How can we induce users to participate more in our website?
For sure a lot of people have this question in their minds. Since the arrival of the Web 2.0 the value of a web is based on its users and the content they create. The more quantity and quality of the user’s created content, the more value of the website.

The first step is to simplify the UI as much as possible, to help users overcome their laziness and participate. The state of art includes clever AJAX tools, browser plugins, and desktop applications. In some websites they go one step further, and reward somehow the most valuable users, like the stackoverflow.com’s badges (a website for programmers), where you get medals for doing things (like “silver medal for good answer”: voted up 25 times).

But what about the quality of the content?
If you help users to add content, that doesn’t mean you will have a great content, just a lot of content. In some cases you can finish with a website flooded by low quality content (read “Facebook”). This is not a bad thing per se, as happens on quite a lot of TV channels: despite their low quality, people continue watching them. But seems that specific (or thematic) websites have better quality than generic websites (this also works on TV channels). Just compare the ratio interesting-content / total-content in Flickr vs. Facebook : of course you can find some bad pictures on Flickr, but meanwhile you can find tons of uninteresting content on Facebook. On Flickr you are somehow induced to publish only good pictures, on Facebook you are just tempted to publish a lot.

So, the balance between quantity vs. quality rules the net as it does in other places. The thing is, as website creator, find the most profitable ratio (regarding personal satisfaction and/or monetary ROI).

Lately I’ve been thinking about resurrecting an old pet project, a website for creating and playing games. Is that specific group (the gamers) enough to pay the bills or just to pay some caprices? Is the “create game” part too specific, or just what I need to make the difference? How could I work effectively on this project while keeping my day job?… too sunny to think!

Sometime ago I decided to arrange my free time during the week (mostly evenings) with my hobbies and things to learn. I set each week day with an activity, like Monday for climbing, Tuesday for composing, etc… It doesn’t really work. The problem is that you have to wait a full week to do the activity again, so you lose the focus. And if you miss the day for some external reason, the problem is worse. Moreover, this method only allow you to have 7 different things to do, and if you change one, you have to remember the change…

So I had an idea: a single subject for each full week. On Sundays, in a relaxed way, I can decide the subject for the new week. And it’s not a problem if one day I can’t do it, because the idea is to try to focus on that subject as many days as you can, during that week. For example, this week subject is “Learn Blender“… so far so good, despite I’ve just spend 2 hours fixing a bug in this website (that is, something not-related to Blender).

For the future, some examples of subjects I have in mind:
- Refresh my C++ programming, maybe take part in a contest, or read some open source code (i.e. Inkscape code).
- Compose 8 songs, based on the I Ching’s 8 trigrams.
- Explore all the menus of Inkscape.
- Do something with my first bought domain, www.novelda.org.
- Help a friend to create a website for displaying Hex game records.
…

In my last Amazon parcel I got the book with the largest name I know: “The New Complete Book of Self-Sufficiency: The Classic Guide for Realists and Dreamers“. It’s really amusing! It shows you all kind of farm related techniques, from sowing plants to building gates, from butchering a cow to installing wind mills. Moreover the illustrations are beautiful and useful at the same time. But the most interesting part for me, apart from the plant related stuff, is the lessons of philosophy that it contains. Let me quote some pseudo-random sentences:

(about sowing tomatoes)

The most luxurious tomatoes I ever saw growing were on the overspill of a sewage works, which leads one to think that it would be better to eat the seed before we plant it.

(about grapes)

I grew ninety outdoor vines there and got plenty of grapes. The pheasants ate all grapes but I ate all pheasants, so that was all right.

(his dry toilet)

The flush toilet is one of the greatest sins of modern man. (…) It is a remarkably expensive way to pollute fresh drinking water, while at the same time wasting the very nutrients that are essential to maintain fertility in the soil. One pull of the lever and the waste becomes somebody else’s problem.

(about clothes)

(During the 1992 Rio Earth Summit) we saw the citizens’ groups from all over the planet wearing ethnic clothing, or cheap T-shirts and shorts, whilst the government delegations and the like wore smart suits and ties. Of course they could only do this in their own artificial world of air-conditioned hotels, cars, and conference centres. Out in the tropical heat of Brazil, the suit and tie are about as sensible as wearing an Aran sweater in a sauna. The suit and tie have, of course, become the uniform of the merchants of greed.

