Second Brain – All Your Content

Got a story on Digg

I was browsing early morning yesterday and noticed a reference to iPoor  - the iPhone Killer in one of my many feeds. I thought it was quite funny decided to digg it from the link on the page. I was then taken to the submit story pattern on digg - meaning that no one had submitted it before. Pretty cool, I thought and went through the submission process. Pretty soon I had five diggs, then I went to bed. When I woke up the next morning, the story had 222 diggs and 45 comments - one of them referring to the story having reached the front page.

I learned a few things from this:
(1) Apple and iPhone stories have great appeal on digg.com
(2) Most diggs came at night, GMT, meaning that it is the US audience that dominates the community
(3) Many comments were on the quality of the story - not everyone thought it was any good
(4) Some people claimed the whole story about the iPoor was digg bait since it referenced Kevin Rose (one of the founders of digg.com

I wonder who I can get a story about Second Brain on digg when we are ready to launch - and should it be a serious piece or a funny thing? I'll probably go for the former and hope somebody writes a good review that someone else will submit to digg. It probably won't look any good if it came from me...

The Change Function

I just skimmed through one of the many business books I have ordered the past weeks. I tend to order almost every book I get recommended on some of the blogs that i follow - and several of these have stacked up on my desk.

But, let's get to the point. The Change Function: Why Some Technologies Take Off and Others Crash and Burn has a few simple ideas that one should get from it. It preaches the user oriented view of product development and marketing that is so popular now. He proposes that technologist have been focusing too much on delivering revolutionary technologies (Grove's law) and expecting the resulting products to be adopted as soon as the price is low enough (Moore's law). This view has justified several expensive and failed product launches according to the author, Pip Coburn.

His advice is to focus on the Change Function. It suggests that customers change habits and adopt new technology only if the pain of their current situation is greater than their total perceived pain of making the switch to the proposed solution for their pain. Following this, the advice is to make products that solve customers' pains (of course), don't try to revolutionize everything, give customers familiar reference points that compares the new stuff to what they're already familiar with. This should increase the adoption rate of the technology and hopefully get it over the 12,5% market share where social pressures kick in. Another good advise is to never do major releases, instead involve your users, and make frequent iterations with smaller, evolutionary improvements.

Top 15 According to Techcrunch

Michael Arrington at Techcrunch just updated his very subjective list of "Web 2.0 Companies I Couldn’t Live Without". Compared to the 2006 list, there are a few changes - most notably perhaps the exit of del.icio.us and the entry of bluedot.us. There are a few other changes of course. My general impression is that there are a wide spectrum of web-based tools on the list. Many of which are quite traditional and used for communication, e.g. Gmail and Skype, and a few that are used for creating and consuming content, e.g. YouTube and Bluedot. I would have expected that there would be more of the latter type, but I guess we'll see more of that on next year's list.

Stolen laptop

When Bartlomiej, our very dedicated Flash Developer, arrived at his flat on Saturday evening, he prepared some coffee for his evening shift and sat down at his desk, only to find that the balcony door was open and the window broken. Next, he noticed there was no computer at his desk - it was stolen, somebody had broken into his apartment.

About five days of normal + overtime work was lost. And this close to the release date, this is very precious time. Today, he is reporting the lost items with the police. We just have to hope he is able to restore some of his lost files and make it for Friday. But most importantly, nobody were hurt, and nothing really irreplaceable was stolen (but time).

The first Second Brain Baby

Bergsvein and his wife Irene, had a baby last Friday at 23:30. The boy weighed 3984 grams and was 52 centimeters long - quite big - for being so small;). Still waiting for the pictures though. We wish him and his family all the best, and hope they enjoy the week together.

But at the same time, Bergsvein is the technical architect and manager on the team, so we hope it doesn't take too long before he is back at work. We have a deadline you know, baby or not...;)

Making Words at Making Waves

Check out the guys (and myself) at Making Waves. They have just created their first blog called Making Words (only in Norwegian unfortunately).The name plays at our company name, of course, and it jused to be an e-mail newsletter that I edited for a couple of years. I'm very happy to see that we're upgrading it to a blog.

As any new stuff on the web right now, it is a beta project. We'll keep the URL "secret" for a while as we start posting and adding content. The goal is to get all the people that work at Making Waves to participate and write about stuff they care about. We think it will become a good resource for sharing knowledge with our customers and ourselves, to show what we do and think about, from a more personal and less corporate viewpoint.

If it works, and people start publishing, we'll link to it from the front-page of makingwaves.com and use it as an extention of our regular corporate web-site. I think it will be an interesting and valuable resource for Making Waves, and a great marketing tool as well.