You could fly to San Francisco, be horrified at the cost of even a cheap hotel room, then spend USD500 just to be there, or you can watch the TechCrunch50 conference live on USTREAM and just pay the streaming bandwidth cost. This is the first time I’ve ever seen a USTREAM live video stream acceptably from Australia, so if that’s been the experience for you too, give this one a try – it seems to be working really well.
On the TechCrunch50 site you can skip directly to the video for each presenting startup immediately following their presentation.
As some of you may know, Elliot and I are toiling away building TrippyThing, a website that turns unfriendly, jargon-heavy confirmation emails from travel booking services into understandable, friendly, shareable trip itineraries.
We hope to tell you more about our launch timeframe for TrippyThing soon.
Right now, we need your help to add to our collection of travel booking confirmation emails.
These are the emails you receive when you book a flight, room, car, etc. The more confirmation emails we receive, the more services TrippyThing will work with when we launch.
We need your help. We need you to send us as many booking emails as possible, from as many companies as possible. In return for your help, we promise to build a cracking-good web service that will save you heaps of time when you next book a trip. (more…)
Why do so many people in tech management find 3D interface so strangely addictive, when it’s clinically proven to be idiot-forming? Techcrunch reports that AT&T has been developing a new web 3D browser, Pogo, based on Mozilla. I’m amongst the readers who reacted with a strong WTF? at the news, though it brings up some important points about interface design, following trends, and remembering history.
I remember my history. Right about when I joined Yahoo! the company cut a deal with Caligari, a maker of 3D software and browser plugins. The two companies collaborated on a 3D visualisation of the main web directory categories of Yahoo! (News, Finance, Sports, etc.) I can’t find a video of the interface in action (challenge: can you find one?) but each section of the web directory was represented by a giant icon on a huge green field of grass.
From memory, Yahoo! 3D was something a lot of senior yahoos were interested in as something fun to play with – it really wasn’t something the company was expecting to monetize or present as the primary interface for Yahoo! then or in the future. This was in the days of 28.8kbps modem bandwidth, 13" CRTs and Navigator 3.0/IE 3.0. Flying across the football field from one category to another would take about a minute, with frame rates at about 5fps, and you were quite likely to miss the category you were aiming for with the frame rate and lag time.
Yahoo! 3D taught me that desktop web browser interfaces were already quite mature, and that on the desktop, the old "click on a link with a mouse" routine was widely-understood, easily adopted by new users, and fast to use.
Since then, browser interface design has tried and rejected a few new ideas, and the only one I can point to that has really been taken up widely is tabs in the browser, as well as in the web page itself.
Twelve years later, 3D visualization of data and relationships is a powerful tool, but 3D navigation remains a solution without a problem. Why is this so? I can’t point you to research on this, but my trusty gut instinct says:
3D interfaces need 3D input devices and displays. It’s too hard to learn to grasp, manipulate and move objects using 2D input devices and displays. It takes too many brain cells to do the interpolation, even for those with strong stomachs and keen to try new things.
Despite Javascript, AJAX, Flash and all that whizzy coding stuff, websites and web apps are still built using metaphors dredged deep out of print publishing. You can stack a bunch of web pages together and drag them about, sure, but each of those web pages has only two dimensions. I can only interact with the content on a web page when viewing it from "the front". Stacking and dragging are useful for organising large numbers of web pages and bookmarks, sure. But who organises large amounts of web content? A tiny percentage of the internet audience. And that dragging is inevitably going to be easier using folders and tabs until Apple ships me a 3D input device and display with my next Mac.
The other classic mistake I see in these videos of Pogo in action is mimicry without purpose, in this case, mimicking Apple’s Cover Flow interface. I betcha nobody at AT&T knows what percentage of Apple’s OS X customers actually choose to use Cover Flow (versus not knowing how to turn it off) but I am sure Apple knows and isn’t telling.
Cover Flow is chrome: something that’s meant to sweeten the sale or upgrade of the operating system, iTunes and iPods, not to be a primary interface mode.
Knowing your new BMW M5 has a gazillion suspension and transmission settings helps you justify your purpose, and six months later, if BMW surveys M5 customers and finds <5% actually mess with the settings? Who cares? We’ve still sold a lot of M5s.
