However in the last 2 months I have been purchasing good software online.  I would never pay for a web service, or online tool that could claim to do something similar for the price of the software I am willingly purchasing.  Why is that.?

Here are the 2 products I felt were a worth paying for this month:

Versions By: Pico & Sofa

This is indeed a simple yet necessary piece of software for anyone working on shared projects that use SVN repositories. The Website is simple and clean and the application downloads to your computer for € 31.20 (Approx $45 USD).  You get a serial code in the mail for full activation, and you drag that application to your finder, and I was fully satisfied. Not everyone will buy this, but there seems to be a code amongst coders to pay a fair price for a fair product, and this is an elegant example of how simple that can be.

iScreenSaver By: XochiMedia

I paid $199 for a limited license to make up to 10,000 branded screen savers. UI and interface wise this app is kinda suffering, but It does, work, and work quite well. People looking to develop screen savers have fairly limited options and they are able to charge big dollars for something to help you get your project done.

With that said however, I would never pay $199 for most web applications, especially if I only needed to use it once. Is there something in our subconscious that states an Icon on the desktop,  has more value than a URL in a web browser? We have come to terms that Microsoft Word costs $300, when Google docs are fee.  Cable, and DVD rentals cost money, but YouTube is available to anyone 24-7.   I would say a definite yes, using the Internet as platform for your software inherently causes scrutiny in its value as a paid service.

Some Interesting Solutions

Since the problem is seemingly just a psychological assessment of product value, we need to help users judge a product for its value worth without basing it on platform. Smart companies have recognized this concept and attempted to solve the issue in a few different ways.

Introduce the Product Physically

Apple sells its new online suite Mobile Me in store. It comes in a box just like the desktop software iLife and iWork. You take it home and open it to nothing but a serial code, and some brochures, but what you bought was product. You looked at the box, checked out the back, and justified $99, in a way you may have never done solely through finding the service online.

This approach has also been used for years with Virus protection companies like Norton. By selling in stores like BestBuy, the product is made available to a completely new group who may not have known the Internet was the place to look for virus protection.  Do your users immediately think of an online solution for the market you are in.?

Present your Web App to Illustrate Power (to the users).

People who use the Internet are ungrateful. They click through pages from link to link all day and never pay a thing. Why is your app, not just another page, or just another link clicking.

A few years back, I made a dynamic calendar system for the Carleton University.  It asked a student for some information, and generated the correct calendar for his/her upcoming events. Pretty straight forward, and would have been a standard form, to calendar. Page to page instant system like people are used to.

However, because of some server transition. I had to go to a page, and do an old school META page forward, it would take 5 seconds before going to the calendar.  On this page, I decided to put a cool looking loading gif.. That took 5 seconds, and it progressed at an uneven pace.

In no way was the middle loading state even needed, real, or actually generating a schedule.  However, I have never received more compliments on a system. Staff and students were amazed with how cool it processed and asked what actions were going on and felt like they system was working really hard for them each time.

Conclusions

There are many great web services that people pay for. In no way do all web-services rely solely on purchase and subscription income like most desktop applications do.  However, when we look at the similarities and try to determine what makes people psychologically justify purchasing desktop applications, there are many takeaways we can use in the web world so our hard work is not taken for granted.

Here are some examples of instances where I think it has gone too far:

TransUnion.com

Trans Union is a credit bureau and one of 3 major ones in the USA and 2 in Canada.  Being Canadian, I have used transunion.ca in the past (the Canadian version). When I moved to the USA, I was blown away at the difference between the 2 countries.

You pay $14.00 a month to have access to a profile, and credit scores. This is the same in both countries. In Canada there is no advertising or external content on the whole site. Only relevant and important personal information.

That’s why I was shocked to see the flow in the USA goes a little like this:

So you dodge that, and land up on your home page that looks a little something like this.

Some entire sections of the site are designed to get you to do something complete irrelevant that will in-turn give them PPC or commission based income.

This is absolutely insane.  A company that you pay, to see your own information, then subjects you to more credit card offers than a college cafeteria. In no way are the relative or even handy. This is  a company ignoring its users real needs to pad it’s bottom line with our confusion, and frequently  soliciting products that are actually the opposite of what is being sought out.

