Ryan Ripley . Com

A big catch phrase with new and improved “Web 2.0″ is “Less is More”!! This statement refering to smaller teams, fewer features, less overhead, and less red tape has catipulted into the latest fad statement. You can see it in wired, business week, and other tech media outlets. So why now is this message getting lost? Because its a load of marketing BS!

Don’t think so? Alright, lets try the semantic version:

less ( P ) Pronunciation Key (ls) adj. A comparative of little.
1. Not as great in amount or quantity: had less time to spend with the family.
2. Lower in importance, esteem, or rank: no less a person than the ambassador.
3. Consisting of a smaller number.

mo-re ( P ) Pronunciation Key (mn) adj. more, (môr, mr) most (mst)
1. Being one of a large indefinite number; numerous.
2. Amounting to or consisting of a large indefinite number.

Pretty obvious… no? Less is NOT More!

So what is everyone missing? The idea of simplicity leads to FOCUS! It’s simple, if you cut out the 80% crap features that no one is really interested in and focus on the 20% that makes everyone go “wow, my job just got easier…” you are going to have a winner every time. Strive for FOCUS… If cutting out some features, and then adding in a few more focused items makes your application more zero’d in on a particular goal then go for it. Don’t get caught in the hype. Ask your users what problem they want solved and only focus on that problem. Keep your ears open for more problems and keep your minds sharp on providing the answers… Keep adding to your applications, but do it in a focused way. It works for Google, no?

I found this post right on, and very accurate of the typical, not recent… 37Signals content. Hey, you gotta talk about the good and the bad… right?

Caught this comment on the 37Signals site this morning:

If you don’t know what Spinfree is, nay was, you are considered “new” here, thus, you should have listened twice as much as you spoke.

Since you couldn’t figure that out for yourselves, 37S is teaching you how to keep quiet.

Go start your writeboards, 37sucks.com, whatever… a community of trolls spewing venom sounds like a great place to visit. I stopped reading 37S because of the comments, now I can finally return.

For all of you that think 37Signals is a design company, that became a product company, think again. They started off building filemaker apps before HTML tables existed.

They are true pioneers, for many of us, they’ve been around since the beginning (before clear spacer gifs…) don’t think for a minute that the people here are fanboys because they respect the sustained creativity.

“Always there will be, along the sidelines of life, inferior souls who throw mud at those whose attainments they do not quite understand. The man who really accomplishes doesn’t pay attention to such detractors. If he did, he’d be on their level. He keeps an eye singled on the higher goal—and the mud never touches him.”
~ Jerome P. Fleishman

You may now close comments.

Why point this out? I guess I’m trying to figure out the whole fanboy/kool-aid drinker phenomenon… How do people get to the point of ignoring everything except what they want to believe? 37Signals, as far as I know, is no longer a design company. This guy truly believes that they do this for him, and that he is special because he has been reading for a long time. The arrogance of this plays out when he states that now that his comment has been seen that the comment can now be closed… Sad.

I can imagine this guy crying as he read comment after comment…

Oh, YEAH! Take a big gulp buddy… You are a winner!

It looks like less has turned into a bit too much for Jason Fried over at 37Signals. In the companies Signals vs. Noise (SVN) blog they announced today that comments to their posts have been shut off. The entire post is available here, I’ve grabbed the juicy part that I’d like to discuss. However, I do encourage you to read the post and the comments for an even better perspective… After you read all of this of course…

…
For the past few months we’ve been pretty disappointed by the noise. The readership on this blog has grown five fold in just the past year or so. It would be great if the quality of the comments and perspectives increased as our readership increased, but instead comments quickly fly off topic. Mud flinging is the norm, not the exception. An occasional cynical comment is good (and welcome!), but when 75% turn negative then it’s just no longer fun. We think that’s a shame and, frankly, we’re tired of the negative energy filling up the threads.
…

I guess they dont remember their post on September 30th of this year: Site Persona: Your site better be your best employee.

I’d like to draw your attention to the part that Jason actually blames his readership for the deterioration of the site. They are the bold letters that appear in the above quote. I think its right to say that when your blog does get to the “tipping point” that the trolls do tend to come out of the woodwork. And with a readership of 16,000+, I think that it is safe to say that they have tipped. However, to blame the readership for the trash that appears on their pages is simply irresponsible.

On November 15th Fried posted about buying an $1800 desk. This post is cleverly disguised as a “Hey isnt this a great design” musing. His readership quickly caught on:

Poster:

OMG! $1,800?! I hope that’s not the desk Jason’s referring to. For that price I could buy a full-size Tempurpedic bed with frame and two pillows! Yeah the desk looks cool, but not $1,800 cool. Eff that noise.

Fried:

“I didn’t want this thread to turn into a rant on pricing, etc. Can we focus for a second on something other than price? Maybe utility?”

Poster:

Most americans aren’t spending $1800 on a desk Jason, know your audience. That’s business 101.

Ok, so perhaps he was just impressed with the desk and wanted to show everyone a cool design feature. But what about this post.
This post was completely self serving and self promotional. I’m sorry, but I do not buy the “Hey, I was being sarcastic.” excuse after the fact. The funny part is that this post came after one on copyright infringement… My thought on all this, KEEP IT REAL! You left yourself wide open on at least 2 counts and you are wondering why you got demolished in the comments?

