Rahul Pathak : My Personal Blog

Breitbart.com has an article about the Top 10 April Fools hoaxes and it makes great reading. The hoaxes were ranked on numerous criteria including number of people duped, by the San Diego Museum of Hoaxes.

One of my favorites:

In 1996, American fast-food chain Taco Bell announced that it had bought Philadelphia’s Liberty Bell, a historic symbol of American independence, from the federal government and was renaming it the Taco Liberty Bell.

Outraged citizens called to express their anger before Taco Bell revealed the hoax. Then-White House press secretary Mike McCurry was asked about the sale and said the Lincoln Memorial in Washington had also been sold and was to be renamed the Ford Lincoln Mercury Memorial after the automotive giant.

I found out about the article on doggdot.us which is an aggregator that blends news from Slashdot, Digg and Del.icio.us.

As part of the feature definition process, I’ve been focused on writing quick functional specs with wireframes and data requirements to facilitate discussions with developers and our tester on what we’re trying to accomplish from a product perspective. This process is proving to be extremely valuable, even in a quasi-Agile, get something up quickly and iterate. Thinking time at the beginning, before a single line of code is written, is extremely cheap. Also, the act of writing to communicate an idea to others is incredibly powerful. Lots of vague intellectual leaps get examined and made explicit. Everybody benefits. These are typically short documents (2-6 pages) and they are not technical or engineering specs. The functional spec is used to have a schedule conversation with engineering and to prep ops and test for what’ s coming. Once this is done, we proceed with comps/html markup in parallel with development.

Thanks, Joel for getting me thinking about this a while ago.

I believe that on any non-trivial project (more than about 1 week of coding or more than 1 programmer), if you don’t have a spec, you will always spend more time and create lower quality code.

Another document I found extremely useful in this process was the spec written for Copilot. What’s your take on specs? Do you find them helpful or are they an annoyance?

Here’s Warren Buffett on the type of acquisition candidate he’s looking for:

We continue, however, to need “elephants” in order for us to use Berkshire’s flood of incoming cash. Charlie and I must therefore ignore the pursuit of mice and focus our acquisition efforts on much bigger game.

Our exemplar is the older man who crashed his grocery cart into that of a much younger fellow while both were shopping. The elderly man explained apologetically that he had lost track of his wife and was preoccupied searching for her. His new acquaintance said that by coincidence his wife had also wandered off and suggested that it might be more efficient if they jointly looked for the two women.

Agreeing, the older man asked his new companion what his wife looked like. “She’s a gorgeous blonde,” the fellow answered, “with a body that would cause a bishop to go through a stained glass window, and she’s wearing tight white shorts. How about yours?” The senior citizen wasted no words: “Forget her, we’ll look for yours.”

What we are looking for is described on page 25. If you have an acquisition candidate that fits, call me – day or night. And then watch me shatter a stained glass window.

His letters are both informative and entertaining. Here’s a link to the 2006 letter (pdf - 486Kb)

UPDATE: I would be remiss if I didn’t thank 37signals and Brad Feld for jogging my memory about the Buffet letter.

On my drive (mercifully short) back from work, I heard a great interview with Bob Iger (CEO of Disney) on NPR. In it, he talked about the power shift from content producers and distributors to consumers of content. He said that at Disney, they were focused on the user experience and on using digital technology to drive incremental consumption. The user experience focus was great to hear about. (Dave’s written about companies that don’t get this and I highly recommend his post.) I’m sure spending time working with and dealing with Steve Jobs has contributed to this focus on UE.

In those instances, they were very much the result of the strategic vision that was outlined, which in those cases was to use technolo gy to reach more people, more often, in more convenient ways, to really think of the consumer and the power and the authority the consumer has in today’s digital world and serve the consumer better.

Apparently, a successful TV series consists of 22-25 episodes of which avid consumers watch 1/3. Making shows available for $1.99 via iTunes is a way to capture incremental revenues.

Really interesting interview and it did seem like Disney was embracing, rather than fighting digital content.

Here’s a link to the interview (audio/transcript) on NPR’s site. Enjoy.

I just got a note from Amazon with the following information in it:

Context Links are a quick and convenient way to add links to your website and monetize your content. Context Links automatically identify and link relevant phrases within your page content to Amazon products, unlocking new ad inventory and saving you the time from having to manually create links. You can add the links to your pages in minutes, and we provide a wealth of options to customize how they are displayed.

