Archive for the ‘Personal’ Category

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I Am Discontinuing Telvee

Thursday, September 2nd, 2010

Telvee was originally a Facebook app. It was Burak Büyükdemir‘s idea to create a virtual coffee reading app. Rakı Sofrası was super popular then. We have quickly built and deployed and getting some good results. But the competition wasn’t fair.

When I decided to give this software a fair chance to succeed on its very own domain the only question in my head was; will it pass the test of users? It doesn’t really matter what you have intended the users do with your application. What matters, first, is what they think they’d like to do with it and then whether or not they actually use it.

So I tried and I failed. Two main reasons of this failure are; technical deficiencies and the special way of interaction coffee reading is. Technical deficiencies is the easy one. I couldn’t devote enough time for telvee, especially lately. As a result it doesn’t even have basic stuff like e-mail changing or account deletion. This is 100% my fault. The second reason however is more complicated and there was not much I could do about it. Except one thing I will tell you at the end of this post.

Telvee didn’t pass the user’s test mainly because coffee reading is somewhat private. It’s more of a 1-to-1 communication, while all social applications1 are designed for 1-to-many communication. This was disastrous not only because of the lack of viral growth but also because of the reluctance of users to interact with other users.

An example image of coffee remains telvee generates

An example image of coffee remains telvee generates

I would like to thank everybody who participated and I hope you had some fun playing with it. Telvee domain will soon redirect to this post and I will probably not renew it next time.

I won’t be starting a new experiment soon. I will spend most of my time on my work. Hopefully I will be spending a little more time on free software projects. By the way I would like to note that Telvee has spawned a couple of Django apps: django-inviting & django-simple-friends.

Oh, and the thing I could do better about user experience was to be more agile. I should have either fixed the problem quickly or failed fast. I have no regrets though. This was a unique experience and I have learned a lot.

1: Yes, even the e-mail system and dating sites are designed for 1-to-many communication primarily in mind.

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Why Not To Localize Community Support

Friday, April 16th, 2010

If you are reading this, you know English. I would like to pose a question before we go any further; would you prefer community support in your native language over what international community offers?1

By community support, I mean free software support provided by the user community. Every successful project has some form of communication; mailing lists, forums, IRC, wikis, etc. And the preferred language is almost always English. Simply because you can reach more people. People who can use your code. Who can test it, file bugs, send patches, etc. It is the logical thing to do. But in the spirit of freedom, I think nobody should be forced to use a certain (natural or programming) language for something they have created.

Real Communities

I think having local communities is a great idea. I don’t know, because we don’t have any in Türkiye2. So I am just guessing they should be cultivating and fun at the same time. We do have many local pseudo-communities though. There is some activity, people come and go, some of them stay much longer than the others. But they never progress towards a community. I think this is because they make the fundamental mistake of localizing community support. They translate documentation intended for highly technical people and create new channels that no advanced user will bother to participate. In short, they attempt to sidestep the language barrier.

If want to be a programmer you need to know English. It is not optional. It is not a requirement of being a good programmer. You are at most an excellent script kiddie without proper English skills. Obviously, knowing perfect English doesn’t make you a great programmer instantly. It will increase the resources you can access dramatically, though. And most importantly it will give you the chance to know more about what you don’t know. Stay in your little world to play with your mates who know just as little as you do and you will never improve.

A Foolish Endeavour

Some people, who spend time with these pseudo-communities, know English well enough. They are probably acting with good intentions when they provide support in their native language. But they are actually wasting their time. Having been solved one specific problem doesn’t make the other person a better programmer. On the contrary they are giving local users another reason to avoid solving the real issue. The function of a community should be supporting each member’s continuous improvement. That doesn’t necessarily mean solving their technical problems for them3.

What is wrong with asking questions in a native language if on a local channel or face to face with local people? Nothing. There is absolutely nothing wrong with that. It would be silly to speak another language there. But if you really want to improve, you can tap into a greater source of information. It is your choice. Pseudo-communities will only take you so far. Because they are only generating more newbies, and not supporting newbies become experienced users. Do they produce anything but empty talk?

Why should a local community produce anything? What should the product be? I will probably write another post about this soon. But feel free to post your ideas and critics in the comments.

1: Obviously, it only makes sense if your native language is not English.

2: I would very much like to be proven wrong on this one. If you know any, please write a comment and don’t forget to include a website and date of the last meeting.

3: Also note that there is a difference between helping someone solve a problem and solving the problem. Spoonfeeding does more harm than good.

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Free Software & Linux Days 2010

Monday, March 29th, 2010

Free Software & Open Source Days of İstanbul Bilgi University and Linux & Free Software Festival of Linux Users Association are united under the name Free Software & Linux Days this year. If you have attended before, you will probably make no other plans for April 2-3.

If you have never been to this event, registration is free and can be done at the front desk. If you are remotely interested in free software or hackerdom you will want to be there. …and, of course, you are welcome.

I will be giving a Django presentation on Friday. Please come and say hello if you happen to be attending.

UPDATE: You can find the slides from presentation here. Slideshare’s importer failed to import the file I’ve uploaded properly. So please download and view the slides with Acrobat Reader.

Django ile Ağrısız Teşhis ve Tedavi
View more presentations from muhuk.
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Discrimination

Thursday, February 4th, 2010

I have wealthy friends, I have friends who are doing worse than me. Most of my friends are university graduates, some of them barely finished primary school. I don’t pay too much attention of their attractiveness but some of them ought to be more beautiful than others. Some of my friends speak with a clear, good accent while others have strong eastern accents. You might find the way they speak funny. But I don’t. I make friends with people who are streetwise and resourceful. You might call some other friends of mine “mother’s darling”. Of all these things I have mentioned above; none of them factor in how close a friend is to me. I wouldn’t go so far as to say I don’t care. But they are definitely not determining factors for my friendships. I don’t discriminate people based on their social status, education, appearance, etc.

