Rob Hague's Blog

A couple of weeks ago, I saw a tweet that went along the lines of “Flattr sounds more like a pyramid scheme than a social network”. I’d never heard of this thing called Flattr, so I followed the link to this article. I found it interesting enough to write a mildly facetious tweet of my own, and before I knew it I’d been offered a beta invitation code by their “evangelist”. What the hell, I thought - it’s worth a tenner (or so - Flattr operates exclusively in Euros) to give it a proper try.

Flattr basically works like this: content creators register “things” - articles, photo sets, videos, or anything else that can be published on the web - with the site. They then add a button, similar to the “Digg/Tweet/Like This” buttons that have been cropping up all over the place for the last couple of years, to the thing in question. Consumers then come along, and, if they like what they see, click the button to flattr (yes, it’s a verb as well) the thing. So far, so conventional.

The interesting part is what happens next. Every Flattr user allocates a certain amount of money per month for the purposes of flattry. At the end of each month, it’s divided evenly between all of the things flattr’d that month, and the money (less a cut) is added to the creator’s Flattr account (where it can be transferred to a real bank account). Basically, it’s a low-friction way to tip creators of stuff you enjoy.

In other words, it’s another micropayment system. The information superhighway is littered with the corpses of failed micropayment systems dating back to the 90s (when people still used terms like “information superhighway”). What reason is there to think that things will be different this time? Well…

Firstly, unlike many previous systems, Flattr is actually low friction. Flattring something is genuinely no more complicated than clicking a link. This is partly due to advances in things like AJAX (also known as JavaScript Actually Works Now), but mainly down to the clever way Flattr is set up. The even distribution reduces the thought process to a binary decision - there’s no need to think about how much you want to flattr a particular thing, just whether you want to flattr it or not - and the fixed monthly amount means that you don’t need to worry about accidentally overspending. The upshot is that Flattr fits in with the way you already browse the web.

Secondly, the company has a clear revenue model - the cut of contributions that I mentioned above. This is predictable, as each active user by definition pays out a fixed amount each month, a fixed proportion of which goes back to Flattr. Equally important, it scales with their costs. The more active users they have, the more servers and staff they need to keep the service running, but the more revenue they’re getting in. They’re not only providing a way for people to pay for things on the web, they’ve come up with a model where users pay to keep the service itself on the web. (The fact that paying for a service you use sounds like a radical idea is testament to the weird hall of mirrors that is the web economy.)

At this point, you may be asking yourself, “Why do I care what the business model is? I just want the site to be there.” The reason I care is that running a non-trivial site like Flattr takes money. Significant amounts of money. The most reliable way to ensure the continued existence of such a service is for it (or, more accurately, the company behind it) to turn a profit. For this, they need a revenue stream. In most cases, services are reluctant to charge users directly, as they rightly or wrongly believe that the users expect things to be free. However, they have to get the money from somewhere. When I can’t see where this is, I get nervous.

Perhaps the best example of this at the moment is facebook. It’s recently been reported that the company is at last making a reasonable profit. I am, under sufferance, a facebook user. Like everyone I know who’s signed up, I have never given them any money. So where is the profit coming from? Maybe it’s from creaming a percentage off all of the money people shell out to not play Farmville. However, there’s a more obvious answer: targeted advertising. In some cases, this can be benign, even helpful. For example, in connection with the turning-a-profit story, Channel 4 News interviewed the owner of a wedding venue who’s adverts appeared on the pages of users in the relevant area when their relationship status changed to “engaged”. However, in other cases, it feels intrusive, even oppressive.

The worrying aspect is that, from outside the company, we have absolutely no idea what they’re doing. We just know that they’re doing something to turn a profit. If you hand over a monthly subscription that covers the cost of providing you with the service in question, the company has little motivation to do anything nefarious to make extra money from you. If you get the service for free, they’re practically obliged to. Another way of looking at it is that, instead of handing over cold, hard cash, you’re handing over a wealth of personal and demographic information about yourself and your social network (in the old-fashioned sense). The value of the latter is difficult to quantify, especially if you have no idea what they’re doing with it.

So, I like Flattr as a consumer because it’s easy, and because their business model doesn’t suggest they’re going to rip me off or sell my personal data to the highest bidder. However, how does it fare as a creator? One key objection, raised by my friend Steven, is that it doesn’t require you to pay for any particular thing you consume. Steven likened this to busking; I think of it more as an honesty box. However, given that the thing being payed for is neither a physical object nor a performance, I don’t think either analogy captures the whole story.

At this stage, it’s impossible to say whether Flattr will soar to ubiquity, or collapse under the weight of spam, fraud or indifference to join the other failed attempts at the side of the road. However, it seems to me to be an interesting experiment, at the very least. Is it an appropriate payment method for everything? Clearly not - you couldn’t rely on Flattr to fund a Hollywood movie, for example. Is it a useful option amongst many? Only time will tell, but I’m happy to spend a bit of pocket money in order to find out.

I've been messing around with JavaScript and the new HTML5 canvas element. After a couple of random experiments, I decided that I needed a well-defined goal, and I picked Conway's Game of Life. Here's the result:

Hopefully, the interface should be relatively self-explanatory (see the Wikipedia page linked above for details of the game itself). The Save button produces a string representing the game board; to go back to a previous state, paste such a string into the box and hit Restore. The whole thing should work in recent versions of Firefox, Chrome, Safari and Opera. It won't work in IE, as that browser doesn't support canvas.

Thing's I've learnt in doing this:

• The interface to canvas works pretty well, and I've not (yet) found any major gotchas between the browsers that support it.
• JavaScript is surprisingly good (and fun) language, especially if you stick to the good parts.
• JavaScript performance varies noticeably between browsers; in particular, Firefox (3.6) seems slower than the others. My hunch is that the difference is in the optimisation of JavaScript's somewhat unorthodox handling of arrays - this is something I'll have to look into.
• The game works, glacially slowly, on my iPhone 3G, but the editing (which uses onclick) doesn't. I might fix this.

The code is up on GitHub.

Update: I've added this entry as my first "thing" on Flattr. Be gentle with me.

The Tories have launched a new poster campaign with such a… strong message that I felt compelled to produce my own version. Sadly, I imagine this one would also go down well at Conservative Home.

(The original image is from here - I’m assuming, given the Quatro thing, they’ll have a sense of humour about this sort of thing.)

Sod Mumsnet - what with MyDavidCameron.com, the Guardian’s April Fools joke and the Fire Up The Quatro back-and-forth, this is shaping up to be the Photoshop election. I might not know about biscuits, but I do know about hastily cobbled together composite images of questionable funniness. So, here are a couple of efforts based on the recent manifesto launches (actually put together in the GIMP, natch):

Last week, I had need to run some queries against the internal database at work. These weren’t reports that needed to be run forever more, but I wanted to keep a record of them - both the queries and the results. I ended up writing my queries into a text file, evaluating them using Emacs’ SQL mode, and pasting the results back into the file. This worked quite well, but I thought I could do better.

I’ve been wondering about worksheet-style interface, as found in, for example, the Sage open source maths system. SQL, at least if you’re running SELECT queries, is ideal for this, as each query is independent, so you don’t have to manage things like ordering and mutation. Hence, last weekend, I knocked up a rough draft of what such an interface might look like. I’ve tidied it up a little, and an posted it here. There’s still plenty to add (support for other databases, UI improvements, some semblance of security), but the basic functionality is there, and it should serve as a basis for further experiments.

So, November is over. And, fifty-thousand and some words later, I’ve managed to do it again. In the middle of Sunday afternoon, I wrote the last words of Homeopath, a somewhat odd tale of intrigue, rage, and maybe murder. But maybe not. In any case, it’s definitely written, and it’s definitely more than 50,000 words, and so I’ve won NaNoWriMo 2009. Go me.

This year, I’m not going to post the entire thing immediately. Instead, I’m going to have a break from it for a while, then revisit and edit it in a month or two. So, no novel in this post, I’m afraid. I can, however, tell you some thing’s I’ve learnt over the last month:

• Planning helps; I didn’t plan in any detail, and ended up wandering around for 25,000 words setting the scene before I got on with the plot.
• Writing in the first person gives me the urge to constantly point out that I don’t necessarily share the opinions of my protagonist. Make of that what you will.
• Emacs and MarkDown make for a pretty nice editing environment for prose. Isolator is also handy.

The main thing I’m intent on taking away from the experience, though, is getting back into the habit of actually doing something substantial - writing something, programming something, practising something - when I get home from work in the evening, as oppose to just collapsing in front of the TV. NaNoWriMo imposed a structure where this wasn’t an option. I’m hoping that I’ll be able to keep it up now that it’s finished.

Finally, two graphs (because graphs are traditional). This first graph shows my progress over the course of the month; basically, things went a bit pear-shaped early on, but I managed to make the time up over the subsequent weeks.

The second graph shows my daily writing rate; the red line marks 1,666 words per day, which is the average rate (more or less) than you need to keep up to make it to 50,000 within the month.

