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Posts Tagged ‘Techies’

Open Thread: The Internet Is Hard

Earlier today, we had a runaway hit of a post that went viral within a few hours, getting unbelievable pageviews and hundreds of retweets and comments.

The trouble was, it wasn’t because of the post’s content. Due to some interesting SEO magic, the post was one of the first search results for the term “Facebook login.” As a result, hundreds of confused readers bombed us with angry comments about how much they hated the “new Facebook,” a.k.a. our Facebook Connect comment login.

We could laugh (and we did), but we could also consider that these are our customers and users – the people we make the Web for.

How can we balance making the Web simple enough for all users while still creating tech cool enough to satisfy geeks like us? And who says either group – nerds or users – is “normal,” anyway?

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Here are some valuable lessons we were taught today by the commenters on the thread. We’ll employ the term “user” here to indicate the non-geeky, average person who uses the Web primarily as a way to navigate his or her real life. Feel free to disagree with this terminology or suggest new nomenclature in the comments.

1. Users don’t care about what you care about.

This quote from another RWW post pretty much sums it up:

“Especially in Silicon Valley, where it’s easy for entrepreneurs to isolate themselves in circles with like-minded techies and fellow entrepreneurs, I feel that a huge amount of startup CEOs and designers… make product decisions that appeal to their own interaction behaviour with such applications or what they think their friends will find cool.

“Building for geeks makes for great customer immersion if you’re building something like (the wonderfully useful) GitHub, but that same process doesn’t work so hot if you’re building a site for middle-aged moms.”

You and your geek friends != middle aged moms. And your users are often statistically more likely to be middle-aged moms.

2. Users don’t read your copy or look at your branding.

Banners, logos, carefully crafted wordsmithery – this is all filler, we’ve found out. Users have been calloused by 15 or so years of surfing through bad ads and marketing babble, and they are unconsciously tuning out everything but the one thing they came to find.

For example, none of the 200 or so confused Facebook users who commented on our earlier post read the post itself, the huge logo at the top of the page, the many links to non-Facebook-related content or the huge, all-bold paragraph about how ReadWriteWeb is not, in fact, some ill-conceived redesign of Facebook. They simply searched for “Facebook login” and, upon navigating to our site, scrolled until they found the one button they wanted to click. Which brings us to our third assertion.

3. Users gravitate toward the simple and the familiar.

A ton of the confused commenters scrolled down far enough to find the Facebook Connect button for logging into the comments section – as evinced by the fact that their Facebook profiles were then linked to their comments.

I’ve often criticized the ripped-off look of social media UIs, but once a UI becomes familiar, is it not a service to certain types of end users to continue in that vein? Two hackneyed expressions will back me up, one about reinventing wheels and the other about not needing to fix things that aren’t broken.

As a tech geek of the 12-hours-a-day-online variety, I appreciate innovative and intuitive web interfaces. But a lot of users don’t. Even if it’s simple, it needs to be familiar. Why do you suppose some of our current, deeply entrenched web design elements – from buttons to text blocks – even exist?

4. Users rule the Internet.

Finally, this is the reason we’ve stopped mocking the poor folks who left those comments long enough to write this post.

400 million people now use Facebook, and they don’t all have CS Master’s degrees from Stanford. But if you work in the IT/tech/Internet/online media industries, they do manage to pay your bills. They’re the ones who open emails, click ads, make purchases, sign up for subscriptions and generally take the majority of actions that make our whole ecosystem work.

And most of them have no idea what a web browser is or how it differs from a search engine or a social network. They’ve chosen to be smart about other things, like building cars or making art or raising families. I’ll bet some of them are terrific dancers. We have to build the Web for them, too.

As a user, a developer, a designer, a marketer, a startup dude or lady, whatever you happen to be, how do you balance the need to find or create cool tech and apps with the need to build with these kinds of users in mind? Do you get frustrated? Do you get feedback? Do you kill features and make buttons bigger?

What have been your successes and failures, or where have you learned lessons? We’d love to know, so please tell us in the comments.

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list.it: Post-It Notes for the Twitter Generation

While furiously trying to organize my digital life this past weekend, I found myself as I often do – with an obscene number of tabs open at the same time while hopping from thought to thought. It was in the middle of this confusing mess that I came across list.it, the self-described “simple, free, open-source note-keeping tool to help you manage the tons of little information bits you need to keep track of each day.”

