Mike Coyle’s Weblog

…comes from this entry on The Daily WTF. Here it is:

It was a work of art, in a Jackson Pollock sort of way.

Nice.

Comedy Central’s annual celebrity roast was on this last Sunday night. This year’s celebrity roastee was William Shatner.

Why is William Shatner famous? Let’s just say that if you and your buddy with the pointed ears ever decide to book a discounted trip back via to 1983 to watch an action-packed police drama where the show’s protagonist sings a really creepy rendition of Elton John’s “Rocket Man”, then Shatner’s your man.

If you missed it, well let’s just say that all you Star Trek fans should set your phasers to “Incessant Reruns”. Truth be told, they might as well rename the network “Roast Central” for the 11 months following the initial broadcast of the roast each year.

This same weekend I stumbled upon the Web 2.0 Logo Creator, which I used for the Shatner logo above. It dawned on me that both William Shatner and Web 2.0 share the following characteristics:

1. Both are immediately identifiable, almost iconic in nature

   As any Star Trek conventioneer can tell you (sometimes even in Klingon, nevertheless), Shatner is larger-than-life to the Trekkies out there. I was never a big fan of the show, but to its fanbase Star Trek provided an entertainment experience that was far more enriching than that offered by its late-sixties television contemporaries.

   Likewise, Web 2.0 applications are very distinctive in their feature set, branding, and approach. To many, Web 2.0 also provides an experience that is far richer than that offered by (cough) Web 1.0 applications.

2. Both served a necessary role in the evolution of their respective ecosystems

   Shatner’s role in Star Trek helped bring Science Fiction to mainstream TV and cinema audiences.

   Nowadays, many Web 2.0 applications are causing the IT world to rethink the very nature of thin-client applications and the possibilities thereof, as Web 2.0 has mainstreamed a variety of technical and design considerations.

   At the risk of making Newton roll over in his grave, the “killer app” of tomorrow will see further by standing on the sans serif shoulders of beta-quality giants.

3. Both have managed to become caricatures of themselves, while they still “keep on keeping on”

   Sunday’s roast made it crystal clear that Bill Shatner has his self-deprecation switch stuck on the “ON” position. Yet his acting career continues to flourish in shows such as Boston Legal.

   Similarly, there have been a number of sites that make fun of Web 2.0 conventions, yet nearly all of the interesting web apps as of late embody many of the principles, technologies, and design considerations that are often subject to parody.

So, Messrs. Shatner and Web-two-point-oh, keep in mind that in the IT world, like the Friars, we only roast the ones we love.

I wouldn’t fret too much regarding the news that Monopoly will be replacing cash with Visa-designed debit cards.

Now, I don’t want to go off on a rant here, but I think that the Parker Brothers don’t know their thimble from a hole in the ground if they think that replacing Monopoly money with debit cards is a good idea. Besides, what will Canadians use in their vending machines?

Our entertainment overlords at Hasbro are just setting us up for inflated prices for “Monopoly Classic”, when it makes its glorious return. They are already counting on us waxing nostalgic for getting paid in $1s and $5s when little Bobby saunters into the beautiful hotel you built at Casa Del Ventnor

Tedium, we hardly knew ye.

Besides, I don’t understand the parents that would buy a cashless Monopoly game to begin with. I mean, Monopoly is a little slice of traditional, old-time Americana. Just last night, we sat around our well-worn Monopoly game for hours. You know, the Bass Fishing Lakes Edition.

I hear that they also have one related to Las Vegas. Or maybe it was Atlantic City.

I forget.

These days, there is a special edition of the game for every movie, city, sports team, hobby, special interest, and topical skin condition. Obviously, brand integrity is not important to either of the Parker Brothers. Seriously, you could drop a half-packet of Splenda into a Big Gulp-sized cistern of coffee, and still have less dilution than the Monopoly brand. What gives, muchachos? I mean Peter Parker is obviously busy at night, but the other one, he has no excuse.

I was at the toy store the other day trying to buy Monopoly for my nephew. I had to ask the kid at the front desk where they kept the Monopoly edition of Monopoly. His answer: 1987.

This latest move is a pure unadulterated marketing move by Visa. I can already picture their commercial after the “Debit Card” Monopoly hits the stores:

• Board Game: $15
• Movie Rental: $4
• Zipping through the tedious parts of the board game so that you can put the kids to bed and watch the movie: Priceless

Family board games are all about the process of playing and spending time together, not Tivo-ing through the gameplay to get to the end. Plus, the swapping of cash among family members is a time-honored tradition. As well as a great (achoo!) way of teaching the youngins to wash their hands after handling money. You never know who touched it last.

At the end of the day, if little Mandy doesn’t grow up learning how to manage her own cash in the cocoon-like setting of the typical family Monopoly game (cheating, temper tantrums, and wicked accusations aside), she’ll end up like the other Bratz dolls dancing at the Community Chest.

You know, it’s that charming little joint at the corner of Baltic and Mediterranean Ave.

And evidently the last place in Atlantic City where Monopoly money still reigns.

Of course, that’s just my opinion, I could be wrong.

(With obvious apologies to Dennis)

Also, with apologies to Canada. I had never heard of the Monopoly/Canadian money analogy before this morning. But the line popped into my head and I had to run with it, eh?