They were kind enough to provide a link to MuppetCentral.com where you can see this revolution in action.

Yes, it really is that bad. If you mouse over a single-underlined link in the text labeled ‘Zappa’ (which looks exactly like a hyperlink) you are actually not navigating, you are in fact going to an Amazon product page. How the user is meant to distinguish between real navigation and this, I’m not sure. Fortunately, there’s a handy popup that tells you what you need to know. I wonder if you’d get a preview of a popup if you used the Snap preview tool in conjunction with this.

Seeing this coming on the heels of Google’s text link ads I get the feeling (perceptive, aren’t I?) that we’re going to see more of these nav breakers all over the web. I can’t wait.

Amazon and Google aren’t stupid companies - they must have tested these formats and found them to work. Having said that, I can’t believe that this will hold true in the long run. I’m hoping these go the way of the flashing banner at the top of the page. Once the novelty value is gone, users will tune them out.

The WSJ has an interesting article this morning (username/pw required) about  EA forming a music label to sign artists for video game soundtracks. I don’t know much about this field, but this is fascinating.

Although Artwerk is not focusing exclusively on music for videogames, the first signed artist is Junkie XL, whose tracks appeared in EA’s top-selling games “Madden NFL 07″ and “Need for Speed: Carbon.” Artwerk says it is in negotiations with other artists.

The new label’s creation comes as Redwood City, Calif.,-based EA and other companies develop increasingly sophisticated sound tracks for videogames, which can cost as much as some Hollywood movies to produce. Artwerk allows EA to expand the investment it’s made in music studios well beyond computer games.

“It is time for the music industry to shake things up, break out new bands and find new ways to expose them on a global scale,” said Terry McBride, chief executive of Vancouver-based Nettwerk One Music, a music publisher.

Whether it’s product or business strategy, until you decide what you’re not doing, you’re not going anywhere. Dreaming about the end state when your product is all-conquering and you’ve gone public on the NASDAQ is all well and good (and necessary), but you have to sit down, prioritize, decide what’s in and out of scope based on time and resources, before you have a hope in hell of going anywhere.

Raymond Chen has a great post along these lines:

Whenever I see a project description, I pay close attention to the section titled “What we don’t do.” That tells me how serious they are about shipping. And if there isn’t a “What we don’t do” section at all, I sigh quietly, since that tells me that they don’t yet know what they do.

His point is spot on. If you’re not telling people what a release won’t do, you haven’t thought it through enough. While this is something I’ve done to a certain degree in our design/spec work at Judy’s Book, I will be focusing on it more going forward. (It’s always cool when someone’s writing influences your actions. Don’t worry Raymond, I won’t blame you for anything in therapy. It’s all about personal responsibility after all.)

Thank you to Dare Obasanjo’s Top 10 Reasons your software project is doomed for pointing me to Raymond’s post.

Alison just pointed me to this awesome ipod docking station. It’s gorgeous. And clever. Opening the lid amplifies the sound.

The Techcrunch post on Google’s CPA release contained a mention about Google’s decision to launch text link ads.

No longer will Google ads need to be confined to their own space on the site - publishers can subtly embed ads right into hyperlinks within the main content of the site itself (see second paragraph of quote above). Other companies already do this, but Google has never tread into the “advertorial” space before.

I think they are a great company, use their products, but I’m not a fan of this format. From their blog post:

Ad formats: You can create text ads, image ads, or our new text link ad format in your pay-per-action campaign. Text link ads are brief text descriptions that take on the characteristics of a publisher’s page. These Javascript-based ads will display like regular hyperlinks and allow publishers to embed these links inline with other text to promote your product or service.

I’m surprised more people aren’t talking about this. I’m looking forward to the transparent image ad overlay that will ‘transparently cover your entire webpage’ generating clicks to your site from a placement that ‘is completely invisible to the user.’

UPDATE: Dave also has a good post about this where he talks about some of the potential page rank implications.

Scott Karp has a terrific post about the future of content businesses and I think it’s spot on.

I would assume just the opposite — that content distribution businesses, or more accurately in digital network terms, content platform and content aggregation businesses (think Google, YouTube, MySpace, Facebook, Digg) are the only real media businesses left.

Couldn’t agree more. Content driven businesses will exist as niche plays, but far better to be a platform.