For example if you sign up for Twitter nowadays you will be sent through a series of pages which encourage you to follow a host of people that you may find interesting. The logic being that someone who signs up and is greeted with a completely blank feed may easily just give up on the service, an engaged user with a full feed is much more likely to stick around.

When you first see a new feature of Facebook you are usually presented with a Guider like overlay which points to the relevant parts of the page and describes how they should be used.

When we first approached a getting started process for AffClicks we modeled it off the UserVoice getting started page, which is a single page (now separated into basic and pro tips tabs) where there is a list of things a user getting started should do with the instructions to complete them. Completing them generally requires navigating to another parts of the app and using the regular interface. When tasks are completed they are marked as being completed by being given a tick and crossed out.

The original AffClicks version is show below:

The old getting started screen.

As you can see it has some fairly dense slabs of text and can quickly become confusing. The left sidebar is there because the getting started page was built into the user accounts/ settings page. This just succeeded in distracting the user (I have seen users the signed up, click on all the side links, then leave). The font was relatively small and the tasks were close enough together that people could skim them without really reading them. They were also ordered wrong (more on that below). By observing user actions my guess would be that only really motivated and fairly technical users were getting much out of it.

Like many who have worked on their startups for a long time I can sometimes delude myself that everyone from our target niche will be highly motivated to get setup in AffClicks. The truth for most startups though is that a large number of users will only have a passing interest in using a product at first, they may give up before they really see any value.

We needed to step back and think about which actions were the highes priority for new users. The first thing we really want a user to do is to connect with an Affiliate Network. This kicks off automated importing, so any sales they get end up appearing in AffClicks. With sales coming in users can get a feel for how AffClicks works and how their information is presented. Getting sales also populates a weekly update we send out, which can remind users that their sales are still being collected and encourage them to come back to AffClicks and continue to use it if they had gotten busy and forgotten about it.

The first tab of the new getting started screen, allowing a user to add an affiliate network directly.

In order to streamline this connection process we duplicated the UI for connecting a network in the getting started process. This is a positive and a negative. A positive in that the first and most important action is even easier to access, a negative in that it could be slightly confusing to the user that adding subsequent networks occurs on a different page to the first. This way a user can complete this task in a matter of seconds from their first signup.

Another important change as you can probably see from the screen above is that the tasks have been separated into tabs, as not to further confuse the reader as they skim ahead.

The next getting started tab, instructions to add the tracking snippet

The second task, adding a tracking snippet to their site is potentially a lot harder for a user to do than filling out a form. They have to add the snippet to their pages HTML and also add class=”affclicks” to their affiliate links. In order to split it up, the user is now asked what method of tracking they use before they are presented with how they can pass the task, as to not prematurely confuse. This could probably still use some more work, not just in explaining how the snippet is installed, but exactly the benefit that the user will get from it. We always have to remember that many users may have only quickly glanced over what we have to offer before signing up, not read all our copy and blog posts. Some good examples  for snippet installation are StatCounter and Google Analytics. StatCounter is probably more interesting because they have gone to pains to make the process as easy as possible for as many users as possible, listing out individual platforms and providing precise instructions. Google Analytics offers a clean and simple interface for the snippet but is probably closer to what AffClicks does right now, provide the code and instructions that users might need to be slightly techy to follow. Something such as a wordpress addon would be definitely on the cards if we find enough users using wordpress with AffClicks.

The third task, connecting to Adwords is currently unavailable, as we must pass Adwords minimum 3rd party app requirements. It is still there though and the PPC features are still prominent in the app but just not available yet. As some users may have signed up because of what they have read about our PPC features we want to remind them that they aren’t far off when possible.

The new Getting Started page has been done in conjunction with improving the signup process, first in removing the need for someone to register interest and then be invited and second in putting a lot of time into the form to ensure it is as intuitive as possible. It makes best guesses on values when possible to reduce the amount of fields the user needs to change.

I think with user acquisition for web applications in general there are 2 main stages that a user goes through.  When they first visit your site, possibly knowing very little about your app, I like to think of things very much akin to an ecommerce site. Generally in that situation a user has very little sticking them to your site, at any second they could get bored, confused or misdirected. This could result in them switching tabs, clicking a link off your site or just hitting the back button. In this stage I think you have to do everything possible to streamline the experience. Kind of bootstrapping in a way, you give the user the minimum amount they need to know to get to the next stage, signing up. Then you give the user just enough information to perform their first in app tasks. Then you can slowly layer on complexity. Once the user is using your app, getting real value from it, be that value time/ money saving, new insights or just plain fun, they transition into the second stage.

