Welcome to the first post on Think Vitamin for 2010. I hope you all had a fun and relaxing holiday period and are easing yourselves slowly back into your normal daily routines.

For the first time in many years I decided to leave Google Reader closed over my two week break and instead relied on a once a day trawl through Twitter for my web design and development related news.

Judging by the amount of great articles published it’s clear that not everyone takes time out. Here in no particular order are some of the best articles I read over the last two weeks sourced from my favourited tweets list.

Design related

• Nine Techniques for CSS Image Replacement – A little old but still relevant look at the issue of replacing a text page element with an image (via @smashingmag)
• PrimerCSS – Create a starter stylesheet from your HTML outline (via @cowshedstudio)
• Making Your Design Pop – 8 quick wins to improve your current site design (via @smashingmag)
• 25+ Useful Infographics for Web Designers – Beautiful and creative examples of displaying data visually (via @smashingmag)
• Advice for designers – D Keith Robinson offers up some great advice for web designers (via @dkr)

Business related

• Haystack is now Sortfolio – Jason Fried on having to rename their most recent application (via @37svn)
• Rework online – New promo site for 37signals upcoming new book (via @dhh)

Development related

• DjangoCon videos available – Videos from the 2009 DjangoCon (via @djangocon)

Content related

• Write articles the fast way – Great article from Christian Heilmann on creating content quickly (via @codepo8)
• Best and Worst SEO Practices – Checklist of the factors that affect your rankings with Google, Bing and Yahoo (via smashingmag)
• Mashable’s Social Media Guide for Journalists (via @mashable)
• Editorial Style Guides – Ideas and resources for creating editorial style guides for web sites (via @smashingmag)

Inspiration & opinion

• @chrispirillo on Twitter and negativity at conferences – Great video from Chris Pirillo discussing the use of Twitter at tech conferences (via @leweb)
• 10 iPhone Apps for Keeping Your New Year’s Resolutions (via @mashable)

What did you read over the holidays? Feel free to link up your best reads in the comments.

UPDATE: Thanks to everyone who has filled out the survey so far. There were almost 150 responses in the first day and some common themes are coming through. Your feedback is really valuable – thanks.

This blog has undergone a few changes in 2009 including two visual redesigns (a modified Woo Theme and the current look and feel by Mike Kus), the addition of a Twitter powered news feed and a ramped up publishing schedule. We want to make Think Vitamin even better in 2010 and as a result of recent organisational change it now has a full time editor to oversee the development of the blog and it’s content.

Earlier this year Ryan asked for contributors and since then we have published many of the submissions. If you wrote in and haven’t heard from us we apologise. I have a full inbox of great article suggestions and will be getting in touch shortly.

We want to make Think Vitamin as relevant to web designers, web developers and web entrepreneurs as possible. With the holiday season approaching we thought it was as good a time as any to ask for your help. We really value your readership and RSS subscriptions and need your feedback. If you would like to help the future direction of this site please spare a few minutes to fill in our simple “Think Vitamin Holiday Survey” below.

The form is also available directly on Google.

Thank you for taking time to complete the survey, we appreciate it.

You might’ve heard the news that Twitter Lists are alive and kicking. If you don’t know what they are, here’s a brief explanation:

Any Twitter user can create a list of people on Twitter, which can be followed with one click. For example, all the people on the Carsonified Team can be found at twitter.com/carsonified/team.

We’re with Robert Scoble on this one: We LOVE this idea (see his great write-up here). It’s going to make Twitter even more valuable because you’ll be able to easily find and follow the type of people you’re interested in.

Here are five Twitter Lists we think you’ll find useful:

1. Top Web Developers
2. Most Influential in Tech
3. Top Web Designers
4. Tech News
5. Carsonified’s Recommended

If you know of any really great lists, please add them to the comments!

We’re here at the FOWA workshops in London and I thought I’d jot something on a random whiteboard in the venue. I initially wrote: “I love @fowa” but as soon as I wrote it, I knew it was totally backwards. Instead of trying to pump up our brand, it hit me that the whole reason we’re here is to serve our lovely customers.

It’s not about us. It’s about them.

So I changed it to “#FOWA loves you. Thanks for coming!”. We love our audience and we’re grateful they took time out of their busy schedule to be here. We should be thankful they’re here, not the other way around.

I think that’s something we should all keep in mind when it comes to our businesses and customers. It’s not about us. It’s all about them. Focus on absolutely loving your customers and your business will flourish.

I just got back from a two week holiday in France and I purposely chose to leave my iPhone and laptop behind. The primary reason was that I didn’t want to get sucked into work, but the secondary reason was that I wanted to have space to think.

