I’m am so underwhelmed by CushyCMS, the much-hyped CMS system launched just today in limited beta. CushyCMS essentially does 1 thing: provide a web-interface to automate the process of repeatedly downloading/uploading source files via FTP, but it could be doing so much more!

CushyCMS could provide the first true WYSIWYG editing experience: by scraping the server output before rendering an editing overlay onto defined editable regions within the browser.  That is WYSIWYG at it’s best: not only do you see your work rendered in a real browser engine, you can even see any dynamic output! (granted, the dynamic output wouldn’t be editable for obvious reasons)  This is especially useful when sites use simple templating systems to render otherwise conceptually static pages.

Otherwise, CushyCMS deserves a cake for being directionally correct…give or take 45°.

Amazon needs to learn from Dell’s mistakes. Selling portable electronics is a high-touch process—people want to touch and feel laptops before they make their purchase. Yet, Amazon appears to be selling their flagship product, the Kindle, exclusive from their front-page. The transition from desktops to laptops really turned the tide in favor of HP, who focused on selling through retail channels, against Dell, who even today appears to emphasize selling online.

I have yet to see a SINGLE person rocking an Amazon Kindle…and they’re telling us they can’t keep up with demand? I call bullshit. Somebody needs to set their ego aside and start talking to retail stores. I know I know, Amazon owes it’s success to waging war against brick-and-mortar retail and it’s entire identity is inherently anti-retail. There’ll be difficult conversations to come, but Amazon needs to get this product into physical proximity of it’s potential buyers.

It’s impossible to explain Twitter to the common internet user without sounding really retarded. “What does it do?” “How could that be popular?” At first I couldn’t understand how a whole application could be built around just “posting away messages.” Unlike email, message boards, or blogs, it’s not clear whether Twitter has any offline behavioral metaphor. If it doesn’t clearly mimic anything in real life, how do people know how to use it? How would people understand it’s value? And we still haven’t answered: what the hell is Twitter, and what makes it popular?

Because message boards and blogs were too structured and rigid

Twitter shares many features with away messages, wall posts, and micro-blogging. What do these have in common? They are convenient, public, and most importantly, casual.

1. Casual—
   Twitter addresses a conversation space that message boards and blogs failed to address: rapid unstructured chatter. Forums are rigidly locked into sections and formally defined threads. The problem is that in real-life casual conversation, threads are incredibly ephemeral, they weave in and out too quickly for anyone to bother defining. With the exception of time and proximity, we don’t normally use any formal structures to manage threads! But yet, if you look at blogging and forums, the traditional methods of public discourse, they are cluttered with manually defined meta-data. Content is categorized, tagged, threaded, dated, titled, sub-titled, stickied, closed. This kind of stuff slows down the pace of conversation. Twitter doesn’t have any of that shit.

   Twitter models conversation behavior by stripping out most of the structure in content, leaving behind only two attributes for each tweet: time and person addressed, which is exactly how much metadata you’d find in real life conversations.

2. Public—
   The other cool thing is how easy it is to overhear other streams (of eavesdrop if you will). Imagine 8 friends standing together at a bar. At first people converse in pairs—they are engaged, but could easily overhear the other conversations. This leads to the rapid merging and unmerging of threads you see on Twitter. It’s just so easy to pick up interesting bits and jump into conversations, bringing back the level of engagement you could only find in physical proximity.
3. Convenient—
   And of course, the most visible strength of Twitter is the sheer number of ways one could send and receive updates. No need to delve into this…

The magic comes together

So the magic comes from letting groups of people across the world mimic close-proximity conversation. If forums are discussion and blogs are publishing, what is Twitter? Some suggest, presence, others, grabage; but I think it’s simply natural public conversation (minus the intimacy of IM).

One thing to note: Twitter works great for groups of friends who are geographically spread out—the dominant usage pattern today. But is it useful for friends closeby? The answer isn’t obvious; after all, instant-messaging supposedly mimics direct conversation but it bloomed with high schoolers who see each other every single day…

This was too good not to share on the main blog. A long but genius essay on moral taboos—how they came to be, how they are used, and how to fight them.

Update:
Another interesting read. A different take on it is: “Extremely intelligent guessing is still worse than not having to guess at all.”

Random thought—
How did the word “downstream” as in “downstream customers” come to be? Perhaps it had something to do with how rivers were central to commercial transport before modern transportation. If manufacturing accounted for the highest volume of transport that needed rivers, it’d make sense for industry verticals to be arranged in the same direction as the flow. So if a furniture shop was setup somewhere along the river, you’re more likely to find lumber mills upstream than downstream.

If you want to measure how much value a new business model adds to society, look no further than how much value it disproportionately destroys for it’s incumbent competitors. One such company is Redfin, who competes against traditional realtors with its online+offline hybrid service by breaking the information barrier with technology.

What I love about Redfin is that it doesn’t even pretend that IT is the solution to everything. Real-estate is a high-touch transaction and the Redfin buying process does involve real agents where needed. The value comes when Redfin breaks apart the transaction process and identify stages where human interaction is unnecessary…and in realty, downright expensive.

It’s true that having an experienced, traditional agent can be immensely helpful, but my challenge is, how often is that the case? and is it the same between buy-side vs sell-side? Every realtor has a story about how they stepped above-and-beyond to create value for their buyers, but what portion of transactions are really just “business as usual”? “Usual” means “routine”, and routine can be routinzed. The thing to keep in mind here is not to look at real-estate transactions as a single process, but to break it down and find pieces that are addressable by automation.

Redfin is probably more meaningful to buyers. Sell-side is a different animal, where success is measured by time-to-sell and sell-price. How do you improve those two factors? by having a really damn good salesman of course. But on the buy side, the key driver to success is quite simple: information, and having a realtor do the job of gathering information for you is of questionable value.

I leave you with a memorable quote from the 60 Minutes segment:

“Now here’s what Glenn Kelman of Redfin says: ‘The price of homes has gone through the roof, pardon the pun, over the last several years. And yet your commission has still stayed at six percent,’” Stahl remarks. “You’re not lowering your commission to give the buyers this advantage. You’re just raking in the money?”

“Wish that were true,” Arends [a top RE/MAX agent in Seattle for 18 years] says. “I think what’s happened is a lot of expenses have gone up, everything from postage to gas, which affect real estate agents’ profits.”

Gas and postage. What a bummer.

P.S. — The title is in reference to Asif Ali Zardari, the infamously corrupt husband of former Pakistani Prime Minister who was nicked named “Mr. 10%” for his modest dealmaking style.