How do I know Cover Flow is just chrome when I don’t have any data? I asked my friends. The responses are all quite similar: even the musicgeekiest friend I have can identify only 30% of his iTunes library by album art alone. Subtract the albums he originally owned on CD, then subtract the albums he’d owned for years before buying an iPod, then subtract the album covers that actually have the band name and album name on the cover? He’s down to <5%.
Don’t believe me? Test yourself, I’d love to read about your results.
Meanwhile, who’d regularly use an interface that forced you to stop and think about 95% of the choices available to you?
While website homepages aren’t as obscure as album covers, they certainly aren’t designed to be recognisable – much less legible – at Cover Flow-sized dimensions. And any new content on them worth clicking on won’t be readable unless the Pogo user is viewing at something far greater than 1280x1024px.
AT&T’s Pogo mistakes the chrome for the fundamentals, and then tacks it onto its own product without any understanding of its true purpose, like a Chinese manufacturer designing cars that come out looking like a BMW that got left too long in the microwave with a LandCruiser.
Some of the videos of Pogo in action are well worth watching, and I’m in favour of AT&T and other large companies with too much money/time doing research of all kinds, even if its only into doomed interface design.
But while you watch, don’t let the siren song of 3D interface whizzyness lure you away. Don’t start picturing yourself in a ‘Minority Report’ future with productivity levels 10x today’s. Expect the personal jetpack to ship first!
Here I am in full iPhone Fuzzycolourtm at the dining table with Yorke Hinds, the devbrain behind Quivalent, once my favourite email newsletter marketing platform, and Zookoda, an excellent tool to help bloggers manage RSS email subscriptions, a product now in the portfolio of PayPerPost.
Peepl have been dropping around to our house a bit lately, mostly to sample our fantastic fresh-ground Forsyths coffee (ZOMG it’s so good I’m gonna make another now) but also to chat a bit about new opportunities on da interwebs. With no consent or prior warning, I’m going to use my iPhone’s craptastic fuzzycam and Twitxr.com‘s social photomessaging to record some of these visits for posterior-ity. Sorry Yorke!
Yorke’s next large-ish thing will be a platform that helps interweb startups manage relationships with the greatest double-edged sword of web development: the beta tester. I’m waiting for my alpha invite from Yorke, really looking forward to having a muck about with it. Unfortunately my feedback will need to remain confidential for the time-being, but hopefully I can tell you all about it very soon when it enters a more open beta.
Meanwhile, if you’d like to drop by, have one of my great coffees, and star in iPhone Fuzzycolour production of your own, do drop me an email.
In place of the original vague "libera/conservative" affiliations we now get actual political parties, which is great if you vote for the same political party every election and agree with their entire platform, which is… rare. But make no mistake, this is a step forward.
In Australia, all Federal parties considered by Wikipedia to be "significant" are represented, so Pauline Hanson and Shooters Party members will be disappointed.
Here’s a fun thing: type a keyword like "Liberal", "Democratic", "Popular" or "People’s" into the field and see all the whackjobs from around the world lined up together. It’s almost like a political party name should be the opposite of who it actually represents.
I am certain there will soon be news stories showing whether, in the US, Democrats or Republicans are more likely to be active Facebook users, and Facebook Platform developers will bring us a variety of ways to surf the social graph according to political lines.
No doubt, many Facebook users consider their political affiliation a personal and private thing. So put “Pirate” or “Ninja” in there and leave us guessing.
Yes, social networks can’t sustain the current growth. There will be a plateau. Following the plateau will come more realistic valuations, rationalisation and acquisition by the networks.
Yes, to some extent social networks will atomise – social networking platforms are already starting to blend in the features of other web platforms via their APIs and developer platforms, and it makes sense that some of that platform functionality will bleed out into email, search, blogging and other web platforms over time.
The ‘friend spam’ we see now on Facebook is a function of the immaturity of the social network businesses themselves, which are still learning how to manage open platforms, and to some extent a learning process for users – it’s already unfashionable to be the friend who sends too much social network spam – soon, it will be social suicide.
