SharedBook: On Demand

Talking to Ourselves

One of the real dangers in running a high tech company is making decisions and setting priorities based on our own, very warped perspective of the world. Yes, we may know about the latest and the coolest, but how many of these products ever make it to the mainstream? We can banter with all the acronyms of Web 2.0, but how many folks at the mall have ever heard of RSS?

As Anick Jesdanun reported for the Associated Press, a recent Pew study found 31 percent of Americans to be elite technology users, 20 percent moderate users and the rest to have little or no usage of the Internet or cell phones.

For those online, the Web changes the way many mundane tasks are done but it doesn’t fundamentally change basic human behavior.

While SharedBook focuses on the print medium, and believes wholeheartedly that it is here to stay, albeit in a revised, more personalized way, I am reminded of Joe Wikert’s blog comment about watching video on the computer. He wrote: “What is it about my attention span that causes it to shrink when I'm in front of a computer? I'd probably have no problem watching those same videos in their entirety on my TV, but I can't watch them all the way through on my computer.”

I agree. I can’t see commuters on the Lexington IRT subway line (4, 5, 6) reading their computers instead of a book or newspaper. Or reading my son Jack his good night story from a computer. But perhaps I’m just old-fashioned and slow to change?

Social Networking

Good lunchtime discussions around here the other day about the old social networking standbys: Facebook.com and MySpace.com vs. everything else.  My long term bets are on everything else.   My family uses social networking daily.  My 8 year old is obsessed...obsessed with ClubPenguin.com.  What kind of biz dev person would I be if I didn't use LinkedIn.com regularly?  My husband is part of lots of group blogs on education reform and Marquette basketball.  We weave and bob through networks based on our needs and wants at a point in time.   I think this is much more powerful than the teen phenomenon.  First, that group has no loyalty to a particular site and no real reason to choose one vs. another.  Second, they will find soon find a cooler way for expression.  I look at one of our partners, CarePages, and I see the real power of social networking to make life better.   Oh yeah, and you may want to capture and preserve some of this content in print, right? :-)

Update:  Well that's timely!  An astute friend, just sent this interesting update regarding Club Penguin.  Based on my family's monthly expeditures, I'd say worth every penny.

Two Continents, One Team

Last week I traveled to New York and visited our U.S. office. It is a huge difference to meet face to face with the same people that I talk with over the phone, exchange e-mails with and video conference every day.

Suddenly, I had to rely on e-mail and phone, to interact with my Israeli team. It was a very strange feeling, calculating time differences to see whether it would be OK to call home or not.

Managing teams that are geographically separate is very challenging. Special attention should be given to time differences, as well as different cultures and language.

So how do we face this challenge? The key to successful team work is communication. This is even more important when working with remote teams. Periodic conference calls are essential, as well as alternative communication: instant messaging, e-mails, wiki (we use two different wikis in coordination with each other: twiki and vqwiki).

By the way, we are not alone in our pursuit of effective remote team work. Check these out: Managing distributed software teams by ExtremePlanner.com, How to start your remote project team off on the right foot by Web Worker Daily and even Yahoo started Yahoo pipes with geographically separate teams, as reported on Library House.

But with this challenge comes also great value: as I was working in our NY office I ended my day with an e-mail to my Israeli team asking to move forward with an idea that was just raised. Sure enough, the next morning when I came into the office – our new gadget (written on top of the SharedBook Open API) was there.

You can imagine our excitement from this overnight magic! (Actually we are going to launch this pretty soon, and I will make sure to cover this in one of my next blog posts – it is really cool, so stay tuned…).

Expect the Unexpected – SharedBook QA

Quality assurance (QA) is always a challenge. The fact that we are the last barrier between development and the customer is enough to place a huge responsibility on every QA person, in any environment.

QA is like a gate keeper, blocking all the bugs and preventing them from reaching the real world – the end users.

In SharedBook, this responsibility includes two additional major challenges. The first one has already been mentioned in this Blog a few times - many frequent upgrades.

Recently, we have been upgrading our beta site once, and sometimes even twice, a week. It must be very challenging for development to meet such tight schedules, and it is no less difficult for us to test in such an intensive atmosphere.  Especially when we have to verify that a feature which was developed so rapidly will meet the requirements and quality as requested.

Therefore, it is essential to make the most of the short time that we have, by knowing where to be strict and where to skip. For that reason we must be very familiar with the new feature we are testing in order to:

1. Detect the important and/or weak parts which will require "heavy" testing.
2. Realize which parts of the system are affected by the new feature, so we can conduct specific and precise sanity or regression tests.

Good QA is to find as many major bugs as possible and to make sure each one of them receives the proper attention. But it is not enough to find all the right bugs, they must also be fixed.

With such a tight schedule it is impossible to fix all the bugs that are found immediately, therefore we need to decide which bugs to fix.  Such decisions are based on the severity of the bug and the likelihood that a user will actually encounter it.

A wise man once said that the right way to spell "test" is U-S-E-R. It is very difficult to accept this determination as a QA person (even though it might be true), so we continue our tests even after the new feature has launched, in order to be the user who finds the bug “hiding” in the system, and make sure it will be fixed before “real” users find it.

