Which one seems more appealing? Which one gets to the gist of what you are doing on the site? Which one would you sign up for?

And hell I don’t even like the Twitter homepage that much, but come on Friendfeed, it is like you aren’t even trying. Don’t hire the designer taking CC classes in Photoshop and learning about reflection and gradients. Get one of your smart engineers who can’t even design and doesn’t own Photoshop and tell him just to make something easy.

Twitter just gives the appearance of being a more fun place to be. Facebook is clean like Friendfeed, but it has a tighter design. A more professional feeling. Friendfeed is stuck in the design ghetto trying to look appealing, but also easy.

Yes, sometimes it just comes down to your features. Yes, many sites excel in spite of their design. When I go to a site I don’t expect design gallery quality, but I also don’t want to run away. I have visited Friendfeed many times since it launched and have maybe used it once. I just can’t do it with the design they have. Sorry guys.

Okay now you can go back to realizing the world isn’t fair and all sites aren’t created equal.

When I sat down and thought about how the code for the new 9rules was going to be laid out I was suprised at how simple it really was compared to the old code. What previously took days/weeks to code was done in a couple of hours. WordPress was great before, but starting from scratch with code that I knew because I was creating it went so much faster. This example shows a huge problem that I am starting to see on the web today.

With so many open source solutions and frameworks out there, many web developers are getting away with using code that is created by others to complete projects. Now I am not saying you shouldn’t use a solution that is already coded for you, but many times you will see that projects are pieced together from solutions found all over the web. The only reason the new 9rules was developed so quickly was because I used SimplePie for my RSS needs. Coding that myself would’ve made the development time at least 5x longer.

When I begin a project I can easily think of ways that I could use WordPress or some other open source tool and twist it around enough to get what I want, but that isn’t always the best way. Developers love Ruby on Rails because it is great at what it does, but how many of these developers are truly proficient at Ruby?

If there comes a time where I use CakePHP on a project I am confident in doing so because I believe I know my way around PHP. I just don’t like working with code that I don’t understand. Before I mentioned using SimplePie, but just because I used it that didn’t mean I didn’t take the time to study the code to get a basic understanding of how it worked. Hell, I even found a bug in a previous version that I had to fix. Can’t trust everything you download you know.

All my projects use the database connection class found in WordPress and bbPress because I would hate to have to code that stuff up every single time I start something. I know the class inside out though and because of that I can make changes if I feel the need. When searching for a contact form script for BullieBoard! I came across a great one that intrigued me, but I spent so much time fiddling around with it trying to make it work the way I wanted to that I gave up and quickly coded up my own.

I guess you have to sit down and look at the time difference it takes to learn pre-written code or a framework versus simply doing it on your own. I just feel more comfortable with the knowledge that I know the code inside out so when it comes time to fix it or refactor I can simply dive right in. By no means am I discouraging the use of frameworks. I plan to take the time myself to learn one of the popular PHP frameworks out there today, but I don’t think developers should be doing so without knowledge of the language they are working in.

• MySpace
• Facebook
• Hi5
• Tagged
• Virb
• Last.fm
• Blip.tv
• Ustream
• Digg
• Reddit
• Flickr
• Stuff on Yahoo
• Stuff on Google
• Stuff on MSN
• Stuff on AOL

The reason I made this list is because I have come to the understanding that nothing is forever. I am sure you know that, but too often we treat the next great thing as being indispensable when in reality we move on more often than we think. Now I do wish I had a site that last with me through the last decade and maybe I have finally nailed down a couple that will, but everything else has always been a passing fad.

This is something to keep in mind as well if you are basing your business around these sites. Your business could last just as long as they can, but that doesn’t mean the people will still be around for you.

Here are some other things that I have acquired and released over the years:

• tens of emails
• tens of IM accounts
• phone numbers
• addresses
• friends
• blogs

Life goes on. Too much of what we encounter is fleeting. I am sure there is a better message hidden somewhere here that I am not relaying so I will leave it to you to find it.

I needed a logo.

Why? Well because I am a brand myself and to be honest I want to stand out from the millions of other people we follow online. I mean have you ever seen a Twitter client’s interface? Here is a screenshot of mine.

I could probably tell you who each of these people are, but it would take a couple of seconds of thought. Ignoring my twat at the top all of these avatars make my mind go hmm for second and I probably wouldn’t recognize them in other places. We care so much about being a presence online and yet we aren’t taking the time to make sure our presence is recognized. Ever been to a bar/club/party and felt like people wouldn’t know if you were even there? That is 99% of us online. I’m not saying everyone wants to be a superstar, but if you spend enough time online you know you have put time and effort into something. I can’t say what that something is for you, but damn if my presence is the guy who changes his avatar every once in a while.

