Along with this, I’ve seen a shift in applications being rejected on technical grounds to applications being rejected on the basis of real or perceived Terms of Use violations or other quasi legal grounds.

This includes rejections for:

• “Scraping” Content from 3rd party sites
• Non official use of a 3rd party API
• Concerns over handling of user data

Now, while there is no checkbox for ‘I cross my heart and hope I’m not violating any treaties of the land’ during the app submission process there is a ‘Review Notes’ section where you can list any steps you’ve taken to remaining on the right side of the law.

For my apps, I’ve started including all of the following information (when relevant):

1. APIs used, along with links to API terms of service, and just a statement such as: “This application conforms to the rules and regulations for API usage at NAME OF SERVICE.”
2. Links to naming and or branding guidelines for API usage. For instance, Netflix requires that applications using their API have names in the form of “X for Netflix” not “Netflix X”.
3. Name and email contact if there are questions / concerns about usage. In particular, I’ve been involved in some projects where the application we were producing was the ‘Official’ application, but it was being published under our company name in association with another provider. So, I included the contact information for the marketing manager at the ‘official’ company.
4. If images, icon sets, etc. are included in the application that may have been used in other applications, I’ll put a quick note regarding where and how they were licensed.
5. If the application interacts with an external site that the reviewer may not be familiar with I would include a summary of that site, including things that you might consider obvious.

   An example: I’ve heard of a couple different applications for interacting with Hacker News being rejected for various versions of: “This seems like it might be shady.”

   If I was submitting such an application, I would definitely put in the review notes a quick paragraph along the lines of: “Despite the name ‘Hacker News’ is not actually about breaking into computers of violating encryption policies, but is a social news site for people interested in startups, programming and interesting technical feats.”

6. Lastly, the app store reviewers are poring over hundreds if not thousands of applications a week. It costs you nothing to be polite and human towards them.

   As a reviewer which review notes opening would put you in a more positive frame of mind about an application:

   Thanks for reviewing my application, to get started here’s a username and password for you to login and use:

   username: appletester

   password: 1happypuppy

   or

   username: apple
   
   password: password
   

   C’mon, who doesn’t like a happy puppy.

Lastly, here is the (lightly redacted) text of the Review Notes section for Flickscan – Barcode Scanning for Netflix, which was approved first try.

However, this policy has some interesting side effects: foremost being that many people asking questions have no idea (or don’t care) how the StackOverflow site works and won’t reward people who answer their questions by upvoting an answer and marking it as accepted. This disincentives some people from answering questions from anonymous askers and people with low scores or acceptance ratings.

To help offset this they created the “Tireless” badge, which I won; given for having more than 5 Zero score accepted answers and 20% of total.

While I was happy to have won the badge, I didn’t really care for the name, which led to the following Twitter discussion with Jeff Atwood:

So, the moral of the story is that I’m tenacious and StackOverflow is awesome.

Sean Cribbs led a very wide ranging talk on how to manage and contribue to an open source project at last weeks Raleigh Ruby Camp.

Some things really stuck out to me:

1. The move to Github quieted the number of people who thought they were heavy handed as they could just fork whenever they wanted.

2. Plugins as a way to involve people in the project without changing the core.

3. Day job is supporting hacking

4. Building a service business around an open source application seems like a natural type of business.

Links:

• Radiant CMS
• WordPress.org
• Github
• CodeHaus
• Upstart
• Radiant on Crack
• Redcloth
• Bluecloth
• Rdiscount

[audio:http://buzzwordcompliant.s3.amazonaws.com/sean-cribbs.mp3]

Download

The quick summary is that due to the cheap lease price, mall architecture (it’s a big box that was designed to be gutted and split up), and electricity pricing in the area what was a massive eyesore and huge problem is suddenly a revitalizing force bringing 1400 tech jobs into the area.

Rolling Acres Mall in Akron Ohio (the mall I went to growing up) suffered a similar fate to the San Antonio mall described in the video. It slowly became a ghost town of crappy shops selling jewelry that was nearly gold and for some reason an inordinate number of storefront churches. Outwardly at least it would be a good candidate for a similar conversion: cheap electricity from the Perry Nuclear Power Plant, close proximity to the University of Akron, and at this point Akron would probably pay somebody to occupy the building.

MacApper is running a contest for the best “switcher” story: someone ditching Windows for the Mac. Today’s entry was interesting, Joe Goh founder of FunkeeMonk a windows programmer turned Mac software developer.

Personally, I was less interested in his “switching story”, than in the story of how he got started with his business. As near as I can tell, Joe chose the absolutely hardest route possible to create a salable software application. Don’t take my word for it, read his “Bittersweet story in 15 slides” (warning: pdf link). It chronicles his creation of “FunkeeStory”, the wildly un-googleable name for his Treo->Mac SMS message application.

While, I’ve nothing but respect for Joe and his work there are a couple things I might have done differently if I were in Joe’s spot:

1. Created a “starter” application that was a release milestone with fewer features than the 1.0 of FunkeeStory. Anything to: get users, get cashflow, get an “real” release under your belt. Some sort of Treo/OSX file transfer application seems like a possible step.

