Sky’s top 10 of Dion’s 50 Essentials:

1. [Dion’s #1] Start with a simple problem. [Sky says] Pick a problem that you can get your hands around. Don’t shoot so high that it will take you a year to build out a solution. For example, my mixed-reality games run on a complex Java-based infrastructure, but I can develop a new game by programming a scenario in a few hours.
2. [Dion #2] Create prototypes as early as possible. [Sky says] It’s so much easier to create a prototype – and then throw it away if it doesn’t get used by the customes – than to spend a year creating a full-blown product, another year promoting it, and then throw it away.
3. [Dion #3] Get people on the network to work with the product prototype rapidly and often. [Sky] Just a comment. This is sometimes the most difficult thing to do. I tend to work kind of on the edge and sometimes it‘s even difficult to explain what the prototype is or does…but that‘s the point…if I can‘t explain it and nobody uses it, I’d better find out about that early in the process.
4. [Dion #7] Put off irreversible architecture and product design decisions as long as possible. [Sky] I phrase this one as “don’t rule out your options too early in the process.” What I mean is, when you build your first architecture, keep it open and flexible so you rule out as few options as possible in the future.
5. [Dion #8] Choose the technologies later and think carefully about what your product will do first. [Sky] And this is probably the hardest one! I find that even though I’m supposedly the tech geek in the crowd, my marketing people are the ones who glom onto some tech or other (right now it is JavaFX) and decide that we simply must develop some online application that uses this or that other technology. This makes the solution fit the technology, not the problem! You fill in the rest…
6. [Dion #10] Balance programmer productivity with operational costs. [Sky] And I will add another concern to this, which is that it is “far easier to conceptualize a product than to build it.” So, when we sit down and brainstorm, we can in 2 hours come up with a project that will take 6 months to implement. Easily. And then someone gets their head out of whack because they thought the product should have been ready next week. Dion’s point is that operation may take every bit as much effort as implementation, and in fact I would argue that almost always the operation of a product takes many times the effort of its development.
7. [Dion #12] Plan for testing to be a larger part of software development process than non-Web applications. [Sky] Testing is huge. And people who’ve never tested a Web product before will always underestimate it. We test on four operating systems [Windows, Mac OSX, Linux, and smartphones], and we test the MS Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari and Flock browsers (not on all platforms). This means that testing takes several times longer than you might expect.
8. [Dion #14] Have an open source strategy. [Sky] I’m going on a tangent here, but I want to add “have a creative commons strategy.” Open source is good, and it opens up the software source code for others to improve and use. But, in addition, and where possible, you should also open up the intellectual property of your product, making it available for re-use, expansion and elaboration. My nonprofit work is usually offered under a Creative Common by-nc-sa license.
9. [Dion #15] Consider mobile users as important as your regular browser customers. [Sky] That’s only a little bit ahead of the curve. It’s coming soon. By the end of 2009, for sure. Plan and implement for the small screen, for limited tactile input (keyboards, touch, pointing and clicking), and for different types of interaction. For instance, quick back-and-forth is typical of phone-based interactions (such as TXT), but not necessarily of online interactions (such as email). Another example is that we’ve provided a relay of Daily Good from Charity Focus to cell phones for several years now – what we do is scrape a news feed they provide, once a day, and we pick off an XML item if it’s short enough to go to phones, and we relay it. (We also relay the entire item by email to those who prefer, and many of these email users are on mobile devices.)
10. [Dion #18] Offer an open API so that your Web application can be extended by partners around the world. [Sky] Yessss! I use feeds from all over the place, including RSS news feeds from other blogs in my blogs, and I provide feeds for those who want to stay up-to-date with the information on my sites. These interfaces can be used by other web sites as well. For example, we provide an API for our knowledgebase (for searching and inserting – authenticated or not), and we provide a feed for our events page.

[1] I actually keep a file, and it’s over 10 years old now, named Gems of Wisdom, that contains all of the helpful little programming tricks and server administration tricks, that I’ve learned over that time.

The post Essential Strategies for Eventually Launching a Site appeared first on Sky's Blog.

I guess them that passes the laws first will get the kudos. So here’s some credit, and honestly if you google around you won’t find this law anywhere else. This is so simple yet it’s the basis of everything we do (and many things we overlook) every day online… Jerry Michalski’s “Law of Convenience.”

Every additional step that stands between people’s desires and the fulfillment of those desires greatly decreases the likelihood that they will undertake the activity.

Jerry reminds us that even one little impediment – one additional click; an additional password; a confirmation – can stand in the way of a product’s being used or not. Ya, everybody already knows this, but a reminder every once in a while is welcome because we sometimes get overly-impressed with the features of the products we’re designing and think that people will love them so much they won’t mind all of the extra steps and clicks.

