BASEMENT.ORG
Posted by Richard Ziade on January 29, 2008, 08:50AMA Side Dish Of Google Docs : gDocsBar
gDocsBar is a handsome-looking extension for Firefox that puts Google Docs in a nice, lean interface within Firefox's sidebar. The sweet feature here: drag & drop for uploading files to Google Docs. Nice.
Posted by Richard Ziade on January 28, 2008, 09:26AMTurn Any Photo Into A 3D Model with Make3D
This is slightly insane. Make3D any photo into a 3D model. It's obviously not perfect but hey what do you expect? Still very impressive. (via Waxy).
Posted by Richard Ziade on January 23, 2008, 10:57AMKeys, Locks & Cheap-Ass USB Drives : A Path To Internet Identity Salvation?
Last week I whined on about how OpenID is a great invention that most people aren't going to get their heads around. I asserted that the big problem was that unlike inventions like email, people don't have a familiar metaphor to work against. The label of "curmudgeon" has been leveled against me in the past. So in the spirit of constructive dialogue, I'm going to humbly put forth an approach to make centralized identity a little bit easier on the Internet.
Let's See, What Do We Have In The Metaphor Box...
Looking around us, there are a few things we carry around that help us function on the actual (not virtual) world. A driver's license. Some credit cards. A bank card. A passport. Our house keys. Our car keys. All of these have a bit of our identity implicit in them. They help you get into places nobody else is supposed to get into: your house. Your bank account. Your car.
People are comfortable with walking around with something that helps them get to their stuff and stops others from getting to their stuff. The lock & key metaphor is a powerful and pervasive one.
Now If We Only Had The Internet's Version Of A Lock & Key...
What you need is a way to easily walk up to any computer and identify yourself quickly and easily. No logins. No nothing. We need a simple easy way to identify ourselves. At ATM machines we just swipe a card. When we get home we just insert a key and turn. Why not for computers and the Internet? What would it require? To start, it would require a key and lock be build into every machine. Well it turns out we do and it's called USB. Let's walk through an imaginary use case:
- Jane heads over to her friend Sally's house to hang out for awhile.
- She kindly asks Sally to user her PC to check her mail and see what's going on at Facebook.
- Jane takes out her USB key dangling off her key chain and plugs it into Sally's computer.
- Immediately, Jane is asked to put in her password just once.
- As soon as Jane puts in her password, the status bar in Internet Explorer identifies Jane as the current user.
- Everywhere Jane goes on the Internet, the various applications know its her. Even when she signs up to new destinations, her data is ready to go.
- Once Jane is done, she yanks out her USB key. As soon as she does so, she's immediately no longer logged in anywhere.
That's it. It's pretty simple...and I actually think my mom can get it. No offense to mom, but she's a great measuring stick here. USB drives are damn cheap and every desktop and laptop on earth has the "keyholes" to receive all the keys out there. No more signing onto comment threads in blogs. No more hassles with 35 accounts we have floating around. It's the promise of unified authentication packaged in a way that actually makes sense to the masses.
I'm not going to get into implementation in this post. I'm sure the technologists can get their wheels spinning pretty quickly around an approach like this. The browser (or desktop) would obviously need to be smarter (Firefox plugin?). And OpenID? This can all still happen with OpenID. In fact, that little USB drive could carry a mini OpenID server just for you...or link up to one in the cloud.
Now where the hell did I leave my keys...
Posted by Richard Ziade on January 17, 2008, 10:32AMOpenID & The Dilemma Of Great Inventions That Nobody Can Get Their Heads Around
Ever heard of OpenID? If you read this blog, you probably have. Do you think your mom or uncle Dave has ever heard of OpenID? I'd say probably not (unless either of them are active members of the OpenID foundation).
For the less enlightened, you can find a pretty good (not great) explanation here. The problem OpenID is trying to tackle is a big one: people have different representations of their identity littered all over the Internet. Amazon. Flickr. Yahoo. Ebay. Your bank. We log in and out all day long. OpenID is an attempt to create a central representation of yourself on the Internet.
It makes a lot of sense. We've got a great way to identity of web destinations through a consistent, scalable model: the URL. Why not have a single place that represents me that others can "visit" and that I can then approve. It nicely turns the tables. If you want me inside your walls, you sign up to me.
Except there's one problem. Nobody, and yes I'm intentionally excluding all the dorks that read this blog and loiter around Techmeme, knows what the hell OpenID is or, more importantly, how to make sense of it.
Yahoo announced that it's 250 million users will be able to take advantage of OpenID (more at Techcrunch). That's a big step for the OpenID initiative. Yahoo is huge. Still, I'm not sure if that really helps OpenID tackle its biggest issue.
