UnSpun: “Community Opinions … Ranked!”

I just discovered UnSpun, an Amazon project (still in Beta) which allows you to “Find the Best, Find the Worst, Vote Your Opinion, Create Your Own Lists”.

To put it simple, you can create a new list (i.e., best bra color… anyway, that one is already in the top ten at the moment ), and make people vote, or search for an existing list and rank other users’ opinions, or just add yours if it is not present in the list so far. You can use your existing Amazon account, if you have one.

Both fun and useful (I suspect the “Best Xmas present for girlfriend/wife” list to show up in the top 3 in a couple of months ).

GeekInterview.com

Don’t know how long this site has been out there so far, but I just love it. A list of all kinds of interviews questions, ranging from career goals to specific technical problems, browsable by category and company as well. Very nice.

Skebby.it: cheap texting (for us as well)

Believe it or not, the price of a single SMS text message here in Italy is 0.15 EUR (0.20 USD, more or less). Let’s get it a bit more impressive: a single character is a byte, a single text message is 160 characters long, so I get charged 0.20 USD to send you 160 bytes, which means transferring a megabyte of text would cost to the final Italian user 1325 USD. It looks like a lot of money, right?

Fortunately a lot of smart people live on this planet, and Davide Marrone – a 24-years-old computer science student @ University of Milan – developed Skebby, a java app to enable people texting via their mobile phones (through Skebby’s servers) at a much lower rates.

The free membership allows users to send a limited number of text message (exploiting free services) at a cost of 0.01 EUR.

The premium membership allows no-limit texting at rates depending on how many text messages you buy in advance, but you might get till a 50% 70% off the current price.

[UPDATE: You should also add the cost of connecting from your mobile to Skebby's servers. ]

I don’t remember but if I’m not wrong Skebby.it is still only in Italian (actually it was on the national TVs yesterday, so servers went down immediately, they’re moving on right now ). If so, I hope they’re going to get an English version as soon as possible.

“Release early, release often”: why bother at all

Here is a very nice post by Andy Brice @ “Successful Software” about the importance of releasing early in software development. I commented the post as well, so I won’t say the same things here.

“You wouldn’t write a thousand lines of code before you tried to compile it. Why would you spend a year or more on development before testing it in the market?”

The author lists a few arguments “for” and “against” releasing early, and puts “Reputation” in the “against” list (ok, not properly, since he explains how not to get a bad reputation). I surely agree with his argument and I think “Reputation” should be in the “for” list as well.

If I release early and frequently add new features in response to users’ feedback, I will incrementally build users’ confidence in the product, acquire new customers, get blogs buzzing about the application and its improvements, and make users feel like their desires do really count and are driving future developments of the product.

On the other hand, if I come up with a late released, one-size-fits-all product, users won’t feel part of the development process at all, which is weird since they actually are important project’s stakeholders.

Anyway, some really good points are in the post… you made it easier on me to release v1.0 for my GSoC project (review coming soon) .

(BTW the blog is currently the “Fastest growing blog” @ wordpress.com. Congratulations. )