Put out by the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at MIT, the browser extention is a “tool to help people cope with information overload and to stay organized” that has since helped me keep track of the common threads of an often multi-threaded day.

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What It Is

The best part of list.it is its simplicity. It doesn’t do much more than keep a list but it does that very well. List.it exists as a sort of frame on your browser that you can hide or show with a hotkey. Even it’s design is perfectly simple, with a text entry box at the top, a search bar in the middle and the individual list items below.

Big Features for a Little App

List.it has all of those things I always find myself wishing an app would do.

There are just four hotkeys to remember: One opens and closes the frame, one searches through your notes, one pops up a quick entry bar at the bottom of your browser and one adds the current URL.

The list items are kept in little boxes, which can be rearranged simply by clicking and dragging. A click on the main area of a note opens it for editing and directly clicking on a URL will open that website in a new tab. A click on the “x” deletes the item.

Information for a Twitter Generation

Now, this isn’t the type of app where you’re going to keep large chunks of text, so the search can serve a slightly different purpose. For techies like us, members of the Twitter generation, the idea of hashtags has become common sense. They work as a great way to keep your information organized, as whenever you do a search, you can click the “+” next to the search box to save that search. Instead of working in a directory structure, you create the structure on the fly.

This might be one of our favorite parts of this little app. While we can use the browser’s bookmarks or services like del.icio.us, we don’t have to spend time keeping our list organized in the same way. There’s no complicated and powerful bookmark organizer. List.it is for parceling off your information into little bites, manipulating them and working with them along the way. As long as you tag your notes along the way, these saved searches act as filters. If that hashtag appears anywhere in the note’s text, it will be displayed when you click on that search button, which is kept just below the search bar.

List.it also allows for synchronization between different browsers by saving your list on a central server, that way you can take your list with you on your netbook or your iPhone. One caveat – we ran into some difficulty while trying to create a user name and password. After installing list.it, there will be an orange triangle next to the text entry box at the top. Clicking on that will bring you to the proper location. Aside from that, we’ve had no other problems, which is always nice to see with an open-source, always in development type of app.

We’d recommend going and taking a look at the extension for yourself. It’s available for Firefox version 3.0 or greater and for iPhone and Android. The video included below gives a quick preview off the extension, but we think using it will really prove it’s usefulness.

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Foursquare’s Brilliant Community Stewardship Campaign

Often compared to Twitter for its meteoric rise to media darling status, location-based check-in game Foursquare is incredibly smart about its member stewardship and business strategy. On the heels of its September launch of Foursquare for Business and its recent partnership with the Bay Area Rapid Transit service, the group maintains its moniker as “little company that could”. Foursquare has found a way to give to charity, increase members, test an advertising program and avoid footing the bill.

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Between December 7-13, the location-based company is offering one sponsor a chance to re-skin the iPhone leaderboard site in exchange for a $0.03 pledge on every point earned on the Foursquare leaderboard. Through the Techies Give Back group, pledges will help CampInteractive in its mission to help empower inner-city youth. Last week New York Foursquare users racked up 150,000 points, so a sponsor would be likely to spend about $4500 to help a great cause, gain exposure to a huge cutting edge audience and be amongst the first to test a Foursquare re-skinning sponsorship service.

It’ll be interesting to see who budgets for this very reasonable deal in their holiday ad buy. Whoever does will have the unfettered attention of thousands of high income, gadget-loving check-in addicted consumers. Meanwhile, Foursquare has found a way to put together a stellar community stewardship campaign while also helping a group who needs it. To inquire about the campaign email info@techiesgiveback.org.

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Peerset Says Forget Demographics, Advertise by Interest

In an effort to help advertisers reach key consumers, Peerset is launching what it describes as a “psycho-graphic targeting tool.” Not unlike dating algorithms, Peerset’s targeting algorithm takes keywords and meta data from online profiles and matches them with relevant information. With dating sites, users receive recommendations on potential mates; with Peerset, users receive advertisements and deals on relevant products and services. Video life-streaming network Justin.tv is just one of the groups already reaping the benefits of this system.

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Said Justin.tv’s Director of Advertising Operations, Scott Newton, “Peerset gives Justin.tv’s advertisers the ability to target users in unique and powerful ways. The company enables Justin.tv to go beyond demographic targeting and target by user interests. Advertisers benefit from a higher response rate when ads are targeted to passions and interests.”

In the past, marketers have centered campaigns on a specific demographic group. Clients define key stakeholder groups, like 18- to 35-year-old urban male techies, and marketers look for corresponding ad placement packages. With Peerset, stakeholders are targeted after a brand has already been audited.

