iLike – No! Never Surrender To Your Users, Facebook

A business lesson for those that are interested in that sort of thing:

While I don’t fully agree with Michael Arrington’s application to Facebook of the concept posted in a recent article over at TechCrunch, he does pose a very valid point of innovation versus customer appeasement.  I’ll be writing up a more full blog post in my WorldOfTech blog in the next few days.  Here I wanted to highlight the intelligence of Michael’s post and encourage others to “look beyond” what customers are literally saying, and figure out what they really want.  You can never innovate if you don’t apply some real creativity to solving the problems presented by customers, instead of simply saying “if they want X, we’ll give them X”.

So next time you are presented with this type of situation, dig deeply to find what the customers really need instead of simply what they’re asking for.  If you’re really feeling innovative, you’ll fundamentally change their needs and improve their habits and methodologies all at once.

iLike – A Good Explanation of OpenID versus OAuth

Over at Defying Classification, the author posts a very good explanation of the differences between OpenID (authentication) and OAuth (authorization).  If you’re interested in either technology, or in Internet authentication and authorization standards, it’s worth the 10 minutes of your time to browse over the article.

iLike – ProBlogger

I’ll be starting a series of posts I’ll be calling my ‘iLike’ series of posts.  They’ll be short and simple postings mostly designed to get topics of conversation started surrounding other interesting blog posts that I run acrossed.

The first in this series of references is a post on ProBlogger regarding freelance writing and idea generation.  I’ve read very similar concepts in a few different places now.  This one happened to hit home as the style of the post and the referred author both resonated with my personality.  Thanks to these guys, I think I’m going to start honing my writing and communications skills.  I’ll try to keep my posts fairly short unless I really have the time to explore a subject in depth.  Chances are, though, that I’ll just be trying to start up enlightening conversations.

So, give ProBlogger a read some-time.  If your interested in another good read, give Writer Dad a chance too.