Andreas Wacker

June 29th 2007: Apple releases the iPhone

August 8th 2007: INTERDUBS supports the iPhone

June 17th 2008: Beam.TV launches mode to support the iPhone.

As for all others companies in the space: Nothing. Yet.

The other day a colleague observed me wrangling some obscure firewall / ftp issue that came up for one of my clients. Once I had fixed the problem he proclaimed: “you really leave no bug behind”. I like that expression. It matches what I am trying to do with INTERDUBS. Actually so far each bug got fixed twenty four hours after it had been reported. Other feature wishes can take longer to get implemented: Some people had to wait months before they could create reels via drag and drop.

The ‘all bugs get fixed right away’ mantra has a huge benefit: Low support efforts. Actually I carefully evaluate each support call / email to see if the software / documentation could have helped with this. I sure don’t mind talking to my clients, but I agree with Don Norman that products need to designed so that they work with their users as well as they possibly can.

Today Interdubs crossed the 80K file mark. 59 days for 20,000 more files. Last time it took 83 days to grow that much, and before that 118. Something seems to be working here.

What makes me even happier is to hear the following from a new client: “you must have worked in our field for a while”. That would be true, and it delights me that it seems to show in the application. Intentions are one thing. Seing that they apparently manifested themselves at least somewhat is very rewarding.

Today Interdubs crossed the 60,000 file mark. 83 days ago there where 40,000 files. Before that it took 118 days to go from 20,000 to 40,000. Interdubs grew 42% faster than in the quarter before. There are 25 official clients now that choose to be mentioned on the website. Interestingly, the support amount has actually gone down. Fixing every bug right away makes seems to let the total number go down. Most emails and calls are about new features and concepts. Since I often don’t get things right the first time, people have to make awesome suggestions how new features and concepts could be implemented better. I think that there is huge value in this kind of feedback. Users are used to things working efficientlly in interdubs. When something does not then they point me to it.

Being able to change the code in minutes and doing so frequently is one of the priceless concepts that are hard to imagine. But now I would never attempt to write software in any different way.

That’s an actual quote of a client in an email received a couple of minutes ago. It is his first month with Interdubs, and he is not used to the fact that the bill will only arrive once the month is over. And then he can pay it. Or not. If he should feel like that. Which sounds ‘good hearted’ or ‘weak’. But it makes actually allot of (business) sense: Most of my clients have made more money with the site in their first week of using it, then it will cost them for whole month. A not so significant part of them actually takes just a few hours to make the 285 that the services costs them. Either by direct billing or by improved client relationships. I was aware of this when I designed the system and set the price. The price is solely based on the system working as well as it seems to be. It is arranged around my costs and the future potential of more clients. And maybe on the fact that I like to code fast.

I really hate the business model that tries to leach on to the success of its clients. Network Neutrality is one of those. Phone companies would sure love to charge more for important business conversations than for idle chit chat.

But back to Interdubs: having a super reasonable price that are people actually eager to pay makes everything much easier on everybody. So far people paid their bills. The majority of companies in record time. Thanks again and also from here. If I would try to squeeze more money out of the service, then I might need an accounting department that starts bugging people. I’d rather not.

On the other side with the latest feature additions the price / performance ratio is in danger to tip from “great” to “ridicolously great”. I have feedback from many of my clients saying that the service is too cheap. And I suspect that I could actually sign up more people if the price were higher. Most people think just because the competition is ten times more expensive it also would be better.

? Saas ? Never had heard of it. Till Today. And then it showed up everywhere. SaaS seems to be a fancy acronym for Software as a Service. Turns out that’s what I am doing with Interdubs. Maybe if I would hang out in the Silicon Valley more or spend more time with VC types I would know this kind of language. But actually, I rather not. I just like to go ahead and write software. No need to call it fancy names. I rather check if people can use it for what they would like to do. Chances are they don’t know -or care- about SaaS either. They just have work to do.

Running and developing a system in the same time is allot of fun. An idea can be quickly added and / or tried. Some are more
involved though. At this moment there are 42,658 files in Interdubs. So uploading happens allot. There was a ftp interface, but people
need passwords and needed to remember the folder name.

It could be easier. And now it is. It’s as simple as clicking on a link:

A transmit droplet with the proper parameters get created and downloaded automatically. Those droplets can be kept in the dock or on the desktop, and uploading is even easier than it was.

As with so many nice and easy things the underlying technology is actually not that simple. It was great to be able to draw from the resources and experience of the amazing people at Oneiric to get the backbone for this service addition installed. David Green was super helpful, without him this feature would have taken weeks longer to implement. Working with David is allot of fun, since everything he says he will do he does. And it works, since he has tested and checked it from the get go.

It is truly interesting how a small company with people that care can have so much more impact that larger ones that take weeks to move.

Interdubs had an awesome year in 2007. I had a certain expectation where the service should be by now. Development-wise and feature=wise I am behind. I want more features, and I want to write them now. But doing them right does always take more time than I think it would. And, my clients got what they essentially need months ago. Since then new features have been extra and on top of it.

