Matteo Bicocchi’s (“pupunzi”) mappping of neeeds of site improvements to Patapage:

9 ways to improve your site but you don’t know how to

My mapping of different work management needs with Teamwork:

Stories of work management

Your software is what people’s usage makes of it.

Here I give some quick impressions and links.

The organizers: a word of praise to the organizers, Develer (http://develer.com). I lived the event as speaker, student and (satirical) “journalist”. In all three roles, I appreciated their efficiency, practical sense and also sense of humor, bearing my postings as “Fake Simone Zinanni”.

Twitter coverage: Maybe in USA conferences this is just normal, but I was amazed by the real time reactions which we got during the speeches through reading tweets: #bsw2010. It was great fun. Also proving a good wireless coverage for 300 PCs – kudos to Develer.

Cirillo’s talk: what has been impressive of his talk is the sense of concreteness. Of interpreting methodology as something minimal, that has to have a deep impact. And the ease with which he can connect habits to problems, never leaving any space for rhetoric.

Actually just before the conference I had studied the “Pomodoro technique”: to learn more about Cirillo see this beautiful site here:

http://www.pomodorotechnique.com/

Alberto Mucignat: I really liked his talk: “Social design: progettare applicazioni che funzionano”

http://www.bettersoftware.it/conference/talks/social-design-progettare-applicazioni-che-funziona

because (given the strict time limits) he has tried to give us “new product / web site creators” some tools to analyze the flow of social interaction of our sites with visitors and communities. I will try to apply his schemes to our (5!) new products and web sites coming out in 2010. Waiting for the slides!

Alberto Falossi: Alberto made a neat and compact talk about crowd funding – see his  kapipalist manifesto. After that I asked him a couple of questions, which for time reasons I couldn’t ask during the class. I reproduce one here:

“Alberto, why did you build a service which serves all kinds of crowd funding, and not one specific for a certain activity (like one for musicians…). Posting your question on a specialized crowd funding site isn’t it more likely that you will get funded?”

His answer (freely re-interpreted – Alberto correct me if I reporting you wrongly): “You should not delude yourself that you will get funded because a casual visitor funds projects of certain category. Searching for funders is an effort that has to be done entirely by you, building a community. The crowd funding service has just to ease the transactions.”

Second question: “You hinted that your idea is not to get a % on the money, as other crowd funding sites do. Where then will you get paid?”

Alberto: “My service is free. I have not decided definitively, but I am thinking of pro versions of the service, instead of taking a %”.

Peldi: I missed Peldi’s talk, only because mine was at the same time. My friends from Open Lab that were there told me that it was great. We had already contacted Balsamiq people for a plugin for Patapage (here). I actually met him afterward at a coffee break through Silvia, who was hunting interviews for Devineu and has “trapped” the fellow.

He is a great fellow, and gave us some interesting advice on our products even in a 2 minutes encounter. Silvia will soon interview him for devineu.eu.

My talk: “Una home page memorabile” –  actually “Get visitors to read and remember your home page” . I am an inexperienced talker. I had 35 minutes for my talk, and that could cover only half of what I wanted to say – so that is what happened: I hope I made the point that copy-writing is neither a secondary nor a trivial skill for any web startup, but I had to skim through the example applications – sorry. You can find the examples presented in detail here:

Part 1: http://pietro.open-lab.com/2009/10/19/get-visitors-to-read-and-remember-your-home-page-the-principles/

Part 2: http://pietro.open-lab.com/2009/10/19/get-visitors-to-read-and-remember-your-home-page-applications/

Thanks to all – see you there next year.

http://devineu.eu

This is a site where European startups can learn from other startups and innovating software houses. Read the mission here:

http://devineu.eu/mission.page

You can even interview yourself here. We used also Patapage for the site development.

P.S. Among the gadgets, there is the Seth Godin – inspired “Tame your lizard brain” app:

http://devineu.eu/lb.jsp

These are among the books  that have most influenced us:

Some of the beloved / informative or both are not currently in Open Lab, because some of us is reading one or is hiding it at home, among which:

Our software house is not formally a startup, though product development has changed so much in the last 12 months that we are proceeding as a startup. There are many nice books from the past in our libraries, whose content is always valid.