In the second stage a user is going to be a lot more sticky, you can throw some more complex concepts at them without alienating them. You can reasonably expect them to come back without having to put special effort into reacquiring them. So a big part of user acquisition is going to be what strategy you employ to transition users to the second stage.

For AffClicks a lot of time and effort has gone into this recently and the early results are promising, seeing more users signing up and completing some in app actions. This will be something we will continue to focus on as we grow.

I am interested though, what kind of strategies others are running to best hold onto new users and sell them enough on your concept before they navigate away for any number of reasons in that first stage.

This is a controversial subject, in particular in reguards to aquihires. Views are often split between the crowd that congratulates the founders on their efforts and wishes them well with their new role and the crowd that feels that they are selling out on their products users.

2 examples that have come up in the last week are Posterous being acquired by Twitter and Kevin Rose’s company Milk abandoning their first iphone app, Oink.

Posterous is a blogging platform, originally slated as the simplest way to blog online. Simply send them an email and and get your blog started, then either post through email or in an online interface. It is one of the more prominent companies launched through Y Combinator [http://ycombinator.com]. For a lot of it’s life it has been in somewhat of a battle with Tumblr [tumblr.com] for users, not that the blogging space is a zero sum game but both operated on revenue models which required immense scale to create a largely profitable and sustainable company. Tumblr had gained the upper through being less of a traditional blogging platform and a bit closer to a social network of blogs and had a lot of users that just shared photos. Posterous has always been about more tradition blogging with a smaller user base. Sensing this trend Posterous launched their own take on the more social/ photo sharing concept called Spaces.

Some may call the eventual Posterous acquisition a smart business move, returning a decent amount to investors and giving the founders a nice pay day. Many people though that have come to depend on the platform for their blogs though see it differently. Twitter will likely be making no effort to extend the life of the platform and the Posterous employees heading to Twitter will be working on other Twitter products.

The Oink case is an interesting one, the parent company Milk is a case of investors throwing money behind an internet celebrity founder with a past success (if you can call ultimately Digg a success). The idea behind Oink was to rank things around you, pretty much anything, whether it can actually be attached to a location like a Coffee at a Cafe or something that doesn’t just exist in one place like a laptop. It was given 4 months after launch until it was shut down, one Hacker News commenter likens it to business ADD. Given Kevin Roses popularity the app quickly shot up in downloads, hitting 150,000 in just over a month. I guess it was likely not meeting expectations in adoption, engagement or product direction. Milk also indicated when they started that they would be experimenting with lots of ideas when they started.

It is more the trend as a whole that worries me rather than any specific example. Time and time again we see companies that are one day selling customers on their products and exciting futures and the next annoying that they have been acquired and the product is shutting down. This time a fair bit of discussion is spawning such as this post drawing an analogy to real estate landlords (discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3703217). I worry that in the future users will be jaded on investing their time into getting started and making the most of new services. They will remember the last time they uploaded all their photos to that “cool new service”, only to have them shut down either require them to export the photos or potentially lose them and any content that has been generated around them.

This is all related to the interesting post “dont be a free user”. Basically it states that when you pay for a service you have a higher chance that that service will stick around, that the service will be generated real revenue and not be so beholden to the next VC round or the VC board that now controls the company. Sure there is still the chance that these companies will be acquired but there is a far higher chance that the a company will either survive without needing addition funding or to be purchased or that when they are brought their product is actual valuable for the acquirer to continue to run.

Many companies run a model where they try to delay revenue generation for as long as possible to build up a critical mass of users. This works for some companies, Twitter being a notable example. Others though, you feel that they would have been better off working out the revenue model before they reached the point where they could no longer continue without outside assistance.

The first one I setup is to post my blog posts to Twitter, I’m sure there is probably a WordPress add on to do this but nowhere near as quick and easy as with Ifttt. This was a while back but I got thinking about it again when I quickly added the #b03 hashtag to the auto generated Tweets for the March blog challenge. The possibilities are really endless with the channels that they have available and they seem to be adding more all the time. They have a list of recipes that is full of actions that others have come up with to give you ideas. The most used one right now is to synchronise your Facebook and Twitter profile pictures, saving you the time to update both. Some other cool ones are: Star an email in gmail to send to Evernote, Backup pictures on Facebook into dropbox, or save email attachments to Dropbox.