Some of our modern behaviours are totally against nature. But the worst part is that people don’t realize it, or think that doing ecological stuff is totally uncomfortable. If you have never travelled to a poor country, or to a out-of-civilization place, you will never understand how difficult and costly are some things that you consume or directly spoil in your urban life. Anyway, if speaking about modern life is just too boring for you, at least do this: plant a tree, and look at it everyday… this will change your mind.

Reading a so so article about brain improvement and the excellent book “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat“, I mixed up some ideas, until arrived to this one: try to focus on only one sense each day of the week. Of course you always have all senses in “active” mode, but the idea is to spend some minutes feeling “twice” with one of them, noticing the details it gives you: patterns, contrasts, sensations, etc.

Mon - Propioception
Tue - Touch
Wed - Balance
Thu - Vision
Fri - Smell
Sat - Taste
Sun - Hearing

Isn’t this a good idea?

Here you have my new super-greenhouse!
130×120x50cm

Material needed:
- 130×90cm 5mm glass
- 2.5m wood stick (x2)
- 2×1m polystyrene-glass surface
- 100ml of water resistant paint

Lessons learned:
- Julio, stop thinking about building things!
- Pine tree wood is not convenient for outdoor, despite is the cheapest wood. They say teakwood is perfect (or other wood from wet jungle trees). Anyway, I made it with the first one, and painted it with a special water resistant paint.
- Cutting real glass is not as easy as you see in youtube videos. First I tried to cut glass to make the wall, but the result was quite ugly. So then I bought plastic glass (2×1m for 40€, cheaper than real glass).
- In order to cut polystyrene-glass you need to adjust your electric saw at top speed. At low speed the fiber starts to oscillate and breaks easily. At high speed the cut is sealed after the saw moves on, due to the heat!, but later you can hit the join and split the parts.

By the way, compare it with my last year prehistoric balcony greenhouse.

In my previous post I criticized Facebook (”Fb”) quite a lot. But at the end it does some good stuff, like the “keep in touch with your people” thing, a decent content aggregator and a way to publish (or share) things like personal mood or thoughts, links, images, etc. But if you distill some of these good parts of Facebook, and improve them, you get FriendFeed (”ff”).

FriendFeed is a content aggregator which is far more complete than the one in Facebook (compare just the numbers: on Fb there are 13 possible sources to aggregate from, and 57 in ff). Actually Fb aggregator is quite bad, because some sources are not updated, and you need a 3rd part app to do so. ff has also a way to share links, images and such, and it’s really impressive (just add its Bookmarklet in your bookmarks bar and see its power). Moreover you get the usual “publish what are you doing”, “like it” and “make a comment” actions.

But the most pleasant thing I found is that it is a real Web 2.0 site. You add content, everybody see it, and there is RSS. Try to search for RSS in Facebook, find nothing. You can even get a widget (as you see on the right column, if you are visiting www.liopic.com). The groups (called “rooms”) are meaningfulness, with current people interested in the subject of the room.

Anyway there are 2 things that I miss from Fb that I’d like to see in ff. First is “events”, a way to invite people to an event and mark dates (despite there are complete websites that do just so). Second is “amount of people”… but this is a question of time: first time I entered in Facebook nobody was there, a year later a lot of people signed up. Let’s hope same thing will happen in FriendFeed.

So, see you there.

Have you ever feel how fast the time goes by when you do some channel surfing on TV? “I spend 2 hours in front of the TV, changing from one channel to another, and finally I’ve not seen anything at all”. I had this thought of “wasted time” while surfing on Facebook recently.

Fb, the origins
I logged in on Facebook some months ago, but I didn’t understand the meaning of the website at first. I came from social websites that focus on one thing, like Flickr (pictures) or Last.fm (music listened), so it was a bit weird to see a social website which end is the social relation itself, without a “theme”. Moreover the only friends you are supposed to have there (and to let them see your profile) are just the friends you currently have in Real Life, so basically Facebook aims to be a copy of Real Life society. So don’t expect new friends, just expect to see what your current Real Life friends are doing… but basically you can do so with other methods, like IM. I mean, when I use Internet, I don’t expect to see a mirror of Real Life, I expect to see different things, improved things… or just surf Wikipedia.

Fb, closed to foreigners
Another surprising thing is that your profile is private, a random net user can’t see it, unless he is your friend. This “closed” philosophy as default annoyed me. It could make sense, to keep your data from public. But coming from websites where you add content, mostly public (like photos in Flickr), and let the world see your stuff, this philosophy is at least paranoiac. Of course you can mark pictures as private in Flickr, and you can open your Facebook profile to everybody, but how many people do so? How many know how to do so? The default settings are the ones that show the website philosophy.