Fascinating, I’m sure you’ll agree.

In 2002, I signed up for NaNoWriMo, an insane Internet pseudo-contest to write a novel in a month. I managed it, and you can see the results here (be gentle - it was written in a month, and I haven’t revisited it with an editor’s pen). For a few years, I paid it no mind, but this year I seem to be surrounded by people who’re taking up the challenge, so I’ve succumb to peer pressure and signed up again. Wish me luck.

P.S. - For anyone who has an nascent novelistic idea (or even a title), and have, say, mentioned it in the pub, then it’s not too late to sign up. You know who you are.

P.P.S. - Regarding the previous entry, the bad news is that I’ll not have a chance to work on SilverService for at least a month. The good news is that I’ve already solved the new entry problem, which was the most serious issue with the current version. If you have the OS X developer tools, you can grab the latest version from GitHub to get the fix.

Snow Leopard, the latest version of Mac OS X, was billed as “no new features”, but actually comes with a whole raft of minor improvements. One of these is improved handling of Services, a vastly under-rated feature inherited from NeXT. If you’re not up to speed on Services, or the improvements in Snow Leopard, this website has a good overview.

This is of particular interest to me, because it has ramifications for a piece of software I wrote a little while ago: SilverService. Specifically, I wondered if the ability to easily creates services in Automator renders SilverService obsolete. One of the areas in which I was thinking of extending the tool was the ability to create longer scripts, something which is definitely catered for well in Automator. However, the Automator approach is somewhat heavyweight, so I think there’s still value in a more focussed tool for one-liners.

With that in mind, I’ve dusted off the (now pretty ancient) source code, and got it compiling under the latest XCode. It basically works, but has at least one major interface bug (newly created services do not appear in the table until you restart the application), and one more minor problem that has been present since the start (the services only work when the application is running). I plan to look into these over the next few weeks, with the aim of producing an updated version with bug fixes but no new features. I’ve also created a SilverService repository on GitHub, if you want to have a hack yourself.

As ever, if you have any comments or suggestions about SilverService, I’d love to hear them, either via the comments below, e-mail or Twitter.

On Friday, I decided had a go at fixing the occasional dropped connections I’ve been seeing between Windows machines and my LinkSys WRT54GS (v5,1) router. As part of the process, I upgraded the firmware to what I assumed was the latest version. That was a mistake. After the upgrade, the router’s DHCP server would no longer dole out an IP address to Mac OS X or Linux clients, either wired or wirelessly (Windows XP clients seem unaffected).

It turns out that the solution is to get the latest latest firmware. The Cisco/LinkSys page offers version 1.50.9 of the firmware as the most recent version for most models; this version exhibits the problem. Instead, try version 1.52.2 available here:

LinkSys WRT54GS Firmware version 1.52.2

The solution is simple, but took me a while to find. Hopefully, this entry will save time for anyone experiencing similar problems.

Many, many people will charge you money to shill your product on Twitter and Facebook. Many people have written many things on why this doesn’t really work, and I won’t rehash those points here. A little while ago, I came across this post describing an example of how social media can help with product marketing - basically, if your product is good, and you don’t actively prevent people sharing information about it, your customers will market it for you. (It occurs to me that you could make the same argument about The Pirate Bay, but that’s a whole other can of worms.)

In any case, yesterday I encountered another way that social media and product marketing can be mixed effectively. The sequence of events went like this:

1) I see a link on Daring Fireball to a Capo, a Mac application for playing songs in various ways (slowly, looped, and so on) so that you learn them on the guitar.

2) I tweet that it looks interesting, but I don’t really have the musical ear to take advantage of it.

3) A little while later, the developer (SuperMegaUltraGroovy) replies, encouraging me to try and learn, and pointing me at a video that might help.

There are two important points here. Firstly, it wasn’t a generic mass-mailed press release, but rather a specific reply to my post. That differentiates it from spam. Secondly, it was clearly from SuperMegaUltraGroovy - they weren’t pretending to be a neutral observer or satisfied customer. That differentiates it from shilling.

The end result is that, from relatively little effort on the part of SuperMegaUltraGroovy, I’ve come away with a very positive impression of the company, and am seriously considering buying a $39 application that I previously only had a passing interest in.

So, it seems there are ways to use Twitter and Facebook to promote your company or products without pissing people off. It also seems like a way that indie developers can differentiate themselves from bigger companies - I can’t see the latter pulling this off without it seeming contrived. We’ll see if this becomes the accepted way of doing things, or if more irritating methods prevail. Given that nobody seems to have figured out a way to make the irritating methods work yet, there’s hope.