2009 was a rough year for me. I was unsatisfied and unsettled at my job with the State and I kept trying, musing and dreaming of a day I could move on and start my own web business. I felt prepared, I had saved some money, I had work waiting for me.

But I couldn’t seem to make the leap.

Starting in October 2009, almost exactly two years ago, I put Steve Jobs’ Stanford University commencement address audio on my iPhone. You’ve probably heard it, but if not, you can read a transcript. If you haven’t seen it, the video is nice. It’s about 15 minutes long.

Every morning when I parked my car, I’d grab my iPhone, one of the first devices I ever truly felt an emotional attachment to, and popped in my earbuds and would start listening to Steve. As I walked the half mile to the office, often in the dark and bitter cold, I’d listen to Steve.
My walk every morning was exactly 15 minutes. The moment I’d sit down in my desk is the moment his talk was over.

Every morning until the latter part of November was spent listening to Steve:

When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: “If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you’ll most certainly be right.” It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?” And whenever the answer has been “No” for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

In November 2009, when I was 22 years old, I drafted my resignation letter to an organization I had spent nearly four years working for. I even noted parts of Steve’s talk in my letter.

The letter sat on my desk for a couple more days. And both days I listened to Steve’s speech, walking in the dark and the cold to a small box of an office to do a job I wasn’t willing to do anymore. Sometimes I’d even listen to it on the walk back to the car in the afternoon.

Two days later, I came into the office, having just finished listening to Steve again for the 30th-plus time. I took my letter, signed it, copied it and put it in the inboxes of my bosses.

“I’ve gotta stay hungry. I’ve gotta stay foolish.” “I have to take some risks.”

Leaving my stable, salaried, benefit-toting job was the best decision of my life, so far.

Now, I’ve been listening to that speech again on an increasing basis over the last few weeks. As silly as it sounds, I feel like Steve’s somehow talking directly to me. Not unlike how religious people feel about God (except, you know, Steve was actually there).

I’m preparing for the next phase. I’m trying to stay hungry and foolish.

Thanks, Steve.

I’ve been pretty quiet lately. I’ve been busy as of late, working this year at X-Mester again and working with my good friend Tony on our re:build web conference coming up at the end of July. There’s a lot going on.

So, it seems like the perfect time to start another project!

While I was away at X-Mester, I was getting up at 6 AM, maintaining client work, teaching and supervising students and going to bed around midnight. There wasn’t a lot of time for much of anything else. So I got behind in the news of the tech world, something I follow very closely. I’m a news junkie that way.

It made me realize how much most things just do not matter. The endless stream of Facebook posts about nothing, Twitter posts that seem out of context to everyone but that person and all the news stories that happened in my industry that were of such little quality.

I wanted a website where I can go to and find out all the important stuff really, really fast that’s well designed and with no distractions. I’ve always wanted something like that even when I’m at the office during the day working. I can easily spend a whole afternoon in RSS Hell reading story after story. Most of them aren’t really worth it. Have you ever read a blog post that changed your life? No, of course not.

So that’s why I’m soft-launching SlowNews.me. A site that’s run by me where I’ll post all the big stuff, the stuff that matters. For now, I’m getting into the swing of things, so posting may be off my self-imposed deadline of twice daily (by 6 am and lunch).

No more wading through posts about endless Apple rumors (“A 24 inch iPad by next week!”) or endless dribble about some new phone (“The Nokia N93522914 is coming soon!!1!!1″) or posts about how to upgrade your browser to the latest version of Chrome. I don’t need that and neither do you. Those sites post stories for the sake of posting. Listening to podcasts is too time consuming and using Twitter for news is fine if you want to organize a bunch of lists to keep all the power-users from dominating your stream. I’m posting for the sake of sanity.

It’s tech news at the speed of productivity for developers, designers, tech lovers and users. It’s time to get back to work.

Check it out at www.slownews.me. You can learn more about the site at www.slownews.me/about.

Everyone’s got an idea on whether Apple will make a TV or not. John Gruber says no, Marco Arment says no, Chris Dixon says yes, Neven Mrgan says maybe.

If you think everything is converging, Apple’s Cinema Display line is approaching and exceeding small television sets. So I can see how Apple might have the factories available to manufacture a true Apple TV.

Most pundits look at whether or not Apple thinks there’s a market or a some other economic reason for building a product. I don’t think that’s true. If Apple cared about the market, Safari would be going toe-to-toe with Chrome on features and functionality. If Apple cared about the market, they’d be much more aggressive trying to get Macs on everyone’s desks instead of PCs. If Apple cared about the market, they would have set a much higher goal for the iPhone than just 1%.

I’m sure whether a market exists or not factors into their decisions on products, sure, but they don’t start there and build a product. They start by identifying what sucks and then identifying the market potential.

Apple thought IBM computers sucked, so they built the Mac. Apple thought Internet Explorer sucked, so they built Safari. Apple thought notebooks sucked so they built the iBook. Apple thought keyboard and mouses sucked, so they made their own (hold your “the mouse still sucked” jokes for later). Apple thought routers sucked so they built Airport. This can go on and on with iPods, software like iMovie and iPhoto and more.

There’s one product that I think Apple will base their approach on: The Apple Hi-Fi. Remember that thing? Apple thought stereos sucked so they built one to use an iPod instead of a radio, CD or cassette. There were plenty of third-party stereos with iPod docks on the market, but Apple evidently thought they sucked. I can imagine Steve Jobs wanted to listen to his music in a room and he probably cringed at having to stick his beautifully crafted iPod into an alarm clock/AM, FM radio/CD player/white noise machine/flashlight thing.

I think the TV is the same. Apple’s curated this wonderful content into iTunes and they wanted a beautiful way of sharing it with a person’s living room TV and rather than build their own glass box, they went with the comparatively ugly TV screens that abound and made what is now the Apple TV. They learned their lesson from the Apple Hi-Fi and I don’t see them making the same mistake over again with TVs. People sometimes have more than one stereo in the house and they don’t upgrade it every year. The same goes for TVs.

Steve Jobs has said the Mac is the center of your media universe. That’s not likely to change despite most people claiming the TV is the center of their media universe. Apple’s where they want to be: your Mac is the center of the universe and you control everything in iTunes from there. Apple TV, iPads, iPods and iPhones are arms of that. They just happen to be able to access the same content.

While I don’t doubt that Steve probably cringes every time people fire up iTunes in their Apple TV on their boxy Sony Trinitron, Apple’s created the ecosystem they’ve said they wanted. I suspect they’ll stay there and focus their attention someplace else. Personally, I hope to see them put some pressure on cable companies by getting everyone to think differently about the content they watch and purchase.

Whoa boy:

A Buckinghamshire computer software company is looking to recruit female web coders who are prepared to work naked.

Nude House, where staff work as nature intended in a “warm and private” naturist office environment in Amersham, also wants naked male and female sales staff.

…

Mr Taylor admitted that a naturist office offers “no benefit to business productivity other than providing a nice facility for the staff”.

There’s no benefit for customers, either, since they’ll “never know that the provider is nude”.

I sit around most of my day in my robe. Does that count?

Facebook is dead. The spam has won.

I’ve been using Facebook for nearly 7 years now and I cringe to think how much time I’ve wasted on it, but I don’t think it’s been that much compared to a lot of other people. I use Facebook like this:

1. Login
2. Look at the recent status updates
3. Maybe make a few comments
4. View photos if they look interesting

I’ve enjoyed Facebook for years because it’s seemingly removed the need for a high school reunion. I know what everyone’s up to, who does what and so on. I don’t follow much family on Facebook, but I can see how that’d be nice, too.

Lately, things have started to change. Facebook, like any other company, can’t just say, “Well, that’s perfect. Let’s just maintain this now and not innovate anymore.” Could you imagine if Henry Ford thought the Model T was “just perfect” and left it at that? What if Microsoft stopped at Windows ME? Companies and people can’t just get to a point and stop. That’s how societies stagnate and crumble.

The trick, however, is innovating and growing in a mature, sensible way with purposeful iteration.

Facebook grew out of the .edu-only years and started enabling everyone with anything to say a place to say it. They innovated quickly, pushed changes at people very quickly and without warning. A slew of privacy issues has come of it, too. Under pressure from Twitter, Gowalla, FourSquare and others, they’ve added real-time status updates, check-ins, chat, email, photo sharing and they’ve monetized by putting ads in front of people that are creepily more targeted than Google’s famed AdWords.

Facebook is the new AOL, trying to be everything to everyone and in the process is becoming nothing to no one. Here’s what I see right now as I log into Facebook:

With all due respect to the original authors, the first two posts are effectively ads. The third post is about a music video I don’t care about or like. The rest are seemingly mundane posts that I either don’t understand or have no affinity to. The last post is a check-in from someone I went to high school with. I’m sure they’re having a fine time, but I don’t know where that is or why I should care. It’s one thing to check in from the White House, Grand Canyon, Times Square or the Space Station. It’s another to post that you’re at some random bar. The events are always pointless to me because everyone invites me to everything from a birthday party to a meetup to a political event. Has anyone ever looked at their Facebook wall and thought, “Hey, I want to do that, too!” or “I’m there, too! Let’s meet!”

In my mind, Facebook is the ultra-social site that combines the one-off services from other providers. Check-ins from FourSquare or Gowalla, statuses from Twitter, photos from Flickr, video from YouTube and so on. It’s becoming a bit much.

I’ve taken the time to at least try to curate my friends list. I know many individuals who have blocked me on Facebook, mostly old high school classmates. That’s fine because we didn’t have that much in common anyway. But now I find that Facebook is becoming “User Streamed Spam”. I guess I do it, too, with blog post links and the sort. But I do try to curate my posts as best I can. I respect people’s viewing experience on Facebook. Most people do not and post whatever pops in their mind.

Twitter, for me, is a better experience. I’ve carefully selected who I do and don’t want to follow, which admittedly, doesn’t happen as much on Facebook. On Facebook, I tend to hide a lot of people. Usually people who I met once somewhere and now they know me from some event I hosted. I’ve unlinked my Twitter and Facebook account in an attempt to refocus status updates to both targets differently at times. And, I’ve un-followed people on Twitter because I follow them on Facebook (or vice-versa) and I got tired of seeing the same thing. That became very cumbersome. Now, Facebook has removed the ability to hide apps on your wall, too. It’s almost as if they’re forcing me to see everyone’s horoscope.

Maybe I’m an old fuddy-duddy, but I don’t like Facebook anymore. It isn’t fun, social or unique like it used to be. While I admit to using Facebook to blurt out some things I’m hosting, I try not to do it a lot. And, I actually do take the time to think about clever things to post on Facebook. No one cares about my dinner, I get that, and I don’t post about it. Heck, I don’t even care about  my dinner. I also try not to repost the same old things that have spread around the web time and time again.

The new polling feature is the death nail for me. I answered a question once, out of boredom, and lo, it re-posted to my feed with no way for me to know or delete it. I spammed people with some dumb question and didn’t even know it. I don’t care whether you like Pepsi or Coke enough to want to see it on my wall at 2:30 in the afternoon.

And, as an aside, on two occassions this week I’ve posted comments on two different people’s Facebook statuses. One, for instance, claimed that Obama moved his State of the Union Speech to accomodate Dancing with the Stars. That’s sorta true, if it weren’t for the fact that the State of the Union happens in January. I mentioned a correction that the speech was about Libya. A few minutes later, that post was deleted. How dare facts make it on to the Internet. On another occasion, someone removed a post because, I guess, they don’t like me. That’s fine, but it makes for a bad experience. That’s probably why Facebook doesn’t have a “Dislike” button. Everyone would get mad at everyone and just leave.

I’ll be leaving Facebook alone for a while and spending more time among the people and content I care more about over at Twitter. You can follow me @jlharter (or @justifystudios or @refreshindy or @rebuildconf). But unlike Facebook where it seems rude not to befriend a person when you both know you know each other, Twitter doesn’t have that culture so don’t expect me to automatically follow you back. It reminds me more of the early Facebook. I ‘like’ that.

Jared Newman:

…some high-profile sites, such as TechCrunch, have switched over the new [comment] system, which is run entirely by [Facebook]. This requires commenters to write under their real names, provided they aren’t using an alias on Facebook, and by default displays the comment on the user’s wall and friends’ news feeds.

Not surprisingly, the switch had a chilling effect on TechCrunch, according to MG Siegler. Although the venomous remarks that once dominated the site’s peanut gallery are gone, in their place are “comments that gush about the subject of the article in an overly sycophantic way,” Siegler writes. There are also fewer comments overall.

It’s hard to care about the people who post some of the most vitriol, hateful, homophobic, racist and downright disgusting comments anonymously on the Internet. I don’t doubt that for some people it makes life difficult. The guy who works at a crappy job but has to stay there for some reason and can’t even make thoughtful posts on a website, for instance.

But, the utilitarian response here is difficult to ignore: more manageable and thoughtful comments. We can all use a bit more thoughtfulness these days.

Because I’m impressed by Apple’s uncanny ability to take songs and incorporate them so beautifully into their commercials and videos, I always try to identify the songs. I seldom like the songs enough outside the video to listen to them over and over, but I figured out what they were.

From the new iPad 2 video with interviews of  Jony Ive, Michael Tchao, Scott Forstall and Bob Mansfield:  ”Dog Days are Over” by Florence and the Machine.

The iPad 2 Smart Cover video features  an instrumental version of “Extraordinary Machine” by Fiona Apple. It’s also very heavily and cleverly edited together.

I picked up a copy of Guy Kawaski’s “Reality Check” the other day. I was surprised by how big it was at nearly 500 pages. It reads almost like a bible for small businesses, entrepreneurs, salesmen and anyone that needs to benefit from marketing.

I expected it to take forever to get through, but I actually got through it in about a week. The line height in the text is pretty high, so the number of words per page was pretty small.

I’m glad it was, too, because it allowed for easy skimming in parts. I don’t sell tangible products, so I wasn’t so interested in messing with that. Nor do I hire employees or have to fire them and other administrative stuff, so I skipped a few of those chapters.

The text was remarkably well written and it read almost like a blog post. It was easy to pickup, read a little and come back to later to read some more. I can’t say I picked up a lot from the book that I didn’t already know from reading other books, which is why I call it something of a bible. Take this advice:

If you’ve never read another marketing / sales / startup book before, don’t bother. Just read Reality Check and it’ll cover and say everything every other book has said (or tried to say).

One part that did stick out to me that I bookmarked was chapter 82, “Ten or so things to learn at school”. The advice was spot on and it stuck out to me because no school teaches this stuff:

1. How to talk to your boss
2. How to survive a meeting
3. How to run a meeting
4. How to figure out anything on your own
5. How to negotiate
6. How to make small talk
7. How to explain something in 30 seconds
8. How to write a one page report
9. How to write a five sentence email
10. How to get along with co-workers
11. How to use PowerPoint (or Keynote)
12. How to leave a voicemail

Personally, I think the more people knew about numbers 9 and 11, the better off the world would be. I’ve designed PowerPoint presentations for people before, I actually kinda like doing it, too. You get to frame someone else’s talk and ensure they don’t bore people with a bunch of bullets in dozens and dozens of slides.

A great book, well worth the time to read it either by skimming or from cover to cover. It has interviews, experiences and a directness that’s well worth it. Plus, it’s only $10 for Kindles.

I’ve made a breakthrough in determining what the best kind of client is: it’s those getting a website redesign.

I’ve had two clients recently fall off the face of the earth because they were starting a business fresh and needed a website. I had another person call me from Muncie, Indiana the other day claiming he had invented a new detachable sound-proof wall. He sounded almost desperate in his plea for a website and only offered 40% of his profits. Sorry, but I can’t pay my light bill with hopes and dreams.

I’m sympathetic to that, sure, but people looking to start a business often have two problems:

1. They’re really tied up in a lot of nitty details and everything is extremely important to them.
2. They have no money, so if the site doesn’t magically make a million dollars overnight, it’s (somehow) my fault.

For some reason, people know that when they start a business, like a restaurant, they’ll have staff costs, they have to buy plates, food, glasses, silverware, tables, etc. Just because your business is going to operate mostly or completely online doesn’t mean you won’t have costs. Don’t think that because a business is online that it’ll be free or super cheap.

The best clients are those looking for a website redesign. They already have an established website that, while not good or just outdated, they’re not happy with it for some reason. So, now I know what not to do. Generally, it’s because the prior developer flew the coop and they’re sitting ducks.

Redesigning a website for a business usually means they have some cash flow, they can afford it and won’t be haggling over how to get a website for $200 and they have an understanding of their market – something new businesses and startups don’t have.

Redesigning a website is also easier because we can use the existing content as a guide and can tweak it accordingly since we’ll have a better idea of what works and what doesn’t. The most satisfied and best clients I’ve worked with are usually people redesigning a site. If only I could find a way to work solely as a “website flipper”, I’d leap at the opportunity.

Let’s face it, sometimes, in some professions, it’s easier to just lie than it is to try and explain something. If lawyers faced even a handful of the questions web designers faced, they’d be asked to explain the law and how their clients can represent themselves all the time.

It’s frustrating, because for example, you’d never hire a painter to paint your house, then ask him to show you how to do it yourself.

That’s why web designers have to bend reality sometimes because it’s almost necessary. If you asked a web designer to make your website have fireworks go off in the background, they’re likely to lie and say, “Oh, that isn’t really possible anymore. Future browsers don’t support that.” It’s a complete lie, but a good one because for some reason, in this business, trying to explain why it’s a bad idea to have fireworks flashing all over your web pages’ background just doesn’t register with a lot of people.

The point here is simple: if you’ve hired a true professional, listen to their advice. Don’t shrug it off and claim you know better because you don’t. Why else would you have hired the professional?