Background

Sites like Dribbble, and FFFound are part of a new class of websites on the internet. The difference is subtle, but important. They have a user base that is a very limited subset of the internet at large.

Lots of sites control their growth through beta codes, invites etc. We do this with every app we launch. it helps us scale slowly, test things, and to be honest it’s a great way to build buzz.

But Dribbble and FFFound don’t work this way. They’re out of beta at least in the way we typically perceive it (not like the Google ever-lasting beta) but they still offer limited access.

Everyone can look, but only a few can create the content. The idea is that this leads to a curated experience where spam, and bad quality is less likely to exist. There are a fair share of self aggrandizing posts that border on spam, and an equal share of sub-par posts, but to a great degree the theory works.

Getting access.

Access for both sites is based on “who you know.” It’s tough to get in. I’ve posted to Twitter twice on 2 different accounts to get a Dribbble invite. We were even an advertiser once, and still didn’t get access. I’ve asked around a bit for a FFFound invite with no luck as well. Admittedly I haven’t worked all my connections, begged, pleaded, or prostrated myself to get in. But as a casually interested person, I’ve had no luck.

I’ve seen blog posts and tweets that offer invitations. Usually there is some sort of contest, or “show me your work so I can judge it” type string attached. I’ve never responded to have my work be evaluated in this way.

Other examples.

Sites like Twitter and Digg operate quite differently. Anyone can participate, but high profile members still get a larger share of the voice due to their status in the app’s community. For example you can follow @simplebits on Twitter and feel like you are participating in a conversation with a high profile designer. Or you can use the same tool to keep up with people nobody has ever heard of. You curate your own experience by choosing who to keep up with.

Both Digg, and Twitter recommend accounts to “follow”, offer a calculated feed of what they consider to be the “best” posts, and allow these recommendations to be ignored.

Wrapping Up.

So the scoop is this. I don’t like elitism. I’m a simple, hard working designer. I don’t give speeches, write books, or do much social networking, so invitations for sites like this don’t automatically land in my lap. I hope Dribbble, FFFoound and any sites like them in the works choose to be more open. I hope access isn’t greedily hoarded, or held up like some trophy only for the chosen.

What I love about the internet is that everyone can participate. It’s what makes it so strong, and useful. Whether you’re a lowly designer in the midwest (like me!) or a college student half way around the world you can stand on equal footing. Sites like Digg show that it is possible to have a curated experience while still allowing everyone to participate. “Open” is a beautiful system, and I think sites who don’t embrace openness do so at their own peril*.

*I do love both FFFound, and Dribbble, and look often.

About two years ago, Jumpchart was already a bigish app (for us) and Staction was growing fast after its release. We realized we would need to do something to increase performance so that our users wouldn’t feel our growing pains.

Besides the easy approach of just getting faster hardware, we also decided to dive into database tweaks – and couldn’t have been happier about the results. Or more surprised.

Like many (probably most) applications for the Web, all of our apps run on MySQL. And while we’re old schoolers at it, we never really worried much about how fast each SQL query was. When your app is small, it hardly matters if you have poorly written queries or inefficient table indexes. Once you start getting the first thousands of daily hits, bad code comes back to bite you. Hard.

The first step we took was to develop code that would tell us exactly which queries weren’t performing well. By adding some timers to our OO database handler, we easily had after the first few days a huge log of all queries that were performing poorly in our MySQL server. It’s really a great way to keep track of how database performance evolves in your app.

Keep Reading

The death of Google Wave got me to thinking about what all Google is into these days. Here’s a list I threw together: Keep Reading

I’ve always laughed at clients who insist on printing out websites for review. It’s like looking at a picture of a painting… The medium itself is what makes the thing what it is. Once you remove the media, the identity of the thing you’re reviewing is essentially lost.

But when I saw this slide in the excellent slide deck called Good vs. Great Design by Cameron Moll I sort of wanted to print a website. Now I have no idea what Cameron is saying during this slide in the real presentation. Maybe he’s making fun of people who print websites too. But what I see is a tactile way to review content and hierarchy.

There are lots of markup tools for online mockup reviews. But they all feel like using a butter knife to cut steak. You want to directly interact and scribble with your hands, not draw boxes and type text in Markerfelt. Why not print out a website big, stand 10 feet away and blur your eyes? We’ve been doing that stuff for print work for years. Maybe a change in perspective will help you focus more clearly on making the site read at a glance. Plus being able to doodle, sketch, and cross things out is always a liberating experience.

“What we call here a Black Swan (and capitalize it) is an event with the following three attributes. First, it is an outlier, as it lies outside the realm of regular expectations, because nothing in the past can convincingly point to its possibility. Second, it carries an extreme impact. Third, in spite of its outlier status, human nature makes us concoct explanations for its occurrence after the fact, making it explainable and predictable. I stop and summarize the triplet: rarity, extreme impact, and retrospective (though not prospective) predictability. A small number of Black Swans explains almost everything in our world, from the success of ideas and religions, to the dynamics of historical events, to elements of our own personal lives.”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_swan_theory

I still print things… Unfortunately when I proofread, I just can’t do it on my monitor. It’s a mental block I guess. But getting my eyes mere inches away from the content, and running my fingers over it helps me.

The iPad has the same intimate feeling for content as paper. I think it’s a great opportunity for a mac developer to build a plugin to the OSX print dialog for iPad output via bluetooth. Not only is it a great way to share documents with yourself right before heading out, it’s a placebo for paper in those few times we still need it most.

“Missing items in a complex visual search is not a new idea: in the medical field, it has been known since the 1960s that radiologists tend to miss a second abnormality on an X-ray if they’ve found one already. The concept — dubbed “satisfaction of search” — is that radiologists would find the first target, think they were finished, and move on to the next patient’s X-ray.” via

-Even when you think you’ve got it sorted, take a second and look around. I can’t tell you how many hours of future programming time you’ll save yourself by making a habit of taking a few seconds to review your last changes even after they “work.”

Even when I write, sketch, or draw in a notebook I never plan on letting someone else see, I have an imagined audience. I feel like someone is looking over my shoulder looking at all my crappy sketches, and stupid thoughts.

Things like this Flickr set make me feel pressure to have gorgeous creative notebooks. I feel like if I don’t, then I’ve somehow failed, or I’m not doing it right.

A while back though, I gave myself permission to use my notebooks for “junk.” Not for finished art. Not to frame. Not to brag about. But to really quickly get ideas out of my head, and thought through in a visual way.

My notebooks aren’t going to be in a museum 500 years from now like DaVinci, and that’s ok. My brain kicks out lots of ideas and 90% of them are bad. I use notebooks to record and sort those ideas, most of which aren’t worth the paper they’re written on.

Giving myself permission to treat a notebook like a tool, not something precious, has been a good thing in my life. Do you have self conscious thoughts like this that keep you from being more productive?

http://the99percent.com/videos/6201/scott-belsky-dont-let-your-genius-go-unnoticed

Imagine every blog article gets a unique hashtag. (kind of like how url shorteners work.) Twitter turns into a very simple way to comment on articles across the whole internet tracked via the hashtags.

You could build a cool site where you could see recently commented on articles. See what’s most popular, and see what users are commenting on what. Kind of like TweetMeme. Kind of like Digg.

Already been done? Other ideas?