The software isn’t finished until the last user is dead.
Anonymous Support Group Member

The first 90 percent of the code accounts for the first 90 percent of the development time…The remaining 10 percent of the code accounts for the other 90 percent of the development time.
Tom Cargill

Why do we never have time to do it right, but always have time to do it over?
Anonymous Code Monkey

Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it.
Brian W. Kernighan

So the iTunes App Store has been out for a little over a month now and we are starting to see some initial sales numbers. The remarkable thing is that some of these numbers are rather, well, remarkable. Let’s look at a couple examples:

1. Tap Tap Tap has posted their (Semi)Final Numbers for July with the juicy takeaway being that their two current iPhone applications brought in $75,177.38, leaving them with $52,815 after Apple’s cut. Simple math here shows that they would be on pace to make $633,780.00 during the next year for just these two applications provided they maintained this pace. Of course, they are already hard at work on their next two applications as detailed in their post here.
2. Mac Rumors has posted that a smaller developer named MintApps is currently making a more modest but still impressive $158 a day from their nutrition application. The significant datapoint here is that this particular application is currently only ranking in around as the 800th most popular application on the App store
3. NeoSeeker reports that overall App sales for Apple are currently raking in $1 million a day.

The really crazy thing is that we are only at the very beginning of the app store. As adoption grows, well you get the picture.

1. Skype, Skype, Skype. If you are going international, get an account and prepay for some phone time. Then buy a portable headset and microphone. Whether you bring a laptop with you or go to Internet cafes, Skype will allow you to make calls for incredibly low rates anywhere you can get an internet connection. For me right now, my cell phone costs 50x what Skype does per minute to call back to the USA.
2. Manage servers? Sign up with Pingdom for active monitoring. You can then rest assured that as long as you aren’t getting emails or SMS messages, your servers are working fine. This is a good idea even if you aren’t traveling, but since you might be checking your voicemail less (or never) if you are on the go, moving more communication to email can be very helpful. This of course requires you to still check email but you might be already planing on doing this anyway.
3. A Nintendo DS can help you pass time on long flights and train rides. But to carry less stuff, get a mod card and put all your games on one cartridge. Only games you already legally own of course (wink wink).
4. On a budget and/or want to meet more people? I recommend exploring the options of couch surfing and staying at youth hostels. In either situation you might end up scoring free wifi as a great bonus.
5. Use online apps to help plan your trip and save money. A great list of the 25 best is located at this geek travel guide

Have a safe and happy trip!

Why Python? Well Google, xckd, and Mark Pilgrim seem to like it. For me, that’s actually good enough right there. And why Twitter? My good friends Shawn Smith and Mike Lambie think it’s a pretty cool service and will probably keep growing. So I figure it’s worth learning the Twitter APIs.

According to Wikipedia, an Internet Bot is a software application that

“performs tasks that are both simple and structurally repetitive, at a much higher rate than would be possible for a human alone”.

The bot we will create today will get a list of all the people a user is following (their “friends”) and then will compute the friends-to-followers ratio of each of those people. Why would you want to do this? Well some people (myself included) feel that a user’s ratio tells you a lot about them. Follow a lot more people than are following you, and you’ll be labeled a spammer. Really interesting people have at least as many people following them as they are following. And some of the best users on twitter maintain a close to 1:1 ratio of friends/followers. So ratio is important, and a bot that can tell us user ratios quickly might be good for other things {insert evil grin here}.

So now that we know what we want to do, we need to figure out how. If you are an experienced programmer you probably know several languages (and maybe you already know Python). You should be able to follow along fairly easily. If this describes you but you’re brand new to Python then I also recommend reading Mark Pilgrim’s book Dive Into Python. It’s available free online and full of Python-to-other-languages comparisons that make the process of learning Python very fast.

If you’re completely new to programming than have no fear, Python is a great first language. In fact, the creator of the language thought it would be useful in high schools as an introduction to programming. A great tutorial list for soon-to-be-programmers is available at the Python website.

