An Open Letter to Third-Party Twitter App Founders
Dear Aspiring Twitter Speculators,
Congratulations on your new idea. You’ve come up with, and perhaps already built, a product that is genuinely useful to almost every Twitter user, filling one of the many feature canyons left open by the Twitter product team. Perhaps you’ve already gathered a respectable following on the interwebs, with a few thousand people using your service on a regular basis. All that, and it only took you a couple weeks to build on the side.
Now you’re waiting for the big moment to happen: the call from Ev or Biz or whomever. You’re sure they’re going to want to purchase your product for loads more money than it took you to build it. It fills a clear gap, after all, and there are already people using it. They bought Summize, right?
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IA Summit 2009
It can be an odd experience attending a conference in a recession, and my trip to the 10th Anniversary IA Summit in Memphis, TN, didn’t disappoint in that regard. The event was smaller, tinged with uncertainty, and chock full of people trying to figure out what the future holds for themselves and for their profession. I left feeling both frustrated with the angst, and brimming with new ideas and a deep desire to return next year. It took me a while longer to get all of these thoughts down than I thought it would, about a month longer in fact, but I’ve enjoyed re-visiting my favorite talks in order to share them with others.
‘Tis the (Tax) Season
If you're in the US, there's a good chance you have April 15th on your mental calendar, if not circled on your desk calendar with a bold, red sharpie. It's the due date for individuals to file their tax returns, and while about 60% of us file well ahead of time, the rest have a fair propensity to procrastinate a bit and file within the two weeks leading up to the deadline. There's good reason for this procrastination — no one likes paying taxes.
Last week, our landlords friends upstairs at Tax Analysts (great tagline: "Respectfully Disagreeable Since 1970") asked us to take a look at the website at the center of this early-spring anti-holiday, IRS.gov. While they were looking for input around functionality and a bit of visual design, we noticed some interesting things that we thought were worth covering here.
The short of it: you almost definitely hate IRS.gov, but not because it has no redeeming qualities. You just can't help hating the IRS.