The Shape of Design - Frank Chimero, on the importance of Why
L.P. Jack from his Education Through Recreation, published in 1932.
Liz sent this quote to me this morning. I won’t pretend to be a “master in the art of living” (still too clumsy at life, still finding my legs), but work looks ever more like play and play more like work. The similarities create all sorts of new complications involving the pursuit of uncomplicated pleasure, but I can not pretend for one moment that I do not love having the objects of my affection so close and accessible. We should all be so fortunate. Happy Valentine’s Day, everyone.
(via viafrank)
We all know that hiring is hard. At Olark, we spent months trying to find the right people. For bigger companies this is a problem, but for a startup it’s a matter of life and death. So every startup I know is desperately looking for a better way to find their next hire.
If you’re in the YC…
1 - William Zinsser - On Writing Well
Eoghan McCabe of Contrast
(Source: twitter.com)
Dustin Curtis, from his blog
In August 2011, during the peak of riots in London, I noticed that baseball bat sales on Amazon.co.uk had increased by 5000%. After posting this link to Hacker News, I got to taste what it’s like to be behind something that goes viral. Those 2 hours and 12 minutes taught me a lot that I’m still thinking about. The following write-up expands on a concept I wrote about in an earlier post.
A New Type of Market
In a previous post I wrote about when I discovered how to leverage market inequalities. Over the years, I’ve noticed some other cases where the same logic could be used, in a different context. If you change the premise of the logic a bit and expand on what a ‘market’ can be, you can apply it to information streams. If virtual currency is the means in the virtual market, information is the means for data streams. Hacker News, Twitter, and Reddit are all examples of information rich data streams. Like in WoW, catching the differences between multiple markets (streams) means you can ‘profit’ from them.
London Riots
In early August, 2011, a Police shooting happened in London, England that lead to rioting in the streets. Initially, protests were held as many people were upset over the event. It shortly became a problem, however as the once peaceful march converted into a rioting affair that would last the next four days.
For the unfamiliar, Gun politics in the United Kingdom are very different than in the United States. It’s much harder to get a gun license in the UK, and far fewer people in general own and use guns.
Market Number One
About midway though the affair, I was monitoring my twitter feed and noticed a tweet about an Amazon.co.uk page which showed the trending purchases from the Sports & Leisure section of Amazon’s marketplace. I found this super interesting because the top listings on on the UK version of Amazon included an Aluminum Baseball Bat that was up over 5000% in sales, and a “Military Police Telescopic Tonfa” (similar to a nightstick or baton) up a large percentage of sales. If you you live in the UK, don’t own a gun, and want to protect yourself or wreck havoc during the riots, why not buy a baton or bat to protect yourself? At least this seemed to the the logic of Amazon customers during the riots.
Market Number Two
Hacker News is both a news website and discussion board, created by YCombinator, and it is heavily moderated and built by Hackers for Hackers. The posting guidelines explain that good posts on HN involve “Anything that good hackers would find interesting” and “anything that gratifies one’s intellectual curiosity”. There was already a lot of talk on HN around the Riots during the time. Cross posting seemed to be the next step for me. I knew that it would probably get some buzz from HN as the implications of the page were pretty controversial.
Outcome
Over the next 2 hours after I posted the link to HN, a couple of things happened. It inadvertently made it to the front page, and quickly became the top post on Hacker News. Most popular links make it to a hundred or so upvotes, and then the buzz slowly dies off. This post ended up getting 465 votes over the next few days. It stayed in the #1 spot for the majority of the day on Hacker News.
The next thing that happened was that Hacker News started to slow way down. This isn’t a particularly normal occurrence. HN is used to seeing a decent amount of traffic as it is ranked just over 1,000 for websites receiving the most traffic in the US.
Paul Graham, one of the founders of YC ended up posting about what happened later that day. Basically, multiple media companies picked up the story from Hacker News and published a blurb about it. Some of them linked to HN, along with Amazon.co.uk. Hacker News received a huge influx of new visitors, many of which weren’t HN users in the first place.
