Shanti’s Dispatches

I called it about a month ago; it looks like Facebook has finally taken action and put an end to forced invites.

This is a really great move for Facebook and platform developers in general.

When competing for a user’s time, you are almost forced to use every tactic that your competitors are using.

If one app decides to engage in predatory practices, and their usage rate jumps ahead of yours because of this, you’ll be the one left holding the bag.

This new change levels the playing field and will give users a better experience all around.

I’m listening to some Jay Abraham mp3s on the plane back to St. Louis.

This usually strikes me when reading ebooks by gurus or listening to their mp3 audiobooks. i.e. David Allen’s Getting Things Done, etc.

You almost never hear some new profound secret that you never would’ve thought of in a million years.

Instead gurus remind us of how important some of the basics are. If this happens to inspire or light the fire of an idea within you, then great! That is probably about as much value as they can provide. Even 1 spark of an idea from a $99 ebook, audiobook or what have you, could eventually be worth $1m, or $1b, to you one day.

Dominiek outlines how he Built a .com in 24 Hour in this excellent writeup on the making of Wigitize.

As readers of this blog no doubt know, I’m a huge rapid application development fanboy.

I’ve blogged briefly about this before, but in early december I developed apps at the clip of about 1 per day for a week. Later I went back and put some polish on them, but it’s motivating to be able to see the finish line within 10-12 hours.

The genius of Dominiek’s strategy was to thoroughly blog the process. I will go ahead and call Bull$hit that he both: 1) created the app (including his slick photoshop designs, etc), setup the server, deployed it and documented the entire process, all in the course of a single day. In 2-3 working days (or ~ 24 hours non-stop), perhaps, sure, I’ll give him that.

The reason I can say that is because documenting things well (like he’s done) can be even more time consuming than writing the actual code. Still, not taking away anything from his accomplishment — it’s a major coup.

When I have the time, I’d love to do an app a day for a whole month, blogging the entire process & releasing much of the code as open source. From my experience though, it would have to be 1 app per day + 1 day to document the process nicely.