MeWare

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Eric Sink of SourceGear has an article, Yours, Mine, and Ours, about writing software that other people use. Over the years I've noticed that massive chasm in the "personal" software developers write for themselves and the software that people actually find useful.

I've written lots of simple utilities for myself but it's been ever so rare that I've made something that other people find useful. Perhaps my biggest flop in this was an online link database that I had hoped my friends would jump in on and use to spread and keep those funny, cool, and useful snippets of the web that we are constantly emailing and instant messaging to each other.

I still use the utility (it's proven quite useful to me), but after a few logins from friends it died as a "public" tool. I haven't talked much to people about it but here's a few reasons I think they didn't like it:

>> It required login/registration.
Even though they were my friends, no one seems to be looking for Yet Another Password Website. Worse yet, I required an email address thinking in future I'd createa mail list with all the links that had been recently submitted.

>> It was buggy.
There were a few things I knew it had problems with. It's embarrassing to say but there was one area where I did a database insert by manually constructing the "INSERT... " and therefore if any content had an apostrophe, it would break. As non-developers they all didn't have time to hear the reason why it broke, I think most, after one error just never came back.

>> It didn't organize well.
I figured out a way to organize things that worked for me personally but never got outside input for how things worked.

>> I wasn't the best evangelist
I did fix some of the bugs, and even though it got a bit better I didn't really know who to tell. So apart from some close friends who tried it and left, it lived in isolation.

>> The URL sucked
It was an offshoot of my main site, easy for me to remember, but a big pain for other people.

So anyhow, Eric's essay resonated with me. I've got some "new" personal projects that I am really hopeful will become Usware. The thing that I find encouragement in is that with each new piece of software I write in my spare time, things get a little better and a little smoother when I show them to other people. Oh, and I'm better at keeping my mouth shut until it's actually working.

My big questions for public consumption are what other deliberate steps one can take away from Meware to Usware, especially with the limited resources of an individual? Or are there any good stories of strategies used to transport Meware to Usware?

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