A Haven for User Data

Last month my friend Suw twittered something that surprised me a little.

Obviously, I knew about Pownce and I remember reading about Twitter buying Values of N, so I get they shut down I Want Sandy.

I headed over to GetSatisfaction to look at IWantSandy’s product page. What a wash of anger and sadness. The closure topic has hundreds of replies and 95 faces and 17 faces most of which were Rael’s and he doesn’t really count. Rael has made an export available for I Want Sandy but it hasn’t been up there for too long. In fact, it closes today. Something that a lot of people objected to.

This isn’t totally dissimilar to the way we closed Yahoo Photos (not that I was involved in that project). I think it’s sad that something can close in the space of a month and after that period user data is lost. The idea occurred to me that while archive.org is great for public data it sucks ass for private data. The idea of the data haven was born.

Imagine this. You sign up for the newest shiniest start-up service. When you sign up you have the option to guarantee your data will be preserved by somedatahaven.org. If that service goes belly up they can pass your data and login credentials to somedatahaven.org who will allow you login and export your data. If an independent organisation can take on the role of guaranteeing the data availability of a number of services that you sign-up to then it’ll be a huge step forward for data portability. This would be especially true if the data could be syndicated as easily transformable open standards to be accepted by other services.

So, I want to build this service. However, I’m a busy man. I might build it anyway, because I’m an engineer with twitchy coding fingers, but I’d really like half a dozen or so people that would want to sign up to such a service so I can work with some real customers and support their needs while building. If you are interested email me.

So as I Want Sandy shuts down for good today, I hope we can create a better solution for the future.

Explaining Flow to non-geeks

So I ended up having a little tiff with my wonder wife Rosemarie this evening. I love her but I was a bit grumpy because I was trying to get some coding done. I don’t like working late, but sometimes needs must. I realised the main problem was that she just didn’t understand why the little distractions matter. To her I was being a princess, and a drama queen. I can understand how my slight peevishness came of really badly when you don’t have an understanding of Flow. Without understanding what Flow is it would be easy to think I was snapping at her.

So, honey, I love you and this is to try and explain.

Imagine reading a book. It should be a real page turner, something you are completely glued too. You know the characters, you feel their pain. Then right at the crux of the story, something interrupts you. It’s a little annoying, but it’s ok. You fluff your cushion, stretch your legs and start to read again.
But no! Something interrupts you again. That’s ok. I’m just going to ignore it. But it’s won’t be ignored. You read the same sentence you just read for the third time. Now frustration moves to annoyance.

This is flow, the concept is that you need a certain amount of time to be able to do an activity well. Sure you can read at the drop of a hat but it takes a minute or so to start understanding what you are reading. If you want that total immersion of a good book it takes a bit longer, but boy the feeling is better.

Programming is hard. It’s harder than reading. In fact programming is hard than most things I know because it’s basically continuous problem solving. So programming takes longer to get into than reading, even deep reading. Some studies have shown it can take 30 minutes to achieve Flow in programming. So for a programmer the experience of small distractions can be that much worse than a reader.

To put it visually imagine an easy task (such as reading) is like a pebble and a hard task (such as programming) is like a boulder. It’s easy to push the pebble down a hill it keeps rolling until something stops it. But it’s pretty easy to get started again, because hey it’s only a pebble. Programming is like a boulder you sit and lever the boulder with a stick for 20 minutes to get it moving much at all. The last thing you want is something that stops it part way down. Sure it’s a little easier to get it going again half way down the hill, but it sure would have been nice if it hadn’t stopped at all.

So while I shouldn’t have been a jerk, I hope this explains a little bit why I was and maybe next time I’m working a little late I’ll find some space where my crotchety programmer angst isn’t going to make you feel bad.