Software Development

• More code, more problems.
• Code. Money. Respect.
• Code war is the new cold war.
• The programer-designer is the philosopher-king or our time.
• Give a man a fish and he’ll eat for a day. Teach a man to gold farm and he’ll eat for a lifetime.

Team Leadership

• When the world is flat and information freely available there is a premium on creativity.
• There is no such thing as free lunch, especially if it’s lobster.
• Give a silicon valley startup founder a lemon and he’ll make a social networking site for people that like lemonade.

Product Placement

• I hope Twitter doesn’t become the next MySpace.
• There is no i in Apple.
• Google is buying Motorola for $12.5 Billion. Google is also developing a autonomous car, so in a few years it might buy Ford.
• It’s not Thanksgiving, so why did Google pay so much for a moto turkey?
• AT&T charges for services you use and most importantly for services you don’t, and they sell you out to the feds on top of that.
• I know that many G+ users are still in the early adopter stages of denial, but honestly, Google does not know how to do social right.

Quote

• Money is a terrible master but an excellent servant. – P.T. Barnum
• Wall Street is now a huge mathematical game of chess where individual companies are just pawns. – Mark Cuban
• Search is dead. What people want is an answer. … You don’t need Trip Advisor, you don’t need Yelp. – @Jason, #TWiST 171

Questions

• Got Woot?
• You think Papa Murphy’s is related to Papa John’s?
• Has Flash lost it’s fizzle?
• If G+ was spun out of Google as an independent company it would be valued at $50 billion.
• What company will be around in 25 years, Apple, Zynga, Facebook, Google, eBay, Microsoft, …???
• Now they are making movies in 4D… What is next, 7D?
• If this is your third startup, are you really still a starting up?
• I just want to know, why are those birds so angry?

Randumb

• When life gives you bullshit, make lemonade.
• Untangling headphones in the dark.
• Current Status: somewhere between FML and IDGAFF.
• Zoned out from being on the zone for so long.
• The future is retro.
• Don’t trust your shit to chance.
• MTV has as much expertise to produce MTV’s Music Awards as the History Channel’s has to produce Ancient Aliens.
• It’s ironic how many people misuse the word irony.
• Even though I haven’t gone back to school for a while now, I can’t resist a good Back To School sale!
• I tired of Shark Week. When will they have Turtle Week or Salamander Week?
• If Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles were to be created now they would have been known as Angry Turtles.
• Total Retargeting
• Shift+Happens

Google Plus does innovate on a few areas where Facebook has lagged and dragged it’s feet, such as in the concept of circles. That said, Google Plus is largely a clone+ of Facebook, which is a derivative of whatever social trend we’ve seen in the last five years. Depending on how you count, Google Plus is Google’s fourth attempt at this social networking thing. The current trend in social networking sites is that anonymity is to be banned. Facebook was the first social network to demand users use their real and legal names in their profiles and Google Plus has followed this trend.

Since Google Plus is the newest social networking site to see an exponential growth, it is now going through some growing pains in the way Google is policing the community. There have been a large number of reports of Google banning and disabling Google Plus profiles that don’t use “real names.”

The worst part, for those whose accounts have been locked out, is that there is no customer support, no due process, and not even a G+ profile to contact if your Google account is disabled or banned our right. If your Google account is disabled you may be locked out of GMail, Google Docs, and other Google products you may use, which might be have years of data.

The natural progression of these policies is that in the near future people will need to show their government issued identification card, passport, DNA sample, work history and resume, retinal scan, and perhaps a Google history scan to use Google Plus or similar social network. I can appreciate that Google wants to encourage people to use their real names, but there are so many instances beyond their automated algorithmic logic that people use nicknames, pen names, aliases, alternative spellings, stage names, witness protection name, and more. Is Google Plus going to force Jon Stewart to use his birth name? What about Lady Gaga? What about Dear Abby? Larry Brin uses the short form for Lawrence, is that okay? And don’t get me started with folks that are known by their initials or by their profession title such as Dr. Dre.

So why is Google, and Facebook for that matter, so against anonymity? It’s all about the data. The more data Google has on each user, the better they can serve ads targeting them. Google Plus is a user data collection service as much as it is a social network. Google Plus gives Google a new platform to collect even more data that it can then sell, trade, and use to target ads. Currently, most of Google’s ads work on the intent of the user. The more Google knows about the people in your circles, their name, age, background, location, work history, interests, trends, and communication patterns it can easily develop social ads that target you and your inner most circle members.

