It seems to be a favorite pastime of the web to moan about the uptime of Twitter. In March of 2008, their uptime according to pingdom was a mere 99.57%. Wah, wah, wah. Sure it could be better. But I’ve felt more connection problems with AIM that I’ve had with Twitter. Even my Comcast network connection seem less reliable than Twitter at times.

That doesn’t exonerate them from building a more stable service. Especially not considering that they have five million dollars of other people’s money to do it with and a few years of practice.

But I for one am pretty damn impressed with what they’ve managed to accomplish so far. They’ve built a simple service that tons of people have become so dependent on that the slightest flicker of the light sends them into terminal withdrawal symptoms. Talk about building something people want!

Now the problem, of course, is that they have a hit on their hands, but there’s no obvious paths to turn that hit into dollar bills (short of waiting until someone offers that 10x+ that their investors probably are savaging for).

If the growth in Twitter usage was mirrored by an equal growth in Twitter profits, the necessary investments needed for infrastructure would be self-evident. But when the money pot is an ever-shrinking gift-with-strings-attached, you can’t just blow your way out of the issue with cash.

Regardless, this is in my opinion the best of what we get from the startup culture of the valley today. An awesome new way to communicate, built very quickly, and addictive enough that people get a little loopy in their expectations. I want my free beer cold, gawd dammit!

So cheers to the Twitter guys. You guys deserve a world of credit for making that Something Awesome. Now please figure out a way to make scaling problems a cause for celebration (more users = more money) rather than condolences (more users = less money).

Life just suprises you sometimes.

Just a few weeks ago Chicago was still locked in the throes of one of the most brutal winters I can remember. It felt like it was a year long. Frigid temps, piles of snow, eternal grey skies. Dead lawns, dead trees, crispy bushes, no color in sight.

Then out of nowhere, spring bursts on the scene. Rapidly, brown turns to green. Life is everywhere now. Up high on the old oaks, down low on the solid ground; there’s color. Everything just wakes up.

Is there anything more amazing?

We recently added a few new Highrise demo videos. Two of them show you how you can use your personal Highrise Dropbox email address and the last one walks you through the process of importing Outlook Express contacts into Highrise…

1. Send an email to a person page.
This video shows how you can use your dropbox to send an email to a person page in Highrise.

2. Create tasks via email.
This video shows you how to create a task by sending (or forwarding) an email to Highrise.

3. Get contacts out of Outlook and into Highrise.
Highrise lets you import contacts from a vCard file, Basecamp, Outlook, or ACT! This video shows you how to get contacts from Outlook Express into Highrise.

We also just added a new feature called File view to Highrise. There’s a video at the Product Blog showing you what it does and how it works.

Today I saw a great special on Fine Living TV called Quit Your Job!. Five little companies were featured to showcase the owner’s decision to leave their daily rat dace of a life behind and dive into the uncertainty of following their dreams. Here’s the kicker: These 5 companies are some of the most mundane, normal, average little companies out there.

These companies aren’t going to beat Google, they aren’t building a better iPod or bread slicer. There’s no “the next Facebook” and not a mention of angel funding. These entrepreneurs are doing simple things they love and making a pretty decent living from it. A cool daycare for pets. An artist who markets her own work to local wineries and restaurants. A movie and dinner theater. They didn’t leave their careers to make millions, they just made a lateral change to a job that is more fulfilling and makes them happier.

Becoming the next big thing is a dream harbored in the hearts of just about everyone I know. But what about that other dream to do something simple, something known, something that doesn’t take $20 million in VC funding? Small steps towards those simple dreams are more rewarding in the long run than jumping the rungs on the corporate ladder any day. In my opinion, a VC is just a creditor, and should never be what you dream of obtaining one day.

You can start your own design shop. You can write a book on programming. You can create a web-based application and make money off it. You can even open your own pet daycare. Is the only thing stopping you this idea that you need a bunch of money first?

There’s a lot of talk of billion dollar acquisitions in the media and in blogs, but the truth is those are the minority of businesses. Profitable small businesses exist in every city, owned by people who love what they do. Some of them will make millions of dollars each year – doing what they love, waking up each morning happy to go to work – regardless of which tech blogger ever notices.

Life is too short not to love what you do, and it’s much, much too short to wait around until someone hands you a billion dollars.