The trouble with our always-on lifestyles is that you can’t go anywhere or do anything without being interrupted (it’s even harder if you have kids). The problem with being constantly interrupted is that it keeps you from thinking deeply.

Why is thinking deeply important? Simple really: life is insanely short and you might be wasting time doing stuff that has absolutely no value to you. The problem is that when you’re busy, it’s easy to overlook.

If you can’t afford to take a two week holiday right now, then here’s what I’d suggest: Wake up two hours early or stay up two hours later for just one day. Don’t turn on your computer or go near your phone. Simply grab a notebook and a pencil. Then here’s the important part: just let yourself be quiet and think.

I’d suggest drawing a timeline from 1 to 100 and plot your current age. Then plot milestones on the timeline like when you’ll be 40, 60, 80 and ‘Kids go to college’, etc. Then even put ‘Death’ on there. Morbid? Not really. It’s just the truth – none of us will last forever. And that makes what you’re doing with your life right now even more important.

I stumbled across a really interesting example of company transparency yesterday. Shirt.Woot sells a different shirt every day and they release all the live data about where their sales are happening.

View large

This is a radical approach because most companies would be afraid their competitors would use this data against them. However, Woot is smart enough to realize that this is a powerful tool for drawing potential customers in and encouraging activity. It’s really interesting to know how you compare with other folks who bought the same shirt.

Interesting, transparent, quirky data, FTW.

Google recently announced their most ambitious project to date called Google Wave. According to Google, Wave is “what email would look like if it was invented today.”

If you haven’t made time to watch the one hour video, I’d highly recommend you do so today.

What’s the big deal?

I believe there are six reasons why Wave is going to have a huge impact on you. However, this is all predicated on mass adoption of the technology. If no-one uses it, then obviously it won’t have a world-changing affect. However, I strongly believe Wave is going to achieve mass adoption for these reasons:

1. Google has the world-wide audience necessary.
2. Google has the cash in order to market Wave and promote its benefits.
3. There is a huge financial benefit to working more efficiently. People who use Wave will be able to work faster, thus leaving behind those that stick to good-ol-fashion SMTP email.
4. Wave is open-source (more on that below). If you want, you’ll be able to run Wave on your internal corporate network, without ever sending a single byte of data to Google.
5. You can run it on the cloud, thus reducing in-house IT costs.

Now I’d like to explain why I think Wave is going to have a life-changing affect on you and your business:

1. Extensions

Google is making it easy to augment the power of Wave by writing Wave Extensions. These are similar to Firefox Add-ons and they fall into two areas: Robots and Gadgets. Here’s an explanation from the Extensions site:

1. A robot is an automated participant on a wave. Robots are applications which run in the “cloud” and can modify state within the wave itself. A robot can read the contents of a wave in which it participates, modify the wave’s contents, add or remove participants, and create new blips and new waves. Robots perform actions in response to events. For example, a robot might publish the contents of a wave to a public blog site and update the wave with user comments. Check out the Robots API Overview and a Tutorial.
2. A gadget is a small application that runs within a client. The gadget is owned by the wave, and all participants on a wave share the same gadget state. The only events a gadget responds to are changes to its own state object, and changes in the wave’s participants (for example, participants joining or leaving the wave). The gadget has no influence over the wave itself. Wave gadgets typically aren’t full blown applications, but small add-ons that improve certain types of conversations. For example, a wave might include a sudoku gadget that lets the wave participants compete to see who can solve the puzzle first. There’s a tutorial if you’re interested.

So why are Wave Extensions such a big deal? I believe that developers and designers will be able to sell Extensions to their clients or to a wider audience, possibly in an Extensions marketplace. This means a huge potential source of new income, providing there is mass adoption of Wave.

2. Embedding APIs

Google has created a huge API to Wave, but one of the really interesting parts is the ability to embed a Wave into any web page. A great example of how this could be used with blogging. You can create a Wave and then publish it to your blog. Then whenever someone comments on the blog post, it appears as a reply to you Wave in your Wave client – no need to visit the site.

That’s the kicker, embedded Waves remove the need to physically visit a site in order to interact with it. This is a fundamental, and very exciting, change to the way we currently interact with blogs and content.

So why is the Wave Embedding API such a big deal? It means that content is king and consuming it will become even easier. Really understanding this and taking advantage of it’s power will make you much more effective in reaching your audience.

