Musings on Business and Tech

About a year ago, my friend and colleague Michael McWatters tweeted, “Oh no, if I die at this moment, my last tweet will have been about Andrew Breitbart…must think of something else. Beauty, science, altruism!” I replied, “@mmcwatters That would be an interesting site to make: the last tweets of famous people.”

In the weeks and months that ensued, we made good on our promise and built the site, which Michael brilliantly named, “The Tweet Hereafter.”  As our lives become increasingly transparent on sites like Twitter and Facebook, we leave indelible marks on the Internet that can’t be erased once we die.

In March, 2012, conservative blowhard Andrew Breitbart famously sent an apologetic tweet less than an hour before he died of a heart attack. And now, a little less than a year later, beloved Olympian Oscar Pistorius has been arrested on suspicion of murdering his girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp, who just yesterday tweeted excitedly about her plans for Valentine’s Day.

We’ve been collecting tweets like this for over a year and have finally decided to publicize the site. The site is certainly morbid, sometimes interesting, quite often meaningless. But we hope it makes you think a little bit.

A recent episode of the Planet Money podcast profiled Thomas Peterffy, one of the first people to experiment and be successful with high-frequency trading. They told the story of how he was doing algorithmic trading before any of the stock exchanges supported electronic trading, and before NASDAQ even existed. So how did he do it? That’s the fascinating part.

He made his money building a system that was able to assign a fair market price to stock options. He then compared these values to what the options were actually trading for, and arbitraged the difference. Back in the late 1970s when he first started, he would print out the numbers and bring them to the trading floor in a huge binder. When the stock exchange banned him from bringing the binder, he stuffed the papers into every pocket his suit had.

Then Peterffy got himself a system called Quotron, a computerized service that delivered stock prices to brokers (it was a replacement for the widely-used ticker tape system). If he’d used the system the way it was intended, he would’ve read the quotes as they came in on the Quotron, manually input them into his algorithm, run the numbers, and cashed in. But that wouldn’t have been that much better than just using ticker tape, and the fact that he had a computerized system meant the data was in there somewhere, in digital form. If he could figure out how to retrieve it he could pipe it into his system and save a crucial, time-consuming step.

Nowadays if we wanted to do something similar, we might look into whether the Quotron had an API, and if it did we’d query that for the information. If it didn’t have an API, well, we might look for another system that did.

But Quotron had no such ability. So he did what any hacker worth his salt would do. He broke out his oscilloscope, cut the wires on the Quotron, reverse-engineered the data signal, and patched it into his system. And you think screen-scraping is hard?

When NASDAQ, the first all-electronic stock exchange, came online, he was faced with a similar system. Brokers could trade directly on the exchange via computer. This was no doubt a huge breakthrough, but there was still no way his system could make the trades automatically. So, again, he busted out his oscilloscope and patched his way into NASDAQ.

Eventually the folks at NASDAQ caught wind of this, visited him at his office, and reminded him that his terms of use dictated that trades must be made via keyboard input, not by splicing into the data feed. They gave him a week to comply with the terms. So what did Peterffy do? He built a robot to type the trades out on the keyboard. Of course he did. When the NASDAQ official returned a week later, all he could do was stand agape, in awe of what Peterffy had done.

We developers could learn from Peterffy. The ease of software engineering has made most of us too complacent. When Twitter’s API terms change, we complain about it for a few days, and then change our business models to suit the new rules. But the real innovation, the real interesting stuff, the way we’ll make $5.4 billion like Peterffy did, is by bending the rules and building systems that give us a leg up on the competition, or, better yet, improve people’s lives.

To be sure there are lots of hackers on the fringes of legality doing very interesting things, but the rest of us are somehow content to toe the line. We shouldn’t do anything that’s illegal, but we should get close. Innovation comes out of spurning the status quo, not complying with it. It’s time for people who know how to build things to bend the rules a little, and see what comes out the other side.

(The podcast was based on Peterffy’s story as told in the book Automate This: How Algorithms Came to Rule Our World.)

How often have you been on a site where you see an address but no map, and maybe not even a link to a map? I find this very annoying, so I created a little bookmarklet that solves the problem. To you use it, just highlight an address on a page and click the bookmarklet. You’ll be taken directly to Google Maps for that address. Easy enough.

Here’s the bookmarklet. To install it, just drag it up to your bookmarks bar!

Map It

On September 11, 2001, my wife and I were woken at about 9:00 by her mother, who told us to turn on CNN. We were newlyweds, living in a studio apartment on the Lower East Side. As soon as we saw the burning towers on TV, we left our apartment and headed down to the street.

Looking southwest from Grand and Henry, we had a direct view of the World Trade Center. We stood for a while and watched in shared horror as the towers burned, and then fell. Apparently, I had my camera with me and was taking pictures–a fact that the enormity of the events had erased from my memory.

But I recently found the pictures I took that day, buried in a box in my house, and seeing them again took my breath away. Here they are, for posterity. (Click on any image to get the full-sized scan.)

