Both MSN Search and Google updated their mobile phone search capabilities They’re essentially paired down, very simplified web pages that are viewable on phones.
A few weeks ago, MSN Mobile opened up local search and maps thru mobile devices. MSN Search’s WebLog has info in it here.
Now Google has countered with the ability to find local stuff as well as driving directions through Google Mobile.
You can play with both interfaces in your desktop browser here and here.
Yahoo continues to lead the pack in RSS. Yahoo Weather feeds are now available.
Posted by Richard Ziade on August 30, 2005, 08:25PMIf you’re looking to save some oh-so precious taskbar space in Windows, this tiny (112k) utility will send anything to the system tray. It’s free, so go grab the little bastard.
Business 2.0 has nice introductory write-up to the whole “Web 2.0” trend: How To Become The Next Microsoft.
In my oh-so-humble opinion, I think the whole “Web OS” concept is a bunch of hooey. It’s one of those ideas that fits so nicely in the brain, it’s got to be right, but in reality the world is a lot more complicated (sort of like…Communism).
Posted by Richard Ziade on August 28, 2005, 09:31PM
The New York Times chimes in on Google’s ridiculous gag order against CNet. It’s about time the press called them on this one.
Posted by Richard Ziade on August 26, 2005, 09:19AMNewsgator has put out the third beta of FeedDemon 1.6. FeedDemon is my feed reader of choice. With this release, we’re starting to see the syncing capabilities start to shine. I can finally see the same set of feed groups and feeds on Newsgator Online as on my client feed reader. It took some poking around (like unsyncing and syncing again) to get there, but it’s happening.
Now if only Newsgator would clean up Newsgator Online. It’s a pretty bad interface The Newsgator Manager and it’s “locations” are downright mind-numbing.
Posted by Richard Ziade on August 25, 2005, 06:54PMTechtarget.com : Mark Hapner (lead architect of the J2EE platform) on AJAX, SOA and Security.
Pretty darn cool: Via Greasemokey, enhance Google Maps with A9’s street views.
Over at blogs.salon, Scott Rosenberg talks about the Google-Microsoft chess match.
I’ve previously posted about how Google’s Willy Wonka, “Do No Evil” image was going to eventually bite them in the corporate rear. Now the New York Times has surprisingly chimed in with an interesting article about the perception shift that Google is experiencing, most notably in Silicon Valley.
I think this is partly Google’s fault for setting the bar as high as they did, and also partly just crowd psychology against a dominant player. In any case, in the years ahead, I think Google is going to have bigger challenges than just brand perception.
All the talk about Google Talk was for real. It is now available.
Posted by Richard Ziade on August 23, 2005, 05:07PMThe new Google Desktop has been catching some flak in the blogosphere (man I hate that word) for being less than stellar. I posted my impressions yesterday. It’s all a little less innovative and a little more copycat than what we’ve come to expect from Google. Putting the general impressions aside, I’d like to focus on a feature Google included in Desktop that, I believe, is a hint of where RSS can really go.
In Google Desktop, it’s called Web Clips. In short, it’s a rolling list of headlines that are gleaned from web pages that you’ve visited that are also serving RSS feeds. So for example, if I visit Kottke.org, it sniffs out the RSS feeds he’s also made available and goes ahead and adds them to my Web Clips mix. After a few hours of browsing around the Web, I glance over to the Web Clips and notice a mixture of headlines from the various sites I’ve visited.
So what’s good and bad about this?
The Good
The Bad
With all that said, I think Web Clips hints us towards what RSS is really capable of: delivering key bits of information to us in an unobtrusive way with very little effort on our part. In a business context, this has enormous potential. Imagine headlines coming to you when:
Today, all of the above require business participants to go get information. They may get it by sending emails or asking others. We try to use technology the help us do this by installing applications, but we often still have to go get it from an insulated application (whether web or otherwise).
RSS provides the transit system for delineating and delivering key information to users without requiring any proactive action on their part. It’s a tap on the shoulder. In today’s application of RSS, we get tapped on the shoulder because someone has something curious or interesting to say. It’s use is casual and mostly relegated to blogs and news sources.
It’s real power, in my opinion, is when the tap on the shoulder is followed by critical information. It is the inverse of your “check on this…” and “check on that…” task list. Once you’ve let it be known that you’re listening in, RSS will let you know when important events happen. For me, this is where it gets exciting for RSS: the realm of communicating critical information. RSS has the untapped capacity to redefine how groups of people communicate around centralized goals.
