But.

I think there is a bigger conversation to be had. A conversation which is only a little bit about Twitter. Bear with me.

Twitter is often referred to as ‘a micro-blogging platform’. Users are asked the simple question, “What are you doing right now?”. The answers are as varied as the people that use it. From the mundane (”eating lunch”) to the useful (”eating lunch at http://localcafe.com ; try the reuben!”) Users ‘follow’ other users, whether they are friends or just good tweeters who post interesting content.

Now, why is twitter so popular? And here is where it gets interesting:

Twitter is popular precisely because it asks so little of its users.

To maintain this blog (which I do a terrible job of, even when I’m trying) takes quite an effort. I need to host my blog somewhere, I need to choose a layout and title, categories etc. And then I need to think of something interesting to write about, and write an article. I usually have to research links to related content I want to include in my post. I’d say I spend about 30 minutes on every entry I write — which is probably why I don’t write too many.

But Twitter…

Twitter users contribute because they don’t have to do too much. Participating in Twitter takes next to no effort — just write one line. In fact, that’s about all you can do. But over time, you get better at creating interesting content because you see other people do it (those people you follow). And you can respond to other tweets, which is much more direct than commenting on a blog.

So what is the bigger picture here? If you have a web property — a ’social network’, say, or a dating site, or any app that asks users to contribute anything at all — find ways to let your users participate with as little effort as possible. Facebook does this with the status message, which is probably the thing I update more than anything else — simply because it takes 2 seconds and little thought or effort to say what I’m up to. Its big bang for little effort.
There’s an old saw about “2% of the users create all of the content for the other 98%”.  If you have any interest in getting more users to participate, think about how to make it as easy as Twitter. Let them ask a simple question. Take a poll, post a comment. The less effort involved, the more likely you users are to create something.

But more abstractly, this got me thinking about value. I define value as ‘high quality for a relatively low cost, relative to other options’. For example, the Bugatti Veyron is an amazing car. It has some of the best engineering ever devised by man, it is incredibly fast, and at $1.4M pretty expensive. However you measure it, it is of very high quality. But it is probably not a very good value. If you use your car to go to work and the grocery store, a $10k used Nissan is probably a much better value to you. The Nissan has less quality than the Bugatti, to be sure, but the utility, performance, and maintainability make it quite valuable (at least, in the context of everyday driving).

So Tim and his readers list some great values for <$10 or so. Wine is a common one, as there is a huge selection of wines ranging from <$5 to hundreds of thousands of dollars, so there's a lot of room for value to appear. Trader Joes happens to carry a lot of sub- $5 and sub- $10 wines, some of which are quite good. The same goes for chocolate -- you can get some of the best chocolate in the world for less than $10 per bar. So most of the items on Tim's blog post are about wine and chocolate, but are there other items that you've discovered that are of great value?

I enjoy good (really good) beer, and I think it falls into this category. Some of the best beers in the world can be had for less than $10 for a 1 liter bottle, which means you can sample lots of them, or drink your favorite every day. The most highly rated wines in the world cost hundreds of dollars, and even if you can afford it you probably don't make an everyday occurrence of it. Beer comes in just as many varieties and can be had in single bottles at many grocery or liquor stores. Even Whole Foods or TJ's carries a decent selection of beers from all over the world.

Tim's list:

• Dolfin 88% Pure Cacao Belgian Dark Chocolate
• Blue Fin 2005 California Chardonnay (available at Trader Joe’s)
• Valrhona Le Noir Amer 71% Cacao Dark Chocolate (also at TJ’s, and other places)
• Original Flavor with Almonds Bumble Bar (online, but haven’t found any local retailers)
• La Famiglia 2001 Sangiovese (Mondavi) TJs used to carry, by mine no longer does

also recommended were Argentine Malbec wines and Gamay wines. TJs carries some of both varieties.

commenters on Tim’s post mentioned some more values:

wines:

• Tesco Premier Cru champagne is only £14.24 (UK only)
• South African Pinotages (TJ’s and others)
• 2 buck chuck (Charles Shaw) (TJs)
• Trumpeter Cabernet Sauvignon — Buenos Aires (greatcorks.com)

chocolate:

• Michael Recchiuti Chocolate from San Francisco –
• Chocophilia
• Rausch 40g-bars, or Lindt Schokolade — berlin
• Kinder — germany, some specialty stores in US (like Cardullos in Cambridge)
• Both E. Guittard and Scharffen Berger chocolates — SF / USA
• Extreme Dark Chocolate from Endangered Species Chocolate
• drinking chocolate recipe
  Green and Blacks dark chocolate (US / Whole Foods / elsewhere)
• Dagoba chococate bars
• Xocolatl with cacao nibs, chilis, maca, vanilla and nutmeg
• For truffles, definitely Recchiuti, Teuscher, Richart and Charles Chocolates
• Plantations — chocolate bars
• Casa Don Puglisi Pure Chocolate from Modica (not cheap?)
• Santander chocolate from Colombia

coffee / tea:

• Rishi Tea
• intelligentsia coffee — chicago

I’ll add to that some of my favorite beers (many also available at TJ’s):

• Ommegang brewery — Hennepin, Three Philosophers, and others
• duvel
• La Fin Du Monde
• Sam Smith porter
• Young’s double chocolate stout
• Dogfish 90-minute IPA, raison d’etre, and apricot ale
• Allegash

So what other things do you consider to be of great value, especially on the low-cost end? It doesn’t have to be food or drink, either — those were just some examples. But I’m sure if you look around, you’ll find some things you love that don’t break the bank.

First, another Boston Globe article about one of my new adventures, BetaHouse appeared in the Saturday August 11 paper and online here. BetaHouse is a co-working arrangement I am involved in. The idea behind BetaHouse (and co-working in general) is that several startups and entrepreneurs share an office space, splitting the costs of rent and such while collaborating and enjoying the company of like-minded people. Co-working is a popular concept on the west coast, especially San Francisco, and we hope BetaHouse is the start of the east-coast trend. For me, it certainly beats the solitude of working out of my home.

The Globe article also mentions Virosity, my new consulting company that has kept me busy these past few months. We’re a ’boutique’ web and mobile consultancy, specializing in social applications and the like. We’re a small shop (3 people) at the moment, but we’re hoping to expand as we have more opportunities than we can handle right now. Whenever I read an article bemoaning the lack of web and media startups in New England, I can’t help but wonder if we’re talking about the same place. Every day I talk to people starting new companies, and they’re not the traditional New England fare of enterprise-this and storage-that. There’s definitely a culture of innovation happening here, even if it is below the venture capital radar. If you’re starting a web or mobile business and want someone to manage and develop your product, drop us a line.

Teenagers and Europeans love it. And the phone company loves it because those 10-cent messages really add up, to the tune of billions of dollars per year.

SMS is a great tool for web application developers — just look at the success of twitter. So how does it work, and how can you incorporate SMS into your application?

There are a few mechanisms for sending and receiving SMS. One is to use a phone or modem connected to a computer. The computer can communicate with the phone (or modem), and send or receive messages on behalf of your application. The computer can expose a web service or some other mechanism to allow your application to send or receive messages as needed. Software packages such as NowSMS exist to facilitate this.

Another way is to use email. Mobile Carriers in the USA have email-addressable handsets. If you want to send an SMS to 212-555-6789, and you know the user is on the T-mobile network, you can send email to 12125556789@tmomail.net , and it will be delivered to the handset. The carrier provides this SMTP-to-SMS gateway, but it’s not very well documented or supported. A full list of carrier email gateways are available on wikipedia.

A third way is to use an sms aggregator. This is expensive, but the best way for full-on commercial applications to send and receive SMS messages the ‘official’ way. An SMS aggregator has direct connections (SMPP) to all the major carriers, and abstracts all of their peculiarities from your application. Instead, an interface such as a web service is exposed to your application, through which you can instruct the aggregator to send messages on your behalf. When an incoming message arrives for your application, the aggregator posts a message to your application, such as an HTTP POST. You can get a different API if REST isn’t your thing.

I couldn’t find a good list of sms aggregators, but some noteworthy ones are mBlox, m-qube, telenor, clickatell, simplewire. I only have experience with mBlox, but I imagine they all operate about the same. You pay a service fee (on the order of $1000/month) plus the cost to send or receive each message. If your application uses Premium SMS, for which the user is charged a fee, then a portion of that revenue will go to you and the rest will go to the mobile operator.

Part of the reason this is so expensive is that getting your application approved by each of the carriers is a time-intensive process. Your aggregator will assign you an account rep who will walk you through the certification process. Although you don’t have to do a technical integration with each carrier, your application does have to meet their requirements. They vary from carrier to carrier — some support different charsets, some require that you respond to certain keywords like “HELP” and “STOP”. This part of the process can be very frustrating. But the good news is you end up with an application that can handle a boatload of SMS traffic, and you get support for your app from the aggregator.