One of the hardest things for any software designer to do is to decide not to implement a feature. Many software projects have been delayed or even derailed by feature creep, or the tendency to widen the scope of a project during development. But in many cases, features that seem like “must-haves” during development can be deferred to later phases of development, or cut completely.

Perhaps the paradigmatic example of this is the original iPhone OS’s lack of cut, copy and paste. How could Apple have omitted such vital features? It didn’t seem to hurt sales of the iPhone though.

Today I just ran into another example, also from Apple. In Xcode, you can switch from a header file to its corresponding implementation file (and back) using the keyboard shortcut Command-Control-Arrow (any arrow). This is a really nice way of navigating back and forth while you’re creating new instance variables and methods for your classes. However, when you navigate in this way, the project browser at the left doesn’t update its highlight to indicate that you’re viewing a different file. Is this a bug? Probably not. It’s probably just the designers of Xcode deciding to rein in feature creep so that they can actually ship the product.

It’s so damn tempting to want to make sure every little bug is fixed and every little corner case is accounted for before you release your software. But, as they say, perfect is the enemy of the good. It’s crucial to know when something is good enough so you can ship it as soon as possible. With cut, copy, and paste, Apple finally introduced the feature into its third version of the iPhone’s operating system. By then they had already sold millions of phones to customers who decided they could live without that crucial feature.

Yesterday Apple’s market cap topped $500 billion. Staggering. Only 19 countries in the world have a bigger GDP than Apple’s market cap, possibly soon to be only 18:

I woke up today to this provocative article in The Guardian about how graphic designers are ruining the web. Naughton’s main argument seems to be that graphic design adds unnecessary bulk to websites, wasting bandwidth. Naughton is absolutely right that page sizes have increased over the last two decades of the web’s existence. He is also right that this is a problem.

However, he describes the problem as a “waste of bandwidth.” Last I checked, “bandwidth” is an infinite resource (unless maybe you extrapolate bandwidth to barrels of oil). The bigger problem is that more elements on a page (and bigger individual elements) will slow down page load times and potentially be frustrating for the user. If Naughton is saying that people who make websites should work to reduce the number and size of the elements on their pages, I completely agree.

But it does not then follow that websites also need to be ugly (he uses Norvig.com as an example of an underdesigned site that is compelling for its content if not its look and feel). Highly-designed websites need not be bulky. Just because the BBC News page sends 165 resources on every request to its homepage, doesn’t mean all designed sites do. NPR.org is a lean and  mean website, requiring roughly 50% fewer requests than the BBC News. Yet I would say it offers a bit more of a user-friendly way to access information than Norvig’s site.

And we could improve things even more than that. We can combine and minify JavaScript and CSS files. We can reduce the number and sizes of images on each page. Many requests on big sites like these are to 3rd party tracking pixels and JavaScripts. How about we agree to pay for the services and content we use on the web so we don’t have to deal with all this bullshit marketing crap? Graphic Design is not the cause of all this bulk. Increased user access to bandwidth and marketers are more to blame.

I’ll agree that some underdesigned sites are excellent because they are underdesigned: Craigslist.org and (the original) Google.com. But if Apple has taught us anything over the past decade, it is that things can be designed without being complicated and bulky. And that is the direction I’d like to see the web going in. That way we get to have our cake and eat it too.

Related articles

• Graphic designers are ruining the web (guardian.co.uk)

My friend Michael McWatters tweeted his frustration today that there is no way change your Twitter password on their mobile site. I’ve butted up against this issue in the past, and the fact that you can’t even switch between the mobile and full site on their is immensely annoying (in fact, there isn’t even a footer on the site!).

With smartphone penetration growing ever higher, it’s increasingly important for companies not just to build mobile sites, but to build them well. Mobile sites can no longer play second fiddle to their desktop brethren. Over the past few months I’ve become increasingly sensitive to, and bugged by, the degree to which so many mobile sites are so badly implemented. With that in mind, here are my 5 “worst” practices of the mobile web.

1. Don’t give users the choice of using the full site – not letting users choose to use the full site on their mobile device is presumptuous at best, and crippling at worst. Just because the screen is small doesn’t mean you don’t want to be able to access all of a site’s features in a pinch. On the iPhone anyway, browsing a full website is often very tolerable and should at least be an option for users. This is related to #2, which is…
2. Don’t cripple your mobile site – while it may be true than on a dumb phone you likely do not need or want to access all of a site’s features on the go, on a smartphone you often do. A mobile site no longer needs to be a list of the 10 most visited pages on a site. Let’s start building mobile sites that allow access to some more advanced features like changing your password.
3. Show an interstitial ad for your mobile app – have you ever clicked on a link on your phone only to be brought to an interstitial ad for a site’s mobile app, instead of the article you were trying to read? And of those times, how many times have you gone immediately to download the app instead of just closing out the ad and trying to read the article you were interested in?
4. Don’t redirect from your mobile domain to the full site on a desktop browser – many sites with mobile domains will redirect you to it using browser detection. But many of those do not do the reverse redirect (i.e., visiting the mobile site on a desktop browser doesn’t redirect back to the full version). Being forced to view a mobile site on a desktop browser is torture.
5. Redirect to your mobile domain, but not the specific page – all this redirecting has its place, but it’s so easy to get it wrong. On many occasions I have clicked on a link on my phone, gotten redirected to a mobile domain, and instead of it going to the article I was trying to read, I get placed on the homepage of the mobile site. So frustrating!