There are other barriers to talk about before RSS can get there. Google has (sort of) attempted addressing one of them – usability and ease of use. Others include security and it’s limitations as an XML payload, but these all can be solved. RSS is generating an enormous amount of attention these days. It’s really a matter of where all this energy (and money) that RSS is attracting is applied.
Posted by Richard Ziade on August 22, 2005, 11:51PMNeat little toys for you Flickr freaks out there.
After allowing this thing to linger on my desktop for a day, I have to say I’m not very impressed. Some points:
Overall, this is pretty disappointing. Google is obviously getting nervous about being stuck inside the browser. With Vista, Microsoft’s guns are aiming right for it.
The real challenge for Google (and Yahoo for that matter) is maintaining brand relevance in a world that is starting to see Internet applications proliferate beyond the web browser. While Google may have the best search engine, the others will eventually get to “good enough.” Couple that with the discrete ability to search without going to an actual web site (i.e. visit Google.com first then search), and you’ve got a pretty dangerous scenario for Google. I think we’re going to see a lot more scrambling like this before its over.
Google has released a new version of their Google Desktop.
Anyone who had any doubts that this was going to turn into a Microsoft-Google thing as much as a Yahoo-Google thing will probably change their view after seeing this thing.
It is Google’s most serious attempt to reach your desktop. It includes a sidebar that sticks to the side of your desktop that does all sorts of things like scratch pad, headlines weather, etc. There are too many features to list here. One of the more interesting is it’s ability to monitor the sites you visit and just steal RSS feeds from within and start displaying entries (under a “Web Clips” category).
By the way, the sidebar is one of the more prominent features in Microsoft’s upcoming Vista operating system. Also, you can grab a popular (and free) implementation of Sidebar for Windows XP here. This is hardly revolutionary stuff on Google’s part. Regardless, it’s clear they’re on a mission to break out of your browser and somehow seep into the rest of your life.
I’m going to play with this awhile and I’ll probably post some impressions later on.
Posted by Richard Ziade on August 20, 2005, 11:19AMGot intimate itching problems? Get an O'Reilly book. Hilarious.
Scott Isaacs (one of the inventors of DHTML) talks about the problems (and possible for solutions) for web apps that utilize AJAX. The first two parts are here and here.
Posted by Richard Ziade on August 18, 2005, 05:43PMWell, now we don’t have to worry about finding some fun weekend reading. A draft of the RSS 3 specification (the “Lite” version) was posted today. John Avidan (the keeper of the spec) blogs about it.
As I watch the whole RSS explosion unfold, I can’t help but wonder if RSS will materialize into a more popular information payload mechanism than XML. It’s simple, and more importantly, it’s definition is far more narrow than XML.
We all know XML can do a lot of different things – transform information, represent remote procedure calls, etc. – but over time, RSS is going to become far more than just a way to get news feeds.
Take a look at how Yahoo decided to handle their REST-based maps API. It’s based on extension of RSS called GeoRSS. So how does it work? You simply pass in an RSS 2.0 file enriched with some geographical information (zip codes, latitude and longitude, etc.) and Yahoo hands back a nicely plotted map.
So why did Yahoo use RSS here? Well, I’m sure the team at Yahoo want people to understand and adopt their services as quickly as possible. What better way to do that than to leverage a popular and widely-understood standard. The alternative would have been to create their own home-grown XML format. This would leave developers with the unenviable task of wading through documentation, studying schemas, etc.
Of course, RSS isn’t for everything. Some payloads are simply too complex for it. Nevertheless, it’s becoming clear that one of the strengths of XML, it’s incredible versatility, is also one of its drawbacks. RSS isn’t as versatile but because it is narrowly defined, the learning curve is far less steep.
You can find a whole slew of creative uses of RSS (via extensions) at the RSS Extensions Wiki.
Looking for free stock photos, vector art, fonts and other design resources? Blue Vertigo is an incredibly comprehensive listing. Use the horizontal scroll bar to see everything.
It’s free and it’s tiny. Notepad2 is a full-featured replacement for Windows’ Notepad.
It’s really exciting to watch some of the trends that are materializing on the Web. Sites like del.icio.us and Flickr are popularizing tagging and collaborative categorization (also known as folksonomies). RSS is starting to really take hold as well. It’s popularity continues to grow and is now attracting venture money to help bring it to businesses and to the masses.
With all that said, I think these technologies, while compelling, have a ways to go before they graduate to the levels of email and chatting. For these trends to break out of the domain of the technically curious and savvy and into the rest of the world, the experiences around these technologies need to feel right and natural.
I was chatting with a friend yesterday. He was telling me about his dad jumping onto Gmail, Google’s popular email service. From the looks of things, his dad is your typical computer user in his 50’s or 60’s. He was explaining how he took the time to label all his messages under categories that made sense to him. Once he was done, was dumbfounded to find out that all his messages were still in his Inbox. “If I did all this work to move them, why are they still there? And now why are they in two places?”
I think there’s a critical lesson to be learned here. One of the ways interaction designers are able to introduce complex or abstract concepts to less technically savvy users is through the use of metaphors. Metaphors allow designers to leverage an assumed prerequisite understanding of how things in the real world work: Folders. Trash cans. Envelopes Pieces of paper.
Today, we go to great lengths to lean on what people already understand about the real world. We all know full well that email systems don’t actually have inboxes and outboxes. Yet we introducing them to users by correlating them with their real world siblings. The result is less “figuring out” on the user’s part. You move a document from Folder A to Folder B. Simple enough.
The challenge for interaction designers is to think creatively about (a) what can we leverage from the real world that will make these new technologies easier to digest and understand and (b) how to apply these metaphors effectively.
RSS is an amazing new technology that most people simply don’t bother with. The RSS experience today is so badly disjointed and confusing that it’s nowhere near capable of breaching the “AOL” type of experience that so many are accustomed to. Orange icons that lead to gibberish in your browser; confusion over what we should call RSS; the requirement to go download a client before you can even leverage it. This is all assuming that people want to even embark on this joy ride.
One of the biggest challenges for RSS is even explaining what it is. Look at the BBC’s attempt at explaining RSS. Bless their hearts, they’re really going the extra mile here. Now put yourself into the curious, yet ignorant user’s head. You figure “Ok, let me see what this is about…” You end up on an essay about the virtues and inner-workings of RSS. The most likely outcome: you’ll do a quick scan and move on without reading.
What needs to happen here is, rather than sitting the user down and educating them (i.e. asking the user to come to the technology), we must think creatively about how we can cheat the user into adopting it. How can we camouflage a powerful technology like RSS such that users will correlate to some other understanding and just say “Oh, cool. That makes sense. I’ll try it out.”
The same goes for tagging. Folders are an incredibly powerful, effective metaphor of a very basic real world concept: things can contain other things. Tagging, which is no doubt powerful and has advantages over folders, is quite a bit different. To understand tagging, we have to effectively “unlearn” the well-engrained metaphor of “folders.” My friend’s dad, in his own head, perceived the actual moving of physical papers (emails) to physical folders (the labels). The fact that they remained in his Inbox confounded him.
It’s interesting to hear all the debate going on in reaction to Microsoft calling RSS feeds “Web Feeds” in their upcoming Internet Explorer 7. Dave Winer (the creator of RSS) railed into them pretty hard about it. Microsoft responded to his criticisms and defended their decision to name RSS feeds “Web Feeds.” The debate was over what would confuse users. RSS. XML. Feeds. Web Feeds. I’ve got news for everyone, we’ve got much bigger fish to fry than what we name this stuff.
The real challenge for RSS and other up and coming technologies is how to best package it such that it doesn’t feel like a new technology at all. Instead, it should feel and work like something familiar. The more familiar it feels, the less cognitive friction the user is exposed to. Metaphors are an essential weapon in creating that familiarity.
Yahoo! Local has a host of new features. Yahoo!’s Search Blog has all the details.
Posted by Richard Ziade on August 16, 2005, 08:28PMNice sandbox of some unique tricks in CSS: CSS Play
Flashearth is an impressive example of tapping into Google or MSN Virtual Earth Data through a Flash interface. With its 99% penetration, you’ve gotta wonder why the big players don’t consider Flash to deliver these rich applications.
Content With Style (an excellent resource for CSS, Javascript, PHP, etc.) published an article on reconciling the Back button and enabling bookmarking for AJAX applications. Not for the faint of heart (a lot of Javascript in there) but really well put together.
Posted by Richard Ziade on August 15, 2005, 08:48PMAs far as I’m concerned, Yahoo! is schooling everyone else on where you can take RSS. They’ve added a media module to their RSS news feeds that enriches their entries with photos and descriptions. Very nice.
Abstract Fonts: 10,000 free fonts for download.
Posted by Richard Ziade on August 14, 2005, 10:03AMAn excellent gallery of quality CSS sites.
Posted by Richard Ziade on August 13, 2005, 06:50PMNice listing of monospaced fonts for coding.
Posted by Richard Ziade on August 12, 2005, 05:47PMCheck out the nifty little Brilliant Button Maker. It creates those adorable little rectangular buttons we see on all the anal web standards blogs (and elsewhere of course).
Mad props (yes, I said “mad props”) to the kids at Airtight Interactive for their great little Flickr tag browser. It feels like paper. Nicely done.
Color in Motion is a neat little Flash movie that colorfully illustrates what different colors symbolize.
Posted by Richard Ziade on August 11, 2005, 05:01PMConsider this pitch for a new book:
The latest Tom Clancy novel, The Teeth of the Tiger, will captivate you from page one. It utilizes an exciting and powerful new publishing technique for printing and displaying fonts that are far more readable to the human eye. Pick up a copy today!
Pretty ridiculous right? Yet, this is what we’re starting to see with software and consulting shops heralding the inclusion of AJAX as a feature of their products. AJAX, while exciting and kind of neat, is little more than a means to an end. Can it improve a user’s experience? Absolutely, but that doesn’t make it a feature. The improved user experience is the feature.
I bring this point up because I think we have to be careful about two things here:
While AJAX is the whipping boy in this post, this applies to any sort of buzzword that is flying around the Internet these days (Web 2.0 anyone?). If anything, the last thing user’s need is another cornball acronym to get in their way.
Posted by Richard Ziade on August 10, 2005, 05:57PMI have to be blunt, I really hated MSN Spaces when it came out. It just all seemed a bit too…err…packaged and glossy. With Movable Type, Wordpress and their ilk, an attractive, almost minimalistic sensibility influenced blog design. Then MSN Spaces came along and it looked like some weird leftover from the dot.com era (think Geocities and Homestead).
But I digress. This ain’t about how much MSN Spaces looks like Times Square. It’s about a slew of new features that cater to the advanced users (like yourself). They’re called PowerToys (which means “features” to you and me) and you can learn about them in this Infoworld article, or by visiting Mike Torres’ Spaces blog.
Posted by Richard Ziade on August 9, 2005, 11:24AMDave Winer, the grandpappy of RSS, lays the smackdown on big companies like Microsoft and Google for fudging around with feed syndication for no good reason.
I tend to agree. ATOM is looking more and more like little more than a distraction, yet Google just won’t let the little bastard go.
I’ve mentioned in the past that Google was going to step into it’s own poop with their “Do No Evil” nonsense. Well, one way to help things along is to ban a well-recognized publication from talking to you for a year.
Google has decided to stop talking to CNet after a News.com story highlighted how easy it is to dig up personal information on someone through Google. To illustrate, they Googled Eric Schmidt, their CEO.
In response, Google has decided that CNet will not be spoken to for one year. Lovely.
Of course, this story has seeped out of the blogosphere and into the mainstream press, which generally speaking, loathes this sort of arbitrary boycotting. The New York Times as well as the major news wires have picked it up.
Now, the metaphysical question we’re left with is: Did Google do something evil? Who are we to draw that sort of conclusion? It seems like a bit of an over-reaction; bordering on almost childish behavior. Does it merit all this press and attention? Probably not. Which I think leads us to the real problem for Google: it ain’t about what you did, it’s about perception. Their cheery, almost candy-like image is going to actually work against them when issues like this arise.
Hey, we didn’t raise the (perceived) bar. They did.
In other news, Howard Stern(?) has filed a class action suit against Google for allegedly fudging around with AdWords fees. Read all about it.
It’s about damn time. Google News is now finally available in RSS.
They’ve made both their top categories and news results based on searches available in feeds. Feeds come in both RSS 2.0 and Atom flavors.
