In October, Google plans to talk up their new Dart web programming language, a project being led by the team in charge of their V8 JavaScript engine. Unhappy with the performance of JS, they hope to replace it entirely and make Dart the new defacto client-side scripting language — a “clean break”, in their own words.

Fair enough. Any company with the scale and development resources that Google has is always looking to push the envelope when it comes to web technologies. I have no qualms about the philosophy behind Dart. But I do take issue with how Google plans to execute this.

Here are some lines from a Google mailing list discussion about Dart, followed by my interpretations.

Developers who can focus solely on Chrome can expect to be able to rely on some [Dart] features built into Chrome within a year. Developers focusing on all browsers will have to make use of the [Dart] cross compiler to target other browsers, and, depending on the success of the evangelizing effort, might have to wait years for other browsers to implement native support for [Dart].

Dart will be Chrome-only for who knows how long, and if you write an application with Dart, you’ll need to use our compiler to build a degraded version for other browsers.

[Dart] will be designed so that a large subset of it can be compiled to target legacy Javascript platforms.

But the compiler may not translate everything, so you’ll need to make sure your application still works in anything other than Chrome.

We will strongly encourage Google developers start off targeting Chrome-only whenever possible as this gives us the best end user experience… While [Dart] is catching on with other browsers, we will promote it as the language for serious web development on the web platform

But we’ll be using Dart and your app should use it too, so deal with it.

Lars has promised to “sweet talk” the other browser vendors… Once [Dart] has had a chance to prove its stability and feasibility, we are committed to making [Dart] an open standard with involvement from the broader web community.

So Google wants to circumvent the standards process, and then sweet talk everyone else into implementing it?

They’re trying to play it both ways: they say Dart will be an open, interoperable standard and that they will work with the web community at large  — and then also describe how they’ll develop it internally for however long, and use their company position to essentially strong-arm other vendors into adopting.

You can’t talk up your commitments to open web standards and working with the community and other vendors, and then push your single-vendor effort for standardization at some point in the future by sweet-talking others based on your sheer market strength.

All of this coming from the company that touts Android as “open”, mind you.

Google is a public company. If they want to continue to please their shareholders and attract talent, they have to show profit and growth. The company is heavily marketing Chrome as if it’s a requirement, like one of those IE website badges from the 90′s. “Best viewed in Chrome.”

Go sign onto the Wi-Fi landing page at Starbucks, or play chrome.angrybirds.com (which works fine in Firefox too, by the way), or even download Skype and look at what came bundled. You’ll see how Google is throwing millions at marketing the Chrome brand. Why?

Remember what it comes down to.

“Everybody that uses Chrome is a guaranteed locked-in user for us in terms of having access to Google. The way we distribute Chrome is people get it organically or they get it based on our marketing efforts, or they see our marketing and they choose to download it, or we work with partners who help us promote Chrome to our users and to other users. So in that context, we found that marketing very often ends up with an equivalent or better ROI than us having to go to partnership deals. Sometimes you’ll see that our TAC and our marketing around Chrome is fungible. Where we spend money and marketing, we take away from TAC as it relates to Chrome. So you can expect us to continue to drive Chrome strategically because it has not just a Chrome specific benefit for us but it also impacts many of our other products that work as part of Chrome. So the lifetime value of a Chrome user is phenomenal.”
— Nikesh Arora, Chief Business Officer at Google on Q1 2011 conference call

Translated: Chrome users will use Google products and see our ads. We don’t have to spend as much money, the people come to us. Chrome users are directly proportional to money. We’ll get people on Chrome because we like money.

First and foremost: your project’s top designer should be given the same respect as your top developer. That being said, they should also be held to the same level of accountability — something that often gets overlooked. It’s easily to tell when a programmer writes bad code, because the application crashes frequently, runs slowly, or doesn’t run at all. But good design is so often mistaken for pleasing art direction that designers are rarely called out for lousy work. Plenty of web designers can make things look nice, but this doesn’t make them good at what they do. Good designers value function, not just form.

If you’re a developer, you should have good design sensibilities. You should be able to push back when something doesn’t feel usable. And just because you took one or two HCI courses doesn’t mean you’re a design expert! Spend lots of time observing the behavior of the websites and applications you love as you use them. You’ll begin to slowly acquire the keen eye for solid design that only comes with time, by identifying firsthand what works and what doesn’t.

