Whether you like it or not, Farmville was the top game on Facebook for 2009. And its success is being attributed, not to a desire for sustainable agricultural growth, but to sticky games and an impressively large and seemingly growing advertising budget. Zynga, the game’s creators, are known for their aggressive use of Facebook’s marketing channels – whether it’s in the players interests or not.
Business of Software 2008 was going to be hard to match, but I think Neil and Joel pulled it off. Inspiring speakers, great location, power outlets for everyone… oh, and I almost forgot the bright blue snuggies / slankets (who comes up with these names?). After a little reflection, there were three standout speakers whose messages kept coming back to me. And here they are (ineloquently paraphrased by me):
Geoffrey Moore
He was the conference opener and he certainly deserved the spot. Geoffrey talked about innovation and the difference between your core (your differentiator, your competitive advantage – in other words, what makes you money) and context (the other stuff you have to do to keep up or to improve productivity – which might even be mission critical). Once you divide everything into these two camps, it’s easy. Innovate on context just enough to get you by – then focus all your efforts on your core. So simple, yet such a useful way of thinking, particularly when it comes to prioritisation.
Kathy Sierra
I hadn’t come across Kathy before, but I wish I had. She had one premise, which she repeated in so many ways it couldn’t fail to get through our heads – make your users feel awesome! Yes, that’s it. It’s not about the killer app, it’s about the killer user. I was used to thinking about software from the user’s point of view, but this takes it a step further. And it makes sense. If software (like chocolate, alcohol, Disneyland – debatable?) makes you feel good, you’ll love it.
Ryan Carson
I respect Ryan for putting so much of his creativity and personality into his company, Carsonified. He made me want to start a company, just so I could make it a really fun place to work. He had a whole lot of tips, ranging from be creative to give back to the community to just hire a designer, but it was more the overriding focus on making it a great workplace that got me.
Conclusion
This is not to say that the other speakers weren’t brilliant (because most were). But these three stood out because:
And to me, they’re the marks of a great speaker.
Keeping to the schedule, it’s been spot on two weeks since the last MeltingFood Beech release. How can we manage it you wonder? Triangles – sine, cosine all that mathematics stuff – easy really, obvious even. Or you can judge it by the length of the list below (we provided less features – but you get them now).
Highlights
A handful of other little fixes, including: sitemaps, so your recipes will be found by search engines; see the latest recipes from everyone; and, pretty (long) recipe urls on the noise page.
Progress
In the last month we had 9 current users (accessed in the last month). And 51 total users referred. This highlights a continued need for improvement – since this essentially hasn’t moved from our figures in May (8 and 45 respectively).
Add a comment here or contact us on meltingfood to join or provide any feedback.
Whoosh. That was the sound of the deadlines for the minor 1-2 week MeltingFood releases going by*. However, enough moping as the Ash release of MeltingFood has arrived and it’s for everyone – that’s right, sign-up for all.
Highlights
There are also a couple of other tweaks like: not breaking your saved passwords; better input field alignment; no search engine scamming from dodgy links.
Progress
In May we had 16 unique visitors, June 110 – ah, the fun of Google Analytics. You can spend time slicing and dicing segments and achieving nought.
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We’re up to the fourth minor release of MeltingFood (and the second in a week if you’re keeping count). It’s all part of the more rapid 1-2 week release schedule – or 4 days in this case.
We apologise that the last release was substantially broken in Internet Explorer (now fixed).
Highlights
There are also a couple of other tweaks, like using your whole name on your recipes – just to make sure people know who to thank.
Progress
We’ve got about 10 current users (accessed in the last month)! Yes that includes us, so back to 8 really 
Add a comment here or contact us on meltingfood to join or provide any feedback.
Just finished off the third minor release of MeltingFood, the recipe / food sharing website for the new millennium (the new millennium line is still good ’til the half way point – 491 years to go, then we switch from ‘new’ to ‘next’).
Highlights
There’s also a bunch of other minor bug fixes and improvements.
Progress
We’ve got about 8 current users (accessed in the last month)! And about 45 total users referred. This is without even resorting to nagging everyone we know (we’re keeping half in reserve ;p). Based on the business plan, this means we’re at 0.008% of the target (100k unique people per month 
).
But keep your eyes open in the next month… we’re eating our words and going public!
One of the first things you’ll do when you get your great idea is a domain name search… and experience the disappointment when you find it’s gone. But never fear, this is not the idea-shattering catastrophe it first seems.
This is because your clever name doesn’t matter. There is a seemingly strong counter-argument, that goes “…but, brand is crucial – look at how much all those big companies spend to make you remember their all important name!”. This is true, however before the names existed (outside of their inventors heads), they weren’t special because they weren’t attached to something anyone cared about.
The user interface is important. It is the ambassador for your system, your advertisement, your customer service rep. So you need to make sure it’s customer-friendly. Put simply, your system needs to do what people expect it to do. When I click on a link with a roll-over effect, it will take me to a different page. When I click on a button, it should trigger an action. So we stick to these standards, even if they’re not the best usability-wise, because we are creatures of habit and even little changes hurt.
A good friend of mine wanted to find out how a customer application process worked in his department. He didn’t grab his notebook and interview his colleagues. He didn’t draw up elaborate as-is process flows in Visio. He didn’t even write one word of documentation. Instead, he did something much more effective – he went through the application process himself.
14 letters and 5 weeks later, my friend had conclusive evidence of how the process worked, along with a set of recommendations on how to improve it.
We have an announcement to make… What? No, stop that. It’s not a baby. We are ‘releasing’ the private beta of our website, MeltingFood.
Taking advice from Pierre Francois, the elevator pitch for our website is, “it’s like Facebook, but for food” (just the trusted network part of Facebook – not everything like, ahem, stalking, that comes with social networking sites). But no, this post is not an invitation to join the site – it’s almost the opposite.
Although we do have dreams of extending our 2-person alpha user-base, we’ve made a decision to limit the number of new users to a couple per week starting with whomever happens to be visiting. But if people want to join your site, why restrict them?
