Steve Sanderson

I had an interesting discussion with Kelly Looney today regarding positioning. Based on his experience, (as I interpret it )positioning starts with identifying and sharing a world-view and then describing what you do (of benefit), in the context of that world-view.

For me, it seems an interesting pattern to use to compose a simple pitch of an idea (e.g. for a startup). So, here’s some attempts to try that pattern out:

(worldview) Desktop apps and Web-based apps will co-exist for the foreseeable future. The web-based application market is strong + beyond conventional desktop browser access, access continues to improve (e.g. iPhone and other mobile web devices). At the same time, there is a resurgence in elegant desktop applications for the Mac - and their ease of use and aesthetics are unbeatable. Right now, it’s a frequent forced commitment to choose (for a particular function) between working on the desktop or in the clouds. The longer this goes on, the more important it will be to banish that artificial choice - and allow both transparently.

(benefit) We build productivity applications that transparently offer the best for your use regardless of whether your are on a Mac or via the web - we take care of making everything work together.

(worldview) There are often repeated patterns (e.g of activity, thought, etc.) that occur across many disciplines. Recognition and sharing of those patterns will have some unknown and unexpected benefits.

(benefit) We have developed an open community system where patterns are documented, explained, discussed, organized and connected to actual uses in the real world.

Nice.

I think that my recent purchase of the iPhone has tipped the balance in quandry I’ve had.

It goes something like this: I’ve wanted a better tool to manage my professional relationships (something I’ve been thinking of as a personal CRM). As a result, I’ve been looking for what Mac apps fill that niche - and there are some nice candidates (e.g. Contactizer, Daylite, even Crm4Mac). At the same time, I see web-based solutions as well (and here’s the ‘in the clouds’ part), such as Highrise, Etelos, even a customized SugarCRM.

Unfortunately, none of these has the right set of features - which would have closed the deal and locked me in (either as a source of recurring revenue for the SaaS solutions or as a grateful customer for a Mac app)

At the same time, it’s itched my concern about whether to committee further ‘down’ into my local box with a Mac app or ‘up’ into the clouds with a web app.

All that leads to this - now that I’ve used my iPhone for a few days, and I’m successful at doing some of my basic tasks on it (e.g. reading blogs, web pages, email) it’s tipped the balance ‘up ot the clouds’. In other words, with no clear feature leader, I will make a solution work that’s an SaaS so that I can use it on my iPhone whereever and when ever I want.

Seperately, I’ll blog about what I really want in a Personal CRM.

So if vertical social networks become popular, then the horizontal problem becomes intestering, e.g. how to manage one identity across multiple services. OpenID provides authentication, but nothing beyond that. What about profile data ala Google’s form-fill?

How? Consider this - if an OpenID enabled set of tools existed to extend OpenId so that when you registered, a plugin (ala greasemonkey) would run to take your OpenID related profile data and place it into the registration.

It would require a community of trusted “registration plugins” to be created that used your augmented OpenID data.

Big or Bullshit: Vertical Social Networks

So I’ve made the plunge and bought an iPhone. Half the joy is in using such a beautifully designed product - every aspect of the experience shows so much thought. I can only add my kudos, and continue to be frustrated at how low the standards are for so many products.

So in the physical world, there’s tremendous constraints placed on a system by existing infrastructure. It defines and limits what can be done without significant extra resources expended - which means cost, complexity, risk, etc.

In a recent issue of Wired, there’s an article about how a new city in China is being designed with what amounts to a well thought out infrastructure optimized towards energy use

It’s an interesting contrast between that approach and the agile software approach of evolving the infrastructure (and the approach to infrastructure that’s true for most cities as well). Of course, the infrastructure in software is much more malleable than the physical infrastructure of a city - yet there are still great costs and challenges with evolving software infrastructure.

Why haven’t we figured out how to make this easier?

Thanks to Julie, we had a great Excite.com reunion party last night at her house. Ostensibly, it was to celebrate an old Excite comrade (Kuntay) coming to Austin to work (at least for a little while) - and it was a great reason for many of us to get back together.

I have to say, after many years - it may be corny (but not surprising to those who know me), that I still fell privileged to have worked with such a great group of people who all shared a common purpose. For many of us, the world-changing potential of online community (now known as social media) was not just a j o b - but meant something personal.

I’ve been fortunate to work with some of those folks since then, as well as to help create similarly rewarding groups as well. I hope that continues.

Ok - so maybe it’s a sign of just how much a shiny-gadget-geek I am, but I love what’s possible with MacFuse (and MacFusion). For example, I have an existing website (at omnis.com) that doesn’t have a ssh account, so the only way to deploy / work on what’s there is via FTP. So when I need to work on it, I have to use FTP to push & pull code & data, but I don’t do it that often - so I’d have to right FTP client to do bulk transfer was a pain, etc. So now, turn on ftpfs via MacFuse and woila (as my 4 yr old says) - there’s the shooting match. Now, it’s an easy matter to bring it all back down locally, put in SVN (as it should have been years ago) and re-deploy to my new account at dreamhost.

No new functionality, just a greater ease of use - esp. since my muscle memory knows how to use either shell or finder interfaces to work with files.

There seems to be more and more instances of platforms appearing which raise the level at which people can create, manipulate and share rich content in a rich context.

Sophie appears to be another interesting entry, in addition to Croquet and the etoys work in Squeak.

Great idea - how to get TV shows, not how to see a bunch of randomly named bittorrent files. Another “so obvious after I saw it” moment. http://tvshows.sourceforge.net/
(thanks to The Unofficial Apple Weblog http://www.tuaw.com/2007/04/16/tv-shows-automatic-torrent-finder/)