The mobile web is certainly in its infancy, but that’s no excuse for giving users such broken experiences. It’s 2011 and it’s imperative now that mobile sites are just as beautiful, simple, and elegant as the devices used to navigate them. If you have to choose between offering a mobile site that suffers from any of the worst practices listed above, and having no mobile site at all, choose the latter.

In my role as a business analyst at a software development shop I see a lot of technical writing, much of it terrible. For some reason, people whose job it is to be precise and logical often fail to do so when the language of expression is English, rather than Java. While the problems in technical writing are varied, the offense I most often see is overuse of the passive voice.

For those who don’t remember their junior high school grammar, passive voice is a grammatical construct in which the object of a sentence is repositioned as its subject. “Tom throws the ball” is active voice, while “The ball is thrown by Tom” is passive. The use of passive voice in itself is not grammatically incorrect, but it often weakens the clarity of the writing by obscuring who or what is doing the action in the sentence.

Technical writing is a veritable breeding ground for passive voice proliferation, in many cases because the actors in technical writing are not tangible. The actors are software code, or systems, or networks. My phone today popped up an alert that said, “The server cannot be reached.” Who exactly is the one not reaching the server? Is it the phone? Is it the app I was running? Is it me?

But just as a writer would avoid passive voice in “normal” English prose, so too should a technical writer avoid it in his work. Phrasing technical ideas in the passive voice dampens the agency of the thing doing the action, making it seem unfamiliar and disembodied. Technology does things. To render technology in the passive voice is to distort its power to create change.

This is especially evident when technical writing refers to error conditions, as in the case of the alert above. It’s almost as if the authors of the software were deflecting blame away from themselves with the message, “The server cannot be reached.” They could just as easily have said, “It’s not our fault that you can’t access this page. Talk to the dudes who run the server.” (People in IT love to blame the other guy, but that’s a story for a different post.)

It’s never that difficult to clean up language like this in one’s technical writing, but it often requires ascribing some degree of agency to to the technology. Instead of “The server cannot be reached,” one could write it as, “The application failed to reach the server,” or, “The application failed to connect to the server.” If English had a better indefinite subject pronoun, we could even write something like, “One cannot reach the server at this time.”

There are any number of solutions to the problem of passive voice in technical writing. The main thing is to be aware of the easy pitfall, and to think about technology more as an agent of change than as some hidden force behind the things we observe.

My family and I haven’t watched “TV” in weeks. Granted, we don’t have cable (we use rabbit ears and a digital-to-analog converter box), but that’s not really the reason we haven’t been watching. The real reason is that Netflix instant streaming has changed our lives.

With the sheer volume of quality content that Netflix has (as well as other online video sites like Hulu), we are now at the point where we don’t really need to watch actual television. We are getting close to a point I like to call “TV Zero.”

By “TV Zero,” I don’t mean turning off all your screens and moving to Montana. I simply mean disconnecting from television as we know it (scheduled programs grouped into broadcast networks). I truly believe that, no matter how much the cable companies and networks drag their feet over the next few years, it’s just a matter of time before all programming formerly available on cable or over-the-air broadcast will be available on the internet. The experience is so much better.

For one thing, video over the internet is truly demand-based. I can watch any episode I want, at any time I want. For another thing, finding content is far easier, and has far more potential, than the current model that cable tv uses. Netflix can recommend shows I may never have heard of, based on what it already knows about my consumption habits. The array of content available is also more vast–services like Netflix can offer back catalogs of content providers with much lower incremental cost than, say, a cable company. In fact if you think about it, it’s kind of shocking that after 15 years of the “commercial internet” we’re still only in the early stages of this.

And then there’s all the recent buzz about Apple making a “smart tv.” If the rumors are true (and I believe they are , for the good reasons outlined here), the acceleration of our culture toward “TV zero” could increase tremendously. The potential for disruption and innovation in this space is huge, and in my opinion inevitable, and there’s no company in a better position to lead this change than Apple. But if Apple won’t do it, then someone else will. (Amazon? Google?)

One thing is certain, though: the cable companies will not go down without a lot of kicking and screaming. Unless someone in their ranks realizes the inevitability of this change, and figures out a way to profit madly from it.

Related articles

• Where Is The U.S. Watching Online Video & How Often? [Infographic] (searchenginewatch.com)
• Legal this time? Startup offers local TV on the ‘Net, with a twist (arstechnica.com)
• Will streaming TV online lead to the death of the big media players? (guardian.co.uk)
• How To Cut The Cable And Watch TV Without A Monthly Fee (lockergnome.com)
• Cord Cutting Will Slow, But Continue to Grow (gigaom.com)