Fb, the false sense of security
Despite it claims for keeping your stuff away from foreign eyes, there are a lot of back-doors to overpass the private settings. The easiest one is just see Mr.X friends list, and look for one with open/visible profile, let’s say Ms.Y… then you can see pictures tagged with Ms. Y, even from the Mr.X picture sets… finally you get full access to Mr.X pictures. Another way is creating an application, using Facebook API: when somebody uses your fancy app, you can get FULL access to all his data, and can (for example) save it in your personal server. So you only need to create a small test app (”How freak are you?”) to harvest a lot of private data.

Fb, trying to create content
Of course in a social website without theme there will be less content created, and user will come back less often. Therefore Facebook staff have to help people to produce content, in order to induce other people to revisite the web often. One way is acting as an “aggregator” (gets content from other web2.0 places, like Flickr or del.icio.us, and publish again in user’s page). Other is creating an API to create applications. 3rd part developers come to create apps, salivating by the amount of possible users for their apps, and Facebook is happy to see more stuff in his system. I created a couple of Facebook apps and I can claim that their API is a torture. Basically they don’t let you use libraries, like jQuery, so you are forced to write old style code. Later you discover you can ignore it and create an iframe for your app… so that means your app is not a real Facebook app, just a nice Facebook frame that borders you website in your personal server.

Fb, a waste of time
So, I can guess that the 80~90% of produced or pseudo-produced content in your profile (or friends profile) is low quality. Do you really need to know that your old friend from school Harry loves chocolate? Nah!

Of course Facebook has good things: the content aggregator and a way to publish things neither short nor long in a fast way… but for such things you can use a better website, like Friendfeed.

The economic meltdown seems to encourage new ideas to blossom up, making classical product borders less noticeable. I’m focusing on hardware technological products today, but this probably applies to all kind of products, even financial ones.

I’m going to show you a couple of interesting examples I saw in the last few days:
- Open Pandora, “Handheld Linux Console” : Some years ago somebody had the brilliant idea of creating a really small laptop, without a real old-style hard disk, and called it “net-books” (referring to notebooks + net support). Then we had PDA, net-books, and normal laptops. My small laptop (12″ screen) is still a laptop, but when I bought a Nokia 770 (theorically “Internet Tablet”, actually a PDA with Linux) it was just difficult to answer “what is it?” to not tech people. And now I’ve fallen in love with this “strong-PDA-like with keyboard in a Nintendo-DS structure made for playing games but which actually is a complete net-book with Linux”. Damn, I’ll need to memorize this description.
- OP-1 synthesizer and controller : In the old times, you hadn’t a lot of options to look for when thinking about creating electronic music. Basically a synthesizer. Then Yamaha created the Tenori-On. And now I stared my eyes on this toy synthesizer, with FM radio and sequencer, created by designers. I can’t set a category for this, except the obvious “I Want One”.

Moreover one detail to think about this products is that there isn’t a big traditional company behind them. A synthesizer created by a group of designers? Sounds weird, but those mixes of disciplines are the future. Also it’s interesting to read about OpenPandora history. A guy annoyed with a Korean idea, another guy, Texas Instruments looking for a machine to test its new chip…

“Tell me, I’ll forget
Show me, I’ll remember
Involve me, I’ll understand”
- Chinese proverb

Some weeks ago I borrowed a baduk (Go in Korean) book from my Go teacher. It’s part of a collection of books by Lee Chang Ho (이창호), written in Korean, so I can just understand the diagrams. Luckily this book speaks about life and death, so it’s not difficult to follow. It shows L&D in a way I’ve not seen in English books on this matter. Shows a shape, and starts doing subtle variations (a extra liberty here and there) and surprisingly the way to solve all those similar problems are quite different. Which helps you to think, to calculate the position, to avoid storing the shape in your memory and forgetting about the details.

So, in order to copy some of these interesting problems before I give back the book, I decided to add them to goproblems.com… Enjoy them!

In my previous work I enjoyed when some coworkers tried “visual things” using a webcamera and a soft to recognize hands, fingers and such. This morning I saw a video with the last research on the field… impressive:

Link to the video

Which technology will win in the input world? Cameras or multi-touch screens?