So what is OpenID's biggest obstacle? Well, I think it's this: it lacks a conceptual model or easily-accessible metaphor that non-technical people can get their heads around. To highlight this, I'd like to compare two technologies and the lessons learned from each.
Email : It's just like regular mail, except with an "e"
Consider the vocabulary around email:
- Inbox
- Sent Items
- Forward
- Sender
- Reply
- Attach
- Signatures
Email exploded in large part because it extends the widely understood concept of regular mail. Hell, even spam makes sense. Everyone gets junk mail in their regular mailbox. When email came along, adoption took off when we were able to visually reinforce the mailing process (i.e. evolving from Compuserve to Yahoo Mail).
RSS : The weird, weird world of subscribing to orange boxes
RSS is damn cool and it's good to see the sort of strange slow-burn adoption of RSS over the past five or so years. It's a great, time-saving way to track a lot of sites that frequently update content. Great tools like Google Reader and FeedDemon have made it even easier to track tons of content very easily.
Still, if you apply the Mom Test to RSS, it fails. If you apply the Mom Test to email, it passes with flying colors - with your mom or just about anyone else. RSS lacks a real-life sibling to help people understand its purpose and value. "It's like subscribing to a magazine" doesn't really cut it. As a result, RSS enjoys modest but by no means mainstream adoption.
Technology Is Easy. People Aren't
OpenID is a brilliant stroke. It's simple and graspable - from a technical perspective - almost instantly. It's similar to RSS in that way. RSS has been embraced on the implementation side because of its dead-on simplicity (contrast that with the cluster***k that is ATOM, and the value of its simplicity is even more visible). But like RSS, OpenID badly lacks a narrative that offsets the conceptual barrier that most people will have towards it.
So while the Yahoo announcement is big on the implementation side of things, it's probably going to amount to very little in reality. AOL & Microsoft also announced OpenID support months ago and the net effect has been pretty much nothing.
So the lesson learned here? You may have pegged a real need out there. And you may have figured out how to solve it. But you've still gotta sell it to the masses. And that sell shouldn't be underestimated or treated as an afterthought. They have to hear it and it has to resonate nice and clear. Otherwise, they're just going to glean over it and move on.
Shed The Extra Weight With JSON!
At Arc90, we're all about XML. It's smart, flexible and runs circles around that two-dimensional database table nonsense. Still, XML can be a bit, how shall I say, verbose for some tasks. Enter JSON (aka Javascript Object Notation). It's got the flexibility of XML without all that bracket and CDATA nonsense.
Yes, it's a slimmer, more svelte way to carry data around. To illustrate, the photo on the left is after a steady diet of XML. After moving onto a steady JSON diet, look how much slimmer (and happier!) they've become. No, it doesn't get any dorkier than this.
While few would doubt JSON's virtues, it hasn't seen many tools come around to help spread the gospel...until now. Fellow Arc90er Chris Dary has put together JSONLint. It's a dead simple way to test out and validate your JSON strings. You can learn a bit more about JSON Lint and other fun toys for the entire family at Arc90 lab.
Enjoy! And if you've got questions, or can't contain your glowing compliments, feel free to let Chris know.
Oh...and be sure to send us your before-and-after photos!
Posted by Richard Ziade on January 10, 2008, 05:57PMA Message From The Coach's Office
Arc90's Tim Meaney put up a great blog post today directly addressed to the developers of the world on behalf of all the project leads an product managers. It's well worth reading in its entirety, but I'll include a choice quote here:
So what's all this about? What do I want from you? Mostly, I'd like a little empathy next time I ask you a question about how you're implementing something. Not only do I need to understand this stuff in order to champion it, to articulate it and to test it, I'm simply just curious about it.. Remember, it's our software you're building. Pull me into your world, talk me through your decisions, do a code walk-through with me - you'll be surprised how much I understand. I sometimes even have killer implementation ideas, as I bring a different perspective from yours.
The lack of control and insight not only can lead to anxiety and uncertainty for those outside of the development bubble. From my experience, when that bubble exists and is impermeable, the outcome is a less-than-ideal product.
There is no more powerful driver than when all the actors lock in and see one another. From developers to product managers to quality assurance, when they see into each other's world and see the same vision, you'll consistently get better product.
Posted by Richard Ziade on January 8, 2008, 11:23AMLooking Forward To The Past : The Longing For And Inevitable Return Of The Analog Experience
After World War II, the U.S. experienced a period of peace and prosperity. Well, the "peace" part is arguable. While we built our homes and highways and focused on the nuclear family, the nuclear arms race quietly chugged along all the while. As for the "prosperity" part, few would argue that they were, at least on the surface, good days for America.
