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YackPack will be featured at the Tech Museum of Innovation this year. Today we'll drop off some gear the museum will need to share YackPack with thousands of visitors in the coming months.
I still haven't gotten over feeling fortunate for this honor. Wow, maybe I'll fly my parents out for the opening. I'll let y'all know when the exhibit goes live.
Last week I spoke twice at O'Reilly's Emerging Telephony Conference, sharing YackPack with a sophisticated crowd. The response was very good. Besides having YackPack named "best service" by one smart blogger, Stuart Henshall blogged this in Skype Journal:
"YackPack certainly illustrates where Skype could go with audio / video blasts. There's no reason this couldn't be developed and copied in Skype particularly now that SkypeWeb exists." -- Skype Journal, January 24, 2006
I guess we should be flattered. But there's something troubling about people asking Skype to rip off the YackPack user experience, especially since I spent two years of my life and over $100K of my own hard-earned cash to develop it. (Not to mention the costly patents we applied for, whatever they end up being worth.)
However, I do agree on this point: Skype can be improved by working with YackPack And we're happy to do so!
Hey, Stuart, if you can see how YackPack can collaborate efficiently with Skype, let me know. (And thanks for the positive feedback.)
I was please to learn that alpha geek Ian Hay chose YackPack as the "Best Service" of O'Reilly's Emerging Telephony conference last week.
I happen to agree, but I'm biased.
Thanks, Ian!
While working hard yesterday to ship a new version of YackPack, our CTO, David Levine, sent this quote to the team.
You know you've achieved perfection in design, not when you have nothing more to add, but when you have nothing more to take away.
- Antoine de Saint-Exupery
We'll . . . YackPack is not perfect. We still have more to take away.
Simpler, simpler, simpler . . .
My team was amused to see how Coach Fu is using YackPack to connect with people all over the world. The truth is he's sort of hacked YackPack. He's posted a user ID and password so anyone can enter his pack and start yacking.
Check out Coach Fun at http://www.elacentral.com/coachfu/pack.htm
You'll see Coach Fu has written instructions that are better than ours. Maybe we should hire him.
I've had only one recurring nightmare in my life: Losing my laptop.
I've probably had this dream about two dozen times. The storyline differs -- I'm lose my laptop in the airport, I forget it at a cafe -- but the outcome and anguish was always the same: My computer is gone and my life is terribly disrupted.
I haven't had that dream in a long time. And I probably never will again.
Now that most of my geek life is online with web-based applications, I don't worry about it. Yeah, losing one of my computer would be a nuisance. but it's no longer a nightmare scenario.
Making YackPack a completely web-based application was a big decision. I think it's the right one.
Yes, other companies have succeeded with installed software, from Microsoft to Skype. But those companies had their first victories with early adopters who had no problem with software installation and updates and patches.
The rest of the world is not like tech-savvy early adopters.
Most people can't install software. Even if they can, some people are afraid to install anything new. In my research with consumers I've heard people describe their computers as terribly fragile -- just on the verge of breaking. They feel that adding one more bit of software will cause the whole system to collapse.
But if it's online . . . that works.
About three weeks ago I started moving my life from PC to Mac. Since the 1980s I've been a big Apple fan, but when I worked at Sun Microsystems, I was forced to go to PC and never made it back to Mac.
Until now.
It's not easy moving your life from one platform to another. But I'm almost there. Today is the first day I haven't (yet) fired up my PC.
The truth, however, is that I've transitioned my life to be web based. So it doesn't matter what platform I use. I now use web-based email (IMAP - Stanford), I'm calendaring online (goodbye Outlook!), I'm a big wiki user, and -- of course -- I'm yacking on YackPack. It's all there online (mostly . . . typepad tools aren't so good for Mac.)
About a year ago, designer and all-around smart person Abbe Don told me about her transition back to Mac. She said the change was something like stepping out of a bumpy SUV and getting into a luxury car. Yes, in my head it feels something like that.
