Jeffrey McManus

In a session on hybrid developer/designers at Web 2.0 Expo, Chris and Jeremy got applause when they pointed out that adoption momentum for emergent widget platforms, as well as next-gen client platforms such as Apollo and Microsoft’s recently-rebranded Silverlight, will be weighed down by the fact that they don’t let users View Source as web applications do.

For a certain class of users, the death of View Source is a feature, not a bug, but it’s certainly the case that access to source code is one of the best ways to learn. On the other hand, there is more than one kind of application and there is more than one way for knowledge to be transmitted from experienced developers to less experienced developers. The question is how these emergent platforms will enable knowledge sharing for developers and designers at the speed of the web.

Update: In comments, Dan Fernandez from Microsoft mentioned that there is a View Source angle to Silverlight.

Link: Barnaby James: Acrobat / Reader 8.0 REST Web Service support.

"Acrobat / Reader 8.0 has improved support for JavaScript networking which makes it easy to communicate with XML web services when combined with new support for XML processing. SOAP Web Services have been supported since Acrobat / Reader 6.0 however support for HTTP networking makes it possible to develop clients for a wider array of protocols - for example WebDAV, the Atom Publishing Protocol and other types of RESTive services like the Approver.com API."

This has come up with several of the companies I’ve been advising over the past few months, so I thought I’d lay out a few of my rules and tips for how to manage a public technical support forum and build a technical community. My thoughts in this area come from twenty years of managing online communities from kitchen table hobby BBSes to tiny startups, to eBay and Yahoo! technical developer communities, to the half-dozen consulting customers I am working with today.

To my mind, the most important rule is that there should be one person in your organization who is responsible for the health of your community. We call this role the "community manager". It doesn’t have to be a full-time job, particularly if you’re a startup or an open-source project, but once your community starts numbering in the thousands of active users, it’s time to start thinking about hiring or outsourcing the management of your community.

The community manager is responsible for the health of the community. This means taking whatever steps are necessary to grow the community, making sure that the community is in alignment with the goals of the business or project, and helping to put out fires when they occur. It also entails the compilation and dissemination of metrics pertaining to the community’s health. Ideally, the community manager shares these metrics with the entire company (and, in some cases, with the community itself). The old business adage "you make what you measure" is at work here — if you are serious about building a community around your product or company and you aren’t sharing your community metrics with your entire team on a regular basis, you only have yourself to blame if the community turns out to be tepid.

The community manager’s report should contain metrics as well as anecdotal information about what’s going on in the forums. If three people post about the same bug in the forums on the same day and nobody from your engineering organization responds, it’s the community manager’s job to escalate that until the problem is resolved.

These days, the community manager is the voice of the company in the community. She’s typically used to convey announcements and news in a way that a spokesperson or public relations person might have done in the past. Here is where an English major with technical chops comes in handy.

Everybody on your team should participate in your community. (At the same time, it’s important that you have one and only one community manager — if everybody’s in charge, then nobody’s in charge.) At some companies I’ve worked at, people had to go through all kinds of hurdles to get permission to post to the forums. This is small-minded; it suggests that you mistrust or have not adequately trained your team. If you have an online forum, then everybody should be encouraged to post to it, particularly people who work for you.

There are a bunch of tactical things to making a community forum work. When we developed an XML-based message board product back in 1999, people thought it was this crazy exotic thing and we had to explain the benefits of XML for customization and syndication over and over again. Today RSSified message boards are de rigeur. They’re the only way I can keep up with the literally hundreds of things I need to read each day. No technology community should be without it. Use the standard RSS icon, make sure your forum home page and each individual topic page has RSS autodiscovery meta tags, and make sure they work in the most popular feed readers (which at the moment happen to be Bloglines, My Yahoo!, Google Reader, NewsGator Online, and Netvibes).

Search engine optimization isn’t something that should be applied only to your marketing web site, it should apply to your community too. At the very least, if the topic of a discussion doesn’t appear in the page title (and preferably in the URL too), dump your community software and get something better.

If you’re a commercial software vendor, make sure that no question in the forum goes unresponded to for more than a day or so. (Your community manager can help with this, although it’s ideal if you have an automated way of doing this.) If paid support happens to be a part of your business model, you may not want to respond that quickly in your forums, which is fine — instead, make it easy for people who post questions in your forums to get priority paid support as an alternative to waiting around for an answer in the community, and manage your community’s expectations regarding the way you expect community-based support to work.