But wait.. Just when you think no one else would do something like that to us.. A system we are supposed to trust and follow even more than an international credit bureau has done worse.. I present..

The United States Postal Service.

If you have tried to forward mail in the USA in the last year or so, you will have used this new system.. If you try to do it in the post office, they say.. No, No, do it online, if you cant get it to work then fill out this form.  Why is that..?  Easier, more efficient, and secure, of coarse.  However they also got really sneaky with step 5.. “Catalog Forwarding.”

After you enter your credit card information which is needed to confirm your identity at your previous address. You get to this step, it will ask you to “select the magazine subscriptions you would like forwarded.” and present you with a list of magazines.  Hmm, I didn’t know I was  subscribed to these..? or.. they are free? or.. meh whatever lets click a few. I have to to get to the next step..

And there you missed the really small text link at the bottom that says “your mail forwarding is already complete”. They use the credit card you supplied to confirm your identity, to sign you up for magazine subscriptions.

The last 2 steps are purely for you to be tricked into signing up for new subscriptions in attempt to reach the end of the process. Uncle Sam, you douche bag.

I very firmly believe that these practices are wrong. We have come to understand that the internet is full of tricks, and IQ tests that the results just need to be text messaged to you.. But that doesn’t mean government agencies and the paid standardized services need to jump in. In the case of USPS there new elegant interface and easy 6 step process, could have been a 4 step process.  When your job is to provide a service to allow something to happen, confusing those users into a path they didn’t intend for your own profit is just wrong. In these cases the systems are taking advantage of us because they know we have no other options, and are in a trusting state of mind, and that is going too far.

Thoughts..?

On the development side of things it has been an incredible learning process.  Conceptually to develop a product with the internet that allows others to again make a product with the internet, that then will be viewed by the end user has presented a completely new depth to  web development.

Lifeyo from a development standpoint is every project you could imagine combined into one:

• Integrated hosting, and domain registration.
• Credit Card processing and recurring payments.
• User authentication, member authentication

All this laced together with one of the most cutting edge user interfaces on the internet today.

What are you waiting for.. Check it out, it’s free and easy.

There are many solutions to this debate that I have learned and tested out over the years. I am going to offer a solution that I came up with and present my findings. The website I will use to present this example is http://fauxfire.com, which around x-mas can have 100,000 visitors a week, many of which will stream upwards of 40mb of music as they enjoy the fire.

A major online company with large storage needs or wanting to take media serving demands off there main box, has been more and more likely to adoption to cloud solutions.  Amazon S3, will let you upload unlimited amounts of photos/files/music, and only pay for it when they are needed.  The load of serving the files, usually static files uploaded by users, is taken off your application server. Seeming like a good idea for my music, I uploaded all of the audio tracks, and flv for the fire to an amazon S3 bucket.  I checked my account a week later, and with only 10,000 visitors I already owed amazon $285.   Ughh oh.. come Christmas, those can easily be $2500.00 days.. That is not going to work.  Now keep in mind each visitor is taking close to 50mb of traffic. If you have a simple site, your bills in no way would be that high.  What I am trying to illustrate however is the cost of transfer on s3 is indeed high, and will grow in parallel based on your traffic for a heavy web application.

So now what?  I cant afford to give away the fire.  The songs are optimized as much as possible.  The next thought for many is a dedicated powerful server.  Even so, you have to watch your ceilings.. most dedicated servers have a 500gig bandwidth limit as well.

Thinking simple, I have a godaddy unlimited account for a few applications.  They claim “unlimited bandwidth” so.. Lets see if they can pull through.

This is a report from last week. Almost 1 TB, in 6 days..  This would have cost nearly $600 from amazon S3, and this shared go-daddy basic server cost me around $9.00 a month ($14 usually but you can find promo code, and buy for 12 months.) I called go daddy, and told them my fire was going to be on TV, and I was expecting a slam of traffic and alot of bandwidth, and asked if there was a hidden limit to the “unlimited” account, and the man said. Hmm let me check.. Break.. Nah.. Yer good.

