1. When changing credit card details in my Basecamp account, the system noticed that I also had a Highrise account and offered to update that at the same time. Thank you, 37signals.
2. When I installed the new version of OmniFocus, it pre-selected the option to delete the installer files once it was completed. Thank you.
3. When Miro TV updated itself to a new version, it re-started and continued playing the last video I watched from where we left off.

If I listed “Moments of Software Unjoy”, it’d go for pages…

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In just two months, Twitter has become one of my core communication tools. Non-Twitter instant messaging and Facebook have all but disappeared from the mix. Here’s why.

Actually, before that… If you don’t use Twitter, or if you’ve taken a look but don’t “get it”, watch this 2.5-minute video Twitter in Plain English from those wacky Canadians Common Craft. Love their style.

OK, back?

Like the character in the video, I was sceptical about Twitter. Why do people need to know every little detail of my life? Who cares? I said as much to Perth’s Twitterati late last year. But then I actually tried using it — and I “got it” immediately.

It’s not about what people need to know, but what they want to know. And, as the video, says, the people who care about you are interested in what you’re doing.

Perfectly-named

Calling this service “Twitter” was genius. Listen to real birds twittering, especially during their dawn chorus, and you’ll hear a constant stream of status messages. “I’m alive and healthy.” “This is still my territory, stay clear.” “I’m hungry, feed me.” “I’ve found some food over here.” “Storm coming! Quick! Quick!”

None of these messages necessarily requires an answer — just like typical tweets on Twitter. But you can act upon them or reply if you want.

• I’m hungry, going to lunch” can elicit “Hey I’m around the corner, I’ll join you.”
• “Firefox has just crashed again” can elicit “Have you tried clearing your cache? That worked for me.”
• “Stuck in traffic on the M4″ lets you know that another person, also coming via the freeway, could be late for a meeting — even if they don’t use Twitter themselves.
• “Finishing an article before 4pm deadline” tells you not to interrupt that person.
• “Finished!’ means you can now ask that person if they’d like a beer.
• “Great blog post about Julia Gillard [with a link here]” could lead you in a whole new direction. Beer or no beer.

Or not.

Twitter is, almost literally, the background clucking of so many chickens.

If you need to concentrate on work or a TV program, just tune out. It’s a permanent window onto my world — but that doesn’t mean I need to sit and watch what’s out the window all the time.

I also have tweets coming from ABC News, BBC News and 37signals (which tell me if there’s a problem with Basecamp). One courier company uses Twitter to inform customers of any delays.

Why Twitter works for me

The key factor is that Twitter adheres to the philosophy of small pieces, loosely joined. It’s a clear, simple tool that’s easy to connect to other tools.

• I can send or view tweets from the Twitter website, the mobile version at m.twitter.com, the Twitterific application for Mac OS X (that’s what I use most of the time), via SMS or via other instant messaging services. Whatever’s handy at the time.
• Ditto for the people following my tweets. They choose whatever’s handy for them. I don’t have to think about where they are at the time.
• Everything’s interconnected by RSS, which means I can do things like plug my tweets into this website.

Permanent versus Ephemeral

Twitter helps me distinguish between the things I want to publish for all time, like my longer essays, and the random day-to-day stuff which might be vital at the time but meaningless the next day.

OK, I’m still having trouble with that, because some tweets are worth keeping. But this is experimental stuff.

What do you think? If you already use Twitter, does your experience match mine? If you don’t, please join Twitter and follow me, and let me know how it goes.

[Credit: Cartoon Twitter-bird courtesy of Hugh MacLeod. Like all of Hugh's cartoons published online, it's free to use.]

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“Chalk and cheese” is how I’d describe two approaches to staff management I stumbled across this week. One treats staff as trusted contributors to a shared enterprise, the other as disposable work-droids from which you squeeze every last effort.

Jason Calacanis (pictured) has started various firms, including Mahalo, a “human-powered search engine”. (Don’t worry, I’d never heard of it either.) In How to save money running a startup (17 really good tips) there are some good tips — like outsourcing accounting and worrying more about good chairs than tables. But to paraphrase the bad ones:

• Hold meetings at lunchtime so people never get a mental break from work.
• Don’t provide phones so staff have to use their own.
• If someone shows signs of working hard, buy them a computer for home so they end up working nights and weekends too.
• Buy a good coffee machine — not because you’d like to give your employees good coffee, but to prevent them “wasting time” getting it from a nearby barista.

But that’s not the worst…

The worst one for me, and this is the precise quote:

• “Fire people who are not workaholics… come on folks, this is startup life, it’s not a game. go work at the post office or stabucks [sic] if you want balance in your life. For realz.”

Can you imagine what it’d be like working for this guy? Do you think you’d get much loyalty in return for being a wage-slave?

As Duncan Riley says in TechCrunch, “Expect to check your family at the door if you want to go work for JCal. Up to 18 hours a day for $30-35,000 (what I’ve heard is the going rate for base Mahalo employees), you’re never allowed to go outside during this time or have a proper break.”

Compare that with the enlightened attitudes at 37signals, creators of truly innovative software which I use every day, like Basecamp and Highrise. They trust their staff!

Here’s the 3 workplace experiments they’ve just implemented:

• A 4-day working week. “People should enjoy the weather in the summer. We found that just about the same amount of work gets done in four days vs five days… Three-day weekends mean people come back extra refreshed on Monday. Three-day weekends mean people come back happier on Monday. Three-day weekends mean people actually work harder and more efficiently during the four-day work week.”
• They fund people’s passions. “We want our people to experience new things, discover new hobbies, and generally be interesting people. For example, Mark has recently taken up flight lessons. 37signals is helping him pay for those. If someone wants to take cooking lessons, we’ll help pay for those… Part of the deal is that if 37signals helps you pay, you have to share what you’ve learned with everyone. Not just everyone at 37signals, but everyone who reads our blog.”
• A corporate credit card for everyone, for whatever they want. “If you want a book or some software or you want to go to a conference, it’s on us. We just ask people to be reasonable with their spending. If there’s a problem, we’ll let the person know. We’d rather trust people to make reasonable spending decisions than assume people will abuse the privilege by default.”

37signals have responded to Calacanis’ post:

Fire the people who are workaholics! Here’s five reasons why:

1. Workaholics may well say that they enjoy those 14-hour days week after week, but despite their claims, working like that all month, all the time is not going to be sustainable. When the burnout crash comes, and it will, it’ll hit all the harder and according to Murphy at the least convenient time.
2. People who are workaholics are likely to attempt to fix problems by throwing sheer hours at the problem. If you’re dealing with people working with anything creatively that’s a deadbeat way to get great work done.
3. People who always work late makes the people who don’t feel inadequate for merely working reasonable hours. That’ll lead to guilt, misery, and poor morale. Worse, it’ll lead to ass-in-seat mentality where people will “stay late” out of obligation, but not really be productive.
4. If all you do is work, your value judgements are unlikely to be sound. Making good calls on “is it worth it?” is absolutely critical to great work. Missing out on life in general to put more hours in at the office screams “misguided values”.
5. Working with interesting people is more interesting than just working. If all you got going for your life is work, work, work, the good team-gelling lunches are going to be some pretty boring straight shop talk. Yawn. I’d much rather hear more about your whittling project, your last trek, how your garden is doing, or when you’ll get your flight certificate.

If your start-up can only succeed by being a sweatshop, your idea is simply not good enough. Go back to the drawing board and come up with something better that can be implemented by whole people, not cogs.

Precisely. Innovation is creative work. Happy employees are loyal employees — and they’ll put in those extra hours voluntarily when they’re really needed.

Mr Calacanis may have generated more dollars in a shorter time than 37signals — or maybe he hasn’t, I don’t know. But I know who I’d rather sit next to on a long flight. And I know who I’d invite to dinner or to share a beer.

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Things of note about this screenshot:

• The content dominates the page, not some loudly-screaming logo or “web page header”.
• The hierarchy of the information is very clear. It’s immediately obvious which label is attached to which object, and what’s more important.
• It’s simple, easy on the eye — so you can work on this all day.

Which all makes it a fine example of Web 2.0 design.

Plus for some reason I really, really love the way the photos of the whiteboard make a lovely abstract pattern.

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