Bounceideas

1. Learning SQL. Less tricky than previously anticipated. May yet hire a programmer to do the PHP. For info, my resources:

• XAMPP Lite which gave me:
  • Apache – local server (http://localhost/)
  • PHP – I know it works because my PHP scripts work
  • PHPMyAdmin – interface that makes database stuff a little easier
• PHP & MYSQL Web Development – bought off one-time IT student, now colleague
• W3Schools – excellent start point. Also taught me all about HTML and CSS some years back
• Google – if in doubt, Google it.  Frequently, first result is MySQL.com
• Notepad++ – I examined various development environments but settled for the simplicity and familiarity of Notepad++

2. Discovered a beautifully designed bulletin board called designateonline.com that, somehow, appeared to be lifting my ideas:

But a quick search on The Way Back Machine revealed that their work pre-dates mine.  Their website looked like this in August 06, well before bounceideas.com was online:

Incidentally, try putting Google into the Way Back Machine for a fascinating insight into their origins.

1. Alex got “stuck with debugging”  and so we have agreed to cancel the contract. On negotiation of the contract, I was keen for him to build the application from scratch.  He persuaded me that the quicker approach was to modify an existing application (e.g. phpBB). No longer am I persuaded: for a non-standard application whose functional design is yet to be worked out, I believe that it is better to trade  the security and robustness inherited from an existing application for the speed and flexibility of a lightweight proprietary application.

2. Hiring non-local programmers (through sites like Scriptlance) to do non-standard jobs, so far, has not proved effective. I will still use Scriptlance but will be more inclined to hire local, and therefore more expensive, programmers – you can knock on their door.

1. 08 April 09.  2 days before deadline.  3 days after I had asked for progress update.  Was preparing to draw the line but, yet again, a convincing excuse from Alex.  And then another.  And then another.  And then silence.  I cannot attribute this to bad luck anymore.  It is more likely that he has lost interest.

2. Found this article (below) about voting systems. I am interested in this because I suspect that the fairness of the application’s voting system will be key to its utility.

What can electoral systems learn from fine wine competitions and ITV’s Dancing on Ice? According to new research from the École Polytechnique in Paris, the answer is nothing less than the holy grail of democracy: a voting system that always picks the right candidates. It has long been axiomatic that there’s no such thing as an entirely fair voting system in a world where tactical voting means that the most popular candidates can still fail to win. According to professors Michel Balinski and Rida Laraki, however, the technique known as “majority voting”—as perfected by oenophile deliberations and sports with judging panels—offers a method for fairly picking the overall favourite every time.

The whole point of majority voting is that participants don’t vote in the old-fashioned sense: they simply evaluate candidates by grading them. For wine—a substance with remarkable analogies to politics—the seven gradations are Excellent, Very Good, Good, Passable, Inadequate, Mediocre and Bad. Every wine in a competition is rated by every voter, and its overall rank is then calculated. Had this system been applied to the 2000 US presidential elections, those voters who thought Ralph Nader was Very Good would still have been able to rate Gore as, say, Passable while dismissing Bush as Bad—and Gore would almost certainly have won. Who but the French could have worked out that wine and dancing are the keys to global justice?

The article was published by Prospect Magazine, Diary, April 2009.  Article title: Dancing on Ice: the future of democracy.  A related lecture on voting in London School of Economics (LSE) has been recorded as podcast on LSE website. I tracked down a short summary of how different voting systems work and the original paper (English version).

1. Alex missed another deadline and then, on cancellation of project, resurfaced.  He provided a convincing reason and so I decided to trust him.  He now has until 11th April.

2. I am concerned that the changes in the last version of the design were too big.  I think that I have given Alex indigestion.  Lesson here is to keep the changes small and manageable.

1. Alex began building Version 3 on 8th Feb; it took a while to explain the differences between Version 2 and Version 3.  We agreed a fixed price of $400.  He was supposed to deliver by 1st March 09 but illness has interupted progress.

2. Google releases Latitude which enables people to be tracked by their mobile phone signal.  May have a bearing on future design.

