James Galvin

I visited Forkd today after seeing some a review on TechCrunch UK (& Ireland). It is basically a social network for sharing recipes. Coincidentally, I had just been looking for a good recipe site with user-generated content. I’m sure there are plenty of websites doing this same thing, but Forkd has a really cool vibe. Mike Butcher hits the nail on the head:

“Note the way they are calling this a “Feta” not a Beta version - it’s part of the overall fun, easy going feel of the site.”

The “Feta” pun is perhaps slightly lame, but it ties in with loads of internet in-jokes scattered around the place that TechCrunch readers would pick up on, ranging from slightly cheesy to very funny: “It’s your turn to mash up” or “I baked you a cookie. But I eated it.”. I actually laughed out loud at some of the testimonial quotes:

Maybe this is a sign that I’ve been spending too much time staring at this monitor, immersed in the world of web 2.0, but this site was genuinely a joy to use. Check out the sign-up form, for example:

I hope there are some web application designers reading who can appreciate this as much as I do. The beauty of the tomato to indicate the required fields. The prompt to enter password again “with feeling”. I have not gone insane, but after the nightmare of Irish-Roots and TV Licence sites, it is so refreshing to come across a project that has been thoroughly thought out. And crucially it doesn’t fall flat by trying to be cute or too clever.

Kudos to the developers Isotoma, it looks like they really know what they’re doing. The design is decent, and I like the company blog, they even list their To Do list and tick off the items as they complete them. If it sounds like I’m gushing with praise, I haven’t even started on the site’s cool features. Best thing is to try it out yourself and let me know how it goes. The only problem for me is that I have no recipes of my own to add so I’m waiting for my neighbour (in the Last.fm sense of the word) to appear so that I can benefit from the service. All the Gastonom.ie folks and Conor, I hope ye sign up and share your knowledge. Which makes me wonder, why isn’t there a hRecipe microformat?

Via Brendan Kehoe on the Irish Internet Users Group on the Irish TVLicence.ie website:

The TV Licence Online system supports Internet Explorer 6 or Version 7 for Windows only at this time.

We have detected that you are using another browser. Unfortunately, this means that you can’t use the TV Licence Online service at this time.

Don’t these people realise that Firefox has a 38.6% market share in Ireland and growth rate of 55%? Those were the statistics from last summer anyway, but even if they’re inaccurate now it makes no difference.

TG4 site has been discussed several times on ILUG recently due to its lack of Linux support. TG4 can be used with Firefox, or on a Mac, and at least they have some excuse based on the fact that they are streaming video, which is a bit more difficult than clicking a few buttons to “renew my licence”.

I’ve sent a mail to tvlicence.web at anpost.ie; not to “register my desire to use another browser”, but to register my disgust that it is unsupported for absolutely no good reason. Whoever developed this TV Licence part of the An Post website has forgot about rule no. 2 of web application development:

• Rule Number 1: no animated gifs or smileys that talk to you.
• Rule number 2: if you’re going to actively exclude a huge chunk of your users, you better have a very good reason.

For some reason probably known to everyone except me, months will pass with no significant Irish tech-related events, then a bunch of them come together at once. Like Bus Éireann, if you’re lucky. Looks like the end of Feb/early March is one of the hotspots this year - Web2Ireland has all the latest news on upcoming events in Ireland. It might be difficult for me to pick and choose which [un?]conferences to attend. I’m considering Creative Camp (well done on the new website) in Kilkenny Castle. I suppose Blog Talk will have to be on the list, seeing as it’s being held in Cork.

If it’s not bad enough that I’m attending a conference about blogging, well I have to admit to skulking in the shadows of the social media darkside this month, caught in the maelstrom of Twitter. Never thought I’d get hooked on it, I always assumed it was just a big club full of narcissistic attention-whores who liked to bash Robert Scoble in 140 characters or less. Good for tracking events like the Irish election. It made more sense to have everyone migrate over to the technically superior Jaiku.