Give recognition to your contributors — they’re helping to build your platform, in many cases free of charge. Some companies resort to special programs (like the Microsoft MVP program) to recognize prominent community contributors, which is fine, but I much prefer engaging in conversations and building relationships with members of the community as a way to incent and recognize them (just saying "thanks for posting that" goes a long way). In many ways, creating a formal recognition program for people is actually easier than having these conversations (since you only have to do the heavy lifting once), which is, I think, why companies gravitate to it. But having conversations is the real money shot here, and if you’re not making time to have these conversations you’re missing out on tons of valuable information.

Your community manager can help engage with prominent contributors, but this should also be something that everybody in your organization should feel empowered to do.

Link: O’Reilly Radar > Yahoo! Open Source CMS Conference.

"Dries’ also said that he sees innovation continuing to move "up the stack" — you don’t see a lot of innovation in the Linux kernel or Apache core, the innovation and creative energy has moved up the application stack. So can we "eliminate ourselves"? Can parts of Drupal be replaced with web services?"

I was dusting off the Platform Associates web site this afternoon and I ran across this. It’s sort of a manifesto for what I wanted to do with the consultancy. Normally when I re-read this kind of writing six months later it looks hackneyed to me, but I think it pretty well captures what I was going for:

The term "platform" is used in a variety of contexts. Early on, it was often a synonym for "operating system," but today it’s used to describe a variety of scenarios.

Platform businesses create an environment of promiscuous integration as a way to
accelerate operations, get closer to customers and partners, unlock innovation,
and discover efficiencies.

Platform businesses have a number of attributes in common. These include:

Link: The Web Gives Hotel Guests the Last Word

NEARLY every morning, over his second cup of coffee, Tom Brady, general manager at the Affinia Chicago, logs onto his computer and surfs over to TripAdvisor.com to see if there are any new postings about his hotel.
“It’s an obsession,” he said. If the review is positive he moves on. If it’s unfavorable — like the complaint posted in March from a guest who had received a $90 parking ticket because of a valet’s error — he’s on it immediately. In that case, he marched straight out to the valet to find out what had happened. After identifying the guest, he made sure that the company issued an apology and a reimbursement for the ticket. "This is all over the world," he said, describing his concern about any negative comment on TripAdvisor. "Everyone is looking at this. I’ve got to make sure it’s solved quickly, so God forbid someone else doesn’t have the same problem."

Link: Salesforce.com’s Balancing Act.

"Sooner or later every software company succumbs to the law of gravity that pulls down its pace of growth as it swells in size. Case in point: Revenue at Salesforce.com (CRM), the maker of software that helps corporations manage customer relationships, is expected to grow 45% this year, compared with 60% growth in 2006 and 76% in 2005. Like its peers, Salesforce.com will try to buck the trend by mining new areas, but it needs to do so without treading on the toes of the companies that build add-ons to its products that boost its own sales."

Link: Add Salesforce.com to the Enterprise Content Management List.

"Software as a Service is a model that Salesforce.com didn’t invent, but has become its biggest proponent and greatest success story. This acquisition will raise the profile of SaaS as a model for ECM. Salesforce will not be alone in delivering content management services as others are developing their solutions with systems like Documentum and Alfresco."

Link: MySpace Restrictions Upset Some Users

"MySpace, the Web’s largest social network, has gradually been imposing limits on the software tools that users can embed in their pages, like music and video players that also deliver advertising or enable transactions."

Sounds like in their race to monetize, News Corp. is trying hard to kill the goose that laid the golden egg. This kind of thing always calls for a careful balance, but when your biggest users start complaining, you know you’re not going about it the right way.

…so I created one too. The price is $13 to list a job for 30 days. I wanted to make the price $13.37, nyuck nyuck, but JobCoin rounds off to the nearest buck. There’s a JobCoin widget on the sidebar or you can go directly to the listings here.

If you’re a recruiter and you’re interested in listing a job but you’re recoiling because this thing is brand new and there are no listings there yet, email me and I’ll send you a discount code. (You cheapskate. Just kidding! Ha, ha.) Anyway, if you’re looking for someone to hire, click here to list a job.