Looking through the recipes, it seems like the RSS feed channel is a big enabler right now, as anything being put into any kind of RSS feed can be acted upon.

Currently upon making new posts for AffClicks I am spending a fair amount of time pushing them out through all the social channels and relevant social news top lists like Hacker News, Reddit and Inbound.org, while I don’t think Ifttt is quiet up to the task yet of automating that pipeline it looks to be heading in that direction of taking that work you would usually have to do and fully automating it. Getting the right words down to create valuable content when blogging is the important part, pushing things out to get maximum exposure (what I am usually aiming for with AffClicks based stuff) is the repeatable bit that just takes up a chunk of time.

Investors seem to agree that ifttt has a bright future, recently investing $1.5 million dollars to further fund development. As developers, we tend to look to automate everything in our workflows that we are able to, giving us more time to focus on the parts that matter. So a service like this naturally appeals to us. What will be interesting is whether this can cross the chasm and gain a mainstream following with regular internet users, as the TechCrunch article mentions:

The simple, big-text interface has managed to guide a wide variety of users through it and get them hooked but some pieces of it. But it still has some rough edges. Some pieces, like the curly brackets section for setting up detailed actions, can be confusing to people who aren’t familiar with programming.

Steve has talked a fair bit of late about creating a habit calendar and keeping up your chosen habit every day in order too see how long a chain of days you can create and cement the chosen pursuit as a permanent habit. In Steve’s case and for the purposes of the March challenge, one of the main habits being formed is that of blogging. In my case last month I made 2 blog posts, one here and one on the AffClicks Blog. This month, while not aiming to post every day I am aiming to post a lot more. Basically any time I have something that I think I can order my thoughts well around a blog post and also to get through a few more of the Affiliate Marketing topics I want to cover on the AffClicks blog.

So what I want to find out is not wether I can post every day, which I feel with startup demands in might be hard, but whether I can make slower but sustained improvements to my blogging habit.

Also I will be following along and referencing in posts what others are posting for the challenge. I was tossing up the idea of trying to make a small web app to track peoples progress before it got underway but didn’t have the time to get stuck into doing it.

(As an aside, the wordpress gods weren’t on my side tonight, spent way longer making things work than writing this post)

As a product gains traction though it attracts a diverse set of users, each bringing their own expectations and use cases to the table and many giving feedback of “It’s great but I’d love if it also did…”. Many of these suggestions in isolation sound great, who wouldn’t want that extra functionality.

Generally things can go one of 2 ways, many of these features can be added and the product can continue being iterated and mature. Or most of all feature requests can be knocked back in order to keep the product as simple as the first day it come out. This tends to result in the project stagnating though, things work better when they are constantly moving and come to a grinding halt when they aren’t.

Either way, the product will eventually be ripe for disruption, either it will now be the slow moving behemoth due to years of feature creep or it will be a simple product that has failed to include many things over time that the disruptive competitor can be based around. Things move so fast that the simple product over time may have to be refocused and mostly rebuilt in order to both stay simple and to cover just the right subset of use cases to remain relevant.

While something new may look new and innovative, maybe it is more like something from the previous cycle than we think. An example is how Facebook greatly simplified the social network from the mySpace experience. Facebook identified exactly what people wanted to do on a social network: easily find and chat with their friends, share pictures and organize events. As time has gone by though there are now many aspects to Facebook and it is becoming more complicated all the time, one look at the myriad of privacy options or the different types of content that can now appear in your feed can convince you off this.

We now have the next way with social apps like Path, which is a lot closer to the original Facebook than Facebook is now. Path focuses on the people in your life you want to connect with the most, while your Facebook “friends” list may have ballooned out Path is all about cutting it back. Path is also riding the mobile wave, being predominantly mobile only. In a few years time will we be able to add the next way to this cycle? Will todays simplistic products have either grown to look like todays incumbents or stagnated and forgotten about?

Personally I am not a game developer and haven’t really touched games dev since I was about 16 when I used to muck around with a few game making engines/ IDEs. The contact I have to the indie game making scene is through my brother Ben who recently completed a game dev degree. I have followed his teams game development with interest but always a step or 2 removed from the actual nitty gritty of putting a game together.