This whole debate is a red herring, the real issue is about the identifying data that Google is collecting on each profile.  There are already a large number of third parties that are forming a “fourth bureau” of sorts that collects any and every piece of information such as if you pay a phone bill on time or if you spend 6 hours in the middle of the day playing FarmVille.

There are assumptions built in in every input field and user control element in software. Common assumptions baked in the User Interface of applications is that your users live in the United States, that they have a zip code or a telephone of a certain pattern. I’ve seen problems with file upload mechanisms when users try to upload a 500 MB PDF document and the server crashes, or when a user tries to enter 10,000 character comment and the database truncates 90% of it.

Facebook and Twitter have learned how to hedge users behavior that could lead to problems with limitations. Twitter best exemplifies this by the 140 character limit of each status update and the 2000 limit on the number each twitter account can follow. The 2000 follower limit can be increased but only when at least that many people follow you back. Facebook has a similar hard coded number of friends you can have.

The less assumptions you built into the software, the easier to use it will be. But as you remove assumptions, consider having caps, limits, and restrictions in case you start to have scaling issues.

Google's Home Page

Just like Microsoft, Google uses thousands of data points from users online usage from web crawlers, social media, ad networks, analytics, clickstream, retweets, likes, trends, and other methods. Google uses a lot of different data points to improve their search results, not just crawling from a href to a href. Google has tracking information on users, from every side of the click. Google often has and collects information when a user clicks a link on its search result page and on the visited page (if that site uses any of Google products such as Analytics or Adsense). Google is sitting pretty collecting data from every angle, because it has the market share to do so and tells competitors “No Soup for You.” The orchestrated “synthetic” outrage from Google and associated Bing sting borders into monopolistic behavior.

Is using Twitter’s firehose cheating? In a black and white world, were using calculators in a test is considered cheating, then using Twitter’s firehose is cheating. If using Twitter’s firehose is considered cheating, then Google cheats too.

Software Development

• If rhythm is a dancer, then algorithm is a break dancer.
• If you were a Java language reserve word what word would you be? I would be volatile!
• I get personally insulted when I am prompted to prove my humanness with a captcha. It makes me wanna bust a cap-tcha on some webdeveloper!!!
• Is there group think in the development community? Yes, but we build patterns around group think and call it Best Practices.

Team Leadership

• Change your perspective and you can change the world.
• If you don’t have an original idea you can remix existing ideas in original ways!
• Go hard, go home, go big. Pick two.
• If a web site’s end users are not paying customers, then the end users are the product that web site then sell to their advertisers.
• Why do people compensate their inability to communicate with the belief that others just know what they mean, you know what I mean?
• Hype is the food of lemmings.
• The plan was to have no plan, the backup plan was to leave the backup plan at home.
• Most people are natural born followers, it’s human nature.
• The toughest competition doesn’t always come from a competitor trying to build a clone of your product but from market shift in the industry

Product Placement

• In terms of hardware, mobile, and even operating systems Microsoft is anywhere between 3-5 years behind the leader.
• Startups age really fast in Internet time, by my calculation Digg is already and Old Media Company.
• Like what percent of Tumblr’s posts are reblogs and reposts?
• I want JJ Abrams to do a movie about do a remake of The Muppets in an alternate time line like he did for Star Trek.
• I want an iPhone that transforms into an iPad when I need a bigger screen.
• Google is an advertising company with great search technology. Facebook is a virtual share cropping company with great social technology.
• Who collects more personal data and knows more about a given user, Facebook or Google?
• Apple should add a few filters to their iPhone camera app.

Mini Meme Machine

• Scotty and Christopher Walken Mashup: Captain, I’m giving her all’s she got.  She needs more cowbell.
• You know who would be great in a reality television show? A prison gang! Imagine, Real World San Quentin.
• r-EPO, the performance-enhancing drug of champions!
• Monetize common sense because people don’t have it.
• I want to trademark the & char so that I could file a trademark infringement to all law firms with names of the form Dumb Dumber & Dumbest.
• The best part of a bagel is the creme cheese.
• My all time historical hero is Johannes Kepler.
• Your life comes with terms of service, batteries not included, void where prohibited.
• In Silicon Valley, everyone drinks the kool-aid but using bottled artisan water from a 10,000 year old glacier.
• In Silicon Valley, everyone is more interested in their piece of the pie than in the recipe of success.

Quote

• I didn’t mean for it to be released so quickly because I wanted to control peoples’ being offended by it. – Mark Zuckerberg
• I think people might be slightly offended but whatever, maybe there’s a way to control that. – Mark Zuckerberg
• Quitting while you are ahead is not the same thing as quitting. – American Gangster
• Living at home with your parents is a very powerful contraception. – David Willetts
• We should start a new social media web 2.0 holiday: Friend, Fan, and Follower Appreciation Day!!!

