To get better consumer engagement, it is important to design the product around not just only focused on goals but its adoption strategy. Using game elements and concepts in non-game settings is a sure way to increase adoption. This course at Wharton goes over the basics, it’s a good tool for all product designers out there.
The Good Bits
debugging software design
I’d like to use the web my way, thank you very much Quora. – Scott Hanselman
If you have been frequenting the inter-webs like me in the early 2000s you must be very familiar with Experts Exchange. For those of you who are not familiar with it, here is a link to an Expert Exchange search result that shows what I am talking about. Just scroll down and you’ll see what I mean. They show a perfectly valid question that you would ask, tell you that there are answers to it but obstruct the view by blurring it so you cannot see it without signing up. What a waste of bandwidth and your time!
A couple years ago when Quora first started, it was a very promising start up that I thought would replace Experts Exchange and fix the issues of the Q&A world. They had a promising idea that would help thousands of people.
It is now clear to me that instead of fixing the problem that Experts Exchange created by polluting the internet with obstructed Q&As, Quora is following the exact same route.
Clearly, I am not the only person frustrated with this. Scott Hanselman shared his frustration with Quora in the blog post I’d like to use the web my way, thank you very much Quora. – Scott Hanselman.
Thankfully, folks at StackExchange have nailed the problem! Good riddance to Quora.
Facebook Open Sources their hardware architecture for photo storage
Facebook announced that they are open sourcing their photo-storage hardware architecture along with a couple other initiatives to Open Computer Project.
If you’d like to see how Facebook deals with storing 300 million pictures a day, check out the link below.
Open Rack 1.0 Specification Available Now – Open Compute Project.
Book Review – Avogadro Corp.Singularity is closer than it appears
Every now and then I get the pleasure to come across a good book that is worth sharing with others. For those of you familiar with the concept of singularity, this book may be a good example of an application of theory to practice.
With the recent addition of Ray Kurzweil to Google’s arsenal of researches and futurists, inclusion of artificial intelligence in every day tools that we use such as our email, TV and car is really not that far off. The book Avogadro Corp: The Singularity is closer than it appears by William Hertling explores what would happen when AI takes over our beloved email.
The author uses the Avogadro Corp. to identify the company but with all the examples shared and the products that Avogadro Corp. owns, it is really not that hard to guess which company he has on mind!
Hint: Ray Kurzweil just joined this company!
Disclaimer: the book link above includes a referral code.
Why you shouldn’t host your blog on a VPS
Last week I realized that some of my games had lost their ability to update the leaderboards. Within a couple of hours I also realized that this blog was down. After emailing my VPS provider (www.vpsland.com) I have been told that the disk on my virtual server has been corrupted and there is nothing they can do about it.
Obviously, I am partially at fault for not taking proper back ups of my posts but I am absolutely fed up with maintaining my own server both from an OS security patch update and DB backup perspective.
As a result, this blog is now being hosted on wordpress.com for $10/year. Now going back to recovering one year of lost posts.
