Fer's blog http://www.gnome.org/~fherrera/blog/2005/Oct/ fer, ferulo, that crazy man en fherrea@onrica.com fherrera@onirica.com http://www.gnome.org/~fherrera/img/fer_reallysmall.png Fer's blog http://www.gnome.org/~fherrera/blog/2005/Oct/ 70 75 Home users migrating to Free Software http://www.gnome.org/~fherrera/blog/2005/Oct//GoingFree

Lot of users are doing a forced migration to Linux / Free Software. That is because that is the preinstaled OS on their computers at school/work . That's ok, but why a home user, non-techie would say I am going to install this free software instead of my propietary OS?. The new software should make then happier than the current one to migrate.

An example of migration because more features is hotmail --> gmail migration. People just got more features from the google mail than from hotmail, and some of them went for the new one. But this hasn't been a massive migration

Also a migration because of less features or you-have-to-pay now to get usual features can happen. For example gaydar is popular gay contact web service. But recently they are charging money for putting on-line nude pictures, so people started to move from it to another services offering the same features for free.

Now take a free (as beer) application as an example: IM. Most users around the world are using MSN, Yahoo or AOL. The users don't care about "systems" behind the application. They don't mind about MSNP9, jabber, nexus or whatever. If they are going to consider a moving, they would ask these questions:

  • Can I talk with all my current friends
  • Would I be able to do every thing I'm used to do?
  • Would I get any new benefit from this migration?
So what's the right approach for a new application? First, answer a big yes to the two first questions, then try to offer something better for the 3rd. So the way for Gaim or google talk to get users should be:
  • for the first time show an assistant importing previous user account/network
  • Show his contacts as before, with all previous features, ofering full compatibility
  • Offer the user the posibility of create a new more-featured account
  • Invite users from the old accounts to get this new fancy client with more features

 Thu, 20 Oct 2005 14:33 -0400 enteletar http://www.gnome.org/~fherrera/blog/2005/Oct//enteletar

I was talking with my friend SemiElf and he didn't know what enteletar means, so I redirected him to La hora chanante dictionary, but it was missing there. Then we tried to search it in google... with zero results!. That's the first time I've search in google for a word that I heard every day and is not indexed by google... so I'm just blogging about it to get it :)

Fri, 07 Oct 2005 00:08 -0400 iParty 7 http://www.gnome.org/~fherrera/blog/2005/Oct//iparty

I'm in Castellon, at iParty 7.Tomorrow (well, in some hours) I'll give a talk about past, present and future of GNOME. I was trying to build X11R7 modular tree on my laptop to demo some cool X effects with the new EXA acceleration, but it's failing somewhere with the font stuff.

 Sat, 01 Oct 2005 03:00 -0400