Posted by Richard Ziade on August 8, 2005, 10:00PMFast Company’s blog, FC Now, recently posted an entry that makes a good point about RSS: for most users, it’s an awful experience that is often explained with a bunch of techie terms nobody’s ever heard of (or cares to learn).
I don’t think there’s any single problem, but actually a collection of issues that are going to continue to prohibit RSS from reaching mass-consumption status. I’ll be posting lengthier posts (articles?) on these various issues over the next week or so.
Macromedia’s Sim Simeonov talks about programming models in the context of RIA’s and composite applications.
Macromedia is starting off the week with a flurry of press releases heralding the arrival of their flagship development suite Studio 8.
You can find learn about the whole package (which includes new versions of Flash Professional, Dreamweaver and Fireworks) by visiting their site.
Posted by Richard Ziade on August 7, 2005, 11:08AMWired has a pretty good summary of the Ajax trend and where things can possibly go.
My .02 cents: Ajax is great from a user experience perspective, but let’s keep in mind that it’s still all happening inside the browser’s walls. The next leap is to start to tie more discrete services to interfaces that are not a part of a web page, but stand on their own. Ultimately, the browser needs to melt away and these richer experiences should land on the platform - whether it be a mobile phone, PDA or desktop.
Slashdot referenced the article, which of course spawned 50,000 comments.
Posted by Richard Ziade on August 4, 2005, 11:06AMCameron Moll’s Authentic Boredom has just kicked off a four-part series on mobile web design.
Posted by Richard Ziade on August 2, 2005, 07:38PMIf you’re reading this post on an index page, you’ll notice some posts with question marks for titles. This, my dear friends, is Movable Type’s Berkeley DB crapping all over itself. The database is corrupt but surviving (for now). I’ve rebuilt this thing a bunch of times because of this exact problem and I just don’t feel like rebuilding it again, right now at least.
So, if you see “?” at the top of post, please move on, nothing to see there.
The RSS Team at Microsoft provides a glimpse into the RSS features in IE7. In a nutshell (so far at least) it’s autodiscovery (a feature that Firefox currently has) and a more readable view of a web feed (vs. the ugly XML displayed today) with some controls.
What’s interesting is that Microsoft is calling the feeds “web feeds.” I’ve always hated the name RSS but you have to wonder if this is too little too late and that it will only result in confusion for novice users.
Yahoo! just announced that they’ve made available their Shopping service via REST API. Very simple (from what I’ve seen so far). Neat-o stuff.
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Yahoo! just announced that they’ve made available their Shopping service via REST API. Very simple (from what I’ve seen so far). Neat-o stuff.
allow_pFlickr just announced some really interesting new features that gleans photos for what they call “interestingness.” In short, it essentially studies newly uploaded photos and determines which ones are somewhat…interesting.
Of course, the big question is: how can software determine what is “interesting”? We can of course ask people what is interesting with features like voting and the like, but that’s disruptive. What the boys and girls at Flickr have done is effectively watch how people use their services, and thoughtfully determine what is interesting based on the actions and behaviors of their users.
A while back, I posted an entry entitled Stealing Metadata. The idea behind that article is that, while tagging and the like are great for gathering metadata, from the perspective of a user’s experience, it is disruptive. What we can do, alternatively, is carefully watch what users do, crunch that information and draw some educated conclusions. Their actions and decisions often provide insight into their motivations. Flickr seems to have done exactly that.
As an experience designer, I think this is the far superior approach to gathering important metadata. Rather than asking users to stop, “check in” with some information, and then continue, the flow of their experience is not disrupted.
On the flip side, this presents new and interesting challenges to the world of data warehousing and usage monitoring. To attain this kind of information, systems will need to do more than just log information. I think the technical capabilities are clearly there. The task at hand is on the design side: what are we interested in? what actions hint towards a certain conclusion? how much weight do we give certain actions? This is a higher level of sophistication than the typical logging capabilities that we’re accustomed to today.
In the end, the payoff is huge. To the casual user, Flickr and other services that provide this kind of information take on an illusion of intelligence and awareness that is truly captivating. Come to think of it, most great technologies are shaped this way: a simple, intuitive solution that hides away the complex work behind it. “Show me some interesting photos.” Perfectly simple.
Posted by Richard Ziade on August 1, 2005, 03:57PMFor all you lazy bastards out there, nice little programming cheat sheets for Javascript, MySQL, CSS, PHP, and some others.