If you’re a designer, you should have good coding sensibilities — nay, great. Stay on top of upcoming HTML5/CSS3 technologies and know what’s feasible to build (and what isn’t). Poke around the technical side of things and recognize that your fancy, AJAX-heavy design might take longer than a couple of hours to implement. You should be able to have an honest conversation with your developers and review each others’ work. It’s surprising how many designers I know who can’t figure out how to use Git or Subversion.

One sentiment I’ve heard echoed repeatedly by software architects and product managers is that designers shouldn’t develop, and developers shouldn’t design. “A good designer cannot be a good developer.” I seethe on the inside every time I hear this.

Not only is it wrong, but it’s a terrible mindset to encourage moving forward. Building an amazing user experience is increasingly essential for product differentiation, and a team that possesses a strong grasp of both trades is critical to that end. Intelligent design results from careful planning and consideration, and this only happens when both sides can fully comprehend the issues of the other.

(Warning: rant ahead.)

I’ve noticed that lots of people in the software development world like to vehemently preach the gospel of “release early, release often”, and how it makes complete sense and that all companies should be doing it. This strikes a chord with me because it’s not a one-size-fits-all solution, and in many cases it can be a flat-out terrible mentality to adopt.

I guess it boils down to this: if you’re determining whether or not a product is ready to ship, you should listen to a) your users and b) your own instincts as a developer. Not to some motto.

Consider the recent launch of Digg version 4.

Digg had a private beta version of its new site open for several months, which sounds like a perfectly good, rational move. But can you guess who was invited in to try out the beta first? Not Digg’s actual user base. Admitted first were bloggers, news organizations, and social media personalities with thousands of Twitter followers — the people with the loudest voices and the most influence; the publishers who would profit when Digg sent traffic to their sites (without any additional effort on their part, thanks to Digg’s new feed auto-import feature).

Of course these folks raved about it on Twitter. The problem being, these aren’t the people that Digg needed to be hearing from. Let’s face it: most of these people weren’t actually using Digg on a regular basis.

Allow me to illustrate, MS Paint style:

So the new Digg eventually launches, people who actually use the site get angry over the pitfalls of the new version, and in retaliation they start completely spamming the front page with stories from rival site Reddit. Digg founder Kevin Rose dismissed the revolt on Twitter: “this too shall pass, it’s revolt #5 for us.”

Yes, Digg’s userbase was being immature, and nowadays it’s easy to dismiss their angry rebellions over site changes (of which there have been several). But there was still a motive behind their obnoxious revolt: since its inception, Digg’s philosophy was all about giving power to the people — no editors. You choose the stories that get submitted and voted to the front page.  With the new release, this core principle was disrupted; publishers were automatically dumping all of their stories into Digg, straight from their feeds. Users didn’t get the recognition or satisfaction of submitting a story and having it voted to the front page. Any user going to digg.com would be presented with the new “My News” section, filled with stories submitted by people or publishers that you followed. And can you guess who Digg recommended that you follow during their new onboarding process? The big guns: The New York Times, Engadget, Mashable, CNN. Effectively, upon visiting digg.com, you would see headlines written and submitted by the heavyweights. While it may not have been their intent, it very much gave the impression that they were shutting out the average user. To add insult to injury, they removed the bury/downvote function entirely, and scrapped the “Upcoming” section of the site where you could view stories recently submitted by fellow users.

Perhaps most off-putting to me was how the new “My News” homepage was filled with stories from major publishers that I had already seen in Google Reader or elsewhere. Gone, or relegated to a different area of the site called “Top News”, was all of the quirkier, more unique content submitted by users that you didn’t see everywhere else online.

The Digg team has been working to address many user complaints; they brought back the Upcoming section, and are working to give regular users equal footing among publishers in the list of recommended people to follow. But it might be too late. The backlash may have tapered off, but apparently so did much of Digg’s traffic and user base.

Let’s take another example: Google Wave. When it was announced at the Google I/O conference last year, the hype was enormous. But again, who did they invite into the preview first? The developers attending the conference: programmer types and early adopters who have the patience to fiddle around with new services, and gloss over most of the clunkier interface/usability issues. So when Google started sending out invitations to the general public, the consensus was:

“I have no idea how to use this thing.” *close*
or
“Wow, this is ridiculously buggy.” *close*

Wave crashed constantly and almost no one understood how to use it, or even what to use it for. We tried to use it to collaboratively edit documents at gdgt but everyone gave up after a few minutes.