I was going to write a big long post apologising for having doubted Twitter, trying to convey what is so great about it, and to get a few more Irish people using it. But Damien has summed up enough just now on his blog. If it’s all about the conversation, there is no doubt that Jaiku has failed, there is no buzz. Also, there is something superior about the non-linear flow of conversation on Twitter - while it is more difficult to accurately follow what’s going on, it is easier to dip in and dip out with the added advantage of not having to read through a string of boring posts like a forum (chez Jaiku). I can’t help feeling that reading in 140 character chunks is somehow affecting my brain - not just the way I read and write but the way I talk and think. Who knows what evolution is going to throw up in a few decades if we keep this restriction.

All Twitter needs now is more normal people; dentists, fishermen, students, accountants… anything other than the same old “early adopters” that you see popping up everywhere droning on about the latest additions to the Facebook API. It will be great when there are hundreds of Cork people bopping around in the Twittisphere spewing their thoughts on Munster rugby or traffic on the South Link. My profile is here (jgalvin) so add me and I’ll reciprocate (as long as you’re not a bot or a spammer or something).

On a completely different note - kudos to all involved at Two Tits and a Vote, an armchair campaign to advocate for better women’s health care in Ireland. Starting with postcards to Mary Harney.

Inspired by Adam’s repository of silly domain names (verbo.se, foot.ie, explic.it, …) and others like pix.ie, I am now the proud owner of galv.in. Unfortunately jam.es was not available.

I was pretty surprised when I saw the lights go off on my Rackspace servers in the DFW data center, in Dallas.

The outage was covered by Laughing Squid, and made it onto a lot of big tech news sites such as TechCrunch, GigaOm, Valleywag, and O’Reilly Radar. 37 Signals and other well known web companies got wiped off the face of the earth.

It was embarrassing for me, since I just handed over a new web app to the customer for testing, which relied on a web service running on one of my DFW servers.

I signed up with Rackspace a couple of months ago, and was impressed by the confidence with which they spoke of their 100% guaranteed uptime. “Not 99.99999999999?” I asked. 100%, they assured me.

Down for three hours? That puts my uptime to date at roughly at 99.791%. Sorry Rackspace, but my Nintendo Wii has a better uptime than that. If you want to continue touting your “fanatical support”, you will have to do better.

And as for the apology:

We cannot promise that hardware won’t break, that software won’t fail or that we will always be perfect. What we can promise is that if something goes wrong we will rise to the occasion, take action, resolve the issue and accept responsibility. If you are a Rackspace customer and don’t think we’ve lived up to this promise at anytime during the outage, please let your Account Manager know.

You forfeit the right to this excuse when you promised 100% uptime. Why do you think everyone else offers a bunch of 9’s? If it hadn’t been a lorry crashing into some transformer, it would have been a giant meteorite. This is God’s way of telling you to listen to your sys admin, and not your marketing guy.

p.s., I will accept a free iPod touch as a gesture of good will.

Update: Got the phone call from Rackspace ~1 hour after writing this. That is fanatical support, since whoever read this post had to find out who I was and get in contact with my account manager in that time. I’ll just clarify that, having been there myself in the past as a sys admin, and also working for a broadband provider, I know full well that these things happen. I am aware that the real test is the response when something like this does happen, and it looks like Rackspace did well to get everything sorted quickly. My issue is with the (now mathematically impossible) 100% uptime claim, which no right-minded service provider should give, and Rackspace now no longer have the right to maintain.

p.p.s., the iPod touch was just a joke

Two weeks since Radiohead shook the earth with their release on In Rainbows. Two weeks in which the blogosphere hopped like popcorn to the funky beat of ‘15 Step’.

Hire professional web designers

A good user experience is critical. Over on the iQ Content blog, they have outlined some of the shortcomings to the In Rainbows site from a design perspective.

• Make buttons look like buttons
• Use clear labels and call to actions
• Don’t present your users with unnecessary obstacles
• and most importantly, as the book says, don’t make me think!

More creativity is needed

In the age of torrents and social networks, bands need to move on from the 1998 homepage concept. The music industry saw the value of web design very early on, and even in 1997, a lot of bands and musicians had stunning websites. They should be leading the next evolution, away from your two dimensional internet brochure and discography, to something more like a band’s clubhouse, interactive and rewarding to its visitors. MySpace made a good attempt at modernising the way bands interacted with their fans, bringing them closer to each other, but it was also a load of shite and it crashes my browser, and I will instantly boycott any band that uses a MySpace page as their primary website.