Initially I was a little worried that I wouldn’t be much use to a team without knowing much about the techniques being used. I am a programmer with a fair bit of experience in a collection of languages but under the time restrictions I thought picking up enough of the concepts might be difficult. It did help though that our game concept could borrow some code from some of my team members game from last year. Having something to look through instead of starting from a blank slate really helped me pickup the basics.

Everyone watching the opening keynotes, eagerly awaiting this years theme.

I ended up one a team with 2 artists and 2 other programmers, one of which was quiet experienced in the platform we chose to develop with (XNA) and the other was like me just getting into it, although with a little more recent game development experience in. Our artists split their workload between background/ objects and the animated characters. Our 2 artists were probably some of the best out of any of the 26 other groups, fairly early on we realised that we were more likely to get held back by programming than by artists.

From the programming side one big misstep we made was not using any version control which would have allowed the 3 of us programming to each work away adding things to our own copy of the game code,  having a program do much of the leg work on synchronising our code. I raised this at the start, knowing how important it is in any development, but ended up going with the other programmers who had previously done a Game Jam before and had more games experience. I think we all agree now though that it is a must have for next time.

Sleeping Quarters For The Game Jam

The Ouroboros, make of it what you will (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ouroboros)

Part of Game Jam is being given a theme, when this years theme was put up over the projector people were a little confused, what exactly was it? Turns out it was an Ouroboros, I depiction of a snake eating its own tail, in a circle. It was left deliberately vague so that teams were free to interpret the image in their own ways. Whether it be circle of life and death, time travel or as literally of having a rolling circle snake in your game.

As some of the guys in the group had done a bit of a joke game last year we decided to go for something a bit more serious. The concept was that you are a robot that is underground and must constantly mine dig sites around a planet to replenish your energy. What seems like the right action though from the perspective of the miner is actually slowly killing the planet as you see through the multiple stages of degradation of the the core of the planet. Things progress form a very rocky environment with flying rocks whirling past to one that is very organic with geysers constantly firing, flesh head monsters and a planet which is progressively making more painful noises.

The thing about the serious concept is that it really needs to be executed well to create the mood. The sounds must be just right and play at the right time and the music must fit the mood. We went for a very creepy and somewhat disturbing collection of sounds and music. The drilling sounds which was adapted from a dentists drill sent shivers down the spine. The gameplay must be right to, silly bugs like the character fly off in the wrong direction or continuing to drill after you have stopped pressing the button would really kill the mood.

An early prototype, 11am on the Saturday, gogogo

Unfortunately due to the time constraints we ended up with a lot of these issues which stopped us from really nailing the mood and ended with some comical bugs for the judges to contend with. After the event was over and I’d had some sleep I discovered that many of the biggest bugs were in fact one line changes that in our desperate rush to finish the game off and daze of tiredness we had overlooked. The whole team though really liked the concept and we are going to continue development, albeit at a much slower pace.

The team hard at work

Somewhat of a completed game at the end of the Game Jam, little better now!

It wouldn’t be a contest without awards and after the judges were done everyone headed off the the bar for some drinks and the announcement. The winners were:
Overall winner and also Jammers Choice: Omelette Boris
Most Fun: Streams
Most Surprising: Seasonal Sci-Flies
Best Art: Whirlstrom
Best Sound: Burn
Best Teamwork: Harry Lee’s mega team

One game I got a chance to play, Nom!Oboros, had a quiet cool mechanic where you had to kill yourself to the the powers of the last enemy that you killed, playing on the idea of reincarnation from the theme, the gameplay was really polished, could tell the difference it made from something like our game where the gameplay wasn’t nailed down.

I’d talk some more about some more about the awesome games made (apparently there was a massive step up in quality this year) but I just didn’t get much of a chance to give them a good go on the day. I will definitely be finding some time for this in current weeks. Also there will be a night in a few weeks for everyone to show off their games, hoping ours will look a bit more complete after that.

Everyone gathering around for awards.

The other game I got a real good look at was Purgatory, the game my brothers group made. It was a battle between life and death featuring split screen gameplay in which you are in 2 overlapping parallel universes. It requires you to look at both your side and the other players each player has walls in different places, allowing each player to tactically hide in the others walls. When one player was out of life, they would descend into purgatory where their movement would be slowed and they would have to try desperately to reach a portal that would bring them back up into the other world while the other player again chased them down attempting to win by killing their foe again before they reached the portal.

