BASEMENT.ORG
Posted by Richard Ziade on February 28, 2006, 01:53PMGoogle CFO Speaks, Stock Slides
Google's CEO hinted at some investor conference that growth from their search business was slowing and that they'd need to find new ways to generate revenue. The stock dropped nearly 12% before rebounding a bit today.
I think there are two points worth making here. First, it's clear that there's a lot of sensitivity and concern around about how much fuel is left in the search ads business. The sky is clearly not the limit. The second point is more critical: Google has not sat around and twiddled its thumbs while search revenue came in. They've been very active (if not aggresive) at putting forth new initiatives in all sorts of areas. Some are very impressive. Some are not. But almost all of them don't bring a dime into the company.
If I owned Google stock (which I don't) I'd send an email to investor relations asking when they tie all of this stuff to an actual business plan. I've said it before, all these little efforts are amount to Google's very own bubble. The more relevant question I'd have in response to the CFO's comments is: what about the 30 or so initiatives you've put forth so far?
Thinking = Good. Overthinking = Bad.
There's been some sporadic press of late about how the U.S. Snowboarding Team listened to their iPod's while competing at this year's Winter Olympics. One of hte athletes summed it up best: "You're not over-thinking, and that's the best way to perform the harder tricks and maneuvers."
Ever watch one of those surgery documentaries? Notice how the surgeon is casually rambling on while he's toying around with someone's heart? How can they be so casual? Shouldn't he be...concentrating?
There are some widely accepted theories within the realm of cognitive psychology that say "no, he in fact shouldn't be." Once we learn stuff and become "experts" we store that knowledge away in long-term memory. Unlike our immediate consciousness, which finds us fumbling around and "thinking too much," long-term memory is highly efficient. Our actions flow out of that knowledge in an almost rhythmic pace, unencumbered by the unnecessary ramblings of our immediate awareness.
As designers, it's worthwhile to think about how we can present information and controls that quickly stick to long-term memory. The more "work" someone has to do to learn something, the longer they're going to fester in the noisy world of short-term thinking. There are a lot of variables at play. The intelligence of the user. The pre-requisite "expertise" a user possesses. But the one thing we can control is the interface itself, and it's our job to do what we can to reduce cognitive load.
So don't blame those hotshot snowboarders. They're just trying to bypass the clutter and tap into a rhythmic flow. They're trying to think less. Any time a design can do that, it's a home run.
[A nice summary article on cognitive load theory is available here.]
FeedBlendr
FeedBlendr allows you to enter the URLs to any RDF, RSS or Atom (XML) feeds you'd like and blend them into a single feed. We won't hold the missing "e" against them. (Thanks for nothing Flickr).
Posted by Richard Ziade on February 27, 2006, 05:02PMLook Up Movie Showtimes Quick With MSN
Pretty cool. Type in the name of a movie or a theater and it gives the movies playing and showtimes. MSN Search WebLog has the details. Groovy.
Appraising Web 2.0
Russell Beatie has an excellent post today about how very little of the Web 2.0 hype actually deals with creating a real, viable business around the offerings people are putting out. I've mentioned this a couple of times in the past. I just don't see the dots connecting between some of the tools coming out and making money. Sure, you may get acquired, but that's not a business plan.
What's worse, I think a certain amount of Hubris has taken hold in the space - similar to the boom in the 90's. Applications are launching with very little explanation. Just dramatic tag lines and the often predictable, over-simplified cartoon-ish Web 2.0 aesthetic. Very often, I don't even know what I'm applying for. I happen to follow the industry, but most users would simply turn and walk away. You can't break barriers and establish value by being this presumptuous. If it's not clear within three minutes why my life is going to be better because of a product, it's going to have a hard time.
But let's go with the benefit of the doubt here and assume the pitch is good and the story is solid. Let's assume adoption is rampant. You're still not out of the woods. What you really need to see is strong adoption numbers against some sort of payment structure. Rapid adoption of free products is half the story. Shut'em off and ask for $10/mo. $5/mo. $3/mo. Let's see what happens then.
