This was a timely article as I recently had a fun time playing devil's advocate regarding QR codes in a friend's start up idea. She insists that they are a useful, convenient, and a big trend. I countered that they require too much effort and precision to be mainstream in their current incarnation. While the promised convenience sounds great (which was basically her argument), the current implementation does not live up to that promise.
While in Las Vegas, recently, she mentioned that she went to an art gallery that had QR codes on the placards for paintings that were for sale. One could scan the code and be taken to the gallery's website where you could then purchase a print. Prints cost in the range of a few hundred to a few thousand dollars. Who goes to an art gallery in Las Vegas to walk out with a few bookmarks so they can spend a thousand dollars at home? It's a use case with lots of cool factor and wouldn't-it-be-awesome-if's, but that does not pan out with real, normal humans.
I was at Google IO this past May with 5,000 other nerds. I spent much of the time walking around, talking to people, and figuring out whose brain I wanted to pick further. On our admission badge was a QR code that attendees could opt-in to having all your contact information on using a checkbox on the Google IO registration page. I had opted in for this. What do you think the primary method of exchanging contact info was that weekend?
You guessed it.
Business cards. Only one person asked to scan my QR code, but this was after he asked for my business card first (I ran out). The rest of time, I logged email addresses and names in my phone or wrote my name and email on a piece of paper.
QR codes are a flop. I know this because I was in a room with 5,000 fellow nerds for a weekend, in 2011, and almost none of us cared to use it.
How can you be the hot new tech if the nerds don't care to use you?
> It could also be that they just aren't being implemented in a very intelligent way that makes them easy for people (or that the nerds are wrong–gasp! :)
I agree. They are not implemented in an intelligent way which makes them clumsy and painful to use.
My point about nerds is that us nerds are much more likely to live with pain to use fun, new tech. And as far as my experience from Google IO and my day-to-day work life, it doesn't seem to be the case here.
I've notice I've been using my business cards less and less over the years. Nowadays, it's more common for me to have the other people simply type-in their information directly into my iPhone.
It's not about the PDF copy having zero marginal cost. Manning is a business that is trying to offer an incentive for customers to buy direct from them. Are you suggesting that they destroy their own value add?
Also, I seriously doubt that Manning responded to d0m's request by literally saying:
"Fu, it's your problem, next time buy it at manning, not amazon"
Pronounced "F-U" and not "foo".
The moment you twist someone's wording to sound that aggressive, you're overreacting.
I don't know if I would consider emailing a PDF to a customer who made an honest mistake "destroying your value add".
I've given some paid members on setformarriage.com free lifetime accounts because they were consistently forwarding us emails from the spam profiles that made it through our filters. I think the value of overall goodwill to the customers is probably worth it.
IIRC, Posterous does this as part of their caching strategy. Static content is HTTP cached and dynamic content is pulled in via AJAX on page load. The result is that the primary content is available fast and dynamic secondary information (such as view count, etc) pops in soon after.
The distinction between web sites and web applications is not granular enough to make this decision. What you should be considering as a developer/designer of a web site/app is not about what bucket Flickr or YouTube or Yelp falls into, but what specific screens should be accessible with shebangs and which screens should not.
Flickr's photo indexes and Yelp's listings and reviews should probably be accessible via regular old URLs. But Flickr's uploader screen? Adding a new listing to Yelp? If you're ok with leaving behind users who have javascript turned off, it simply _does_ _not_ matter. In those cases, why not take advantage of the snappy UX that shebanged interfaces offer?
That's true, to a point. My principle objections to hashbang URLs is greatly reduced for pages which people are never intended to link to - private "edit" interfaces protected by a login are a prime example.
Personally I'm not OK leaving behind non-JS users in my own development, but provided a site's public pages are accessible I'm not too bothered what they're doing when people log in.
Agreed. On top of that, the discussion about time in app is an implicit straw man. It's no surprise that one set of metrics might be more important to LinkedIn versus for Facebook, but the relative importance of a set of metrics for two different businesses targeting different audiences is a weak argument for their relative valuations.
Facebook has fundamentally changed the way millions interact with their social circle; LinkedIn's impact is smaller by far. I find this a pretty simple explanation for much of the difference in their valuations.
As an introvert myself, I follow a short list of rules/steps before big events/social gatherings that starts a few days before the event itself. Although I'm usually physically exhausted the day after the event, I'm often complimented and mentioned as 'quite the social butterfly' by friends and acquantances during such events. These things don't take much time, but do take effort. The payoff is worth it though (firends, fun, and fame ;-) ). YMMV.
1. Ditch the alcohol. Or, at least, know your limit (that gives you a buzz) and have 50% less. You want to be able to remember faces and names of the people you meet and some details about your conversation. So make sure your mental faculties are reasonably sharp.
2. Spend most of your time listening. Pretend that you're interviewing the person and ask them open ended questions about their job and hobbies. You will almost certainly find out something interesting about them that you can discuss further. Who knows, maybe they're a programmer just like you!
3. Get up to speed on current events. I personally try not to read much news, but for about 3 days heading up to an event, I'll skim headlines and first paragraphs news articles on a broad range of topics (takes less than an hour each day). The goal here is to create little hooks that you can hang conversations on, it is not to become an expert on a random topic. You'll most certainly run into someone who'll know more than you and will gladly tell you all about it.
4. Keep it light. You and the other guests are there to have fun. Downers are for drug addicts. Politics and religion is for reddit.
5. Work the room by having short conversations with lots of people and asking for introductions. Introductions are as simple as asking, "So who else do you know here tonight?".