2 Charge more. It’s obviously not the whole story in the slides but pricing decisions were made based on feedback from users saying “Your app is too expensive!”, even after discounting from $25 to $20. This is extremely dangerous as users would say the same thing even if it was $10. My suggestion would be to go the other route, pick a date a couple weeks from now and say that on that day you’re doing to double the price. Explain on the site that you need mexican food and microbrews to function and output more great software and take the resulting sales data as another price point on your supply demand curve.

It might also be helpful to read Camels and Rubber Duckies by Joel.

Technorati Tags: startups, osx, mac, software, pricing, strategy

That seems to be the crucial part of the ruling here, because it essentially means it’s acceptable for employers (or at least the federal government, as an employer) to check out workers’ backgrounds online. The judges seem to be saying (quite reasonably) that the internet shouldn’t get singled out for special treatment, and that it should be considered as any other research source. Should any communication on the internet constitute prejudicial ex-parte communication, then it should be dealt with as such. The bottom line: just because your boss found out about your past online, it certainly doesn’t mean they can’t fire you.

My new project (still unannounced, but progressing) is an attempt to help people manage their own online “brand”. I’m still kicking around ideas, maybe there is some way to algorithmically generate an “Online Reputation Score”, though it would be nice to have a snappier nickname: Jerk Index? Stalker Score?

[update] I’m thinking maybe Internet Karma – IK [/update]

If I go ahead with commercializing it as a service, it’s likely I’d need to make the API dependent features part of the “premium” package to directly attribute their costs to that of the API’s.

This was legal per the terms of the contract (an admittedly poorly written default clause), but I think that Garrett described the situation correctly, that Brian Ball and macZOT displayed “completely unprofessional behavior”.

Garrett has since decided to release xPad as freeware, if this is maniacal rage, it’s classy maniacal rage.

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It’s a good concept: Mike Nelson as sarcastic commentary track on any movie. I simply can’t tell you the number of times I wished there was a MST3K button on my remote. I’d press it and the silhouttes of Crow and gang would pop up and entertain me by mocking “Big Billy’s Bass Fishing Review”.

Anyway, this whole endeavor is just crying out for them work with NetFlix, Amazon, iTunes and the Blogging community.

They should become NetFlix affiliates, this pays between 10 to 15 dollar per signup and the RiffTrax service would likely have good success in generating new signups as they are an add-on service. Sarcastic audio commentary tracks add to the value of the movies someone would get from Netflix and may “tip” people who were on the edge about whether or not to join Netflix. It might be worthwhile to offer something like 3 free RiffTrax for each person that signs up through their affiliate link. At a minimum, they should be linking their RiffTrax directly to the NetFlix movies so people can easily add them to their queues.

Amazon’s affiliate plan pays out 5 – 10 % of the purchase price. At that rate, it’s would almost be worth it to just offer the track for free if someone purchases the DVD through RiffTrax’s affiliate link.

iTunes is the way people get audio from the Internet onto their iPods and computers. Let’s be honest, there is a large audience out there that has no idea how to get audio from the Internet to their computer and MP3 Device in any other way. Making RiffTrax available over iTunes would greatly increase the ease of use of the service, the visiblity to the target audience (people with iPods) and lead directly to more downloads and money.

[tags] RiffTrax, Amazon, NetFlix, iTunes [/tags]

Unfortunately, NewsAlloy doesn’t seem to be tackling the “switching cost” issue with any sense of urgency. This is really too bad as the interface seems very responsive and well thought out. Underlying this though it would seem that they don’t really want people to switch over and use their application.

Issues:

• Onerous Signup: You are prompted for geographic information, need to decipher a CAPTCHA, complete a detailed chalk outline of the True Cross and then wait for an emailed “Account Activation” code to get started.

  These steps are usually taken to deter people from slapping ads for natural hardening agents all over their blog and/or seeking assistance on what to do with the tens of millions of dollars they have cluttering up their third world country.

  While that is all well and good, it makes little sense for a newsreader that is PULLING information to be so draconian in account signup. This is for the exact same reason that we haven’t seen dive bombing squads of spammers attempting to mass signup thousands of accounts to check their one email account for notes from Mom: the economics just don’t work.

• OPML Import: Here is the process you need to undergo to ATTEMPT to move your subscriptions from Bloglines to NewsAlloy.
  • Export OPML File from Bloglines
  • Save OPML File to Desktop
  • FTP File to some publicly accessible place on the Internets
  • Pause to check if you wrote the last line of instructions correctly. Yes, NewsAlloy will not let you upload an OPML File (you have to enter a URL on their import page) so unless you are both technically inclined and have your own webspace you’re out of luck. I’d guesstimate this precludes 90% of users from even attempting to switch
  • Receive a notice from NewsAlloy that my OPML file is not valid.
  • Run my OPML Export from BlogLines through the OPML Validator finding out that Bloglines like the attribute “title” and the validator likes “text” for the feed and folder names.
  • Manually correct the errors in my OPML File, Re-FTP, Try Importing one last time, only to fail and be told that my OPML File does not contain any feeds
  • Give Up, Curse Bitterly and go in search of more coffee.

I’ll give it another try in a couple weeks and see if it has improved.