Another point worth mentioning is that this is not a purely "small company" trend. Google has set the tone by unloading a litany of services for free. They can afford to do it today because ads along search results provide the money. The smaller players out there don't have that machine behind them. Yet there's still an "if Google can do it" mindset that is pervasive and I don't think it's healthy.
Amidst all the doom and gloom, I think there are real opportunities out there. Much of the philosophy and innovation that is coming out of Web 2.0 hasn't even reached businesses and solving real enterprise problems. People just need to bring these great ideas across the bridge. The world doesn't need any more tagging software or mapping software. Hell, none of the ones out today charge a dime anyway. Instead, we need to raise the bar and challenge ourselves to find real opportunities and create value - value that people will pay for.
Posted by Richard Ziade on February 24, 2006, 03:18PMMalcolm Gladwell Is Blogging.
EgoSurf
There's no doub that the popularity of blogging is fueled by the author's ego. We say what we say to attain validation from others. We are social animals after all. Every blog entry is a little broadcast and we crave the need to find out how our words landed. Who's reading? Are they talking about it? And so on. Tools like Mint, MeasureMap and Feedburner help quench our need to know how broadly and to what extent our voice is being heard.
EgoSurf sidesteps all the statistics and metrics and just scored your ego outright. It wades through search results from the popular search engines and follows links to determine an ego score of sorts. An digital pat on the back. Nice.
Who needs site statistics and referrer logs?
Posted by Richard Ziade on February 23, 2006, 03:56PMSlick Online Form Builder : Wufoo
No, not waffles. Wufoo lets you build on line forms. A very slick interface that nicely marries Flash and DHTML.
Google Page Creator
Google has unleashed their latest offerng: Google Page Creator. It's a WYSIWYG-style page editor (anyone remember Homestead?) that lets you create your own pages (a bunch of pre-canned styles are available) and host them on Google's web site (up to 100MB).
Will something like this take off? Google has a few things going for it. It looks relatively easy. It's a Google-branded product. There's obviously not a lot new here. Geocities and AOL home pages of years ago told the world that, well, most people don't know a lick about design. All in all, it's pretty Web 1.0. With blogs you had the immediacy of simple publishing. With social apps like Myspace, you have the tools to connect with others and such. Google Page Creator may be the foundation for all sorts of neat features. Maybe we'll be able to host our own music or movies (not someone else's of course)? Searchenginewatch points out that stuff like this can often get hijacked by the porn industry (Google Base is flooded with adult material). We'll have to see how well the masses behave on this one.
Another angle is the resulting markup that's created. Drew McLellan sums it up: "Signup was painless, editing was painless, publishing was painless. The resultant markup? Painful."
Posted by Richard Ziade on February 22, 2006, 05:13PMRSS Everywhere
Anyone that follows this blog knows that RSS isn’t all about headlines and blogs. In a couple of posts (Taking RSS Beyond Headlines Part 1 and Part 2), I outlined all sorts of cool things you can do with RSS.It’s a deceptively powerful technology. One of the great things about RSS is that the information comes to us (sort of). We have to do less work to find out if our favorite information sources have something new to offer.
In this article, I will outline the various ways we can be tapped on the shoulder when something new comes in via RSS.
- PDA’s. A natural use of RSS is to sync up your sources and go. PDA’s are a great way to catch up on your feeds. Here are some RSS feed readers for PDA’s:
- Windows PocketPC. There are a host of applications for reading RSS on Pocket PC’s:
- Sunrise XP. My person favorite for reading RSS is an application called Sunrise XP. It’s far less user friendly than others but very powerful. It’s a Windows desktop application that syncs with Plucker-compatible readers for both Pocket PC and Palm OS. It’s main selling point: it not only grabs feeds but the links on the web as well and saves them offline. That’s great for reading feeds and articles when not connected to the Internet (which is often).
- Mobile Phones. For phones and messaging devices with some horsepower, there are a few ways to go:
- Blackberry. Just in case you’re not staring into your Blackberry enough these days, there’s FreeNews for Blackberries and Nokia phones. Or maybe you can convince your IT guy to push specific feeds to your device.
- Palm Treo. QuickNews is a feed reader specifically designed for Treos.
