After Andy Baio co-founded and sold social events listing site Upcoming.org to Yahoo! he could have spent the rest of his days doing whatever he wanted. He spent a year and a half writing, but this month he decided to join another startup (Kickstarter.com), because he loves building social software.

Baio is a thinker, a hacker of big social patterns and an admirer of the collective intelligence that emerges from groups of people acting independently on the web. We sat down with him this week and discussed some of his ideas about what makes good social software grow.

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In addition to Upcoming, Baio is also well known for his quirky, smart writing and link sharing at Waxy.org. His best known works there include tracking piracy data for Oscar nominated films for the past six years, the first published interview with an Italian factory worker who mysteriously produced the most-viewed video of all 2008 on YouTube and a number of fascinating experiments with Amazon’s Mechanical Turk system, including one titled The Faces of Mechanical Turk - he payed Turk workers a small sum to post their pictures with a sign saying why they participated.

After years of experience, observation and thought, here are a few pearls of wisdom Andy offered us about how to build compelling social software. You can also follow Baio on Twitter @waxpancake.

Build to Existing Social Connections

The company Baio has joined is called Kickstarter. It’s a service that lets people fund small projects by collecting “all or nothing” pledges from people around web - if a project’s financial goal is met by its deadline then the money is collected, but if the goal isn’t met then no one’s contribution is withdrawn. The site will open to the public at the end of August, but one principle that he’s had underlined by his experience with beta testers and from his time at Upcoming is this: you can’t just post a request for funds or an events listing up on the web and expect strangers to stumble upon it and give it support. In both cases, these sites provided infrastructure that allowed users to reach out through their own established networks and say “here’s where we’re processing your show of support.”

It’s like social middle-ware, these kinds of services are neither inherently viral nor really destination sites where people come to browse. They add value in ways that people can’t easily produce themselves - RSVP lists, maps, etc in the case of Upcoming or time-delayed money processing in the case of Kickstarter - and thus give users an incentive to reach out and ask friends to visit their pages on the sites.

Social Goals Are Front and Back End Heavy

Kickstarter’s early beta tests mirror what Baio saw at Upcoming when it comes to distribution of social input. It tends to come in the most at the very beginning and at the very end. At first, project initiators are enthusiastic and do a lot of promotion. Then, if they later get close to their goals then they do a final push to promote their project. That’s especially true with Kickstarter, where 90% of a fund raising goal is as good as nothing at all - users will lose all the support they’ve gained unless they put out another push to pass 100%

Baio says that he’s looked at the numbers and found that the two biggest factors in project success at Kickstarter appear to be offering rewards if the goal is met and sending out regular updates to supporters of a project.

The Kickstarter crew isn’t creating content themselves, they are creating software for other people to create content. “One thing I found out over the last year,” Baio told us, “is that writing doesn’t scale. When you code, it takes on a life of its own. I ignored Upcoming for a year after my son was born and it kept growing. I did not write a line of code in a year and it got more popular.”

That too seems intuitive, but building software in a way that makes it easy to offer rewards, prompts people to send out regular updates and helps them create good content for themselves on your site could be the difference between a good idea and a successful one. That’s true for both the particular projects on Kickstarter and the site itself.

Games Are Good - But Make Sure Users’ Goals Align With the Site’s

Baio is a big fan of games. He likes iPhone games (his favorites include ZenBound, Eliss and Edge), he likes retro 8-bit style games and he likes the prospect of bringing game-like elements into non-gaming environments.

As a part of that thinking, Baio believes it’s important to make sure that users’ interests on a site align with the interests of the site itself. On Kickstarter, “success depends,” he says, “on your ability to promote your work.” And thus to promote the site as well.

The risk here is that a game-like system of rewards can change the way people behave in ways that aren’t helpful. “Yahoo Answers, for example,” Andy says, “got the point system totally wrong. They tuned it for traffic instead of for quality. People get points for offering any answer at all to questions, so you’ve got all these people just entering one word answers to loads of questions so they can climb the leader board.”

Successful examples? Baio pointed to the UK Guardian’s MP Expenses experiment, where readers are crowdsourcing analysis of hundreds of thousands of expense reports filed by members of Parliament and finding some pretty funny claims. That’s similar to the Sunlight Foundation’s Transparency Corps. (Check out that project’s latest - a crowdsourced national directory of state-level elected officials on Twitter - cool!)

