All posts by ajohnson

Links: 9-26-2010

Your vs. My Pattern – Design Pattern Library – YDN
We chose "Your Stuff" back in 2006 for Clearspace based on gut feel, looks like we did it right.
(categories: ui interface socialsoftware )

Rules to live by « Scott Berkun
Seventeen in total, #1-6 = You must not dilly-dally. You must be your word. You must have good intentions. You must admit to being the maker of meaning. You must not feel sorry for yourself. You must have a vision that you are striving for.
(categories: life culture motivation creativity )
Yelp Engineering Blog: Yelp Makes Beer More Fun
Awesome work by the yelp engineering team.
(categories: yelp culture beer engineering )
SaneBox
Remember when the Internet was shiny and new,
every piece of mail in your inbox was important,
and getting on a plane didn’t involve a cavity search That is the world of SaneBox
(categories: email socialsoftware startups inbox )

Washington, We Have a Problem | Politics | Vanity Fair
Quote: "…Durable achievement demands a long time horizon—something that the country as a whole seems to have lost. We can’t wait for the carrots to grow—we keep pulling them up to see how they’re doing."
(categories: culture speed strategy focus gtd )

The 9X Email Problem
In most companies, groupware didn’t solve the problem; it wasn’t that much better than email. … But that’s not really the critical consideration. The critical consideration is brutally simple: are these tools 9 times better than email for collaboration?
Consider how high this sets the bar. Email is freeform, multimedia (especially with attachments), WYSIWYG, easy to learn and use, platform independent, social, and friendly to mouse-clickers and keyboard-shortcutters alike. It’s the ultimate example of what Dion Hinchcliffe calls a ‘comfort app‘ (a phrase I love, and plan to steal (with attribution) shamelessly). It would actually be a pretty tough competitor even if it weren’t the universally-used incumbent, and so the beneficiary of the 9X problem. In short, it’s not going anywhere.
(categories: email socialsoftware activitystreams ui ux )

Buzz Kill : LOL: The Life of Leo
Quote: "It makes me feel like everything I’ve posted over the past four years on Twitter, Jaiku, Friendfeed, Plurk, Pownce, and, yes, Google Buzz, has been an immense waste of time. I was shouting into a vast echo chamber where no one could hear me because they were too busy shouting themselves. All this time I’ve been pumping content into the void like some chatterbox Onan. How humiliating. How demoralizing."
(categories: socialsoftware twitter )

Scaling startups
Wow.
(categories: culture risk engineering entrepreneurship startup speed )
inessential.com: Flexibility and power
Quote: "I don’t expect we’ll make software that looks and feels like iOS apps (we shouldn’t), but I do expect we’ll learn from iOS apps how power is the real goal, and that flexibility is just a tool to use exceedingly sparingly, only when it substantially increases power."
(categories: ux customization design )
What Happened to Yahoo
(categories: leadership culture entrepreneurship engineering )