- Strip Down Code For Mobile Reading. Phonifier strips out unnecessary markup for portable device reading. Skweezer is a similar service.
- J2ME Devices. For the lucky few with J2ME devices, the fine folks at FeedBurner have a Mobile Feed Reader for you.
- Sony Playstation Portable. The PSP, as of firmware 2.6, supports RSS feed reading. Engadget has a more homegrown tutorial for getting feeds on your device.
- Email. Getting feeds via email sort of defeats the whole purpose of RSS, but to each his own. RSSFWD will send feeds to your Inbox (because, you know, there isn’t enough clutter there already).
- SMS. You can pretend you’ve got a lot of friends by wiring RSS feeds to your mobile phone. Get SMS alerts all day long with FeedBeep. NextBlast provides a similar service. It looks like both charge money.
- Instant Messaging. Both MSN & Yahoo offer alerts services that allow you to receive feed alerts via both SMS and through their instant messaging programs.
- Apple iPod. Look like a hipster while staying informed. Engadget comes through again with an RSS to iPod tutorial.
- PDF. If you’re all about touching and feeling your information on paper, RSS2PDF will take care of converting any feed to an Adobe PDF download.
- Wristwatch(?). Yes. If you’re really looking to impress the ladies. There are accessories out there that will allow you to read RSS on your wrist. Very sexy.
There are two other services that should be distinguished as above and beyond the usual out there. One is Bloglines’ Moblie. It’s a dead simple version of the popular web-based feed reader. It lays out very nicely on a wide range of devices. Simple = nice.
Another service already mentioned but worth mentioning again is Yahoo Alerts. This service allows you to tie together any feed with an instant message, email or SMS – effectively rendering a good number of the services already mentioned obsolete. It’s nice interface also puts it ahead of MSN in my opinion.
So there you have it folks. now get out there and start tracking those feeds everywhere.
Technorati Favorites
There's some buzz today around the debut of Technorati Favorites. In short, you can track your favorite bloggers on one page (up to 50). You can also share your favorites page with others. It even allows OPML import.
Which of course leads me to ask the question: is this a feed reader? Well, it's a way to track my favorite blogs (or any feeds I guess) in one place. My subscribed feeds are essentially my "favorites." So yeh, it sort of is a feed reader. The sharing aspect is a nice twist.
On a related note, credit should go to the Technorati team for turning things around. I remember not too long ago, people were railing into them pretty harshly for various reasons. It looks like they've overcome their issues. I visit it pretty regularly.
Posted by Richard Ziade on February 21, 2006, 05:00PMWeb-Based Spreadsheet : iRows
Web-Based Spreadsheet : iRows.
Interaction Design Conventions As Band-Aids
Digital Web magazine has a new article up on the Usability of Rich Internet Applications. It's a good article that brings up some salient points. Section 3 of the article touches on a subject that always left me a bit curious. Designers of AJAX applications have spoken at great length about clearly showing users that something's changed on the page. You'll often see this in the often-used yellow fade convention. The idea behind it is this: something's happened and we need to give a user a better indication that something's happened; that their action actually had consequences - significant consequences. Typically, it's denoting a write-back (or "saving") to the server. Luke Wroblewski eloquently stated the technique as "communicating change."
Stepping back, I can't help but feel that the last ten or so years of web application building established such a low expectation of interactivity that we need to re-teach users that "hey, this is actually doing more stuff than your typical web app." I'm guessing that, over time, as AJAX and Flash apps become more mainstream, such conventions will no longer be very distinguishing. It will simply become accepted that applications work this way. When they don't, we'll think they're broken.
Until then, what I think we have to be careful with is establishing conventions like yellow fade not because they are justified on their own merits but because they are needed to help overcome a previous shortcoming in technology (in this case, the static, page-based nature of web applications of old). The Netvibes web portal is a highly-interactive AJAX-driven app that has very little yellow fade and frankly, I don't think it needs it. The novelty of saving asynchronously to a web server is wearing off. Move on.
More broadly, I think it's important to move on because I think giving the existing boundaries and limitations too much credence can stifle more creative, innovative thinking.
There Goes Breakfast
Cheat Sheets Everywhere
A couple of really useful cheat sheets for Actionscript and the Javascript Prototype framework.
