Carsonified

I’ve been reading a lot about Ojective-J, Cappuccino and SproutCore and I believe these new frameworks are going to have a huge impact on the web app industry and user experience on the web.

So what are they?

Objective-J is a clone of Objective-C, the language behind OSX desktop apps. It was created by the guys at 280North who recently launched 280Slides (a browser-based version of Apple’s Keynote). If you’re interested, I managed to find a link to the Objective-J source which hasn’t been open sourced yet. More files here and here.

Cappuccino is a port of Cocoa (the set of Mac OS X Objective-C application frameworks) to the web. It was created by the 280North team.

SproutCore is JavaScript framework created by Charles Jolley which is being used in the new Mobile Me platform that Apple has just introduced.

So what’s the big deal?

Right now, people are generally building web apps with CSS, HTML, a sprinkling of AJAX and their framework of choice (Rails, Django, Symfony, etc). The basic client-server model still dominates.

Objective-J and SproutCore change all that. They allow you to create true desktop-like apps right inside the browser. They don’t rely on a continous web connection and they are as quick as desktop apps. In fact, if you run them inside a site specific browser like Fluid, you probably would think they were real native desktop apps.

Everyone already generally agrees that we’ll see a melding of the desktop and the browser, but Objective-J and SproutCore are the first solid step in this direction. They’ve abstracted away all the basics so developers don’t have to re-invent the wheel for every web app they build.

Quoting from Mac Fanatic:

“Developers have even more reason to be excited. The whole Javascript/HTML/CSS design process to manipulate the DOM is abstracted to a higher layer with the introduction of Objective-J. The Objective-J language allows developers to write code in a style more like writing for traditional desktop applications. The developer doesn’t directly interact with the DOM or style the page with CSS. Instead, Objective-J itself manages all the views and drawing the objects to screen. More so, the Cappuccino framework provides functionality that is traditionally lacking from other Javascript frameworks, such as: copy/paste, undo/redo, document management and archiving, vector graphics and animations.”

So the big shift is this: instead of relying on the client-server model, you can build asyncronous, offline, robust web apps right inside the browser. In fact, they don’t even need to connect to the web at all.

And even more interesting is this: if you use Cappuccino, those apps will automatically look and behave like OSX native desktop apps - with zero learning curve on the developer’s side. He or she can simply focus on building an kick ass app instead of trying to re-invent basic UI functionality every single time.

You might be saying “Duh. You can already do this with AIR or Silverlight. What’s the big deal?” The answer is that Objective-C, Cappucino and SproutCore are all open source. I think this is very important as it ensures the ideas aren’t directed by one specific company or organization (and their financial goals).

Backed by the big boys

Everyone has heard about Mobile Me, Apple’s latest incarnation of the .Mac platform. They are essentially porting Mail, Address Book, iPhoto and iCal to the web … but what isn’t as well known is that Apple have chosen to use SproutCore for Mobile Me.

This is really exciting for a couple reasons:

1. A massive consumer based company (Apple) is building applications for the browser that look, feel and function exactly like desktop apps. This will change the average web user’s expectations of what ‘web apps’ should be able to do, thus eventually completely removing the need to differentiate between desktop and web apps. The user simply won’t care.

2. We will start to see standardization in UI conventions because more and more apps are built on frameworks that mimic OSX. (This could be the topic of another large blog post as it relates to Apple’s long term strategy to crush Flash, AIR and Silverlight and standardize everyone in the whole world on Cocoa.)

So that’s it. I’d love to hear your thoughts on where this is going. Whatever happens, we’ve got exciting times ahead.

Additional Reading

• Simon Willison
• TechCrunch’s coverage of SproutCore
  
• Ajaxian’s interview of SproutCore
• Ajaxian’s interview of 280North
• This Week in Tech
• TechCrunch’s coverage of 280Slides
• Dru Nelson
• Y Combinator - Paul Graham’s angel fund which funded 280North

Keir recently came up with a really fun web app idea … so the whole team is taking a week off to build it. It’s going to be called ‘Matt’ and it’ll be built in Django on a popular API, include a desktop AIR app, and will be hosted on an elastic computing cloud (probably Flexiscale, but yet to be determined).

