Doing Words

• On the importance of owning your web platform
  Posted on Tuesday, December 9th, 2008 in platform - Comments: (2)
    “Who cares how the platform works”? This is the subtext to a lot of web startup business plans I see. At this point, you’ve lost me.For web businesses, web platforms are not like phone connections and photocopy paper, they are tightly woven into the fabric of every aspect of your companyBut first, big props to Balsamiq, the mockup tool I used to do the image above. It costs $79, comes in Mac, Windows, and Linux versions, or you can use it from within Confluence, JIRA and XWiki wikis if you use one of those to manage your product process. It’s the best quick mockup tool I’ve ever used - quicker even than pencil and paper, and after about a month of use, it’s an essential part of my paper prototyping and developer briefing toolkit. Product people: if you have a customer or business process owner who’s always bugging you, give them this to use and tell them if they can sketch it, you’ll build it.
• How do you get users to upload their profile picture?
  Posted on Thursday, December 11th, 2008 in social networks - Comments: (4)
  Please make the scary man go away!Ever since My Yahoo! introduced personalised content to the web, product strategists like me have been struggling with getting more than 10% of our users to actually use the personalisation features available.Personalisation matters to a product like My Yahoo! because it’s intended to give the company a far richer understanding of the user’s preferences for content, allowing closer targeting for marketers.Personalisation matters even more to any social media business, because observing user behaviour has taught me that new visitors often judge the ‘interestingness’ of the product according to how personalised user profiles are. A classic case is MySpace - user experience as ugly as the wrong end of a bulldog but users love it because they can see right away that real people like them - warts and all - use it.The toughest part of profile personalisation is getting users to add an avatar - an image of themselves (whether that be an actual photo or representational graphic) to their profile page.
• Pollenizer: feels like coming home
  Posted on Friday, December 19th, 2008 in Uncategorized - Comments: (4)
  Kiva Gift Certificate from Pollenizer Originally uploaded by thatjonesboyI never had a second to really blog about it but a week ago I accepted an offer to join Pollenizer full-time after subcontracting to them on various projects over 2008.The last few days have been absolutely insanely busy for all of us, but somehow, on top of all the other madness Mick and Phil at Pollenizer found time to thank me and wish me a merry Christmas with the perfect gift.It’s a big increase on my current Kiva portfolio and I will set aside some time on the 25th to allocate some new loans to teh ppl. Everybody wins when Pollenizer sends you a gift.Of course, this does nothing to change the fact that I’m outta here the moment a proper job comes along… kidding! Proper job: no social media access on the office network, no install permissions on the machine, it’s not a Mac, trying to find a printer and connect to it, internal mail groups with 200 subscribers and nobody reading, conference rooms as welcoming as the bottom drawer of the freezer, hunting for your VPN dongle and crawling access for out-of-hours work, having your boss pinch the best bits of your powerpoint and taking all the credit for the idea, heavy-lifting colleagues out of C20th ways of thinking about business, clients and suppliers and partners all talking relationships when what they really mean is date rape, standing around a sad crappy factory-made birthday cake rush-bought by someone’s PA every Friday morning as if it means we care about the three people whose birthdays happened a few days ago, introducing yourself to someone at friday after-work drinks and then realising you’ve been working on the same project for months.

I’m so busy! I have so much to write about but Pollenizer is growing like a sprout and the interwebs wait for no-one. So very quickly, before I jump into the shower and head out to celebrate #NYE2009 with what remains of my circle of friends, I thought I’d share my New Year’s Resolutions with you.

Hehe, a geek joke, who would have guessed?

Thank you very much, you’ve been a wonderful audience tonight and all year, in fact. My name is Alan Jones and I’ll be here all 2009.

Have a great night, and if you drink, don’t drive. Instead, do what I do: fall over and stay down until you smell breakfast.