Posted by Richard Ziade on February 20, 2006, 02:34PMRSS + P2P = FeedTree
FeedTree mixes in some peer-to-peer lovin' to accelerate (and alleiviate) the task of feed syncing and feed entry retrieval. I haven't played with it yet but it looks promising. It works with your existing feed reader software. Slashdot already has a discussion on it.
Jotform : Simple Web Form Builder
Jotform is a neat little form builder with drag & drop support. Nice.
Posted by Richard Ziade on February 18, 2006, 04:58PMTimes Online : Are You Experienced?
Times Online : Are You Experienced?
Posted by Richard Ziade on February 17, 2006, 09:36AMTrack Local Events with Eventful
I'm sorry this one didn't get into the RSS uses list from a couple of days ago because this is damn cool.
Eventful allows you to track events like concerts, shows and gatherings in a particular area for a particular period of time and subscribe to it. For example, here's a listing (and corresponding RSS feed) of music events in New York City for the upcoming week. Very, very cool. I'm not sure where there event data comes from, but it found some obscure events in New York City. I'm a fan of Pollstar and always wished I could track my favorite artists via RSS but they don't make such a service available (wake up Pollstar). This is the next best thing.
Taking it a step further, Podhop wires together Eventful events with MP3 podcasts of artists. So you can listen to artists that are coming to your town before they get there. They also provide RSS feeds.
Scriptio : A Javascript-based Presentation Framework
"Scriptio is an open source framework for presenting animations and educational content in a rich online experience." The framework is written in Javascript/AJAX.
Posted by Richard Ziade on February 16, 2006, 09:14AMFeedDemon 2.0 Beta 2 Released
I know I bitch a lot about the deficiencies of feed readers these days, but FeedDemon is still the best one out there in my opinion. Nick Bradbury just released FeedDemon 2.0 Beta 2.
25 Free Grunge Fonts
Tasty. 25 Free Grunge Fonts.
Carbonmade
Create your own design portfolio online with Carbonmade.
Posted by Richard Ziade on February 15, 2006, 03:36PMZenGarage
"ZenGarage is a showcase tool that may help you to develop and present different visual styles for a single set of templates. All by the power of CSS."
Taking RSS Beyond Headlines : Part Two
The first article on Taking RSS Beyond Headlines was very popular (mainly due to it's proliferation on Digg and the resulting "Digg Effect.") It's great to see this kind of interest and curiosity around RSS. Of course, latching a "Part One" on the end of the last article put an enormous amount of pressure to take a stab at a "Part Two."
And so, without further delay, let's take RSS beyond headlines, again...
- Track Job Openings. You can easily keep tabs on openings for particular positions in particular locales with Indeed's simple job searching site. Or try Hotjob's feeds through their service (any search can be delivered as a feed).
- Log Referring Links To Your Site. Here's a cool one for blogs. Track who's visiting your site via Referrer Madness. Simply drop one line of code in your pages and track the link provided. No account required.
- Be A Knowledgable Citizen. Stay on top of important government news and information with FirstGov's RSS feeds.
- Recipe Syndication! Track 4 and 5 star recipes or subscribe to the recipes of your favorite chef's with Big Oven's RSS feeds.
- Get Your City's Latest Traffic. Traffic.com delivers RSS feeds of traffic information for most major U.S. cities.
- Track Movie Openings & Reviews. Find out about theatrical and DVD releases as they happen (as well as reviews and upcoming releases) with Movies.com's feed list.
- Keep Tabs On Medical Information. Hubmed.org delivers Pubmed (a service of the National Library of Medicine) search results in RSS.
- Stay On Top Of Virus & Security Threats. Sophos (feeds), Trend Micro (feeds) and Viruslist.com (feeds) all provide feeds to stay on top of viruses and other security threats.
- Download TV Shows. This is a bit more involved than just subscribing. RSS & Bittorrent make a nice match. Here's a quick tutorial on how to subscribe to your favorite TV shows.
- Bring Humor Into Your Life. Yes, RSS can deliver joy (maybe) into your life with a joke a day. Joke feeds are provided by Yahooligans and Comedy Central.