6. Prepare yourself mentally for being at the event. Clear out to do's and other distractions. I kind of psych myself up for chatting with lots of people in the same way others might psych themselves up for sports contests (metaphorically, of course).
All of the above can be summed up as:
1. It's not about you. It's about everyone else who you'll meet, the friends you'll make, and making sure your significant other has a good time (especially if he/she is an extrovert).
2. Prepare. "A hard drill makes an easy battle".
I've learned to turn down small talk heavy events that I can't adequately prepare for. I've also learned that you can have a 15 minute conversation with someone by just asking what they do for a living and how they got to doing it. I've learned that stock phrases (aka, pick up lines) really work. My favorites are:
"Hi, I'm Andrew."
"What do you do (for a living)?"
And, if I find out the person has an MBA: "So what the hell is future-discounted value?"
#5 is gold. You're not there to do business or woo people - it's all about establishing contact so that you can follow-up with a few and do business and go on a coffee date.
What you may find is the simple act of repeated short interactions is the most effective warmup for introversion. The thing is it may take more than one interaction to be warmed up. Five more likely. Any number is better than one.
A social experiment I highly recommend: Walk down a not too busy city street and just start smiling and saying hi to people. You'll find most people will ignore you, maybe even give you a negative look. Don't mind them. If you can get to a certain magic number for the environment, you'll find the balance shifting - you'll start to feel energized, fearless, alive and - it is usually at this point that some people respond back in kind. And when that happens, I can schmooze with the best. In a way only introverts can. This might be 50 HIs and smiles later though. Good luck! Even on a smaller scale (walking into a room and deliberately greeting everyone you first encounter), this really helps!
Very good advice indeed. Looking forward to putting it to practice on New Year's Eve!
Your point #2 reminds me of a HN comment that said something along the lines of "when I meet someone, I assume this person has a secret and it's my job to discover it".
Recently after reading this, I got talking with a guy sitting on the next seat on a plane, who I discovered had been a screenwriter for a famous TV show for three years and had a particular fondness for programming (and a lot of insightful comments on tech in general). An hour before, I only knew this guy had an impressive mustache.
Karma's really a proxy for community participation, albeit kind of one-sided since you don't get increased karma for up-voting someone else (and rightfully so). I don't think it would be unreasonable to say that if you don't participate, then you don't get to solicit the help of others.
But the bar is much lower than that. For the purpose of just keeping spam accounts out, I think the combination of a karma threshold with average non-karma accruing activity over time (such as upvoting others, clicking through on articles, etc) could be an effective filter.
If you're doing the work for a flat project fee, ask for 20-50% of the fee up front before doing any work. If you're going to be paid hourly, you probably would have provided at least an estimate of hours that the project will take. Your retainer should be 20% of the total of your rate times hours estimated.
Always request a retainer. Especially for new clients. Even more so for friends and family.
Most of the time, I'd argue that you can't really say 'No' at all. Not if you want a happy client. If you do say no, then you'll just end up delivering an end product that isn't exactly what the client wanted and didn't have that feature they requested. I can't imagine any situation where that results in a happy client.
So what do you do? I say: Get the client to say 'No' for you.
Getting people to understand the trade-offs and sacrifices for what they might consider a "quick 'n easy" feature is the name of the game here. You've got to flesh out all the assumptions that they have when making such a request so that they understand what the impact is on schedule, budget, and code.
But what they still don't understand is why Projects X, Y, and Z will have to be pushed back for 2 weeks or why Joe and Mary will have to pulled away for 3 weeks just to do this "quick", "simple" thing. At this point, what I usually do is spec out the entire feature (front-loading all the mockups, copywriting, etc) on the spot or in a meeting immediately following. The reasoning is that "If you want this feature tomorrow, then it has to be designed today." And well, practically speaking, you can't implement it by tomorrow if you don't know what you need to do yet anyway and, worse still, you'll build the wrong thing if you don't at least discuss it in some detail with your client first.
If the feature isn't important enough to spec out in detail now, it's not important enough to be done by tomorrow.
In my experience as a solo webdev freelancer (so take it for what it's worth), clients usually see my point and give in when they realize that we're trying to compress about a week's worth of back and forth emails, phone calls, and let-this-idea-sink-in time into about an hour--sometimes even realizing that they don't really know yet what they want.
While in Las Vegas, recently, she mentioned that she went to an art gallery that had QR codes on the placards for paintings that were for sale. One could scan the code and be taken to the gallery's website where you could then purchase a print. Prints cost in the range of a few hundred to a few thousand dollars. Who goes to an art gallery in Las Vegas to walk out with a few bookmarks so they can spend a thousand dollars at home? It's a use case with lots of cool factor and wouldn't-it-be-awesome-if's, but that does not pan out with real, normal humans.
I was at Google IO this past May with 5,000 other nerds. I spent much of the time walking around, talking to people, and figuring out whose brain I wanted to pick further. On our admission badge was a QR code that attendees could opt-in to having all your contact information on using a checkbox on the Google IO registration page. I had opted in for this. What do you think the primary method of exchanging contact info was that weekend?
You guessed it.
Business cards. Only one person asked to scan my QR code, but this was after he asked for my business card first (I ran out). The rest of time, I logged email addresses and names in my phone or wrote my name and email on a piece of paper.
QR codes are a flop. I know this because I was in a room with 5,000 fellow nerds for a weekend, in 2011, and almost none of us cared to use it.
How can you be the hot new tech if the nerds don't care to use you?