Purgatory - One of the awesome games made at the Jam

Personally I got a lot out of the event and will definitely be back next year. It has rekindled my interest in game development and shown to me that getting the hang of a toolset like XNA and C# isn’t overly hard (although I’m sure I’m only scratching the surface). While in the second half of last year I completed the Stanford online AI course (should do a post on that one) as a side project of sorts I think this year my side project will be further my experience in games development.

Over time and through my degree I have progressively got better at the software engineering side: structuring and commenting maintainable code, thinking about a class/ db hierarchy, sever setups, source control, issue/ bug tracking, testing and deployment. Since starting work on my startup over a year ago now I have been largely coding alone, which makes it doubly hard to follow good standards and not slack off. I know that any time saved by cutting corners now will come back to bite me once I expand my team. Even programming away by myself though AffClicks is now sizeable enough that that lack of proper tests is coming back to bite me with some refactoring I have had to do recently. This is also a good thing though, a reality check, that I can’t just code away without building proper structure around that code. It’s alo slowly showing me the value of unit tests, I have read plenty on the subject over a period of time but have never really embraced them.

Appart from AffClicks I still have projects I have been working on or a long time or contracting for where much of the development involves simply FTP’ing files to the live server which is something I want to look to eliminate.

So my goal for the new year is to get a lot more rigorous with my practices, write better more maintainable code that isn’t impossible to decipher once other people come onto the team.

Path gives a really simple and functional layout on the iphone.

I have been thinking about this recently since getting into the new version of Path, which without using the old version I believe it has moved from a more strictly picture sharing app to include more of the regular social network features such as it’s take on likes, location, statuses etc. In all it is aiming to try and bring a much more close and intimate experience among close friends mainly expressed with photos and videos as opposed to long chains of text based statues and comments. The lack of page/ app spam that you get in Facebook is refreshing and overall it looks a lot nicer (although mobile only). I doubt it would replace Facebook completely for me though, given only certain people will probably be interested in Path and it’s really not the forum for having longer text based discussions via status comments. Also the internet marketer in me does like the keep an eye on business branding and ads on Facebook.

One app that I have used from time to time that I feel that Path really does replace for me is instagram and this is quiet deliberate on Path’s part as they have included image filters, the main thing the differentiated instagram from other image sharing apps in the first place. Path is a lot more natural to build up a list of people to share with than instagram, as instagram, being more on the side of a feature than a fully fledged product doesn’t really draw people in as strongly with network effects. The one thing that can be interesting about it is that it will show you popular public pictures drawn from all users but that itself isn’t really enough to invest the time in it also. I think that it’s harder for apps that are trying to be a featured layered on top of other networks primarily rather than setting out to create their own. Another app is Batch, from the creators of Daily Booth. This app attempts and succeeds in my opinion to create a better interface for creating and sharing albums (batches) of photos. Again they have the problem of the overhead of having to use their app, then post to Facebook or Twitter, then have people authorize their app when it pops up in their feed to see your album. This is a feature app just waiting for the big players to get right themselves and build it in.

Google+ as most know is another slightly different take on the social network. It’s something that I would love to see work, as it would be great to build a network of mostly like minded tech people to talk in depth with. I have read that this kind of thing is happening with a lot of groups, unfortunately (or possibly fortunate for participants) a lot of this quality conversation is locked away in circles thus making it appear as somewhat of a ghost town to the rest of us. Most of what I see is posts from famous/ internet famous people and companies building an audience in yet another place, some of this is insightful but not necessarily social. Again network effects make something like Google+ difficult to kickstart, a similar thing occurred with their failed Google wave effort where people would eagerly jump on try try it out, only to give up once they realised no one they knew was on there, only for friends to come along later and find the same thing when they are trying it out. It is a contrast to their browser Google Chrome in which for every incremental user gained it is immediately useful to them without them needing their network dragged along into it to, this means it has been far easier for Google to build a large market share of active, engaged users.