Looking back at 2007 I particularly like the the fact that Interdubs could scale from a few beta clients to more than 20 customers. Many of them with very diverse needs. And all of them seemingly happy: Even though nobody is contractually obliged to continue their subscription each one renewed month by month. People some times wonder why Interdubs is so inexpensive. Specially compared to it’s feature set. I think it makes sense: Having the most awesome feature vs. price ratio means that I don’t have to spend much time to keep my clients happy otherwise. It also helps with marketing: If anybody interested in an online media solution should happen to talk about it to an existing interdubs user I will get a call. And when I get a call it becomes a sale. Sooner or later it does. Always.

2007 was also nice, since I had not to act on my 99.99% uptime or money back promise. By now it would be not so nice, if I can not charge anybody for a full month. Which is the whole point: I believe in Interdubs’ reliability enough to put my money where where my mouth is. Outages might happen in the future. Nothing is perfect. But by giving my clients their money back for a whole month, if Interdubs should be longer unavailable than for 5 minutes I there is at least a plan. If this should ever happen. The looming penalty of a month long ‘invoice outage’ makes it financially viable to upgrade the servers that Interdubs runs on. So that it does not happen in the first place. Or is at least less likely.

2007 I published 590 times code updates to Interdubs. That’s why I don’t like to call things “Versions”. Version 590? Sometimes I just moved a couple of links around, to make a frequently used choice easier to find. A couple of times I replaced or upgraded the entire engine that runs Interdubs. I might have gotten lucky, but at no point did I loose data during those updates. And only about 10 changes were so stupid, that my users demanded a change back or further alteration of what I did. Knowing that I will hear about things going in the wrong direction allows me to suggest things with great liberty. The same concept looks enabling from the other side as well: Interdubs users know that they will be listened to. Sometimes it takes only minutes between a suggestion and the actual feature / change showing up on the site. Actually a great deal of ideas and features that make Interdubs worthwhile are a result of this collaboration.

2007 was a very successful year for Interdubs, so I had to decide what to do for Holiday presents. I decided not to send any at all. Instead I asked my kids to pick a charity. They suggested “Doctors without Borders” which I liked as well. So instead of sending gift baskets around some people got vaccinations that they needed.

Being able to decide on these things what to do is one of the perks of running your own company. Today I found Charity Navigator and realised with great relief that only a very small percentage of the interdubs donation will go to the adminstration.

I am certainly looking forward to move Interdubs forward in 2008.

via IM, earlier today:

just wanted to tell you: we were training a new freelance producer and she said; "you use Interdubs? I love interdubs!"


Hit the 40,000 mark today. Nice.

Computerworld looks at internet market share data for different devices / operating systems. The headline reads ‘iPhones closing in on 0.1%’. That does sound like laughable little. The author paints a different picture, but I have no interest repainting that here.

I looked at the iPhone user share on Interdubs, and found the following numbers:

November 0.22
October 0.54
September 0.35
August 0.74
July 0.45

Not surprisingly they are by small magnitudes bigger than the general ones found by Net Applications. I had thought that they would be even higher. The iPhone has a nice display. It’s fully supported by Interdubs. Was it a mistake to invest into the iPhone mode? Absolutely not. It is very interesting to see those numbers. With already having iPhone support there is no second guessing ‘what if there were a special iPhone browsing mode’. There is, and that’s what the numbers look like. Right now.

A client of mine has a shoot supervisor in Paris. He takes stills for an upcoming job and is posting them on his own ftp site. My client asked if he could use Interdubs instead. He could. There is the public upload function that can be enabled for a login. But right now it does not support creation of folders. And he shot thousands of images. That’s where unix comes in real handy: He had given us the access paramaters for his ftp site where he stores those images. Using wget it was a breeze to write a little script that works as a conduit it and puts those images on to the interdubs server. Now whatever he creates on his ftp server in Europe will be mapped automatically into Interdubs. So people can use the comment feature, see thumbnails, can copy content.

All those nice features that Interdubs has, but ftp naturally lacks. ftp is a great work horse. Kinda. It’s so simple (actually it isn’t even), let’s say it’s so widely in use that it will not go away to soon. So it’s only natural to support it, and work with it. Instead of forcing people to use something more advanced. And with solutions like todays hack they can have the best of both worlds: They don’t need to change the way that they work. And in the same time everybody can have the benefit of working with the best tools available.

But wait, wget stores unix files and interdubs keeps files in a database. Did I recompile wget with Interdubs support? Well, that would be possible, but would take a day. Nobody has a day on a shoot for a commercial. At some point a couple prospective clients said that they could only use Interdubs if they could upload content via ftp. So I wrote an ftp gateway. Same deal: I did not change the ftp source (yet). I just wrote a general filesystem to Interdubs Database mapping tool. Not many people use ftp to upload content into Interdubs: The web interface is way to nice for that purpose it seems. But have this conduit is still a great way to get any data quickly and consistently into Interdubs.