I took it for another spin a couple months ago, only to find that it was actually running smoothly and they’d worked out nearly all of my original problems and frustrations. I got my co-workers on board and we started using it to track bugs during development projects. It actually worked really, really well…

But it was too late. Wave never picked up steam, and despite Google’s best efforts to encourage people to give it another try, they couldn’t turn people back on to it and the entire product was relegated to the deadpool.

The attention span of the average web surfer is ridiculously short. First impressions matter a great deal. They have the potential to make or break your product. If you don’t get it right, it’s extremely tough to win people back later once you do. You can send out all of the tweets and “Come back to us!” emails that you want, but it’s a given: you won’t be able to match the buzz, excitement, or level of interest that you had the first time around. So make it count.

Lessons learned?

• If you’re overhauling your site/software/service and you plan on opening up a private alpha or beta, don’t invite celebrities, journalists, and social media heavyweights first. Crazy idea: let the members of your core user base be the first ones to try it — the people who honestly use your product every single day and can provide you with the most valuable feedback.
• Actually listen to what these users say. Find out what they want. If you ask the right questions, you could identify something they need that your company (or any other) isn’t offering, that they might not even be aware of. If you suck at listening or aren’t even making an effort to gather feedback from these people — your core users — then you’ll release your new product “too early”, without the compelling feature/aspect that keeps them around (or on the contrary, with something that actually drives them away).
• Don’t feel pressured to release early. If your product feels pretty rough around the edges, don’t push it out the door and tell yourself that you have time to fix it later, because if it’s bad enough, you might not. If development was rushed and your gut is telling you that something is going to break, releasing now might just be entering into a world of pain. Having your new product crash and spit out errors is probably not the first impression you want to make. If you have a strong feeling that something’s not right but you’re rushing to make a deadline, do yourself a favor and try to take the extra couple of days/weeks to get it right.
• If you release too early, you might receive feedback or complaints from users that distract you from your goals for the product before it’s even taken form as you envisioned it (or before you’ve had a chance to tackle the already known issues you need to iron out).

“A delayed game is eventually good, a bad game is bad forever.” — Shigeru Miyamoto

Consider this quote during your own product development cycle. You can iterate later to fix your mistakes, but if things weren’t particularly pretty from the start, it’s a challenge to convince people that things have changed for the better once they’ve left.

RIP Google Wave.

As Facebook’s privacy blunders gain more public attention, a lot of people are talking about deleting their accounts. Here are my thoughts on the matter.

First: not to defend the company’s irresponsible behavior when it comes to user privacy, but quite simply, you shouldn’t post anything to Facebook that you wouldn’t want to see being shared publicly. (And that goes for any website. It’s just common sense.) Your Facebook profile is not a fenced-in yard; depending upon your privacy settings, at least some of your friends will be able to see the personal things that you post. Facebook’s questionable business practices aside, all of the privacy settings in the world wouldn’t be enough to stop a “friend” with access to your info from sharing it with other people or re-posting it elsewhere. Just don’t post private information on Facebook. Boom.

As the controversy over Facebook’s privacy control (or lack thereof) enters the mainstream media and catches the public eye, I can envision how the uprising might play out: Users will join angry Facebook groups and voice their frustration, as they always do. Facebook’s users like to rebel and be heard. The sentiment will gain popularity as people see their friends joining these groups in their News Feeds. And if the most popular or influential people in one’s social graph make a switch, others are likely to follow them out the door. Suddenly, leaving Facebook becomes the cool thing to do, just like what happened to MySpace a few years ago. We aren’t loyal to social networks, we’ll go wherever our friends are.

But there’s one thing missing from this equation right now — the alternative to Facebook. What solid Facebook competitors have you used? Diaspora sounds like a nice concept, but it’s exactly that. They haven’t even started coding it yet.

A lot of influential people are leaving Facebook right now, and that’s great, but it’s not going to spur a revolution, or even make a dent in Facebook’s user count. Why? Because no one is proposing an alternative that people should sign up for instead. They aren’t recommending a competing, more trustworthy social network with a similar feature set that people can suggest to their friends.

Admit it, for all of its controversy, Facebook is still a useful, fully-featured product. There will be no mass exodus anytime soon. People aren’t going to ditch it and face that feeling of social disconnect; not without somewhere else to go that’s just as good, or better, where they can invite their friends to join them.

So if you’re planning on leaving Facebook, more power to you. Just recognize that the rest of your social graph probably won’t be following in your footsteps anytime soon until a suitable replacement appears. Until that happens, I’m planning on sticking around, not sharing anything I consider private, and opting out of whatever new (dumb) things Facebook comes up with, because it’s still a useful communications tool and all of my friends are here.