Monthly Archives: May 2007

The heart of the edge of the world

I’m a big fan of the ideas behind The New Zealand Edge.

Here is where the name comes from:

“The metaphor was given to me by Kevin Kelly, founding editor of Wired. I drove Kevin to Karekare, as one does, when he visited in 1996.

He said that New Zealand was really easy to understand, because in biology – his genre – change and innovation occurs first on the edge of a species, where the population is most sparse.

New forms of life emerge on the margins, away from the deadening effects of the center. The excitement is on the wing, not in the scrum.”

– Brian Sweeney, Victoria University Design Conference, 2003

Applying these ideas to New Zealand came out of the work that Saachi & Saachi did for the Tourism Board in the late 90′s, before being dumped because of a scandal involving a dinner between Kevin Roberts and Jenny Shipley.

In it’s place we got the “100% Pure” campaign.

They have great photography of amazing scenery and of course an award winning website, but it feels like an unfortunate compromise to me.

“We must turnaround our fixation with beauty. We have to stop defining ourselves in terms of other countries’ standards. We’re actually not going to win a ‘My Alps Are Bigger Than Your Alps’ contest, so we’ve got to add massively to the existing set of perceptions about New Zealand.

People don’t have a really great holiday here just because the mountains are so beautiful, or the fishing’s great, or the fjords terrific. People are the essence of most memorable tourist experiences.”

– Kevin Roberts, NZ Tourism Industry Association Conference, 1998

Here is a video of a recent speech where Kevin Roberts applies the same ideas to Wellington:

The heart of the edge of the world

It’s 38mins, but worth watching.

Here are a couple of quotes that stuck with me:

On measuring the success of an advertisement:

“The only question that matters is ‘do you want to see it again?’”

On engagement:

“It’s not about ‘marketing at’ it’s about ‘connecting with’”

Good stuff!

P.S. You might notice that their logo is the alternative NZ flag design, as proposed by Lloyd Morrison and friends (see www.nzflag.com). What ever happened to that campaign? It seems to have just fizzled out eh? What a shame!

Why doesn’t Trade Me have an API?

This is a question I get a lot:

Why doesn’t Trade Me have an API?

It’s actually a slightly frustrating question for me to answer.

Internally I’m usually the one asking this question. Externally, at places where technical people gather, I’m the one defending the fact that we don’t have an API and, what’s more, have no immediate plans to build one.

Why not?

Nat Torkington’s recent post has some of the answers.

It’s not that we haven’t thought about it. There are some legitimate reasons why we’ve chosen to not build an API to date. I thought it would be interesting to talk about some of these and get your thoughts.

Some questions to think about

Would we need to communicate all changes in advance to third party developers? If so, how much in advance? We’re constantly making small changes to the site. We generally deploy site changes twice per day. The cycles can be very short. We sometimes deploy something in the morning and then tweak it later that afternoon. Anything which threatens to slow us down is quite correctly frowned upon.

What happens when we need to make breaking changes to the API? Do we version the API and continue to support older versions? If so, how long do we leave this support in place? If not, what liability do we have if we break a third-party application?

How do we deal with authentication? We put a big effort into keeping Trade Me safe for buyers and sellers. We have a full-time team working on this. One of the problems this team deals with is phishing of members login details. We have a simple and consistent message for members: don’t enter your Trade Me email address and password anywhere other than on the Trade Me site. So, obviously allowing third-party developers to build tools which require our users to enter their login details is inconsistent with this. To solve this we’d need to build an alternative authentication process – e.g. the token based approach used by upcoming.org.

Are we prepared to invest in creating an eco-system where third-party developers can profit? As Nat pointed out to me when I discussed this with him, one of the reasons that Amazon have been so successful with their new web services is that they are creating more value then they are capturing. In other words, they are leaving some money on the table for the people using their API.

Are we prepared to allow our customers to become dependant on a third-party tool? If somebody created a really wicked tool using the API, and lots of our users started to use it, would that limit our ability to innovate that the same area? This is a dilemma that eBay have started to encounter with their API, where they have created listing tools which compete directly with third-party tools built on top of their API. At the moment I’m not sure we’re prepared to let others build something we then wish we had built. Is that bad?

How do we protect the user experience? How do we protect our brand? We’re currently very protective of both of these things, for very good reasons.

How do we protect our infrastructure? In the past we’ve had to ask people to discontinue or specifically block access to automated external tools which were causing us pain. To an infrastructure guy there is a fine line between a well-meaning but poorly implemented external tool and a Denial of Service attack. In fact, we currently prohibit the use of any “robot, spider, scraper or other automated means to access the Website or information featured on it for any purpose” in our Terms & Conditions (see 4.1 c).

If we build it will they come? Are there enough developers in New Zealand to justify our effort in creating an API? How many people will actually use it? How many people will use the applications they build on top of it?

Do we have bigger fish to fry? Keep in mind that any development work required at our end would be at the expense of something else. Is an API just too much work for us for too little reward? Any argument in favour of an API need to be more compelling than: all the cool kids have one. :-)

Your thoughts?

What would you do if you were in our position?

Vista gadget for Trade Me

Today we launched a Trade Me gadget for Windows Vista.

It is designed to help you keep an eye on your current listings directly from the sidebar of your desktop. Of course, you can also use it to track listings from any member – just enter the user name of the seller you’re interested in.

More information about installing and using the gadget

Credits: Thanks to Darryl from Microsoft and Jeremy from Mindscape for putting this together for us.

The gadget uses a new XML feed we have implemented, which returns the details of current listings for a given member.

http://www.trademe.co.nz/API/MemberListingFeed.aspx?nickname=movieshack

In theory there is nothing stopping anybody from using this feed to build their own version of this gadget, or perhaps a Mac widget?

If you do build something interesting using this feed drop me the details and I’ll link to you from here.

The Fortune 5,000,000

I really like the idea of The Fortune 5,000,000.

This is from the 37 signals home page:

“Who uses our products?
While our products are mainly built for small businesses and individuals (we call this group The Fortune 5,000,000), companies of all sizes use them every day.”

It’s a nice way to describe the opportunity of creating software for the long tail of small- and medium-sized businesses.

But, don’t fall into the trap of thinking that this much larger group is in any way similar to the handful of large companies or government departments where many technology people spend their careers working on multi-million dollar projects.

OnStartups.com lists some of the differences.

To paraphrase:

  1. They don’t have the cash to pay big up-front fees for software.
  2. So, you can’t afford to spend lots of money chasing sales (instead, focus on building a great product which people will find useful and tell their friends about).
  3. Compared to the pain and hassle of a custom built application, a simple hosted solution which they can buy and start using right away is likely to be quite attractive.
  4. As such, they will mostly be happy to take the software as-is rather than expecting to have much control or ability to customise to their specific requirements.
  5. They don’t get a lot of love from the software industry today, so there is a massive opportunity to fill that gap.

Lip Dubbing

This looks like a lot of fun…

http://www.vimeo.com/173714

If you liked that there are lots more like it here…

http://www.vimeo.com/tag:lipdubbing

This would make for an awesome team building exercise. Mix people up into teams of half-a-dozen or so. Give each team a video camera, an iPod with some songs pre-loaded (+ a print out of the lyrics!) and perhaps a laptop to do the editing and over-dubbing. Then give them a couple of hours to choose a song and put their masterpiece together.

There is lots of room for creativity: one singer or the whole band, the straight lip-synch or perhaps a bit of a story line, all in one take or with a bunch of editing, some dancing in unusual locations, or a re-make of the original music video (or even a re-make of a re-make).

At the end get everybody back together to watch the final results, perhaps throw in the odd prize for cinematography or whatever.

Would be wicked. :-)

UPDATE: I notice the video I linked to is actually the team behind the Vimeo site. Looks like a good crew eh!