on the theory (we’ll ignore the lazy factor for sake of argument), while students complain because they don’t see the application of the lower levels of computing theory.

3. Students want skills to get them in the workforce and there is a pressure on professors to teach job applicable skills.

4. The pure concepts of computer science are bastardized or forgotten in curriculum because of the pressure of corporate interests.

Items 3 and 4 I’ll address together as they go hand in hand. Students want good paying careers and corporations want an educated workforce. What a synergy that academia at large isn’t built to address or participate in. Academia is about knowledge for for furthering and fostering general understanding, science, art, and culture. The process of fulfilling corporate or work goals can overlap the process of pursuing knowledge in academia and this is where things get blurry.

Capitalism. Corporations and students are both aligned to give and get jobs to exchange service for money, duh. Institutions of certification, corporate training, technical schools, and even university continuing education have been specifically developed to evaluate and rank the work force. But the university degree is king and any industry specific awards are never quite as good. So the programs and curriculum to gain a university degree in computer science and engineering are changing, they are leaning towards “real-world”, work related interests. Now, I think in the last few years we’ve started to see the prestige of the bachelors degree in computer science or engineering is being degraded as a result.

There is a level of prestige given to a university degree, especially post-graduate degrees. This prestige is being compromised in computer science as more and more scientific knowledge is traded for more and more application in the realm of work and corporate interests. Students influence the computer science programs as do corporations, through a lack of enrollment and large financial donations, respectively. I think the university system stands against it where it can, gives in many places, and the result is a program of education that never fully meets the wants or needs of either side. Both sides are merely placated.

This socially ingrained capitalism is so strong that it’s affected computer science and engineering programs in universities, pressure is coming from outward and from within.

Conclusion

So what do we do? I’m not sure. My personal view is that universities stand up, make academics and knowledge king and do not give to the pressures of student uninvolvement, corporate interests, or any other factor that pulls a university education into an uncomplimentary realm. I know that’s not going to happen, universities are necessarily capitalistic. They compete with each other, they need a student body to make money and continue, and they do what they can to balance these needs with knowledge, education, and learning.

My only idea is that there are multiple tracks to computer science and engineering, and maybe that means that there are domain specific minors offered to give a flavor of application to the broader science. Possibly start all students with a computer science appreciation class to explain what computer science is, what it isn’t, why the science is important, and alternative ways to meet goals not necessarily in the realm of academia.

I don’t know the answers, I’d love to hear feedback. I am curious if others have the same view on the higher education system and if I’m flawed anywhere. Expand my understanding, I like to learn!