In the computer world, Bill Gates will always be remembered for Windows and the blue screen of death. Now that he has moved his attention to education and health care such as vaccines, a blue screen of death in these fields will can really cause someone dying.

If your enemies enemies are your friends, then it is to Microsoft’s interest to see Facebook get into the search space. It makes sense that Microsoft would pay a ridiculous amount of money for the tiniest fraction of Facebook just to see Facebook’s value go through the roof and branch into search, ads, mobile, etc.

I just started noticing people I follow on Twitter start using a new service to take and share their pictures taken from a mobile device. There are already a ton of other services such as Twitpic, Facebook, Flickr, Mobile Me, etc. I consider myself an early adopter, but I think there is a new category of adopter, the “I’ll try everything adopter.” There is a bunch of folks that suffer from the New and Shiny Syndrome where they must try every single new product or service they hear about. They all rave how much better that new product is on Facebook and Twitter for a week and then the herd moves on to the next new and shiny thing.

Every year there are a few companies that everybody wants to work for. It has been reported in many news outlet that there is a micro-brain drain at Google as engineers are migrating to Facebook. Zynga has also seen a tremendous growth and has been attracting talented developers, designers, and engineers. Both Facebook and Zynga are already large establish companies. If you are looking for the next breakout company I think you should look into Second Market. Second Market is building a marketplace for employee stock to private companies, Second Market is building a new market and perhaps a new industry. Second Market is has the potential to eventual be at a level to create or move markets.

Microsoft is anywhere between 5-10 years behind current market leaders in social, search, mobile, internet television, digital music, etc. They only consumer technology that they have a leg up on the competition is gaming with its XBox console system. As Microsoft keeps missing each industry boat in the consumer space, Microsoft more and more starts to resemble a company that only sells to large companies. For example, it took Microsoft a long time to get the security in Windows OS right (from XP to Vista to Windows 7) and all along the missed the mobile as a platform.

Twitter and Facebook need to come out with a year-end zeitgist for 2010. Google has been releasing zeitgists for each year since 2001, see the Google Zeitgist Archives. From Twitter I want to know what event was the most tweeted about, what was the hottest trending topic for the year, and a graph of the number of tweets throughout the year. From Facebook I want to know how many likes does it take to reach the center of a Tootsie Roll Pop, who do they sell private personal data to the most, if they fixed the broken fence that let out all those sad malnourished cows.

Facemash, A website created by Zuckerberg prior to Facebook, was a clone of Hot-Or-Not specifically for Harvard students. But using his trademark of abusively, forcefully, and willfully opting user into options that they would not otherwise choose, Facebook used unauthorized pictures of Harvard students to seed his Facemash site.

Mark Zuckerberg’s true genius is that he has no ethics, in a another dimension or another time he could have easily been a Nigerian scammer or a Russian spammer. It is clear, from previous settled lawsuits and poorly planned privacy controls, Mark Zuckerberg can easily backstab a former founder and throw under the bus his whole user base.

Because Mark Zuckerberg has a skewed moral compass and as allegations of his character have been settled in court, it’s clear that it’s as easy for him to cheat a partner, hack into users accounts, sell out his users, obfuscate privacy settings, copy features, as it is for him to throw out code and re-execute on an idea. This is what Mark Zuckerberg is great at, to throw out a feature or code and try again and again and again even if users complain about backward compatibility, loss of privacy, excessive rights over user’s data.

So, the question that we can try to answer is, what feature will Facebook focus on next? To answer this, we need to survey the web application landscape and see what has been successful over the past year. Web search is an obvious space for Facebook to move into next. Facebook Credits and apps can lead to a healthy paid app market. Facebook has had a great success with it’s photo service, I could see them moving toward support for movies and videos. Facebook has also acknowledged that they are moving to provide a mobile platform, I can see them providing the social glue for mobile application as they have done for web applications. I the long run, I see Facebook as being as one of a few companies that can threaten Apple’s dominance over digital music. Groupon has been one of the hottest startups over this past year, maybe Facebook will get into social location base group coupons.

Most, if not all, of Facebook’s core features have been borrowed from other successful websites or services. Mark Zuckerberg has always taken a back seat to innovation but a driver seat into ramming features into users via opt-in settings. Mark Zuckerberg’s earliest website was a clone of a website popular at the time. As Facebook continues to evolve, what features do you think will be implemented in the social network?

V-Day Victory!!!