Sure not everyone needs a logo and not everyone will want one, but with over 6 billion people in the world wouldn’t it be cool to have a “shield” representing you? Okay maybe not that cool for you, but I thought it would be cool for me because these are the things I think of when I am laying on the beach watching the sun set.

Now I had to go and find a logo for myself that I can use in many places. I needed something simple yet powerful. So I went into the graphics program and played with fonts and I found many cool ones to work with. Now did I want my logo to be ‘Paul Scrivens’ or ‘Scrivs’? Well I am Scrivs basically everywhere I go, even in real life so I might as well continue that trend. Besides one name personas are much cooler than two name personas. So Scrivs it was, but every logo I tried with ‘Scrivs’ just didn’t scale well. As you should know if you are going to create a logo, create one that scales at different sizes and in grayscale.

I guess the next logical step then was to simply go with the letter ’s’. This is risky because someone might own the letter ’s’ already, but nobody that I knew of. Then I thought of how Superman had the letter ’s’ and that made it kind of cool so I knew I had to go with it because I am the 9th cousin of Superman so it only made sense to carry on the family legacy.

After all of this thinking, which in reality only took about 13 minutes I came up with this.

And so this is what I use on Facebook and Twitter and will use in whatever future attempts of online domination I attempt. This of course could be an exercise in futility, but I like the idea of it. I think it gives me a better identity online than what my past avatars were and allows me some consistency. A pic of mine in some capacity would be more personal, but I don’t like the pics I have and how they would relate to my new logo/shield so this is where I stand now.

At least @zeldman likes it.

@scrivs Lovin’ that avatar, chief.

If you have a consistent identity online or know of anyone else that does I would love to see them.

UPDATE: Dan Benjamin likes the idea of faces being used and I understand his point of view, but in the long term faces change. And a shield will always be cooler than my face.

However, I do say that right now is the best time and when I say ‘now’ I mean whenever you feel the urge. The second you are reading this could be right now and 10 years from today could be right now for you. Now is always the best time no matter what the climate, but each climate is the best for different reasons. Matter of fact why don’t you try to start a company that isn’t dependent on the what economic climate you are in. Waste management companies played it smart here.

Now is a good time because maybe you really need to start something on the side to help support yourself and your family. Now is a good time because maybe you won’t copy other ideas you see around the web because now you are starting to understand that many businesses fail. When the world was happy with all their money how often did we see a copycat of a copycat spring up? Now you see people are a bit more careful with what they launch with and this is a good thing. Of course the cycle will go back to copycats eventually, but for now the people who wish to innovate will stand out in a year or two.

Two years ago if you started a company it was much easier to get money than it is now. Now you have to prove yourself a bit more and nothing is wrong with that, unless you were hoping to get easy money. So for many people maybe two years ago was the best time to start a company. Maybe two years ago when they still had a job to support themselves was the best time. Maybe now they have no job or way to survive so now isn’t the best time to take a chance.

The problem with assuming that this climate is the best to start a company is that you will read it from people who tell the story of how their company was started during the last bust. It worked out for them and as with anything else in business it doesn’t mean it will work out for you. As we know sometimes things just fall into place and sometimes they don’t. Maybe you start a company now and it doesn’t really show signs of life until the economy picks up. Who knows.

I can tell you that now will always be the best time to start because we have enough times in our life where we look back and wish we did it earlier. If anything, start now so you don’t regret the next now.

• Craigslist
• Facebook
• Yahoo

They are all large and successful sites that help their users complete a number of tasks. There are a ton of competitors that go after these specific sites and look at what they have to offer and say they can offer everything they offer and more. In fact, they can do it better. The problem is there has to be something blatantly wrong with these sites for a competitor to match them feature-for-feature and take their customers.

The flaw in this logic is you probably can do everything your competitor can do, but how much better can you really do all of that stuff? Wouldn’t it be easier to simply do one thing better than them and become the focus of that?

For example, what do these sites have in common?

• BullieBoard!
• Twitter
• Google

They all do something that the first three sites do, but they made that their focus. They found one task that they felt they could do a lot better than their competition (whether they were actually thinking of the competition or not) and they are succeeding. Now whether that is how they methodically planned it out I am not sure, but that is how it turned out for them.

The premise behind BullieBoard! had been in my head for a very long time. I always wanted a site that could show me the clubs and bars in Tampa and what they had going on tonight. I could never find it. My original ideas were very similar to what Club Planet offered in its select cities. For one reason or another I never went through with the idea.

Then this year while sitting at a bar with a friend of mine we began discussing the idea of the site again. All of these great features came up, club reviews, user profiles, pictures, music, etc. Now when you drink and discuss ideas they start to become really good ideas in your head. When I got home I looked at sites that offer such things and although none of them were great in my mind, they did the job.