In part 2 of this series we’ll get into the meat and potatoes of creating the bot

The most important thing to getting people to use software is to make it easy. Easy isn’t easy, but some companies do a great job of making things easy. The social websites that have done well have done so because they are good at lowering the barrier to entry for people. My grandpa has a Facebook account and I since I never showed him the site I’m not kidding when I say to you that easy is what really matters.

WordPress is some of the easiest web software to install that exists on planet Earth. They have a famous 5 minute install which has worked well for millions of people. But not everyone has web hosting, so they also give a free service for putting up your blog and connecting you with other WordPress users. You don’t have to use it of course (I don’t) but it’s there to continue to make it easy to use WordPress. And remember, it’s all about easy.

Oh and it’s completely free (as in both speech and beer). You can change and add to it all you want if you got mad developer skills. Speaking of changing and adding, WordPress supports plugins which get developed by the open source community. Thousands of them. There are already projects to add social-based features to WordPress. And since the people are WordPress are so smart they have hired a developer for working on this goal. That’s important because for the social features to really get used they have to be built right in. Again, to keep things easy.

In fact, some social features are already being built right into WordPress. Gravatar support is included in version 2.5. For those of you that don’t know what that is, a gravatar is a picture that follows you from blog to blog. So if I comment on a post on your blog running the newest version of WordPress, my picture pops right up. No registration, no select my image for the 8 thousandth time crap. Super easy.

If it’s all done right, every single feature that Facebook offers now could be ported to WordPress. Even a similar apps platform could be made and then - bam - iLike on your site just like that. For an example of this, imagine a world where you your friends can still tag you in their photos with tag links that point right into to your own photo app on your blog. Maybe these applications could even automatically share photos to all people tagged in them so you get your own copy sent to your site every time someone puts up your picture. Plus now everyone can see them without them having to register for Facebook if they don’t feel like it. And if you didn’t want everyone to see them there could still be privacy controls. You control your own content and make is as accessible as you chose. No more walled gardens. Plus everything is a few-clicks-easy… do you see the theme yet?

WordPress can be the social platform of the future. And if it succeeds, we will all have much more control over publishing and using our social content.

Let’s talk about Facebook for a minute (I’ll ignore MySpace for now since it’s basically Facebook’s very ugly and very dumb little bastard brother). Let’s look at both the good and the really stupid. Facebook gives you a way to easily join, and search for friends, and do things with like look at you friend’s pictures and interact using the site. On top of that they build (and let others build) Facebook apps to increase what you can do there. They do it well, but it’s pretty much like every other social site. You join, you put up stuff, and you find your friends and their stuff. Same process over and over.

But the devil is in the details. Facebook is what we call a walled garden. Besides the pain of having to sign up for yet another online account (and remember/update your password, and find your friends, etc) you have limited control over how you interact with the site. Facebook can’t go get your pictures from somewhere else. Facebook can’t talk to MySpace or most other sites. You don’t really control your data. And to top it off, Facebook’s terms of service are ridiculous. I found this out when I tried to build a script to update my status on Adium and Facebook at the same time. It’s messed up.

The truth is, Facebook is basically a middle-man who shows you ads and doesn’t play nice with others. You can’t even see someone’s full profile without registering. That’s ok though. We already have the the ultimate social medium ever created. It’s called the web. And some some very smart people at a very smart company are already hard at work on the problem of helping us tie everything together and understand how websites and accounts and people are all related. Those people also help us search it. And as search and site relationships are better understood, you won’t need to have all your friends on the same social site anymore. Plus, we already have some technologies like OpenID and XFN which are helping solve some of the challenges with the decentralized web.

And ultimately, you should have more control over your content and where it gets sent. They’re your pictures, and you own them period. You can register a domain that only you control for < $10 a year and some people will host you for free if you want them to. Notice I said 'if', since they will also give you their software for free and let you host it anywhere, asking nothing else of you because they are that damn cool. Of course, I'm talking about wordpress.com which uses the best web publishing software ever created which already powers 0.8% of all the pages on the web. And your domain should be the hub in your social wheel from where you send your content to whatever other services you want whenever you want. Your domain should be you and you should be your domain.

