Recently, I found a Craigslist job advert that made me chuckle. It seems to manage to do almost everything wrong, from the point of view of recruiting the kind of person it appears to be targeting.

So, in the spirit of improving the web, here’s my blow-by-blow description of all (or most of) what’s wrong with this job ad.

Recent news has pointed out that gold farming in China has become a $500m industry.

Blizzard should be ashamed.

We have many challenges in the world today. Entertaining people (as Blizzard does with their main products) is a worthwhile activity for a business. Hard-working people do need it, and even though there are some extreme cases of “entertainment abuse” (similar, in many ways, to drugs abuse), the abuses of the few should not limit the many from enjoying a perfectly healthy, if somewhat fruitless, activity.

However, gold farming is not entertainment. Gold farming is an entirely sterile activity. It produces nothing other than a transfer of wealth from one part of the world to another. The “gold” that is being farmed is purely artificial. It represents no value creation whatsoever. It is merely a symbol of time that has been wasted on a pursuit that is designed to be entertaining. Each piece of gold farmed represents a small amount of wasted productivity for the human race. In aggregate, the $500m gold farming industry represents $500m of wasted human productivity.

Moreover, Blizzard could very easily stop this trade, by creating an official gold market where people can exchange dollars for gold. There would still remain some market for rare items, but those are necessarily less fungible than gold coins, and so would at least greatly decrease the $500m black hole.

If anything, Blizzard should see its own self-interest here: if it can get even a 10% slice of this $500m market (and there’s little reason to think that it couldn’t get 100%), that would represent $50m - not an amount to be sneered at. From a business sense, Blizzard should be ashamed not to have opened up a gold market yet.

Dear readers,

I’m very sorry, but for some time the commenting system was utterly and totally broken. And in a very frustrating way, too, giving no useful feedback to the commenter.

I’ve now fixed this, and I recovered what comments I could from the logs, so they’re now up (although it looks as if they were all posted at the same time) - and it is now possible to add comments without tearing your hair out!

Thanks for your support!

Do you have a hyperbrain?

A recent article posted up on HackerNews presented a list of symptoms (representing things that the author felt about himself). These symptoms are not common to everyone, but they are common to enough people to warrant this and further articles. Plus, I promised some of them that I’d write about this.

The characteristics exhibited there seem to touch on almost every so-called mental disorder out there: Bipolar-like ups and downs of energy and, sometimes, emotions; Obsessive focus (under certain circumstances); Compulsion to do certain things that just have to be done; Hyperactivity (with a tendency to start many things at once); Attention Deficit (hell yeah.. oh, shiny stuff!). Yet it is far from diseased. With that brain, you can achieve great things, so long as you apply a few simple, practical approaches to harness it.

(From XKCD)

Here’s an article from VentureBeat waving about some figures about how much money can be made with Facebook apps. Although the figures are a bit anecdotal, and I hope for their sake that no VC’s ever invest based on such hand-waving mathematics, the real gem is at the end:

Either way, the many naysayers suggesting that it’s impossible to make money on Facebook might want to think again.

I don’t know if anyone’s ever suggested it’s _impossible_ to make money from Facebook. The main backlash against Facebook applications as a business model has really been against the gold rush mentality of the early Facebook app “golden age”. In those days, the mental processes went a little bit like this:

1. Facebook has lots of users
2. Facebook is inherently viral
3. If I make a Facebook application, it will be easy to reach millions of people
4. An application that can reach millions of people is bound to make money.

That’s a nice story, and it explains why some many people (myself included) rushed into Facebook application development last summer. Since then, most of them have pulled out, and for very good reasons.

1. Facebook became much more protective of its users (and quite sensibly). A large part of the changes to Facebook in the last year have been to protect its users from over-greedy and spammy applications
2. Many changes entirely nerfed the virality, making it much, much harder for an application to magically spread from 10 users to a million within a few weeks
3. Therefore, it’s become very hard to reach any large number of people on Facebook
4. Even applications that did benefit from the early “golden age” conditions didn’t manage to make that much money. Their business models are still being proven. Slide and RockYou may have a few very successful apps, but they also have many developers, and it’s unlikely that their Facebook revenues cover their costs yet (though I’d love to hear some hard numbers on that).

The truth is, yes, it’s possible to make money with a Facebook app. But, and this is the key, it’s no easier than making money with a non-Facebook app. In many ways, it’s harder. Working with the Facebook platform and its many limitations is a challenge in and of itself. Even if you’re a consummate start-upper outside of the Facebook bubble-world, you’ll have to learn application development all over again in this new, different environment. That’s not a huge deal, but it should give pause to people who think they can just “make a Facebook version” of their otherwise successful application.

More importantly, building a Facebook application puts you in the thrall of Facebook. That is a huge deal, because Facebook is their own business, and they will always do things to their own advantage, even if that involves doing something that will completely destroy your business. The internet is fickle enough as it is. Do you need the extra risk?

Ok.

So I’ve been a bit sparse on the posts lately.

Well, that’s all going to change. I intend to start posting a bit more often from now on, with shorter posts most of the time (although the odd big post will still come up every once in a while). I’ve been terribly busy with my start-up, and, well, I know it’s not an excuse, but hey, that’s life. I’ll probably be terribly busy in the future too, but I’ll make more of an effort on the blog.

In other news, I’ve actually published a couple of articles in the meantime, which you may be interested in reading. They appeared on Sitepoint, and are titled Why You Should Fire Your Clients And Launch A Product and Nine Deadly Startup Diseases—and How to Cure Them. If you like my usual start-up oriented articles, those should be of interest.

In any case, thanks for reading this blog, and I hope the new publishing regimen works out for both you and me.

“Very deep is the well of the past. Should we not call it bottomless?” - Thomas Mann

Whenever working on anything remotely artistic, I feel compelled to try and be original. After all, what’s the point of creating something just like everything else that came before? That seems like a noble aim: add something new to the world, rather than re-hashing the same old thing. It’s a desire that all artists share, to an extent. History appears (on the surface) to recognise those who brought forth something entirely new, and, particularly, to recognise them for the very reason that they brought something entirely new into existence.

Recently, someone wrote an adaptation of a famous Russian fairy tale by Alexander Pushkin, ”The fisherman and his wife”, adapted to the topic of greedy SEO tricks, and called it ”The web developer and his wife”. On YCNews, someone commented: “Sometimes it is better to not make bad copies of good things.”

I couldn’t disagree more. In fact, I believe that this is the exact formula for making great things.