Friday, February 5th, 2010
By-products Rock! by-product n.
Something produced in the making of something else.
A secondary and sometimes unexpected consequence.

Lately I've become a big fan of by-products. Sounds a little weird I am sure, but they are pretty awesome if you think about them. We use products everyday that are or were the by-product of something else. A good example is the Post-it Note. Everyone uses them and they came about on accident.

The Post-it Note wasn't a planned product. Spencer Silver, a scientist for 3M Laboratories back in the 70's, was working on a new adhesive. The goal was to create an adhesive that would be one of the strongest on the market. Something odd happened during the development process and he ended up developing a fairly weak adhesive, weaker than what 3M already manufactured. No one knew what to do with the stuff, but instead of discarding it he kept it around. Then one Sunday four years later, another 3M scientist named Arthur Fry was singing in the church choir. He used markers to keep his place in the hymnal, but they kept falling out of the book. Remembering Silver's adhesive, Fry used some to coat his markers. With the weak adhesive, the markers stayed in place, yet came off without damaging the pages. 3M started selling Post-it Notes nationwide in 1980 -- ten years after Silver developed the super weak adhesive. Today they are one of the most popular office products available.

I really love that story. I'm constantly thinking of ways to make by-products out of what I do and use daily. Sometimes that boils down to just recycling things and allowing someone else to reuse what I used. But on occasion I've been able to create by-products out of something I've made and in the end they become even more useful.

Poop Bags
That's right, I said it... poop. We do our best to use tote bags for grocery shopping and to carry other purchases home from stores but occasionally it just doesn't happen and we end up with a collection of plastic shopping bags. Our recycling center will not accept plastic bags so we started saving them and using them to pick up dog poop with. They work perfectly for that and it's a good way to get a little more mileage out of them.

Wrapping Paper
A year or so ago we were rummaging around at the local Habitat Re-store on a lazy Saturday. I stumbled on a couple old sets of nautical maps that were for sale for $1 each. They were really neat maps with a unique design, I wondered if they could be used for something more. I bought them just because I thought they were cool but eventually decided to use the pages as wrapping paper for gifts (thanks for the idea, Bob Pike). They are a nice size and work perfectly for most medium to small gifts. I'd imagine you could do this with lots of books and artwork that's seen better days.

Reusable Code
Through the years, I've built a lot of web sites and applications that do certain things. At a high-level though, most of them share common functionality. They all connect to a database of some sort, allow users to setup an account and login, have a navigation system and share information with visitors. I've written functions that I've been able to reuse time and time again, that make these actions possible. Over the years the functions have improved and become more beneficial. It makes my job a lot simpler, when I start building a new web site, to not have to start from scratch each time.

Humzoo By-products
We didn't really think about it when it happened but the contests on Humzoo are a by-product of something. Members were already uploading photos and videos to the site, but we decided to take it a step forward and have some fun with it. Plus it encourages people to use the site more and maybe even invite others to use the site. In the end it could benefit us even more.

Another recent by-product that we created for Humzoo is the Related Content section in the side bar on user pages (you should see one to the right of this blog right now with content related specifically to the tags for this blog). Once again, it wasn't intentional but we took the existing tagging system, which only served the purpose of a way to find specific content, and reused the data to create a new section that suggests related items to site visitors. In my opinion, the data is being used far more effectively now than before. For years I've be tagging my items only for the sole purpose of easily being able to quickly find them later. Now I feel that the tagging system and my tags are far more useful to myself and others.

I'm barely scratching the surface here, I know. This is a new concept to me really. I first started thinking about this all a year or so ago when I read a blog on 37Signals' Signal vs. Noise blog. The specific blog was more related to their business and how they've found ways to create by-products from their work, but it's applicable in may ways to daily life.

I'm sure there is an entire world of by-products out there that I haven't even thought of. Does anyone else have by-products or methods that they've created that others might find useful as well?