Those of you who have been following us for awhile will remember that we did something similar recently called Idea Week where we built HugMyMac.com. It was a blast and we’ve decided to do something similar again.

We’ve never built anything in Django, AIR or used elastic computing, so it’ll be fun to learn. It’ll also be a difficult but fun challenge for Mike to come up with a complete visual identity, site, web app interface and desktop interface - all in four days. Yikes.

We’ll be starting on June 30th, so I hope you’ll tune in for the adventure. If anyone is stopping by Bath, come on over to Carsonified HQ to say hello.

P.S. Thanks for the photo Scott
P.P.S. Any affiliation with Matt Mullenweg, WordPress extraordinaire, is entirely coincidental :)

I’ve got almost 3,000 followers on my Twitter account … and it’s starting to become a problem.

You might be wondering why it would be bad to have so many followers. Isn’t it perfect for building the Carsonified community and communicating with them?

Here’s the trouble - a lot of my followers ‘@ reply’ to me in a conversational, chat style. For instance:

“@ryancarson good luck with FoWA this year, wish I could make it”

I’d love to reply to this in-kind with a response like:

“@lazzurs - Thanks! Hope you can make it to the show.”

However, the problem is that replies like that are no fun for my other followers to read. It’s a bit like butting into someone’s private conversation and having no idea what they’re talking about.

I receive roughly four @ replies every time I tweet, so responding to each one would make my entire Twitter feed a series of @ replies - thus making it impossible to understand, follow or enjoy. I could ‘direct message’ everyone who @ replies to me, but that would mean I’d need to follow a ton of people, which goes against what Twitter is all about - keeping up with your friends.

So here’s my theory: Microblogging services like Twitter break down if you have more than 100 followers. People like Jason Calacanis might disagree, but I’d argue that by him following 26,672 people he’s obviously not actually interested in what those people are doing (nor would it be possible to actually interact meaningfully with them).

Thoughts?

Update: I’ve added a few more web apps to the list at the end.

My last post on Web Mission stirred up a lot of discussion so I’d like to expand on my original thoughts.

My main point was not that going to Silicon Valley to build relationships is a waste of time or money. Everybody knows that making friends and nurturing connections is of the utmost importance and I’m 100% supportive of that.

Also, if anyone is participating in Web Mission because they’re trying to establish a specific relationship with someone in the USA - more power to them.

So what’s the problem?

Getting the message right

What bothers me about Web Mission is that it sends out this message:

“Web apps need to emulate the Silicon Valley model: Funding, quick growth and exit by acquisition or IPO.”

I disagree. And I also don’t think that that’s the message we should be sending out to the UK Web industry.

David Heinemeier Hansson doesn’t agreed either and makes the point in his post Are you sure you want to be in San Francisco? I think this quote is particularly relevant:

“It [being in Silicon Valley] takes away much of the urgency to make money that I think is critical to build sustainable businesses. It gives you too many resources to be satisfied building simple tools for niche markets. Everything becomes about catching that huge wave.”

There’s glory, money and fame to be made in California but the problem is that only a tiny percentage of web apps will ever find it.

More of us should be focusing on building simple, focused, small-team web apps that meet everyday needs. Am I saying we should kill our dreams of changing the world? No. But we all need to admit that YouTube, Facebook, Bebo, Google and Twitter just aren’t the norm.

Instead of desperately trying to create the next phenomenon, which is highly unlikely, why not aim for something that’s definitely achievable?
If you have a team of two or three and you bring in $1M in revenue per year, I’m guessing you’ll be pretty damn happy with your earnings. And to do that, all you need to achieve is 2000+ accounts at $40 per month. With those kind of numbers, you just don’t need mass adoption.

