Success/Failure Web 2.0 Style

Ben Barren has an interesting post on New Web Success vs New Web Failure. Hip dude that he is, he's using the "New Web" term to encompass the old "Web 2.0" world. The basic idea is that whilst things are easier (i.e. cheaper) to start nowadays, the payoff is also less, initial investors don't get a big bang IPO.

There may well end up being many more “lifestyle” businesses than billion dollar IPO’s, but hopefully there will be less failures, and a less savage bust next time around, as overall expectations are better managed.

I think a lot of the Web 2.0 entrepreneurs are looking to the Freemium business model, getting busy implementing the free level, and hoping that they'll work out the premium level's business case before they go broke.

There is some value in that, after all many of these businesses are breaking new ground, and there is no guarantee that the original idea ('hey, let's do an online linking game'), will match the end result when the mob gets a hold of it ('a collection of favorites' a la del.icio.us). For people wondering what is the attraction of this model, David Beisel says:

The answer is that they separate the initial delivery of value to the customer away from the ultimate monetary payment corresponding to that value. This time lag minimizes the risk involved for the customer, thus prompting increased usage.

And the Web 2.0 mantra is that the more users you have, the more likely your business will succeed.

It does ignore the fact that a user does NOT = a paying customer, however they are certainly potential customers (prospects), or at least people who could recommend the service to potential customers (referrers/fans). I suspect that a lot of the business successes and failures we will see over the next few years will be due to a basic failure to convert prospects to customers. Funnily enough, that is Sales 101 ... and is the very essence of an old web business.

One very real barrier to the Freemium model's paid level is that the business world still doesn't get Web 2.0. There are slow signs that they are using hosted solutions, looking at RSS, etc., but I suspect that the real paradigm shift will only come as staff bring their personal favorite Web 2.0 tools into the workplace and then demand an enterprise version of it (probably for improved security, reliability and secrecy). Until that changes, you are looking at convincing consumers to buy your premium level, or small businesses. Both are highly competitive areas for Web 2.0, and both tend to have very fickle customers that are as likely to cancel a service as quickly as they take it up. The answer I'm afraid is that Web 2.0 must break into the enterprise market (as Google Maps is trying to), I wonder who will do that first?

Standpedia - Web 2.0 Argumentation

Here's an interesting concept, take basic argument mapping and bring it to the web, opening it up for general use as a social site. In a sense this is what Standpedia does, and it seems to be aimed at being an online resource of arguments, in the same way that Wikipedia is an online resource for facts.

Standpedia is wiki-style encyclopedia of controversy. It's a place where tough questions are answered from a variety of perspectives, instead of a single 'neutral point of view'. Standpedia users work together to build maps of controversial issues that everyone can agree on -- not because the map offers one right answer but because all the perspectives are well-represented within the map.

I am a little bit jealous, I have had a similar idea myself, ever since discovering formal Argument Mapping as presented by Austhink. It is certainly a timely idea as it can help people communicate more easily, but I wonder whether it will really work as presented by Standpedia.

One of the most hotly contested aspects of Wikipedia is the way that articles are often vandalised, hacked, tainted with inaccuracies, biased and dominated by a few editors. And this is whilst trying to present facts, let alone emotional issues like Standpedia aims to.

Blogger Jeremy Heigh points out that conversations on the web are often "more like many monologues at once". Jeremy also calls this "philosophical voyeurism spiced with a hint of insanity", and Kottke thinks that while "choice of topic, the way in which the question is posed, and the pace of the commenting has a lot to do with it", "there's still a ton of chaff out there obscuring the wheat."

There seems to be a fundamental disconnect here between what people would like to do (discuss an issue) and the end result of what they actually end up doing (spurt out their opinion as fast as possible). A public website that stores your opinions/thoughts/rants seems like an invitation to many of us to scrawl anything that currently inhabits our mind, often to the detriment of the conversations already taking place there. Standpedia is fighting this issue by supplying an online gladiatorial arena for people to present their thoughts on a particular topic, with some visual tools to help convey argument structures.

The problem for Standpedia is that as the site gains popularity/notoriety it will require a great deal of self-policing by users to combat the inevitable slife towards chaos, miscommunication and general comment-graffiti currently found on many blogs and online forums. Making the user interface as simple as they have may actually contribute to this problem, as the barrier to entry for a casual uncaring user is remarkably low.

Perhaps they could assign user's ownership of topics they create, allowing that user to moderate the edits that others suggest. But perhaps that is simply too un-Web 2.0 for the 21st century?

Soccer Sucks, Bring on the Rugby!