Note: As we mentioned last Friday, we’re going to try and post some lighthearted content on Friday afternoons to peruse when planning your weekend. Please note that all of the references in the Top 10 list are fictitious, most of them obviously so.

Last week’s inaugural Hawaiian Shirt Gonzo Friday Top 10 List was a lot of fun. But we found ourselves in somewhat of a moral dilemma: How can we position ourselves as champions of agile delivery, flexibility, and simplicity to our customers, while still remaining beholden to the conformist and somewhat archaic notion that a Top 10 list must contain 10 items.

After nearly seven days of research, I’ve come to the realization that one can capture 96% of the humor with just 70% of the list items. That saves you, my dear reader, from the long and burdensome slog through those three superfluous Top 10 items whose very being epitomizes the Law of Diminishing Returns.

Imagine that, a Top 10 list that’s 30% lighter. Anyway, here we go:

Hawaiian Shirt Gonzo Friday Top 10 List #2:
Our 7 Biggest Disappointments In 2006 (so far)

2006 has been a good year so far. We have a bunch of ProjectPipe users all over the world, and our website and blog traffic continue to grow at a nice clip. Plus, we have some new functionality that will make ProjectPipe much more customizable. I’d also like to thank those who’ve given us constructive feedback.

Unfortunately, there were a handful of dissapointments as well. The Yan to our aforementioned Ying. As painful as they are to recollect, here are our Top 7 Biggest Disappointments:

7) Walt Mossberg’s Review: “It’s like Flickr, but without all of the pictures”

6) Everyone missed our Superbowl ad depicting Abe Vigoda as the new frontman for Phish.

5) Our worst fears from last week’s list have materialized: We’ve been characterized in the mainstream media as mean and judgemental for the inclusion of Role-based Security and Auditing respectively

4) The minor altercation with Nintendo’s Mario, because no members of Cartoon Plumbers Union Local 123 were involved in the creation of the ProjectPipe logo.

3) Stephen Colbert still holds to his schedule of making Pennsylvania’s 13th district (The Fightin’ 13th) the 434th installment in his 434-part series “Better Know a District” on The Colbert Report. Based upon my calculations, that could take…..months of sitting through shows about far lesser districts before it finally airs. Stephen, you’re on notice!

2) We got an email from Fred Brooks last week advising us to add about 20 developers to hit our 2/28 release. That’s not a good sign.

1) We know that Joanie Loves Chachi, but evidently not enough to buy him a ProjectPipe workgroup subscription for Valentine’s Day.

Have a good weekend,
Mike

Note: We’re going to try and post some lighthearted content on Friday afternoons to peruse when planning your weekend fun. And if you’re not careful, you may learn something before it’s done!

In building out the underlying application infrastructure for ProjectPipe, we added a bunch of features that seemed like the right thing to do at the time.

Here are the Top 10 features that we added to ProjectPipe but maybe shouldn’t have:

10) We came up with a lightweight mechanism for integrating web-based apps and desktops applications. I spoke about this approach here. Unfortunately, now that AJAX-y Web 2.0 applications are all the rage, far fewer people are using Excel, Word, or MS Project anymore, especially in business.

9) We baked Tagging into our infrastructure, but the profound lack of interest in Flickr,
Gmail, and del.icio.us suggests that people may not find Tagging to be a particularly flexible or intuitive means of organizing their data. Someday if Amazon were to support tagging, maybe it would catch on.

8) We allow data to be managed as an outline, and we support hoisting so that you can focus exclusively on a segment of the outline. For example, you can hoist your view of the project plan tasks so that you only see the tasks for Iteration 2 of the Elaboration Phase. But deep down inside, we feel a little guilty that our innocent hoister may be missing out on the big picture. For if you focus on the 20 tasks that you’re working on, you miss out on the majestic view that you get as you stand and look out over the 500+ line items of the overall project plan, most of which you may never otherwise be involved with. From that perspective, the stuff you’re working on today looks like a little dot.

7) We allow users to subscribe to adds/modifications/deletes of any data via RSS, but our feeds are guarded by the Role Based Security. However, if you have to type in a userid and password, is it still Really Simple Syndication?

6) We’ve hooked auditing into the application. But if someone on your project team wants to delete a reported bug when no one is looking because it’s hard to fix, who are we to judge them?

5) We provide Role-based Security, but it seems kinda mean to not give everyone on the project the same access privileges.

4) We have integrated workflow. But that was no mistake, my friend. Workflow is the cowbell of enterprise computing. Even though workflow means different things to different people, you just can’t have too much workflow. Guess what? I got a fever. And the only prescription… is More Workflow!

3) We allow any-to-any links to easily establish traceability across use cases, requirements, test cases, issues, etc. However, it’s probably easier to just keep track of all these dependencies in your head. I think that’s the approach that the GTD folks advocate. (I tried speed reading the book). Plus, committing these dependencies to memory instead of entering them in a system means less typing, so not using this feature is also easier on your fingers.

2) We’ve integrated visualization tools that automatically layout complex traceability graphs. But Good Developers know that Project Managers don’t need dependency diagrams. Seeing the big picture without first spending hours pouring through all the excruciating detail is like having dessert before dinner.

1) We made it possible to dynamically alter the data model by adding fields to existing tables and/or creating entirely new tables. But who ever heard of a customer wanting to customize an application? Not I, for one.

Have a good weekend,
��Mike

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