I Just Make Things Work.

Hi! My Name is Horia Dragomir.

Charge From Day One

if you plan to one day sell you product, you'd better make it day one

That's the conclusion I came to after a brief chat with Eric Ries.

Even if you offer a free version, you need to have some sort of premium, paid version. You need to get your users accustomed to the idea that your product, in its full form, costs money.

Last.fm had a lot of trouble with this. At first, you could listen to online radio for free and you could pay for a subscription to get more control over the radio, get more tracks, etc. Most people used the free version because, well, people don't want to pay. Then, the people at last.fm decided that they need more revenue, so the lowered the subscription cost, and made it so that you can only listen to radio stations if you have a subscription. At first, this almost killed them. They pulled some voodoo quickly and now they're still around.

Mr. Unfollowr is a twitter bot that sends you a direct message when somebody unfollows you. It's a great tool and about 37k people are using it. Obviously, everything was free in the beginning. However, the developer is now trying to earn some cash off his nice invention. The thing goes like this: you make a one-time donation ( even $5 ) to the dev and you get DMs the instant somebody unfollows you. Well, almost instantly. Those who don't make a donation, they have to wait, sometimes even a couple of days, until they get notified. I think that's pretty fair.

The problem is that only 15 people have made a donation so far, and only $96 have been raised. That's a very small conversion rate ( 0.04054% ).
And that is because people were used to getting it for free.

Also, I think the fact that there are alternatives out there ( to both services ) makes a big difference ( in both cases ).

You need to make your users aware that you're going to charge!

Do PHP Devs Like Windows?

But I don't think that's really telling us much. PHP quickly became one of the most popular programming languages.
Especially for newcomers. Especially for people with poor programming training.

There are two reasons for this:
  1. Market demand. Everybody wants a website and, since most host run PHP on Apache, well, you do the math.
  2. Huge community. By community, I don't mean just stackoverflow.com, I mean the ton of tutorials and snippets and examples ( that get copy+pasted right into production ) and what have you that is available to each coding monkey.

Sadly, this means that most PHP developers aren't really developers. At least, not right from the start. They're people that like to latch on, going for the easiest and most convenient solution without questioning.

While easy and convenient is generally good, not questioning things means you tend to go with the flow. People who follow the herd find safety in numbers. So, naturally, they choose a Windows box because it's still the most widespread OS, it's user friendly, and there are a lot of people that can help you if you get into trouble.

Plus, most companies I've seen have Windows powered machines in their office. And let's not forget that Macs are pricey and Linux is damn hard.

So yes, most PHP developers do use Windows, but not necessarily by choice.
It's because Windows is the most accessible low hanging fruit.

Still, Windows won by a small margin.

Buzz

Right now, Google has rolled out Buzz to most of its users.

Some people love it, some people hate it and some people are not sure what to make of it.
I've played with it some, and I am sold. Not to what it can do right now, although that's already pretty neat, but sold to what it can become.

That said, here are some things I think you should know.

  • You can use most of the Gmail keyboard shortcuts to navigate, reply, mute and so forth.
    Win!
  • You find out exactly how many people were actually following you on Google Reader.
    Win! + pleasant surprise
  • Its mobile interface is well thought out for the iPhone. I see a big place for Buzz in the future of LBS.
    Win!
  • It makes for a lot of emails generated by comments on other buzzes.
    fail
  • You can filter out those messages: Create Filter, Has The Words "label: buzz", Skip Inbox, Apply Label "Buzzes" (Optional).
    Win!
  • I was already spending too much time in my inbox. fail
  • You can use gTalk like formatting, like *bold* for bold.
    *Win!*
  • People are now paying more attention to their Google Profiles.
    Win!
  • I've followed and been followed by a lot of nice and interesting people.
    Personal Win!

Do take it for a spin, as it's not meant to replace or compete with Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and the like. Merely to aggregate and complete them.

All in all, it's a great new service!

Facebook Dislike

That's right! The new Digsby Alpha enables users to dislike posts made on Facebook.

The positive noise effect that's been poisoning us all can now be countered by this.
Because before, you only had a Like option, you'd either get no feedback or just get positive feedback on whatever you posted. Quite seldom did people actually tell you "That's crap!"

While that may do wonders to egos, it impedes actual, meaningful feedback. Not that Facebook would be the best way to convey it, but it's a step in the right direction, making people aware that not everything they post is golden.

I actually like it better when people tell me what they don't like about me, rather than what they love about me. I think that helped me learn a lot.
Maybe it would do others some good too.

Flash on the Apples

Ever since the iPhone landed, people have been going on and on about how they want Flash support.

Stupid!

Even if, by some miracle, you would get Flash support you would still have to redo all the apps you were dreaming of running.
Flash apps are built for the desktop. For huge screens! Not a tiny iPhone screen.

Apps would have to be refactored. Mostly re-written. And since you're not able to reuse what you already have, since you can't just copy a file and have it work, why bother? All the functionalities you could get with Flash you already have, native, in the iPhone. And its SDK is brilliant.

The only reason would be that you don't want to spend time learning something new. Like how to build a native app.
In this case, you need to get your ass out of IT now!

Actually, if Flash came to the iPhone and iPad and iPod, the first things you'd see would be ads! Because they're already the right size.

Stupid!

The Good Old College Feeling

 

I went by the University today.
It was nice to see eighty people in a room, with almost eighty laptops lit in front of them, all writing furiously for an exam.

I was nice to finish early, as I always do, and enjoy a smoke in the cloister next to the amphitheatre.

The best part, though, came when we were defending our projects.
A smaller room, full of nerds. An array of languages, from Java, to Ruby, to PHP, to Actionscript, all consuming popular or obscure APIs or playing with sockets, all bundled up in little apps and services, with a touch of shine on top.
That, for me, was bliss.

If you're using something other than IE, you can check out what I made at http://hdragomir.com/follows