I can’t see Mark’s ‘Email 3.0′ spelling the end of social networks. If I were an 18-25 year old, why would I need to wrangle with Hotmail and Yahoo! Mail if I can use Facebook’s email to stay in touch with everyone I know? Hotmail spam vs Facebook spam? Give me the latter any day.
Why would I need to search from the Google homepage if Facebook was my homepage and I could launch a Google search from a Facebook app in my profile page?
Google’s become the default for us 30-40 year olds, and Yahoo! is the default for our parents, but Facebook and MySpace have an opportunity to be the default starting point for our kids. …if they seize the opportunity and execute well, which so far they have had trouble with.
Email is inherently a functional product – I need to have something to communicate to someone before I send an email. However social networks work best when I can use them as inspiration for finding something to say to my friends. I may not have any news myself today, but by browsing what my friends have been up to recently, there’s always something that I can comment on, criticise, debate or LOL at.
Social networks will remain a place that people go to ‘hang out’ with their friends and meet new friends online. There will be fewer of them in the future, and the big ones will probably be owned by larger networks as MySpace is now.
But just as social networks have an opportunity to steal the email, search, media sharing and buying/searching eyeballs from the incumbents, there is already a couple of threats to the social networks: social messaging businesses like bluepulse (who are more comfortable if I disclose that I’m contracting for them any time I mention their name online, bless ‘em!) and microblogging services like Twitter.
Social messaging businesses threaten social networks because they may steal away the user’s all-important ‘status message’. Without the status message being updated there’s half the value of the Facebook newsfeed gone, and the newsfeed is everything to Facebook’s business. If I can more quickly and easily update what I’m doing now from my mobile phone on bluepulse than I can on Facebook, then sure, Facebook may lose me (that’s “me the hypothetical 20 year old” not “me the 43 year old”.) Facebook’s mobile product is still lame: you can’t sign up as a Facebook user from a phone, and many of the key features are missing from the mobile product. Using MySpace’s mobile product is like travelling back in time to 2000 and back in space to Boondocks, Carolina. I don’t see any sign that Facebook or MySpace ‘get’ the importance of building a better mobile product yet.
Microblogging services like Twitter can also steal away the status message traffic and user loyalty from the social networks, by making it all about status messages, and then using the social network’s own APIs to let the user update multiple social networks from one spot, saving time and money, both very precious to 18-25 year olds.
Richard Giles from Scouta was looking on Twitter for some feedback on his new redesign. I charge for this kinda work, but here’s some brief feedback:
S-P-E-L-L out the benefit
You haven’t yet shown the user the benefit. You assume they know why receiving personalised recommendations is a good thing. Start with, “Who has time to find good stuff to listen to/watch online?…” and explain the benefit. Most consumers still aren’t aware of what recommendation is, much less why it matters to them.
Who’s your target audience?
It’s really hard to get a good balance between the consumer target and the media publisher target, so why try? It just clutters and confuses to have a message aimed at publishers wedged in-between two consumer messages. Just put a button-shaped link near the bottom that says, “Are you a media publisher?” and take the publishers to another page. We media publishers are smart, we’re better at retention when scanning a page than joe consumer.
What’s your brand?
You’ve got two competing brands on the page: the “scouta” text and the whirly play button, which is really your chicklet – what should be small, subtle interface cue used before links, instead of player play buttons, etc. Which do you need the user to really recall? I’d suggest it’s the Scouta logo.
Not all ratings are equal
Are you sure you want to collect user ratings on content right from the homepage with no prior Learn More or new user registation? Before they’ve really invested in the idea that rating things well delivers good recommendations? Having worked on content recommendation products before, not all user ratings are equal. I’d expect these ratings would be next to useless in this context, and aren’t likely to give the user a positive result – they’re going to expect a perfect recommendation after the first rating click, or click both of them to see what happens, or worse.
When it doesn’t work as they expected (because you haven’t yet told them what to expect) their simple little mind will come to the end of their tiny little attention span, they’ll click off your homepage and whatever you paid the SEO to get them will be wasted.
CaPiTaLiSaTiOn!
I’m Not A Big Fan Of Capitalising Words That Aren’t Actually Proper Nouns When The Whole Page Uses Them It Doesn’t Focus The Eye, Instead It Decreases Readability Significantly.