1. The month was spent trading emails with Alex.  It was a painstaking process.  We settled on this development approach:

• modify an existing CMS (e.g. phpBB) – no point writing code if it already exists
• develop a ‘media module’ (API) to isolate the application logic from the CMS – can update CMS without rewriting whole application
• design custom template (i.e. HTML/CSS) – appearance is not constrained by CMS template
• create ‘modules’ for each feature – development steps are well defined

2. Watched an interesting TED lecture which, I think, relates to this application.

1. In review, I released first version of Look2Look in March 2006.  It flopped.  Put it down to poor appearance, mainly. Spent from August 2007 to June 2008 trying to make the application more compelling by experimenting with the way it looks, its pitch and the way it works.  Not achieved. Some consolation from seeing 6 (ish) other websites attempt the same thing over the same period but, apparently, without success. The conclusion I must draw is that this particular use of the search-on-search technique (i.e. two people looking for each other) is a lame duck however you cut it.

2. Final design for this month looked like this:

Right at the start of the month, Nick got in touch. I showed him what I’d done…

He said:

I personally think the layout is far too simplistic, I suppose its important to balance between usability and unique design, although I do think you are on the right lines. Need a hand with the design at all?

This blue one was greeted by Mark Osgood, a colleague, with a flat and emphatic, “it’s worse”.

3. Spotted a new competitor:

1. Matt’s disappeared for a while due to illness.

2. Had very helpful input from colleagues, mainly Chris Hocking.  Stripped out lot of features as a result. This month’s experiments (having trouble letting it go):

1. Here is the latest design attempt.  It feels ‘elegant’ and colleagues who have seen it like it.

Good points:

• Lots of white-space
• Centred on the screen but flexible width
• Feels like a serious ‘tool’ – not a gimmick (inspiration from Google and Craigslist)
• Minimum use of colour by employing an ‘eyefeed’.   Putting primary (mainly) colours in a prominent place (top) on the page seems to satisfy the eye and thus lets me get away with extremely simple styling through the rest of the page.  I think Google’s logo enables Google to employ the same trick
• Using a lot of browser defaults
• Only uses one column and mostly uses browser defaults, therefore, will render well on broader range of browsers and load to wireless devices quicker

Bad points:

• The title color of ‘visited hyperlink’ clashes with the eyefeed
• The logo at the bottom clashes with the eyefeed
• The list of searches look bad without a strong left margin
• The links do not all operate in the same way (Chris Hocking’s observation)

2. Phil Shanks (colleague) spotted new competitor called findmyship.com:

Emailed the owner and, much to my surprise, got a reply.  Owner was Brendan based in Dublin.  Good bloke.  He said the site had been up for a year already but he has only just started to market it.  Here are some of the things he said:

On what he is doing right now:

“Yup this is my baby, although there are more bodies getting involved in particular around the marketing side, and we’re about to do a tech upgrade, providing I can justify the spend. (To date it’s just been a ’spare time’ project really).”

On his previous experience:

“Really though it’s an experimental ‘toe in the water’ thing. I’ve been a keen follower of the social networking trend for years. We tried launching an online dating site around 8 years ago back here, but were beaten to the punch and pulled back.”

I am not the only one who thought there was a market:

“Since then I’ve just watched all these social sites grow and felt there was a market for a product like ours.”

Where he got the idea:

“For me it was a girl I met in a taxi rank at 3am on a Saturday morning. We got on famously, really clicked, but she was so suddenly whisked away by her friends who pulled up in another cab. We had that, “ooh what now” moment but everything went so quick that no contact info was shared and the ship sailed on!! I went back and said to myself, ‘ok, how do I find this person again?’ but obviously couldn’t. “

How he is marketing it:

“I’ll keep you posted on our progress, but really everything about what we’re doing now is in around the marketing area and specifically around viral marketing campaigns. The Metro link was a result of an email blitz on a range of radio station and magazine emails based in Ireland and the UK. I wasn’t expecting anything to come out of it but it popped up on the radar in a couple of places which is all we want really. We’ve also been doing some local late night flyer and card hand out advertising which has generated some interest too.”

My kick off was Shepherd’s Bush.  His is Dublin:

“I agree with you completely on the local issue too. Our initial concentration is on Dublin, and specifically key venue locations within Dublin. The biggest threat is the ‘run out of marketing steam/budget’ issue too I think. We need that user base to really kick off any type of advertising revenue in the longer term.”