3. Collaboration

The separation between documents and emails will be completely removed with Waves. This is because Waves can be edited by more than one person. A great example would be taking notes for a meeting. Here’s how it might work:

1. I create a Wave titled “Notes from website branding project”
2. I add the other people in the meeting as participants in the Wave
3. Everyone who is a participant in the Wave can take notes simultaneously
4. After the meeting, everyone’s got a copy of the notes

An added benefit is that people can “chat” during the meeting, by creating private replies right inside the Wave. The writer can choose whether or not to make this chat visible to other participants.

4. Open Source

Google doesn’t intend to ‘own’ Wave. They have open-sourced the technology and created the Wave Federation Protocol. A brief explanation from Google is:

[Wave Federation Protocol is] the underlying network protocol for sharing waves between wave providers.

Yes, that’s between wave providers: anyone can build a wave server and interoperate, much like anyone can run their own SMTP server. The wave protocol is open to contributions by the broader community with the goal to continue to improve how we share information, together.

To help potential wave providers get started, our plan is to release an open source, production-quality, reference implementation of the Google Wave client and server, as well as provide an open federation endpoint by the time users start getting access.

This means you can either use Wave hosted on Google’s infrastructure, or you can have it hosted on your own server, without ever interracting or sharing data with Google.

This makes it completely different from Microsoft Exchange Server, and even Google Apps (which isn’t available to host on your own infrastructure).

5. Google Web Toolkit (GWT)

Wave is written entirely in Google Web Toolkit. GWT allows you to write HTML 5 web apps in Java, which are then cross-compiled into optimized JavaScript. If you want to learn more, this video explanation is very helpful.

I’ve always been wary of auto-generated code, but I think this might be an exception to the rule (providing your ensure the HTML is accessible and standards-compliant). All you have to do is look at the Wave demo in order to realize GWT is seriously powerful.

What does this mean for you? I means if you’re a web developer, you need to have a serious look at GWT and the potential benefits it has to offer. Programming in Java gives you all the traditional benefits of breakpoints and being able to step through your code.

There is also a plugin for Eclipse if you’re interested.

6. Playback

The increased collaboration that possible with Wave might actually make it confusing for someone to be added to a Wave after a lot of editing and replies have been made. Enter ‘Wave Playback. The best way to explain it is by jumping to minute 13:00 on the Wave introduction video.

This feature allows you to step through the changes to a Wave as they happened over time.

What do you think?

Obviously we think Wave is a big deal, but what do you think? We’d love to hear your comments below.

If you’re interested, there are two other videos that are worth watching:

1. Live Collaborative Editing: A short video explaining concurrency control and operational transformation in Google Wave
2. Natural Language Processing: A short video explaining how Google uses their vast search history to implement spell checking.

Photo credit: flickr.com/photos/philipgibbs

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I think we have a serious problem in our industry.

I believe it generally started when Basecamp became quite successful and 37signals started to talk about their theories on the subject. Their basic mantra was “Don’t quit your day job to build a web app. Build it in your free time and use your day job to pay the bills until your new app brings in enough money to quit your day job.”

I used to agree with this, but now I think I’ve come full circle.

I’ve seen a lot of web apps launched recently which haven’t succeeded. They’re not failing miserably, and they’re not wild successes. They’re just kind of puttering along, sapping just enough resources to be a problem, but not succeeding enough to really take off.

The majority of these apps were built by small web design firms or freelancers who bought into the dream without really understanding how much time it takes to make an app succeed. I speak from experience as this is exactly what happened with Amigo (which we sold in a firesale a few months ago).

Who Died, Who Survived?

There’s a really interesting post over at Meish.org with a great graphical example of the various web apps that have gone under. Here’s the graphic Meg put together:

It’s a sobering reminder of how tough it is to launch a successful app.

So what’s going on here?

I believe there’s a general misconception that goes like this:

1. Identifity a niche need that you have that’s currently under-served
2. Bang out somewireframes (or better yet, just start HTML’ing)
3. Ask a designer or developer to help out, in return for a bit of equity
4. Tweet about an invite-only beta
5. Listen to beta feedback and make tweaks
6. Launch
7. Get TechCrunched
8. Build recurring revenue till you can quit your day job
9. Live the good life

The major problem occurs between step #7 and #8. Most apps will fail here, not because there’s a problem with the idea, but because they don’t know how to market it. The reason for this is that it takes significant passion and time to properly market an idea. Sure, you may get lucky and the app magically spreads itself, but the cold hard truth is that most apps need serious time and effort in order to make them a success.

We need to consider that 37signals and the success of their apps are probably outliers – anomolies that aren’t easily repeatable.

So now what?

