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Life lessons: the steer

Monday, April 15th, 2013

Our company’s culture and understanding of itself isn’t just determined by what we do within office walls. Sometimes something outside the office proves a perfect metaphor for something within the company or our industry.

For instance, Toby Robinson just bought a yearling Angus steer to put on his three acres of grass just outside of town. One morning, he dropped a note on our group chat:

By 10:10 AM, Isaac, Brendan, and Mark had joined Toby, fanning out into the hayfields and tree farms surrounding Toby’s place in search of the steer. A mud swath surrounded the adjoining hayfield, some 80 acres of steep Palouse hillside green with the new growth of Spring. Surely the steer had traversed this swath, leaving hoofprints, and had paused somewhere in the rolling green to snack on the tender young grass. Populi is a company of experienced hunters and animal husbandmen; we’d track down this errant animal in no time.

But after circumnavigating hundreds of acres that morning, we found nothing save for a fresh splatter of dung in a field. This 600-pound, sternum-height Angus steer had disappeared without a trace. No hoofprints in the mud. No lowing off in the trees. No torn turf where he’d paused for a bite to eat. Nothing. We reconvened at Toby’s house and shook our heads; our hapless QA guy called Animal Control and called his neighbors to advise them of the loose black steer. Our best guess was that he’d beelined south, back in the direction of the ranch from which Toby had bought him a few days before.

That evening we all received a text from Mark Ackerman:

Mark lives on the ridge up above Toby. Speaking with a neighbor after work he mentioned the steer and asked if she’d seen anything.

“No,” she said, “but someone called me earlier to ask if I’d lost a calf…”

The steer had wandered south and then west, traveling up and down the Palouse slopes and the fingers of the forested ridge before wandering onto a small farm some four miles away. Our entire search in the hayfields was focused in the wrong area; our notions of him beelining south were belied by his true course: due west. In short order the steer was returned to Toby’s pasture, and all was right on the farm.

This episode really reminded us of some of the bugs we’ve had to fix.

Most bugs are easy to find. “These credits aren’t adding up correctly.” “Oh, sorry about that, there was a bug in the calculation. Fixed it!” Others, however, ain’t. Permitting me to quote myself, here’s what’s involved sometimes:

One of our programmers—usually Patrick—simply reads through the code, line-by-line, to find what’s wrong. A few things to keep in mind about this job:

Computers and software are very literal; they require extremely precise instructions in order to work.

Bugs take several forms. The code might have a syntax problem, or is missing a statement, or has a slash where it should have a bracket (among a zillion other things).

Indeed, bugs are usually miniscule, but a tiny error is all it takes to transform a precise instruction into nonsense.***

Every part of Populi talks to other parts of Populi. And even those functions that aren’t directly connected are linked together like that Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon**** game from the late ’90′s. A bug in one place can affect a dozen other functions that rely on the broken function to do their own jobs.

Populi has about 361,000 lines of code.

Of course, knowing the nature of the problem narrows the needle-in-a-haystack odds in the bug hunt. For instance, if someone’s having trouble in Admissions, we know not to look at the Library codebase. Of course, given Populi’s intra-connectivity, sometimes we do need to look afield for the bug; a problem with Student Billing might trace back to an error in course enrollment, for example.

It’s those last ones—those bugs in course enrollment that cause unexpected things to happen in Student Billing—that make us feel like we’re tracking a steer through the Palouse hills. And sometimes it takes a chance mention from another user reporting a weird thing on, say, a transcript for us to figure out that the Billing bug actually stems from Academics.

Sometimes we think the bug is off to the south somewhere, when in fact it’s due west.

Tags: beef, bugs, software, the Palouse
Posted in Bloggable, Company culture | No Comments »

Legal language

Monday, February 18th, 2013

We recently announced some upcoming updates to our various legal documents. All in all, the revamped documents are a good step forward for us and our customers: they’re better organized and do a better job of defining some key terms and relationships.

But one thing we’re not crazy about with the new documents—or our outgoing Terms, for that matter—is the general tone of the language. Legal language, in its quest for absolute clarity, is wont to produce real mouthfuls. Dig this one from Section 4 of our Acceptable Use Policy:

“You hereby grant to Populi a non-exclusive, transferable, sublicenseable, worldwide, royalty-free license to use, copy, modify, create derivative works based upon, distribute, publicly display, publicly perform and distribute your User Content in connection with operating and providing the Services and Content to you and to the Customer where you are or were employed, engaged, enrolled, or applying to be enrolled.”

I don’t know about you, but my eyes start glazing over about six letters into the word “sublicenseable”—and I’m the guy they pay to read and (re)write stuff like this! But that’s the thing about legal language: it has to cover every possible situation. Without the above, a student could sue us for saving his course discussion comment so his professor could read it later. If that happened often enough, we’d have to just fold this thing up and go home.

So, the legal language is there to help us color inside the lines, and it’s there so you know exactly what the arrangement is. As the old saw goes, “Good fences make good neighbors.”

But… yeah, this stuff, frankly, is a solemn read, and its detail and precision can get in the way of you understanding what we’re trying to say. For that reason, we’ve included brief, plain-English summaries above each main section of the official documents.

Each section is prefaced by a “This means that…” blurb that elucidates the official text that follows. These aren’t legally-binding clauses of the policies; if you can think of the policies as fences, then think of these summaries as notes tied to the gateposts saying, “This fence means that that there is yours, and this over here is ours.”

For example, the summary of Section 4 of the AUP distills the above-quoted mouthful into this crisp little sentence: ”We make no claims of any kind to your Content, but you give us the right to make that Content useful to you and others at your school.” Much better, right?

We got this idea from some other web-based services, including 500px and Shopify. Evernote took a different approach but in the same spirit: it rewrote its Terms as a Q&A in plain-ish language. It’s a good notion. Legal language can be dense and intimidating, and while there’s some justification for it to be so, we nevertheless wanted to help de-mystify it a bit for our users.

Tags: Acceptable Use Policy, legal, terms of service
Posted in Bloggable, Company culture | No Comments »

Upcoming changes to our Terms of Service

Friday, February 15th, 2013

We’ll be making some changes to our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy soon, and in the interest of forthrightness and transparency, we wanted to let you know about them ahead of time. You can find them on this preview of our new legal page, where we will soon collect all four of our various official documents. Those documents include the Customer Terms of Service, Acceptable Use Policy, Privacy Policy, and Copyright Policy. The new Terms and Policies will go into effect on April 1, 2013 (and, noooo, this isn’t a prank…).

Before we get into the changes, we want to emphasize a couple fundamentals that are not changing—things that are basic to how we do business and serve our customers:

1. Your data is yours

And it always will be. Our business is simply to provide you with a tool to collect, store, manage, and use your information for the benefit of your school, staff, faculty, and students. And should you choose to move on to a different system, we give you the tools to easily take all your data with you. We won’t sell or otherwise traffic your information—our mission is to give you a safe, secure way to take care of it yourselves.

2. Pricing works the same way

We’re not doing anything new or different here. You’ll still pay a monthly base rate and per-student price, together with any extra file storage and SMS fees. These are all still plainly spelled out on our completely public pricing page. If we need to raise prices, we’ll still give you 90 days’ notice (we reserve the right to keep price drops a surprise!). And implementation, support, updates, etc., are all still included for free.

Okay. So what’s new?

Well, for one, all the wording is gonna be different. For the most part, though, it’s just a more precise way of saying the same things we were saying before.

That said, our current (soon-to-be-old) TOS had a few gray areas that we wanted to clarify:

Customers and users

First, we wanted to better distinguish between our customers and our users. Customers are the schools that do business with us (i.e., that send us payment every month). Users are the individuals authorized by those schools to make use of Populi—whether staff, faculty, students, or prospects.

Accordingly, we have now divided the Terms into two chief sections: the Customer Terms of Service (CTOS), and the Acceptable Use Policy (AUP). The CTOS defines the business relationship—what we provide with our service, the customer’s responsibilities for use and payment, how to set up an account and terminate use, and so on. The AUP defines the rights and responsibilities of users in relation to Populi—rights to content and data, restrictions on use (no hacking or illegal stuff), general responsibilities, and dispute resolution.

Pricing and payment

The only novel element in our new Pricing and Payment section is a change in nomenclature: we’re replacing “active student” with “billable student”. The problem we would run into is that “active” has a few potential meanings. It could mean “a person with an active Student role” or “a Student who is an active user“. Because our services’ definition of “active” is somewhat different from that of our Terms, our customers sometimes assumed the wrong meaning.

So, for clarity’s sake, we felt that the students we actually charge you for deserved a unique term, one that isn’t used anywhere else in Populi: they are now called billable students. Everything else, however, remains the same: billable students are students enrolled in or auditing one or more courses for seven or more calendar days in a given month. Nothing sneaky, no sleight of hand here: we’re just changing a word so everyone understands our pricing better.

User-generated content and data

As Populi has developed since the adoption of our Terms of Service some years back, user-generated content has assumed an even greater role than it has before. And given the swirl of concerns regarding copyrights, distribution, piracy, privacy, and so on, we needed to make sure we A) did a better job of defining user content, B) clarified your ownership and rights over it, and C) sought all the proper releases from you to make it available to you via our service. Again, nothing substantial is changing here: you can still use Populi to store, manage, and distribute (within the rights granted to you by any copyright holders) data, files, audio, video, documents, etc.—but now the legal fencing around this part of the service has received a fresh coat of paint and new hinges on the gates.

Dispute resolution

Our outgoing TOS implicitly assumed that any disputes between us and a user or customer would be handled via civil litigation. But the thing about litigation is that it’s a very public, time-consuming, and expensive process that can prove incredibly destructive to entities with limited resources—not just us, but also our customers. Our incoming AUP specifies that disputes that come to that point will be handled in arbitration, which is private, less expensive, and swifter than dragging things into the courts. Of course, we hope it never gets to that point with any of our users or customers! But should things go south, we feel this is the best way to enter into a formal dispute both for you and for us.

Revamped Privacy Policy

We also refreshed our Privacy Policy. Just as with our TOS, nothing substantive changed:

Your data is still yours
We still take every reasonable measure to protect it and back it up (unfortunately, we cannot guarantee the absolute security of any information)
You can volunteer personal information confident that we will never sell it or otherwise share it
For purposes of customer service, system maintenance, diagnostics, usage patterns, and marketing (i.e. taglines like Now serving over 20,000 students!) we may use non-identifying aspects of your information in aggregate form
We share some information with third-parties so they can perform services on our behalf (such as credit card processing)

It’s pretty standard stuff, really, but now it’s better-organized and explains our policy with greater clarity than before.

The heart of the matter

Think of this as an overhaul of the user interface of the TOS. Yes, some things have moved, some things look totally new, but the substance is the same.

Again, the new policies are slated to go in effect as of April 1, 2013. Before that time, we may make minor tweaks to some of the wording, but we don’t anticipate anything major.

And, of course, we welcome your questions and comments.

Tags: authorized use policy, copyright policy, legal, privacy policy, site redesign, terms of service, users
Posted in Bloggable, Company culture | No Comments »

Selling

Monday, November 26th, 2012

Selling is what selling sells/The lonely saints of the seven avenues/Could sell the seven hells!
—The Clash, “Car Jamming”

“The key to economic prosperity is the organized creation of dissatisfaction… If everyone were satisfied no one would want to buy the new thing.”

Thus wrote Charles Kettering, inventor and ersatz philosopher, in 1929. Kettering spent a goodly chunk of his professional life in the employ of General Motors as head of research; his work spanned a number of disciplines, including marketing. To American businesses, it was a potent, irresistible thought: if people are satisfied, they won’t buy our things… so we’ll just make them dissatisfied with what they have. This thought molted into consumer-focused advertising, now so familiar to us that we don’t notice how pervasive and intrusive and habit-shaping it is. Some words from William Cavanaugh really get at it:

In fact, most contemporary marketing is based not on providing information but on associating products with evocative images and themes not directly related to the product itself. Non-commodifiable goods such as self-esteem, love, sex, friendship, and success are associated with products that bear little or no relation to these goods. The desire for these goods is intensified by calling into question the acceptability of the consumer, what General Motors’ research division—in a reference to changing car models each year—once called “the organized creation of dissatisfaction.”

Products are sold to solve problems; Kettering’s genius was to locate the problem in the person, rather than in the material situation. If the problem is that you don’t have a car, any car (or even a city bus pass) will take care of you. But if the problem is your self image, your independence, your virility… well, this year’s model has a bigger, throatier, more emotionally-fulfilling engine than that old thing you’re driving, fella. This psychology bruntly manifests itself in the housewife hectored by her sister-in-law because of spots on her dishes; it is more subtly and appealingly deployed by Apple, the single most effective creator of dissatisfaction ever.

This is simply the way marketing is done now: aim the pitch not at the need but rather at that psychological pressure point, that emotional vulnerability, that underlying hunger that motivates all other actions. It’s used on individual consumers, and it’s also used on institutions. Higher education institutions have particular desires, insecurities, and goals that motivate them, and software is nowadays pitched as the panacea to nearly every problem—including these deeper issues.

As evidence, we proffer marketing quotes from a variety of education software companies. Read them, and ask yourself what they’re really selling:

Prestige and hipness

Relevance and community

Institutional identity and uniqueness

All of these products solve certain problems for schools and educators—they track data, keep records, pull reports, handle grading, email donors, and so on. But look at where the copy actually tries to make contact with you. All of these quotes leap from saying some form of “this product does that” to “we’ll make your school everything you wish it could be”. “We build software that lets you… be a leader… change learning… be complex and unique… be the answer to all your students’ questions…” and so on.

And just like what’s promised you by that emotionally-fulfilling muscle car engine, those results are something a software program simply cannot deliver.

Populi is a tech company that serves higher education and solves particular problems for small colleges. But one of our fundamental beliefs is that technology cannot even begin to replace institutional vision, competent and committed faculty and staff, and most of all, meaningful communication with students. World-changing leadership, depth of community, institutional pride, and whatever else is implicitly promised in the above copy—these things take decades to develop, decades during which one year’s Latest Technology will inevitably fossilize into next year’s antiquated dinosaur.

Hopefully, then, our own marketing copy holds up to that belief. We try to stick to this basic story: Populi exists, it does these things, you get it for this much, so wanna try it out? In a lot of places, we have to strike a balance between describing the functions it performs and the more intangible elements—ease of use, visual design, and so on—that invite bloviated copywriting. Here and there we promise things like, “a more usable and accessible dataset that will do more for your college“: we should perhaps soften that to, “…that can do more for your school…”.

Our yardstick for our own writing: if there’s anywhere in our copy redolent of Charles Kettering, we want it gone.

Populi handles critical operations for a school, and our customers depend on us to make sure a lot of essential things happen. In view of that relationship, we simply can’t afford to over-promise regarding what we do. Matters of prestige, community, relevance, identity—software can help, but it can’t make it happen. If you don’t like where your school is at, Populi might help with your change of course. But it isn’t that change of course itself.

Tags: advertising, Apple, Charles Kettering, sales, writing
Posted in Company culture, Sales | No Comments »

What does Twitter do?

Thursday, April 12th, 2012

Let’s ask a few questions about Twitter and figure out what this company is up to.

What is Twitter?

To hear them tell it, it’s “a real-time information network that connects you to the latest stories, ideas, opinions and news [sic] about what you find interesting.” The you in this case is the Twitter user. A user signs up with an email address, figures out a unique username, maybe enters some personal information, and finds other Twitter accounts to follow. Then he starts tweeting and telling the world about what he’s into.

What makes Twitter go?

Money. Duh. However, Twitter doesn’t charge its users for its service—one which spans 20 countries and supports 140 million active users and 340 million tweets per day. What’s keeping the lights on?

Venture capital, thus far to the tune of 1,160,000,000.00 green American dollars ^[1]. Venture capital (VC) is a form of private equity that’s invested in young, untested, high-risk companies in return for a share of ownership and, presumably, an out-of-proportion payday in the form of an eventual “liquidity event”. A considerable portion of software startups receive VC funding in multiple rounds; that is, when the money from early investors runs out, new investors refill the tank. Popular, free services are especially likely to go this route because scaling something to the size of Twitter while also not charging for it creates certain cash flow problems ^[2].

The solutions to such cash flow problems are the aforementioned liquidity events: the IPO, in which the company’s shares are offered and sold to the public; additional VC rounds where earlier investors sell their ownership to later investors; the acquisition, in which the company is sold to another company and the investors’ shares become cash or equity in the purchasing company; or profitability, in which the company’s assets finally become a viable, ongoing business.

What assets can Twitter turn into a business?

Any number of things can be turned into a viable business, but the long and the short of it is that you need a product that you can sell to customers for more than that product cost you to make it.

Let’s review a second: VC-backed software companies usually need VC money because their product is free and they have no way to support their growth. But the investors are getting into it because there’s a fat payday in there somewhere. How do you make fat payday kinda money from software that doesn’t charge its users?

You could start charging those users for your product.
You could add new stuff to your product and charge for a premium service.
You could start selling ads.

Good luck charging for your previously-free product. If you want to charge users, you’d better do so right out of the gate. Adding new levels to your existing free product stands a better chance, but those paid customers still have to pay for themselves and all the free users; that’s a tough price point to hit.

Then there’s advertising. Web-based or digital advertising, worldwide, is an $85 billion concern; some $25 billion of that is spent in the U.S. alone. ^[3] That’s just about too good to pass up if you’re a software company that needs a way to convert all your users into a solution to your cash flow problem. Of course, in that size a market, there’s a lot of competition. You need some compelling features to set your product apart from the rest.

For Twitter, that compelling feature is the frictionless broadcast of interests and information within Twitter’s vast ecosystem and their ability to analyze it, target it, and predict what you’ll do. The product, of course, is your attention and all that stuff they’ve learned about you when you voluntarily shared it with them.

In a word, you are the asset they’re turning into a business.

How does Twitter sell their product?

Twitter’s customers are advertisers, or brands. An advertiser is a company that buys a shot at your attention so you’ll buy their stuff. A brand might only be one part of a company that buys a shot at your attention so you’ll buy their stuff. Since advertiser is kind of a dirty, untrustworthy word, companies like Twitter favor the word brand. Accordingly, I’ve coined the ungainly portmanteau brandvertiser to highlight the just, you know, cosmic importance of that distinction.

Twitter hawks three different angles on their product to brandvertisers: Promoted Tweets, Promoted Trends, and Promoted Accounts.

Promoted Accounts let a brandvertiser hire Twitter to help them get more followers—so when the brandvertiser tweets about something, more people will be there to read about it. Twitter does its mightiest to match brandvertiser accounts to people likely to follow them. If you tweet a stream of bile and vitriol against restaurants that serve cheesecake, Twitter will probably not promote @Cheesecake to you; on the other hand, if you tweet incessantly about kitty cats, you’ll probably be hearing from @FancyFeast.

Promoted Tweets are tweets a brandvertiser pays to have injected into user timelines and searches. If you search on Twitter for “tomato cages” and The Cheesecake Factory has paid for the word “Tomato”, their Promoted Tweet will show up at the top of your search. If you or people you know follow @Cheesecake, it might even pin itself up in your own timeline.

Promoted Trends let a brandvertiser buy a slot among the top Trends. “These trends are featured prominently next to a user’s timeline,” says Twitter, which means that a Promoted Trend buys a prime little piece of screen real estate. When you click on a Trend, you see a stream of tweets relating to that trend; when a brandvertiser buys a Promoted Trend, the aim is to jumpstart a “conversation” (hopefully favorable to you!) on Twitter and thereby build up awareness and followers.

These three things are different angles on their very compelling ability to target relevant ads at users based on their analysis of everything you’ve revealed about yourself. You’ve tweeted about a show you liked. You’ve tweeted what you’re listening to. You’ve tweeted about lunch. You’ve tweeted about purchases. You’ve tweeted about things you want. You’ve tweeted pictures. You’ve tweeted responses. You’ve retweeted stuff others tweeted. You’ve tweeted about trends. You’ve linked it to Facebook. You’ve linked to your blog. You’ve favorited tweets. And even if you haven’t done any of that, you’ve still followed others who have. Twitter has some pretty solid information about what you’re into and what you’re up to. So when a brandvertiser sidles up to Twitter’s stall in the giant advertising marketplace, Twitter promises not just your likes and interests, but also some credible predictions about your behavior.

The end result is, hopefully, user engagement, which looks something like this.

In the 1980′s, Nike figured out how to get you to pay them for a t-shirt with their logo on it, turning you into a walking billboard for their company and products. Twitter’s aiming at the same thing: to have you let them fill your timeline—the digital expression of you—with messages from brandvertisers.

So, what is Twitter?

Twitter is actually an advertising company that sells what it collects from you to companies that want you to buy their stuff.

Advertising? So?

Advertising is nothing new. Mass media—newspapers, magazines, radio, television, and the like—subsist on advertising dollars, and always have. Advertisers have always sought out the best ways to target their ads, and so media companies have poured considerable resources into figuring out who’s consuming the content they produce. Print publications had some limited information about their readership—where they lived, political leanings, rough income estimates. Radio and television figured out what kind of people were tuning in and when—housewives during daytime, kids in the afternoon, dads around suppertime, the whole family during primetime, parents at late night, weirdos at 2 AM. Of course, this data was somewhat piecemeal, being largely inferred from Nielsen samplings and general demographic studies. It was also completely anonymous.

Early internet advertising was a lightly re-imagined version of broadcast advertising until the rise of social networks facilitated two developments in the ’00′s. One, data collection grew in scope and sophistication as these sites made “sharing” features available to their users, who could now tell their friends (and volunteer to the watchers) a minutely-detailed view of their location, interests, politics, income, time, and behavior. Two, social networks facilitated the collection of heretofore completely elusive data: relationships, social interactions, and real-time behavior (“Likes” on Facebook, for instance). Now there was hard data on something called “engagement”, and advertising companies started selling that.

Despite those advances in collection and targeting, those 25 billion semolians are chasing an incredibly diverted, desensitized, and uninterested sea of eyeballs. In the early days of web advertising, clickthrough rates—the percentage of times an ad was clicked relative to how many times it was shown—wobbled between five and seven percent. Clickthrough rates now do well to hit 0.3%. In an environment like that, it’s one thing to plop an ad in front of 30 million pairs of eyes and quite another to credibly promise that 4% of that 30 million will click it and do something to engage with it.

What’s not to like about the advertising business model?

Ads are unwelcome, ugly, and noisy. And there are some deeper, interlocking concerns.

There’s what they have on you. The information collected about audiences by newspapers, radio, and TV was necessarily anonymous—they simply didn’t have the technology or the means to get specific data about specific people. The product they sold to advertisers was aggregated into market segments and not connected to individuals. The information websites collect about us, on the other hand, is not anonymous—it is anonymized. That is, you give them your name and other identifying information ^[4], volunteer your interests and other delicious information to them… and they sell everything but your name to the brandvertisers. They, of course, still have your name on it all.

So?

There’s what they gotta do with that information. In capitalist ^[5] systems, the one demand of shareholders, markets, and other faceless abstractions is… ever-increasing profits. That demand forces advertising-dependent companies to wring more marketable assets from their users at ever-decreasing costs. One way to do that is evolve the service to encourage you to give them more data about yourself ^[6]. Another way is to sell access to the data in new ways. Other avenues have surely been contemplated but not tried.

Whatever the case, whatever money Twitter is making off of you now needs to increase by… a lot. They’re in the hole by $1.6 billion of invested capital, or about $11.50 per user. They’ve spent a bunch of money filling up their warehouse with product. And now they have to move some of that “engagement”—or something else—out the door.

There’s the issue of long-term sustainability. You’re giving them something valuable—valuable to advertisers, of course, but also valuable to you: thoughts, pictures, correspondence, videos, jokes, laments, and so on. But you’re not providing them with the valuable green things that keep them running. In terms of a business relationship, ad-dependent companies have no obligation to you—to your interests, your content, your privacy… for that matter, they’re not even required to stay in business.

Some words from Maciej Cegłowski that get at it perfectly:

People upload photos, videos, email, and all kinds of valuable personal information to websites large and small on the assumption that someone there will take appropriate technical measures to safeguard their stuff.

Most of those websites don’t get their revenue from users. Instead, they rely on some form of advertising, or on investor money they receive in return for telling a credible story about future advertising…

…the real problem with this triangular model is that it gives users no visibility into or control over the relationship that ultimately pays for their long-term data storage. If the advertising market collapses, or if storage costs rise unexpectedly, the site might give them little warning before going belly-up…

…the most common way we store important data online right now has shaky foundations.

Beneath it all, there’s a contemptible idea of what “social” means. Sites like Twitter and Facebook think of themselves as social media, as reflections of your real life community, as a way to deepen, extend, and re-establish connections with family and friends, and so on. But the point of all that activity—sharing, following, friending, connecting—is to funnel it to brandvertisers that want to sell you something. Your social life, in other words, has no intrinsic value except as a commodity, like crude oil or soybeans.

It doesn’t paint a pretty picture—the stores of data they have on you, the unrealistic expectation that it should yield expanding profits, and the brittle trust between the user and service.

Twitter’s not the only one.

The Twitter story is hardly unique to Twitter itself. This is the basic outline of every site that gives stuff away to attract users, takes on investors to keep going and growing, finds itself needing to convert all those users into revenue, and so turns to advertising to keep investors happy. Google and Facebook did or are doing the same thing. Lots of other popular, free services find themselves somewhere on this same rickety rollercoaster.

There are three options:

Get comfortable with these free services. After all, it is pretty easy to be part of the unengaged 99.7%—for now. Who knows what kind of revenue hoses they’ll have to screw on to the spigot later.
Pay for what you use. Lots of companies charge for software that helps you work. But almost no one charges for the bread-and-circus stuff that Twitter and Facebook traffic in. At this time, that’s a challenge.
Read a book. Tell your friend about it over supper. Have a conversation with him.

All three options require this one thing: that your eyes be open to what’s going on.

[sic] Serial commas forever.

1 Via Crunchbase.

2 Via the Pinboard Blog.

3 Figures extrapolated from the estimates at WPP.

4 Identifying information includes things like email addresses.

5 Whatever that means anymore.

6 See the ridiculous Google Glass concept video for this notion taken to an extreme.

Tags: advertising, Business, Facebook, Twitter, venture capital
Posted in Bloggable, Company culture | No Comments »

Killing bugs

Monday, March 12th, 2012

Every field bears thorns and thistles. A good farmer makes sure that they don’t proliferate and ruin the crop. For that matter, every profession has its own thistles, its own bunch of ankle-biting thorns lurking in the wheat and the corn. For us here at Populi, those are software bugs, errors in the code we’ve written that cause functional problems for our users. So an important part of our job here is finding them and killing them.

Software bugs get their name from the days of computing yore* when a modest computer filled a room with hardware—lockers, tubes, relays, engineers, switches—that moved information from Point A to Point B. “Bugs” in the system were just that: little creatures that got in the works and prevented the physical passage of electrical impulses from one locker or tube to another, thereby preventing the computer from working properly. Troubleshooting those problems had to be, I dunno, just a ton of fun.

Having built Populi without using lockers, tubes, and the like, our extermination system is much less arduous. We start with software testing, or, as it’s called in the biz, “Quality Assurance”. When our developers deploy code in our local development environment, it’s kicked over to our QA crew—Toby and (more informally) Brendan and Isaac. These three run the new feature or function through its paces to determine a few things:

Does it work as intended?
Does it even work in the first place?
Does it break anything else?

We ask other questions during the QA process,** but these three are key. If the QA guys find that the code or feature fails on one of these points, they send it back to the developer who authored it and tell them where to spray for pests. The respective teams repeat this process until the code or feature works. Only then do we release it.

Once we release, our users subject our code to a different kind of testing—that of everyday use in a live environment with all of its attendant surprises and unexpected side-roads. And if something’s not working, they let us know.

The first thing we do in our bug hunt is verify whether there’s a bug at all. Sometimes the user’s workflow has gotten something out of order. Sometimes another user has changed or deleted something the first user was looking for. And sometimes we discover that everything’s working fine, but we don’t currently accommodate a particular “edge case” that the user needs Populi to handle. If it’s the first problem a little garden-variety training is in order; if the second, we update the feature to handle the “edge case”.

But if the user’s problem turns out to be neither of the above, it’s time to start digging through the code to see what grubs and creepy-crawlies we discover.

The digging is the part that’s most like the old days of checking each switch, tube, and locker for moths. One of our programmers—usually Patrick—simply reads through the code, line-by-line, to find what’s wrong. A few things to keep in mind about this job:

Computers and software are very literal; they require extremely precise instructions in order to work.
Bugs take several forms. The code might have a syntax problem, or is missing a statement, or has a slash where it should have a bracket (among a zillion other things).
Indeed, bugs are usually miniscule, but a tiny error is all it takes to transform a precise instruction into nonsense.***
Every part of Populi talks to other parts of Populi. And even those functions that aren’t directly connected are linked together like that Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon**** game from the late ’90′s. A bug in one place can affect a dozen other functions that rely on the broken function to do their own jobs.
Populi has about 361,000 lines of code.

Of course, knowing the nature of the problem narrows the needle-in-a-haystack odds in the bug hunt. For instance, if someone’s having trouble in Admissions, we know not to look at the Library codebase. Of course, given Populi’s intra-connectivity, sometimes we do need to look afield for the bug; a problem with Student Billing might trace back to an error in course enrollment, for example.

Whatever the case, a review of the code turns up one or more culprits, at which point we take the next steps—polishing the code, running it through our QA battery, and then finally releasing it to our live servers.

Fixing bugs can be very time-consuming, but we’re laser-focused on it. We know that the only thing worse than us having to find a bug is having a bug prevent you from getting your work done. For us, bug-killing isn’t an abstract matter of “we’ll-get-to-that-someday” software development. It’s a matter of active, responsive, “get-it-done-yesterday” customer support.

*Yeah, I know, this is over-simplified.

**Especially the question: does it work in Internet Explorer? That browser is a real turkey sometimes.

***We recently found an error that consisted of one wrong character. Easiest fix ever!

****Isaac Grauke once met Kevin Bacon; therefore, there is only one degree of separation between any given Populi feature and the man himself.

Tags: Brendan, bugs, customer support, development, Isaac, Patrick, Quality Assurance, Toby
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Populi Inc. releases idiotic press release

Friday, February 24th, 2012

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

February 24, 2012

Populi Inc. of Moscow, Idaho, announced this morning that users have successfully sent over 181 emails to their email dropboxes, a new record for the company. Populi, makers of the industry-leading Populi College Management System©®™, released the award-winning email dropboxing feature on February 20th to wide acclaim in today’s competitive environment.

“We’re incredibly pleased at the response of our users to the new email dropboxing feature in the Populi College Management System©®™,” said James Hill, Chief Technical Officer of the award-winning Populi company that makes robust, computer-y software solutions for today’s leading-edge colleges. “In just four or five short days, they have sent 182 emails to their email dropboxes, allowing them to post emails to any person’s Activity Feed©®™ using any email client including such popular programs and/or internet websites like Outlook, Apple Mail, Thunderbird, Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo Mail, Juno, MapQuest, and many others. And these numbers have nowhere to go but up.”

“We’re pleased as a pig in punch in a poke at how our customers have responded to this new feature,” added Hill, who then also added, “Really, growth like this is unprecedented. Really, really unprecedented and robust.”

Populi CEO Isaac Grauke said, “The amazingly incredible thing is that Populi included this brand-new email dropboxing feature at no extra cost to current customers of the Populi College Management System©®™. Even better, it’s easy for future customers to take advantage of the completely popular feature—all they need to do is sign up for Populi. It’s a powerfully robust, industry-leading, best-of-breed, fruit-forward, tailor-made solution to the challenges today’s colleges in the sub-1000-student market segment are facing. The future’s the limit here.”

Populi Inc. is the world’s most-beloved maker of web-based solutions for higher education college management in the sub-1000-student market segment with its Populi College Management System©®™. Founded in Fall of 2007, Populi Inc. is dedicated to helping colleges in the sub-1000-student market segment more fully leverage their implementations and maximize industry-leading synergies.

This press release contains confidential information and is intended only for the individual named. If you are not the named addressee you should not disseminate, distribute or copy this press release. Please notify the sender immediately by press release if you have received this press release by mistake and delete this press release from your system.

Press release transmission cannot be guaranteed to be secure or error-free as information could be intercepted, corrupted, lost, destroyed, arrive late or incomplete, or contain viruses. The sender therefore does not accept liability for any errors or omissions in the contents of this press release, which arise as a result of press release transmission. If verification is required please request a hard-copy version from Populi, Inc. 1336 Alturas Drive, Moscow, ID 83843.

No employee or agent is authorized to conclude any binding agreement on behalf of Populi Inc. with another party by press release without express written confirmation by the Executive Director. Populi Inc. accepts no liability for the content of this press release, or for the consequences of any actions taken on the basis of the information provided, unless that information is subsequently confirmed in writing. It may also be privileged or otherwise protected by work product immunity or other legal rules. Please note that any views or opinions presented in this press release are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of the company.

Tags: dropboxing, funny
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Oppose SOPA and PIPA

Monday, January 16th, 2012

On Tuesday, January 24th, the U.S. Senate is slated to vote on the Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA). Together with its counterpart bill in the House of Representatives, the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA)*, it seeks to curtail online bootlegging from overseas websites via several means:

It gives the U.S. government the power to force internet service providers to block access sites that traffic in bootlegged (or, in the words of the bill’s proponents, pirated) content.
The government could also sue search engines and other websites to prevent them from linking to such sites.
U.S. credit card companies and advertisers would be required to cancel their accounts with those sites so as to cut off their sources of funding.
It prescribes jail sentences for users who post copyrighted works or links to infringing sites.

We here at Populi oppose these two bills for a number of reasons. Our chief concerns:

They extend considerable powers to the U.S. government to shut down sites that the beneficiary corporations consider “infringing”.
They allow corporations to sue the owners of such “infringing” sites.
The bills are draconian: the government could block sites like Facebook and Twitter if just one user posted just one link to an infringing site.
The smallest infraction runs afoul of the bill’s harshest measures.
Perhaps worst of all: the bills destabilize the Domain Name System (DNS), one of the key methods used to make the internet secure and at all trustworthy.

This video explains what’s at stake…

We care about the internet—it lets us serve our customers and earn a living, after all—and PIPA and SOPA are foolish, short-sighted pieces of legislation that will do great harm to it.

Read more about these bills at the Electronic Frontier Foundation and americancensorship.org and contact your Senators to encourage them to oppose PIPA.

* SOPA was shelved on January 16th, which means that the House won’t vote on it. It is currently very wounded, but not dead.

Posted in Company culture, Security | No Comments »

What Populi doesn’t replace

Friday, November 11th, 2011

Somewhere in some book some place is a line that goes something like, “Education consists of a wise and caring teacher, a humble and curious student, and a log for the both of them to sit on.”*

It’s a bit mawkish, but there’s still something to it. In education, you need someone willing to share their understanding. You need someone who wants what’s being shared. And you need something to hold them up, to free them from other labors so one may give and the other receive.

In this phrase’s economy, Populi is the log—rather, it’s just part of the log.** And whatever their marketing language might claim, every other software vendor out there also sells nothing more than log parts. If a company promises to unlock unlimited possibilities to unshackle teachers and students and take education beyond any place it’s ever gone before—or some similar bloviation—well, there’s a pithy barnyard phrase for that.

It’s up to the teacher to care and speak. It’s up to the student to listen and do. And the log? Its job is to be sat upon. Log-part vendors like us have a duty to make the log comfy, to shear it of pointy branches, and free it of ants and beetles. Nothing more. If the log starts putting on airs about how it’s part of the conversation or how it frees education from the constraints of sitting, it’s getting outside of its core competencies. If a teacher is unwilling to teach or a student is unwilling to learn, no amount of technological gee-whizzery is gonna overcome that fundamental failure of communication.

Populi is, as we’ve mentioned before, in the business of replacing software. Put another way, we’re made to help the log do its job: to help your people free up teachers and students to pursue what matters.

* At this writer’s first college, phrases like this were as common as blue in the sky.

** Other log parts include: buildings, staff, administration, budgets, infrastructure, donors, and so on—all of these exist to free up teachers to teach and students to learn.

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Dig in

Tuesday, August 2nd, 2011

We originally built Populi to help a local college replace what small schools typically have to settle for: a creaky old system with Word and Excel tacked on to plug the holes. Since then, lots of other schools have signed on, most of which left another system to get going with us. One way to look at us is as a business that replaces other software.

And if we’ve learned anything from replacing software, it’s that software (like any tool) creates habits in its users—especially software that makes you do too much work. These “habits” aren’t limited to individual users, either: sometimes, entire schools shape policies and institutional workflows around the limits of what their old system could do. Policies and workflows that Populi probably transgresses.

Some of this is because Populi obviates the need for these old policies and workflows. In other cases, it gives you a round hole where your old software made you use square pegs. And other times, Populi introduces the “proper” way to do things where previously you had to just kinda, y’know, wing it.

Whatever the case, we’ve found that Populi can disrupt how a college runs itself. Online registration might do away with your enrollment process for incoming freshmen. Your approach to billing could differ from what we intended with tuition schedules. That old “submit grades” spreadsheet just ain’t the same as our gradebook. Bookstore just might be the first real inventory system you’ve used. And so on…

Populi just isn’t what you’re currently using, and it’s probably gonna rub up against how you’re used to running things. So, our exhortation to prospective customers: during the sales process, just dig in!

We’ll even give you the shovels…

Nick and Joseph will do as many live demos as you need.
We’re liberal with logins to our demo site—which has the same codebase as our customers’ sites and the same access to our help desk. Get your faculty and staff to try it out, too.
Ask lots of questions. Ask about the big stuff (“What do you mean by Accounting?”), the seemingly-little stuff (“What does the course catalog mean by ‘credits’?”), the technically-arcane stuff (“What’s your approach to server replication and redundancy?”)—and everything in between.
Nick and Joseph will answer as many phone calls as you can dial and as many emails as you can type. And if you ever stump them, they’ll find someone else here who can help. We want you to be well-informed.

Dig in! Beyond finding out what Populi does (or does better, or does different), you’ll get a sense of where your school has been formed by your current software—and where Populi might hit your pressure points. Of course, we trust that Populi will do a better job for your school than whatever you’re using now—in everything from the software to the security to the support. But we simply want you to make the best decision you possibly can, and that includes knowing about the potential sticking points.

Posted in Bloggable, Company culture, Sales | No Comments »