People got In Rainbows from Torrents because there is no benefit to gain from navigating that awkward website and filling out forms only to download it for exactly the same price (€0). I don’t know what kind of incentives Radiohead should have offered to convince more people to download from the In Rainbows site - that’s something they’ll have to think up. Even if thousands of people who got the album from Bittorrent weren’t willing to pay anything, that’s OK - you still have your audience under your control, and you can more accurately track the number and nature of downloads.

Must be more accommodating to ‘tryers’

Dahamsta outlines the difference between scroungers and tryers. I paid nothing for this Radiohead album, but in fairness, I am a tryer. I occasionally purchase fully functional shareware software, and sometimes I even donate to non-profit websites that I use. I didn’t really like the last couple of Radiohead albums, so I had no intention of paying for this one. I’ve only listened to it a couple of times, but it sounds like a good album, and definitely worth at least $6 to me. What would it take for me to retroactively pay that $6? As far as I can see, I’d have to navigate that ugly awkward website again and mess about with shopping carts, and fake email addresses, and pretend that I’m buying a new album. Not a chance. There should have been a follow-up email a week after I bought it, “So, what did you think of it?”, linking me to a feedback portal/discussion forum. It invites me into the Radiohead online community, it tells me when they’re going to be playing in Cork next, and it has a big button allowing me to easily hand over my $6. A little bit spammy, perhaps, but I’m certainly not going to complain, because I enjoyed the album, and now I want to support them.

Online surveys more skewed than usual

Nialler9 references the results of the What Price Did You Choose survey, which was fundamentally flawed if it depended on volunteers to mention how much they paid. Some reports are confirming my assumptions that a large portion of mildly interested people like me who idly downloaded the album for free would not be as inclined to actively partake in a survey to label themselves as cheapskates.

Can it work?

Yes, despite some flaws in the execution, it appears to have done fairly well on this occasion. Give it another two years and it will all be worked out.

Does it work, in general like

The jury is still out on this one. How big a part did the hype and ‘Snakes on a Plane’ factor play in the success of the In Rainbows release? I’m guessing a good chunk of people paid for this album because they wanted to support this progression. Others wanted to give a smack in the face to the record industry… kind of like voting for the McElhinney twins in You’re a Star. That novelty has worn off now, and the reality is, if the Frank and Walters allowed you to pick your price for their new album at ARenewedInterestInHappiness.com, they would be lucky to get a couple of thousand visitors, let alone paying customers. Which brings us back to the most important point: #2 above - more creativity is needed.

Was over in London for the FOWA. I’ve been to London a few times in the past couple of years, but still can’t get over what an insanely expensive city that is. Breakfast in the hotel, for a basic fry: £21! That’s €30 or $43. Future of Web Apps conference was on in the Docklands, a long haul from Cork using just about every means of transportation bar skateboard.

At FOWA, the amount of Macbooks around the place was astonishing - I’d guess that at least 9 out of 10 laptops at the event were made by Apple. The business track was a little bit basic - people giving too much of the same old common-sense advice and not enough real examples and numbers. The developer track was a bit better and people were happy to give the facts and figures. Matt Mullenweg spoke a bit about the architecture behind WordPress.com. It is good to hear first-hand about what is involved behind the scenes - if I heard correctly they’re running 300 servers! Kevin Rose spoke about his experiences in launching Digg and Pownce - interesting to note that they moved from PHP (Digg) to Python (Revision3) to Python & Django (Pownce). The lads from Dapper gave a nice overview of practical aspects of the semantic web, although not everyone was convinced by their reliance on the community. Matt Bidulph from Dopplr spoke about integration with external sites & services, highlighting the need for portability in social networks, and open standards such as OAuth.

I won’t go into any more detail about the talks, but if you are interested, then I’m sure you can find some reports on Technorati.