Despite the character limit I find Twitter is current much more useful for this type of like minded tech discussion via @ replies and links to interesting content. I have also noticed of late that the feed from Twitter ends up being a lot nicer due to the uniformity in postings rather than being very disjointed as Facebook has become given the many types of postings that may end up in your feed. From the new timeline effort you can see that Facebook is slowly starting to attack this problem of being unappealing visually and disjointed. Even while I am approaching 100 followers on Twitter it is still very much a consumption medium for me as it feels like much content being produced is largely ignored, this isn’t really surprising as it is largely an inpersonal network where many people are following you because of common interest rather than personal friendship so your post becomes one more in a fairly fast moving stream depending on how many others are following.

Then there are many apps that attempt to layer themselves on top or across these networks, you have no doubt used things that allow you to post and share across many different mediums. Interesting things to like FlipBoard for iPhone/iPad that attempts to aggregate Facebook, Twitter and online news sources to form your own personal magazine.

I’m interested in what others have settled on. Do you use a wide variety of apps or find it to be tiresome to keep on top of them all or do you abstain from the whole concept in general?

This is probably down to being short of resources or knowhow when constructing a fairly simple, possibly low use API, but almost ensures that anyone who wants to implement it properly will be contacting them for more details, occasionally the company themselves don’t know why their API is behaving in a certain way.

I have also noticed some using WSDL in a way that doesn’t really actually specify anything by leaving the return type open. I’m no real fan of SOAP but at least a proper WSDL can go a long way to figuring out how an API will behave.

I think a bit of extra time to fully document an API will save a developer/ support staff a heap of time down the track where other developers are able to implement their API without ever getting in contact. At very least though, when you get questions from developers the answers should also go into the docs so the same issues are covered in future.

With all that though comes the other side, occasionally there are long stretches where you are getting things perfect on the backend, especially in the case of something highly data driven. I my case for the past couple of weeks I have been attempting to reconcile the outputs of many different reporting systems on affiliate networks that only loosely follow the same reporting scheme. This isn’t a new thing as many of the networks are already part of our system, though whereas last time I was kind of just skimming through and making them good enough, I am now revisiting and thinking of all the possible corner cases users could possibly have. The quality of these networks data retrieval varies from full OAuth implementation, to nice API’s with API key, right down to scraping using a plaintext username and password. I have a feeling how the guys from Yodlee must have felt early on.

I seem to have a fairly good approach to this kind of thing, goal directed in getting it all done ASAP and not stopping to much to worry about how tedious and boring the work has become. I also try to move onto another part of the large stack of related tasks when I get stuck somewhere. One thing I want to ensure though is that I am as through as possible, I’m sure to others involved I end up posing crazy corner cases that may never eventuate for any of our users but I figure the more I can cover now the less I get floored with complaints at launch.

I guess what I’m wondering is how others approach the boring grind parts of a startup early on, where there is no one else around to shoulder the load and the founder has to sit down and work the whole thing out themselves. We read plenty about the launches and the cool hacks, but how do you deal with having to go through large amounts of relatively boring activity of days on end to iron out edge cases and complex interactions between systems?

Different people have different thresholds for which they are willing for form trust online, some may be happy to give someone new a chance, it might be that the transaction is of sufficiently low value that they feel the risk is low. Others may require that a person have a long and spotless reputation record before choosing to deal with them, this has been evidenced time and time again in the threats people have received when they have deemed an eBay power seller deserves negative feedback.

One of the real issues preventing people from getting involved though is that initial feedback that will open doors for them and allow them to fully utilise any server. Often when an account is created on a service it is pretty much a blank slate, with little to identify the person. Facebook or Twitter integration may help in verifying that someone is who they say they are but this says nothing of how they are going to treat a rented car or how long they take to complete a bank transfer for an item. The perceived risk for other users will always be higher than someone with an established record.

I experienced this firsthand some years ago when as a uni student I looked towards RentACoder to improve my programming skills and get some extra cash without having to take up a job outside my chosen field. Initially it was almost impossible to get work, bidding against other more established users the only way to get that initial feedback was to do essentially free work. Things improved over time but this problem surely put many off as it would have across many services. Product sharing and redistribution networks online are in their infancy compared with more traditional mass market consumption, in this stage they need all the help they can get to cross into the mainstream. The need for instant gratification is important in facilitating this, the mass market doesn’t want to sign up then invest weeks into a service before full participation.

So what is the answer? The feedback has to come from somewhere to begin with, it is hard to get around the issue of building up reputation and trust at all. What can be done though is one reputation is build up on one service it should be able to be move between services in which the same form of trust is required. For instance if I were to build up trust renting out houses this should carry across to renting something like a car, if I treated the house well the feedback is equally useful when applied to treating other rented items well.

