Emotional Pattern Programming. What??

I was talking to a woman from IBM the other night while I was at a party, and I was explaining to her about Emotional Pattern Programming (EPP). Obviously she didn’t know what it was, as it is only new. It is it the point where you program an action into a program that will trigger an emotional response. So if you want to get a user to perform an action based on an emotion, then you have to set the emotion before the action can be carried out.

How do you program EPP though? Or where are examples of it? Well first off you need to understand human emotions and human states. After all the human brain is a computer with many function or programs, for instance love is a program or function that is run whenever you meet someone you love. You perform various actions that have been programmed into you when are around that person, i.e. caring, etc.

Examples of it are everywhere! Amazon do it to a degree. They do it differently though, they hope that a person is in a buying state before they apply an Emotional Pattern. So they wait until they have put something in their shopping basket before they really push for other books to buy (They do it throughout the user browsing, but they wait until the Emotional Pattern is fully induced before they really push it). They do it by suggestions of what other people have bought with your book. This is highly effective because the person is already in a Emotional Pattern of purchasing!

You see this in other mediums and methods not just on the net. A classic example is Maccas, when you finish your order they used to ask-Not too sure if they still do I think they ask, “Is there anything else?” now- “would you life fries with that?” 9 out of ten people would say yes as they are in the Emotional Pattern of Ordering, Not purchasing yet! If you were to ask them that question, “Would you like fries with that?” when they were in the Emotional Pattern of purchasing 9 out of 10 people would say no.

It is an absolute without a doubt fascinating topic, which I think is going to take off in the next couple of years.

Like I say to everyone now, “The information age is over, it is the emotional age now!”. If you don’t believe me let me tell you how I have come to this conclusion. On your home page do you have iGoogle or myYahoo! do you have everything that you like emotionally or do you have everything you don’t like emotionally? Well the answer is going to be you have everything you like emotionally. Why would you have something on your site that you don’t like? You seek out what you like emotionally, hence the emotional age! If you still don’t believe me, have you heard of the term Emos. They are people with pitch black hair and maybe pink highlights with mascara. They believe the world is a terrible place and everyone is out to hurt them, in other words they are emotional. In the next ten years these people will be entering the work force. That means the work force that we know right now will change to an emotional workforce. There are hundreds of indicators to see how this new emotional age is formulating.

So we need to understand emotions to create better results for ourselves as developers. That is where EPP comes in.

What do you think? Tell me if I am wrong or tell me if I might be a little bit right. I would love you feedback!

August 4, 2008
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Always chase your profits!

In business people seem to chase everything except their profits. They concentrate to much on what is happening at the current moment and not on how to reach their profit goal. Yesterday I was talking to another web-developer, he was telling me how he is working on this mad project. It is going to have all these whiz bang features, and I’m like, “That’s fantastic! How much do you expect to earn from it?”, he’s like “Yeah, don’t really know, but… It should be heaps.” I thought about what he said later, and instead of putting a downer on his emotional state, I kept my mouth shut.

It’s fair enough if you goal is open source and you want no profit from it, but if you’re going to build a project that you expect will be a return on investment, I suggest you forecast your profit earnings. If you don’t know what you profit target is, how are you going to know if you’re successful or not?

“Hey Rhys, if I am earning a million a month! I think I would know if I am successful or not!”. Yeah that is true, but… how often do you hear that as soon as someone puts their work out there, they’re earning a million a month straight from day dot! You never hear it and it never happens. It takes time, It takes steps, and each step is a goal. First off might be to break even or come close to break even. Then the next step might be to break even and earn 5% over your break even mark. What ever it is, chase it! Don’t expect to do a rain dance, and then money to fall out of the sky. It doesn’t happen. If it did… arrr (Drulling)

The web-developer I was talking to is most probably going to read this, so hug hug… ahhh, lot’s of love, ahh… yeah. Mate no hard feelings, I want you to be successful, so chase it!!!! Chase it with certainty, with passion and never ever give up. If you do that, nothing can stand in you way! Then I can say, “I knew that bloke when he started out, look at him now!”.

August 1, 2008
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My work or yours?

I was talking with one of my mates the other day about using open source code for commercial products. We touched the subject of maintainability of it. One of the things I said was that if you are going to use it make sure that it is well documented, because most of the time the open source community code comments for any language is very lazily written. I was also going on about if you leave a company and not acknowledge that the code you used is open source and developed by someone else plagiarism might come into play.

Now I love open source code! The thing I am getting at though is make sure that you reference where you get it from, document it to the standards that you use – so you can understand it, and most of all understand how it works. If you don’t understand how the code works, and you just throw it in your work with out knowing the ins and outs, when something goes wrong! Ahhh good luck with that!

Just thought I would mention it because I get work that has been done by someone else who has used open source code, and you can tell that they used it because it only gave them the result they wanted. They didn’t care how it worked.

If you are trying to make money out of your software take the effort to learn how it works and take it to your level of coding, don’t sell your self short! Who want’s to be average? Be the best!

July 18, 2008
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Move over XHTML!

Crystal BallI won’t deny it, but XHTML is a beautiful language. It’s is vast and is practicably translatable on every computer. It is based off GML which many other well known languages are based off, but I am going to look into the future and tell you what I can see in my crystal ball…

“Over the next 5-10 years XHTML will phase out as the main language that is interpreted by the browser. The language that will exist will be a compiled language that will need a runtime to run it. Now don’t get scared! You don’t have to learn formal programming skills to code with this new language. This is because this new wonderful language will be based off GML as well. The difference to what you are doing now to what you will be doing in the future is compiling it before you give it to the world to see. “

For web sites to become more interactive and more diverse in what they can do, a stronger language has to be used. Right now XHTML is for presentation only. It can’t perform actions with out the help of JavasScript. JavaScript will be upgraded to 2.0 shortly, which will enable vast improvements, but will it make a difference. Hell yes! It will put it into the league every one else is playing. AJAX will vastly improve and blow people away.

Javascript 2.0 is based off EMCAScript Edition 4, which is the same as ActionScript 3.0. This means that JavaScript 2.0 will have power, that same power as ActionScript 3.0. I believe that eventually XHTML will be called something else and it will be designed like MXML or XAML (Microsoft Silverlight version of MXML). It will represent different classes as tags for easy building.

But like I said above I’m only looking into my crystal ball to the future, and of course it is hazy.

July 6, 2008
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