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Also a section for the IT guys:

And there is more:

Actually, the answer is everyone in Open Lab,  and specifically no one. I always found a bit simplistic the idea that the “developer” creates applications by programming, and when the app is working and almost done, he/she asks a designer to create some graphics for it. In this line of reasoning there is a family resemblance with the idea “I first create an application and then market it.”, which I find deeply wrong – but this is another topic. If you are developing web applications aimed at wide markets, design and application development integrate one another at every development step. And this is how we create and design applications in Open Lab.

Like when we have to create a logo, the internal designers, who are also developers, propose candidates in a meeting to which the entire software house takes part; not only design and application integration are considered, but also marketing must be taken into consideration when evaluating design solutions.

Interface design and graphic design are different concepts, but are also related: a usable interface must be pleasant, not confusing, and both skills must be used to get a good result. Today’s users expect applications to be pleasant; and a well designed and pleasant application will more easily elicit a “collaborative” attitude from users in the first steps of evaluation, and even afterwards, if the design is consistent throughout the application. Consider also “wow” effects that designers can create.

The gaming software industry has understood the crucial role of designers long ago. And the boundary between gaming techniques and usability for “serious” software can be crossed proficiently – we did this with good results in our Teamwork software. A great introduction to this theme is  Putting the Fun in Functional: Applying Game Mechanics to Functional Software by Amy Jo Kim. In order to use such techniques, good design is essential.

People that have designers take part in development, will notice that they can learn a lot from development, even when they get back to more design-specific tasks. And vice-versa, even more, holds for developers. Usability is often supplying the right metaphor: algorithmic experience often won’t help in such tasks, but the culture of a good designer can.

If you are doing web development, can you draw a strict line between what is done in your CSS for usability and what for esthetic considerations? And with say jQuery JavaScript selectors, their usage is for behavior, layout, design? There is no clear distinction; and you may see this as a problem, but also as an opportunity for interdisciplinary work.

This also evidences that it is a bad idea to use just external occasional collaborations for graphic design; you should find a way to have a consistent and continuous flow of design ideas in your software house. A similar conclusion is reached by Joel Spolski in this podcast: “Joel explains why he no longer believes in outsourcing design.”

So among the hats one startup should include in its first team, there is indeed development and marketing, but also graphic and usability design.

Similar considerations to the one above are valid also in the rest of the industry, not only in software; I was recently in Milan in the Triennale expo about Deepdesign (see a review here), and what they are doing brings together design, industrial prototyping, integration with mass production, and hence the distinction between design and product engineering is blurred.

Another, similar development: with Patapage in Open Lab we are working continuously crossing the boundary between page design and data / contents mashupping, creating a tool that makes the distinction between designing a site and inserting / updating / community contributing its “contents” problematic.

And the answer to“who designed the graphics?” is… the entire Open Lab team.

Some definitions and references

I’ll start by quoting the Wikipedia definition of mashup:

And also that of mashup enabler:

Now mashups are mostly used by developers, in particular, JavaScript developers. A nice and typical example is this one:

How to build a personal mashup page with jQuery

and the result is this:

http://enriquez.github.com

where we see the date collected and displayed. Notice that this is all done purely in JavaScript on the client, also using Yahoo Pipes service; but this requires some development and maintenance, and the server side service has to be already available; you cannot build your own service without installing and maintaining your own server. Another widely used option is to use the web service provider widget (“web widget”), where the style is more or less fixed.

Our idea

Our starting idea was… why not give even more power to site builders on the client side by relying on a unique, simple service, acting both as direct content manager and as “proxy” for other services? The fact that Ajax calls allow to add and call Java scripts on say a button click to an existing, fully loaded page, and then by making cross domain requests it becomes possible to add contents to (over) the calling page, opens a world of possibilities, which up to today has been used only by developers of both client and server side code, by low level access to such features and then lots of hand coding.