In this edition of Designing Details, I want to share with you a technique we use to go the extra mile on interface design. We believe little touches like these really improve the overall experience when using our products. The best way to show you is with a video:

Techies, VCs, and the press are always swooning over the glory of the Bay area. This is where all the excitement, the money, and the people are, they say. And that’s true to the extent that your great big idea fits the current cultural mold of that environment.

If you’re looking to build the next web 2.0 social media eyeball-collecting application, don’t want to worry about boring details like revenues, and hope to either flip to Google for an early $20 million or get that Facebook billion-dollar valuation, the Bay area is exactly where you want to be. No where else do you have the connections, the people, and the atmosphere available to make that dream happen.

But this strain of startups is a highly inbred line that holds more risks than most people realize. It’s not that they never work financially, enough people are sipping Margaritas on sunny beaches from towering buyouts to prove the contrary. And it’s not that they don’t work socially — I personally enjoy YouTube as much as the next guy. It’s that the Bay area pipeline for building web businesses isn’t optimized to carry much else than these stereotypes.

Osmo Wiio is a Finnish researcher of human communication. He has studied, among other things, readability of texts, organizations and communication within them, and the general theory of communication. His laws of communication are the human communications equivalent of Murphy’s Laws.

• If communication can fail, it will.
• If a message can be understood in different ways, it will be understood in just that way which does the most harm.
• There is always somebody who knows better than you what you meant by your message.
• The more communication there is, the more difficult it is for communication to succeed.

And I particularly like his observation that anytime there are two people conversing, there are actually six people in the conversation:

1. Who you think you are
2. Who you think the other person is
3. Who you think the other person thinks you are
4. Who the other person thinks he/she is
5. Who the other person thinks you are
6. Who the other person thinks you think he/she is

If you find this interesting, you can read more about Osmo and his theories on communication.

Coudal Partners, our officemates, are a great example of what a design firm can do when it decides to take control of its own destiny.

Coudal used to generate revenues almost exclusively from client work. Anyone who’s done client work knows the inherent frustrations that come along with that. But instead of merely accepting these frustrations as “the real world” (aka The Way It Has To Be), Coudal searched for another path.

From Jewelboxing to Field Notes
When they had trouble finding great CD packaging, they realized other designers probably had the same issue. So Jewelboxing was born.

It was a hit and soon more products came down the pipe: lowercase tees, The Deck, Pinsetter, and Field Notes. Some were bigger hits than others, but, overall, the strategy has succeeded: Coudal now gets the majority of its income from products it creates.

And you can tell they’re having fun along the way too. They also created Swap Meat “in an attempt to make lots of people as happy as we are when the FedEx guy shows up unannounced.” And they even financed and shot a movie, Copy Goes Here, “for no very good reason.”

Client work
They still do client work, but it’s for clients who get it instead of whomever comes along. They partnered with a restaurant chain to do design work and agreed to a deal that involved a percentage of the business instead of just a flat rate.

Risky? Sure, but it’s paid off. Sometimes you need to risk to get reward. The reward for Coudal is a real sense of ownership in the project, from both a financial and creative standpoint.

Advice from Jim Coudal
I asked Jim Coudal if he had any advice for work-for-hire types that want to into selling their own products. His reply:

Two quick points. Not every idea is going to work. Know that going in. Ideas tend to follow the path of least resistance and more often than not that path is the one where you find yourself talking an idea to death, by getting hung up on the “what ifs.” So you need to actively push ideas out and embrace failure.  Fail spectacularly whenever possible.

Secondly, every single person I have ever met or corresponded with about leaving the work-for-hire world and trying to create something of their own, something that they really care about, says exactly the same thing. Win, lose or draw they always express the same thought and most of the time they say it in exactly these words.

What they say is, “I should have done this sooner.”

So it appears CNN is selling t-shirts with CNN headlines. Why I have no idea. Are people actually buying them? I wonder.

But what's great is that you can fuck with the URL and generate shirts (complete with the CNN logo) like I Prefer MSNBC or Wolf Blitzer is Hairy or Fire David Payne (senior vice president and general manager of CNN.com).

[hat tip: Jeffrey]

You ask a guy for directions and, while very kind, he answers with “go down this path until you reach the perpendicular street, then…”.

Maybe there is such a thing as too much studying.