• @techknow: I like the day after Valentine’s Day 50% more than V-Day, that is because I can get all the chocolate covered marshmallow for 50% off.
• @ladyfox14: Hahaha, just make sure you don’t get a stomach ache. It sounds like Halloween all over again.
• @techknow: LOL I did get a tummy ache eating all that chocolate… I overdosed on marshmallows.

In the this conversation, I think of the meaning of life and everything in terms of software development life cycle and software process best practices.

Life as Beta

• @juixe: Life is a beta release.
• @gkmaestro: Then is death the Product release ??? :P
• @juixe: LOL it depends on your views of the after life, death + rebirth might mean upgrade.
• @gkmaestro: ha ha perhaps, then Patches n hot fixes might be moments of happiness in ur life :-)
• @juixe: as a developer, and user, no hot fix has ever made me happy. ;)

Here I must have had in mind some story about when programmers would get royalty on the code the write. If you get paid on the usability f an application, imagine getting dinged $10 per bug.

Bug Bounty

• @techknow: Can you imagine only getting paid if there is no bugs in your code?
• @mcory1: I’d be panhandling if that were the case.
• @techknow: LOL I often think what I would do if I wasn’t doing what I do, and panhandling is an option.

I try not to get political on my timeline but it’s been hard to not tweet about what is happening in the world, fires in Russia, floods in Pakistan, earthquake all over the Western Hemisphere, financial collapse in the develop world, world recession, etc. And yet, what technology pundits focus on is what laptop brand world leaders are using!

Economic Fail Because We Focus on the Wrong Thing

• @cote: Watching Papandreou on the Zakaria GPS bit. The Greece PM has a MacBookPro on his desk, in background. Wonder if that’s his.
• @techknow: Greece might default on billions, people protesting in the streets and all you notice is the Mac. LOL. I wonder if he has an iPad?
• @cote: Yeah, a bit too micro, I guess ;)

Again, I try to not get political but when someone makes a comparison of Facebook to a country I had a little something to say, unfortunately it didn’t all fit into the 140 character limit on Twitter.

Facebook Nation

• @ArabCrunch: If facebook was a country it would be the 3ed biggest country in the world.
• @techknow: and it would be a dictatorship not unlike North Korea, where the country is built in labor camps which look like Farm Ville re-education camps and your data can’t travel outside the country without permission of the Fhurer Zuck.

Software Development

• Programming is more about problem solving than coding, just like being an author is more about storytelling than writing.
• Next time your significant other starts nagging, throw an IllegalArgumentException!
• I want the web to evolve to a stage where flash is not required! It’s 2010 for God’s sake, why we still using plugins in browsers!?
• why do I have to tether gadgets and string along services just to catch a call?
• Patents? We don’t need no stinking patents.
• When life gives you users, make customers.
• For programmers everything is as easy as alpha, beta, and gold master.
• Good debugging techniques go a log way in and out of the debugger!
• Like the Free Masons, I am part of a secret society of digitari and conspiracy theorists and computer repairmen known as the Free Hackers.
• I am so WYSIWYG!
• If privacy settings are difficult to edit they are hard to implement, enact, and enable correctly.
• Privacy setting should be transparent not secretive and misleading.

Team Leadership

• You always get further faster with less effort if you work with what you got.
• The next big thing usually sneaks up on those waiting in line to ride the current thing.
• Mo money mo ways to solve mo problems.
• Bad apples introduce bad seeds.
• Litigation stifles innovation.
• Technology is changing so fast that I have obsolete gadgets the unopened packages I bought them.
• I’m coming up so you better get this project started.
• As companies grow, they lose acceleration and focus, but depend on momentum and size.
• I have to call into our all hands meeting tomorrow. Since I have to call in, I’ll be all ears at the all hands meeting.
• A great idea in the mind of someone that can’t or won’t do anything about it is like an orphan.
• When companies can’t create engaging products and new markets they create bogus patents.

Product Placement

• Twitter needs a reliable picture service, as reliable as Twitter, but Twitpic just needs to go away.
• The #newtwitter is like the the #oldtwitter plus HTML crack.
• I wish Twitter was like survivor and we can kick some twits of the service.
• This is how much AT&T sucks, I’m tethering my T-Mobile Nexus One with my AT&T iPhone to tweet this!
• Apple press events are as large as sporting events! Apple should televise them in Pay-Per-View.
• Steve Jobs is a mad genius, you gotta buy his hardware so that you can buy his software and along the way pay for a horrible service plan.
• The new iPod mini is one gadget closer to the Dick Tracy wrist watch phone.
• Apple cares more about design than market share, and that’s why users pay a premium.
• Steve Jobs would make a great James Bond villain.
• And the Grammy for the Album of the Year goes to… Autotune!
• AT&T should rebrand itself as FU&U!
• In addition to Document, Presentation, Spreadsheet, and Form document types, @google Docs should add a Gantt Chart!