25% OFF! Oh wait, it’s free…
Love rosettes for highlighting ‘special deal’ info, though they tend to get ignored by users not interested in clicking on advertising links. They’re not very ‘with it’ anymore. If you must use one, consider one with fewer points. If you’re not wedded to a rosette but still want visual impact, nothing says “Ideal for iPod, iPhone and AppleTV owners” better than a pic of the products all nicely arranged together with some dramatic lighting and a zushy background.
Black on orange isn’t kind on eyes, and, uhh… were you happy with that font?
Love the promise of personalised content recommendations, keen to see how the new site looks when it goes live! Hope that helps!
There are now so many microblogging platforms out there, and they’re all so new none has quite achieved ubiquity yet. So teh kiddies at hellotxt have decided the right thing to do is to add anothr layer of aggregation on the interweb, this time to let you update all your microblog feeds from the one microblogger.
So gay! Why? Mostly bcoz they’ll never keep up. New microblog apps appear quicker than anyone can blog about them, much less try them out.
But also because I’m starting to realise that all this blogging (and microblogging on top of that and microblog-aggregation on top of that) is taking the user in the wrong direction. Well, maybe not the generic user, but definitely me.
I’m being asked in the name of aggregation and convenience to step away from rich content and navigation and adopt command-line txt as my default mode of communication. I’m also being asked to divide and subdivide my total potential audience into smaller chunks based on how they want to receive me, with so much overlap between them it’s usually possible to spam my true meatspace friends with my every thought.
This is what I get now.
I get to push my thoughts through an ever-narrowing set of command line options defined by the subset of content types that will pass all the way from microblog aggregator at the top down to flexible, rich media publishing platform at the bottom. If I got carried away with the aggregation model, the blog you’re reading now could become merely an RSS feed of my Facebook News Feed of my Twitter tweets from my Hellotxt login.
That’s just wrong. AFU. All my bases are belong to telco and jabber.org.
This is what I want.
Why do I want to flip the model?
For starters, I want to publish the richest possible content to the widest possible audience first. Blogger’s my most flexible, creative publishing platform. OK, to bang out a post that includes much rich content I have to go to the immensely tedious trouble of logging in via a browser or blogging client, but I’m old enough to remember desktop publishing, and if you imagine that old standby of print publishing Quark Xpress to be like a four-hour full cavity search in a Kazakh checkpoint that’s just run out of lube, then Blogger’s browser interface seems like a standup quickie with a supermodel in comparison.
My Facebook and Myspace and Bebo and even Twitter presences are discoverable, but with nothing like the discoverability and search-crawler friendlyness of my long-established blog. Most of my blog readers have never read my stuff before. Sadly, most of them never come back, but that’s an issue I could address if I wasn’t so half-arsed.
My Blogger blog introduces me to more new people than anything else, and lets me publish just about anything. Slowly, tediously, but with more control over how and where it appears than just about anything.
Follow the arrows and you’ll see my content gradually being stripped of its richness as it gets handed on to Facebook and my other social network platforms I have yet to abandon. At this stage it’s still got the potential for images and video, but it gets separated into different modules and not all of it is shown to everyone I know on Facebook – some goes to one group but doesn’t display for others.
Finally, at the Twitter level, I’d like just the txt pls, shrthnded enuf so it fits in 1 sms, but like right now, 2 the smllst grps of frnds i.e. 121.
In other words, I don’t want my blog to become a vast bog roll of five years of my text haiku; I want my Twitter feed to be the best possible condensed goodness automagically gleaned from my Facebook page, which is automagically being updated from my Blogger blog.
There are now so many microblogging platforms out there, and they’re all so new none has quite achieved ubiquity yet. So teh kiddies at hellotxt have decided the right thing to do is to add anothr layer of aggregation on the interweb, this time to let you update all your microblog feeds from the one microblogger.
So gay! Why? Mostly bcoz they’ll never keep up. New microblog apps appear quicker than anyone can blog about them, much less try them out.
But also because I’m starting to realise that all this blogging (and microblogging on top of that and microblog-aggregation on top of that) is taking the user in the wrong direction. Well, maybe not the generic user, but definitely me.
