California Dreamin’

Now that I’ve mentioned what I’m working on, how about the stuff I don’t have time for? Here’s some ideas/projects I wish I had time to explore more fully (I may get around to them someday but if you read this and beat me to it . . . whoo hoo):

Information Indexing: How many times have you come across a great article on the Internet, read it, and then 6 or 12 months later wish you could remember where you read it? This is more than bookmarks, it’s your own search engine. If I see a page I should be able to enter the URL, let a spider index the page and then if I need to access that page 12 months from now I just search on it. Instead of getting eighty thousand hits from every site Google has ever crawled, I just get the results of the pages that I told the spider to index. Obviously the concept is that if I already spent an hour searching the web for this data why should I have to try to remember exactly how I went about finding it? If I just index the results that are most relevent to me then I can just type in a few keywords and voila, my answer!

Fraud Analyzer: I’ve seen some of the leading fraud detection services on the market and they are rank between mediocre and crap. Fraud is like SPAM; the people trying to rip you off will constantly be trying to outsmart the system. What’s needed is a smart system that learns. Better yet, it needs to learn about your business. I’ve written a white paper on fraud detection but that just scratches the surface. The biggest flaw in fraud detection is that it’s mostly outsourced. How can Authorize.net or whoever your payment gateway provider is know what people like to steal from your store? They can’t. How do they know that Star Wars 12″ Figures are hot fraud items because they resell quickly on eBay? They don’t. As a business owner you are the person best qualified to know that. Most fraud detection is simplistic. AVS only tells you that the thief got both the card number and the address of the card holder (not too hard — let me sift through your garbage and see how much info I can dig up). CVV2 only tells you that the person ripping you off once held the credit card in their hands (do you eat at resaurants?). In the brick and mortar world those are excellent prevention techniques because you can get a signature which is your Get Out of Jail Free card in terms of fraud. Online, your transactions are considered Card Not Present (CNP) which means that no matter how blatant the fraud Visa, MasterCard, Amex and Discover will side with the card holder and leave you stuck with the bill.

Web Patterns/Standards: In the OO programming world there’s an idea called patterns. In a nutshell, a pattern is a way to do something. There’s probably 50,000 ways people have implemented user logins but in reality they all basically do the same thing. Why do we re-create the wheel in every project? The short answer is that people are unaware that the work has already been done for them. No matter what site you’re on the concept of a user is basically the same. Some sites may have user preferences that are unique to the site but a user usually consists of a username, email address, and password. The methods of creating, verifying, and modifying the user should be pretty universal but they’re not. A lot of brainpower is put into doing things that others have already figured out. Bottom line is that Internet programmers need to come up with some set of patterns (or ways of doing things) that are universal otherwise millions of man hours are going to be sunk into doing the same tasks over and over again.

Project Management Software: I use MS Project for most of my project planning needs. One of the big problems with MS Project is sharing information with people who don’t have MS Project (like designers who are on Macs, developers who are on Linux, and clients who don’t own MS Project). Sure, you can output the data to various formats (including HTML) but what you mostly end up with is a completely static view of the data. The user can’t re-sort the tasks or tweak the project plan to suit their needs. On the other side are the web-based project management tools which aren’t truely project management tools. Most web-based tools are more collaboration tools than they are project managment tools. Some go so far as to even create tasks lists and GANNT charts but mostly they’re a message board/weblog with some file sharing and a calendar thrown on top. What about costing? What about risk management? What about labor allocation? Those aren’t really big feature items on most of the web-based solutions (to be fair, MS Project doesn’t do all the areas of PM either so I’m not just putting the blame on web-based solutions). I hear rumors every now and again that the next version of MS Project will solve some of these issues but until it arrives we’re left guessing.

Due to post size constraints I’ll have to leave the rest of my California Dreamin’ for a Part Duex.

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