Peter Van Dijck's Guide to Ease

Peter — Sun, 11 May 2008 06:46:27 +0000

Draw a very small elephant walking across the table:

Peter — Sat, 10 May 2008 17:47:23 +0000

Facebook is raising another 100 million (for a total of about 500 million) to get another 50,000 servers. That’s like what - 2000$/server I suppose. Sounds right. Google is supposedly adding 500,000 new servers a year, Microsoft 200,000.
Scaling cheaply is a great competitive advantage.

Peter — Thu, 08 May 2008 13:59:10 +0000

A great presentation on design & Star Wars:

| View | Upload your own

Peter — Thu, 08 May 2008 06:19:13 +0000

If you’re applying to Founder’s Co-op, you should know that our default preference in terms of number of founders is as follows:

2 founders: 1 technical and 1 business
3 founders: 2 technical and 1 business
4 founders: 2 technical and 2 business
1 founder: 1 technical

Sounds right, although for 4 founders I’d prefer 2 technical, 1 business and 1 user experience/product.

Peter — Thu, 08 May 2008 05:23:10 +0000

Amazon S3 now lets you copy, rename or move objects in S3 buckets. The Amazon guys are on a roll, and have been so for a few years now. I’m still amazed nobody (Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, …) has come even close to what they offer.

Peter — Thu, 08 May 2008 05:10:01 +0000

Fred Wilson: “Tim makes a passionate argument for “tackling big hard problems” in
his keynote. But Dave is correct in his assertion that the best way to
do that is one step at a time. Think about the way Linux was built and continues to be built. One
step at a time. Each one looks trivial. Taken together it’s awesome.
Same with wikipedia. Or a social net like Facebook.”

Peter — Tue, 06 May 2008 21:11:30 +0000

Hate your intranet? Check out Google’s internal tools.

Peter — Tue, 06 May 2008 20:18:20 +0000

In case you didn’t know, I’m blogging at 290s.com about global UX stuff.

Peter — Tue, 06 May 2008 20:09:19 +0000

Good notes of a talk by Amy Jo Kim: Putting the Fun in Functional: Applying Game Mechanics to Social Software.

Kim recognizes social game mechanics in the following forms:

collections (Flickr lets you collect photos to demonstrate your aesthetic savvy),
points (Digg lets you demonstrate insight into what’s going to be popular), and social points given by other players (Flickr’s metric of “interestingness” are points generated by others based on how many people have seen your video, shared it, etc),
feedback demonstrating mastery (Guitar Hero, Karaoke Revolution, Rock Band, Dance Dance Revolution offer compelling visual and auditory cues),
exchanges both implicit (comments on FaceBook) and explicit (MySpace “Add Me as Friend”), and
customization (MySpace profiles, avatars in WoW)

Here are the slides:

| View | Upload your own

Peter — Tue, 06 May 2008 19:11:02 +0000

Hey, Amy Jo Kim has a blog! Subscribed!

Peter — Tue, 06 May 2008 19:10:13 +0000

I had a great chat with Eugene Kim who works at IGN (a fascinating website) at the IA summit - he’s blogging about UX and stuff, check it out. With his experiences on IGN with community, he should have some interesting insights.

Peter — Tue, 06 May 2008 17:17:46 +0000

I heard two stories lately. One about an entrepreneur who got rich making a system that works like this: you call a phone number, then you get access to a website as long as you leave the line open. When you close it, access is cut off. You get charged because the number you call is a for-pay number. The second story is about Africa. You work in the city, your mom lives in a village and is poor. There’s someone selling minutes on a cellphone in the village. If you want to send your mom money ($5), you buy a phonecard, but don’t use the code. Instead you call the guy with the cellphone, give him the code and ask him to pay your mom. He pays your mom 4.90$. Micropayments over distance.

Peter — Mon, 05 May 2008 07:34:18 +0000

Blogging about your kids: “Will you resent me for this website? Absolutely. And I have spent hours
and days and months of my life considering this, weighing your
resentment against the good that can come from being open and honest
about what it’s like to be your mother, the good for you, the good for
me, and the good for other women who read what I write here and walk
away feeling less alone. And I have every reason to believe that one
day you will look at the thousands of pages I have written about my
love for you, the thousands of pages other women have written about
their own children, and you’re going to be so proud that we were brave
enough to do this. We are an army of educated mothers who have finally
stood up and said pay attention, this is important work, this is hard,
frustrating work and we’re not going to sit around on our hands waiting
for permission to do so. We have declared that our voices matter.”

Peter — Sun, 04 May 2008 21:27:38 +0000

Natural building: Apart from that, there is a good feeling we get from natural buildings which is difficult to describe. Even though conditioned to prefer the new, the shiny, and the precise, we respond at a deep level to unprocessed materials, to idiosyncrasy, and to the personal thought and care expressed in craftsmanship. Nearly all the natural buildings I have seen, regardless of the level of expertise of the builders, are remarkably beautiful.

Peter — Sun, 04 May 2008 07:43:55 +0000

Microsoft hasn’t lost it’s touch. Without even blinking, by bidding on them and now withdrawing, they’ve wounded Yahoo deep enough so that insiders now seem to believe it’s a goner. It’s like the 90s all over again.