Peerset scrapes data from millions of sites, profiles and status messages and compiles a series of word clusters. While seemingly unrelated, Grey’s Anatomy, John Mayer and Starbucks coffee are clustered together simply because a large number of users have expressed interest in all three topics. These users might come from vastly different demographic groups, but their interests are the same. The system can then serve ads to them by matching general word clusters or by targeting specific users who have expressed an interest in one or more core concepts. Peerset operates on the belief that this interest-based targeting outperforms traditional demographic targeting. The service price varies based on a percentage of your ad buy.

Says Peerset CEO, Mike “JB” John-Baptiste, “We’re betting on the fact that if you can find commonality in data, you can scale it and generate sales.” To try Peerset visit Peerset.com.

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100 years of Big Content fearing technology—in its own words

It’s almost a truism in the tech world that copyright owners reflexively oppose new inventions that do (or might) disrupt existing business models. But how many techies actually know what rightsholders have said and written for the last hundred years on the subject?

The anxious rhetoric around new technology is really quite shocking in its vehemence, from claims that the player piano will destroy musical taste and the “national throat” to concerns that the VCR is like the “Boston strangler” to claims that only Hollywood’s premier content could make the DTV transition a success. Most of it turned out to be absurd hyperbole, but it’s interesting to see just how consistent the words and the fears remain across more than a century of innovation and a host of very different devices.

So here they are, in their own words—the copyright holders who demanded restrictions on player pianos, photocopiers, VCRs, home taping, DAT, MP3 players, Napster, the DVR, digital radio, and digital TV.

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Screencasts of Twine’s Facelift; Does It Live Up to the Hype?

We’ve chronicled semantic web service Twine’s birth, checkered youth, and recent woes in terms of traffic waning and criticism waxing.

We’ve been given screencasts of the new version of this knowledge management application – screencasts of both the consumer- and developer-facing facets of the site. Take a look, and let us know if the new Twine lives up to expectations. This new version, we are told, will be live by the end of the year.

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The consumer product promises to supplant keyword search by treating the web like a huge database with infinite filtering capabilities that allow users to pare down search results to only the most relevant, applicable, and useful links.

Developers and other techies can check out this screencast exploring Twine’s collaboratively authored ontologies:

The Twine folks see the new version as a realization of Tim Berners-Lee’s vision of the semantic web. So what do ReadWriteWeb readers think; is the new Twine worth the wait? Does it live up to the hype? Leave your expert comments below.

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RSS isn’t Dead (Just Ask Executives)

It’s become fashionable among a certain set to declare that RSS is no longer the foremost pipeline for news and information on the Web. Steve Gillmor and innumerable others have said they’ve abandoned their RSS readers in favor of Twitter. Twitter hiring Feedburner’s CEO seemed to compound this trend towards dismissing RSS as old hat (though headlines shouldn’t always be taken literally).

The usual suspects, such as Dave Winer and our own RSS geek, quickly jumped to the defense of really simple syndication. But where was the data to back them up? And what do businesses think about RSS? The McKinsey Global Survey on Web 2.0 in business came out yesterday, and out of the almost 1,700 executives they talked to, 42% said they see a measurable benefit from RSS. That’s 24% more than those who see any benefit from microblogging (i.e. Twitter).

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A big part of the disillusionment techies are feeling with RSS may be misdirected. Gillmor and the boys over at CNET both spent a lot of time talking about the failures of Google Reader to deliver news that matters in a timely fashion. Many of the complaints are problems with Google Reader, not with RSS. Entire businesses have been built on improving the creaky interface of Reader.

Gillmor isn’t the only one to confuse RSS with the apps that deliver it. The definition McKinsey provided to execs was “RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is an application that allows people to subscribe to online distributions of news, blogs, podcasts, or other online information.”

As Winer puts it so well, RSS is how the news flows. But both the public Web and enterprises are using RSS, which is embedded in numerous applications, to do more than just news gathering on items that would be Twitter-worthy.

McKinsey Quarterly’s survey was conducted online in June of this year, and garnered 1,695 responses from executives working in a wide range of regions and verticals. The aim of the survey was to ask “about the value they have realized from their Web 2.0 deployments in three main areas: within their organizations; externally, in their relations with customers; and in their dealings with suppliers, partners, and outside experts.”