Something kept bugging me about the sites though and that was the fact I couldn’t just see what is happening tonight. There was so much clutter and useless information that trying to plan my night became a chore. I realized that all I ever wanted was a site that told me what is happening tonight. So simple.

So now instead of a super club social network, I was having dreams of an event site. However, those used to be a dime a dozen during the first dotcom boom so I had to go out and see what they offered. They certainly did the task of letting me know the events happening in Tampa, but the problem was they let me know almost every event that was happening in Tampa. It could be a simple meetup at a restaurant or a bridge tournament in a bingo parlor. You had to know exactly what you were looking for, search for it and pray you got the right results. A ton of great features were added to these events, but nothing I would use.

If I was going to create an event site that did what I wanted I was going to have to do it myself. A problem arose though. I remembered Craigslist had a section for community events. Well that was just a giant clusterfuck of everything under the sun, but I did take away a few lessons from Craigslist so it wasn’t completely useless.

I can’t outdo Upcoming, Eventful or Craigslist by doing everything they do. I can only do what my main focus is to the best of my abilities and I just need that to be a ton better than those sites and I am succeeding.

So if you are creating a product or service and looking at the competition don’t setup a spreadsheet to see what features you can match them with, see what features you don’t care about that they have, scratch them off and go from there. Look at the couple of features you offer and make those killer. That is how you will change the game.

I would love to hear some other examples that you can think of where a competitor took what the competition did and stripped it away.

Many times I simply want to code something up and push it out to see how it does (another great aspect of PHP). In doing so I get to see what I like and dislike. There is no design planning. There is no time making sure that my methods are attached to the right objects. If I need to accomplish a task on a page a quick function will do.

But what happens on the larger projects I work on? Surely this approach can’t work. You know what? It actually does because my procedural code is so close to object-oriented anyways that most of the time all it involves to make the conversion is to wrap my functions in an object. In fact most of the time my code is a mix and match of procedural and OOP. I use a DB object to handle all my SQL needs, but it might be wrapped in a simple procedural function.

My code is easy to look at, I never get lost in it and I can always return to it and know exactly where I left off. Maybe I’m not launching missles with my code, but I like to think I do enough to know when its just fine to do some procedural programming. Don’t be so quick to jump onboard of what the experts feel is best. Most of the time you have to feel your own way around and if the best advice you get is to release early, release often, then find what method allows you to do that while still pumping out great code. Great code will always be great code.

(If you are heavy into frameworks ignore all the above and focus on your objects. And I have done many projects that are great examples of OOP, this applies more to my mini-projects.)

Now the article linked above gives a good list of suggestions for users. But to be honest Twitter itself doesn’t need those. Twitter has everything it needs already, this doesn’t mean all of its users have everything they want, but that isn’t the point. When people use any type of system enough, they will begin to find workarounds to enhance the system for themselves.

Game consoles last for years with the same technology because developers better understand the limits of the system over time and therefore know how to push those limits further.

How many different ways do you really use a telephone? I’m not talking about the super phones like an iPhone, I mean just the basic telephone service. How often do you find yourself making conference calls? How often do you find yourself dialing 411? How often do you need to *69? The basic premise behind the phone hasn’t changed in a century because it has worked well within its limits. You use it to call one person. That’s it. Make and receive calls. Now you can add a thousand features around that, but that doesn’t mean a phone company needs to do so. People will find their own workarounds for it. Although I’m sure I have three-way calling I have no problem calling one friend and then calling another one after to relay some information.

How many features have been added to email? IM? IRC? Hell, Linux itself is a kernel and nothing more, but users have found ways to work with just the kernel and build out whatever solutions they need. Too often we assume that limits mean we are limiting the potential of something, but in reality you might possibly be enhancing what can be done with a system because people understand the boundaries they need to work within.

I will admit there are times I use Twitter and think how nice it would be to have X feature, but it is never anything I am dying to have or prevents me from using it. As long as you have created a product or service that people use enough and haven’t limited their ability to use it effectively then you have done your job. You have to understand that every specific person will each have their own set of specific features they want implemented in a system. Catering to them all is silly. The more you add to your own system, the harder you make it for yourself to maintain so if anything keep it simple for selfish reasons.

Sure the explanation of how something works can be complex, but there is never a reason for a system that a person uses to be complex. Complexity leads to mistakes and mistakes are ugly. Limiting a system is more difficult than simply blinding creating one. Holding back is against human nature especially when we come up with a million ideas to add to something. Find your boundaries and stay within them and you will eventually find something beautiful inside.