The problem of ‘critical mass’:

“In talking with friends and family I realised that this was so much more common than I originally thought, and the concept of findmyship was born. I mean in theory, like your site, it’s a great idea, but depends ENTIRELY on the brand being a common, household name! If everyone knew that such a site existed and what its primary purpose was then I’d have no doubt such a site would be a raging success. Educate the masses!”

On motivation:

“At the moment it’s all just a labour of love, albeit a strange warped and perverted love!”

It is remarkably rewarding to have met someone who is under apparently similar circumstances, has had similar experiences, drawn similar conclusions and made similar decisions.  Good luck Brendan.

3. Hoping I can rekindle Matt’s enthusiasm by moving onto the groups application but, in case this does not work, I am looking for local developers.

First attempt was a guy (Alex Tingle) who had developed a WordPress plug-in and, I discovered from his website, lived locally.

Second, I attended phpLondon event on Alex Tingle’s advice. I demonstrated the product to two programmers I met there.  They thought it was cool but were not in a position to help with development.  Then met programmer who was local, avaialble and apparently capable.  His price was £30 per hour.  Useful benchmark.

Sidenote, Nick got back in touch offering to work on style/design for free in exchange for future profit share. Nice offer and nice to know that someone else still has faith in this whole enterprise.

1. Tricky month for development. Matt was elusive due to other commitments. I had to start analyzing my programming options again. What can I do to pick up the pace?

2. The site has been up for three months. I have not generated interest with online advertising. I am beginning to sense that it is time to let go of Look2Look and to turn focus onto the ‘groups application’. Last time we tried figuring out the groups application, we got stuck. I have done some more thinking and I may have cracked the problem. No details yet. As a research exercise, I studied Google Groups. It does pretty much everything I had hoped my groups application would do which leaves me wondering whether there is anything that I can add.

3. Meanwhile, my quest for the perfect pitch and design hasn’t quite dissipated yet:

4. Latest functonal changes:

The idea is to attach a discussion thread to each search. Up to this point, a discussion thread is only created when one user contacts another and is ‘private’ because only the two participants can see it. I saw that online classified advertising sites like Gumtree had public discussion threads linked to each search and thought a similar arrangement for Look2Look would make the application more compelling.

I also noted that Gumtree ads enabled the ad owner to write a personal message or expound upon the basic listing. I thought this feature on Look2Look might help make the application more compelling. Matt and I had difference of opinion about execution but resolved by end of month.

We got rid of a module that listed the latest chats by, instead, re-ordering the contacts in the Contacts module by activity (most recent at the top of the list).

We have struggled with how to persuade the new user to sign up to the application. Previously, our method was to ‘talk them into it’. Again, taking my cue from Gumtree, I thought a better way would be to make the application immediately interesting by enabling new users to see and search for searches without having to log in first. Initially, our concern was that this would undermine the point of the application – which was to record what people searched for – because people could search and leave no trace. However, I felt that there would still be a strong incentive to log in if the search facility on the logged outside was much less powerful than the facility on the inside. In other words, we had ‘quick search’ on the outside and the full cross-matching and filtering form on the inside – which saved your searches.

1. Development slow.  Matt does not see where the project is going.

2. I am still figuring out how to get users. I still believe the key lies in how it looks. What is the look that I am after?  I discussed this with a colleague (Lee) who has graphic design background. We concluded that, because the application was somewhere between a search engine and an online social network, it should give the impression of an ‘online social network that feels like a search engine’.  Like me, he thinks that achieving a design that communicates this will make or break the site. Below are some screenshots of my design attempts for this month.  This one attempts to mimic Google’s page layout:

Discovered that dropping title cases and some punctuation greatly improved the application’s appearance.

3. Advertising online in order to encourage someone to sign up. No luck so far.

Realised that I can have ‘midwife pages’. A user coming from, say Gumtree, lands on a ‘midwife page’ that pitches the application, specifically, to Gumtree users.  It could only be accessed from a link on the Gumtree site.

4. The Subject Matter Application was due to expire. Had to decided whether to pursue the patent process or drop it altogether.  Short history of advice:

Dec 2006 – bunch of PWC executives said ‘patent your idea’.

Mar 2007 – submit preliminary application which establishes priority.

Aug 2007 – bright technical bloke says ‘there’s nothing new in your idea’.

