Having been a Web consultant since 1995, I have learned a thing or two about bubbles.  As the dotcom era of the 1990s transitioned from irrational exuberance to disillusionment, the most important common denominator was the irrationality of both extremes. In recent years, Web 2.0 and social computing have driven a wave of investment with some people now concerned about another bubble.

The problem with the bubble metaphor in technology is that it implies an ephemeral, fragile, and rapidly rising trend which… pops.   The truth about the past dotcom bubble is that now, 8-years after the “pop” none of us could imagine running a modern corporation without e-mail and a browser on our desktop, to say nothing of E-Commerce, VOIP, chat, etc.

The term bubble is an oversimplification of a short-term speculative boom & bust, and most importantly, it is misleads investors, enterpreneurs and the public from a sustained and rational confidence in an underlying trend of lasting innovation.  This is not to say that there aren’t winners, losers, and lessons to be learned in the advent of any new technology, but social computing is here to stay.  We’re in the midst of a revolution in collective intelligence, with thriving and vibrant online communities breaking down boundaries between public and private life.  This is changing the way we work, play, and collaborate forever.  We’re really at the beginning of a new era in social computing, and a there is nothing temporary about it.

Say you have a new, wildly successful platform, the new hotness. Everyone wants to buy the hardware and developers can’t wait to get on board. You’ve set up a nifty distribution channel and things are rollig along. So, how do you make it fail?
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People sometimes ask me why I don’t blog.

The Short Version
I can’t produce ‘good content’.

The Long Version
Last weekend, a man named Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn died. His death (by which I mean his life) has inspired me to explain, in proper context, why I don’t blog.

Aleksandr produced many works that are worth reading. Therefore, almost no one reads them. Things that are worth reading are always hard to read. They take time. Sometimes things are so hard to explain, they actually require a captive audience, such his commencement address to Harvard University in 1978:

“The limits of human rights and righteousness are determined by a system of laws; such limits are very broad. People in the West have acquired considerable skill in using, interpreting and manipulating law…. An oil company is legally blameless when it purchases an invention of a new type of energy in order to prevent its use. A food product manufacturer is legally blameless when he poisons his produce to make it last longer: after all, people are free not to buy it.”

That’s simply not the kind of ‘content’ that people are looking for in a blog. They didn’t like it much at Harvard either. Luckily, no one paid much attention to what he was saying. Besides, that was, what, 30 years ago? Blogs are about what’s new and hot and important *today*.

I suppose I could give some tech tips in a blog. Here’s the best tech tip I know: read No Silver Bullet by Frederick P. Brooks, 1987:

“[L]et us examine the difficulties of that technology. Following Aristotle, I divide them into essence, the difficulties inherent in the nature of software, and accidents, those difficulties that today attend its production but are not inherent.

The essence of a software entity is a construct of interlocking concepts: data sets, relationships among data items, algorithms, and invocations of functions. This essence is abstract in that such a conceptual construct is the same under many different representations. It is nonetheless highly precise and richly detailed.

I believe the hard part of building software to be the specification, design, and testing of this conceptual construct, not the labor of representing it and testing the fidelity of the representation.

We still make syntax errors, to be sure; but they are fuzz compared with the conceptual errors in most systems.

If this is true, building software will always be hard. There is inherently no silver bullet.”

Great stuff, right? You didn’t even follow the link, did you? Yeah, nothing kills a good tech blog like the application of Aristotelian Metaphysics to explore the concept that software may, in fact, be hard. Definitely not ‘good content’. Never going to get on the cover of Wired with an attitude like that Fred; here in the 21st century we like our tech reliable and affordable, like Vista and the iPhone.

You see my dilemma? The only stuff that I read is difficult, and kind of depressing, stuff that no one would ever want to read about in a blog. Who wants to read that kind of stuff on a computer anyway? I mean, you can’t even make notes in the margins. The message just doesn’t fit the medium.

Rest in peace Alek. I am wiser for having heard your testament; God bless you and keep you.

We recently completed a project for a new client, Vizzitt. The project had a short duration, a mere four weeks. And the budget was fixed. And the client needed an entirely new site up and running, with a significant number of features. How to do it?

The answers we came up with:

• Agile development processes
• Ruby on Rails

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Firstly, a note of thanks to colleague Hal Reed for introducing me (and now you?) to the term deprovement. Hal defines deprovement as “a change that is intended to improve something, but in actual practice makes it worse, e.g., harder to adopt, harder to use, or less reliable.”

In the world of software or Web applications, deprovement is all too often what occurs when a company enthusiastically announces their next release. Today, I was inspired to learn that Mozilla added an honest to goodness improvement in their 3.0 release of the fast growing (and excellent) browser Firefox. Their secret: Version 3.0 is reported to run “more than twice as fast as the previous version while using less memory!”

How many times have you opened the newest release of a software application only to find that the latest improvements and new features have substantially deproved your system performance? This is even more serious for a large scale Web site or Web application. As an industry, let’s try to remember that speed is one of the most important elements of software and Web site usability!

In another life, I worked at Business Week. The second person I ever met there was a guy named Nick White. Shortly after I left BW, Nick was trapped in an elevator for 41 hours. The New Yorker has a piece on elevators that includes details of the ordeal Nick went through. The story includes a time-lapse video of the entire thing. It’s eerie watching.

I once spent thirty minutes trapped in an elevator with several coworkers. Fortunately, we were all good friends with decent senses of humor, and there was no chance of us being stuck for too long. But it was still kinda scary (deep down). I can’t even imagine how Nick managed to make it.

The New Yorker

Hi! I’m a 9 month old yellow lab who’s created quite a buzz among Bit Group employees lately. There are many dog owners in the group but so far mine has been the most persistent about letting me visit the office on a regular basis. Maybe it’s because people feel they’ve watched me grow from the time I was only 5 weeks old through pictures, stories, and eventually office visits. Bit Group is practically my second family so I try to get to Cambridge on Fridays.

A typical day for me would include quite a bit of people watching out the large windows facing the street. I try and stay quiet when people are on the phones and typing away at the computers, but every once in a while I feel I have to remind them that I’m here and available to play at any time.

Cambridge is a great place to stretch the legs. I encourage people to walk with me down the path to Davis Square at lunch time. By the time we get back to the office I’m usually ready for a long afternoon nap. When I wake up it’s usually time to say my good-byes and head home.

I’ve included a few pictures from recent visits. You can track how big I’m growing while getting to know people around the office. I’m a very friendly puppy always looking to make new friends. Please be sure to stop by and say hi to me the next time you visit Bit Group.

woof! woof!

Mason

At the end of a recent trip to Austria, my family made a stop in Heidelberg, Germany for a night. We stayed at the Hotel Rose, which caters to the American military both in terms of its accommodations and its decor. One of the most fascinating decorations was this picture from 1911, featuring the river Neckar, the “Old Bridge,” and several important military types:

What I realized quickly after noticing it was the people clearly weren’t sitting on the bank of the river. In fact, it looks like this picture is actually composed of about 24 separate photographs taken in a studio, which led me to wonder just how the photographs were integrated into the obviously painted landscape. My guess: the photos were glued to a canvas, the canvas was photographed, then an artist painted the landscape on top of the composite photograph.

My theory of how this picture was created reminds me a lot of matte painting, a technique used in movies to create grandiose settings without having to physically build them. When was matte painting first used? 1911. So perhaps this picture used lessons learned from the early days of that technique.

Could we do something more convincing in Photoshop? Of course, but the stylization and attention to detail in this picture lends it a certain beauty that I don’t believe would be eclipsed by the realism of a Photoshop composite.

Forget the iPhone, if you want to browse the Web while on the move, this is the best way to do it! Eliot and I found this handy Web kiosk in a McDonald’s drive-thru on Rt. 128, just south of the Mass Pike! Leave your iPhone at home and don’t spill coffee on the keyboard!