We'd just beaten down the evil Axis and it was time to bring our boys home to prosperity. The G.I. Bill guaranteed homes for every American soldier. Mom was coming out of the factory and headed to the kitchen. Dad was putting in his day at the office and looking forward to a nice home cooked meal. Junior was focused on his first car and his first kiss.
Technologically, the "automation" of the home elevated to the Nth degree. Vehicles, appliances and other gadgets seemed to take away a lot of the labor associated with doing just about anything. Here's an ad for the "Speedster":
I'm not entirely sure what this thing does. It might just be an oven, but this highlighted a pervasive sentiment back then: convenience was paramount. Anything that could be automated or made easier was inherently good.
Looking beyond gadgets and appliances in the home, the years following WWII saw a boom in distribution infrastructures. The interstate highways built with government subsidies made it far easier to establish a successful "business template" and replicate it all over the country. Businesses like General Electric and McDonalds thrived on their ability to deliver convenience in a predictable and uniform manner. From their perspective, it made great sense. If you've sorted out something that works, replicate it.
As the years went by, things didn't exactly go as planned. The utopian proved to be flawed. The sentiments in the 60's were in many ways a reaction to what turned out to be some false assumptions of what makes people happy. While we look back on the artifacts of that era and can't help but be charmed by the retro-slightly-off-futuristic aspects of it all, we can't help but react to it with a bit of a snicker or the occasional "that's just ridiculous."
Today, we're shunning convenience and automation. We want experiences around the things we do. We don't want to press a button and get pancakes and eggs. We're willing to drive to that charming diner that's been around for a hundred years and enjoy farm fresh eggs and organic pancakes. It turns out that all that shortcutting deprives us of something.
In all this, I think there are some important lessons to be learned as we design the tools, applications and gadgets of the future that are supposed to provide us with convenience but in fact turn us off in many ways.
User Machine Interaction
In thinking about interaction design, we rightly focus on the user. We call them "user interfaces" and "user interactions." But the interaction isn't one way. It's a dialogue and the machine has plenty to say. Think about the experience around the convenience you're delivering. A lot of the joy that people experience with machines isn't purely out of the proverbial output, but how that machine interacts. What does your machine do when something goes wrong? Is it patient? Is it forgiving? Is it helpful? Does it anticipate and accommodate what the user is going to do next?
Respect The Analog
People love experiences that reinforce what we understand about the physical world. Innately understood phenomena like gravity and inertia help us understand what's going and actually add a bit of joy to a user's experience. Check out this Flash physics demo. It's a lot of fun...and it's not even a game! Anyone that's flicked the album list on an iPhone can quickly see the value of adding that analog-like experience. It requires more work that can appear superfluous from an engineering perspective, but its very much worthwhile.
Convenience Is Good...But Not Free
More broadly speaking, we should be wary of what we assume to be conveniences that people want and at the costs of providing them. It turns out that making the cake from scratch is way more fun than tearing open a plastic wrapper because there are good things to take away from that experience. As we define our value and design around it, we should be as sensitive to what people don't want as to what we're certain they do want. It serves us well to respect that delicate balance.
[Disclaimer : This blog post was written on a Steampunk Keyboard Mod. Aww...yeh!]
Posted by Richard Ziade on January 7, 2008, 11:13AMWikipedia For Your iPhone Or iPod Touch
iPodia is a finger-friendly, slimmed down version of Wikipedia that fits more snugly into all those fancy iPhone contraptions people are waving around.
Posted by Richard Ziade on January 4, 2008, 09:30AMGoogle Charts Online Builder
Hohli Charts (I'm not even gonna try to pronounce that) steps you through building the query string around generating a Google Chart. The interface is a bit clumsy, but it sure beats wading through API documentation and building them yourself.
Posted by Richard Ziade on January 3, 2008, 09:08AMOk. Time To Reboot Your Life : Happy New Year!
Ok I'm admittedly a little late on this one...
I hope everyone had a happy, relaxing and safe holiday and a great 2007-was-ok-but-let's-really-blow-the-doors-off-their-hinges-2008 new year. It's a new year and people love to reboot around this time. Let's clean things up, wipe the slate clean and start fresh.
With luck, 2008 will hopefully bring some interesting and thought-provoking ideas from basement.org. At least that's the plan. One of the most challenging things I face with writing is to somehow continue to come up with fresh ideas that challenge old ones. I'll admit it got a little tougher in 2007.
But hey, that was 2007. It's now not 2007. It's a whole other thing! So let's see what '08 has in store. So it should be good. Hell, it has to be good.
Oh, and keep a close eye on the kids at Arc90 (between both the blog and lab). We're cooking up some nice surprises for the upcoming year.