The good news is smart people already get this. Matt Mullenweg, one of the developers of WordPress, has already said “It’s clear that the future is social.”

In part 3 of this series we will talk about adoption of WordPress as social platform.

It’s 2008. We are all now spewing information about ourselves in every which way. This is great for sharing our lives online and using the internet as a social medium. The only problem with this is that this system begins to break down more with each additional service that you use. And you have to use multiple services, since you have different friends and audiences on each. You have no choice in the matter. What’s worse, they don’t always often almost-ever play well together. It’s like they don’t even care about you.

Even when there are good tools for brining in content from different services those tools aren’t yet perfect. And the same could be said for tools helping you publish content as well. Things are improving in this area but the lack of features in the tools are only half of the problem.

To illustrate the problem let’s pick 3 services at random which have an overlapping feature. I’ll go with three really popular ones: Facebook, MySpace and Flickr. You probably have accounts on 2 or 3 of these right now as you’re reading this. And if you use them at all, you probably post pictures to them. All three of them let you tag these pictures with additional information like who’s in the picture. When you have new pictures you want to share online, you now have to upload them to all 3 services by individually logging into each service and repeating the process 3 times in a row. What a pain.

That’s totally completely broken and ass-backwards from how things should work. The services should get your pictures from you. You should be able to say “Hey Facebook, here are my pictures, add them to ones you are displaying”. And then if your audience is similar you could then say “Hey MySpace, look in the same place”. Now you update your pictures in only that one place — which is hopefully a place you own since they are YOUR pictures. And it shouldn’t just be pictures, it should be your status updates, you’re shared links, and everything you are publishing online to the same or similar audiences. And believe me, the stuff you publish online is going to increase as the barriers to entry continue to lower. Can someone say YouTube?

In part 2 of this series we will talk about current social networks and why some are full of fail.

Twhirl, everyone’s favorite cross-platform Adobe AIR based client got a public update today with the release of version 0.8. Most notable new feature is added support for FriendFeed. Go download it here.

So first off, FriendFeed is a great service and kudos to all those that have worked hard on it. I’ve been using the service for a little while now and I’ve come to believe there are three features that it really needs to make it into a much more powerful app.

1) Personal Ranking of Users and Content Type

Facebook already has this. When you get your news feed of your friends activity, you can signal a thumbs up (or the equivalent of a thumbs down) and Facebook learns what type of friend activity you are actually interested in. FriendFeed should give you the ability to do this both on a user level (i.e. friends you care about more than others) and on a friend service or content type level (e.g. I like their tweets but not their flickr photos). When it learns what you like, FriendFeed should show those items more often and respectively other items less often or never.

2) Importing of Feeds / Accounts from Users Who Aren’t on FriendFeed

Let me give FriendFeed access to my Twitter account and have it go retrieve and integrate the tweets from all the people I follow on Twitter. It shouldn’t matter if a user has a FriendFeed account or not provided their data is easily accessible. This of course means that FriendFeed will need to be able to associate FriendFeed members with their respective other user accounts on various services, but we each give it that information when we add our shared content and some additional user controls here would also help with this process.

3) Duplicate Reduction / Filtering

I post duplicate content to multiple services (as long as it is relevant to each audience) using Mahalo Share and I know that many other people do too. FriendFeed should be smart enough to hide duplicate or very similar content by default if it appears on multiple shared services within a fixed time period.

You’ll notice that a common theme here is the need for combing and filtering content. There is now so much content being created that tools will have to be built to help separate the signal from the noise. This is an area where Twitter desperately needs some work as well.

Photo by Tracy Olson

I found some great videos today for startups and entrepreneurship. The two speakers don’t always agree on philosophy but both were interesting. Both videos took place at Startup School 08

The first one is from 37signals’ David Heinemeier Hansson and is called The Secret to Making Money Online

The second is from Google’s David Lawee and is called My 2 Cents on Entrepreneurship

These videos use the Omnisio video platform, which I hadn’t seen before and which is absolutely wonderful. Quick note: You might want to turn off the comments in the first video using the controls on the right side, they seem to be on by default.