The specific technologies McKinsey asked about included everything from wikis to mashups and prediction markets. 69% of respondents said they’re seeing measurable gains from these types of technologies both internally and externally.

RSS racked up quite a bit of support from the executives, coming in third after blogs and video sharing sites. While Steve Gillmor and others may have kicked RSS to the curb in favor of Twitter and other tools, people outside the sphere of early adopters are getting a lot of rewards from RSS still.

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OmniFocus for iPhone finally has reminders, but implementation is awful

Filed under: Software, Features, iPhone, iPod touch, App Review

[Update] Ken Case comments below, addressing some of the concerns listed here. It looks like a future version of OmniFocus on the Mac will be able to directly update the OmniFocus reminders on the server, removing at least one of my complaints.

Ken Case from The Omni Group has been twittering for awhile about the impending inclusion of alarm reminders for OmniFocus. The task management app’s iPhone users have been pestering The Omni Group to implement reminders as push notifications, but OmniFocus refuses to do so. They say that reminders that rely on connectivity are not good enough, and they have instead chosen to implement reminders by exporting due dates and times into iCal. Once the time comes for a reminder, it pops up like a normal iCal appointment reminder.

Well, OmniFocus 1.5.2 for iPhone was released, and now we get to see how this alternative reminder system works. If I had to choose a word to describe this implementation, that word would be “awful.” Here’s why:

• The Omni Group has taken great pains to point out that you do not need to be using the desktop version of OmniFocus to get use out of the iPhone version. But for users that only have the iPhone version and are not synchronizing it to either MobileMe (which has a yearly fee) or a WebDAV server (complicated for non-techies), they can’t use this implementation of reminders. That’s right; the way it works is that OmniFocus on the iPhone exports your reminders to your synchronization server, then points iCal on the iPhone to the server to import your reminders. That means that if you enter new due dates in OmniFocus for iPhone but don’t happen to have connectivity, you won’t get reminders. Wait, I thought it was implemented this way in the first place to guard against a lack of connectivity?

• Your OmniFocus reminders unnecessarily pollute your iPhone calendar with reminders. This is a visual problem when you need to glance at your calendars and see what actual appointments are coming up. On the iPhone you can either look at one specific calendar, or all calendars, so if like me you need to regularly stay on top of more than one calendar, you’re forced to look at your OmniFocus reminders as well. Oh, and even when you complete them in OmniFocus and resync, they don’t go away in your calendar. [Update] Stephen points out in the comments that this works as expected, and upon further testing I have to agree. Maybe I was being a bit too impatient.

• Since your OmniFocus reminders are actually just fake appointments, there is no way to audibly differentiate them from appointment reminders. They sound and look exactly the same. Remember the Milk, for example, uses push notifications on its iPhone app, and you can set the notification sound to a number of different options. That way you know that you’re being reminded of a task rather than an appointment.

• Reminders are set based on Due time, rather than Available time, and in terms of flexibility you can set the reminder to be 5 to 60 minutes before the task is due. By the time a task is actually due, isn’t it too late to be reminded about it?

• Finally, if you’re a user of OmniFocus for the Mac, your reminders are not created on your iPhone until you think to launch OmniFocus on the iPhone and synchronize it. That means that if you work all day in OmniFocus on your Mac (like I do), then drive home and start doing other stuff and don’t happen to open OmniFocus on your iPhone, you won’t receive any reminders for tasks that you might have set for that night, or until you actually open and sync OmniFocus on your iPhone.

So, what would I rather see? Push notifications, like the many other OmniFocus for iPhone users out there that have been providing their feedback to The Omni Group.

As mentioned, Remember the Milk has implemented push notifications, and the ability to change the notification sound isn’t the only trick it has up its sleeve. The Remember the Milk icon on my iPhone’s screen shows how many due tasks I have that day, and the number changes almost instantly when I make changes on the web version. To see how many currently available and due tasks I have in OmniFocus, I again have to launch the app and wait for it to synchronize.

While I love OmniFocus and I think The Omni Group does amazing work, this implementation of reminders for the iPhone version of OmniFocus is just full of an amazing amount of fail. It’s a hacky workaround that still doesn’t ensure that a lack of connectivity won’t adversely affect the user’s ability to receive reminder notifications. Omni folks, this is just meant to be tough love — I wouldn’t be saying all of this if I didn’t truly care about OmniFocus.

TUAWOmniFocus for iPhone finally has reminders, but implementation is awful originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Fri, 24 Jul 2009 00:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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