In systems like that, and especially in Baio’s much-studied favorite Mechanical Turk, users “have full control over their choice of tasks. They turn work into a little bit of play.”

Build to existing social connections, maintain engagement during the quiet spells in the middle of goal pursuit and make it like a game - but be careful how people play. That’s some of Andy Baio’s advice. You can begin to see it in action at Kickstarter.com. That site’s full functionality will open to the public at the end of August.

Top photo by Jeremy Keith on Flickr.

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Boomi is a platform for on-demand integration of software as a service. Until recently, all their tools for migrating and manipulating data from SaaS applications were self-service: you built a custom pipeline from point A to point B every time.

Now, business users with little-to-no coding ability can create connections between their favorite apps with Boomi Widgets that are pre-built. Speed and ease of integration is a major concern for SaaS use in the enterprise, and these widgets show great potential for streamlining that process.

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The regular version of Boomi supports a full range of standard business software, from Quickbooks to Oracle Database and SAP ERP. Boomi’s widgets are basically browser-based GUI controllers for how information is ported from a SaaS application and either another software as a service or an on-premise solution. They make it easy for anyone with a little knowledge about how tables work to integrate enterprise software platforms and create a pipeline of information that is extensible.

Any Boomi customer can create one of these widgets from their integrations that already exist, and this should save businesses the time and energy usually invested in creating the same integrations over and over again.

Boomi also says that soon anyone will be able to create and sell a widget on their platform with a significant revenue share. However, it looks like currently only the Salesforce.com and Netsuite connections have been widgetized and offered on the site. Unless Boomi picks up the pace and gets a wider array of them out on the market, this isn’t going to create any kind of significant marketplace.

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In Part 1, we described the three big waves crashing down on the traditional book publishing business: Google Search, the Kindle and e-books, and print on demand. In Part 2, we indulged in some science fiction, envisioning the future of the major players in book publishing: readers, authors, printers, publishers, retailers, and e-book device vendors. In Part 3, we’ll dig into one very specific business practice: returnability (a.k.a. “the curse of unsold inventory”). Some thinking outside the box on this 70-year-old business practice could possibly help an industry in turmoil. Unless e-books simply replace all physical books (which seems highly unlikely), some radical changes will need to be made to the physical book supply chain.

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Bruce Batchelor: POD Pioneer and Returnability Crusader

We outlined the practice of “returnability” in Part 1, but it took a pioneer in print on demand (POD) from Canada to help us see the scale of the issue. Bruce Batchelor is a successful publisher and author. Back in 1995, he created the world’s first POD publishing service, Trafford Publishing, which was recently acquired by US competitor Author Solutions, Inc.

So he knows this game from the inside. Through some emails exchanged with him, we began to see that eliminating this business practice was critical. Eliminating it may seem radical and impossible to book industry veterans who have never known an alternative. But change may now be feasible: necessity is often the mother of invention.

Further down, we’ll look at new technology that could change the supply chain even more radically.

The Problem

Bruce describes the problem very well on his site. There, you’ll find a 7-minute YouTube video for people who need the basics. Those in the book industry already know this, but for outsiders, here are the basics:

• Publisher says to retailer, “Here are some books. If you don’t sell them, we’ll take them back.”
• According to Bruce, “Returns (and eventual shredding) reportedly run between 40% and 80%.” That is massive waste.
• How can publishers afford this? By charging the retailer more. In most other markets, retailers get 50% off the retail price. For books, they get 40% off.

Bruce’s mission is to get publishers to change this 70-year-old practice (it started in the Depression of the 1930s). That would save publishers a ton of money.

What About Retailers?

Our question to Bruce was, “Nice idea for publishers, not having to deal with returns. But retailers are already struggling. How will they survive if they have to deal with this added risk of inventory?”

Bruce told us:

“The answer is to give the retailers a deeper discount [which he explains in his video and on his website]. If retailers now get 40% and are barely surviving, think how much better off they would be getting 50% off. That’s a 10% (of gross sales) reduction in expenses and would go directly to the bottom line.

“The sad truth is that small booksellers already order carefully and are not rewarded for doing so. It is the chains that grossly over-order, according to every publisher I’ve ever talked to. And the chains are already getting 50% to 65%(!) off simply by bullying the publishers. So, the smaller stores are subsidizing the wanton waste of the chains“.

Retailers do pay higher prices, then. They pay to return books, and that cost is significant. It is not a free lunch for them, and it is a disaster for publishers.

Without this practice, what would happen? There would be inventory sales and discounts: i.e. the normal functioning of free markets.

What Other Industry Has this Practice?

Music retailing engages in returnability as well, and that industry seems to be doing just fi… er, nevermind.

If Trees Could Vote

Trees would vote to change this business practice. This is an ecological disaster. If consumers knew the environmental cost of those stacked shelves, they might change their behavior. Yes, it would accelerate the trend to e-books and many would see that as a positive, but it would also cause terrible hardship to all who work in the industry and would deprive people the inexpensive pleasure of the good old-fashioned book.

Can technology deliver a solution that totally eliminates waste from the physical book supply chain?

Is the Espresso Book Machine the Answer?

We are all techies here at ReadWriteWeb, so we tend to look for answers in technology. In Part 2 we described something we thought was science fiction:

“We can even imagine digital printers setting up shop in the back of coffee shop/bookstores.”

What we thought was science fiction is already a reality called the Espresso Book Machine. It is POD in the retail store. You order something that you can’t find on the shelves and, 20 minutes later, voila: a freshly minted book!

Ah, the wonders of technology. We love this stuff. Because Bruce is a pioneer in POD, we had to ask:

“Do you think something like the Espresso Book Machine is a part of the solution? Could it really remove the costs, risks, and inventory from the supply chain?

“Or is that a techie’s pipe dream?”

Bruce responded:

“A decade ago, a small company called Sprout.com tried to introduce similar devices to bookstores. They even managed to get Borders to buy into the concept and install one machine. But the enterprise died because of many factors that are still around today. The machines work only for some formats of books: no color or oversized books, no hardcover or coil bindings, a lot of dust, fumes, and production issues, and s-l-o-w. Lack of demand is the real kicker. No one seems to want these out-of-print books very much.

“So, my answer is no, I don’t think Espresso machines will make a significant difference to the situation.”

We would take issue with his response. He is on a mission, and it is a good one, so he is probably smart to stay on message and not get sidetracked by this technological wonder. He talks of retailer POD as being only for out-of-print books. But there is no reason this could not work just as well for the latest blockbuster. If retailer POD became widespread, we would get an Amazon-like long tail for physical books at the retail level. That would eventually change both author and reader behavior.

Perhaps 20 minutes is too long to wait for a book in our rushed ADD world? My advice, of course, would be to “Chill out, dude!” But there are times when 20 minutes might really be too long; say, when you are rushing to catch a flight. But mobile devices could help with that. You could browse the catalog on your mobile device while waiting in line to pass security, order the book, and then pick it up as you head for the gate.

We are also likely at an early stage with this technology. These devices may be comparable to the IBM mainframes of the 1960s: amazing that they work at all.

This is a potentially big market for printer companies. It is hard to imagine HP, Canon, and Xerox not wanting a piece of this action.

The two approaches (eliminating returnability and retail POD) are complementary, not competitive. They are two approaches to a supply chain problem that is really hurting the industry. Whoever holds the inventory carries the old curse of “May you have much inventory on you!”

Eliminating returnability could trigger faster adoption of retail POD. Knowing that retail POD is feasible might make retailers more willing to accept the change in practice.

Just-in-time manufacturing worked for Dell in the PC industry, and book printing is a bit simpler.

Part 4 Returns to Regularly Scheduled Programming

We had planned for this Part 3 to focus on the author’s point of view. We got diverted down the supply chain. Tune in to next week’s thrilling installment to find out how our starving genius who hacks away at a typewriter in the attic might be able to prosper in this new world…

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It might not have a Gmail gadget and an iPhone app, but reminder service Task.fm is a good alternative to popular productivity tool Remember The Milk.

If you don’t need all the other bells and whistles, Task.fm is a good choice. The user experience is clean and simple, and the reminders by email, phone or SMS work like a charm. This week it added contacts and groups, yet another strong basic feature integrated into its simple reminder service.

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Twitter-like Tasks

Task.fm doesn’t have nearly as long a feature checklist as Remember The Milk, but it compares well to other vendors in this space. The newest addition to Task.fm is a simple yet important aspect: contacts and groups that can be CC’d to a reminder through email.

Its core user experience is well-designed, and has an input system that shows strong hints of Twitter. Though there’s an advanced version with other options, the default way to add a reminder is through a 140 character message typed out in natural language. Task.fm converts that automatically to a name, date, and other information.