Quote

• We can suggest what you should do next, what you care about. Imagine: We know where you are, we know what you like. – Eric Schmidt
• Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. – Steve Jobs
• Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. – Steve Jobs
• Get into jiggle mode. – Steve Jobs
• So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated. – Bill Gates

Cash Angels

• School experience is not in tune with the current job opportunities. College should be more like a series of Y Combinator funding cycles.
• If there is a angel investment bubble, everybody should cash in before they can cash out.
• When you see startup accelerators with names like 500 ACME Startup Founders Camp you can be sure that there is an angel investment bubble.
• Zuckerborg has dropped out of college and he is pledging $100,000,000 for kids to stay in school.

Software Development

• Tests? We ain’t got no tests. We don’t need no tests! I don’t have to show you any stinkin’ tests!
• Test. Code. Debug. Refactor. Repeat.
• Party like a rock star, code like a _why.
• Code has a center of gravity.
• There are features that become products, products that become companies, and companies that become revolutions.
• To increase productivity when working with buggy software tools, don’t focus on how it should be done but the work around to get it done.
• Can you imagine only getting paid if there is no bugs in your ode?
• One developer’s bug is another user’s loss of faith in technology.
• Delivery dates for feature sets that there are no specs is a death wish list.
• Running software trumps unwritten specifications.
• I drop fools like I drop database tables, with one SQL statement.
• Memories are backward compatible.
• I dream in quantum bits.
• My dreams are hosted on the cloud.

Team Leadership

• 80% required in swimming is just to have your head above water, the rest is about moving forward.
• I know Google offers employees 20% time, that must be why 80% of their products feel like 80% done.
• Having your head in the clouds is better than your head in the sand! Hold up your head up high and you will see further.
• Make your own path, build your own bridge, be your own light.
• Make work be more wow!
• Future proof your thinking.
• Meeting don’t generate momentum.
• It only takes a single dash to turn a minus into a plus.
• Some set out to follow a leader, others follow his vision, and still others his path. Why not triangulate his geolocation based on all of these?
• A high IQ does not equate with success. I developed a new algo to measure likelihood of success, Kick-ass Quotient, or KQ instead of IQ!!!
• Sweep me off my feet, not under the rug.

Product Placement

• If Zuckerberg would not have created Facebook, he would have been just another picture collector on Craigslist.
• If Facebook would had been invented in the time of Hitler, Zuckerborg might had been a collaborator, aka Little Fuhrer, and would have geolocated Ann Frank
• Facebook is said to release geolocation check-in feature soon, default setting is to notify your parole officer or ex your current location.
• Why isn’t common sense the default at Facebook when it comes to users’ privacy rights.
• BP handling of the oil spill is what I called fail whale, I mean if you kill a whale it is an automatic #failwhale.
• Two guys walk into an Apple store to buy an iPad… This is not a joke, this is a tragedy, they walk empty handed because they are sold out
• Happy Quit Facebook Day!!!
• Flash, there is no app for that.
• Can you imagine a 20 inch iPad? This shall come to pass.
• The iPad is the iPC.
• At Home Depot, just came from Office Depot. Are these stores like related? Can’t wait for Gansta Depot!
• Disney wants to kill your creativity!
• People used to clock-in to work, now they check-in.
• Which is the most hated tech company, Apple, Google, Facebook, Abode???

Quote

• I love the smell of napalm in the morning! – Lt. Col. Bill Kilgore
• You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. – Rahm Emanuel
• Billionaires rule supreme. – P. Sainath
• We made the buttons on the screen look so good you’ll want to lick them. – Steve Jobs
• I wish developing great products was as easy as writing a check. If that was the case, Microsoft would have great products. – Steve Jobs
• Ahhh, what an awful dream. Ones and zeroes everywhere… and I thought I saw a two. – Bender
• A documented bug is not a bug; it is a feature. – James P. MacLennan
• The invisible hand of the market is actually a very visible bunch of grubby paws if you really look. – P. Sainath
• Languages shape the way we think, or don’t. – Erik Naggum
• Shawty is a eenie meenie mo lova – Sean Kingston
• If at first you don’t succeed – call an airstrike. – Banksy
• Lots and lots of blogs does not replace lots and lots of sales. – Larry Ellison
• Baby there is a shark in the water. – VV Brown
• The market is no longer driven by shareholders. The market is driven by formulas. – @mcuban