A View from Elsewhere

Several people have asked me, "Why would we do this?" They imply that there are so many better things to do. I typically speak about it in terms of increasing the potential universe of people who can create -- developers of a sort. And I've made the argument in the past that something like Popfly is competing for attention with things like TV or Xbox more than something like Visual Studio.

Courtesy Jon Udell, I found a much more articulate way of thinking about this: a blog post from Clay Shirkyon called Gin, Television, and Social Surplus:

Let's say that everything stays 99 percent the same, that people watch 99 percent as much television as they used to, but 1 percent of that is carved out for producing and for sharing. The Internet-connected population watches roughly a trillion hours of TV a year. That's about five times the size of the annual U.S. consumption. One per cent of that  is 100 Wikipedia projects per year worth of participation.

I think that's going to be a big deal. Don't you?

Yes, I do. If we can get even 1% of the casual-game-playing population to try to build a casual game -- to move from consumer to producer -- we've done a big thing.

Oh, and the other reason I love this post is that it defends Lolcats:

It's better to do something than to do nothing. Even lolcats, even cute pictures of kittens made even cuter with the addition of cute captions, hold out an invitation to participation. When you see a lolcat, one of the things it says to the viewer is, "If you have some sans-serif fonts on your computer, you can play this game, too."

I have a soft spot for Lolcats.

This morning we’re launching an alpha of the Popfly Game Creator (http://www.popfly.com), a Silverlight-based environment that makes it easy for anyone to create and share a casual game – something like Space Invaders, Asteroids, or Breakout – without having to write a line of code. If you’re familiar with Popfly today, all the existing features like the web editor, mashup creator, and embedding functionality are still there and we’ve improved on them. But Popfly is about making it easy for people to discover how much fun it is to create things, and time and again people tell us that they really want to learn how to create games, so we added the game creator.

Here’s how it works: you log in to Popfly, and select “Create a Game” from the home page. You’ll then have two main options: create a game by starting with one of Popfly’s 18 templates, or start a game from scratch. Let’s say you start a game from scratch. You’ll then be able to create scenes (which are kind of like levels in the game) and add actors (the players and props of the game) to the scenes. Popfly comes with hundreds of backgrounds, animations, images, movies, and sounds that you can use to create any kind of game and you can upload your own if you don’t like the ones that come with Popfly.

Once you’ve included the basic scene and actors, you start to set behaviors on the Popfly actors, for example setting rules for how they move, when they shoot, when they appear, and so on. Popfly uses a unique “inside-out” view of the game eventing that’s easier for someone who’s never coded before to catch on to. Instead of starting by having an “onclick” event, Popfly reverses this and starts with an action (e.g. DisappearWhenClicked), then enables you to connect events, state changes, and sounds to the actions.

There are some other interesting aspects to the game creator. First, it’s not just a graphical interface: all the actions and events you create in the game creator are represented in code (either JavaScript or XML) and you can edit them using Popfly. That means that if the game creator UI can’t do something you want to do, you can click on the “code” icon and step into the code.

The second most interesting thing is that all the normal Popfly embedding and rating functions work for Popfly games. That means that you can create a game and, for example, embed it into Facebook or turn it into a Vista sidebar gadget.

The third most interesting thing for me has been how people have reacted to the game creator during our usability tests. We’ve pulled in people of all ages to see what they do and how they do it, and from the 8-10-year-old kids who came in and started to create complex animated stories to the older folks who tried to create the games of their youth (Pong, anyone?) we’ve seen people who would never think twice about programming spending hours glued to the game creator trying to get things “just right.”

I'll be darned. Daniele Muscetta has Popfly running on Moonlight.

And this is an interview question how?

You probably already know that Mark Frydenberg at Bentley College used Popfly in some of his introduction to information technology courses. Campus Technology magazine pointed to his work to show how Bentley is trying to teach the impact of technology on business practice.

When students use Popfly to create mashups -- such as geotagged photos of mountains from Flickr mashed up with Virtual Earth data to place the photos of mountains on a map in the countries where they lie -- they see an illustrative example of Tim O'Reilly's Web 2.0 principle that "Data is the next Intel Inside."

Mark just forwarded me this link because the hardcopy of the magazine came out and because he and Philip DesAutels will be speaking at a conference this summer.

What's interesting to me (aside from the fact that Popfly could be useful in education) is how this dovetails with CMU's Computational Thinking ideas.

A conversation on Twitter got me thinking. That's kind of rare. Thinking, I mean. At least for me.

In my time, I've given a lot of demos. I am not a demo god. Don Box is a demo god. Scott Guthrie simply exists on a separate plane. I mostly note what they do from the sidelines. I've picked up a few things of note. In the words of Michael Gartenberg, "Like most worthwhile things, good demos are hard to do, look easy from afar, require lots of practice to perfect."

So what have I observed the best demoers do (either explicitly or implicitly)? Seven things:

First, know your audience. Noobs? CEOs? Noob CEOs? Devs with more experience in the product than you'll ever have? Friendly? Hostile? Bored? Are you giving the post-lunch demo? Knowing the audience means that you'll have a higher likelihood of connecting with them. Or at least not insulting them.

Second, know your product. This is especially critical if a) there is the chance that an audience member will ask you a question or b) the product is in one of those awkward beta states where it may stick four paws in the air on you at any given moment. You can skimp here if you know this is a one-off, but it's not recommended.

Third, know what you're trying to get across to your audience. Is this demo an:

• Introduction to a concept. Sometimes the hardest demos are the ones where you're introducing the audience to a new (and potentially abstract) concept. Imagine being the first person to ever demo object-relational mapping.
• Introduction to a multi-product scenario. Second on the difficulty list: a demo involving multiple products in which you're introducing people to at least one of them for the first time.
• Introduction to the product. These are kind of easy -- the audience knows you're demoing a phone, for example. Your job is just to make it look good. As Jonathan Yarmis pointed out: good products don't need great demoers.
• Introduction to a feature. By the time you're introducing a feature, your audience knows the product. You can generally get pretty in-depth. These can be a lot of fun also.
• Explanation of how to do something specific. How-to demos are a special case: demo as training tool. Rather than dazzling with BS, you're trying to train and inspire. Don Box rocks at these.

Fourth, know your themes. A demo, like any presentation, can push 1, 3, 5, or 7 themes. Don't ask why the odd numbers -- it's a marketing thing. Nobody in marketing ever makes 2 or 4 themes. I'd mock it further, but it works. Pick your themes carefully. The worst demos are the ones that try to make too many themes . Even a knowledgeable viewer will get lost. I've seen demos of my own products that have left me confused. Are you trying to hammer home that this product is incredibly simple to use, or are you demonstrating that the previously impossible is now merely hard? Are you trying to subtly point out that a competitor doesn't do what you do? Are you trying to convey cool and new or secure and enterprise-ready. Knowing your themes dictates the next step.

Fifth, know yourself. Are you serious? Funny? Boring? Quick-talking? Earnest? Cynical? Whatever you are, it'll probably come out in front of the audience. Plan for it, and accept it.

Sixth, know your story. Once you know all that, spend a minute and mentally script the story, taking into consideration especially how point #5 will affect it. Actually, for big demos (like the big multi-product keynote demos) it's more than a minute. Often there's a huge amount of custom development and tweaking to get the demo right. Getting the story -- the actual words-on-the-left-demo-actions-on-the-right script -- written can be critical. But remember: be true to yourself. If you're by nature cynical and caustic, invite the audience into that world (preferably with humor) rather than trying to be an earnest do-gooder.

Sevent, practice. Especially if anything in the chain is new to you, at least one run through to ensure that the system is set up right and that you know where it's likely to fail is key. Many is the time I've not done a run through only to have that awful, "Boy, it's never done that before" moment.

And oddly, there's no eighth point. Must be all that marketing training. Or the fact that my wrists hurt now.

Earlier in the week we quietly updated Popfly. Why quietly? Because we really didn't add any new features. We fixed some bugs, sure, but mostly what we did was roll out an improved caching system. Between the middle-tier cache and changes we made to take better advantage of the browser's cache, we're seeing anywhere from a 2X to a 6X performance improvement when you load an existing mashup. A lot of this work is in CacheMan, which Sriram (a dev on our team) implemented as a personal project and which turned out to be useful in Popfly.

I waited to post about it mostly because... Well, mostly because I'm lazy. But also because caches are among the most complicated things to get right. Caching -- especially multi-level distributed caches -- are very finicky. I'm happy to say that this one is working. At least for now.

You should notice that your embedded mashups like the one on Soma's blog or the one on the Express download page should load much more quickly. Even more quickly if you refresh the page.

Popfly, a mashup tool, depends on three things: data that is simple to access programmatically, interesting, and available under terms that enable users to work with it. As with most software endeavors, you can pick two.

The government has a huge amount of interesting data that's available under really great terms. Weather? Check out http://www.noaa.gov. Financial information? Start with http://www.sec.gov. Crime statistics? Dig around in http://www.usdoj.gov/. But how much of this is programmatically accessible? Very little, as it turns out. I'll pick on NOAA for a little bit. They have great weather information at http://www.weather.gov -- enough that you can find out whether the weather this weekend is going to be good at the local fishing holes and whether the fish will be biting. But, despite the RSS feeds, the really interesting data (the forecast and the information about water conditions) is locked up in a combination of HTML, JavaScript, and GIFs. If you play with EDGAR (for information on SEC filings), you'll find a confusing array of HTML, static XML, and .txt files.

Yes, you can program your way out of these, but it's far too hard. Entire organizations such as the Sunlight Foundation are trying to change this, and Lawrence Lessig has proposed what he calls the Open Government Data Principles. And that's great. But it's not enough, because it's not just the government.

I'll take another example. Let's say that you want to create an application that will check your favorite online bookstore for the books it might recommend you purchase next, and submit that list to your local library to see which books are in and maybe even offer you the ability to put one on reserve. This is an example that Jon Udell outlined something like six years ago. Unfortunately, when you think about it, the bookseller really doesn't want you to use the local library: they want you to buy books from them. So it would be a logical extension to look at the terms of use for the booksellers APIs and see indications that scenarios that take you away from their site will be frowned upon. Of course, this makes sense to me since they're a business, but it's a case that the data is interesting and available, but the terms are restrictive for the scenario I'd like to build.