We’ve done it. So can you.

As I’ve said before, we spent $45,000 on building DropSend. It now brings in profits of over $200,000 per year, and we don’t even have someone working full time on it.*

YouSendIt, our biggest competitor, has raised at least $10 million in funding. I don’t know how big their team is, but I’m willing to bet it’s at least 20 people. So immediately, they’ve created a huge amount of pressure on themselves to generate large revenues. With all that funding and all those mouths to feed, it’s a completely different game.

Could they crush us because they’re throwing more money at the problem? Possibly. But we’re more agile and can react much quicker. Even if they squeeze us out of the market someday, we can easily launch another niche-market web app and quickly become profitable.
I’ve got nothing against taking big risks and betting big, but sometimes it just doesn’t make sense. We’re currently enjoying a lot of profit from DropSend for almost zero risk or stress. Which model is better?

Too simple?

I can see the comments already: “Ryan, you’re naive. It’s not that simple.”  Well, maybe not all of the time, but you know what, most of the time, it is that simple. Build your app on a smaller budget, with a smaller team, focusing on a smaller niche, and you’ll be profitable much more quickly.

With the advent of cloud computing and storage, it’s much easier to build more than one app with a small team. If you build three applications and two of them are mildly successful, you’ve got a great business on your hands.

There’s just no need for being TechCrunched and trying to reach the mass market.

I’m sure someone will say in the comments: “But Ryan, you’re an edge case. You’ve become friends with some of the big names in the Valley and that’s why DropSend is successful - you’ve received a ton of exposure.”

Here’s my answer: 99% of our paying customers have never heard of Web 2.0, TechCrunch or any of our events. They’ve just googled ‘Send large files’ or someone has sent them a file via DropSend so they decided to give it a try.

The bigger question

The real issue I’m getting at here is this: What does it take to make you happy?

Money is important to being happy, I’ll admit that. You need enough cash to live comfortably and feel secure. However, I think it’s dangerous to assume that your company needs to bring in a huge amount of revenue in order for you to live the good life.

Take a minute and do a little exercise with me. Imagine logging into your online banking and seeing a deposit of $10 million - right after you’ve been acquired or sold all your shares.

How do you feel? What would you do with the money? Buy your dream house? Pay off your debts? Get that Audi R8 you’ve been dreaming about? Send your kids to private school?

OK, now imagine you’ve done the things on your list. How do you feel. Any happier? I’d be willing to bet that you won’t actually feel much happier than you do now. You might feel nice for about two months, and then you’ll be itching to do something else.
Happiness isn’t found in being the next company to sell for $100 million. So that’s the whole point - you can have a small web app business and still enjoy the good life.
No Silicon Valley needed.

They’ve done it too

Here’s a list of great web apps that are small, successful, profitable and happy - all without emulating the Silicon Valley model:

BlinkSale
37signals
FreshBooks
WeLoveLocal
Flexiscale
Remember the Milk
Fogbugz (from Joel)
Campaign Monitor
Nozbe
ActiveCollab

There are a ton more, obviously. Please add them in the comments and I’ll update the post.

* I plan on changing this as soon as I get off paternity leave, I’ll be going back to work full time on Carsonified’s web apps. We’re hiring a full-time developer and we’re hoping to start on our third web app quite soon.

Today saw the launch of Facebook Chat to the masses and it will be interesting to see what impact this will have on our daily lives and communication methods.

Everybody that I know now has a Facebook account. When I’m out in bars, guys no longer ask for your number (maybe it’s just me!) but instead they check whether you’re on Facebook. I have my suspicions that this is so that they can remind themselves of what you look like the next day, but that’s a whole different subject matter.

For me the introduction of Facebook Chat means a couple of things (positive and negative) :-

For a start it means that I won’t have to try and explain AIM to my friends and family any more. For some reason, the fact that Facebook have introduced it means that they will trust it, embrace it and be chatting like chatty chattersons in no time. I think it could become for instant messaging what the internet explorer icon still is as a browser for many people.