Now we have social media experts that do…see I don’t know what they do. From what I gather they find a site that uses social features and say “company X needs to better utilize site Y.” Is that how it goes? Or maybe you have to sound surprised when you find that “company D isn’t up to par with the world since they are not on Facebook or Twitter.” Seriously, I have the feeling that anyone can be a social media expert.

Let’s see what would happen if I walked into a business and they were paying me to consult them on social media. I guess this is what I would tell them:

• Create a Facebook group and page and use it to connect with people.
• Create a Twitter account and use it to talk to people and let people know about your company.
• Say nice things and keep track of what people are saying to you.
• Be consistent, don’t disappear for months.
• Be honest, don’t pretend you can outsmart the public.
• ???????
• Profit.

Chris Brogan used to call himself one, but I guess now he simply says he advises companies on how to use social media tools. Is Shel Israel one because he covers all things social media? If he is that is kind of scary considering what happened to him last year. Mack Collier is considered a bigshot in the social media world I hear, but he can’t even get his blog off of blogspot? Wayne Sutton talks a lot about social media and even calls himself a social media & technology strategist, but looking at his site I see links to places that don’t even exist anymore (pownce and magnolia for example). UPDATE: Wayne has completely redesigned his site and removed the links that I was pointing out. Not sure how much of a coincidence this is.

I have no issues with these guys (keeping doing your thing fellas) and from what I gather they are all extremely nice people, but I just don’t understand exactly what all of them are supposed to be doing. As humans we have been social since the beginning of our existence so it is not a new science. The only thing new here is the technology and to be honest it isn’t that much different.

Ever been to a party and people seem to gather around one individual? Why is that? Well usually because the person is interesting. Want people to follow you on Twitter? Guess what? Be interesting.

Ever been in a relationship where either you lied or the person you were with lied? How did that turn out? Not good. Want people to respect your company and follow you on Twitter and other “crazy social media realms”? Guess what? Be honest.

I’m hoping that someone can come here and clue me in because I really am interested to know what separates these people from the rest of the world. An expert designer is different than me because he designs a million times better than I do. An architect knows how to design buildings and I don’t. A heart surgeon can perform a triple bypass and I can’t. A social media expert can…stare at his Twitter feed longer than I can?

And please don’t tell me the answer is they know how to get people to follow them. Anyone can do that if that is their main goal by using age old marketing techniques. If the answer is they talk more than others then maybe you got me there. I just don’t feel like I am missing something that the rest of the world is getting so hopefully you can help me out.

Here is a listing of data that I figured would occur on two separate pages on the site. I like to list all the information that I can use on a page and narrow down what will actually get used from there. I wasn’t trying to create the next Yahoo so large schemas and IA diagrams were not needed.

Now before I go into these lists, take a quick glance at them and imagine the form that people would have to fill out just to complete these profiles. Seems like a hassle to me and if I don’t want to do it, why should I expect users of the site to want to? The more I looked at the list the more I realized I didn’t care about most of this information. I really just wanted to know what was going on tonight in my area.

Users? It didn’t matter to me who was using the site, just as long as people were using it for the same reason I liked using it. Did I really need to know what their favorite music was? Did I even need them to login for some reason? Nope. Well that took care of user profiles so I didn’t have to worry about that page at all. Not saying logins won’t come into effect at some point in the future, but at this moment I just didn’t see a need for party people to have to login and keep track of another account of their’s on the web.

Moving on to the clubs, I just continued to think about the form. That form just seems like it would be stupid to fill out and considering how different every venue is why not just focus on what they all have in common? Every venue has a name, address and hopefully some type of description. Those are three fields that are definitely needed and just to help users out a bit more I figured a URL and phone number would provide a way to contact the venue. Looking at the Club Profile list we went from 15 lines to 5 and the beauty of the description field is that they can provide the rest of the information in there if they want to or not.

I was starting to feel good about what I was coming up with at this point and presented the idea to two of my friends who use club sites. Their first reactions were similar and they wanted to know where the reviews were at and the pictures. When I told them I wouldn’t have them they kind of just looked at me waiting for the reasoning. I asked them if they needed that kind of stuff to see what was going on tonight. Of course the answer was no. Sure they are cool “features” to have, but not needed, so why add them? Other sites can take care of that stuff.

So what exactly would the site have? I told them already, a listing of what is going on tonight because that is what I want to see. I want to go somewhere that I don’t have to file through tons of garbage just to find out if the club is even open tonight. I want to see my options and go from there. Why can’t a site just do that for me? Well now one can.

Too often we complicate a site by what what we can add to it instead of staying focused to what is needed on the site to make it usable. Believe me, I can come up with at least 20 cool features to add to BullieBoard, but they aren’t necessary and each one would only apply to a subset of users. When I can think of a feature that makes the site better for the majority of users I will add it, till then I focus on what I can take away from the site to keep its core strong.