So here are some examples from my life.

Web Design: The classic rule for web site design is that you lose some (half or more, I say) of your site visitors every time they have to click to move onward. This is also true, to some extent, if your web pages are long and people have to scroll down in order to finish reading the page — your site visitors will generally not read something that’s “below the fold” (it’s a newspaper term meaning the lower half of the front page, but in our case it means “below the bottom of the window”).

Hmmm: This means that over half of the people who read the top of this article will not click to see the more… portion of the article. So over half of you aren’t even readin gthis.

Games: I’ve had mixed-reality games running (on and off) for about five years now. These are games in which you send a TXT from your phone to an address then you get back instructions assigning you a task, then you accomplish that and move to the next task. We always thought that people would have fun doing these things and would go through a whole series of such tasks to complete a “game.” However we found the same attrition rate I cited above – over 50% of players dropped off every time there was an additional step. Maybe one in 10 players even finishes a 4-step game. So what have I done about this? I’ve made most of our new games one-step games, so people can choose whether to follow the entire trail or just get a quick hit. See Faces of Happiness and the Essence Project for example. In the Essence Project we incorporate videos into the community-created matrix, and that helps some, since people like watching video.

The post Jerry’s “Law of Convenience” appeared first on Sky's Blog.

To find examples of Google Earth being used by nonprofits, check the Google Earth outreach web site. There are many, many specific example on the outreach showcase page.

Google Earth is built on a technology developed by Keyhole Technologies – and thus the file format that’s used – KML – stands for Keyhold Markup Language. KML files contain the stuff that describes each geo-linked event or information.

To create a new “layer” (contining your own locations) to Google Earth, you can make your own forum (on your own server) using UBB.threads (Ultimate Bulletin Board $229 per year or $499 for 5 years) software. (This may or may not work any more – I haven’t tried it.) You could also create and edit your KML file by hand, or using an XML-editing tool.

The post Google Earth as a visual-access tool appeared first on Sky's Blog.

Well, let’s just blame it on Twitter. Or on the new iPhone. Or on two clients wanting 70-hour weeks from me all month. Or on processing 4 hours of teacher training videos.

Nah, let’s just blame it on Twitter.

Twitter seems to have taken a big bite out of my blogging energy lately.

I primarily use Twitteriffic on my iPhone to both follow and to create new tweets, but I also love Twitterfox (a plug-in for the FIreFox browser) if I’m at a computer (it just pops up a little panel showing the most recents, and lets me quickly twipe a new tweet whenever I feel the need.

But why do I even bother with Twitter? – because I get stoked with a dozen new ideas every day! In the old days, “kids” used Twitter to vacuously and narcissistically communicate “I’m having breakfast” or “I’m on the bus” or “I’m at the coffee shop.” But somehow a large number of busy people realized that not only was this a waste of a good communication medium, but something better could actually be done with it – and now what we do is communicate concepts, places, activities and ideas of interest to our group. Someone might be experiencing writer’s block and need inspiration and put out a call for help that explains the concept she’s working on, and get back a half dozen interesting tangential ideas! Another might have returned from a trip and posted photos – and will put up a tweet pointing to the photos. Someone else will be at a conference and will tweet about each speaker’s primary concept.

You have to carefully pick who you “follow” (whose tweets you subscribe to) on Twitter, but once you have your list tuned well, you have constructed a channel that lets you really stay in touch with the ideas and activities that will surface as blog posts and news in the next 24 to 48 hours. And you get a real boost from knowing what your friends and colleagues are working on and thinking about.

The post Twitter made me (not) do it appeared first on Sky's Blog.

Then came the iPhone. And rich (HTML) email entered the picture for mobile devices. And richer and longer in-game responses from players. (SMS is only 160 characters, while email doesn’t have this limit, and thus is so much more fun.)

Well, over time that changed. Sometimes text messages are delayed for a substantial time (can tale hours), and our games are real-time so any delay beyond say one minute is a catastrophe. And then more and more phones became capable of sending text messages to email addresses – it had only been T-Mobile at first, and now it’s most phones. Today, at least 50% of phones in the US are capable of sending/receiving email, even thru the SMS mechanisms (there is an SMS-to-email interface on all systems).

So we’ve made a number of improvements in our games that permit play from regular email as well as mobile email-capable devices like phones, PDAs and smartphones.

And it looks like 2008 may be the year that we’ll develop more of these new, rich street games based on HTML email, and still played from mobile devices like the iPhone.

Yesterday (July 31st) we sat down and planned the trajectory for the next few such experience for YBCA – this is going to be fun. Watch for more on this as we announce the next YBCA game (October).

The post Bye Bye SMS appeared first on Sky's Blog.