Good thing that the new iPod touch from Apple is compatible with Interdubs. Quiet a nice player for all those commercials being made that are hosted in Interdubs. And, upside: you get to see how things will look on this player from day one.

Interdubs hit another milestone: I just pushed code update number 500. One of the beauties of an internet application that you host is that the code can be changed easily. All clients always run the current version. Since all information of interdubs exists in a database it is pretty easy to update and change code. Users suggest things, and it is often quicker to just write the feature and see how it is been used. If it is not gets used then it will go away again. That is the other beauty of a web application: you can see exactly how people are using the application. When I develop the interdubs code I usually develop it in a test segment. Once it works, or at least I have convinced myself that it would, I publish or ‘push’ it all client segments. I wrote a little version control system for this, and one of the features is that it does count the updates that went live. And just now I did update number 500. Five hundred times I put my results out there to make Interdubs better. It’s fun. For me and for the people that use Interdubs. Seing your suggestions and ideas getting implemented is encouraging users to think what could be better. Most of what makes Interdubs so useful resulted from user feedback. I just put a platform out there that worked with what I thought would be good feature set to start with. The plan always was to develop Interdubs around the needs of the users. With thirteen different customers right now I get a very healthy mix of feature requests: The rule is that if two people from different companies ever asked for a feature or have a similar issue with an existing function the task instantly bubbles up in priority and gets done as quickly as possible. The other nice effect of those five hunderd updates is that new users have a much better time with backend interface then they used to a couple of months ago.

As anybody can see on the public file odometer on Interdubs’ clients page the 20,000 file mark has been crossed. It really is nice if a system scales smoothly: Thanks MySQL, Linux and all the other decent ingredients that went into building Interdubs. Since there was no difference between 2, 20, 200, 2,000 or 20,000 files, I look forward to hit the 200,000 and 2 Million mark. All current Interdubs clients hardly can be busier as they are right now (a good thing in itself) I will need to find some more customers to get to those numbers quickly.

Interdubs will detect iPhones now and serve a specific navigation mode that looks, feels and works very much like the phone itself. It was actually kind of fun to code content for one specific device. It’s nice to know that things will look excatly the same for everybody. There are upsides to closed platforms. The number of hits on interdubs from iPhones made the work that went into this worthwhile. The nice thing is that this feature becomes available and automatically for every Interdubs customer. All that has changed in Interdubs on the surface is a button to turn iPhone detection off. Not sure why, but easier to allow that option then to worry about it.

AT&T enabled the toll free number for Interdubs:


877 837 3827


Or -if you like- 877terdubs. I never fancied vanity numbers that much. OK< maybe with the execption of 800 800 4sgi ten years ago. But these days your cellphone number is almost impossible to change. So posting that in those internets is a total no-no. A toll free number is a nice and easy solution to this dilemma. Combined with Callwave it makes for a nice system for voice communication.

Finally I got around to make a public website for Interdubs. It was an interesting experience to condense the essence of a sucessful and working system into a couple of pages. Good thing is that it can be changed and altered. I decided to link to sites of competing services. Those that I know about. Being able to do so is one of the joys of running your own business: I doubt that such a move would have made it any commitee. I want to believe that I work in a world where people can decide what’s good and what is not. I have no fear to that click on a link of a different service and then fall in love with it and sign up over there. If they should do so, then Interdubs should not be around anyway. Well, it is. And with 11,968 files right now it seems to be going strong. I decided to put total file count inside of interdubs also on the outside. It’s my job to grow the service. And I certainly don’t feel doing so clandestine.

Next Stop: Press work and iPhone version.

Developing a new public site for interdubs. I am almost done. I needed a png file. Of course they looked different in Safari and Firefox. Actually, to be precise, they looked wrong in Safari. There is problem some academic reason why safari displays them with all that fancy color information rendered in. I don’t care, they are still wrong to me: I want all people to see the same image. this describes the problem I think; as I said, I am making a new site for Interdubs, I don’t have time for another science project. That site however recommends pngcrush. Problem is, that one is a real bitch to compile or install on OS X and linux. Again, I am just trying to have the same image look the same in the two most popular browsers under OS X. I can figure out which libraries to install etc etc. Just that I don’t want to. Finally I found the solutions, and it works awesom: Gamma Slamma might have an odd name, it might have a trendy logo, but it certainly works like a charm.

Interdubs has a ftp gateway. If the quicktime creating program supports uploads after compression then you can have a pretty nice workflow. Even better: having a watchfolder and posting things to interdubs would be one drop.

Of course it was not that easy: It turns out that Sorenson Squeeze Version 4.3 can either do a watchfolder or an upload to ftp. But not both. If you try it, then it will log in to the ftp site, and just sit there, not uploading anything.

Luckily Sorenson Version 4.5 works as advertised. Posting is a one stop thing.

a quick out of the box article about the apple-TV set top box.
The nice thing is that interdubs already supports iTunes. So my clients can show their clients work in progress via Apple TV. Today.