I can't believe how Australia was sent out of World Cup 2006 by a lousy referee decision (it was a certainty that Italy could put the penalty away). At first I blamed Lucas Neill, then Grosso for his artistic 'dive', then the ref, then finally FIFA. Finally I realised who the real culprit was ... soccer itself is to blame. Check out the end of the Italy vs Australia match:

Italy vs Australia - World Cup 2006


Not only is the game far too slow (although Australia made even that interesting), but the scoring methods are far too hard, leading to low scorelines and games that are decided far too much by luck, and the ref's decisions, than by preparation, strategy, or actual play on the day.

Personally, I find rugby union to be a far more exciting game, with a greater degree of preparation and strategy required (which probably contributes to rugby's 'minnows' finding it so hard to compete).

Finally, compare the huge rugby (union and league) tackles in the video below with the pathetic play-acting of Grosso above.

Huge Rugby Tackles

Why so quiet?

Things have been quiet here in Falkayn-land. Mainly that's been because I started a new role around the middle of March, and between the hectic work to get finished where I was and the hectic work to get caught up where I am, plus some really hairy end-of-financial-year stuff at the new place, I've been busy.

I;ve also got less access to the internet than I did before, specifically to my GMail account, so a lot of my home time on the computer gets spent clearing my email.

Is Cattle Dog dead? Well, not quite, but in its current form, yes. The good news is that I will focus this blog more on Web 2.0 stuff, and restrict my private posts to my game/fun blog, Infini-nut.

Playing with Ruby on Rails

Recently I decided to play with Ruby on Rails and see what all the fuss was about. I've been around a while and taught myself a bunch of stuff along the way from Omnis7 to Java to T-SQL to .NET, and so Ruby on Rails shouldn't be too hard ... right?

Well, it wasn't, once I invested in Programming Ruby and Agile Web Development with Rails. Those two books helped me considerably, especially the follow-on tutorials in the Rails specific one. Without those I would have been left floundering.

However, there were two problems that neither book really helped me with (although the first one was properly shown in the Programming Ruby book, it just didn't bother to point out the weirdness of it).

Elsif

You might not have realised it, but that heading above is missing an "e" (and a space, but most programming languages ignore that). Unlike any other language I have learnt, Ruby's If ... Elseif ... End construct spells the "Elseif" without the second "e", as in "Elsif". Perhaps it was because Matz is Japanese, but this really threw me - I even ignored the way the Ruby book showed me it was.

Decimals

Rails' ActiveRecord is very nice for doing lots of hard work for you. Thank you very much David Heinemeier Hansson. Unfortunately it maps decimal database columns to float variables ... which if you have ever tried using floating numbers in financial calculations you would know means major problems!

Frankly this is a show-stopper for me. I can't imagine ever doing something real with Rails that would not involve dollars, and I certainly do not want nasty rounding errors creeping in because there are floats mapped to my decimal table columns. It turns out that the solution in Ruby is to use the BigDecimal data type. It took a little while to find the API documentation for this datatype, but eventually I did.

That didn't help me work out how to implement it. The Rails community is full of talk about modifying ActiveRecord to do the job properly - but it turns out that ends up involving a lot of database-specific code, and whilst ProgresSQL and SQL Server have been done, good old MySQL is left wanting, and that is what I am using to play around with. There is a little blurb in the book about overriding the accessor/mutator attributes for a model (don't worry if that makes no sense to you, it didn't to me either until about 8 hours into the tutorial). The online API documentation for ActiveRecord seems to hint that the _before_type_cast accessor could help here.

After too much mucking about, I finally got an answer that is elegant and works very nicely. I even have some sample code for those other newbies following the Rails tutorials. At the beginning of our Product model we need to add a couple of lines:

# modified this to get the price as a decimal

require "bigdecimal"
require "bigdecimal/util.rb"

Then later, we can override the default price accessor/mutator with a simple call to BigDecimal:

def price
    # we want to make Price a BigDecimal, the format
    # will look weird if we don't do anything to it
    # but we are using sprintf() in our fmt_currency
    # method, which handles this nicely
    BigDecimal(price_before_type_cast, 2)
end

As I've noted, the main problem with BigDecimal is that the native display of it is ugly. A value of 20.00 is displayed as 0.2E2, which is nasty. Fortunately the formatting seems to work out in text fields OK, and we end up formatting price everywhere we show it as a label so that it shows with dollar signs. The formatting function sprintf() has no problem with BigDecimal so that works fine!

So far (and I have all of the cart code working) this does not seem to lead to any issues with the Depot tutorial, and it gives an elegant solution (provided you are willing to create a formatting method for displaying these numbers wherever they are outside form fields).

