We use Clients & Profits for client billing and it is unable to backup the database if any users have their client app running.  I was the bad guy last night that forgot to log out and decided that there has to be some easy way to kill an idle app.  I didn’t find any Mac apps that did exactly what I wanted, but I realized that between cron and applescript, I should be able to do what I wanted in a reasonably elegant way.

osascript lets you send Applescript commands to apps from the command line.  A little experimentation shows that:

cleanly exits the app.  a quick crontab -e from the terminal allowed me to:

So now at 11:30 pm nightly, if my machine is running, I’ll cleanly shut down C&P.

I haven’t had much time to play with Google+ today, though I like what I’ve seen.  Need to have some more connections to really wring it out.  My initial thought is that it will be more geek-centric with better privacy and open-sourciness than Facebook.  Exactly the same model as Android to Apple.

But I just found the feedback functionality and it’s just awesome.

Clicking a small lower-right feedback button lets you highlight the problem, black-out personal details and submit a screen-capture of a problem or suggestion.  VERY nice.  They need to package this up for use by other web app developers.

Beyond having a ridiculously nice URL (https://shh.sh) – SecretSocial is pretty nifty.  Anonymous, encrypted, time-limited chat rooms and polls that are removed from the server after use and never hit by search engines.  Connected to twitter for authentication and invitation. I could see this being useful for audience participation – it goes without saying that had it launched sooner, we wouldn’t have had to suffer through a month of Weiner jokes.  

SecretSocial Trailer! from SecretSocial, Inc. on Vimeo.

Tall Chair and OnSwipe – Necessary next steps in epublishing – apps that allow content creators to publish (and receive payments) without having to release their content through the iTunes store.

Active Reader is a revolutionary way for you to get your interactive stories onto the iTunes App Store. Using the Active Reader toolset, you will be able to quickly and easily take your custom art and make it come to life with our animation and events system. The best part of all is that you will be able to create interactive books and magazines for the iPad with absolutely NO CODING needed!

Onswipe enables publishers to provide the best browsing and advertising experience to their readers on tablet and touch devices.

• Get Started In Under 3 Minutes
• Infinitely Customizable
• Anytime. Anywhere. Any device.
• Breathtaking Ads

I spent a little time yesterday putting together some resources for a friend dealing with the difficulties of fixed-price contracts, that I hadn’t pulled together before. So I’m posting my comments to him to prevent having to dig all this stuff back up at some later date:

Fixed fee is fine if you have a good working relationship. But unless your client trusts you absolutely, you can’t avoid the pushing paper problem. Without spending project development dollars on documentation, you will have no good way to to respond to a “why did we do it this way?” or a “what happened to feature X that I wanted” question.

With a high level of trust, it you might be able to answer “don’t you remember, we agreed X when we were in the conference room with Bob” and be done with it. But you’ll be in a lot better shape if you have a waterfall model spec and change orders, or a batch of use cases at various levels of completion sitting in your project backlog along with burndown reports showing what moved where through the project instead of having to rely on email, or worse, partially remembered conversations.

The key is avoiding a mismatch between the amount of paper pushing and the potential need for documentation and that is going to vary by client and by project. Which means you can go in assuming a high level of trust – to maximize value for the client dollar, only to get burned if the client isn’t happy. Or you can go in assuming a lot of CYA – which minimizes your risk, while also minimizing what you deliver. A bad set of compromises.

There is a lot of thinking about how to do this stuff in scrum land as the old rule of thumb was that fixed price bids and agile were like oil and water. Turns out that because of the high level of collaboration and continuous client involvement, some fixed-price-like models can actually work pretty well:
http://alistair.cockburn.us/Agile+contracts
http://agilesoftwaredevelopment.com/blog/peterstev/10-agile-contracts#MFN-cff

I’m very fond of the “money for nothing and change for free” model (look at page 28 here) :
http://www.slideshare.net/gerrykirk/money-for-nothing-agile-2008-presentation
and here:
http://coactivate.org/projects/agile-contracts/money-for-nothing-change-for-free

Gantthead had a couple good articles about agile contract types as well: (registration required)
http://www.gantthead.com/content/articles/261798.cfm

Who knew that there was room for a quantum leap in screen capture usability?  Skitch.com delivers way more than just ease of use for Mac users – it’s downright FUN.  Even though it’s sadly lacking the ability to capture a scrolling window (which I do with the webpage screenshot Chrome extension) the ease of use,  pretty interface, powerful capture features, post capture annotation and editing and direct posting through API to blogs, flickr, your skitch.com scrapbook etc. just blows away every other screen capture tool out there.

An essential app on a Mac, It’s unsurprising that “when will there be a windows version?” is the most common question on their support forums.

I’ve played with a batch of location based social apps on my G1 (gowalla, foursquare, where, latitude among others).  I like the idea of knowing if friends/colleagues are in the neighborhood or seeing reviews of restaurants, galleries, parks, etc. from people I know, but the numbers of other users is dismally small.

Support isn’t in the android Facebook app and I don’t expect it for a few months as it’s kind of the red-headed stepchild platform from Facebook’s point of view.  It also hasn’t yet appeared on touch.facebook.com for me.  Assumably, they are rolling it out across servers a bit slowly to make sure that it scales.  There are some privacy oddities (friends can check me into locations without me knowing?) but they’ll work those out.