Feb 2008 – bright strategy consultant says ‘without the prospect of real revenue, even if the patent was valid, its worthless’.

I wrote to Keltie (my patent agents) asking them to confirm the costs of going ahead with the patent process.  Here are some excerpts from their reply:

“Drafting costs of approximately GBP 9,000 (excluding VAT).”

“PCT filing costs of approximately GBP 3,000 (excluding VAT).”

“Filing of a US application from the PCT will be largely the same as a direct filing and will be approximately GBP 3,000 to GBP 4,000 including our service charge and our US associates fees, together with the official fees.”

“Unfortunately, it is not usually the case that patents go straight through to grant, and so it is very unlikely that no further costs would be involved.”

“Typically, each round of examination will cost approximately GBP 500 (for a very simple response) to GBP 4,000 (for a very complicated response incurring our time-based charges and a local US agent’s charges for reviewing and filing the response).”

“Typically, costs of GBP 1500 to GBP 2000 are not unusual for responding to a US Office Action, and one or two rounds of examination are not uncommon.”

“If you have not disclosed your concept, you may feel that it would be preferential to withdraw and re-file the UK application at minimal cost. However, if you have disclosed your concept out of confidence this option is not advisable.”

Matt thought £20K (rough total) was ‘insane’.  Piers (strategy consultant) pointed out that the USA awards patents to ‘first-to-invent’ which means my original Subject Matter Application, with it’s early submission date, still counts as useful evidence in the USA.  Michelle (Keltie) felt there had been insufficient public disclosure to void the patent and so I decided to re-file for approximately £400 – which gives me another year’s grace.

1. Someone pointed out that “all applications look dreadful without users or content”.  Didn’t stop me trying…

2. I opened a Twitter account out of curiosity yesterday.  Good name, good design but Twitter is a success because it is instantly rewarding (like any other blog) and novel (currently, nobody else offers the ability to publish by text). Good article about the founder and its foundation from a December edition of the Economist magazine:

I was looking at Gumtree’s ‘sponsored links’ with a view to advertising there and discovered a new competitor:

1. The product and pitch are still not good enough yet.  Despite this we are back online for the second time. Was using 2 column layout to accommodate inline help but was unhappy with it because I do not like using floats (reduces browser and small screen compatibility). Tried various ways to make it look more appealing. I want to use browser defaults as much as possible but this limits what I can do. Taking inspiration from Craigslist, Google and Wikipedia.

Maybe I need to show the site is ‘alive’. Could do this by showing something topical –  for example, winter photos in winter time or usage statistics.

Read some interesting stuff about web design in Mind (Scientific American).  Web-designers have 10 seconds for their homepage to snare user,  sentences need to be very short – no paragraphs and, if you want people to pay more attention, make something harder to read.

1. This month, tried adding photos.  Will that do the trick?

Or maybe bold primary colours is the answer.

2. Invented an alternative name to search-on-search: ‘reciprocal search’.  Is a reference to ‘indirect reciprocity’ or ‘reciprocal altruism’. Google search (below) suggests the term exists but not much literature.

1. My best design effort was reviewed at the end of the month by a trusted friend. She thought it looked ‘rubbish’. Her advice, as an accomplished business woman, was to not release now.

2. Guardian article, ‘Social networking sites don’t deepen friendships‘.  This is very interesting. I suspect that an application that got more out of your friendships would be more valuable than an application that got you more friends.

1. I have run out of money. Dropped Nick (design), kept Matt (programming). Matt is getting busier with other customers.

2. Have bought Mootka.com because it sounds more ambiguous than Look2Look and so more can be done with it.

3. Now I am doing the day job and learning how to do the design work myself. This involves reminding myself about HTML and learning CSS. Here is my first design using CSS:

4. Facebook has invited external developers to build their own add-ons. I do not know what this means for Look2Look.  Does it present an opportunity or has it killed Look2Look?  A friend, Christopher, wondered why anyone would use Look2Look given the success of Facebook. I met a Facebook founder (Matt Cohler) last year and his opinion of my application was that it was a ‘feature’ of an application, not an application of itself.  But becoming a Facebook add-on feels like a bit of a come down.

5. Spotted another competitor called Kizmeet. Variation on the technique: