Dan Mall of Big Spaceship has a great article on A List Apart on the whole Flash vs. Web standards debacle going on right now.  Among his insights is this one on innovation:

I’ll go so far as to assert that most technological advances are born from something that would be good for people using it. When we put stock in technology and try to be creative for creativity’s sake, we almost always repeat our mistakes. When we try and solve problems instead, we force ourselves to care. Innovation is a natural side effect.

Build something useful.  Solve problems.  Innovation happens.  

So I decided to take a week off tweeting.  This wasn't something I really put a lot of planning into.  It's wasn't a scientific experiment.  Or Lent.  It was really a combination of a few things like not feeling like I had much to contribute at the time and also needing to focus on some pretty specific goals for a while.

Photo by SteffeA big reason I took a break was that I had made a goal that I really wanted to make a larger contribution to the community this year (mostly in the form of blogging more) and halfway into January I still hadn't made much more of a concerted effort to get out any thoughts beyond 140 characters.  Now I don't want to downplay the potential value of these glorious snippets of wisdom I share.  It's very well possible that every time I hit submit in Tweetie that a unicorn is born in a far off land.  But I was obviously feeling the disconnect between these great events and their contribution towards my goals.

So spending one week without Twitter gave me a decent sense of how I think about the technology.  I really do believe that it is a technology that is unlike any other.  I know that some people feel the same way about Facebook or perhaps another online social community they are a part of.  For me, Twitter has become an important way that I connect with others and being off of it for a week seems like it is more significant than just saying I'm not going to use the phone or read the news for a week.  It's certainly more significant that cutting out one-way broadcast-only technologies like TV or radio.

Twitter is a lot of things to a lot of people.  I use it both for both personal and professional reasons, but I found that the aspect that I missed the most about it was the connection it brought me with people I would not otherwise be connected to.  These might be people I was connected to in the past but are now separated by geography or people I have never met in person, but with whom I have had the pleasure of interacting with online. 

I couldn't help but think of what Leisa Reichelt called ambient intimacy.  She defines it as:

Ambient intimacy is about being able to keep in touch with people with a level of regularity and intimacy that you wouldn’t usually have access to, because time and space conspire to make it impossible.

And in response to the obvious follow-up question "Who cares?" I think her response is also apt:

There are a lot of us, though, who find great value in this ongoing noise. It helps us get to know people who would otherwise be just acquaintances. It makes us feel closer to people we care for but in whose lives we’re not able to participate as closely as we’d like.

Knowing these details creates intimacy. (It also saves a lot of time when you finally do get to catchup with these people in real life!) It’s not so much about meaning, it’s just about being in touch.

And being off Twitter for a week is like not talking to those with whom you would normally converse on a daily basis.  So to the few of you on Twitter who I had been talking with, I wasn't ignoring you.  I was just on an unannounced vacation for a bit (incidentally, don't try doing one of these unannounced vacations with your spouse).

And one short note about being off Twitter for your business: don't do it. Ever.  It obviously makes no sense at all to stop doing this unless you replace it with and equally effective way with talking to your audience and potential audience.  And there are not many equally effective tools at this point.   If you're not in the conversation, your company is as good as dead to the public eye.

Thanks and best wishes to all.

@jamiestephens

HotPrints has just announced that they will be offering free ad-supported photobooks made from your social network photos.  Their photobooks were already priced at $2.99 a book (much lower than most other services), so it looks as if they have well established themselves as the cheapest way to get photobooks online.

Making personalized photobooks has become increasingly popular over the last few years and printing companies are constantly trying to find new ways to get customers interested in turning their photos into these products. With most companies, you can now customize your cover, choose from high-quality papers, and create cool themed pages from their templates. However, one trend I did not expect to see is the price going down...especially going down to nothing. Making books (and photographic products in general) is not cheap once you factor materials, labor, and shipping, so it is interesting to see a model where these costs are not being passed on to the customer.

Here's the rundown of the HotPrints deal:

• Everyone gets one free book per month (free shipping too)
• Program is ad-supported with removable ad inserts
• Each book consists of 16 printed pages on glossy stock paper
• You can make your photobook with your Facebook or Bebo photos

I have not created a HotPrints book (or seen one) so I can't really comment on the ordering experience or the quality of the product. However, my inclination is that most people who are creating these from their candid Facebook photos will not care too much about pristine quality. And at the low price of "free", I don't think too many people will be complaining.

For me, the really fun thing to watch is if this ad-supported model for user-generated content can be successfully transferred over into physical products. This model has had varying success on digital content sites, such as YouTube, Facebook, Flickr, etc., so it will interesting to see if it is possible to sustain when there is an even higher cost (or at least different cost) to the end product.

I don't see them converting any pro photographers over to their service, but it will be interesting to see if this increases an interest in photobooks among consumers and if other services start to feel compelled to offer free physical products to compete.

I recently had the privilege of sitting down with Travis Smith (TravisSmith_e) to talk about one of the things I like to talk about most: business and the Internet.  Travis heads up the online marketing over at SoccerPro (recently acquired by SoccerMaster) and has long been one of my most trusted sources for online marketing wisdom.  He's a genuinely good and humble guy who really knows what he's talking about.  Therefore, you can imagine my surprise when he wanted to interview me for his series on "Growing Your Business Online".  Go check it out if you want to hear us talk candidly about some of the things we're excited about today.  

Thanks Travis!

Growing Your Business Online 

This is the first of a number of posts I plan on writing that share some of the things I have learned while building Book'd. Some of the posts I share will be technical, some business/startup related, and others perhaps just anecdotal. Hopefully they'll all be fun for someone. :) Enjoy.

This first post is a technical post. For most programmers, this is CS101 kinda stuff, but I thought I'd share anyway because it's fun. It is a simple algorithm in Ruby for detecting collisions between 2D objects on a grid. I have greatly simplified this in order to keep it short and just get the idea across.

So imagine you have a collection of objects you want to lay out on a plane within a confined width. Every object has a defined top and bottom, but its width should take up as much space as possible so long as there is not another object that overlaps with it. Here's how you would do it in Ruby:

# Call this for each block in a collection of blocks if you 
# want to position the blocks on a grid without them overlapping.
# Returns the array [top, left_offset, height, width] for a single block
def get_coordinates(block, blocks)
  y1 = block.top
  h1 = block.top - block.bottom
  
  collisions = 0
  colliders = [block]

  # this part checks for collisions and adds colliders to an array

  blocks.each do |b|
    if block != b     
      y2 = b.top
      vOverlap = h1 - (y2-y1).abs
          
      if vOverlap > 0 
        collisions += 1
        colliders << b
      end
    end
  end

  # if there are collisions, then you need to set the width 
  # and offset from the left of the block
  if collisions > 0

    # get the percentage of total width to take up
    w1 = 100/(collisions+1)
    
    # You need to decide what order the blocks appear in order to 
    # set the offset from the left. Therefore, you need some 
    # variable by which to sort them that will be consistent each 
    # time you call this for a block.  Could be a creation date 
    # or a custom field.
    colliders.sort!{|x,y| x.sort_field <=> y.sort_field } 

    # now that you know the width and the order of the blocks, 
    # you can then set the left offset
    l1 = "#{colliders.index(block) * w1}%" 

    # return the original height, number of units offset from 
    # left, the original height, and the width
    [y1,l1,h1,"#{w1}%"]

  else #there are no collisions

    # return original top, 0 units offset from the left, 
    # original height, and 100% width
    [y1,0,h1,"100%"] 
  end
  
end