Photo by Auchinoon

My old roommate Dave taught me snowboarding, and one thing he said stuck with me: "If you don’t fall down at least once every day, you’re not pushing yourself hard enough". (He also comforted me with the claim that "chicks dig scars" after I impaled my leg on a fencepost on my first day out.) One of the things I’ve found liberating here in the US compared to England is that it’s possible to fail without being labeled as a failure. On that topic Bob Sutton has a post on why "Am I a success or a failure?" is the wrong question to ask.

I’ve never been through the death-throes of a startup, but Visual Sciences, a games startup I worked at for four years, collapsed in a painful bankruptcy throwing a lot of good friends out of work. Andrew Hyde laments the sense of shame that still comes when you’re involved in a failed business, and like me wishes there were more post-mortems out there to help us all learn. Nick Napp, founder of the promising Disruptor Monkey, has taken that up that challenge with a post explaining what happened to the company. It’s tough because it’s an emotionally charged topic, and there’s always details that have to remain private, but he’s done a great job covering what he’s learnt. Now I guess it’s up to me to pick one of my own professional failures and return the favor.

I’ve looked at a lot of ways to create graphs dynamically on the web. PHP/SWF charts are fantastic if you want a beautiful results, a lot of options, and interactivity, but they require flash, which both limits the platforms that can use them, and can result in slower loading. For better compatibility, you need something that generates images on the fly.

I’d investigated using jpgraph, but the results looked really ugly and it takes up precious cycles on your own server. Then I discovered a free Google web service that generates images on the fly for you, the Charts API. The pictures above are examples of the high-quality results it produces, with clean fonts, nice 3D and most importantly antialiasing. The API is incredibly simple to use, you just pass in the data and options as parameters to the URL. You don’t even need to register or get a key. Here’s the URLs for the two images:

http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?cht=p3&chs=480×200&chd=s:Hellob&chl=May|June|July|August|September|October http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?cht=lc&chd=s:pqokeYONOMEBAKPOQVTXZdecaZcglprqxuux393ztpoonkeggjp&chco=676767&chls=4.0,3.0,0.0&chs=480×200&chxt=x,y&chxl=0:|1|2|3|4|5|1:|0|50|100&chf=c,lg,90,76A4FB,0.5,ffffff,0|bg,s,EFEFEF

While it’s easy to get started with this style, it does have some downsides. Since the data is encoded as part of the URL, there’s a hard limit on how many points you can have since some systems choke on URLs over 2000 characters long. The API also doesn’t support as many styles or options as PHP/SWF, and no animations is possible.

Despite those disclaimers, this is an amazing tool, and I’ll be having a lot of fun with it. One of my favorite features is the map graph type, which lets you easily specify just colors and states or countries, and it generates an image showing that on a simple map. It would be insanely easy to create some geographic data visualizations using it if you’ve got interesting data. Here’s an example of the results:

http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?chco=f5f5f5,edf0d4,6c9642,365e24,13390a&chd=s:fSGBDQBQBBAGABCBDAKLCDGFCLBBEBBEPASDKJBDD9BHHEAACAC&chf=bg,s,eaf7fe&chtm=usa&chld=NYPATNWVNVNJNHVAHIVTNMNCNDNELASDDCDEFLWAKSWIORKYMEOHIAIDCTWYUTINILAKTXCOMDMAALMOMNCAOKMIGAAZMTMSSCRIAR&chs=440×220&cht=t

Photo by kkelly2007

I’m a fan of plain English all the time, everywhere. I had to rewrite my undergraduate thesis to use the passive voice ("the experiment was performed") after I submitted a first person narrative ("I performed the experiment"). When I needed a privacy policy, I was pleasantly surprised to find that it didn’t have to be in legalese. In fact, it’s hard to find any hard instructions on exactly what you do need in there. California law requires that you have one if you collect any personal information, but only gives a general idea of what you need to explain.

Most privacy policies are organised as a series of questions, with the answers spelling out what you collect, how you use it and who else sees it. SafeSelling has a comprehensive article on privacy with a section halfway down the page titled "What should my privacy policy include?" that covers the sections you’ll need. I love starting with a template, and ended up basing my policy on this example from the Better Business Bureau.

As I mentioned, I was impressed by how readable most policies are, even for big companies like Google. They don’t have much legal force yet in the US. I wonder if they’ll be drowned in latinate obscurity if they end up in court more often?

Photo by Dr John 2005

There’s a strong bias in the web community towards openness. We all know information wants to be free, and we apply that to our daily lives through wikis, blogs, twittering. We’re very comfortable publishing content that’s available to the whole world.

Most people don’t behave like this. My parents worry about people knowing they’re away on vacation in case the house gets burgled, they go out of their way to make sure someone takes the mail in. Some engineers I’ve worked with hoard information like gold, afraid that if they give too much away they’ve lost their own value. Most parties require an invitation from the host, and to avoid giving offense you probably won’t tell anyone about it if they’re not on the list.

Email has a fine-grained, laborious but very powerful mechanism for controlling who sees any information. You specify exactly who it goes to. Others can forward it, but at least that requires an explicit action and leaves a trail.

Things start to get really interesting once you add circles of trust. JP Rangaswami opens up his mailbox to all his direct reports, but not to the rest of BT. Only my friends on Facebook can see that I’ve just turned 20 in hexadecimal.

Email is the biggest private silo of information by far. I’d be happy to share 75% of my mailbox with everybody I know, but there’s no way to do that, yet. But I’d only be willing to open up any of it if there was some way to be certain that the items I needed to be private really were sacrosanct.  The key to opening up email will be making sure there’s a simple and understandable way to keep secrets. Once we do that, we can take the next leap forward in email by liberating all of the information that’s currently gathering dust in everyone’s inboxes.

I’ve been a fan of CoolIris’s work since they started over two years ago. I ran across them because their first product was the eponymous browser extension that let you view live, in-context previews of web pages by hovering over the links on certain pages. This was in the same area as my GoogleHotKeys and SearchMash projects, where I was trying to find a better interface to search results than the standard text listing.

Since then they’ve kept innovating and experimenting with new approaches to interacting with web content, and PicLens has been a break-out success. It’s also a browser extension, but gives you a full-screen interface to a lot of popular image-based sites like Flickr, YouTube. The images or movies are shown in an infinite 3D wall that you use a gesture-like interface to fly up and down, and zoom into. Initially what draws you in is the gorgeous rendering, with subtle but classy effects like the reflections, and smooth animation and transitions. What keeps you using it is the interface, it’s like the next generation of channel surfing. After using it for a while, going back to the traditional model of a static page with embedded 2D images or movies feels very awkward and slow.

This week I was fortunate enough to spend a few hours with the CoolIris team, who I’d never met before. They were a lovely bunch of people, and had an inspiring story. The initial team spent two years self-funding all of their work, running up big credit card bills and working without a salary. Recently they closed a Series A together with Kleiner Perkins and now they’re running full steam ahead on some very interesting developments that I could tell you about, but then I’d have to kill you.

They’re on the lookout for good engineers, particularly people with experience of writing 3D engines for games or similar graphics applications, and anyone who’s been thinking about really innovative interfaces. Contact kathy at cooliris dot com if you’re interested in talking to them about this.