The thing that particularly strikes me about location based social though, is that it doesn’t require a smart phone.  A bar or park can put a check-in shortcode on their menu/coasters.  Sending an SMS can check me in, allow the place to give send me a 5% discount SMS for checking in as a first time customer, send back an SMS with the names of friends who are nearby, etc.  Dodgeball did all that stuff 5-6 years ago.  Google shut it down after buying it, but it seems a safe bet that those services will be under the hood of Google’s location-based product offering that is coming down the pipe.

Money quote:

The Numbers Are Really Big. Insane, I mean. The billion-plus phones sold per year. The number of active subscriptions, which is greater than half of the human population. The number of new Android devices that check in with Google every day. The line-ups outside Apple stores for every new iOS device. The hundreds of thousands of apps. The ridiculous number of new ones that flow into Android Market every day. Everywhere I look, I see something astounding.

This is the big league; bigger today than the computer industry ever was, and growing fast. This is as fierce a concentration of R&D heat and manufacturing virtuosity and distribution wizardry and marketing mojo as humanity has ever seen.

http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/201x/2010/07/30/Mobile-Market-Share

But the important thing isn’t Android vs. iPhone.  Smartphones, while wildly profitable, are only a fraction of the market.

The smartphone is not the start of the mobile phone industry. The mobile phone business is the most dynamic, most competitive race for the soul of the future of the most widely spread consumer technology ever. Televisions sell 300 million units per year. DVD players sell about 250 million units per year. Personal computers including laptops, netbooks, tablets like the iPad and desktops – sell about 300 million per year. Videogame consoles sell far less than 100 million per year. Mobile phones sell more than all of those – combined! Mobile phones sell 1.3 Billion units this year. To put it another way, more new mobile phones sell this year, than the total worldwide installed base of all personal computers in use worldwide.

There are 5 Billion mobile phone subscriptions in use on a planet of 6.8 Billion people.

http://communities-dominate.blogs.com/brands/2010/07/understanding-smartphone-market-share-battle-not-for-phones-is-for-platform.html

Carrier relations are where the platform wars have been won and lost in the past.  Likely where they will be won and lost in the future, though I wonder what would happen if Google decided to build a low-end Android “world phone” that uses google voice and SMS/MMS for always-on connectivity, depending on store and forward data connectivity whenever it finds open wifi for all the social applications.  A “smart” dumbphone that doesn’t need expensive smartphone data plans.

Cringely bets that Facebook is getting so large that they are bound to fail and notes that as our social networks get larger, the VALUE of those networks becomes less and less.

Facebook is useless to me. We’re all too connected to really connect.

Yes, I hide all the Mafia warriors and the Farmers and those people lately who are so thrilled to be breeding weird little animals. I hide as many of my inane friends as I can. I don’t join any groups and I am a fan of nothing, but it still doesn’t matter. There are people whom I’d actually like to know what they are doing and maybe they care about me, too, but we just no longer meet-up.

He doesn’t offer any proof or rigor, but it’s true for me as well.  Interesting that social networks appear to invert the network effect.

He also notes that for publications there is an optimal circulation size for an advertising base – making it quite possible to become too large to make money.  Cringely’s suggestion is for Facebook to way to weed out the least profitable customers so the value to advertisers (and CPMs) is higher.

But Facebook doesn’t want to be Time magazine, they want  to be Google – number of impressions is all.  BUT if people stop getting value from the networks they’ve built in Facebook those numbers will plummet.

The right solution isn’t booting people from Facebook – the cost per user approaches zero.  The RIGHT solution is fixing Facebook so even an incredibly large network is still compelling to the user.  And the solution is dead simple in concept (if very difficult in implementation and design).

I don’t have 487 friends – I have a dozen networks of people with only a very small number of those people being in more than one network.  Facebook’s networks help FIND people with similar interests, but do nothing to help MAINTAIN connections with those people.

The solution is personas.

If Facebook is going to kill off all the mailing lists, bulletin boards, yahoo groups, blogging networks, etc that allow me to keep my personas locked into different online spaces (which they are currently doing at a rapid pace), they are going to have to stop forcing me to lump family, friends, co-workers, long lost high-school friends, Thrashers’ fans, college alumni and neighbors into a single network.

Facebook’s list functionality sort of allows me to organize my networks and switch between them – but it’s clunky at best.  What’s more it is something that should be automated by Facebook.  They can see all those potential  interconnections when I add a friend and should be able automatically drop them into the correct network.   Furthermore it should be simple enough to figure out which persona I’m currently wearing based on my activities.

They’re not shy about ignoring privacy to sell ads, how about giving ME some of the benefits of the all seeing eye?  If I’m looking at the activities of the other parents on my kid’s soccer team the ad targeting can be scary precise (and much more valuable.

Hmmm – a massive network of people that can be sold against in very specific niche interest areas and current activities…

sort of like Google adwords.

Playing with a couple email tools today.  Etacts and its gmail plugin is a VERY nice enhancement, essentially putting all the functionality of xobni into web-based email.  You see contact info, linkedin profile and social activities of the sender in an expandable sidebar.  It also allows group activities and minimal boilerplate email blasting (first name, last name substitution).

Gist is more of cross-network aggregator that creates a profile page of all your web activities, but more useful, attempts to do the same for all of your email, linkedin, facebook, twitter contacts – so you can watch their activities in a single place.

Both include light CRM features – contact reminders and history and importance weighting for emails/activities