I’m being asked in the name of aggregation and convenience to step away from rich content and navigation and adopt command-line txt as my default mode of communication. I’m also being asked to divide and subdivide my total potential audience into smaller chunks based on how they want to receive me, with so much overlap between them it’s usually possible to spam my true meatspace friends with my every thought.
This is what I get now.
I get to push my thoughts through an ever-narrowing set of command line options defined by the subset of content types that will pass all the way from microblog aggregator at the top down to flexible, rich media publishing platform at the bottom. If I got carried away with the aggregation model, the blog you’re reading now could become merely an RSS feed of my Facebook News Feed of my Twitter tweets from my Hellotxt login.
That’s just wrong. AFU. All my bases are belong to telco and jabber.org.
This is what I want.
Why do I want to flip the model?
For starters, I want to publish the richest possible content to the widest possible audience first. Blogger’s my most flexible, creative publishing platform. OK, to bang out a post that includes much rich content I have to go to the immensely tedious trouble of logging in via a browser or blogging client, but I’m old enough to remember desktop publishing, and if you imagine that old standby of print publishing Quark Xpress to be like a four-hour full cavity search in a Kazakh checkpoint that’s just run out of lube, then Blogger’s browser interface seems like a standup quickie with a supermodel in comparison.
My Facebook and Myspace and Bebo and even Twitter presences are discoverable, but with nothing like the discoverability and search-crawler friendlyness of my long-established blog. Most of my blog readers have never read my stuff before. Sadly, most of them never come back, but that’s an issue I could address if I wasn’t so half-arsed.
My Blogger blog introduces me to more new people than anything else, and lets me publish just about anything. Slowly, tediously, but with more control over how and where it appears than just about anything.
Follow the arrows and you’ll see my content gradually being stripped of its richness as it gets handed on to Facebook and my other social network platforms I have yet to abandon. At this stage it’s still got the potential for images and video, but it gets separated into different modules and not all of it is shown to everyone I know on Facebook – some goes to one group but doesn’t display for others.
Finally, at the Twitter level, I’d like just the txt pls, shrthnded enuf so it fits in 1 sms, but like right now, 2 the smllst grps of frnds i.e. 121.
In other words, I don’t want my blog to become a vast bog roll of five years of my text haiku; I want my Twitter feed to be the best possible condensed goodness automagically gleaned from my Facebook page, which is automagically being updated from my Blogger blog.
I think it’s an interesting feature of Leopard, but not really significant to the widget sector (is it a sector yet? covered by TC.
Unlike most other widget platforms, OS X’s widgets are hidden in a Widget app that you need to open first, reducing the number of views/user. They aren’t cross-platform, and Leopard’s market share is only a slice of the total OS X installed base. I don’t know what share of the total OS market OS X enjoys, but it must be small. Growing faster than other OSes, likely, but from a very low base.
Microsoft, with it stated aim of being the Internet OS – and its long-developed habit of copying Apple’s interfaces – may eventually copy this ‘create your own widget from the browser’ feature, but at MSFT’s current rate of innovation, count on seeing that some time >2020, by which time it’ll be Mozilla-based browsers, not IE, that will have dominant market share.
The other thing to consider is what percentage of users will make their own widget given the opportunity to do so. My experience working on personalisable homepages for portals suggests that while everyone ticks “yes” when you ask them whether they want their own personalisable homepage, when the product goes live, most of those yes-tickers will never take the time to personalise their homepage. My observations suggest that ease-of-use has no bearing on that result – it doesn’t matter if it’s one button on the toolbar away.
Personalisation is like fast-food – knowing that the fast-food franchise lets you choose your own fillings gets you in the door rather than the competitor’s door. But 98% of us choose the off-the-shelf burger after we walk in and view the menu because it’s quicker, easier, and we figure whoever decided that pickles and ketchup go together must know what they’re doing. Mistakenly…
We think we want choice, but what we really want is the feeling that we could choose if we wanted to.
Mark Jones of 
When The Whole Page Uses Them It Doesn’t Focus The Eye, Instead It Decreases Readability Significantly.