Stay tuned. I hope to talk about the second major challenge next time.

Follow Up

Rick mentioned Walter Mossberg's profile in The New Yorker yesterday and I just want to add that if you're interested in seeing what he has to say, you should check out D: All Things Digital. It's a new Web site devoted to news, analysis and opinions on technology, the Internet and media. Mossberg and Kara Swisher, who wrote the Journal's "BoomTown" column, are co-executive editors of the site. BoomTown is back -- this time in blog format!

Walt Mossberg in The New Yorker

Walt Mossberg is a fave around here, and this terrific piece from The New Yorker pretty much explains it all.  Walt sussed out long ago that, in technology, it’s all about the user.  And he’s never wavered.

All hail the original!  Walt rocks.

Enterprise Systems Management

Enterprise system management wares from BMC, CA, HP and IBM are expensive, overly complex, difficult to both deploy and maintain, and rarely yield all the promised benefits even after years of use. This message has been reverberating for years now throughout their commercial consumer base.

SharedBook recently reviewed a number of mid-tier commercial and open source products from a range of vendors with some rather unexpected results.

In short, Zenoss, an open source management product from the company of the same name, floated quickly to the top of our list.

Erik Dahl started development of Zenoss in 2002 after becoming frustrated with the bloat-ware from the aforementioned companies.  A seasoned management team and venture funding enabled the formation of Zenoss in 2005 which in turn led to the open source launch in mid-2006.

Zenoss is free to install and use, and there are very active user and development forums for support. If you need more support than what’s available in the forums, Zenoss offers several tiers of paid support that give you direct access to Erik and company.

What we like:

Zenoss is built entirely on open source products: Zope , AJAX, MySQL, RRDtool, and a collection of control services written in Python. A low-end server for a monitoring station with some flavor of Linux is all you need to get started monitoring your heterogeneous infrastructure.

This product covers all the bases:

·         Automated modeling and device discovery

·         Process and service monitoring

·         Event collection from Syslog, WMI, SNMP traps, and XML RPC events

·         Performance monitoring via SNMP, XML RPC collection, custom command execution and host based agents (Nagios agents are supported as well)

·         Lastly there’s a customizable alerting mechanism to advise you in real-time of any problems that might creep up in your environment.

We’ve been running V1.1 on Debian Linux for about 5 weeks now and love it. As I said before this product is in active development, patch release V1.2 just came out last week and V2.0 (with some significant enhancements) just entered alpha.

If you’re in the market for a tool that will turn your shop from reactive to proactive this is certainly one to consider.

SharedBook in the News

It probably comes as no surprise that we’re all fans of SharedBook here and dedicated to our mission of freeing the Web. For a change of pace, we thought it might be nice to see what some others have had to say recently.

Yesterday’s write-up on Ajaxian.com provides a great peak into some of the development behind SharedBook’s Reverse Publishing Platform. For a more general overview, you can go to NEO Binaries.com.

Additional information regarding the platform and our open API is available via Mashable.com and Programmable Web.

We appreciate everyone's help in spreading the word!

Dynamic Frameworks

Lately we find ourselves doing frequent upgrades, which involve building a version and updating our servers. This takes some time and it would be better to have a lighter way to modify, try and publish code.

Dynamic frameworks can help us with that, since updating the site from the development would be a mere copy (and rollback would also be easy) so we are considering Django, Grails and Ruby on Rails.

Leveraging a dynamic framework as part of the front end and using our core Java code as the back end would be a great benefit.

Grails is interesting since we would be able to use our current Java code directly. But, my personal favorite is Django (a very vibrant well organized open source community) since it is based on Python which has been my language of choice for some time. Django has a really nice way of controlling URLs and a great template engine (that other frameworks have given tributes to by copying features). Django also scales very well and is considered a veteran in very high load dynamic sites.

Java (J2EE) does many things very well and has become lighter over the years. We manage to do things faster using Spring & Hibernate, but we wish to be even faster than that using the emerging dynamic platforms.

The Web has really changed in usability and capabilities and these dynamic frameworks are part of the change.

Note: Saffi Hartal is one of SharedBook's team leaders.

Karaoke and Big Media?

So last night we had an impromptu Karaoke party.  First, let me say this sort of social, frivolous, evening behavior never rarely happens at SharedBook.   We work too late, are too focused, need to get up too early to talk to our developers in Israel and generally are all grown-ups who have lived that life already.  That being said...there was singing!     

This may be a stretch - in fact I know it's a stretch, but here goes: Big Media could learn a lot from karaoke.  Here is this rich database of archival content, stretching across multiple genres.   The brilliant minds who invented karaoke knew that this content resonated strongly across cultures.   They set up a distribution mechanism to allow an individual to select the content most relevant to them, MAKE IT THEIR OWN, and to distribute their unique version of this content to a community.  That is a beautiful thing. 

Some choose to distribute to a whole bar, some like it in the privacy of their own basement.   The abiding philosophy though, is that you open the doors wide and don't worry about what is chosen or how it is used.  Yes, copyright should be protected and the originators should be paid, but let the consumer have at it.  I just found a great old post from Fred Wilson's site which offers his take on the same idea.