Couldn’t it be easier? Couldn’t the HTML designer be spared of (re)building specific client readers and server-side services, and focus on just integration and building a beautiful and friendly site? And even if you are a server-side developer, why not delegating web site content building to a third party, and focus on your main activity?

Why use mashups only to add RSS aggregation, pull data from social sites and multimedia contents? Why not use for any kind of dynamic contents? Why use it in blogs and not web sites? The structure of web site is more complex, and the services needed more refined, at times, but that’s no obstacle to the idea.

Also in case of hand built integrations, the graphic quality of the integration is often not at the same level of the originally designed site.

This is where we started thinking about a new online service, and then started building it up. In mashup terms, we started building friendly data sources to be called and used on button and link clicks; then we standardized even the buttons and links, so that the web builder has just to paste the button script on the page, and gets immediately fully working buttons, links and associated services.

Since we had the service up, almost every day a new possibility of a button comes up, as the sum of serving both the client side JavaScript and the server side content, or proxy to contents, opens a lot of possibilities. See in the side picture just the first suite of buttons.

More are being added, like a Delicious aggregator, Picasa integration, custom designed forms; the existing ones are being extended, like the Wiki-button will allow creations of new pages from links, like Wikipedia.

What superficially looks like a single functionality, like adding a wiki-like button (“PataWiki”), actually adds to your web page a layer of dynamically updatable content, by both the site maintainer and site visitors (if that is what is wanted). This could be a “help” page, contributed contents, a “more in depth” presentation, a “buy now” page (we’ve seen it online used this way already), a way to publish news, …

Each button / link you paste in your pages is associated with a “page id”, which the designer can set by hand: this way the same mashup / widget combination can be used across the entire site, on a single page, or shared across a specific group of pages. This is a flexibility that usual mashup on blogs don’t need, as these are basically single paged, , but is a necessary extension for using mashup effectively on web sites.

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We also developed a web based configuration of buttons and opened windows, which allows setting of style, dimension and layout. This is what you had to do by writing code and HTML by hand when displaying the contents of  mashups – before Patapage . Of course if the designer wishes, she can customize the layout of the buttons integrating in the existing layout, as done in this example.

Another recurring problem when adding the possibility of visitors contributing and commenting your pages is that of spam, moderation, e-mail verification and in general of security. Like for example if you enable moderation, you have both to reassure users about their contribution, manage the incoming list to be moderated, notify on approval, etc.: imagine having this by just pasting a little script on your static site instead of configuring a CMS to do that! And you should be able to do this differently for each link or button, if you wish so.

The resulting application is not only a mashup enabler as defined at the beginning, but also a tool providing mashups of all sorts ready to be used.

So we are covering the problems of layout, contents, social contributions, notifications, security… all typical problems traditionally requiring installing your own CMS. This way we are empowering links on the web pages of a site that is preserved as it is, with all its style, effectively progressively making classical CMS’s site development look like stone-age site building.

All this functionality is available in an online service, currently in beta, which we called Patapage¹,

http://patapage.com

from there you can try the demo, see a video, and just enroll and try it on your site.  When out of beta, the service will be a paid one (see here for details) which will be a way of keeping it ad-free: as one of our ideals is to give as much as an unobtrusive service as possible, channeling ads would result in just the opposite. We also believe that using a commercial service is a higher guarantee for the users.

I’d be glad to read your impression of this idea – use the comments, or tweet me.

[1] Raymond Queneau has described ‘pataphysics as resting “on the truth of contradictions and exceptions.” Well.. we just liked the sound of the word.

e.g. on answers.onstartups.com How to pick a platform for a startup web 2.0 app?

or

I hope to show in the following that this is simply false.

The origins of the commonplace

As most commonplaces, they are simply the repetition out of context of something true in context, and all those who have followed Java and its evolution in the last ten years, and the coming and going of many, too many, architecture astronautic – inspired frameworks and fashions, there has been no lack of context where Java has been and is used in absurdly convoluted ways; but this is history, boring, and by now not very interesting. And of course the point is that there is nothing in the nature of the language and tools that forces you to use complex solutions.