- Pull In Those Video Snippets. Our ever-shortening attention spans are loving those 1-2 minute video clips flying around. Youtube provides RSS feeds of all their major categories. del.icio.us also has a popular videos feed.
- Sticky Notes + RSS. Webnote (warning: the yellow on this site is downright painful) allows you to keep notes and subscribe to a feed that delivers them.
- Track Ebay. For person that just can't stop buying porcelain puppies, you can track ebay auctions via RSSAuctions.com and feedback.net.
Credit goes to some of the commenters on the last article for a few of the tips here. In all of this insanity, let's not forget that we can still use RSS to track newspapers, magazines and blogs (heh). In a future post, I'd like to list out possible uses of RSS that I'd like to use but don't exist yet (or at least that I don't know about). Hopefully, the creative use of RSS will continue to grow. I think these last two articles are just the tip of the iceberg. Until then, happy feedreading.
Posted by Richard Ziade on February 14, 2006, 09:05PMMeasure Map Acquired By Google
Adaptive Path's Measure Map has been acquired by Google. Congrats to Adaptive Path and the Measure Map team. Basement.org has been beta testing Measure Map for a couple of months now and I enjoy using it. It feeds the blog writer's ego. Why do we blog after all? To be heard and validated. It's also good to see a company like Adaptive Path - which stands for the virtues of good interaction design - get this sort of validation.
As a side note, I wonder if Google, and Yahoo for that matter, are going to be more aggresive with acquisitions since their stock value has been on the skids of late.
Yahoo! Spreads The UI Lovin'
Yahoo!, in its unending desire to "shake things up a bit," has released their design patterns and front-end UI libraries to the masses. It's essentially a collection of interface design best practices and related front-end code that people can adopt and play with. Pretty cool.
So why would Yahoo! release these tools? The optimist in me says that Yahoo! simply wants to share and help others create better end-user experiences with their tools. My more pragmatic side thinks otherwise. Yahoo! is battling the Google juggernaut. What better way to fight the larger enemy than by handing over some of your practices to the community? Commoditize the interface. Focus on content. Arm the masses and let's see what happens.
On another note, the only thing that worries me about UI design patterns is that they can breed a lack of creativity or out-of-the-box thinking. There are 10-15 common "controls" that make up just about all application user interfaces today. That's both good and bad. It's good because establishing common conventions flattens the learning curve for new products. It's bad because shrink-wrapping interface solutions can discourage innovative thinking and problem-solving.
That's enough from Cynical Rich. Kudos to Yahoo! for forwarding a philosophy and handing over some of their best assets without fear. Implicit in their openness regarding things like API's, RSS and now user interfaces is the belief that they will continue to innovate. Good stuff.
Posted by Richard Ziade on February 13, 2006, 08:57AMSlideshow Meets AJAX : AJAX-S
In the spirit of Eric Meyer's S5, AJAX-S is an AJAX-powered slideshow renderer that pulls in an XML and presents it in slideshow form. A demo is available.
Posted by Richard Ziade on February 11, 2006, 01:25PMBusiness Week : A Flashy New Adobe
Business Week published an insightful article on the Adobe / Macromedia merger and the rationale behind it.
Posted by Richard Ziade on February 10, 2006, 08:45AMThe Usability Of Peace Of Mind
As an interaction designer, I get excited about the possibilties that products like Google Desktop, Yahoo Widgets, Microsoft's XAML platform and Adobe's Apollo project bring. From a purely experience design perspective, it opens up a whole new world of possibilties. More specifically, we're able to build experiences that are not relegated to a browser. It allows designers to use a finer, more powerful set of tools to carve out applications that better fit how we think and work. The notion of a URL destination to do things is challenged.
However, there turns out to be another, hidden benefit of keeping things in the browser: peace of mind. Users have come to accept that what happens inside the browser's walls is inherently different from the rest of their desktop. It's a perceived window to things - applications, information, all sorts of assets - that live elsewhere. Inversely, an association between the desktop and the data on your machine as well as the physical hardware itself, is also reinforced. What users have come to expect (and software vendors strive towards) is maintaining a buffer of protection between your world and the rest of the Internet.
