The Seabourns

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Gmail’s Humble Beginning

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I read a great blog this morning: Gmail’s Humble Beginning . It’s by the developer of Gmail.

By the way, if you don’t know what “incipient” means, I had to look it up also! Dictionary.com defines it as beginning to exist or appear; in an initial stage: an incipient cold.

Paul Buchheit, who left Google and currently works for a startup with other ex-Googlers, thinks it’s important to release applications in an incipient phase to get feedback from users.

So what’s the right attitude? Humility. It doesn’t matter how smart and successful and qualified you are, you simply don’t know what you’re doing. (…) What is the humble approach to product design? Pay attention. Notice which things are working and which aren’t. Experiment and iterate. Question your assumptions. Remember that you are wrong about a lot of things. Watch for the signals. Lose your technical and design snobbery.

Some thoughts from the blog:

Paul (and Gmail) refused to add a Delete button for a while. They wanted users to Archive, not Delete. Didn’t work. Users wanted a Delete button. So Gmail added a Delete button.

Gmail wanted users to Tag, not File in a folder. Users want to File (yes, Microsoft has trained us all!!!), so after trying to educate users, Gmail is now added “filing” type functionality like drag-n-drop rather than sticking to the “assign a tag(s), not drag to a folder”.

This is good advice for me personally, who tends to die on the wrong hills while trying to change user behavior. There is bound to be balance, but I have trouble finding it. What do you think?

[Thanks, Mike, for first alerting me to the blog.] 

Great tutorial on using WordPress

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I found this great tutorial on using WordPress. The focus of the tutorial is on using WordPress for a church website. But the principles are very useful for those of us who use WordPress to manage a website that does more than serve as a blog.

Missionaries frequently ask me for advice on creating a website to communicate with ministry partners. I regularly recommend either Blogger.com because it’s easy to use or WordPress.com because it’s very flexible and powerful.

This series has very helpful topics like

  • Picking / Finding a Free WordPress Theme
  • Personalizing Your Theme and Making It Your Own
  • Two Quick Ways to Make WordPress Look Like a Regular Website
  • Six Handy (And Free) Plugins

If you are looking for a good website publishing tool that is both easy-to-use, flexible, and extremely powerful, look into WordPress.

Edit Google Maps

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I’m a big user of Google Maps. But since I moved into our home in Orlando four years ago, Google Maps has led people to the wrong house in our neighborhood. Now, Google allows users to edit their maps to improve accuracy. Hooray!

Before, I would tell people, “You can look up our address on Google Maps. It will get you close, on the correct street. But we’re on the other side of the lake, so keep driving around the lake until you find our house number.”

So, I’ve edited Google Maps. Now anyone can use Google Maps and actually get to our house without driving around the lake looking for house numbers. Cool!

Now, if Mapquest and MSN Maps would just let me update their location marker…

So if you want to come see Kay and me, please use Google Maps!

Keith & Kay Seabourn

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I’m reading in 1 Peter this morning. Some of the passages are especially challenging.

“So be truly glad! There is wonderful joy ahead, even though it is necessary for you to endure many trials for a while. These trials are only to test your faith, to show that it is strong and pure. … So if your faith remains strong after being tried by fiery trials, it will bring you much praise and glory and honor on the day when Jesus Christ is revealed…” (1:6,7, New Living Translation).

I don’t understand why God needs to use trials to test our faith. It feels bad. It seems there must be another way. But apparently there is not, because he is both all wise and all loving. Putting these together tells me that he is not playing games with me. This is serious stuff and he’s committed to me – both as his child whom he loves and as his child whom he knows will be happiest as I grow stronger and purer.

I was also finishing reading in James this morning. Ch 4:10 surprised me in NLT (which is why I like to read different translations from year to year). “When you bow down before the Lord and admit your dependence on him, he will lift you up and give you honor.”

I’ve been convicted personally about my need to feel and express my dependence on the Lord more regularly, multiple times each day. It’s easy to drift into independence where the focus becomes the mechanics of the Christian life and the processes that lead to success (like sharing my faith with the guy sitting next to me; organizing successful conferences, etc.). It’s a fine line and it’s not very sharply defined. But a life truly dependent on God delights him. By this time in our Christian lives, many of us know the words, and I can trick myself into a feeling of dependence.

My prayer lately is that I’ll truly live out my total dependence on him. It pleases him. He loves it when it’s pure in my own soul.