karlo.org

Despite the ongoing economic downturn, one persistent trend I've noticed is pennies lying on the ground in high-traffic, public space. It seems like very, very few people find them worth picking up these days.
 
This has been coming for some time, with the cost of producing a penny inflating to (I believe) more than its face value some time ago. But it's still interesting to see its perceived value to the general public drop this far... Given that we're now talking about something that would buy about a tenth of an ounce of soda, ignoring them is actually fairly rational. But doesn't that mean we should revisit just getting rid of the damned things altogether? Does anyone have a reason not to?

Some of the whining almost defies belief. Did Alberto Gonzales, the former attorney general, really say, "I consider myself a casualty, one of the many casualties of the war on terror"?

-- Paul Krugman, Bigger than Bush

It's time for a fresh start. Here's looking forward to a great 2009. Much love to everyone.

I've been working my way through Groundswell, by Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff. If you're up to speed on Web 2.0, a good part of the book will not be new to you (it's obviously targeted more at the corporate customers of Forrester Research, where the authors worked.) But the book does have real value in showing how particular businesses should make quantitative decisions around social internet participation, and also providing frameworks for calculating potential ROI. I'd say that even if you're very familiar with the social web as a firsthand user, it's worth at least skimming Groundswell before any new project to look at the frameworks they provide for assessing potential social web projects. Even if you disagree with their conclusions, it may provide a good basis for explaining or justifying your own view to other constituencies.

I'm a huge fan of using patterns when designing web services, especially when it comes to user interaction and non-core tasks. There's a number of reasons why:

1. You can focus on what differentiates your service, rather than re-designing what others have already worked out through trial and error
   
2. Users are happier with interaction flows they expect -- and generally, they expect what they've seen before when using other products
3. If you're working with a team, they'll generally understand and build a known pattern faster  and more correctly than a totally new design, even if the new one might be marginally better
   

Sometimes though, using patterns can get you into trouble even if they do fit the immediate requirements. As part of building IsAlternateSideParkingInEffect.com, I utilized a very standard pattern for validating new users -- sending an email to a user with a unique token, then requiring that they provide the token from the email to the system in order to fully activate their subscription.

Frankly, it worked well -- too well. Only about 50% of users would complete the validation (and I assume that the number of spurious submissions is well below half.) For a service where the risk of a faked registration is almost nothing, the pattern was costing me way too many users in the process of guarding against them. The guards were protecting the front gate, but they were eating all of the villagers' food.

I've since changed the process to an "opt-out" model - when a user submits their email to the site, they are immediately "activated", but every message they receive from then on has an unsubscribe link at the bottom. Making this relatively simply change from the established pattern immediately doubled the yield rate of subscribed users per unique visitor to the web site. It was simply a case where the "best practice" pattern didn't fit with the realities of a very specific service design, and acknowledging that reality.