Yesterday, Google released their new version of the their Google Desktop. One of their features allows users to search their data from other machines. To do this, Google stores your data (in encrypted form) on their machines for up to 30 days. I went through the installation process and Google should be given credit for amply warning users of the implications of this feature (though I'd venture to guess that most won't read the warnings anyway). Neverhteless, the response from privacy advocates and bloggers generally has not been friendly at all. The Electronic Frontier Foundation voiced their concerns loud and clear.
I think there's a lesson learned here. If the user has a clear idea of what is going out and coming in, then I think users will be more comfortable. I store my to-do lists elsewhere on Netvibes (a web-based personal portal). I'm fully aware that they are housing that data. In Google Desktop's side bar, there's a to-do list as well. I have no idea where that data is getting stored. And yes, it matters to me.
The challenge here is communication and being as transparent as possible about which pieces are going elsewhere and which aren't. Icons. Colors. Something. Tell me when my data is going to your servers when it happens. Tell me when I'm pulling my data from your servers. Ask me before I put data on your servers for the first time. All of these things are unnecessary in a browser because it's already understood that you are on someone else's property. With a desktop, it's far less clear, and in many cases, confusing.
Along with nice design and good usability, peace of mind no doubt factors into a user's experience with a product. I don't think software providers can deliver peace of mind in a disclaimer during installation. As the Internet becomes more pervasive on the desktop, it's going to require more than that.
Posted by Richard Ziade on February 9, 2006, 10:43AMNew Google Desktop Debuts Thursday
Associated Press is reporting that Google has debuted a new version of Google Desktop that features a new search capability that allows users to remotely search the contents of computers that they allow Google to index. The Google Desktop blog also has details.
The only catch is that Google is going to hold onto that data - your documents, files, and such - for 30 days. This is no doubt useful and no doubt requires you to relinquish some of your privacy. Google's making all sorts of assurances (purging after 30 days, stored in encrypted form, etc.) and are actually pretty forward about the convenience-privacy exchange. It'll be interesting to see how successful this is. Most casual computer users fly right past the end-user agreement step and just go.
Then there's this twist:
Besides empowering computer-to-computer searches, the improved software allows users to set up an array of mini-applications, sometimes called "widgets," to monitor topical information such as weather, stock quotes or news stories.
A la Yahoo! Widgets, except you can share these guys with other people. That could potentially be very cool. The Internet is changing. The browser can't contain things anymore and content is leaking everywhere. It's all one big mish mosh. Our data is over there. Their content is over here. The end-user experience possibilities are very exciting but this new breach is going to test and re-test privacy issues.
The Shelf Life Of Web 2.0
I’m not going to lie. I genuinely enjoy playing with many of the Web 2.0 efforts that spring up (and they spring up just about every day these days). I think there’s a great vibe out there where good clean design is blended with some great (sometimes heroic) web application building. I’m a big fan of RSS, the elegant use of technologies like AJAX & Flash, and I think there’s a lot of potential in the whole “social” angle of software (e.g. Digg & del.icio.us).
But how much of the stuff I try do I keep using? And by “using,” I don’t mean for the purposes of trying out or checking out how someone else approached a thorny interaction design issue. I mean using as an actual tool in my everyday life.
I thought further about this after playing with 30boxes. It’s a new calendaring tool and I’ll readily admit: it’s about as good an execution of the Web 2.0 philosophy as I’ve seen. Good, judicious use of Ajax. Low barrier to entry and use. Elegant design. And so on.
It turns out I’ll probably never use it again. Ever. Of course, I may be the exception. I sincerely doubt it though. I can go into why I don’t need this tool in my life, but that’s not really the point of this post. Here’s the gist of it:
This chart lays out the web 2.0 applications that survive and actually end up a part of my regular usage. I’ve probably tried more than 70 but I think the chart gets the point across. In the end, I’ve got a portal (Netvibes), centralized bookmarking (del.icio.us), and a few other sites I just enjoy visiting frequently (e.g. Digg).
