API strategy is a must

While researching the social networking API, I stumbled upon these slides by Sam Ramji at Apigee.  They are worth flipping through especially the first 70 slides or so.  Sam draws an interesting parallel of today's API-based application trend with Amundsen's South Pole expedition.

Why where we hang out is important

[...] we leave parts of ourselves all around us, which in turn, come to shape who we are.
By Alix Spiegel @NPR

I was listening to NPR Morning Edition this morning, and heard an interesting story about how we are shaped by our own environment.  You can hear the whole segment here.  It was talking about how we can do things without even thinking about it (sort of auto-pilot mode, if you will), and this habit is closely tied to the cues that we get from our own environment.

Happy New Year!

I want to wish everyone happy new year.  I hope everyone gets a chance to prove themselves and while doing so, can make a contribution to building a better society.  2011 has been a tough year for some of us: continued housing slump, unemployment becoming chronic condition for some, those who got hit by natural and man-made disasters and those of us who lost our loved ones oversea in armed conflicts.

Through all these human struggles, I think we became closer to realizing that we are one global community with shared destiny.  Struggle for freedom and justice in one part of world is shared and felt through out our globe, thanks to social media and ever-connected global psyche.

I hope that 2012 will be a better year for all of us on the earth.  Whether we are struggling to find the next job, new home; rebuild from devastation left by tsunami or hurricane; regain the freedom and dignity from oppressors; or recover from the loss of loved ones, I hope we all make a progress toward our goals and can be thankful for 2012 at this time of the year 2013.

Let's all toast to a constructive, peaceful, productive and healing year 2012.

Once out, it's not yours anymore; so make a platform

It's funny how we all get used to this idea of attachment and ownership.  When we spend time to work on a product, we often make a mistake thinking that we know how to use the product best.  We think we own the product because we designed it.  Of course we all start out with problem that we want to solve, and create a solution that best addresses the problem.

Look!  It's 24-hr live fish channel TV that runs without power.
Would TV designer thought of this use case?  Probably not... 

But in reality when users get their hands on the product, it's no longer your product.  It is now user's tool.  It's up to users to decide how to interpret the tool, and apply it to their problem to create their own solution in their own way.  I call it interpretation because it's really up to the users to decide how to use it in their own way.

I think we all tend to underestimate how creative users can be in solving their problems given the tools at their hand.  This user creativity (or improvisation as I blogged earlier) actually works for designers in some sense because as users create their own solution often far-stretching the intended the product usage, and this actually does a couple of things.  One is that product designer is led to believe that people are using the product because it's well designed.  The other is that product can be used to solve totally different problems other than the original intended problem.

What are big trends?

Last week I had a chance to have a long talk with my earlier startup colleague.  We both love high-tech startups and share interest in following latest venture trends.  While we were talking, I realized how much things have changed last time we worked together to launch our startup back in early 2000.

"Frictionless sharing" - Isn't that oxymoron?

Last month I wrote about Facebook Social Reader.  It's also known to implement "frictionless sharing".

I talked about what it means for publishers and marketers.  It is a great tool to keep track of who's reading what, and how contents spread through open social graph.

But this has profound implication to readers (that's you!).  Let's stop and think about what it means to readers.

Blogs and social network

As a blogger, I have been writing on and off for little over a year.  When starting, I had committed myself to write once a day, but with my workload it proved to be a difficult commitment to keep.  These days perhaps I've slacked off too much, not even posting a blog per week.

When I first started writing, the most difficult thing was finding readers.  How do you know whether anyone is reading your blog?  If you wrote something that no one cared to read, is it not a complete waste of time?  Well, I believe it is not a waste of time.  It's because when you write something it helps you think logically and organize your thoughts into black and white.  It's amazing how often I found myself changing my opinion once I started writing a blog entry.  When you are thinking about things in your head without sequencing them as one logical argument, it is hard to make your argument clear even for yourself.