My relationship doesn’t go very far with somebody who is not a man of his word. My close friends are punctual, reliable and they keep their promises. I don’t hang out with snobs, envious, scornful people. But the most important qualities I look for in a friend is being cultivated and refined and open minded. I am attracted to people who has a spark in their eyes. You know, the opposite of being a zombie. I make very strong distinctions on these matters. Everybody wants to have nice friends. I’m a nazi about it. I’d rather not waste any time on shallow people and their silly affairs.

We live in a society where any and all kinds of discrimination is frowned upon. I call this “but he is a good guy” disorder. That but clearly indicates there is something not good about that guy, he is not all-good. Scrape any negative attribute off of people. Are we all equally honest? Are we all self-sacrificing and understanding? And then that guy is actually a very nice person. Very nice my ass.

Discrimination based on gender or color or whatever superficial feature is bad. Even kindergarden children know that. Not discriminating at all is idiotic at best and bad for the society at worst. You have to make a choice between people, you can’t be intimate with everybody. You better not base your choice on stupid criteria like coolness or popularity or, god forbid, assertiveness. This is the exact same mistake we make choosing our rulers… ehm, I mean political representatives.

This is not just about human beings. We need to pick out the good from bad when we are making spending decisions. I have seen Food, Inc. recently and it talks about this (near the end). Corporations hide behind many layers of obscurity and we don’t easily see how they are doing their business. To compound that we, as individuals, think ourselves as too small to matter against big companies. But the truth is the only thing we can do happens to be a very powerful way to send them a message. If a company is evil, don’t buy its product. You can’t do much else anyway, but this one act should be enough.

So, make a choice. Or not. Choice is yours.

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XING Türkiye Social Media Win

Thursday, November 5th, 2009

I had a small issue with XING recently. I had reported this stupid message sent to an unrelated group. I’ll try to translate a snipplet below:

I have sent XING two messages to cancel my account, I don’t want to be a member.

I would like to take advantage of XING’s unique potential to bring people together, until they cancel my account, to help homeless children and elders.

WTF! This was supposed to be a business related group. If anybody and their aunt will spam all 15k members; thank you, but no, thank you. So I did what any responsible user would do and used the report spam thingy.

Here is what I had hoped to happen; my report is stored somewhere. Other people flags this as well. When a critical number is reached a moderator reviews if the message is really spam and takes the appropriate action.

Here is what happened; an hour later or so I got an e-mail. It said “if you don’t want to receive messages from this person do yak yak yak”. King-size WTF.

  1. First of all I had already done that. He should have checked if I did before writing an e-mail.
  2. More importantly, he should have checked my profile for a second. It says programmer. So, if I’m a programmer I am supposed to know a thing or two about these computer thingies, right? Clicking, double-clicking, expertise on check boxes and stuff. Telling me how to block a user is the same thing as saying “hey muhuk, you’re an idiot”. Even if we suppose there are such morons1, you still don’t have to tell it to their face. If you don’t have anything useful to say, don’t say nothing.

As a result, I got pissed of and sent this tweet:

XING Türkiye Support is clueless. Make sure you know who you’re e-mailing + take a moment to check if your advice has already been applied.

This is not the end of the story though. I received an e-mail from XING Community Manager yesterday. It was a very polite message containing the acknowledgement of both issues2. Nothing out of the ordinary at first sight. But wait, the message mentioned my tweet. In the very beginning. Actually the first word was “Twitter”. And it was concluded with something along the lines of “keep sharing your comments”.

Well, of course my comments and ideas are worthless. Especially since I’m not a very active XING user. But don’t miss the important point here: XING basically, via it’s community representative, says “you tweeted a negative tweet about us, but we are cool with that”. Why is it so important?

  1. They seem to be really cool about that. That means they understand social web. Conventional thinking is “I’d prefer you told this to me directly”, “we could have solved it between you and me”, “why do you shout, you make me look bad”. I have seen supposedly social media aware brands do this. It doesn’t look good. Trying to silence people is a horrible idea.
  2. You can win people easily. Beautiful thing about Internet (and online services in particular) is that no party has too much power over the other. You can’t intimidate someone because she doesn’t like your services and writes about it. On the other hand she can’t do much damage3. So instead of freaking out, try to be nice and convert naysayers to evangelists.

Most of the time complaining customers want to know there is someone who can see things from the right perspective. Someone reasonable, agreeable, fair. Most of the time that’s all that is needed to turn “<your brand> sucks” to “sh*t happens, no big deal”. My perception changed from “clueless” to “hmm, I guess that was a misstep of an individual” to “wow, appereantly XING Türkiye knows social web very well”. And all it took was a simple e-mail4. It’s not that difficult.

Kudos to XING for being a good web2.0 citizen.5

1: I mean programmers who couldn’t figure out how to use a web GUI. People from other professions might not know these and that’s not necessarily their problem.

2: What more could a user/customer hope other than acknowledgement? The message also contained an apology. But, I personally don’t think brands should apologize to their customers. Especially regarding to freemium services.

3: This is true even for big players like TechCrunch.

4: I bet it’s instantiated from a draft, everybody gets more or less the same message. This makes it even cooler though.

5: And special thanks for making me feel like a jerk. Just kidding, feelings are for losers. ;)

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