My good friends at HiiDef just launched a new app that has been in beta for awhile, Flavors.me. This is an excellent tool that has a great, simple, and usable design.

What’s the value preposition of Flavors.me? It’s to unify your various “online identities” into a single, dynamic, automatically-updated, and elegant website.

What do I mean by that? OK — so, like most people on the web, you spread public information about yourself in multiple places. You might run one or two blogs (personal and work?). You might have a Facebook account, a Twitter account. You may share your favorite books at GoodReads, your favorite movies at Netflix, and your favorite music on Last.fm.

Flavors.me lets you take all that information and put it together in a single website to serve as your “online identity”. All your publicly shared information, aggregated in one place, and displayed beautifully.

I’ve been running a Flavors.me site for some time that you can see here: http://flavors.me/pixelmonkey

Now, that’s the end product. All the content gets pulled dynamically from your various online feeds. The real magic with Flavors.me is how easy it is to get there. You can drastically change the look and feel of this site using a dynamic, “WYSIWYG” interface. You can do one or two clicks to add a service, reorder it, rename it. Another couple of clicks and you change font sizes, colors, and even the overall layout.

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I recently re-read Douglas Crockford’s JavaScript: The Good Parts. I have been writing more and more JavaScript lately, especially object-oriented JavaScript plugging into existing frameworks. Re-reading the book has definitely been a useful exercise — I think when I first read it approximately 6 months ago, I didn’t fully understand it. But now, I do.

I also found it very interesting to hear Crockford wax poetic about the virtue of simplicity in all forms of software design. The following passage concludes the book.

When I started thinking about this[...], I wanted to take the subset idea further, to show how to take an existing [product] and make significant improvements to it by making no changes except to exclude the low-value features.

We see a lot of feature-driven product design in which the cost of features is not properly accounted. Features can have a negative value to consumers because they make the products more difficult to understand and use. We are finding that people like products that just work. It turns out that designs that just work are much harder to produce than designs that assemble long lists of features.

Features have a specification cost, a design cost, and a development cost. There is a testing cost and a reliability cost. The more features there are, the more likely one will develop problems or will interact badly with another. In software systems, there is a storage cost, which was becoming negligible, but in mobile applications is becoming significant again. There are ascending performance costs because Moore’s Law doesn’t apply to batteries.

Features have a documentation cost. Every feature adds pages to the manual, increasing training costs. Features that offer value to a minority of users impose a cost on all users. So, in designing products[...], we want to get the core features—the good parts—right because that is where we create most of the value.

We all find the good parts in the products that we use. We value simplicity, and when simplicity isn’t offered to us, we make it ourselves. My microwave oven has tons of features, but the only ones I use are cook and the clock. And setting the clock is a struggle. We cope with the complexity of feature-driven design by finding and sticking with the good parts.

It would be nice if products[...] were designed to have only good parts.

I removed direct references to the main subject of Crockford’s discussion — namely, the JavaScript language itself. The truth is, this advice is much more valuable for the design of all software products. Perhaps one day someone will write the much needed book, Startups: The Good Parts.

I’ll start off this post with a somewhat controversial claim: I invented Dropbox.

I’ll show why this claim doesn’t matter later, but for now, I’ll assure you that it’s true.

How many of you out there use Dropbox? If you don’t, you should — it’s an excellent tool. In its free version, it provides you with 2GB of storage “in the cloud”, using a new kind of folder called a “Dropbox”. What distinguishes a Dropbox from other folders on your computer? The following:

• Every file put in your Dropbox is automatically (and securely) uploaded to Dropbox’s servers, ensuring you have an offsite backup of all data therein.
• Multiple computers can gain access to a Dropbox, ensuring files are automatically synchronized across computers without having to use complication version control systems.
• All files in your Dropbox are versioned, ensuring you can always recover an older version of a file in case you accidentally overwrite a good version.

Dropbox is supported on Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux, and now even has mobile applications, as well. Further, I have a special place in my heart for this service because I started using it almost 2 years ago, and it has acted as a file sharing and project management tool for my own startup’s internal operations at Parse.ly. I was therefore more than ecstatic to discover that this excellent tool and its smart founders had also made it through all of the hurdles necessary to get an early-stage company the financing it needs: they’ve raised over $7 million in financing and have over 3 million users.

But there is another reason I absolutely love Dropbox: because it was my idea. I invented it.

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I presented Parse.ly at the NYC Search & Discovery Meetup on Thurs, Oct. 29.  The meetup is organized by Otis Gospodnetic (blog), who is one of the authors of Lucene in Action and the author of the upcoming book, Solr in Action. We make heavy use of Lucene and Solr on Parse.ly, so it was exciting to get an opportunity to present to a community of fellow technologists building systems with these excellent technologies.

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If you were trying to log into Parse.ly between 11pm-1am this Sunday, you may have noticed that it was intermittently down for maintenance.  Over the last several weeks, we’ve been working hard to roll out some new features, polish some rough edges, and improve our infrastructure after our launch last …

Sorry for excessive metaphors related to trees, but it just seemed so fitting.

You see, for almost a year, Sachin (the other founder of Cog Tree) and I have spent every moment of our free time to the path of starting this company.  We felt quite nomadic during that time — …