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The iPhone text messaging revolution

It's been a little less than a month since I acquired this iPhone 4, after months pondering about it. I never had one so everything is pretty new. Still, out of all the innovative tools and well crafted systems, the one which got my attention was the text messaging app: yes, the one which handles SMS, the most archaic feature of all cellphones (except by the phone itself).

Till that point, SMS had been an atomic and asynchronous medium, that mimicked e-mail with its storage design (outboxes and inboxes), but that had countless limitations. I avoided it, because it was hard to keep a conversation up and I would use it only to leave message when a call was not possible: an unilateral, atomic conversation.

Now with the iPhone, SMS is a continuous conversation, one you can see evolving and are compelled to keep going as the interface resembles much more a private chat room than an e-mail client. Plus, in 2011, with much higher speed in communication services, SMS is almost instantaneous now, so it actually feels like a conversation.

It's the same system, but with a different approach. And the result is a totally new paradigm.

Quora, so innovative... hm?

An online service, with public questions made by the users and open for the users to answer, where good answers get up voted and rise in the view as the best answer for its question. Yahoo! Answers, obviously -- what did you think?

Essentially the same service, both Yahoo! Answear and the new hipster Quora. So what makes Quora so hype and attractive, while its Yahoo! counterpart have been there for so much more time, and have never got such love?

Simply great, simple greatness

What I find in Quora, as a non registered member (for I don't have an invite), is an almost depressing lack of everything, but its core functionality. And that's why it is so great.

Every detail is meticulously left out, even new users are so, to preserve what really matters in the service: its content. For the question and answer mechanism is nothing but a cheap approach to gather rich content, that would otherwise be generating traffic (and maybe revenue) in its author's blogs and websites, but is now freely provided to the system. That in turn get all the traffic (and possibly revenue, in the future).

With Quora I don't have to deal with gigantic mastheads, or colorful backgrounds, or ads, or any other attention sucker that is present in the other service. I get the offending question about 100px from the website top and simplistic interface with all the answers there provided.

With Quora I get spam free answers and highly relevant questions, as everyone is responsible for its content, as the invite system prevents and discourage vandals to get into the system. And for all its relevance, the service attracts the cream of the crop of several different areas - as Entrepreneurship, Design, Development, Business, to name a few - and gets excellent and share-worthy content.

Quora is by no means innovative. They are only building on a existing concept, but doing it right. Not innovative, but ingenius, for sure.

Quora has a (potentially growing) long tail in its hands with super-specific questions to the web community, and while they're probably spreading over all subjects that ever happen to exist in the human history in the short future, I believe they can certainly stick to it and get a good outcome of that. If not, won't be long till they start fighting market share with the likes of StackOverflow minions, and even Reddit and Hacker News.

 

"I knew I should've fixed that bug..." - said iPhone lead developer about the alarm glitch

Staring coldly at the Product Owner and QA Manager, there was John Doe, cursing the bureaucracy imposed by the processes and rules the team have to follow: just for the sake of organization politics, prioritization would cut off business demand and technical needs, just a bit here and just a bit there, to show who is who in the org chart -- yet claiming to do so for design excellence, proper quality assurance and protection of the engineering crew. 

"It would have cost me just a few hours, and we would have avoided such messy press coverage", said John to the suited up, and boldly concerned Mark, the product guy who vetted the bug fix for the long time known issue, two releases in a row, till it got forgotten due to the overwhelming demand for new features for the core services of the product, that have recently started to be consumed by the iPad and brought new capabilities to the iPod. An unforeseen new market that was now hitting the backlog with all its strength.

"You could have just done it then, couldn't ya?", mocked Harry, the blond English gentleman, responsible for the test designers team and manager of the defect queue, which worked co-located with the engineers to ensure good communication among both teams. "Well, I could, should you only be ready to take the time for a proper sign-off after I'm done.", replied John.

"Maybe you should all get some fresh air, gentleman? It's now done and we should just make sure we got a better prioritization process in place for this upcoming release...", gently interfered Alice, with a friendly smile in her face. The senior engineer, auto-entitled "An Almost People Person", was always all for sincere and sober conversation and knew that wasn't going anywhere.

John nodded and stud up. Grabbed his phone on his pocket, a test prototype for the white iPhone 4, and gave it a good look to see what time it was. Now putting the chair back in place, he waves, and turning to the door of the meeting room, walks off. 

"Guess sometimes I should just trust my gut feelings." -- John knew he could have fixed that.

 

the escalation

Not sure I understand, can you clarify why it isn't feasible? Adding <Big Boss>.

I don't want no executive position

off the world

I'm completely out of the world. I don't read any newspaper, magazine, news website, journalist twitter, political party ad, I don't listen to any radio or radio news, I don't watch soap operas, political debates, news, reality shows, or any kind of television program. I'm also fairly quiet and slightly anti-social, the kind that hardly talks to you to know about mundane happenings, and instead will only search for specific subjects.

I'm not particularly fond of it though. I'm not proud of not knowing what parties are available for the presidential elections, nor that the world is collapsing because of a major crisis in Greece. I don't not-do it because I think it's cool, I just do it. And it's been a long time since I started doing it - at least 4 years, which basically superseded any taste I had for those activities, and pulled them off of my culture, entirely.

It's strange to know though that it's not as normal as I would think it is, and that staying tuned in what happens in several news channels and is being broadcasted in several vehicles and even following alternative media for more info and POVs is actually the rule for most people I know, which are inline with my age and my living standards. Though this doesn't change my affection for those activities, this certainly means I'm more out-of-the-world than I would think of, and it gets really clear in a bar conversation or in a day-to-day small talk.

Anyway, I believe news are loaded with a bunch of crap, and way too much death-and-die-and-sadness-and-poverty-and-drugs-and-weirdery-and-celebrities-shit that don't really add much value, and I also think that most of largely published content is bias and malicious in some way, and I don't really think that I do play a big role in politics, as I'm not even emotionally bound to my country, and would be happy to leave it anytime. I don't mean to convert (or corrupt) anyone though, and I think it's pretty decent to follow the latest headlines and act upon them, or not.

why not posterous too?

I know Tumblr is way simpler than Wordpress, and that's why it seems friendly to me. Now the e-mail based posting from posterous, which should make it easier for a non-iphone users like me, really got me.

#edted - My first community experience

It was my first event/conference. I never had any interaction with any business, dev or design community here in Brazil before, and I’m interest in all three. As the event was about all three, it was a great start. My main goal there was to make some contacts as I want to expand my network and get off the whole I’ve been digging since I started working 4 years ago. I went there with team mates, and in the end we found some more people that proved how small the world is…

We started with two agile presentations. One from an agile coach and other from a software developer (and agile champion of his company) - both were good, and it was interesting to see the difference: while the developer was more focused in the practice and the engagement of teams, the coach was more focused on subjective values and the mindset needed to coupe with things like feedback and continuous improvement. One of the most valuable concepts there, was the relation of pair programming and theories from Piaget and Vigotsky, presented by @henriquebastos - the software developer, to illustrate the flow of knowledge that such interactions produce.

After a failed lunch (bad bad restaurant), there was a really compelling talk about medias and their evolution and convergence (the so called cross-media), by @jonatasabbott, who owns an e-mail marketing company and strongly believes there’s no such thing as dying medias, as television and radio advertising still generate a lots of money in the marketing business, despite the unstoppable growth of the internet.
The last presentation was about creative process and how to defend your creation in front of the client, to avoid the creation of a “Webenstein” - a Frankenstein website, by the owner of an advertising agency with awesome values: they believe the market needs to be feed with great agencies that can compete in the same level to keep the market sane, and so they fight against market prostitution (“my uncle makes sites” and “the competitors offered 10 times cheaper…”) by providing free workshops for prospects and make contact with competitors to show their strategies, pricing schemes and overall processes: to enable them to understand that they could earn more by pricing it right. They work with no protected information, they blog about the tools they use and how they make money, instead of hiding it and becoming a blackbox, they show it and set the market standards… now, this is uber cool.

We had a round table with the technology presenters after that, the agile peeps, the e-mail marketing business owner, and a Rails developer from Thoughtworks. We kicked it off with management and leadership and the subject evolved from there to team posture and interactions, and from there to “management as bottleneck” and then to management of “rock-stars” (those unmanageable employees that produce well and good but can’t fit in). I exposed a bit of the ideas I’ve been studying to introduce at Dell, of porting Open Source communities’ concepts, process and systems to the enterprise environment as a way to reduce the overhead of multiple levels of management… it wasn’t much commented, but it was questioned, which I believe is good.
The idea also interested @henriquebastos - that gave one of the agile presentations, remember? - and we exchanged contact info after that. Turns out he is a active member of the Python community, and also engaged in several communities of software development here in Brazil. I made contact, my goal was achieved: I went sleep at 3AM after ~6 hours of beer and intense nerdy talk in bar with him, @nataliarsand and my cousin (who arrived later…). I was bombarded with 10GB of knowledge and random data per minute. Quite an experience.

 

Make it short and sure

Just finished reading 37Signals’ Rework after 3 hours of easy read. I’m impressed, but not just becouse of the content - which is pretty good, no doubt. The way the content is laid out on the book, the way it was written and the way it evolves, is simply genius.

You don’t get any buzz word, any fuzzy logic, any extra adjective. It’s information and opinions, bare bones. You get more info in one sentence than you get in a full chapter of most books out there.

I recently finished reading Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink and I can say, it’s just not the same. It’s a good book, for sure, but it’s way-too-much-information. Malcolm comes up with 3 or 4 points to support his theory/idea, and although the points are good, he shows so much data to back them up that you end up dizzy - sometimes you have to get back to the cover to make sure you are reading the same book, because it gets so far away of the original context that it loses the reader.
Also, the awful lot of data allows the reader to start questioning whether it even believes on the point that is being argued about at that moment - several times I thought he was destroying his argumentation with things that I didn’t really agree, after having bought in.

In the case of Blink, it’s even a bit ironic: good part of the book is around taking decisions on top of little amounts of information and data, because too much information misleads your judgement.

Recently, Jason Fried twitted the above sentence, and it was bookmarked right away by me. It made me think a lot.

Brevity respects the reader.

Turns out it’s so true, and Rework is a proof. And Blink is another.

Brevity is respect because you understand that the person on the other side isn’t a moron. You don’t need to take the longer trip: I get it, next chapter please.

—

Yes, I need to work on that too. I need to simplify my communication in all places where writing is involved. I add shitloads of useless points in e-mails at work, and over-emphasize when writing here and there.

I tell you what I do

I had an interesting talk with my manager today. We talked about my growing feeling of having nothing specific to do - I mean, I don’t have a daily occupation that I need to take care of, I don’t have any script that I need to follow throughout my work day. Turns out, I have a lot of free time - and that’s on purpose.

My current role, as a Product Owner, is meant to have free time, because it’s expected that I’ll figure out what to do with this free time and come up with something. It’s a right, and it’s a responsibility. I have time to research, to “walk around”, to meet with people and to figure out what’s next. This is not in my role description, this is implicit in the functional expectation of my position. They don’t want to tell me what to do, because they don’t want to worry about it - because they don’t think they need to. Again, it’s quite a lot of responsibility.

Luckily, finding what to do was never a problem for me. I’m the kind of guy that hears “work generates more work” and “don’t you have what to do already?” every now and then. I’m usually caught up trying to find a way to get things improved and work streamlined.

The takeaway here is the “tell me what to do” and the impact on the trust among the parts in the conversation - telling what to do and being told what to do degrades trust. If I need to tell you what to do, I can’t really trust you can do it without that step-by-step. If I need to be told what to do, I probably don’t trust I can get my work done for you - and believe that you think the same.