To send a message to your application, the user texts to a special number known as a short code. This short code is a 5 or 6 digit number reserved specifically for your application. You need a shortcode to work with one of these aggregators, which you can reserve from http://www.usshortcodes.com/. It’s $500/month for a random code, or $1000/month if you choose your own.

other resources :

sms shortcode primer

SMS aggregator list

Thursday was a pre-conference day dedicated to tutorials. These were optional, and at extra cost. I ddin’t opt for this because it seemed like a lot of the topics were pretty basic. The one that did look interesting to me was already sold out, so I ended up skipping the entire tutorial day and arrived on Friday.

Here is a link to the full schedule. Most of the session presentation slides are here.
David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH), creator of Ruby on Rails, gave the keynote speech on Friday. He introduced some of the features arriving in Rails 2.0, including built-in REST, debugging and breakpoints, and some performance enhancements like query caching and css/js resource bundling. Nothing revolutionary, just a bunch of nice, useful enhancements.

The conference was multi-tracked, meaning you get to pick-and-choose the sessions you attend; it also means you may miss out on something you want to see because it is scheduled at the same time as something else. So Friday I attended Building Community-focused Apps with Rails. The talk covered some best practices for building any site, not just communities, and how to make using your app easier and more enjoyable for your users. Dan Benjamin (of A List Apart) gave the presentation, and Cork’d was used as a case study.

I also attended the talk about scaling rails on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). The presenters were from Rightscale, which I have used before, but so far I’ve been pretty unsuccessful getting a rails app to run in a clustered fashion on EC2. I hoped this talk would shed some light on this, but it didn’t (at least not for me). They chose a case study which was atypical for web apps — it was an audio-transcoding application with little web traffic, so the EC2 cloud was used to process the audio files, rather than serve web content. I think this niche was pretty unlike most other web apps, which are more concerned with how to handle a large request load.

An impromptu musical guest um, “performed” for us — the Extra Action Marching Band.
Most importantly, I got a chance to catch up with some old friends and collegues.

It turns out, ruby compiled wth gcc 4.0 on powerPC macs — which my laptop is one — is known to exhibit these strange behaviors. David Heinemeier Hansson himself mentioned this in this blog post.

Turns out, the solution is to set gcc to 3.3 mode, rebuild ruby and any dependent libraries. You can do this with ‘gcc_select 3.3′, then running configure, make, make install as usual.

On the way to finding this fix, I tried updating to Ruby 1.8.5 patchlevel 2. To get this to work, I had to configure, make, and install, then go into the source tarball in ext/readline and run :

cd ext/readline

> ruby extconf.rb

> make 

> sudo cp readline.bundle /usr/local/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8/powerpc-darwin8.9.0

Those instructions came from this mailing list archive.

So if you’re running ruby patchlevel 2 — which is the latest ruby that works with rails 1.2.2 — make sure you compile with gcc 3.3, and copy over the readline bundle as described above.

I’m pretty disappointed this much hackery is required to get ruby working on my machine, which is a fairly standard platform. Ruby should “just work” with gcc 4.0, and the Makefile should do the right thing with the readline module as well. Grrr.
In the near future I hope to get an Intel mac to develop on, and have access to all the latest ruby/rails goodies on that. But at least now all my tests are passing, and I’m not getting any more strange Fixnum errors.

But when it comes to ‘life skillz’ , where to turn? Most people associate ’street smarts’ with everything you can’t get a PhD in, from balancing your checkbook to how to hotwire a car. But there’s a lot they don’t teach you in undergrad, or graduate school, or postdoc… things we’re either expected to know, or ‘pick up’ , or something we want to give us that edge against the cutthroat job competition.

One such example is negotiation skills — how to ask for more money in an interview, or how to get your landlord to lower the rent, or how to settle a heated disagreement amicably. My good friend (and former roommate) Carl Tashian clued me in to the Harvard Program on Negotiation, which is getting rave review from its alumni.

I hope to get the opportunity to take this course — it’s one of those things that I expect to find numerous applications for only after taking it.

I don’t think that’s far off the mark.

It may be a small change, or applicable to only a small group of people, but the goal is laudable — to change the wya people think, or work, or play, or see the world. To have that impact on humanity is an awesome lure for some, and it certainly is for me.

I’ve worked in a variety of environments during my career thus far, from very big to very small. It’s been the small companies, the startups, the two-guys-in-a-garage-eating-only-ramen-noodles that have been the most rewarding (and most challenging) to me. I’ve started this blog to discuss some of the issues surrounding this exciting world — from challenges to rewards, from the technology involved to the more human element.

If you’re one of us — one who enjoys the challenges of swimming upstream, the oportunity to do something new, to change the world — then I hope you’ll enjoy reading and contributing to this unfolding story.