I get cruised by recruiters and hiring managers pretty often (three times in the past 24 hours, actually). So hopefully giving recruiters the ability to list their jobs on the blog in a self-service fashion will translate into a lunch a month or so. (Having one hundred different recurring revenue streams that translate into one lunch per month is my new career goal, by the way. And I must say, I do enjoy my lunches.)

Since I’m in pimp-my-blog mode, I should say that I’ve been doing a bunch of metrics and reporting on the blog (as well as the new blog and the secret new blog) over the past few months using Google Analytics and Feedburner. These tools tell us that this blog now gets about 1,400-ish visitors each day, which surprised me. (In contrast, the newspaper I wrote for the year after I got out of college had 10,000 daily subscribers.) About 1,100 of the blog visitors are RSS subscribers and the other 300 are viewing the main site. (The majority of those — about 75-90% — are finding the site through Google search. About 10-20% seem to have the main site bookmarked, and the remainder are finding the site through some other search engine like Yahoo! or MSN.)

Link: What Starbucks Can Learn From the Movie Palace

Panera has no interest in rushing these customers out — the longer they stay, the greater the likelihood that resistance to the aroma of freshly baked muffins will crumble. Free, unmetered Wi-Fi is one way the restaurant sends an unambiguous signal: Stay as long as you like.

Link: Social Networking’s Next Phase

Next week Cisco Systems, a Silicon Valley heavyweight, plans to announce one of its most unusual deals: it is buying the technology assets of Tribe.net, a mostly forgotten social networking site, according to people close to the companies’ discussions.

I had a couple requests from consulting clients who wanted to get information on upcoming technology events, conferences, and so forth. One easy way to get hooked into the events that I’m interested in is to friend me on Upcoming.org, then subscribe to the RSS feeds for My Friends’ Events, but I realized that it might be nice to provide a filter for people who may not want to slog through the whole Upcoming experience. (Upcoming is terrific but once you friend more than a few people the list of all your friends’ events can get a bit unwieldy.)

So I started bookmarking certain notable events on Ma.gnolia. Using tagging and RSS, I am republishing my list of events here. (If you’re RSS-inclined, you can also subscribe to the Ma.gnolia feed directly if you prefer; that feed is here.)

Alfresco is an enterprise content management system that also happens to be open-source. Today they came out with their 2.0 release and changed their licensing — they’re now fully GPL. You can read details about the release on John’s blog or download the bits yourself here.

I just started advising these guys so the timing couldn’t be better. I’m looking forward to coming up to speed on the new release.

Richard MacManus says what I’ve been thinking about OpenID for years — it’s a great concept, and it’s terrific that it’s starting to be adopted by the big kids like AOL et al., but it’s going to be awfully hard to look at this as a success if regular users aren’t on board with it. They don’t seem to be part of the conversation today at all.

The OpenID evangelists used to harangue me regularly about authentication since opening authentication was part of my job at both eBay and Yahoo. The conversations we’d have were always pretty short — they’d say why doesn’t eBay or Yahoo support OpenID? I’d answer by asking 1) how does this help the average user and 2) what would it do for the business, and 3) who has implemented this already and how did they do it? I never got a good answer to any of these questions. OpenID is something I really want to believe in, but if you’re pushing a technology initiative onto a large incumbent business, you have to have really fucking solid answers to all three of those questions (for this or any new technology) or it’s not worth spending five minutes on.

So the question is, if you have 50 million users and you implement an authentication strategy that makes 5,000 of those users happy, is it worth it? Passport is actually an instructive lesson here; eBay was a big third-party adopter of that technology and got rid of it around 2004 — the extra QA cycles weren’t worth it for the relatively few people who were using it.

On the other hand, you can make the argument that in 2007, as AOL reinvents itself, it’s no longer an incumbent internet business — it’s now an upstart, so it should be employing disruptive tactics. If AOL can attract 50,000 influential OpenID users, it might be worth whatever effort they expended to integrate OpenID into their authentication flow, even if the practical benefit is limited to some positive public relations.

Link: One Company’s Search For The Perfect Open Source Software - InformationWeek

H&R Block wanted a flexible, easy- to-use document management system to capture clients’ tax documents and move them digitally to its tax preparers’ offices. It considered [closed-source] products, such as FileNet and Documentum. But H&R Block CIO Marc West eventually directed the team to focus on open source options, since the cost of putting commercial options in 13,000 fields offices wouldn’t fly. That left about 300 open source content management packages to choose from, with names like Alfresco, Drupal, JackRabbit, and Joomla.

