Twitter Suggestion – Open to Ideas?

Two very prominent people in the software development world were having a discussion on twitter.   The one was suggesting/joking that the other one said they promised to keep their political views to another twitter account.  The first replied in twitter that he had made no such promise.

I read these public messages and an idea popped in my head.  What if we could add a filter on our list.  We could add a filter tag such as #political and instead of seeing everything on that topic, it would filter everything out on that topic.  I suggested this seemingly good idea including the two who had given me this idea.

The response I got was unexpected.

@BillyGarnet #political How about using your eyes and mind to filter tweets. Or do we not even want to be exposed to different ideas?

Ironic message indeed since I was proposing a new idea…

Now from another very prominent person in the software development world.

@BillyGarnet What we need are more tools so people don’t have to listen to each other #sarcasmOff ow

I must be missing something here.  People are reacting like I just suggested drowning kittens is a good idea.

For the record, I love hearing all the personal, political, and non software related views I get from some people that I really admire.   But others say that they don’t so maybe we can have a tool that they can use.  Many people have limited time to do things.  They might not want to read about certain tags.

Here’s an example:  Blogger A loves to hear what Blogger B talks about.  However Blogger B is a huge soccer/football/whatever fan.  If blogger B was diligent about using hashtags like #soccer, Blogger A could implement the #soccer filter in his settings.  This would nicely remove all the #soccer posts showing up on his page.  Blogger C meanwhile, a big #soccer fan, could get all the wonderful tweets about #soccer coming from Blogger B.

There it is, my suggestion, with an example.

Please give me some feedback.  I would especially love to gain the understanding of what is so “wrong” with this.

Response to Tobias Mayer (IE)

Discussion started on Twitter, moved to http://bit.ly/12BV5Q

My response:

Hi Tobias,

Thank you for getting this discussion going.  I believe discussions help to improve things.
Here are my 2 cents in a larger then 140 char format:
a) A surprise for everyone, I use IE AND Firefox.  Firebug is a great tool.  If you don’t know what it is and your doing any CSS work, your missing out.  IE is integrated better for .Net work.  Yes, I know I can browse with Firefox but I find that IE has less hickups.  So I use both.  I think it raises my quality.
b) The different design models that Microsoft and Mozilla are following ensure that Firefox will be the winner, if not today, if not tomorrow, then the week after, imho, so this problem might go away.
c) As Ian Barber mentioned, many people are inside firewalls and only have IE6 at their disposal.  Two points to emphasize here: 1) IE6 is the real problem.  IE 7 and 8 don’t cause pain or waste “50% of life”.  2) Can / should we help these people.  Should they help themselves and demand an upgrade from their tech departments?
d) I build sites for certain audiences.  If the audience was Mozilla, I probably wouldn’t even test it in IE.  Sometimes my clients have been inside intranets using only IE6.  I have given them value sooner by only making the sites work in IE6.  Not so hard if it doesn’t have to work in Firefox as well.
e) You should be very concerned about accessibility.  Javascript is not so wonderful in this department.  Investigate screen readers and have people who have vision concerns (lots of the population) check your site.  Have someone over 60 look at your website.  Ok, I’m off subject a bit here but good things to know.

Important point is that I build sites for a target audience. I match my designs and compatibility to my target audience.  If there was a movement that caused all browsers to magically work the same, wow, that would save us all some grief, agreed.   But, that’s not reality.  What if I made a new browser that did lots of cool stuff but ignored standards totally.  Would I get some users, yeah if it was cool enough. We’ve seen this with Flash.  For those of you who have flash only please try browsing on a phone.  The thing is, different people (Microsoft, Mozilla, you and me, our clients, W3C and other standard bodies including government and corporate) all have different goals and objectives AND target audiences…so we view browsers differently.

Where does this leave us?  I don’t know.  You can find lots of friends for Microsoft bashing.  I recommend Java, Linux, and Apple forums to get started but I won’t join in.
Maybe you will get a movement started to get everyone to work a certain way.

My view is that this is a perception issue.

You have every right to restrict your site to certain audiences.  They have every right to not go to your site.  That’s it really.  Do you want them to visit?  Are you willing to do the extra work? Is it worth it?  Maybe, maybe not.

Lean Halloween

While checking Halloween candy I noticed that a small process was automatically created.  It was fascinating how many real world examples crept into this small five minute activity.  I have tried to highlight lean concepts such as ‘waiting’ with single quotes.

Here are the details:

Two kids, each with different size bags of different types of candy.

Specific checking rules (requirement tests):   No open packages, no gum, no tampering, no unrecognized candies, no unpackaged items.

Stage 1: Starting process:

Taking turns, candy was passed for me to run through my tests.  I would then hand it back to them if approved, otherwise it was put into the pile of doom (to be transferred to the garbage).

Starting observations:

Both kids had a pile of inventory to be sorted through

I seemed to be a ‘constraint’ (bottleneck) in the process since all the checking had to go through me.

My pile of doom was creating a new approved inventory pile.

Each child had to be trusted to put the approved candy in their new inventory pile.

(Note: Obviously we are not getting rid of all our inventory but Just-In-Time (JIT) delievery is a funny concept for Halloween.   Maybe my kids could visit one house a day for candy instead of all in one night. )

Stage 2: Process starts to evolve

Child 1 begins to presort all the candy (put all smarties boxes together), thinking this will help the process.  Great comparison to individual cells optimizing and not ‘seeing the whole’.  This presorting actually had me ‘waiting’ at times.

Child 2 was forced to ‘wait’ as I went through this large batch of candy instead of ‘one piece flow’.

Stage 3: Process Improvement / guided evolution

I begin dropping Child 1′s approved candy directly into his bag since it was right in front of me.  This removed some ‘waste’ since we reduced ‘movement’ in our process.

The rule of taking turns one at a time was dropped.   While waiting for Child 1 to create batches of candy, Child 2 was bringing one item at a time over and over again.  Since I was available to do more checking.

Stage 4: Process End

Child 2 ran out of candy to check.  His ‘inventory’ was less to begin with but he also seemed to have all his candy checked at a quicker rate by keeping to the process.

Child 1 had all his candy checked.

Pile of doom was moved to the garbage.

Stage 5: Lessons learned

The one candy at a time made sense to check since that was a limitation of the candy checking machine (me).  Presorting candy had no beneficial impact on the process except some entertainment value.  Reducing waste had an impact on the process.  It was difficult to speed up the checking process ‘value added activity’ so there was more benefit in removing waste from the process.

Have a look at repetitive activities that you do in your daily life and see if you can make them ‘leaner’.   I’d love to hear some stories on how others have optimized their everyday activities.