Barely Usable

As you know, I moved home to small town Iowa to continue living the self-unemployed lifestyle.

Here I can live in something resembling comfort while only doing ten hours of freelance work a week. The remainder of the time I’m free to pursue my own interests. I can go to the gym or work on a novel. I’m supposed to brainstorm on some business ideas, but I don’t feel like it at the moment. The pace is slower here, and I’ve lost my sense of urgency. Partly it’s that I’m no longer rushing from place to place; more significantly it’s that I have no great ambition for the future.

Monday and Tuesday are strenuous two-hour workathons. Sometimes I even work overtime. After work I hit up the grocery store before lunch. I always buy an item that requires a “price check” because I think it’s fun. For those of you unfamiliar with small grocery stores, this occurs when the item you want to buy isn’t logged in the computer and an actual human person must locate the poorly-described item in question, discern its price, and return this information to the checker in the form of a high-pitched scream. The checker then enters the price and the computer promptly forgets it so you can do it again next time.

Wednesday I take my middle weekend. I play Mario Kart, watch movies, read a novel, break out a 20oz pop. I get a burger and cheese balls. I may run some errands or mow the lawn. I’ll probably wash my tower of dishes that’s glued together with pasta bits.

Thursday I recuperate from my middle weekend. I decide to get ethnic food, which means a taco burger at the greasy spoon. I usually go into the backyard sans shoes and lock myself out. Then I have to walk a block to the middle school and inconspicuously meander down the halls to my mom’s office for the spare.

Friday I mentally prepare for my coming weekend.

Saturday and Sunday I brood about how I can’t get anything done.

I can get used to this.

When I tell people I don’t want a “real job” they don’t believe me.

Not deep-down, anyway. Sure, you don’t want one, but you’ll have to face reality someday. You’ll come crawling back, oh, yes, you will.

So, I suffer their kindness. I get emails with job postings or notes about so-and-so’s brother at IBM. People will ask me, to fill a silence, “Did you find a job yet?” They sign me up for resume workshops.

And I just sigh. How dense are they!

But reality does set in. There are bills piling up and nobody’s taking the responsibility of paying them. I know it’s either get a real job or… or what?

I pace around my apartment and notice it’s a little too freshly-painted. There’s no baked-on grime to the oven burners and by apartment operator’s math that cleanliness is probably costing me $25 a month extra in rent. I start mentally subtracting things from the apartment. Fireplace - $100. Balcony - $50. No saintly person ever needed a machine to wash dishes. I don’t eat breakfast in the nook anyway. If this place was just a lot crappier I wouldn’t even need money.

So I do something that would have seemed impossible six months ago. I load all my stuff into a van and head out for small town Iowa, where I will occupy a dilapidated rental house in a low-cost-of-living paradise. And if for some reason that doesn’t work out, I’m not too proud to move in with my parents, get my old job at the grocery store, and re-enroll in high school.

I have a vivid memory of a tiny moment from an “all staff meeting” I endured as an employee at my last job. These were morale-boosting, congratulations-all-around, raise-the-CEO-up-on-our-backs-and-chant power naps. Occasionally there was a legally-required special guest speaker—always a woman, usually ugly, normally in an argyle sweater vest, and obviously imbued with a sense of moral-superiority. She would lay out for us the intricacies of the law—what questions you can and can’t ask in an interview, who you can and can’t harass, and so on.

One such woman was brought in to explain the precariousness of our employment and excite us into socialist revolution. In my memory she had this one line that I’m sure she believed was a real shocker. One of those kick-in-the-pants lines that forces us out of complacency. Something must be done!

“In legal terms you are all what we call employees-at-will,” she said. “That means your employer can fire you at any time for no reason!”

Well, it was a real shocker. “Any time!” “For no reason!” “Mercy of mercies!” We all felt the injustice of it. We felt insecure, suspicious, and even vengeful. The fact that at any moment, without cause, our jobs could simply disappear and we’d be totally screwed. Why can’t our jobs just be guaranteed for perpetuity by God and the Law? Surely that wasn’t too much to ask, just a little bit of certainty in our work. We were getting out of our seats, clenching our fists, and I could tell that many of our arteries were clogged (an unrelated phenomenon).

Some saner minds persuaded us, however, that while technically true, it was certainly not the company’s business to randomly fire good employees for no reason. Things were in fact quite the opposite: the company was trying it’s very hardest to not fire us. It was an undertaking on a massive scale to disregard the hundreds of reasons to fire us and the millions of opportunities to do it. Whole teams of HR specialists were at that very moment working to keep us employed despite our litany of abuses. It was the bottom line: the simple cost of finding our replacements was so great that our constant tardiness, bad breath, and possible racism weren’t even footnotes in the double-entry ledger.

The tempers calmed, complacency reigned again. Our socialist friend’s exclamations failed to excite us, and the only words spoken as the meeting adjourned were a chorus: “God bless inertia.”

Next week: Quit now before they fire you!

You’re about to launch your viral application on Facebook. You want to grow it fast. Really fast. But you worry that your app solves no real problems and presents only negligible entertainment value. Surely no one will install it… But wait! You’re wrong! You (yes, you) can get one million installs without breaking a sweat. And I’ll show you how.

Let me tell you a tantalizing story. John is your average guy. He puts gel on the front tip of his hair so it sticks up, he likes pepperoni pizza, he goes to spin class three times a week. One day his friend Jane sends him a message on Facebook using your app, and well, Jane is an above average girl. So of course John wants to read the message, but in order to read it he must install your app. Without a second thought he installs it and excitedly whips off a quick note to Jane. Oh Jane, oh Jane! You are so above average! What he doesn’t realize is that your app’s default is to send the message to all his friends! (Lucky for John he didn’t reveal any embarrassing emotions.) So John’s friends all get a message, and they’d like to read it, even though John is only an average guy. So they all install your app and spam all their friends. Repeat a couple of times. Voila! Your app has one million installs.

Wow, you say, that sounds easy! But what do I do once I hook them? You know I don’t make any money from installs… I need pageviews!

(For the uninitiated, Facebook application developers can’t post advertisements “on ‘user profile’ pages or other pages of the Facebook Site,” only those “served by a developer.”)

Well, what if I told you getting pageviews from silly, average John is as easy as getting him to install your app?

Awesome, you say, awesome!

A word about Super Wall
In just a moment I’ll present you with five repeatable steps gleaned from RockYou’s stellar Super Wall application, but first a note.

Super Wall isn’t your typical, useless Facebook application. No, you’re going to love this, it’s actually pretending to be useful! Imagine the balls these guys must have.

Some of its “features” include “graffiti” (a low-fi drawing pad), digital “gifts” (it’s the thought that counts) and “greeting cards” (advertisements).

If this useless hunk of app can break the million installs barrier, then let’s get to emulatin’!

Five easy and repeatable steps for Facebook application domination

1. Wanna see what’s inside? Install first!
Like Super Wall, your app better not give away any free information. Make ‘em install first or they may realize your app is useless.

Here’s how John is introduced to Super Wall:

What’s John gonna do, ignore Jane? Of course not. Just imagine if you let John see Jane’s boring message before he installs it. Come on!

2. People don’t talk one-on-one anymore
When a user sends out a message from your app, you want to make sure it floods into everyone’s news feed by default. Don’t give people a choice or they might just send it to one person. They can be antediluvian like that.

Best practice: include all friends in a tiny box, defaulted to checked (see below, right).

Please note: this step builds on our strong foundation from step number one. Step two without step one is useless. Think about it: if there’s no app to install, you’re spam is just plain old boring spam. Nobody wants to read spam if they don’t have to install an app to read it.

3. Wanna see this juicy bit? Click here!
Now, let’s apply step one’s brilliance to after the installation phase.

As a counter-example, here’s how Facebook’s wall alerts John to a new comment from Jane:

I mean, come on! Don’t just tell him she’ not interested, at least give the man some hope for a few milliseconds.

Look at how tantalizing the Super Wall version is:

Oh boy, John’s gonna be clickin’ for sure. Ah, glorious pageviews.

4. What works for the news feed works for email, too
Facebook used to get this right. Here’s how an email notification used to go:

Jane wrote something on your Wall.

To see what Jane wrote, follow the link below:

http://www.facebook.com/n/?profile.php&id=12345678#wall

Now that’s gonna get a pageview for sure. But then the dunderheads at Facebook changed it to this:

Jane wrote on your Wall:

“Friday night is too busy. Let’s hang out at Tim’s party. ”

To see your wall or to write on Jane’s Wall, follow the link below:

http://www.facebook.com/n/?profile.php&id=12345678#wall

Duh. It’s all right there. No surprises. No pageviews. Facebook says this is a “usability improvement,” which is easy for them to say now that they have a billion users or whatever.

But you don’t have that luxury, so follow Super Wall’s lead:

Jane just sent you a message. Click here to read your message.

Oh yeah, that’s hot.

5. A few dead ends create excitement and lots of pageviews
It’s simple: create multiple paths to action, some or all of which don’t work, and your users will have to keep clicking and clicking. It’s not just great for pageviews, it’s a fun diversion for any user!

Take this message:

Question: Which link lets John see the “new photo” that’s been posted?

Answer: none!

By the time he figures that out and then scrounges around for the photo on other avenues he may see five or more pages instead of a lousy one. Delicious!

Conclusion
We can learn a lot by studying the brilliant tactics of the totally useless but million-plus-installed Super Wall.

I know a lot of so-called “user-centric” designers believe that these tactics are rotten, but as you can see these “designers” don’t know jack about getting action on Facebook.

I didn’t do any work Monday or Tuesday. I wasn’t feeling it.

Here’s what Joel Spolsky says on the subject: “Sometimes I just can’t get anything done.”

Sure, I come into the office, putter around, check my email every ten seconds, read the web, even do a few brainless tasks like paying the American Express bill. But getting back into the flow of writing code just doesn’t happen.

I hear that. But what’s this “flow” he’s talking about?

Flow—it’s what athletes call being “in the zone” and hobbits call “second breakfast.” If men think about sex every seven seconds, then flow is the only period of time when they don’t.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi – the “architect of the notion of flow in creativity” – describes flow as a state where one is “completely involved in an activity for its own sake.”

The ego falls away. Time flies. Every action, movement, and thought follows inevitably from the previous one, like playing jazz. Your whole being is involved, and you’re using your skills to the utmost.

You don’t even think about sex.

When you’re flowing you’re gellin’, but what about when you’re not? Sometimes you can coax yourself into flow after a bout of procrastination, but other times you’re so far from flow that you’re really just wasting your time sitting at your computer shifting around code. You’re not feeling it. On these days there are an awful lot of better ways to waste time. You should just relax and recoup for when flow hits again. You need downtime. If you give yourself a hard time for not working you’ll probably feel even less productive.

But your company doesn’t care about this. Your company expects you to show up at the regular time and put in a full eight hours of pretending to work. If you don’t do your part in pretending, how would the company keep up its impressive image of efficient pretend working? If we let one of you slip by without pretend working, we’ll have to let everyone stop pretend working, and we can’t have that, can we?

I happen to think that’s silliness, and at my startup (which doesn’t exist) we offer a generous allotment of “not feeling it’ days right along with sick days. You can redeem them without guilt or trepidation. They’re yours to use for vegging out in front of the TV, golfing, shopping, or anything else you want. I recently used one for a haircut and back waxing.

(For further reading, see Signal vs. Noise’s “roundup” on flow.)