So so far so good.  The new go daddy shared system is grid based. In the older days, your shared server meat you and around 1,200 other people share a single box.  If I had a neighbor they would be angry, and with this amount of traffic may run out of resources quickly. These days, you share a grid of servers, so 12,000 may share access to a 10 server grid.  meaning for $9.00 a month you really have access to huge range of resources if you need it.

In no way will this work for everyone but for me it was simple and has saved me thousands.  I am sure if the fire runs at this rate for too long go daddy will decide it not worth it for me to be a customer.  But until then I recommend a basic shared structure for file hosting, and not to get to ahead of yourself if you don’t need to.

Starting bid $3500. Hmmm..  My boss told me that is ridiculous, and in essence yes.  However if you were a rock star, or in a band.  You spend easily that amount above the the normal cost of a good guitar for one that has a bit of stage presence.  It only makes sense that if your a champion computer programmer, you do the same.

Computer Choopers is in the business of modding apple products. So I decided to give them a call and see if… This is a good deal, as there prices are not listed on there website.

Nice man answered after 1 ring, and told me the following info:

• Anodizing of any color if you provide the computer is (13″ =$899, 15″=$899, 17″=$1099). The anodizing is deeper and will not scratch as it actually colors the aluminum identically to that of the colored iPods available.
• Coatings, such as 24k Gold, Platinum, and the like start at $2500 and go up to $4500.
• Keyboards are not included and cost an extra $250 to mod / color.
• He said it does void your Apple Care, but if the computer is new at the time, they will give you a 1 year guarantee from them.
• He said that this macbook, is one of there earlier models, before they were clear coating the backs.  It may leave fingerprints, when you touch it in the gold plating.  However that macbooks original coast would have been in the 3500’s.  So… Not the best deal for the one on ebay.
• They don’t take credit cards, you have to send an envelop of cash, or use all time weary Western Union Money Transfer.

I think what they are doing is impressive, and a lot of the time stunning. Its likely around the corner that apple begins to offer the anodizing finishing they do on their iPods on the aluminum macbooks. However at that point it wont be cool anymore.

I cant wait to go home and experience the snow. Seven days is usually just the right amount.

Even though Betsy is gone, I am impressed with how she is able to still be all over the hot page of lookbook.nu.  This is actually a lot harder than you might think.

I challenged Betsy to a hype competition, and lets just say.. I only got one Hype from another nice young man.

Betsy however seems to know how to get work done on this hot page.  I just need to find a profit model for the LookBook hot page that will pay for her ever changing wardrobe. I know there is something there I just haven’t figured it out yet.

The website uses 3 API’s to work in the same way a human might.

1. To interface with popular audio sellers and gather recent albums given an artist.
2. Once aware of songs we use another system to search the file given its title.
3. A recommendation engine can help tell you what you might also like, to keep the loop going.

The website has a few other features in its unique but simplicity interface.

• Limited 5 searches per IP, per day.
• Paypal subscription API integration for sellers looking to go beyond.
• Ratings for dead/wrong links to push that result by default.
• Smooth scrolling and Ajax requests make this all happen on one page.

• RSS feed optimized for BlogLovin
• Scrollable archive box for large volumes of monthly posts.
• Searchable and catorizable content.
• More posts button at end of page to give similar behavior to that of lookbook.nu

• It always helps to start with good example code. Spend more time looking to see if anyone has done something similar to what your doing than starting from scratch.
• If you have never worked with Encryption Keys and Apples iTunes connect, you can spend just as much time trying to get it onto the App store is it took you to make it.
• The people at Apple are fairly friendly. They will call you and say.. “Hey like your app, but…”
• Your first reviews stick to the top for the life of the app.  So send out some early emails to friends and family to help make them good ones.

• Fluid CSS layout and dynamic navigation.
• Paypal IPN system used to sell and deliver the screen saver downloads automatically.
• Pre-order sign up for items that are not yet available.
• Ajax contact form.
• iTunes store application links for the iPhone application.