The traffic spike basically made HN inaccessible for awhile. Paul Graham fixed this by adding pagination on the comments page for the Amazon post so that the HN servers would be fulfilling less load requests at a time.
Thoughts
It’s such a strange feeling, knowing that you “made a dent” in the internet. This was essentially my “profit” from the ordeal. Seeing the buzz along with the nerd credit of a 450+ upvoted post on Hacker News was equally interesting and distracting, to say the least.
Like most nerdy high schoolers, I went through a hardcore gaming phase and got hooked on MMORPGs. I did some heavy level grinding in some of the games, which lead me to waste away many hours of my teenage years. I didn’t find the regular game play particularly interesting though. Among my other nerdy gamer friends, I was notoriously obsessed with each game’s virtual market.
Each game was setup differently with how they handled virtual currency and virtual goods. These markets turned into my virtual playground.
Passive Income Generation
In Lineage II, you could “set up shop” by sitting on the ground, selling your wares, and basically going AFK - you couldn’t play the game normally while you were in shop mode. You would often see people sitting all over town with wares that nobody wants or people sitting AFK without a shop open all day long. (after you sold your last item it put your character in regular game mode) The main benefit of this was that I could leave the shop open during the day when I was at school, or overnight when I was asleep.
Maximizing ROI
Guild Wars was interesting because the economy wasn’t dictated by virtual items so much. The money was in “runs” where people would piggyback on higher level characters to get to higher level towns that they normally wouldn’t have access to. I used this to gain all the money I needed in game. I was successful because I found a super efficient run - one that wasn’t too long, that I could do with my character, and that was high paying. Also, it was a run that not many other people were doing. Other runners were doing runs that barely paid more, that were often only successful 40-60% of the time, and it took them hours to complete.
Recognizing Scams
Another method that came up from Guild Wars was a type of money making that is a bit shadier, but worth noting. You could go from town to town and yell (in chat) that you “Knew of a method of making X amount of money in Y amount of time” and could “fill you in on the method” for “a small fee”. Some realized the trick, others didn’t (which is where the profit came from). At the time, this felt like performing magic to people wanting to know how it was done.
Leveraging Market Inequalities
World of Warcraft was by far the most useful for me, but I didn’t know it at the time. In each big city in WoW, there is an Auction House, where most people move their goods. The AH, at the time, was set up similar to how eBay is set up. When adding a good to the Auction House, you could give it a starting price and an ending time and let it go from there. Another option that people used was a “Buy It Now” price. This was precisely what left room for exploit.
The OTHER method you could use to sell something in WoW was advertise it through a in-game chat. You could also pull all the information from an item and post it on the chat so others could see it.
The epiphany came when I realized that you could put both methods of selling together, profiting off of the difference. Looking through the Auction House, I found items that were worth a decent amount of money, that I could afford, and that were “Buy It Now” for a reasonable price. I then opened up the trade chat channel and tagged the item from the AH. When I got a bite from the chat channel, I marked up the product a bit. If we agreed upon a price, I bought the item from the Auction House and delivered it to a meeting spot in the city, instantly making the difference.
These video games were the mediums I used to discover the joys of being an entrepreneur and profiting off of a market. It was just a matter of understanding the context and playing with the variables. I wrote another post about how I have used the last example in a different context.
John Boardley, creator of ilovetypography.com, from 8 Faces #4
There’s still this preconceived notion about twitter that most people think they don’t “get” it.
For me, it’s one of those tools that is only as useful as the work you put into it (at least initially). It’s about curating an information stream for yourself.
Into design? Great. Find the twitter accounts of the designers you respect. (Including ones that you would like to actually talk to!)
Hacker News is another great source. Most of the popular content on HN are blog posts. Follow the writers of the posts you like. (or the designers?)
Another thing to consider: watch who your following is talking to. I’ve found many different people indirectly this way. Too bad twitter hides the replies now. Bio sections are really important.
Also, check out your following’s following. What? For example, If you’re following Derek Sivers (@sivers, you should be), check out who he’s following.
If you’re looking for designers to follow, check out who I’m following lately. :)
This makes twitter go from “What’s the point?” to “Holy sh*t Awesome!”
