How did Apple nail so many features of the iPhone and yet get picture messages so horribly wrong?

Right now when you receive a picture message via SMS on the iPhone you get an alert that looks like this:

But since there’s no copy/paste feature, you’re apparently expected to hold the 9 character MessageID and the 8 char password in your head, switch over to safari, go to viewmymessage.com and type these in the form fields. I guess that’s realistic if you’re this guy but us mere mortals don’t have that kind of mental swap space.

AT&T should just put a link in the SMS to retrieve the picture. It’s no Treo experience like getting the pic immediately but it’s a one-click retrieval step at that point since the iPhone automatically creates links for valid URLs in messages. And this method would be no less secure since they already put these tokens as text in the SMS now.

If getting AT&T’s cooperation to fix this isn’t an option, Apple could still solve it by the having the SMS app recognize and parse the MMS alerts that AT&T issues and create a dynamic local page that posts those variables. Either one of these would make multimedia messages tolerable on the iPhone- it’s basically unusable now. I don’t know how Apple is prioritizing their improvements - I know they probably don’t expose that anywhere but it would be good if they allowed people to vote for fixes. BTW, Matt Assay has a good discussion of other iPhone brokenness. It’s such a beautiful device but has some things that are conspicuously annoying. It’d be great if their calendar worked more like the Treo’s and I still haven’t figured out if/where it syncs data from the notes app to the Mac.

Just a quick show of hands, how many people would find it useful to have an event like BarCamp only focused around tactics for promoting your stuff? We were kicking around the idea yesterday of an event called “MarCamp” (and actually Austin came up with “MarKamp” which is even better) that would take the same unstructured, self-organizing format of the other *Camp events. A quick search reveals this event back in 2006 in SF but it doesn’t like like anything came of it.

This is something I really want to see. We have all these different marketing initiatives we’re kicking around now and I just want to run a “Matrix training program” and instantly have all this experience now. It would be great to have a BarCamp style event where you could sponge up experience from folks that have learned this stuff the hard way and then contribute back what you know.

I will help make this event happen if there’s enough interest. Topics that I would most like to see:

If you can think of others of interest, add them in a comment and let me know if this is an event you would attend. If we get even ten talented marketing folks interested, I’m doing this. We’d most likely be able to get a free venue like we did for BarCamp Phoenix. Of course the inherent paradox here is we’ll need good marketing skills to promote awareness of the event to all the marketing people we’d like to attract ;-) All thoughts on this idea are welcome in the comments field.

There are a lot of parallels between wind sports and startups. One thing we’ve encountered lately with JumpBox is something I can only describe as the tendency to “fight the wind” in our desire to artificially accelerate the pace of adoption. Everyone who’s tried to wind surf for the first time falls into the trap of trying to muscle the sail into position instead of respecting the wind and working with it. You end up completely wearing yourself out on that first day. By day two you’re so physically exhausted that your only option is to learn to work with the wind.

I feel like we just woke up on day two with our startup. We work ourselves into a state of mental gridlock with all these “open loops” as David Allen calls them. And the reality is we’re doing fine and just need to continue to execute and lower our expectations of how fast we can realistically run given our size.

I would be curious to hear from others who are running a small business: a) do you find yourself encountering this same tendency? and b) how have you coped with it and do you have any reliable techniques to relax and “work with the wind?” We’re in an emerging space and we’re not for lack of a killer product at this point- we have incredibly positive feedback from everyone who uses our stuff. Our real issue is that we see such incredible opportunities and yet we can’t tackle them as fast as we’d like and the market itself is still in its infancy. On first glance it seems our greatest challenge is in spreading awareness, but in reality it may be more in developing patience and becoming comfortable with the natural pace of adoption.

Anyone else in the same boat (or on the same surf board)?