My point is the opposite of the commonplace: if you have Java expertise, you are in an advantageous position to start developing an online service.

Using Java for your online service will lead you to a change of focus from corporate development, together with a complete revolution in marketing strategy; it is likely that the business logic involved will be relatively simple, you won’t need to redistribute your code, you won’t need say to certify it for some complex pharmaceutical software standard; other different, complex problems will come to the surface. But this will happen whatever language / framework you are using.

A pragmatic attitude

The quoted common places assume that being a Java programmer simply means the lack of pragmatic sense; but why should that be? Surely there is no entailment there.

Lets tell a few simple facts that most experienced developers are perfectly aware of, but don’t say in conferences: you can write excellent applications and never ever write a single line of unit testing and Javadoc. And put all the time you saved from writing and fixing bugs in the unit tests ( ) in having human testers try your application, and in this way get feedback worth a million times what your own self-test would tell you (assuming optimistically that the code-based tests are bug free). Also human users will  tell you about interface bugs that no code test will ever do, like about the dark gray buttons on a black background, or the unpredictable series of clicks ad back which users find so intuitive and code tests will never cover. You can be self-satisfied with your unit tested and JavaDoc-umented code (remembered to update it all by hand after the last refactorings and fixes?), and release a totally unusable program filled with what for the user look like serious bugs, though you didn’t perceive them as so.

Having a firm pragmatic and user oriented attitude is not at all in contrast with using Java for development: you can be a talented duct-tape programmer, and indeed use Java.

We should all be grateful to the dynamic language communities, that with their repeated successes have shown that the “king is naked” and self-referential practices of formal code quality or blind following of methodologies valid for over-ruled corporations are useless advice in many environments, and that a more socially oriented testing and user interface design is what wins for creating online services. But I believe the development language involved is accidental.

There are all sorts of tricks you can use in Java to avoid complications: as class reloading may cause the web server to drop sessions, you may simply publish some experimental business logic in an included JSP file – yes, as simple as that. Having “duct tape” capacities is not language-dependant, and if on top of your pragmatic skills you use Java, you’ll be perfectly fine.

Note that I am not saying that the development language choice is a crucial step in you startup path (hear the end of this podcast for some wise considerations): I’m just saying that if you have Java expertise, use it, and you’ll be fine.

Online in three months

As a concrete example, working in Java, having a considerable experience in Java web development (we develop Teamwork), and using the simplest solutions and the best tools available, we developed two online services from scratch and put them online in three months, with 2 people working for each service and one shared. The services are these:

http://patapage.com “add dynamics to your web pages by embedding simple widgets”

and

http://bugsvoice.com “turn bugs into opportunities”

and some of the work done for development and marketing is presented here. Anyway in this post the focus is on whether Java helped in the process, or it was a hindrance.

Notice also that the server side development is more and more a fraction of the total development needed; as you can see in the example services above, the design and UI/JavaScript part is getting more and more important.

Java’s comfortable world

If you are a Java developer and are thinking of dropping it,  think carefully before doing that: there are many features that you may assume as “obvious” which are not at all available in other environments. A few examples:

Choices. In the Java world we are happily used to having choices; that is, for a well defined common problem, not only you often find a solution, you most often find more than one. This is in stark contrast with “canned” environments.

Refactoring. You take as granted Java’s clear syntax, and all the advantages of its static typing. If you are fascinated by dynamic injection, consider for example that you’d simply have to drop your trust in refactorings to work, which with Java (and Intellij ) is close to certainty. And this may mean a shift of focus from the core of your problems to… find-and-replace by hand, a reversion to stone age code writing – sounds silly enough. Java core is stable, and basic signatures can’t be overwritten: in many case, this is a quality. Listen to this very interesting Java Posse podcast for competent discussion of Static vs. Dynamic Typing, which will help you get a clear picture about the myths of dynamic language productivity.

The largest server side development community you can get. That’s a simple fact. See this and this, for example.