Phone Reminders

The real strength of the service is in its reminder system. Adding email or mobile notifications means Task.fm beats a bare bones todo-list like Gmail Tasks hands down. Along with email and SMS reminders that come free, paid accounts get phone reminders as well.

So far as we can tell, the only thing really holding back Task.fm is that at $10/month, its price point is higher than RTM or some other services, which can go as low as $25/year. However, the fact that RTM doesn’t seem to have phone reminders as either a free or paid option may be what you’re paying extra for. Either way, anyone hunting for a new way to manage tasks should definitely take a peek at Task.fm.

WebJunction is gearing up for an August focus on Technology Policies and we’d like to hear from you first. To understand how libraries develop, update and communicate technology policies we would like to invite you to complete a short survey. The short survey asks questions about:

• What sorts of technology policies you’ve developed and why?
• Who’s involved in the review, creation or updating of your policies?
• Which factors prompt you to update your policies?

We will share the results of the survey later in August and will address some of the key issues in an August 26 webinar. Thank you for taking the time to help share a current understanding of library technology policies!

View survey results »

Washington, D.C. Code{4}lib (http://www.code4lib.org/) fosters community and shares information among those interested in the intersection of libraries, technology, and the future. The Maryland and Washington, D.C. area code{4}lib group is hosting a joint meeting (http://wiki.code4lib.org/index.php/MDC) with the DC Fedora Users Group on Aug. 5, 2009 from 9:00 a.m. - 4:30 p.m. at the National Agricultural Library.

Morning sessions will include overviews from Fedora users reporting on what they are working. Afternoon sessions will offer more technical discussions about specific aspects of using Fedora Commons Repository software.  Presentations may be 20-30 minutes covering topics such as choosing Fedora, a description of your project, implementation issues, etc.  NASA Goddard will give an overview of its project.

Please contact Mitzi Cole if you are interested in attending and/or presenting Mitzi.M.Cole@nasa.gov.

12seconds.tv, an online video service that lets users upload short video clips, just announced its new iPhone application. While the first 12seconds app could only send still pictures and audio, this new version can finally also send real video from the new iPhone 3GS to 12seconds’ online service. To post a video, users of 12cast (iTunes link) simply record a new video in the app (no longer than 12 seconds), give it a title, and hit the send button. In addition, users can also send any pre-recorded videos right from their library to 12seconds.

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Note: This story was embargoed until 10am Pacific, but as usual, the app still hasn’t gone live in the store. This is becoming standard procedure these days and Apple is doing a disservice to both the developers and the press by not giving developers a clearer idea about when a new application will actually appear in the store.

Update (5:30pm): the app is now available in the App Store.

Earlier this year, 12seconds announced tighter integration with Twitter and this app clearly shows this. Once you have uploaded your video, a message will be posted to your Twitter feed.

One nice aspect of the app is that it is extremely easy to use. You just tilt the iPhone sideways and the recorder automatically opens. After recording a video, you can play it, retake it, or delete it.

In a future update, 12seconds also plans to integrate Facebook Connect. This will give users the ability to share video on both Twitter and Facebook. The company also plans to release a few more iPhone 3GS apps in the near future.

A number of other Twitter video services like TwitVid already offer iPhone apps (iTunes link). 12seconds, however, is one of the largest players in this space - especially now that Seesmic has decided to shift its focus away from its video service.

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Google’s vision for Google Books obviously goes far beyond the controversial Google Book Search settlement with the Authors Guild and the AAP. The Google Books settlement mostly dealt with the past and out-of-print books. In a talk at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View last night, however, Google Books’ engineering director Dan Clancy laid out a clearer vision of the company’s plans for Google Books for the first time. Among other things, the company hopes to create its own electronic bookstore for in-print books. In Google’s vision, publishers would partner with the company and offer all of their books through Google and through traditional retailers.

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Google’s eBook Store in the Cloud

In his remarks, Clancy stressed that he doesn’t believe that brick and mortar book retailers will die anytime soon. He did, however, argue that book retailers will have to adapt to the changing environment and start to offer digital copies of books in addition to regular print copies. In Clancy’s vision, Google will “syndicate for our partner program all of the books we sell that are new, so that any bookstore can sell a Google edition and find a way that people can buy them in brick and mortar stores as well.”

Clancy did stress, however, that books will always be stored in the cloud, so we are not quite sure if this means that users will basically only buy access rights to a book but won’t be able to store a copy on their devices for offline reading. As most book publishers are still extremely nervous about the potential for piracy, cloud storage might indeed be a way to alleviate some of these fears for Google.

Google Editions: Readable on Any Device

Clancy also stressed that these “Google editions” should be readable on any device, including laptops, phones, and dedicated eReaders. In addition, Google wants to work with any publisher that is willing to work with Google to offer books in the Google cloud.

Of course, Google’s relationship with publishers is rather rocky, so it remains to be seen how many publishers would really want to sign on to this program. At the same time, though, most publishers also aren’t exactly happy with Amazon either. What is clear, though, is that Google plans to create its own cloud-based alternative to eBooks stores from established retailers like Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

Thanks to E.E. Boyd from MediaBistro for transcribing Clancy’s remarks.

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I love this list assembled at “The Heart of Innovation” blog.

“1. “The server’s down.”
2. “You’re breaking up.”
3. “Your email ended up in my spam folder.”
4. “I’m out of range.”
5. “My laptop crashed.”
6. “I can’t find my Blackberry.”
7. “I forgot to recharge my battery.”
8. “I couldn’t open the attachment.”
9. “I didn’t get a calendar reminder from Outlook.”
10. “I don’t remember which password opens that application.”
11. “I had a power surge and I’m using a dial up connection.”
12. “The magnetic strip on the ID card is damaged. I couldn’t get in.”
13. “I couldn’t find your fax number.”
14. “The main fuse in the building burned out.”
15. “My dog ate my mouse.”
16. “I don’t have an Orkut account anymore.”
17. “I had trouble getting online.”
18. “My cat urinated on my laptop.”"

Unfortunately, sometimes they’re true. Don’t you just hate technology?

On today’s ‘to do’ list - dump the crumbs out of my keyboards. Windex the screens. Ahhhhhh.

Stephen

Every year since the turn of the century, the last Friday in July has been Sysadmin Appreciation Day. If you’re an IT worker, we already know how you’ll be celebrating today – it is Friday after all. For everyone who doesn’t do the thankless work of systems administration or IT, here’s your directive: do something, at least one thing, nice for a sysadmin today.

Sysadmins and all IT people do a lot of difficult work you probably don’t understand. Stepping up to the plate in one of these ten ways will earn you points in the eyes of those who keep your tech running. God knows you need them.

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Fun & Games

1. Send out a half-hearted email with a link to the Wikipedia article. We’re getting this suggestion out of the way now. It’s really lame, but it’s probably what you’ll actually do if you’re a busy manager.

2. Buy your sysadmin an appropriate gift. Bribery works, and you know it.

3. Read them a bedtime story. Just kidding. Please be less creepy and send them some good IT-related reading instead. This option is especially good for a Kindle-carrying sysadmin. Also, please note that Creative Commons is your friend, in life and in gift-giving.

4. Sing them a song. Or not. You could just watch the song with them and laugh. For the record, the gentleman who composed the tune seems to think that all sysadmins do is tech support for individuals. That is wrong.

5. Give a donation or a microloan in their name. For most, a raise might be better. But sometimes there’s a charitable, civic-minded sysadmin lurking around your server racks.

Serious Business

6. Let them keep their jobs. Your business is not the newspaper business. You can’t “buy out” your most valuable employees and then expect everything to run smoothly. I understand that some people are cutting IT budgets out there. Please ignore those dullards and let your sysadmin keep his or her job.

7. Give them the tools they need. This is the conditions part of the “wages, hours and conditions” trifecta of complaints. It’s also the thing we hear the most from sysadmins. Don’t ask your people to do a job and then give them inadequate equipment to do it with.

8. Listen to their advice. In order to accomplish point seven, you need to actually listen to your sysadmin instead of just whining/begging for help. Like the Internet, a sysadmin is not a big truck to just dump your problems on. Remember, tubes go in both directions.

9. Design and/or buy software like you give a damn. See points seven and eight. If you’re a vendor or lone developer creating software, please think of the sysadmin down the road who will have to clean up your awful mess. (Microsoft, I’m looking at you.) If you’re the one doing the purchasing instead of the coding, then you need to think seriously about how your choice impacts your IT staff.

10. Don’t piss them off. If you remember nothing else today, remember this. It’s the most important thing in dealing with sysadmins, which is why we put it at the bottom where no one will read it. Pissing off your sysadmin will result in bad things. Whether you’re just left staring at a blue screen of death or he holds your city hostage, it won’t be pretty.

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