In an interview, Fried, creator of Ruby on Rails, talks about the power of small teams and small businesses. He has some advice for software projects as well:

List all the features you’d like on your product and cut them in half. Then, cut that list in half.

I think it’s pretty funny, true as well. As we bloat software with more features, it becomes complicated and creates usability problems for users. The product becomes difficult to learn and use. Less is more approach is becoming an important methodology in software design.

I believe the internet is going to replace word of mouth. I still rely on others’ opinions and expertise, however I do this via searching the internet. The problem is that Google’s clever searching algorithms still can’t compete with the enormous amount of information present. What we really need is to augment Google’s searching technology with the wisdom of the crowds. Who would have believed that the Wikipedia idea could actually work in reality? But it does, and works really well. Now take a look at Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, people are still better than computers at performing simple tasks such as categorizing images. Why not try the same approach for reorganizing search results? Who can judge better than you whether that site has the information that you need or not…

Showing top posters on the front page, thus creating a competition probably increases user contribution to that site. But do I, as a reader, care about who the top posters are? Does it deserve to be on the front page, or even belong there?

On one side it degrades the quality of your site, while it increases user contribution on the other one. So which side weighs heavier?

It really depends on your goals and preferences. When I was running a gaming forum, showing quick reply forms or displaying post counts were positive motivators for increasing the number of posts made. However, the tradeoff made was regarding to the post quality. To increase their post counts, people made unnecessary posts and the quick reply form promoted making quick posts of poor quality. Since quality was more valuable than quantity, I always removed post counts.

You know the nasty tricks marketers make, like placing fundamental needs such as water, bread etc. at the end of the store, or putting escalators to only one end of a shopping mall. The idea is to make you walk around to increase your consumption.

I noticed a trend towards creating more social environments at the restaurants in Kanyon. I guess that is a managerial decision by the mall itself, it’s less likely that all the owners of cafes and restaurants collectively followed a new trend. Maybe the concept of Wagamama was influential in making this decision, who knows… Most restaurants have seating arrangements such that you have to sit in a big table, next to other customers. It’s a bit uncomfortable at first, but I believe this is a more civilized manner. It is beneficial for the cafe owners as well, since they can fit in more customers to a limited space.

I love shopping malls. Who doesn’t? In today’s busy world, being able to find all the shops in one place is certainly a time and effort saver. Kanyon, a new shopping mall in Turkey certainly deserves some publicity here.

The architectural design is astonishing, as the name suggests the design resembles a canyon. If we look at the previous shopping malls in this neighborhood, Akmerkez stands out by being the oldest one. The circular shape of Akmerkez is a brilliant way to design a shopping mall, because MetroCity’s rectangular design helps you realize the design flaw and appreciate the difference between the two approaches.

• People who go after their dreams is something to talk about. Barış Akkırış, at the age of 28, quits his big corporate job to go on a journey around the world. He shares the details of the journey that lasted 9.5 months on his blog as well. I’m sure that it was a priceless experience and I feel very, very envious!
• The experience of using an Apple with a 30” screen is tempting for everyone with an interest in computers. I need to stay away from these Apple stores for a while, in order to continue enjoying products of other brands. Apple products are so impressive in their design and very appealing to the eye as well.

I enjoy reading non-fiction books and Malcolm Gladwell is one of my favorite authors. He published two best sellers, The Tipping Point and Blink. The former explains how social phenomena emerge and focuses on the tipping points, small factors that have caused great changes in the society. In the latter book, he argues about the power of snap judgements and the importance of trusting our senses. His style is argumentative, in the sense that he makes an observation and supports his claim with research findings in social sciences.

It is the little things that makes a difference, they always say. Yeah, surely it is. It is the five minutes my friend spared to help me with my luggage, it is the automatic pause feature of ipod when your headphones get plugged out, it is the automatic underlining of numbers in your Sony Ericsson phone and it is the lights at the ceiling of Kanyon shopping mall that resembles stars at night. It is probably these little things that separate the special ones from the rest.