Why does Mark Zuckerberg hate "beta" development?

You know how everything Google does is launched in a “beta” mode. They know that their products are most likely going to break, fail, or simply invade your privacy. Google is so obsessed with beta releases that they often leave them in perpetual beta.

So why is Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg so against beta?

This massive company with more than 800 million users just rolls out new features to the entire group. One day you know how to use Facebook and the next day everything is different.

Then, as has happened 17 times before, they roll back and change many of those features because they weren’t tested properly with a large enough user group (i.e. beta testers).

A description of beta from Wikipedia:

It generally begins when the software is feature complete. The focus of beta testing is reducing impacts to users, often incorporating usability testing. The process of delivering a beta version to the users is called beta release and this is typically the first time that the software is available outside of the organization that developed it.

The users of a beta version are called beta testers. They are usually customers or prospective customers of the organization that develops the software, willing to test the software without charge, often receiving the final software free of charge or for a reduced price.

This practice is so common in the tech industry that it shocking that Facebook hasn’t had it from the start. I guarantee everyone at that company has experience with beta releases of products. Well maybe not everyone…

Perhaps, Mark Zuckerberg started so young at Facebook that he never learned the value of beta testing. A lot of people want to compare him to Steve Jobs and so maybe this is his own reality distortion field, “it should be so good we don’t need beta!”

Still, that doesn’t explain the stubbornness after having new updates to Facebook continually blow-up in his face. I’m sure that after each blow-up someone has said, “Hey Mark, this is what beta releases are for”.

Yet, here we are with the new auto-sharing feature instantly pushed live and everyone is complaining about it. The feature is brilliant but incomplete. Their are simple mistakes in the usability, like the problem with the “cancel” button that Marshall Kirkpatrick found.

This is such a simple fix, i.e. change the wording of the button so it’s not “pushy, manipulative and user-hostile.”

If found and fixed during beta it would have been a non-issue. Instead the flailing public is in hysteria and that crucial “first-impression” is of ruining sharing (Molly Wood) or gaslighting the web (Anil Dash).

It boggles the mind why Mark wants to avoid beta releases so bad that he enrages his user base.

There is hope. The new feature, Facebook Timeline, is in a semi-beta release in that it was open to developers early for testing. The tech journalists quickly hacked this and reported it to average users. Who then signed up as developers, created a fake app, and clicked several buttons that they had no idea what they were doing.

A surprising amount actually did all that, myself included, which means there definitely is an appetite for Facebook beta testers. Plus, Facebook has delayed releasing Timeline allowing all those users to test out the features. The situation looks an awful lot like a beta release…

Maybe Mark is realizing the value of beta testing? Or, at least the value of releasing a finished product as opposed to a brilliant but incomplete idea?

The DNA of Happiness

Disclaimer: I don’t subscribe to creationism. I’m an ardent believer of evolution and a long-time student of biology. 

Much like DNA, I believe happiness is embedded in each us. I don’t believe it’s some mystical, mercurial, ephemeral phenomenon. I believe it’s the product of an alignment with our true self and the more we try to appease and conform to standards dictated by others, the more happiness will evade us.

Yesterday I had a fairly explosive fight with my mom. I’m not living my life the way she would like. I’m writing and surfing and living in sin with my boyfriend in California. But the truth is, I’ve tried to make her happy. I tried to make a lot of people happy and inevitably the one person that’s never happy in this equation is me. So I took everyone else out of the equation and found that my happiness was there all along. It’s that simple.

There’s a great quote by Christopher Morley: There is only one success – to spend your life in your own way. 

This is the DNA of happiness.

Another Happy Day: A Lesson on Family Pain

There are some pieces of art that just hit you in all the right places. That’s how I felt when I saw “Another Happy Day” at Sundance last year.

The film, set in Annapolis, MD and loaded with an A-list cast including Ellen Burstyn, Ellen Barkin, Demi Moore, Kate Bosworth and Thomas Haden Church, tackles one family’s terrain of emotional landmines that have given rise to a “primal web of resentments and recriminations.”  

The tone of the film is anything but happy, and yet there are so many moments of indelible humor, I couldn’t help but find myself smiling and laughing throughout it. Like the scene when the mother (played by Ellen Barkin) is duking it out with her son (played by the mesmerizing Ezra Miller):

Mother: “Get out, you son of a bitch!”
Son: “You just insulted yourself, Mom.”

The film serves a painfully honest example of what happens to a family unit when conflicts, feelings and memories are repressed and buried, and judgment is couched in every smile. The result is anything but resolved and healthy.

During the holidays, if you find your family driving you a little bit nuts, I highly recommend checking it out:)

The definition of investment banking and its lines of business

An investment bank is a financial institution that:

  • Assists individuals, corporations and governments in raising capital by underwriting and/or acting as the client’s agent in the issuance of securities.
  • Assists companies involved in mergers and acquisitions.
  • Provides ancillary services such as market making, trading of derivatives, fixed income instruments, foreign exchange, commodities, and equity securities.

Unlike commercial banks and retail banks, investment banks do not take deposits. From 1933 (Glass–Steagall Act) until 1999 (Gramm–Leach–Bliley Act), the United States maintained a separation between investment banking and commercial banks. Other industrialized countries, including G8 countries, have historically not maintained such a separation.

There are two main lines of business in investment banking.

– The sell side which involves trading securities for cash or for other securities (i.e., facilitating transactions, market-making), or the promotion of securities (i.e., underwriting, research, etc.).

– The buy side which involves dealing with pension funds, mutual funds, hedge funds, and the investing public (who consume the products and services of the sell-side in order to maximize their return on investment) constitutes the “buy side”.

Many firms have buy and sell side components.

An investment bank can also be split into private and public functions with a Chinese wall which separates the two to prevent information from crossing. The private areas of the bank deal with private insider information that may not be publicly disclosed, while the public areas such as stock analysis deal with public information.

An advisor who provides investment banking services in the United States must be a licensed broker-dealer and subject to Securities & Exchange Commission (SEC) and Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) regulation.

via Wikipedia

Future of wind power? I vote for Dutch Windmills and small pinwheels

I recently encountered a state-of-the-art wind tower on the freeway. The base was separated into three parts and the turbine into another three. Carried by six trailers flagged with “wide load” and trailed by escort cars. Yeah, it was big.

The current trend in wind power is to go bigger and bigger with more complex features. Including mag-lev, upper-atmosphere turbines, helicals, loopwings, skyscrapers, and highways (21 different types) .

But, none are more interesting (to me) than the Dutch Windmill and the tiny pinwheels. I really hope our future is a landscape dotted with structural beauties and childhood toys, rather than industrial aluminum.

Doug Selsam’s Sky Serpent uses an array of small rotors to catch more wind for less money. The key to increasing efficiency is to make sure each rotor catches its own fresh flow of wind and not just the wake from the one next to it, as previous multi-rotor turbines have done.

That requires figuring out the optimal angle for the shaft in relation to the wind and the ideal spacing between the rotors. The payoff is machines that use one tenth the blade material of today’s mega-turbines yet produce the same wattage. A wonderful and controversial design of which the inventor says:

“This is a 1,000 year-old design” of the single-bladed turbine, “I knew if I could get more rotors, I could get more power.”