The book likened this idea to a bank account, one for reputation. I’m thinking of something slightly different, not something that really exists standalone but rather can be build into every product service or redistribution network. We have seen how simple and useful OAuth Twitter and Facebook connect, as well as openID have been in allowing people to transfer their online identity between multiple services online. A similar service allowing people to transfer their reputation online would go a long way to getting more people involved and trusted quicker as opposed to the walled garden online reputation systems we are currently accustomed to. A service developer when implementing this could specify which kind of existing reputation and trust would carry over well to their service.

As we have seen with many things on the web, open systems provide many benefits over walled gardens, reputation and trust systems are no different.

Recently much has been written on people coming out of university expecting to have a job handed to them on a platter. They reason that they have put in the years of work passing the degree and now they should be rewarded for this. One of the problems is, is the candidate really suitable for the job position, sure they have completed the degree but how much did they really learn? Did they apply themselves or just cruise through the system as I outlined above? Does the subject really interest them or did they just see it as a means to an end, a pay check. This isn’t of course entirely graduates own fault, they have been feed misinformation which has breed misconceptions about the real world. It is in educators, governments and employers interests to push out a steady stream of graduates, of course this doesn’t always align with the students themselves.

Recently I have been thinking about what kind of a different level I would be at if the only experience I had in my field (computer science) come from what I was being taught in university and wasn’t curious and explored things on my own, asked questions and programmed my own things. It’s interesting to note that these activities have never really been encouraged by the university; the course content has always been squarely the focus. I would have no knowledge of start-ups or business, my programming would have been restricted to languages such as C, C++, Java, .NET(on internship) ect, without stepping outside this and exploring real world uses and implementations. Many more advanced algorithms and ideas would have been lost on me because as good as the Operating Systems and Algorithms and Data Structures courses they can only cover so much in a semester.

Spending time on reading, learning, completing my own experimentation, freelancing and a startup has taken away much of the time I could have spent improving my grades and as a result while I think I have become a broad well learned student and very good at my subject area my grades don’t really reflect this at times, including a few fails. To me, this is a trade off that I am very happy to make, on the university side though and to other observers they can resemble someone who is slacking off. Also during my university I have spent a disproportionate amount of time on things, for example our full year software project. This really interested me and to that end I put in a lot of time developing a solid framework and adding extra features about and beyond requirements, to the detriment of some other subjects I was taking.

Similarly now, as I am on the cusp of completing my honours thesis (more on this in a later post) other subjects have fallen by the wayside as I consume myself with a mental model of what I am trying to complete. The thesis is also something in which I don’t think I could have go anywhere near the level it is at or the broad subject that it covers without what I have learnt reading and tinkering outside of formal education. My thesis really interests me, so much so I am contemplating continuing my research after I have completed the requirements of my degree. I’ve had to do a bit of a double take on that, thinking, do people actually do that? I have no intention of completing a post graduate degree but would like to continue what I have started in my spare time.

As for job prospects, I am way more excited about the startup I have cofounded than applying for any job. And should it fail, as many startups invariably do, I will have another great example to add to the portfolio and move onto the next opportunity.

As for universities, I think there needs to be a frank discussion with students about what they really hope to achieve when they begin and some of the realities of the workforce they may be stepping out into. Granted this isn’t the traditional role of the university, they aren’t meant to be a vocational training centre but increasingly this is what people are looking for when they enrol. Get into university, pass the classes, get a degree and get the ideal job. This progression doesn’t exist anymore, if it ever did, the current landscape calls for more people who show a genuine passion for what they do. It also calls for self motivated people who want to make their own way through freelancing or running their own company. If my company grows and it comes to taking on an employee, I know what type of person I’ll be hiring.

This isn’t a great reason not to be heard though, sure a post might not be the most in depth comment or the most technically correct on an issue but it can still give a lot of value. Recently enough topics have been mulling in my head that I would love to sit down and express in a longer form. Also as any developer would know you frequently come across technology, methods or tips that haven’t been well explained in the past that would be great to clear up or write about in greater depth. There is also a lot of tech news that comes out that I have an informed and well reasoned opinion on.

In short despite me largely ignoring participation in the medium for a long time I think the time is right for me to get involved and hopefully contribute something meaningful in my areas of interest.