Digg

Alex Foley on Digg’s “While you’re waiting, add your profile”:

Excellent way to avoid having a longer signup form. I filled out the second part without even thinking.

The Nonist

The Nonist blog gets aquatic/literal with its anchor icon.

Others Online

Joel writes:

I was looking at the Others Online product tour and found these two screens. They say: “Registering is easy! It’s not like those other sites where you have to add a bunch of content. Yeah, you just have to enter a screen name, password, birthdate, gender, country, postal code, email address, a friend’s email address…And then upload an image, type in your interests, your tagline and your various web addresses. Sure, it is (unfortunately) fairly standard to ask for all that on registration pages, but what’s interesting is that they claim to be very simple and better than “those other sites”.

Got an interesting screenshot for Signal vs. Noise? Send the image and/or URL to svn [at] 37signals [dot] com.

Wallflower at the Web Party details the rise and fall of Friendster. Though there’s a lot of finger pointing in the story, there’s also a lot to learn from the site’s bust. Some excerpts:

Founder Jonathan Abrams vows to never again accept a dime in venture capital.

Mr. Abrams believed that he had developed a sound business plan for building Friendster into an Internet powerhouse — and that the plan foundered when his well-known investors shoved him aside and proceeded to mess everything up…’Jonathan had all these high-powered investors to please. He had all this money in the bank, so there was all this pressure to hire people and get things done. Open up new territories: China, Japan, Germany. Add all these new features. Meantime, he took his eye off the ball.’

The company spent too much time worrying about new features instead of the poor performance of its existing site:

As Friendster became more popular, its overwhelmed Web site became slower. Things would become so bad that a Friendster Web page took as long as 40 seconds to download…[Yet] technical difficulties proved too pedestrian for a board of this pedigree. The performance problems would come up, but the board devoted most of its time to talking about potential competitors and new features, such as the possibility of adding Internet phone services, or so-called voice over Internet protocol, or VoIP, to the site.

And they made the mistake of trying to solve exciting potential problems instead of real mundane ones.

In retrospect, Mr. Lindstrom said, the company needed to devote all of its resources to fixing its technological problems. But such are the appetites of companies fixated on growing into multibillion-dollar behemoths. They seek to run even before they can walk. “Friendster was so focused on becoming the next Google,” Professor Piskorski said, “that they weren’t focused on fixing the more mundane problems standing in the way of them becoming the next Google.”

More mistake stories:
Evan Williams: How Odeo Screwed Up
Actual lessons from Kiko
The top five mistakes entrepreneurs make when they market
Paul Graham’s list of 18 mistakes

In part two, the design gurus chat about what they’d be doing if it they weren’t designing, letterpressing, time management, influences, and moodboards/comps.

Some of the activity this week at our internal 37signals Campfire chat room:

Pragmatism source
David: “My pragmatism just comes from a tendency to give up really easily ;)”

Vox.com’s status screen
Jason noted Vox.com has a status screen set up for when the site is down.  It read, “15 mins of ‘scheduled maintenance’.” David: “We should have that too.” Ryan: “Totally makes it look like they are on top of shit. Stuff could be breaking every other day and the site still makes it look like they are all over it.”

Chicagoing
The torch/skyline logo for Chicago’s 2016 Olympic bid got a thumbs up…

...and so did the way Chicagoist includes the weather over its skyline image.

But thumbs down to the White Sox for selling the start time of games to 7-Eleven (“Sponsorship deal calls for White Sox to begin games at 7:11 p.m.“). I hear the next step is to sell home plate to Bennigan’s.

Plane info graphic
Jason pointed out this great interactive info graphic of the plane crash involving a Yankees pitcher.

Clever job post title
I got a kick out of this clever “made ya look” job post title: “StyleFeeder is looking for a @job = (‘designer’, ‘info architect’, ‘css’, ‘xhtml’);. See more on the Job Board.”

Dyson vac cleans keyboards
Jason: “OK, now THIS is a great idea. Check out the Combination Accessory Tool video. Why hasn’t anyone thought of this before? That’s smart.”

Logitech MX Revolution mouse
David: “Btw, bought this mouse. First new mouse in 8 years ;) It has a very interesting scrollwheel. It’s free-range so you spin it away and it keeps spinning. So it’ll keep scrolling until you stop the physical spinning. Totally rocks for long pages. It has a 3 button on the side as well as two additional direction buttons that I bound to desktop switching and a 4th button underneath the scrollwheel for lookups— got it bound to Dictionary.app.”

I recently got an email that I enjoyed a lot promoting this seminar: Dealing with Difficult People (“Techniques for handling difficult people with tact and skill”).

Never again fall victim to those who love to make life miserable for the rest of us. This training gives you concrete techniques for dealing with difficult people in the workplace and at home. It provides specific strategies for getting adversaries to cooperate … bullies to back off … wallflowers to open up … chronic complainers to quiet down.

Check out the site. I like the list of undesirables and how they single out both “Yes” people (“They agree to any commitment, yet rarely deliver. You can’t trust them to follow through.”)...and then “No” people (“They are quick to point out why something won’t work. Worse, they’re inflexible.”) What about those awful “Maybe” people!?

And I’m fascinated by the portion of the day titled “Be less of a target for difficult people.” Man, this sounds like David Brent territory.

The ironic part is that the attendees of this seminar are probably the most difficult people imaginable: those who are convinced that everyone else is the problem.

[Fireside Chats are round table discussions conducted using Campfire.]

Guests
Dan Cederholm
Jason Santa Maria
Ryan Sims
Greg Storey

Topic: Design
This was a long one so we’re splitting it up into three parts. In part one, the guests chat about what they’re working on, Korean design, Web 2.0 hype, and whether RSS is killing creativity.

Got an ergonomic keyboard that you recommend? Link it up.