[EDIT: The year-old enhancement request relating to the decimal issue is an interesting read.]

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Total Solar Eclipse from Space Station

Here is what a total solar eclipse looks like from space, courtesy of the astronauts on ISS, the big black mark is the Moon's shadow moving across Earth's surface:

Image Science and Analysis Laboratory, NASA-Johnson Space Center. 6 Apr. 2006. 'Earth Sciences and Image Analysis Photographic Highlights.'

It kinda reminds me of one of those creepy moments in sci-fi/horror films when they realise that the "black nothingness" is spreading. That is one of the cool things you get to see when you have people permanently in space.

Will Australia get into space?

• Senator Grant Chapman's Space: A Priority for Australia (PDF) policy document (Jan 2006).


• Dr Andy Thomas' interview with the Mars Consortium.


• Dr Andy Thomas' dream of a Woomera Spaceport.


• More info about Woomera can be found online.


• Australian Space Industry Chamber of Commerce.

Falkayn's List of Web 2.0 Lists

For various reasons I've been exploring the Web 2.0 world more lately than previously. I have come across a few lists that I thought I would share, in case you're looking to learn more about this yourself.

For a start you must read Tim Ziegler's Webmonkey article Web 2.0: A Pattern Library for an easy to read breakdown of Web 2.0. It's only a summary of features/attitudes, it will be out of date within a year (at most), but it's pure gold if you are still fuzzy about what is Web 2.0.

Bob Stumpel's Sacred Cow Dung has the first list of Everything Web 2.0 that we'll look at. It's a nice list, posted in a blog post and limited to simple categorisations and bullet point format. Micro descriptions of each one help you decide whether to hit their link or not.

Now for a different sort of list (or two). ProgrammableWeb is looking to get you to their site with a short but sweet list of Web 2.0 APIs, and a more detailed list that covers Web 2.0 Mashups. They have a pretty decent Web 2.0 reference page that references sites talking about Web 2.0, common technologies used by Web 2.0 sites (including Amazon links for books so they can make a buck off it).

The eConsultant has an impressively plain (looks very Web 2.0 itself) Web 2.0 directory that both categorises sites and gives you an alphabetical view of them. Like any categorisation method it is limited by one person's view of things.

So we come around to the more interactive and truly Web 2.0 lists. First up is the eponymously named Web 2.0 List. There is no About page on this site, but basically it seems to be creating a ranked list of Web 2.0 sites based upon Alexa, del.icio.us and digg. Or perhaps it's just from Alexa, I included the other two because a) you could, and b) they show links to all three after every listing. The del.icio.us link lets you tag that site (rather than searching for it), but the digg link just lets you search for it. The Alexa link shows you their Alexa stats page. Confusing (an About page would sure help!), but interesting, especially when you include a tag cloud, give registered users the power to vote for sites, and show lists like top voted and top rated. A fun geeky site and worth it alone for the ability to get a tag cloud view of various memes at work.

Of course some of their data is a bit wrong, for example FCKeditor is listed as a Web 2.0 site. Well, it isn't, not by a long stretch of the imagination. It is a very nice Javascript-based text editor widget that can replace TEXTAREA fields in your online forms, but Web 2.0 it ain't.

So let's say we stay with human-editing, but want something a bit more Web 2.0 than we've seen so far. The Museum of Modern Betas may be just what the DJ ordered. It is basically in a blog format, with simple entries that show the name of the beta site (not necessarily Web 2.0, but nowadays almost always is), a thumbnail of a screenshot and the date posted. Clicking either the name or the thumbnail will take you to a more detailed page that shows a little bit of detail about the beta, usually a quote from the About page (the Web 2.0 List entry is decidely small) and often links to press about the beta. They've gone over 1,000 betas and seem to have their finger on what is happening at the moment. Cool features of MoMB are:

• a tag cloud


• an alphabetical list (good to see if you're there already)


• the top 100 as measured by number of del.icio.us links


• a list of alphas for the pre-beta crowd


• a list of ones that are by invitation only (the opposite might have been more useful)

Use all of them, use none of them, I don't really care. But I do hope this helps you get a few more hours of surfing Web 2.0 than you might have got on your own.

Feel free to comment on any I might have missed!

EDIT:
Saurier from MoMB kindly points out that Emily Chang's eHub is the most popular list around that I missed out (weird seeing as she's on the Web 2.0 Workgroup), and reminded me that Techcrunch have their own list of Companies and Products, which has the lovely feature of being available as an RSS feed (slurp!).