Carsonified

Building a thriving community around your company/app/service is fuckin’ hard work.

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Somehow, I’ve amassed over 8,000 followers on Twitter (ryancarson) and I get roughly 37 new followers per day. I was thinking about this the other day and wondering how it happened … and if I could share any tips. Here we go:

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I wanted to record a quick video response to Mike Arrington’s post about taking a break from blogging.

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Recently, we’ve been compiling a few of our websites together. This is a really cool idea, because it allows us to use more of our data in more intelligent ways, and to keep a cleaner, more DRY codebase. It also means we can start to replace some of the parts of our systems that possibly aren’t as helpful as they could be. Case in point: the 500 page!

Now, don’t get me wrong - this page is pretty informative. It clearly shows you that something’s gone wrong. However, it’s not very helpful. It’s simply a message. So I thought to myself, “What would I like to see on an error page? Clearly this error isn’t my fault - so I should have some options here.”

Changing this error page was, in my mind, a big thing. This error message has been at the company longer than I have. Does it get a severance package? I mean, it doesn’t take Fridays off. It never turns up late. It always stays behind and works while we have parties. It doesn’t even play Guitar Hero. Short of monit, it’s probably one of our most diligent employees. Even if it stopped working, I’m sure it’d show itself as its own error page. That’s commitment… or, possibly, infinite and fatal recursion.

So what could replace this trusty workhorse of a page? I put myself in a user’s shoes. Well, I thought to myself, I’d really like to notify the  developer directly. That would mean that this might get fixed, stat. Does that mean a phone number on the page? An anonymous email address? Both of these things seem far too difficult. For instance, I cannot work the Carsonified desk phones correctly; they have many, many buttons. Once, my particular unit started typing letters instead of numbers. And OSX seems to enjoy stalling whatever I’m doing by opening Mail.app every time I click a mailto link.

Nah, let’s put a FORM on it. One that sends the message to an independently-hosted site to process. That way, if the site were to go down, Dreamhost-style I’ll still be able to get hate-mail from all our users.

That’s not going to be enough, though. If I’m clearly not to blame for this evident failure, I’d like to know who is… so there should be some sort of backup contact details. Details that clearly aren’t just a blatant ploy for fame, admiration and Twitter followers.

Now, the worst part about making a 500 page is that, if you do your job right, nobody will ever see it. But things do inevitably go wrong, and a good 500 page is a useful tool to have around for when they do. This is 2008 - hiding behind a blank error page just isn’t enough. If you care about your users, and your application, you need to know when stuff goes wrong.

Current number of 500 page emails: 2

A lot of geeks and developers out there are using Mozilla Firefox. It’s a fantastic browser, and I highly recommend it. Firefox has been a huge factor in the progress of web development. Where would we be without the Web Developer Toolbar and Firebug?

However, there’s one place you have to be careful using Firefox - password management. You know the little “Remember Password” button you click when you log in? Turns out Firefox doesn’t mind showing you the passwords you’ve saved, in plain text. It’s no secret - others have previously blogged about it - but it does bear repeating. This is the default behaviour, so if you haven’t already spotted this, then chances are it applies to you right now. That means someone unscrupulous can come along and read your passwords. Like this:

First, go into “Preferences” in Firefox (on a mac, hit Cmd-,) and head to the Security tab. Then click the Saved Passwords button as shown here:

This will bring up a Passwords window. I’m not showing you mine. But look for this button at the bottom right:

Press this button. Voila! All your passwords are shown, in plain text, on-screen. Please note, my password is not hunter2.

This means that someone can open up Firefox on your computer, and view all your saved passwords. The way to change this is to set a master password for Firefox. Close that passwords window, and go back to the Security preferences pane. There, you’ll see an option for “Use a master password”.

This means that Firefox protects all your saved passwords with a master password which is never shown. However, get used to seeing this prompt…

because it comes up ALL the time when you’re using password-authenticated sites. Personally, I use Webkit nightly builds for everyday browsing: they’re extremely fast and stable.

I had an eye-opening experience the other night and it reminded me how important it is to open up real conversation with your customers. It’s so exciting how tools like Qik and Seesmic are encouraging this.

I saw this tweet from Kathy Sierra, which piqued my interest to go see what was Gary Vaynerchuk was up to on Seesmic. Gary Vaynerchuk and Kevin Rose (digg) where doing an impromptu Q&A where you could ask them questions using Seesmic.

So I thought I’d have a go and shoot them a question (about Grand Theft Auto IV, of course):

I was really fun to get a reply almost instantaneously:

What is so amazing about this interaction is that it was personal and fun. That just isn’t possible over email or even the phone. They were in Las Vegas and I was in Shockerwick and we connected. It increased my loyalty to Kevin and Gary because they took time to interact with me - and that’s the value of that personal exchange. Amazing.

How do you all think this is changing the way we interact with our customers, fans and friends?