Just upgraded from a free to a Solo Highrise account.  This is significant: it marks the first time I’ve shelled out cash for a Web app, it’s the first 37signals app for which I’ve paid, and it means that I no longer have to keep going back and deleting contacts to stay under the 250 / free theshold.  

Highrise rocks because it’s the perfect place for me to keep all the notes I used to keep on people locked away in Word notebooks. Now they’re attached directly to the person and searchable.

Kevin Ham, the $300 million master of Web domains

Does anybody reading this have experience with or know somebody that does parkour?

I’m tired of it.

Plus, it gets hard to say.  Try saying it five times really fast.

…should be…

If you want to do something that’s going to change the world, build software that people want to use instead of software that managers want to buy. When words like “groupware” and “enterprise” start getting tossed around, you’re doing the latter.

You start adding features to satisfy line-items on some checklist that was constructed by interminable committee meetings among bureaucrats, and you’re coding toward an externally-dictated product specification that maybe some company will want to buy a hundred “seats” of, but that nobody will ever love. With that kind of motivation, nobody will ever find it sexy. It won’t make anyone happy.

Your “use case” should be, there’s a 22 year old college student living in the dorms. How will this software get him laid?

That got me a look like I had just sprouted a third head, but bear with me, because I think that it’s not only crude but insightful. “How will this software get my users laid” should be on the minds of anyone writing social software (and these days, almost all software is social software).

“Social software” is about making it easy for people to do other things that make them happy: meeting, communicating, and hooking up.