The Stack Overflow Blog: “The Unix world loves to take sides. I don’t have to blog about this; Freud already did, in 1930. He called it ‘the narcissism of minor differences’”
We’ve been opening new Stack Exchanges left and right on a variety of topics. In almost every case, the Stack Exchange appears to duplicate the content of an existing community. For example, our WordPress answers site (now in beta) covers the exact same material as WordPress.org’s existing forums.
This is nothing new to us at Stack Overflow, which purported to cover the exact same material as hundreds (if not thousands) of other programming sites. There’s no rule that says that there needs to be exactly one Q&A website per topic.
There is, however, a compelling case for the Stack Exchange technology. WordPress.org’s forums don’t have voting, so you have to read through every answer and decide for yourself which one might solve your problem. They don’t have reputation, so there’s no way to see whether you’re getting an answer from someone who knows what they’re talking about. They don’t have wiki-style editing, so collaboration is impossible. You have to log on to ask or answer a question, so the burden of participation is higher. Stack Overflow is simply better than traditional forums, which is why it largely replaced proprietary forums. I remember hours of discussion with John Resig and the folks at jQuery who couldn’t decide whether to replace the jQuery Google Group with a forum or with a Stack Exchange. Ultimately it didn’t matter that much, because most of the jQuery Q&A activity happens on Stack Overflow anyway.
One day, the features that are standard on Stack Exchange will be copied everywhere. Until then, we’ll keep churning out new sites.
Sometimes I think a pretty good business model would be to copy the applications that 37signals makes, but make them more complex. More features, more promises—generally, just more complicated.
Here’s the video from a talk I gave at the Business of Software conference last year:
I’ll be speaking again at this year’s conference in Boston, October 4th-6th.
We launched three new Stack Exchange sites this week!
We’ll have three more for you next week, too.
“We decided that individually-branded sites felt more authentic and trustworthy. We thought that letting every Stack Exchange site have its own domain name, visual identity, logo, and brand would help the community feel more coherent. After all, nobody wants to say that they live in Housing Block 2938TC. They want to live in Colonial Manor. Never mind the connotation of, well, colonies.”
Want to know how to export mail from Gmail? Or delete your Facebook account? Or send giant files via email?
Well, the new Web Applications Stack Exchange is for you. It’s a part of the Stack Exchange network, so it has the clean, elegant design that made Stack Overflow a phenomenal success.
The newest member of the Stack Exchange Network is the first one to go through the community site-creation process called Area 51. There are more great sites in the pipeline, but they have to demonstrate that they can reach critical mass or we won’t create them.
Neil has posted a video of Don Norman (most famous for his book The Design of Everyday Things) speaking at the Business of Software conference last year in San Francisco.
“Imagine you’re on the first slide of your powerpoint presentation and want to move to the next slide. Your remote control has two buttons. They are unmarked, but one button points up and one button points down.
“Which button do you press?”
It turns out half the people press up, half the people press down, and everybody thinks their choice is obvious. It’s a great talk.
The early bird discount for the Business of Software 2010 (Boston, October 4-6) saves you $400, but it expires this week, so this is the right time to sign up for my favorite conference.
Area 51 is now in beta
. This is the promised place where the community comes together to invent new Stack Exchange sites.
Benofsky from Hacker News writes:
Seems overly complicated, I have no idea what's going on when I visit Area 51, I guess this is their strategy for turning away uncommitted users.
Also, how are they going to make money?
I’m glad you asked, benofsky! The answer is simple. Volume.
Well, I’m not one to take Internet chat board comments seriously. After all, the Anonymous Nostradamus’s over at Code Project reacted thus when Stack Overflow itself launched:
I think the UI sucks. I can't imagine this site being around in a year.
We all know how stunningly accurate that prediction was:
Benofsky is onto something, though. Area 51 is not for everyone. If you don’t know what it’s for, or why it’s going to work, or you can’t figure it out, it’s not, actually for you.
My friend Noam at Harvard Business School does annual surveys of executive compensation in tech companies. The surveys are a great way to figure out how much to pay that VP of Sales you were thinking of hiring, or whether your equity grant as CTO is fair.
You can buy the studies for $999, or you can participate in the survey and get free access to the results when they’re published.
Paul Kenny is a regular speaker at the Business of Software. He’s an expert on sales, especially high tech sales, and both Red Gate and Fog Creek hire him all the time to train our sales teams and build our sales organization.
Here’s a video of his talk at last year’s conference:
The next Business of Software conference will be in Boston, October 4th-6th.
Over the last 10 years I’ve written 1085 articles on this site about software development, management, business, and the Internet. To make it easy to find the best ones, here are some reading lists, sorted by topic.
Read the archives in dead-tree format!
Many of these articles have been collected into four books,
available at your favorite bookstore. It’s an
excellent way to read the site in the bath, or throw it at your
boss.
There’s a software company in New York City dedicated to doing things the right way and proving that it can be done profitably and successfully. Fog Creek Software. Here’s the story:
I’m your host, Joel Spolsky, a software developer in New York City. More about me.
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For my day job, I’m the CEO of Fog Creek Software, a bootstrapped software company in New York, NY. We’re proving to the world that treating developers well can be profitable.
We make FogBugz, a bug tracking system that actually works and can be used to manage everything your development team does, from bug tracking to customer email to feature management to project scheduling and so much more. Free online trial.
We also make Kiln, a web-based version control and code review system based on Mercurial and tightly integrated with FogBugz. Free trial. Wondering about Mercurial? I wrote a tutorial.
Fog Creek Copilot lets you control someone else’s computer (with their permission, of course) over the Internet. It's the best way to fix someone's computer problems remotely. There’s nothing to install, it’s simple as heck, and it works through any kind of firewall, NAT, or proxy situation with zero configuration. More
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