The expo was disappointing - one or two interesting companies but hardly any free stuff. Had to settle for a few stress balls off Sun and some pens from Zoho. There was one Irish group there, Just Routes - a few guys from DCU(?) who have developed a route planner for public transport. Dublin routes are currently mapped, so this should be a handy tool for getting around the city. Good luck to Dave & co with that.

Without a doubt, the highlight of the event was Diggnation. At first I assumed it was just another podcast. I’ve seen some sturdy servers buckle under the weight of attention from Digg, but I still had no idea that there was such a large and passionate community. Long before the show was due to start, hundreds of people were packing at the front of the hall. “Those are the fan boys”, I heard someone remark. Soon enough, the place was literally crawling with student nerds wearing Diggnation t-shirts rattling off top 10 ways of running Ubuntu on the iPhone. These guys knew the ins and outs of every story that had appeared on Digg recently. A girl with a “marry Me, Alex” banner clambered on stage to get a hug from one of the presenters. They discussed the Halo 3 launch, YouTube ads, Amazon’s DRM-free music store, and other top stories from Digg this week (including the “fucked up” account of a boy who survived a two hour flight on the wing of a plane).

Conor O’Neill has these tickets up for grabs for the Web2Expo in Berlin.

This is the deal; the Irish (or Ireland-based) blogger who makes the best suggestion for an original Web Application with an Irish focus will win the tickets.

Well Conor, as much as I’d love to go to Germany for that conference, if I thought up a truly great idea for an Irish web app then I would probably keep it reasonably quiet until I’ve got something started. I would worry that if I publicly announced my great Irish web app idea: “Christy Moore Song Generator”, someone would come along and steal it.

Today, Monster.com have taken one step closer to their goal: becoming responsible for all the spam on the internet. They spammed just about every internet user in Cork (except me, hehehe). Tom Raftery has the details: Monster steals email addresses and spams it@cork membership.

It was not too long ago - 2 months? - that these guys were fighting the most miserable PR battle, as they tried to convince the world that they do care about the integrity of your confidential information (your personal details, your email address). 1.6 million+ people got their names tacked on to some Ukranian guy’s spamlist thanks to Monster’s inadequate security policy. These 1.6 million people are now being contacted by Nigerians peddling phony job opportunities (remember those 419 scams in the Examiner jobs section?) Millions of people trusted Monster.com with their information - not only their home phone number and email address, but practically their entire life story. Their work experience, their strengths, their education history, even their hobbies. Monster make huge profits from selling this information, and in return you get an inbox full of V|agR4 spam.

I’m trying to put myself in Monster.com’s shoes - how would I react to something like this in the media. I can really only see one route: I would change my attitude towards data protection - I would make it my top priority. I would audit my operations, make policy changes wherever necessary and I would launch a campaign to tell the world that we will do our best to protect your privacy. I really cannot understand how Monster’s business development manager in Ireland cannot see this. Not only does he blatantly spam a lot of very vocal people - he thinks he is justified in doing so!

Tom makes an interesting point:

The Irish Data protection Commissioner takes a very dim view of this and has the power to levy fines of up to €3,000 per address spammed (so potentially €570,000 in this case).

It is so rare that anyone is held accountable for breaches of the data protection act. This is such a perfect example with no excuse. Michele reckons this kind of thing can destroy a company’s reputation. Well, a company like Monster doesn’t have much left to destroy. I’d just like to see how the Irish Data Protection Commissioner responds.

Update: Michele has more information here. Digg it.

It’s that time of the year again - time to vote for your buddies in the Net Visionary Awards. The question on everybody’s lips: “How do Jacobs get the fig” “Whom should I vote for in all of those other categories?”. Even the all-knowing Michele is struggling with that one.

As for the “Best Online Banking Service”, Bank of Ireland’s 365 Online is the only one I’ve used and it is not quite painfully bad, so that’s a no-brainer. Congrats, BOI.

In the web designer category, it has to be Darren Murphy, because he’s the only one who links to me on his blog. A close second-place goes to Alan, because I’ve actually seen some of the work he’s done and it’s very good.

The real decision now is, do I randomly select my votes in the other categories, or do I pick the guy with the funniest name? Now who said anything about this being a popularity contest?