Oh, it's not just the booksellers who have terms like that. Any site that makes money off of advertising, for example, is going to have holdbacks in its API terms -- limits on how many calls you can make to the APIs in a given time period or how many results can be returned, or how their brand has to be shown in the resulting mashup, and so on.

As I read a Dow Jones Insight Election Pulse blog post about how much time each candidate spends talking about different issues, I thought, "There's an interesting mashup that I would have loved to build." But the information to create that mashup isn't easily accessible to tools.

Why must good data be so hard to find?

I got hooked on plugging sites into Alexa a couple of nights ago, and started to see some patterns. Mostly, I saw that a lot of large-volume sites saw their peak at the beginning of 2006 and have been tapering off since, but a few others have grown ridiculously. Notably, Amazon and eBay, and digg and Slashdot follow this pattern. Blogger and Wordpress are growing I guess due to splogs, and myspace and Facebook went up until mid/late last year when they started declining. I can understand much of this intellectually (well, not the decrease in Amazon, which seems still a very useful site), but is there some underlying pattern?

Today Popfly was nominated for a Webware 100 award. As you can see on the Popfly team blog, this means we need people to help us by voting for Popfly. So please vote for Popfly. Just like regular elections, you can vote up to three times. (Yes, that's a joke.) And please encourage your friends to vote for Popfly. You can also help out by either reposting this blog entry to your own blog or by pointing people at it.

Winning isn't everything, but it's a lot. ;-)

One of the things that Popfly does well is take photos from one place (e.g. Flickr, Live Image Search, Facebook, Live Spaces) and display them in another (e.g. your blog) in pretty ways. Tim on our team created a really nice block called "MovingSlideShow" that takes simple photo display a step further: it pans around the photos, much the way Ken Burns (the director of the documentaries The Civil War and Baseball) did to make static photos from historical archives seem more alive.

So what does this mean to you? If you like what you see and want it on your own blog for your photos, just Tweak the mashup. From the Popfly Tweak screen you can change search terms or even go into the full editing mode to change data sources. For example, instead of just pulling photos from a Flickr search, I built a mashup that pulls photos from a Facebook photo gallery and a Flickr search as well. As my subject matter, I used Robert Scoble (a relatively safe subject since there is a substantial amount of content on the Internet by and about Robert) and the book "Naked Conversations." The result is actually a moving slideshow of some of Robert's more recent activities.

I don't mean this metaphorically, nor do I mean that the food in the oven is on fire. I mean, "The oven is on fire." As in, the wires in the controller switch overheated, the insulation melted, they arced, and the insulation caught fire. Had I not been standing right there when it happened, I would never have believed it, except for the noxious plastic-smoke and the stench.

Oh, the range is a Thermador PRDS304 dual fuel (that is, gas on top electric oven) range that is about eight years old. This happened during the cleaning cycle.

Needless to say, I killed the circuit breaker and my wife called the repair man.

Adam Nathan created a pretty cool Popfly gadget the other day. You can see it on this very blog if you look to the right: the Recent Posts section. Basically, this is a Popfly mashup that reads the last few blog posts from my blog and generates a nice HTML list that I can then present on the right side of my blog. In the case of this blog (based off the Telligent Community Server code) all I had to do was:

• Click on the link to Adam's original project.
• Click on the little gears in the upper-right-hand corner to "tweak" the project.
• Change the RSS URL to the URL of the RSS feed of your blog (in the case of my blog, I changed it to http://blogs.msdn.com/johnmont/rss.aspx)
• Click on the Save link. If you aren't already signed-in to Popfly or don't have an account, it'll prompt you to sign in and/or create an account at this point.
• Share your project by clicking on the project details link in mentioned in "Success! You can do more with your saved copy of this mashup here!" and then clicking on the "Share" link on the right side.

Now go into your blog's control panel and, in some place where you can paste in code for an iframe (on Community Server, I've used the "News" section), paste in the iframe code that's on the same project details page as the share link. In the case of my blog, that code looks like this:

<iframe style='width:100%; height:280px' src='http://www.popfly.ms/users/johnmont/recent%20posts.small' frameborder='no' allowtransparency='true'></iframe>

You'll notice that I overrode the default that Popfly supplies for height; it turns out that 280 pixels just looks better. 100% width worked fine.

When is the right time to take down Christmas decorations? Growing up, my parents typically did it just after New Years. My wife and I had our tree up until this past weekend (more as a result of laziness than any statement we were trying to make) and I still have the lights on the tree in front of our house on. What is the Emily Post regulation on lighting takedown?

One of the scenarios a lot of Popfly customers have tried is to create a block. Display blocks have been particularly hard to create until recently (with the latest release of Popfly and Popfly Explorer' it got much easier) and Tim Rice has blogged about the process of creating one.

Update: Steven Wilssens has just posted on how to use Popfly Explorer to create a block.