Good producer support. Server side Java really runs well everywhere, and also is fast everywhere (see e.g. Twitter: Service vs. Platform), and keeps getting faster;  with today’s servers that is not that relevant. Anyway, it feels good to know. Being fast, no great hardware support is required, which is the opposite of the commonplace quoted in the beginning.

If you are using a relational database, all the components scale, with well known and documented practices.

A real virtual machine. Virtual machines should run on all main OS out there, and with identical functional coverage. Otherwise its cheating.

All this makes Java a great platform for almost any kind of development; but lets see some specific needs for online services.

Some positive examples

Lets see how the Java platform, available APIs and some tools developed by us along the way can help you in several concrete cases.

While developing your new online service you will probably need to meet these or similar problems along the way, which you will hardly have met doing say intranet corporate development:

- Cross-site scripting
See a definition here. Examining these kinds of problems, we put together a quite complete Java HTML sanitizer here, which everybody can freely use.  The development process is described here.

- Cross-site request forgery
See a definition here.

- Filtering spam
For this there are many solutions, see this one for example:

http://www.theserverside.com/tt/articles/article.tss?l=UsingCI-Bayes

We are experimenting using an online service; the nice thing about using Java is that because it is so widespread, everybody provides the Java stub for their services, ready to use.

- Exposing a (RESTful?) API
Here our solution is under development (but almost there), in our experiments we are using JSON-lib.

- Configuring/scripting your service
A (great) example where we used the power and openness of Java to “talk” with a wider audience is in BugsVoice rule scripting language, which is simply JavaScript; given the large and cross server-platform competence in JavaScript, it is the ideal language for letting a wide audience script your application. See here for details.

- Integrating Open Id
We use openid4java, but of course here too there are plenty of choices.

- Talking with Google applications, Twitter, … .
Here too the fact that everybody is exposing stubs for Java is just great, and saves a lot of time.

- Full-text and even smarter searching
Lucene here is the framework to mention. Actually there are many cases, in particular in online services, where full-text search is not enough; never tried Google? So we did some work on this theme too. Here is a quote from Smarter search and recent object functionality :

Here we examine a technique to improve usability in complex applications by introducing smarter search and “recent objects” functionalities. As usability becomes more and more a crucial feature of applications, helping users with full-text search and recent object lists may still prove insufficient. You may need to go beyond these features, by having a way to keep track of “most used” objects, which will help to:

- guess what you are looking for

- find what you are searching for

(Some links on this problem:

Google’ page rank paper: The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine

A discussion on badges: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/135647/how-do-badges-work-in-stackoverflow

An introduction to full text search: http://www.javaworld.com/javaworld/jw-09-2006/jw-0925-lucene.html

Hibernate full-text search: http://www.hibernate.org/410.html

Our contribution to Hibernate full-text search: http://www.hibernate.org/432.html)

Conclusions

The basic question is: does the Java environment help solving your real problems, apart from any architecture astronautic fad? I hope that the examples above show that it does.

  http://patapage.com

Patapage is a way of adding services to web sites (also static ones) in a most simple way: just by adding buttons. There are buttons for socially contributed contents, like adding a wiki-like layer to your pages, and also comments, image galleries, contact forms, rating, retweet, Google or Twitter searches, windows on other websites, annotated feedbacks, and so on. We are adding more services almost daily.

By relying on this service, you are avoiding any kind of server maintenance, and getting some nicely designed and customizable additional layers on your site. All this in an unobtrusive, simple way.

Anyone who is familiar with adding Google analytics or Twitter gadgets on their site will find Patapage simple to use and in line with the current evolution of the web.

There is simply nothing of the sort, and to see the demo you don’t even need to enroll: so just give it a try!

BugsVoice site

Error trapping is a well known “secondary” aspect of application development that has received a certain attention in recent years in usability studies. It is more and more believed that it is not that a secondary point, and that handling it properly can be a considerable help in developing quality applications and online services.

It is also true that managing this will make you loose focus with respect to the main target of your application development; so we came with the idea of providing an online service that would solve the problem for you, where you are either a web application developer of the maintainer of hosting services – or both. We called such service BugsVoice “turn bugs into opportunities”.