However, for myself, it also brings some issues. I have a number of work contacts as Facebook friends as well as just my old school friends and “weekend buddies”. Whilst I love the idea of being able to use Facebook Chat with my non-tech friends to cajole them into getting ready a little quicker on a Saturday night - I’m also opening myself up to chatting with lots of people that I don’t know that well and it can become a little overwhelming, not to mention time consuming.

In an ever increasingly busy world, Facebook (and Twitter) provide a low maintenance method of keeping in touch with the people in your lives - just glancing at status updates tells you what’s going on in their lives without having to spend time on the phone or writing emails (tip: mothers always appreciate calls home this said!). What I love about this is that you can choose when to get in touch - it’s not intrusive, or should I say - wasn’t intrusive.

Facebook Chat appears to be the complete opposite of everything that I loved about Facebook. Unless you specifically choose to appear offline, any of your contacts can start chatting with you whenever they feel like it. To quote Lisa “email used to be the productivity enemy number one!” but I can easily see Facebook Chat quickly overtaking. Michael Arrington soon discovered this when he went out for dinner having forgotten to log out of Facebook, only to return to a swarm of messages.

Feedback on the Twitterverse has been mixed, but many people, myself included, are planning to stay permanently offline. Could that mean the sound of tumbleweed for Facebook Chat? Only time will tell…

I’ve noticed that TechCrunch is fully supporting Web Mission ‘08 and I just can’t hold my tongue any longer.

Web Mission exemplifies everything that’s wrong with the UK and European web start-up scene.

Read the rest of this entry »

Anyone who hasn’t logged on to the world wide interweb over the last two months might not know that I’ve just come back from SXSW. Anyone who’s never been on the interweb before now may also not know that at Carsonified, we’re all huge Twitter fans… who isn’t?

SXSW made something abundantly clear to me, the way that Twitter is used can change hugely depending on the following things:-

* your location
* your social circle
* your mobile device

Bear with me, let me explain some more…

The way in which I use Twitter changes dramatically depending on where I am at the time. Whilst Twitter’s become the poster kid of the web, it hasn’t reached mass adoption (yet!). I’m still repeatedly telling my friends that it’s like Facebook status updates only better. So, if I’m tweeting from home in the UK, where fewer people use it - as opposed to somewhere like the Bay Area - I’m likely to share random facts about myself (blog style) or stay in touch with my friends stateside.

However, take me to the States where far more people use the app, it becomes much more of an outreach / conversational tool - enabling spontaneous meetups (read: booze-ups) and easy organisation between friends.

When I’m not making random videos and twittering nonsense, my day job of course involves organising Future of Web Apps, so what do I think is the future of this web app? It’s going to be fascinating to see how Twitter’s gravitational pull grows and its potential usage enters a whole new dimension. More and more companies are already using it as a reputation management tool, especially given the emergence of sites like TweetScan that provide immediate feedback on their products and services. That’s bringing about a whole new level of customer service (thank goodness!), and research and development.

Something that’s fascinating me at the moment is the rise and rise of the ‘personal brand’. @Garyvee did a great talk on this at FOWA Miami and is one of the best examples I know of someone that has built a fanbase and brand around their personality. Gary recently said that building a personal brand is the best way of “recession-proofing” and it’s easy to see why. Twitter allows you to wear your heart on your sleeve and for the community to feel like they’re getting to know you (even if this means realising that you’re a little nuts) as well as an insider’s look at the company you work for. Being able to track @melkirk means that I can respond directly to people and maintain close relationships. On the flip side you also need to develop a bit of a ‘rhino’s skin’ - what some people say on the web but never in person always amazes me!

A final thought, it doesn’t matter who you are or where you are, there is nothing better than Twitter for breaking and spreading news right now. The impact of seeing a Tweet on my desktop is ten times greater than a mail in my inbox. Normally from the people “on the ground” without spin. Unedited content. I love that.