wejustblog

Since this is my first post on wejustblog, I shall begin with a little self-introduction. I am U-Zyn (http://uzyn.com), the CTO of Widgeo.us. I am head of all things technology-related on Widgeo.us, including the system design of Widgeo.us and management of the development team. Being a part of development team myself, I am also the chief code monkey.

t.widgeo.us

Working at Widgeo.us with a bunch of geeks is not only fun, we sometimes also do crazy things together. t.widgeo.us, is a project Aen, our Art Director, and I made together with the free time we get while working on Widgeo.us.

Like many of you, the team members at Widgeo.us all have personal Twitter accounts. On top of that we also have a combined Widgeo.us account to update our followers with happenings around the company and the development. More often than not we find it a chore to be logging in and out of Twitter just to switch accounts to leave updates for different accounts. If you are like us, now you can manage your Twitter accounts with ease with t.widgeo.us.

As of now, t.widgeo.us is still very new, with quite a limited feature set. Though we like to keep things simple, we would most certainly be happy to hear from you. Aen and I will be spending more of our free time working on it as we go along, most importantly we are looking forward to interface t.widgeo.us with the soon-to-be-launched Widgeo.us.

Photo Courtesy of Josh Bancroft

A few hours ago, we did 2 firsts.

We officially launched t.widgeo.us as part of our run-up to the actual beta release and we pushed out our first newsletter. I won’t talk much about t.widgeo.us because I’ll leave the honor of doing that to the guys that built it — Aen and U-Zyn.

I do, however, want to talk a bit about what I’ve learn about creating real value over the past few months…

We knew what we wanted to do but being afraid that what we launched wouldn’t have enough value proposition for the early adopters, we kept beefing up the plans by throwing in more and more features. It didn’t take long to realize that we would take an enormously long time to reach that level of development.

Unknowingly, we had made that mistake of focusing too much on perfection. What Cobalt Paladin had said in an earlier post was pretty much the start of a series of discussions to trim down our roll out plans and to really… focus.

And it’s here that I asked myself, “How are we creating value?” and came to the realization that sure, we would be rolling out a platform where people can use apps that run across multiple communication channels seamlessly and that’ll save people time and save businesses money and all that…

…but that value isn’t realized if no one has something to actually use. So even if we actually had a 10 gazillion dollar solution, keeping it in our vaults would do nothing for people.

I feel that that was an important realization. One that helped me asked a list of other questions to find a good balance between the business and real-life priorities. Maybe if you’re developing something, it’ll be useful to you. And if you have other questions that are worth pondering over, do share

1. Does it actually make life easier? What is the cost of that convenience?
Sometimes we fall into the trap of building something so cool that it blinds us from the fact that it comes at a price. Take the scenario of a new social network user. He joins because it helps him stay connected with his social circle. At a first glance, it does make life easier with the automatic updates of friends particulars and actions. But it probably doesn’t take long for people to realize that eventually it becomes quite a chore to have to clear all the spam invitations and having to always set permissions for the application invitations.

So at the end of the day, was it worth the trade-off? Does the user’s life in general get easier?
If yes, you’re on the right track.

2. Does it come at the price of making someone else’s life more difficult? What impact does this bring?
I asked this because some solutions simply shift the balance of responsibility to other parties. In the case of offering a portal of high-quality suppliers for instance, it would help for businesses which would no longer need to spend as much time doing tedious due diligence. But it does mean that the provider must have a reliable system that can do that due diligence for the users.

In another instance where a platform provides users with a repository of applications built by external developers, it might be easier for end users to find apps, but is the platform able to attract and sustain the developer’s needs (since they would the ones generating applications for users)?

3. Can you sustain that solution or at least attach a business system that makes it sustainable?
This is an important question that always has to be addressed. It would be pointless to create a world-changing solution that lasts 6 months. It’s bad for the business and it’s terrible for the people. To me, it’s akin to giving people a drug, getting them addicted, and then telling them they can’t have it anymore. Do you remember the last time you were hooked on the features of a site only to have it shut down one day? (I felt that sort of deep sadness when Pandora was blocked… of course, it wasn’t their fault in this case)

What do you ask yourself when you try to create value for people?