As technologists and people inside this world, we can lose sight of what really makes a difference such that people will shift their lives and habits to work with something. We can easily get caught up in how cool something is and lose sight of what we’re all really going after: something attaches itself to people’s lives. Has an application like del.icio.us, an unequivocal Web 2.0 success story, really “broken out?” I’d argue that, beyond our own world, it really hasn’t. Some of the barriers are conceptual. I often find myself scratching my head as I click around a new offering (this happened with Newsvine), trying to look past the cool factor and attempting to digest why I should personally invest in it.
I’m curious to see if others have had a similar experience. Are people out there using Rollyo and Squidoo on a regular basis? Or more generally, how does your chart look?
IE Developer Toolbar Beta 2
IE Blog reports that the IE Developer Toolbar goes to Beta 2.
Yahoo! My Web 2.0 Updated
Yahoo!’s My Web 2.0 get’s an update. The Yahoo! Search Blog has the details.
Posted by Richard Ziade on February 8, 2006, 08:59AMGoogle's $1B Gamble
Internet Outsider (Henry Blodget) cites a WSJ article that reports that Google is willing to pay Dell up to $1 billion over three years to preinstall Google software (probably the Google Pack) on Dell boxes. For me, this highlights a serious challenge for Google’s growth plans: the cost for a user’s desktop is exponentially higher than a users eyes on a web page.
Google should be given credit for handily winning brand loyalty inside the browser. But let’s not forget the level of commitment required to install software - and use software – on a desktop versus typing a URL in and searching. For a major chunk of computer users, mainly ones that aren’t reading blogs like this, they use whatever Dell throws on those boxes before they ship them out. Google badly wants in on that usage. So badly, that they’re willing to pay a lot of money for it. I couldn’t guess at the cost/benefit of paying that much money to preinstall software.
But let’s assume that it’s a good move for a second. New Dell customers happily use the various Google Pack software products. Now what? Will they be hit up for a “Sign Up Now” after six months the same way McAfee & Symantec do it today on Dell installations? Will they start to sprinkle the desktop and the chat client and other installations with ads? How does Google recoup on such an investment?
People talk a lot about how it’s materializing into a Microsoft-Google battle. It still costs $100+ to purchase Windows XP Pro on a Dell desktop. You pre-pay for a Microsoft OS. They make their money before the hardware gets to your door. Google is being forced to attack from a completely different angle: paying off a hardware vendor to install software that users pay nothing for. It’s a frightening gamble. $1 billion in. What’s supposed to come out?
Posted by Richard Ziade on February 7, 2006, 09:25AMbgMaker : Nice Background Tile Maker
bgMaker is a nice, interactive tool to create your own tiled backgrounds for your web pages (a typically annoying task). Very nice implementation.
Opera 9 Preview Released
Opera joins the browser party with a preview of their own browser's next release : Opera 9. It features widgets, Bittorrent integration and more. Opera Labs a good summary.
Posted by Richard Ziade on February 6, 2006, 05:01PMThe Naming Of Web 2.0 Initiatives Must Stop
This is an actual quote from Techcrunch:
Like Megite, Newroo is ultimately addressing the same market as Memeorandum. However, they have a number of squidoo-like features (this is meant as a compliment) to allow anyone to create their own topic-based version of the main service.
Somewhere along the way, it somehow became standard practice to name your products so they sound like an 8-year old's toys. I think it's now reached the threshold of ridiculous - and headed straight towards the next threshold: pretentious and annoying.
Applications sound like fluffy toys (Meebo, Zoozio & Loomba); gastro-intestinal medications (Fluxiom, Librivox, Zimbra); or just sites that refuse to end with the letters "er" (flickr, gTalkr and Wrickr).
The whole thing is a weird bastard descendent of the dot-com era and it's starting to freak me out. All of these names were obviously fathered by Google. There's no doubt that the GOOG has set the tone: convey a cute and fun image and everything else is going to be A-OK. The primary colors and simple interfaces. It's non-threatening and fun!
People have been giving Google a lot of flak of late with their earnings results and the whole China thing. The've even called into question their "Do No Evil" mantra. For me, everything else Google has done is up for debate...except this. This is evil, ladies and gentlemen. Pure, distilled evil.
Design Inspiration : Cigarette Packs(?)
