The Adegga Blog

When users subscribe to a social network based service they usually have the ability to customize the profile. Having a profile picture is probably one of the most important things the user can add because not only allows other users to recognize them but also serves as a personality thing.

Being so important is interesting to see how different is the user reaction to different default pictures. On radar an interesting post on the Face-off of Flickr and 43Things faces. Apparently users tend to more easily change a picture they don’t feel confortable with, like the expressionless face at flickr.

    
I think this is what Scoble calls Anti-marketing design. People feel more confortable using sites that are not perfect. Sites that they feel the sites are were made by humans. And bad design sites success stories are all over the place: ebay, craigslist, myspace.

Personally, I believe in things like flickr and etsy that combine both simplicity in design and usability. Thankfully they’re also success stories or I wouldn’t have and argument to defent against.

If you’re looking for a simple way to password protect a web server’s public directory then .htaccess is the way to go. Simple yet powerful, .htaccess is really easy to setup. You can even use this tool if you’re really in a hurry.

With .htaccess you can do such thing as setup error pages (not founds, etc), password protect directories and files, block users by IP or by referrer, do redirects or prevent directory listing.

If you want to learn how .htaccess works follow this very good tutorial on the subject.

A simple logo-and-tagline-and-alert-subscription-and-vintage-port-mentioning welcome page is online.

Once you’re there enter your email on the box if you’d like to be notified when we launch.

Talking about the long tail Chris Anderson noted that:

For the first time in history, archives have a business model.

It’s an interesting quote regarding the existence of a business model for older (or rarer) items amd it gives me some ideas for a tagline.

The rest of the report on Anderson’s talk is an excelent read on the long tail.

I like in the 7th point in this list of 7 more reasons why web apps fail

The amazing thing about Flickr is that nobody uses the service to upload pictures. Nobody says to themselves “I need to upload me some pictures”. Instead, they’re satisfying some other need in their lives, like showing off the new kid to relatives. Or showing their friends how their trip to Europe went. Or letting their co-workers in on their conference activity. All of these things have to do with their life, their relationships, their everyday activities that aren’t centered on the Web, but are made much easier by it. If we look closely, that’s what most successful web apps do: they make our offline lives richer.

I believe that if technology is both easy to use and helps people in their everyday life then it naturally becomes a success. Email is a killer application in doing this. Flickr does that brilliantly too and that’s why they’re so successful.

I was planning to launch this blog in a few weeks but a very good friend became a father 2 days ago and so to celebrate I decided to give birth to the project’s blog this week.

This is will be a blog about the building of adegga.com.

So the blog is up and running on the blog.adegga.com (you are here!). Simple setup for now. I plan to move the blog to a different IP address in the near future as it might be good to use the blog for system status too.

Technically, a little DNS setup and creating the VirtualHost entry and we’re on.

The welcome page and a few more project details will come in a few days.