Don’t get me wrong, I’m a big fan of 37signals, but I think that unfortunately a lot of folks are getting the false impression that it’s easy to build a successful web app.

It takes time, passion and more time in order to make something succeed.

With that in mind, here are my suggestions for avoiding the web app Deathly Hallows:

Make time for marketing

Plan for the fact that marketing the app is going to take at least two days a week. I’m talking about about 16 solid hours of work, at a minimum.

How will you do this if you’ve got clients banging down your doors for changes or updates every day of the week? I’d highly recommend saving up enough cash so that you can take at least two months off from normal client work in order to make your app a success. This is two months after you launch. Keep in mind you might not be making a single $0.01 during this time, so you’ll need plenty of reserve cash.

If it’s impossible to make time for marketing, you’ll have to get investment in order to hire someone who can do it for you. This is pretty dangerous though, as this new recruit isn’t going to have your passion or understanding of the app.

Create a resource that helps your customers kick ass

One of the reasons why 37signals has been so successful is because they have built a large blog that’s aimed at their potential customers. Signal vs Noise has around 90,000 RSS subscribers and it does one thing really well: offers great advice, opinion and tips for people who might subscribe to their products.

If you read one thing about building a community around your products, read this comment by Kathy Sierra. It sums up this idea in a couple paragraphs.

Spend money on advertising

I think a lot of us are lulled into believing that if you tweet enough about your new app then it’ll surely succeed. Wrong. It’s very likely that the only way you’ll be able to get the word out to the masses about your new idea is by spending cold-hard-advertising-dollars.

Now, if you’re going to go down this route, it’s vital that you can track the effectiveness of your ads. You need to know:

1. Conversion rates on clickthroughs
2. Percentage of clickthroughs
3. What keywords are converting well for you
4. Where people are dropping out of the conversion process
5. Which ads are working (always test different copy and designs)

A/B Testing from the Start

One of the keys to increasing conversion rates on your site is to test the hell out of it. Plan on doing A/B testing from Day One, and never stop. If it’s a bit overwhelming, just tackle one page at a time, starting with your home page. Google Website Opimizer is the way to go on this.

To wrap it up

The most important piece of advice I’m trying to communicate is that you need to prepare for the huge amount of time it’s going to take after you launch to make your app succeed. Of course you need to believe it’s going to kick ass, but make sure you’ve got a  plan for making that happen. It might take several years of work to really make your web app a success, so be prepared.

Plan on building a business, not just a side project.

I’d love to hear if you agree or disagree, or if you have tips of your own.

Photo Credit: flickr.com/photos/david_han

Something happened yesterday that really frustrated me. 37signals launched the re-design of their site and almost immediately, a blog post appeared (from someone who I respect) that said:

Dear 37signals — You can have this one for free. – Love [named removed] :)

a:hover {opacity: 0.75;}

The boys at 37signals have clearly forgotten they are designing for an interactive medium and have instead redesigned with a great looking site that’s about as flat and static as you can get.

Want to know why he said that? Because they didn’t have a hover state on their links. No “Hey guys, great re-design. Have you noticed you don’t have a hover state on the links?” or “Love the new design, only one small tweak would be to add a hover state on the link.”

It’s the smug elitism that bothers me. The celebratory negativity just isn’t adding anything.

It’s as if we’re all just waiting to attack instead of encouraging creativity and *politely* mentioning tweaks that could be considered.

I’m fairly thick skinned and I can take negative comments, but a lot of creative people can’t. They would rather not blog/tweet/etc than be publicly criticized. I think we should, as an industry, consider that we’re stifling creativity and innovation by the band-wagon bashing that often occurs when folks launch something new.

Tipster beta

We recently launched Tipster and while it was in beta I saw this Tweet:

“lol at http://tipster.carsonified.com … its now up again and yes I agree its particularly pants”

Not sure what the yardstick was for measuring it and concluding it’s “particularly pants” but the comment isn’t helpful whatsoever. If it is “pants” why not give us your idea for improving it? We built Tipster in three days in Django, for fun, and the first thing someone does is laugh at us. What does that say about our industry?

We should all welcome constructive criticism, but I just don’t understand the point of purely negative commentary.

If there’s one thing that’s going to kill the creativity and fun of web design and development, it’s people ripping each other apart for a bit of a laugh.

Conclusion?

If we could offer constructive criticism, instead of quick-fire negativity, then we’ll see a lot more innovation and creativity – because people aren’t afraid of launching something new.

There’s a great piece in the NY Times on this very subject. I highly recommend a quick read.

Photo credit: flickr.com/photos/cybertoad