"The first thing I do
is go out to the community pages," Ginn says. "How many active members
are there, how many [discussion] threads? It tells me whether the
community is thriving."

He also checks for how many developers are involved and how frequently
the project puts out releases. He watches how effectively bugs are
dealt with and inserts his own questions to gauge the caliber of
response.

Terrific worm’s-eye view of how a corporate IT manager evaluates an (open source!) ISV.

I wanted to mention that I’ve gotten a few compliments on the blog over the past week or so. I’ve actually been making a concerted effort to post more stuff this year as sort of a new year’s resolution, so the kind words are really appreciated. Thanks!

I should mention that I’ve started a couple of other blogs this year as well. One is going to remain anonymous because it’s deeply sick easily misunderstood. It’s something my wife came up with about six years ago and we’ve played around with on and off since then. If you know us, you have probably already seen the new incarnation of the blog. If you don’t know us and are curious (it is sort of a celebrity satire site), drop me an email or a comment and I’ll shoot you the address.

The other blog is for the kids, and it’s called Kid Scientist. The idea is to take the talks that Celeste and I have on the way to school each morning (which, 95% of the time, are about science, and always stem from her questions about science and the natural world) and commit them to a blog for other kids to benefit from. The blog is written in language that a 6-9 year old should understand, but we pull no punches — yesterday we had a fun talk about cadavers, for example. Once I get a full head of steam going I will post The Truth About Cavemen, which is a favorite recurring discussion.

Daniela is responsible for this momentary journey into the world of the Livejournal-esque. It is all her fault. I am a pretty close-to-the-surface kind of guy so this isn’t going to be too easy. Let me think of what I haven’t disgorged here already…

1. I worked my way through college.
2. I have been moderating online communities for nearly 20 years (since the pre-Internet days of the dial-up BBS). I’ve been a moderator on The Well for 14 years.
3. My first office job was in developer staffing, making cold calls to engineering managers to generate leads for head hunters. This was a full-time summer job, back when I was 15 years old.
4. I have some very un-American appetites: I can’t stand apple pie or watermelon. (I actually hate all kinds of melon and nearly all kinds of cooked fruit. Also many kinds of fresh fruit. Okay, I hate virtually all fruit except very ripe green apples and bananas.)
5. I acted and sang in high school. I performed in a bunch of plays and choral concerts, and the choir I was in went on a few tours and performed on television in Mexico City.

I will be speaking and giving live demonstrations of Approver.com twice in the next few weeks.

The first demo will be at the Silicon Valley NewTech Meetup in Palo Alto tonight (October 3).

The next will be at the Office 2.0 Conference in San Francisco next week. The conference is October 11-12 but my session will be at 10AM on Thursday the 12th. The session is a competitive series of lightning demos; Approver is going up against a dozen or so other "Office 2.0" tools and applications. At the end the audience will vote for their favorite demo, so if you’re going to the conference and you’re an Approver.com fancier, do please attend and vote for your favorite beige web site.

I’ll also be speaking (although probably not demoing) at the Evans Development Products Conference in San Jose on Friday, October 20. This talk will be less about consumer sites and more about my experience developing, launching and managing platform products for developers, so if you want a taste of what I’ve been doing on the consulting side, here’s your chance.

Update: Just got word that the Evans conference is cancelled, so if you want to see the McManus Approver.com floor show, your only chance will be at the Office 2.0 conference in San Francisco this week.

Link: WSJ.com - Disney Courts ‘Tweens With Video, Music Player.

Priced at $99, the Mix Max is set to hit stores in late October, say Disney officials. The device has a 2.2-inch color screen and comes with enough memory to hold six hours of video or about 240 songs. Disney hopes to court kids and parents by keeping the price well below what it would cost to buy a video iPod.

While it is possible to download music and videos from sites such as Yahoo and Napster onto the device, Disney also will sell in stores its own movies on postage-stamp-sized memory cards that can be inserted in the Mix Max.

In one significant departure from the recent industry norm, the Mix Max technology is open to anyone who might want to create content for it. "There’s nothing tying it to Disney," says Chris Heatherly, global vice president of Disney global electronics. "We intentionally left the platform open because we knew kids would want other video material."

Very smart — this price point and the fact that the system is open will make this a no-brainer purchase for our little video-watcher this December.