One Dimension Is Not Enough

As I search for a partner, I'm doing silly things like looking for people via LinkedIn and managing my just-created calendar at Airset, I'm thinking about why these sites are never as good as you want them to be.

I think it's because they really only try to do one thing -- they have a hook, but nothing else. Sometimes this works (and it's actually working relatively well with Airset), but there are usually 10 things I would like to do with my data that I can't do, and if you're going to make me upload that data, then the least you can do is come up with tons of great things to do with the data.

For instance, LinkedIn wants a copy of my entire addressbook, for one specific purpose. Great, there's now another duplicate of that data (in addition to my Mac address book, my Pine address book on SVN but on two different machines, and my phone), with one straight benefit, and it's not even supported by iSync (not that Pine is, either).

The reason I hesitate to use this is because I want some metabenefit that I wasn't thinking of, but there isn't one. I can think of 20 ways you could make my life easier WRT my addressbook data, but this doesn't solve any of the ones I was thinking of, and it only does a mediocre job of solving the one it set out to solve.

Which brings me to the point of the post -- one dimension of usefulness is not enough. You can choose a single dimension to be core, but you need to stack on other dimensions of functionality fast and thick to really deliver value.

LinkedIn isn't the only one doing this. PubSub has some interesting ideas (although I cancelled all of my subs in about 2 days, since I got a useful hit rate of about 1%), but they don't seem to be making an effort to mash in all of the other great ideas that obviously apply like clustering.

When I started blogging, I was livid that it wasn't easier -- I don't want to type HTML, I don't want to link every instance of a word. Shouldn't the software automatically link every unlinked instance of a word that I link once? If I create a link for "pine", should'nt the blog software go all Wiki on me and link all of them? Shouldn't it do that for every article I ever post? I link to my own product, Puppet, constantly -- why isn't my blog software smart enough to insert that link for me?

How does this relate to Puppet? Very clearly. In using Puppet to build your server configurations, you are adding in huge amounts of semantic content that wasn't there before. It would be embarrassing if I didn't take advantage of that extra information to make your job easier. This is exactly why I'm going to start slapping Rails on the output side of Puppet. Eventually I want Puppet itself to be smart enough to take advantage of the extra data on its own, but for now having simple interfaces that make that data available and provide you some ability to manipulate it will be a big step forward.

Thu, 27 Apr 2006 | Tags: design