The service will provide you with a choice of friendly error pages, which you can eventually customize, and guidance on how to integrate your application error handling with the service. If you stick to the basicsm, you should be up in no time. Enough words: BugsVoice beta is online here – give it a try!

Teamwork's Q&A's new site

In Open Lab we just adopted a StackExchange instance as support for Q&A’s for our Teamwork product (here), and another one for generic jQuery support (here). Now, the speed with which you put up one of the highest quality services available on the web is such that it ridicules any attempt to build such a service in-house – a mistake that we actually pursued. This has led me to the following thoughts.

Many developers and managers live in a omnipotence dream. The apparent power of a Turing-complete tool, that in principle can perform any kind of computation, feeds the illusion that having developers in-house means that any software task can be solved by simply developing the application from scratch. If this seems obviously false to you, just take a look around and you’ll find more examples that you’d ever imagine.

So, we need a support forum for our product? Let’s just develop one. We need a bug tracking system? Let’s just develop one. We need to build a web site with database? Lets develop it internally.

Taking the opposite attitude, that is, developing from scratch only what is strictly related to your core business, can be a way to becoming more productive. I’ll call this the software delegation principle.

Ok, assuming this principle looks easy enough; but… there are several mistakes that can be taken in sweeping generalizations of the principle above. The worst one is confusing delegation of secondary services with outsourcing the core productivity of your company. There is a semantic difference between “delegating” and “outsourcing”, and it is connected to where you put your company’s worth.

If you put it in designers, developers and their skills, you can delegate everything but their activity, you will have to struggle to keep their focus on our main development, without making them develop say a support forum when it has nothing to do with their core issues.

If you are a software house, renting a coder is probably a bad idea – see Jeff Atwood’s Can You Really Rent a Coder? . For similar reasons, though many developers and bloggers don’t get it, it is just as well a bad idea to rent a designer. Your people’s skills are the core of your value. Like, our core competencies are development, design and marketing our web applications. Anything that distracts us from our goal, should be removed if possible.

Another in some sense opposite mistake is delegating problem solving which touches your core competencies: like using tools that give you simplistic solutions that hide you the real complexities involved and that will lead you to great troubles when going in production. A classical example is like trying to set up a web site using visual tools, without understanding HTML, JavaScript, and eventually the server-side part that goes with that: maintenance, cross browser compatibility etc. will soon become a nightmare. But delegating non core issues will actually help you going in-depth about your core issues. This is the mistake of outsourcing the core productivity of your company.

If you are a traditional custom-development based software house, what I am saying here applies in a different interpretation, simply because the value of the company is in the customers, not in production (in the case of a software house, this means the developers). Quality is concentrated in making deals with the managers, not in providing good solutions. That is why often such companies really outsource everything but marketing.(I personally don’t like much such business model, but that is another matter).

Made the necessary distinctions, if you overcome the temptation to build everything in-house, here are some examples of services that you can delegate if you are developing online services:

Development:
- writing code -> get the best IDEs, working stations, monitors, keyboards, that money can buy (see CodingHorror for many advices)
- integrating third-party technologies in your software: -> rely on available APIs
- designing mock ups ->use Balsamiq Mockups

Testing and support:
- testing your application – use http://www.usertesting.com or similar services
- collect feedback from your users  – use an online service like UserVoice or GetSatisfaction
- support questions and FAQ – use StackExchange

Marketing:
- statistics of your site – use Google’s analytics
- following marketing progress – use StartupTodo

These are just some examples that I am using or exploring.

Using the best tools for development, like using the best IDEs (see The Joel Test: 12 Steps to Better Code), goes in the same direction: you delegate syntactic work to your development environment, and you focus on solving the business model problems and, most importantly, on usability.

Productivity by delegation can also be a great source of new products and services ideas; we in Open Lab are just now developing two new products exactly for this end, one for delegating collection errors and user feedback online (BugsVoice), the other for making your web sites dynamic without using a CMS (Patapage). Time will show whether I’m right…