I'm always looking for sources of design inspiration. So why not weird, old, foreign cigraette packaging? Desginboom has a post up thank links to hundreds of cigarette packs.
Posted by Richard Ziade on February 5, 2006, 10:12AMJSMin : Shrink That Javascript
JSMin is a filter which removes comments and unnecessary whitespace from JavaScript files.
Posted by Richard Ziade on February 3, 2006, 08:30AMI'm Tired Of Going To A Web Page To Search
I must do between 20 and 100 searches a day. Work-related. Fun-related. Everything-related. I'm tired of going to a web page to do my searches. I'm also tired of seeing a browser spawn and take up 70% of my desktop every time I get search results. The search results are just a pit stop. I usually move on very quickly.
How quickly I move in is testament to the quality and goodness of Google's search results. It's so good it's utility. I want to use it and keep it out of my way. It's a tool, not a destination. Like notepad or a command prompt, it's always there. You can make a strong argument that search technology has gotten so good and become so pervasive that it now needs to fade into the background of how we work and just be at the ready when we need it - and not dominate our field of vision with search results.
Particle Tree : Lightbox Gone Wild
Particle Tree : Lightbox Gone Wild. Tackling modality. Nice.
Posted by Richard Ziade on February 2, 2006, 08:53AMInternet Explorer 7 Beta 2 As RSS Reader : Some Thoughts
I downloaded IE7 Beta 2 a couple of days ago and it looks to be a pretty solid release (frankly, the memory leaks in Firefox are testing my loyalty). What I'd like to focus on in this post are the RSS capabilities in IE7.
As a feed reader, IE7 is pretty bare-bones. Even though it does go a step further than Firefox in terms of RSS support, it's still falls way short of the full-featured capabilities of other RSS clients (like FeedDemon). With all that said, you cannot discount Internet Explorer as a feed reader for a few reasons:
- The feed subscription experience is badly broken today. Rather than deliver a pile of jumbled XML, IE7 provides a far friendlier representation of the feed with some explanation on what exactly to do with it. Mind you, there's still going to be confusion, but this is a huge step in the right direction. Let's face it, the bridge to RSS is the Web and the perceived leap from web pages to feeds needs to be more elegant. This is a good start.
- Under the hood, IE7 isn't just casually gathering feeds. If I'm not mistaken, it ships with Microsoft's planned, underlying feed API. This is a lower level set of feed managment services that not only IE but any feed reader can take advantage of. Of course, you can avoid them altogether (just as every feed reader does today on Windows), but this may prove to be a critical front that Microsoft is establishing.
- Which leads to my next point: synchronization of feeds - lists, read/unread states, new entries, etc. - is going to be a critical. Wherever I am, I want the "state of my feeds" to be the same. As far as I know, only Newsgator does that today (and does it pretty well). A feed API is nice, but a feed API that syncs to an external repository is much nicer. Newsgator should get the lipstick out and pretty itself up. It's a nice fit.
- The reader itself, which displays feeds in some sort of generic XSL-styled newspaper, is pretty weak. It doesn't show items read/unread. It also doesn't give a lot of flexibility in terms of layout, priority, etc. We're still stuck in the list-on-the-left, entries-on-the-right paradigm a la email clients (which in my opinion, falls sort for RSS). Let's also keep in mind that this is a beta release (whatever that means these days).
Overall, the RSS "leap" for many (and there are many that don't know of RSS) gets a lot more fluid with IE7. In my opinion, that's the biggest advancement of all. All those "XML"'s and feed icons are cryptic enough. It's good to see an approach that addresses this shortcoming.
FeedButler
A Digg-style link voting site that suggests headlines from contributing feeds. Pretty nice design too. FeedButler.
Nice List of (Mostly) Free Icon Sites
I can't kick the icon addiction. Here's a nice list of icon library links. It's in French, but still useful.
Posted by Richard Ziade on February 1, 2006, 10:15AMScalable Logos Via Flash
Really nice, simple trick. John Oxton throws down a logo via a static Flash image. If you zoom in/out (CTRL +/CTRL - in Firefox), the logo keeps it's sharpness and scales nicely.