Finally I think this post is what sent some people over the edge… In this one, Jason asks the simple question, Have we “jumped the shark“? For those that do not wish to click the links, jumping the shark refers to going past your prime, and the answer he got boiled down to a lot more Yes votes than No…

The funny part is that through out some of these nonsensical posts by Jason, his customers have been telling him what they want:

Poster:

I miss the 37Better project, too. It’s not that not having it is shark-jumping, but I’d love to see more design posts here, too. The 37Better project was what really made me sit up and go “Wow.”

And this is what really gets me… Instead of embracing the criticism (mainly that his ego has gotten too big) Jason decides to give his fan base the big middle finger and shuts them all up. He’s drank way too much of his own Kool-aid, thrown on a tie, and has become more concerned about perception than his customers. If that isnt selling out and going corporate, then I dont know what is… It’s sad to see the underdog turn into the man.

AND NOW FOR THE CONSPIRACY: Here’s the kicker… I have this gut feeling that turning off comments was not something that Jason wanted to do. Go through their archives and their current posts. He loves to respond to the comments. He adds to the noise that he hates!

I would guess that his partners tackled and told him that his blogging had to be “done” for while. They just realeased “The Deck“, and this back lash against Jason could impact ad sales… Instead of making him quit completely though, I think he is being allowed to save some face and post fluff pieces to keep his name out there… I’d imagine that this is closer to the truth than what has been posted…

Disclaimer: If you want to disagree with me, then please feel free to in a logical way. However, if you have Kool-aid stains around your lips and are looking to flaunt your love of 37Signals in some desparate hope that they might notice and want to become your instant best friends please think twice and go back to writing Jason love notes on your write boards.

In all fairness: 37Signals is (was ?) a pretty cool company with some interesting employees and products. Backpack is a neat idea. From what I’ve seen, Basecamp can be very useful. They even have David Heinemeier Hansson, creator of Ruby on Rails, on their staff. So, they are talented and can do TOP OF THE LINE work… I’m just hoping that the ego factor gets surgically removed… and soon.

Hey, this technology stuff is just getting crazy. This is a 3D image of my buddies yet to be born child. Fortunately, he looks like his mother. Congrats you two!

I’ve spent most of this evening reading Idea Virus by Seth Godin. This is a very thought provoking book. The most interesting part about it is that it actually acts as an example of what he is trying to teach. Confused? An idea virus is simply an idea that travels very quickly by word of mouth. In this book Godin goes into detail on how to plan for, nuture, and take advantage of this phenomenon. He even breaks down who the key players are in this process and how to act towards each one. The “wow” factor of this book is that if you click the link above, you can download and read the entire book for free. He even states every couple of pages that you should send this book to others. So, he creates an idea that “may” appeal to others and provides a smooth mechanism for spreading the word… The is definetly a different approach than some of the other marketing works that I have read. Very good read, and check it out. Its only 197 fast moving pages, and its free! SPREAD THE VIRUS!

The Register is running this story on a “trio of entrepreneurial hackers hope to do for the business of password cracking what Google did for search…”

Over the past two years, three security enthusiasts from the United States and Europe set a host of computers to the task of creating eleven enormous tables of data that can be used to look up common passwords. The tables - totaling 500GB - form the core data of a technique known as rainbow cracking, which uses vast dictionaries of data to let anyone reverse the process of creating hashes - the statistically unique codes that, among other duties, are used to obfuscate a user’s password.

Now it looks as though they’ve launched an online service… Lock down the apps boys…

Lee Gray was kind enough to answer my question on a Windows based Rails IDE:

If you’re looking to do Rails development in Eclipse, the guys at http://www.radrails.org are doing a nice job.

After downloading it and playing around with it for a bit, it seems like this will suit me just fine. There are some features missing at this point, however, for my purposes… ie. Getting throught the Agile Development with Rails book. I’ll try to post some screenshots and thoughts on the IDE as I get more familiar with it. All in all, this is RAD.

Here is some added info from the RadRails site.

The RadRails 0.4.1 bugfix release is out now. It’s about 4:30AM EST. The interesting Podcast is available now. Sorry in advance, please note the time of this post.

In this release there are several bug fixes, a completely refactored RHTML editor, a brand new CSS editor, more Ruby content assist templates and SQL content assist templates.

For those of you that are down on the version number, check out their roadmap, here. It looks like they have an aggressive schedule and are sticking to it quite nicely…

Ok… This is just… Brilliant. Incredibly simple, and amazingly profitable…

I wish I could get my brain to think like this…

Looks like I’m not the only one migrating over to Ruby…

From the site:

Ferret is a soon-to-be-high-performance, full-featured text search engine library written entirely in pure Ruby (with an optional C extension). It is a full port of the Apache Lucene Java project.

It looks like they still have a bit of work to do, but the fact this API even exists is pretty sweet. As I dig more and more into the Ruby/Rails community I find out that a lot of the Java API’s are being ported, and in a lot the cases are much simpler in the Ruby world, and have promises of running faster…

Currently Ferret is an order of magnitude slower than Apache Lucene which can be quite a pain at times. I have written some basic C extensions which you may or may not install when you install Ferret. These double the speed but still leave it a lot slower than the Java version. I have, however, ported the indexing part of Apache Lucene to C and it is an order of magnitude faster then the Java version. Once I’m pretty certain that the API of Ferret has settled and won’t be changing much, I’ll intergrate my C version. So expect to see Ferret running faster than Apache Lucene some time in the future. If you’d like to try cferret and test my claims, let me know (if you haven’t already found it in my subversion repository). It’s not currently portable and will probably only run on linux.

It can only help Rails gain more traction as more Java API’s start making their way over into the Ruby world… Plus they have a pretty sweet logo: