OraNA :: Web 2.0

What Makes UI Good?

Jake — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 17:30:25 -0600

Thanks to a comment from Terry on my post about locking your smart phone, I’ve been digging around looking for ways to make my beloved iPhone more secure.

Surprisingly or not, Apple has made it maddeningly difficult to even the simplest precautions.

Terry’s comment, which I read a bit hastily, mentions changing the root password on your iPhone. This standard operating procedure for Linux-based systems, e.g. your Mac or your iPhone.

Surprised? You shouldn’t be. OS X introduced a version of the kernel underlying the GUI elements, so your Macbook and your iPhone both run on modified Linux and as such, can be manipulated using the root user.

OK so, how do you change the root password? For OS X, you can find instructions online, and probably work it out using the Apple Support notes. For your iPhone, you can’t, at least without breaking Apple’s terms by unlocking it.

Please let me know in comments if this can be done without an unlock.

So much for that easy measure of security, but why would Apple make it so hard to take this precaution?

It’s all about good UI.

I read an interesting post on “Why Apple is great at interfaces when others are not“, and the short answer given was because they make UI enjoyable.

Rather than survey a bunch of users on every decision, the Mac team decided each issue among themselves, invariably going for the option that might amuse a user the most, that would give a user the most pleasure, and therefore imbue the Mac with personality.

Usability is not a science by any means, but most people agree that Macs “just work”, which makes them easy and possbily fun to use. But at what cost?

In my Mac experience, I’ve noticed that OS X does like to keep the power user stuff as abstract and hidden as possible. Not that I need those functions very often, but when I do, they’re inevitably hard to find and use.

This is solid design. Make the UI fun and simple and hide the stuff that could seriously bork up the O/S, especially since power users aren’t a large percentage of the market anyway.

And don’t power users have their own choices anyway, like any number of Linux distros?

True, but maybe you’ve noticed that more people (like yours truly) are fleeing Windows for Linux. The diehard Linux types have; it seems like at least once a day, my Digg technology feed has some item about how switchers like me are either ruining Linux or making it better.

Here’s an interesting one from today with very interesting points about how habits from Windows (right/wrong/ indifferent) impact both Linux support and design.

I love choice, and one thing I love about Linux is the choice in distros. So, even if Ubuntu gets too easy and sells out, there will always be a distro for the power users.

Anyway, it’s interesting to see UI evolve, especially when you have a transparent view of why features change or don’t.

So, a typically meandering post, but my initial question remains. Does good UI assume you are average? Is this why I can’t change my iPhone’s root password, and why I have to Google the way to do this on OS X?

Find the comments. I’m interested to hear your thoughts.

I Got ID

Jake — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 12:42:02 -0600

Ever since the WWW came online, the consumer web has pwned the enterprise web.

The consumer web is the ‘tubes at large, with all its content, bells and whistles, networking, gradients, rounded corners and flashing lights. The enterprise web is the intratubes, erm intranet, inside the corporate firewall, hidden from outsiders and often from insiders.

There no comparison really, and for good reason. Web development inside the firewall, doesn’t have the audience and therefore, the need to be as bleeding edge, and even if it were better, very few people would ever know or care.

Now, the enterprise finally gets one back from its older sibling.

Inside the firewall, we know who you are, and you’ll only ever need a single set of credentials. LDAP provides an easy way for new web apps inside the firewall to authenticate who you are. No fuss, no mess and no need for a new account on every single new 2.0 web app that you want to try.

Not so on the consumer web, where your identity is fragmented and your data live inside walled gardens.

This week a few interesting lines have been drawn between two competing credential management systems, i.e. OpenID and Facebook Connect.

OK, so OpenID isn’t a single system, it’s a standard, and there are many providers. OpenID generally suffers from confusion among users, but it works. And the logic is sound, i.e. you control and manage your credentials, how they are used and by which sites.

If you use OpenID, you have some measure of data portability and control, and ideally, you can scrap the password.txt file you use to keep track of all your accounts. I said ideally, not practically though because the onus is on sites to uptake OpenID.

OpenID has gained momentum lately with big names like Yahoo, Microsoft and Google supporting all or pieces of its standard.

But beyond the benefits of single sign-on, data portability is another highly desirable and highly charged hot button topic on the consumer web. Data portability means you take your profile, its attributes and your network of friends with you wherever you go online.

If it’s not already, this is where it gets murky. First you have an open standards body, DataPortability. Then, you have three (for now) services that seem to provide data portability, MySpace Data Availability, Google Friend Connect and Facebook Connect.

Let’s look at MySpace first. As part of the Data Availability feature, they also announced they plan to implement OpenID and possible become a provider. They also belong to OpenSocial as a founding partner and as a container, and Google’s Friend Connect is built on OpenSocial APIs.

So, MySpace is all over the place, without a really clear plan on how these potentially competing services coexist. This week, they were mentioned as the catalyst for the Flock+Vidoop partnership that produced the in-browser OpenID management extension for Flock.

Incidentally, I’m wondering if that extension works for Firefox; it should since Flock is basically Firefox at the core, and the extension is just an .xpi file. Still, I’m a bit scared and don’t feel like recovering a borked FF instance. If you’ve tried this, let me know in comments.

Now for Google. Google’s OpenID implementation came under fire when it was announced, and they quickly clarified. On the data portability front, Google Friend Connect uses the OpenSocial APIs to allow you to add social features to your site. If you have a Google Profile, you can use it; you can also cross-pollinate with your Orkut and Plaxo profile and networks.

Want an example? Look to the right. Rich has implemented Friend Connect here. Eddie also added it to OraNA.

This doesn’t seem terribly useful, but it definitely flies in the face of Facebook and to a lesser extent FriendFeed by building a network around content, instead of adding content to your network.

And now for Facebook.

Facebook wants to be a walled garden, and Facebook Connect is further proof. Initially, Google included Facebook as a service to which you could cross-pollinate Google Friend Connect information, but Facebook quickly banned it as a violation of their terms.

This isn’t that surprising, really. Facebook has the most users now, and they need to monetize in a hurry. But before TechCrunch announced they were going to implement Facebook Connect, I didn’t realize how broad Facebook’s reach was.

Facebook Connect allows you to 1) login to another site with your FB credentials and 2) cross-pollinate your activity with your News Feed. Seems pretty benign and possibly useful.

However, I don’t think Facebook plans to support OpenID or any data portability initiatives. They want to keep your data inside the walled garden, which is good business. The more they know about you, the better they can target advertising at you. Sure, Beacon was a failure, but Friend Connect, done right, could be even better at pitching you.

The big question is do you care?

Most of the voices against the walled garden are early adopters in favor of an open web, i.e. OpenID, DataPortability, etc. Or they’re the voices of Facebook’s competition.

Facebook is definitely mainstream now, and as people build networks of real friends, they will strenghten their position as the de facto social network. Sorry MySpace.

As people join and realize they can use their Facebook credentials in other places on the ‘tubes, Facebook’s position will improve.

Frankly, I don’t think a mainstream user of the ‘tubes cares about open standards or data portability or monopolies for that matter. The opposing coalition will continue to play catch-up until they can offer value that trumps Facebook.

This stuff is interesting to watch, and it will shape the ‘tubes of tomorrow.

Sound off in the comments.

Poll: Do You Lock Your Smart Phones?

Jake — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 14:44:26 -0600

Every IT department has this policy. If you have a work computer, you’re expected to password lock it when you leave it unattended.

This makes sense, and I’ve followed this practice for many years, for work and personal machines, including desktops. My wife switched to locking her desktop after our cats created a few random events in her calendar.

I guess it was a bit jarring to see an appointment at 4 PM for “rtggggggggggggggggggggggggggjhkljm”. Anyway, why wouldn’t you use a password to lock your computer? It’s got scads of personal data on it, maybe even a good old password.txt file.

This is easy stuff.

But how many people follow lock their smart phones?

I asked this same question on Twitter, and a surprising minority actually password-lock their devices. Keep in mind, an iPhone could has 1) your contacts, 2) several of your email accounts, 3) mobile banking information, 4) pictures of you and yours, 5) scads of personal information.

Just like your desktop or laptop, making it an easy target for identity theft, impersonation, all kinds of bad.

Unlike your computer though, your smart phone is small and not that hard to misplace. Believe me.

Some of the feedback I got from Twitter was around the inconvenience of a locking feature. The iPhone’s Slide to unlock is supremely easy, and even with the PIN enabled, it’s not that much less convenient.

So, there’s good design going into security for smart phones. Remember the Android unlocking feature, which is clever, but still crackable by low tech means? The designers of these locking features have done a good job making them easy.

So, do you password-lock your smart phone? If not, why not?

Find the comments.

Amazon iPhone App is Sweet

Jake — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 13:10:42 -0600

Last week, I told you about SnapTell Explorer and mentioned that it would be a great app for collecting and pricing your holiday gift and wish lists.

I also wondered why Amazon wasn’t doing this already.

Today, Amazon released an iPhone app that included Amazon Remembers, a feature close to what SnapTell Explorer does.

Use Amazon Remembers to create visual lists of things you want to remember while out and about. Photos you take from the app are stored on both the Amazon App and the Amazon.com site as reminders.

If the item you want to remembers (ed. their typo, not mine) is a product, Amazon will try to find an item for sale like the one in the photo. If we do, we’ll send you an e-mail alert and post the result along with the original photo.

According to the New York Times Bits blog, the images you snap and remember are sent to freelancers working in the Mechanical Turk program. These workers compare the item to Amazon’s product catalog and email you the price information if Amazon sells the item.

You’ll remember I also wondered if Amazon would acquire SnapTell Explorer, which works well, but only for CDs, DVDs, books and games. I guess this answers that question.

I tried Remembers with the same CD I used to test SnapTell, the De La Soul classic “3 Feet High and Rising”, and less than ten minutes later, I got an email from Amazon Remembers as well as an update in the Amazon app, identifying the product and pointing me to its product page on Amazon.

Sweet. I like this for a number of reasons:

Although SnapTell is slick, it’s limited, and this app claims to be able to identify pretty much anything that’s a product for sale.
Using Mechanical Turk isn’t instantaneous, like SnapTell, but it’s pretty fast. Bonus points to Amazon for employing real people and providing a use case for the cool and under-used Turk service.
This app makes my iPhone ever more useful and even more a laptop replacement, as was my first reaction to the iPhone when it launched in Summer 2007.
It pushes brick-and-mortar stores to compete, and competition is good for consumers. Think about it: you could head to the mall if you like that sort of thing, and browse like you’re registering for a wedding, picking out stuff you want to buy or get for the holidays. Then compare the prices in near-real-time and get the best deal.
I look smart here, which is always a plus, and not that common.

I do wonder at the timing of the app’s launch though. I wonder how much coin Amazon lost because people weren’t out and about snapping images and comparing prices on Black Friday.

I guess I should disclose that I’m an Amazon apologist. I love Amazon, always have, ever since January 1997 when I first bought from them.

Their UI is great, they make useful changes that others copy (even Apple), they’ve expanded their business into web services, flying in the face of conventional wisdom about online retailing, they have great customer service. I could go on for a while.

Something about buying stuff online is fun for me. Maybe because I truly hate shopping IRL.

Anyway, your thoughts belong in the comments.

Update: I really wanted to test the limits of the Remembers feature, but I’m feeling guilty. Knowing there are real people wasting time scurring around and Amazon’s spending real money just to satisfy my urge to play with their app makes me feel bad.

Interestingly, since Amazon knows what you snap and what you buy, I wonder if their Turk response times will vary over time, i.e. if you buy a lot with Remembers, you get a quick reply. If you mess with them, you get the 24 hour maximum by default.

Very cool stuff.

Email: A Love/Hate Relationship

Jake — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 13:47:13 -0600

Photo by I am I.A.M. used under Creative Commons

We all use email, like it or not.

Even Gen Y uses email to communicate with “old people“, despite their preference for SMS, IM, and social networks. How many accounts do you have? Probably at least two, one for work communication, one for personal mail.

Boston College has recognized this trend, announcing that incoming freshmen will not receive email accounts, but rather a .edu address that can be forwarded to an existing inbox.

A common enhancement request for Connect and Mix to add subscriptions by email, which has led me to start thinking about ways we can integrate with email, a la TripIt and Sandy, which will unfortunately be shuttering its service next week.

Incidentally, an Open Source project has started to recreate Sandy, if you’re interested in helping or providing requirements.

Anyway, email provides an established and easy way to communicate, but it has its problems. For example, it’s not very good at threaded discussions among several parties. To work around this limitation, people generally reply to all, causing frequent (and ironic) backlash from mailing list members who don’t want to be spammed.

Most people complain that they have too much email, leading to declarations of email bankruptcy and the like. So, I’m always a bit surprised when people volunteer for more email, e.g. from Connect. I suppose it’s a natural desire to use a single interface for information, rather than logging in to the network to check on updates.

I wonder why RSS hasn’t been more successful conquering this problem. Everyone uses email, and everyone uses a browser. So, if you want to consolidate into a single place, why not use RSS instead of increasing the clutter in your inbox?

I guess RSS suffers from an image problem, i.e. most people have no idea what it is or why they should use it. The inclusion of feed readers into email clients goes a long way toward helping, but again, most people blank out when you mention RSS.

Anyway, back to email. A few weeks ago, one of the mailing lists I belong to served up an interesting case study about email. The list is for Mac users, and someone sent a question asking for feedback about buying a Macbook vs. a Macbook Pro.

The question generated at least 30 replies over the course of a week or so, and not a single unsubscribe me tirade. Sure, it’s an opt-in list, but this tells me two things. One, people don’t mind interesting email, where interesting is highly subjective, and two, it underscored how email fails at a threaded discussion.

Problem 1, the person asking the question had a bunch of useful information, scattered over many emails. Problem 2, people giving advice didn’t have easy access to what was already said, which caused duplication. Problem 3, if anyone ever has that question again, there’s no good way to search the list’s history, which leads to reiteration, annoyance and tirades.

What’s the solution? Forums and blogs do a much better job of this, which is why Connect and other social networks follow the object+comments model. A group on Connect would meet the requirements of this type of mailing list much more completely, but as I mentioned before, people crave email interaction with Connect.

Again, I’m not sure why, but I’m trying to think of ways to accommodate this. Beyond stuff like, subscribing to activity, providing a create idea/question template that can be parsed or creating comments by replying to the mail we generate when you get comments, what other cool interactions (like TripIt and Sandy) could we do?

Maybe one missing thing here is desire. Why did a simple question about Macbook vs. Macbook Pro generate so much interest, even though people complain about too much email?

Apple is interesting. No doubt about it. The “Have an iPhone?” group on Connect has 600 members and is the largest group. The mailing lists for iPhone users and Mac users get heavy traffic. The posts I do here about the iPhone generate a lot of traffic.

So, if your users don’t want to be bothered to go to your web app to check on content, I guess you have to make it easier for them to interact, e.g. by using email interaction.

A bit meandering, but the question is this: what are the best ways to integrate with email, striking a balance between desirable functionality and annoyance?

Sound off in the comments.

De-Friend Sounds Better than Remove

Jake — Fri, 28 Nov 2008 03:42:28 -0600

Photo by signalstation used under Creative Commons

Mashable had a highly entertaining post earlier in the week called “12 Great Tales of De-Friending“. As social networking eases into the mainstream consciousness, awkward situations will arise, and since there’s no playbook, conventional wisdom or Miss Manners for social network interactions, stories of de-friending will continue to entertain us.

Or not, depending on your role in the interaction.

I don’t recall ever de-friending anyone on Facebook or LinkedIn, i.e. networks where you make a request to connect with a person. I don’t pay close enough attention to know if I’ve been defriended either, but I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s happened. Whether or not that stings would depend on the person, I suppose.

Twitter is a totally different animal because of its asynchronous connection model, i.e. I can follow you and your tweet stream without a reciprocal follow from you. FriendFeed also employs this model, and I like it much better for these networks because it allows more control over the stream of information you receive.

Although I don’t expect everyone I follow to follow me in return, I’m sure some people do. I tried to do this for a while, until I was following about 250 people, and Twitter began to lose its value to me. My stream was so loud that I couldn’t sort out the noise.

So, I scaled back to a smaller number, and combined with TweetDeck, which has groups, it’s much easier to keep track of all the tweets. Incidentally, Corvida mentioned TweetGrid yesterday, which allows you to follow multiple keywords in real time, e.g. hashtags like #oow, replies like @jkuramot, anything. Very cool for conferences, methinks, and it’s web-based, so no client install or preferences.

Anyway, Facebook pioneered the News Feed, and they’ve added granular controls that allow you to control how much of your friends’ noise gets into your News Feed. This filtering allows you a passive-aggressive way to avoid people without the messy de-friending.

Wandered a bit off topic, but no worries. So, I don’t personally have any horror stories of de-friending gone wrong. Maybe you do? If so, please share in the comments.

Joel’s comment on the data visualization post earlier in the week got me thinking about the not-so-funny ramifications of social network interactions. Showing real-time, geo-tagged interactions could lead to real world outlets for the hurt and embarrassment caused by something like de-friending.

When shown at a global level with no user information included, the visualization is harmless eye-candy, but if the visualization is both personal and geo-tagged, a la flickrvision or twittervision, it’s only a matter of time before you get problems IRL.

Case in point, the machinations of social networking employed on MySpace that are currently on display in an LA court.

So, what do you think about all this? Care to share a de-friending story? Maybe some other thoughts on social networking and its affect on meat life?

Find the comments.

Thanks

Jake — Thu, 27 Nov 2008 03:13:53 -0600

It’s Thanksgiving here in the States. So, if you’re celebrating, have a good one. If you’re not, be glad we’re not at work today and enjoy the silence.

I debated whether to do a thank you post, since it’s cliché and done to death.

Well, add another thank you post to the torrent. Here goes:

Thanks for reading here.

Now for a list of ten, random, geeky things for which I am thankful.

Google Reader
TiVo
Twitter API
Digital music
YouTube, now in HD
TV programs online (studios, Hulu, Joost and now Sling)
Open Source software
Updates from THE_REAL_SHAQ
Social networks, for making the World smaller
Dual monitors, KVM switches

Here’s one of my favorite videos from YouTube, Where the Hell is Matt?

For a treat, click-through and watch the HD version. That option isn’t part of the Flash viewer, and now, I’m wondering if you can embed HD videos. Anyone know?

Feel free to add your thoughts and thanks in the comments, and enjoy the day.

Do You Have Cyberchondria?

Jake — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 06:42:19 -0600

Photo by Julie70 used under Creative Commons

Do you, or someone you love, suffer from that rare form of prostate cancer that only affects women? Or from that flesh-eating fungus that has jumped species and a plane from the Amazon to afflict you in the US?

Finally, there’s a word for this behavior.

Cyberchondria

I guess that word was coined a while back, but it’s new to me. Described by the Urban Dictionary (the best information source on the ‘tubes) as:

When one become so obsessed with medical websites on the internet that they diagnose themselves with certain illnesses that more often then not they don’t have, thus making the situation worse.

There’s really no way to combat this condition. Lifehacker clued me into the term; Microsoft Research published results of a study that observed people who used the ‘tubes as a “self-diagnostic” tool. From the abstract:

Our results show that Web search engines have the potential to escalate medical concerns. We show that escalation is influenced by the amount and distribution of medical content viewed by users, the presence of escalatory terminology in pages visited, and a user’s predisposition to escalate versus to seek more reasonable explanations for ailments. We also demonstrate the persistence of post-session anxiety following escalations and the effect that such anxieties can have on interrupting user’s activities across multiple sessions.

I especially like the phrase “post-session anxiety” and may borrow that for other uses.

Just last week, I wrote about Google Flu Trends; so now, your searches could actually be used to plot the spread of disease.

Freaky.

Anyway, I think we’ve all used the ‘tubes to find medical information, probably for our own or other’s symptoms. What’s interesting to me here is the effect this has or will have on medical care.

I wonder if there’s a way to monitor how diagnoses have changed over time as patients come into consultations with pre-formed ideas of what they have, backed by the Internet.

Also interesting to me is whether cyberchondria is an international phenomenon. I think we Americans have a tendency to leap to the worst possible outcome, so I’m curious to know if this is as common in other countries.

So, enlighten me. Do you have cyberchondria? Does someone you know? Have you seen this affect a doctor’s diagnosis? Maybe you’re a doctor and can comment on your own experience with Internet diagnoses.

Find the comments; this stuff is interesting.

All a Twitter

Jake — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 12:30:15 -0600

Hot on the heals of news that Facebook and Twitter couldn’t agree on an acquisition deal, news broke yesterday that Twitter had purchased Values of n.

So what?

Values of n produces Stikkit and Sandy, two very useful and artfully designed products. According to Rael Dornfest, these services will become Twitter’s IP and will go offline on December 8, 2008. I’m sure Matt is weeping into his Wheaties this morning, while Rich bangs his head off his keyboard.

They both loved Sandy, in case you’re wondering.

Although I never used her, erm it, much, Sandy’s elegant design and “just works” mentality always appealed to me. Probably the most significant piece of this acquisition is Rael himself.

I’ve not met Rael, a fellow-Portlander, but his chops can only add value to Twitter’s development team. I’m a big proponent of Twitter bots and using non-web interfaces to do stuff, and one thing I’ve always liked about Twitter is its API, which opens up a world of clients as heavy or light as you like.

Twitter’s value is in the network, which is why, even when Twitter was down more than up, I didn’t jump onto any of the clones that materialized. Imagine what Rael (and Sandy) could do to make Twitter even more useful.

From what everyone is saying about the failed Facebook-Twitter deal, there were issues with Facebook’s valuation; Facebook offered its stock as the bulk of the deal, and Twitter questioned the $15 billion valuation established by Microsoft’s investment in October 2007.

Valuation and revenue aside, Kara Swisher cited a source with what may be the prevailing wisdom (used loosely) at Twitter:

“It’s more about timing,” said one person familiar with Twitter’s motivations. “There is a strong feeling that there is still an opportunity–even with the economic downturn–to blow this thing out.”

I tend to agree, and this is much more interesting for those of us on the outside observing, especially in light of the Values of n acquisition. Social networking is maturing rapidly, whereas what Twitter does (I suppose it’s called micro-blogging) is still in its infancy.

Facebook has done a better job of what MySpace and Friendster did first. Twitter was first.

Twitter is still pretty small, in terms of network size, with six million registered users, but year-over-year, new user registrations were up 600% this October over October 2007.

Revenue models aside, I understand Twitter’s desire to see where they can go. Twitter has loads of promise that I hope to see realized.

What do you think? Sound off in comments.

I Still Heart Data Visualizations

Jake — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 02:11:25 -0600

If you haven’t seen this already, it’s worth a look. If you have, it’s worth another look. Thanks to Mashable for the YouTube version of the video.

A group of developers at Facebook have created this fantastic data visualization of Facebook network data overlaid on a globe. They’re calling it Project Palantir, (an LOTR reference), and it grew out of a hackathon project.

Palantir uses the open source jME framework for rendering, and the data visualized are real-time network interactions on Facebook, nicely geo-tagged so you can see visually the global usage of Facebook. The trailing mesh visualization of actions as they happen is most interesting to me because it shows the direction of actions, e.g. friend requests orginating in one location and “traveling” to another. Very cool stuff.

Rumor is that Facebook is considering productizing the visualization; aside from the cool factor, I’m not sure how much value it would add, unless you could watch your own activity flash around the globe. I think data visualizations work best when you’re trying to show benefits or scale, e.g. in a presentation format.

Someone on the video thread page on Facebook has pointed out that Google has a similar visualization at its HQ in of its real time searches plotted on a globe.

Again, this shows the scale (and I guess power) of the data processed, but if you had this visualization available to you on Google, would you use it?

I really do like data visualizations, but for social network data, I think new ways to look at the data are better because we’re still struggling to show value in the network.

What do you think? Do you like the eye-candy, or is it frivilous? Any suggestions for better visualizations?

Find the comments.

An iPhone App Your Holiday Shopping and Wishlist

Jake — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 14:08:49 -0600

Last week, I found a perfect iPhone app for the year-end holidays, thanks to Paul’s Google Reader Shared Items feed.

SnapTell Explorer (by way of Lifehacker) is a free app that works with the iPhone’s camera. Open the app and snap a picture of any DVD, CD, game or book cover.

SnapTell processes the image and returns online prices to purchase it, as well as a link to Barnes and Noble, its Wikipedia entry and keyword searches for the item on Google and Yahoo. You can also send an email to share that you’ve snapped an image; the email targets sharing the SnapTell app, not the item you snapped, which seems like a fail.

This app is perfect this time of year, when people are rabidly consuming. It’s like an instant gratification wishlist; say you’re shopping and see something you’d like. Snap a picture of it, including links to buy it online and fire that off via email to all the people who are shopping for you.

If I were Amazon or any online retailer, this would be a perfect app to acquire and deploy right now. How many times have you been out shopping, seen something in a store and thought you would check its price online later? SnapTell works great for that because you can make an informed decision right away.

Anyway, Lifehacker mentions that SnapTell is similar to the Barcode app, which I’ve also tested a bit. I like both because they both have use cases. Bar codes are unique, and you can use the Barcode app on anything, not just media (DVDs, CDs, games, books). SnapTell has a pictoral representation of what you snapped, which helps jog the memory when a bar code alone wouldn’t. Both are pretty helpful.

These apps remind me of creating a wedding registry, walking around a store scanning stuff you think you need.

Most of all, apps like these show the true power of the iPhone as a transformative device. I still heart my old skool Edge network, Gen 1 iPhone.

Google SearchWiki

Jake — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 05:33:35 -0600

Shortly after I finished a post about a couple cool things Google has done recently, they announced that Google SearchWiki would be going public.

Back in the Summer, Google teased the addition of Digg-style social features into search, and it looks like these became SearchWiki. So, what does it give you?

When you’re logged into your Google Account, you can:

Reorder keyword search results, promoting and demoting the results.
Remove results from a search.
Add results to the search.
Comment on individual results, either privately for your own viewing or publicly.
View other people’s comments on a given keyword search.
See the re/ordering other people have performed on a keyword search.

Apparently, any time you’re logged into your account, your changes will appear.

At first blush, I like the idea a lot, but I’m not sure how much I’ll use it.

This seems like a useful feature for keyword searches you perform frequently, and it definitely stretches Google into several areas: social search (Spock), human-edited search results (Mahalo) and web page annotation (Diigo).

If your site generates a lot of user feedback, e.g. TechCrunch (search for “techcrunch” and click the “See all notes for this SearchWiki” link toward the bottom of the page), you might find this useful. Or not, depending on the comments.

So, on the one hand, I like the addition of social features, but on the other, I don’t see them as terribly valuable. I wonder what percentage of Google searches are even done from Google Accounts. Beyond that addressable market, how many of those people would be creeped out to see other people’s comments on their searches. Or even get what the extra icons are supposed to do.

The problem here is that Google Search is an institution. It is the WWW for a huge percentage of people, e.g. I have seen people Google URLs, no joke.

Think about that for a second. They are so conditioned to Google that it has replaced the browser’s native functionality, and when told that knowing the URL actually can save time and clicks, I’ve been told that’s too hard, vs. Googling.

So, aside from a small, intersted minority, many of us have grown accustomed (and fond) of other ways to do this same type of thing, e.g. Digg and Delicious. We’re used to working around what Google does really well to accomplish what we need. I’m not sure I’ll jump over to the SearchWiki way and quit those other services.

Marshall has some interesting thoughts from Ward Cunningham, the inventor of the wiki, over at RWW.

Anyway, here’s the video if you haven’t seen it already.

Check out SearchWiki and drop your comments in the box.

Let’s Take a Legal Break

Jake — Sun, 23 Nov 2008 10:54:25 -0600

Something has been bothering me for years about our (American) legal system.

Pause for snarky comments.

Drawing by Austin Kleon used under Creative Commons

As a longtime reader of Slashdot, I’ve followed the legal aspects of technical lawsuits passively for years, especially court decisions that affect overall precedent, e.g. RIAA and MPIAA decisions as they pertain to P2P, cyber-bullying, spamming, anti-trust in tech, etc.

I find this stuff interesting (and sometime frightening) because I’m a geek, and these precedents affect me because. I wish I had bookmarked some of the stories I recall from the early RIAA trials because I remember being absolutely scared to death by the lack of fundamental computer and network skills shown by some of the courts.

This begs the larger question that has troubled me for a while: should cases of a technical nature be sent to courts with specialized skills, i.e. the judges have technical background and training?

Most recently, the start of the Lori Drew cyber-bullying case reminded me of an old sore.

I’m a huge believer in this idea, and I’m surprised it hasn’t been broached in the open yet. There are several compelling (I think) arguments in favor, and I shall present them in bogus legalese for your consideration.

Time Saved = Money Saved
Everyone knows going to court costs money for all parties involved. Most importantly, it costs taxpayer money.

Up front costs to establish a new court system and train judges in technical disciplines would quickly be recouped because lawyers would not have to spend hours detailing the intricacies of TCP/IP or the differences between Windows and Linux licenses.

Expert witnesses called to testify would also benefit from a higher base knowledge, skipping the “dumb it down” phase and going right into the meat of the testimony.

This would be like calling customer support and skipping past the n00b on Level 1 duty who reads off the “Have you rebooted your computer?” script and heading straight for the Level 3 geeks who can really help. No need to explain what a BIOS is or how to configure it. Just point me at the right setting.

Ultimately, a tech savvy judge will also be able to set a jury’s expectations and advise them appropriately on the technical nuances of the case, just like a judge does with legal nuances. This saves deliberation time.

Jargon is What Jargon Does
Quick: name two types of jargon?

I’ll bet you said either technical or legal. Bonus for both. There’s a very good reason why lawyers shouldn’t talk about technology, least of all in an explantory way; it’s like combining Latin and Sanskrit. I hear your voice, but nothing you’re saying makes any sense to me.

Assuming you believe that either side of a lawsuit will explain objectively what a technical concept really does, it’s still less than ideal to have the lawyer educate the principle decision maker(s) in a lawsuit.

With a tech savvy judge, the lawyers would be held accountable for misrepresenting technical concepts. This is a win, IMO.

Too Late?
Of the branches of our government, the judicial is generally the slowest to react to change. The legislative branch has been the most savvy to date, maybe in spots, but due to the large number of members and regular turnover, new ideas tend to bubble up quickly.

The incoming Obama administration is by far the savviest at tech to date, e.g. using Twitter as a campaign tool, uploading regular fire-side style chats to YouTube.

It may be too late though for the judicial branch. Precendent has already been set and continues to be set by cases in the system now. When in doubt, look for precedent.

As the general population grows more tech savvy, with Gen Y entering the workforce, cases will get more complex. Want an example? Boston College announced that next year, incoming freshman will no longer receive email accounts; they will instead receive addresses (e.g. johndoe at bc dot edu) which can be forwarded to existing inboxes elsewhere.

This is a big deal.

Sure it’s a savings for college IT departments, but it’s also a harbinger of things to come. Gen Y uses email, but only to talk to older people. It’s seen as a chore to maintain an inbox.

I wonder how many judges even use email regularly.

Technology is moving so fast. It seems logical (and necessary) to train judges on tech.

This is pure opinion, and if something already exists to meet this need, please enlightened me in comments. I’ve not heard of anything in this vein.

So, what do you think? Did I miss something obvious? Let me know in comments.

Is the Venture Funding Model Broken?

Jake — Sat, 22 Nov 2008 04:13:15 -0600

Jerry Yang’s ignominious resignation as CEO of Yahoo this week further underlined for me what’s broken about the venture capital model.

I’m not referring to the slidedeck presented by Adeo Ressi to Harvard Business School faculty earlier this month, i.e. I don’t really care to cover what’s wrong with the investments made by VCs or the reasons they were made.

I’m talking about using the equity model for startups. By now, everyone has a working knowledge of the usual financial path a startup takes, assuming it successfully stays in business:

Incubate an idea and stay self-funded as long as possible.
Take small infusions from family and friends to keep the equity spread across people you trust and who trust you and have faith in you and your idea.
Seek angel investment, further diluting the equity.
Close a round of venture capital with probably a single firm, further shrinking equity.
Retain employees by offering equity options in the event of a liquidity event.
Close x number of additional venture capital rounds, adding more firms, possibly reupping an existing investor, all the while spreading equity to more parties.
Contemplate a liquidity event, which requires the addition of an investment bank to the equity pool.
Add more stakeholders when you close the liquidity event, typically in the form of publicly traded shares of your own company or of another company, i.e. in the event of a merger or acquisition.

What you end up with at the end of this path is a whole mess of people who, rightfully, demand to have a voice in your precious company’s affairs.

Frequently, the founders of a successful company step aside during this journey, but if they remain, how much voice can they really be afforded?

Yang’s stewardship of Yahoo since Terry Semel was forced out in June 2007 includes several instances of his problem balancing his vision for and love of the company he built with what was clearly best for the company’s many stakeholders. I’m talking about the failed Microsoft acquisition.

Google co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page may soon face similar problems; of course, Steve Jobs has faced this in the past with Apple.

The equity model creates this issue because on the one hand, you need money to run and grow a company. On the other, how comfortable are you relinquishing control of your beloved company to outsiders whose goals are not the same as your own?

I think this is a huge problem with the equity model. Maybe serial entrepreneurs don’t mind because they start companies at the outset with the goal of maturing the idea to a certain point, divesting and moving on to another project. But what about those of us who want to stay with an idea through its full lifecycle?

Maybe you don’t agree, but I know some of you do.

Back at WhereCamp PDX, Wm Lehler discussed applying the residual model, used by movies and TV, as a new structure for compensating startup employees, instead of the prevailing model of salaries funded by venture money.

Labor is typically the largest cost for tech startups, more now than during the Bubble, since Open Source and cloud-based infrastructure services (like Amazon Web Services) have removed the sunk costs that used to be associated.

Obviously the problem is how to compensate your people when you’re not able to pay them at market rates. The equity solution is a fair way to do this, and at an early stage, it’s likely that your few employees will be inline with your vision. Why else would they take on the risk of an early stage startup over a more mature company?

I like equity for employees, especially if you can balance salary with something like residuals. This still leaves the problem of how to grow the company.

Beyond bootstrapping and staying as small and meager as possible and taking traditional loans to infuse the company, are there any other models that exist to fund and grow a company without giving up equity to investors?

I’m curious to hear thoughts on this because it’s an interesting dilemma for tech startups. Innovation and competition don’t allow the average tech startup to mature slowly, which is why the VC model has worked for so long.

Sound off in the comments.

Connect for Your iPhone

Jake — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 09:16:58 -0600

As I teased earlier in the week, Rich has been cooking up Connect People Search for your iPhone. Last night, it went live.

This isn’t an iPhone app because, as we all know, there are a few issues preventing an app that requires behind the firewall access: 1) we can’t yet connect to VPN using the iPhone VPN client and 2) there’s no way (without jailbreaking) to put an app onto your iPhone without using iTunes, which means applying to the App Store and hoping Apple will approve.

Connect People Search is just that; people search optimized to run in Safari on the iPhone. Rich did several clever things to make this work.

First, he’s obviously not using the iPhone VPN client, but rather, another method provided by GIS. It’s not really a secret, just not as frequently used. So, before you can do anything, you’ll need to authenticate to VPN.

Once you’re in, you’re presented with a search box. Simply enter the string you want to query, just like in the full version of Connect, and off you go.

The results are constrained to people only, natch, and you can click through to view a person’s profile. No fuss, no mess.

This simplicity has a lot of value. Rich left out all the social elements of Connect, and you don’t have to log in to SSO to search. His goal was people search, nothing more.

Connect has a lot of iPhone and Apple content. The “Have an iPhone?” group has nearly 600 members, and people use it actively to exchange iPhone information. Many have asked how they could get some type of directory lookup on their phones.

Rich took this demand and ran with it.

He used features of Safari on the iPhone to make Connect People Search a bit more app-like, e.g. he hides the URL bar by default, which makes it look more like an app. My iPhone Twitter client of choice, Hahlo, does the same thing.

The bar is still there; it’s just not rendered in the visible screen area. Just scroll up to see it.

The search box, results and profile are all optimized to fit the iPhone display in portrait (standard) mode; if you turn the iPhone to view in landscape, you’ll notice Rich hasn’t yet tweaked the display to resize, not a big deal.

One big missing feature is the abilty to click on a phone number and call it. Testing this out, I think this may be a limitation with how VPN handles the URL versus a gap in functionality. Maybe Rich will comment.

Clicking a person’s email opens the Mail app with the address populated, which is nice. I noticed that links to other people on a person’s profile, e.g. the management chain, begin to render and then nuke Safari. Again, not a huge deal, just a warning.

Thanks to Rich for building this very useful little web app. Now that he’s got his feet wet with iPhone development, the sky’s the limit. Look for more goodness in the coming months.

Curious? Gotta have it? If you want the 411, leave a comment. Obviously, I’ll only be able to give out the link to employees, so use your Oracle email address when commenting.

Update: There is also a mobile-enhanced version of search for Aria. As with the full-sized versions of Connect and Aria, you’ll get different results for the same keyword search because Connect indexes your profile.

So, if you’ve completed your profile, you can be found based on its contents, e.g. a search for the keyword “appslab” returns Paul, Rich, me and a few others.

Another Update: If you’re interested, Clayton Donley has a few iPhone apps, as well as a way to get them on your iPhone without a jailbreak. Good stuff.

Google Does and Knows a Lot

Jake — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 15:24:49 -0600

It’s pretty hard to keep up with all the stuff Google does. There are several blogs I know of whose only purpose in life is to cover Google.

Anyway, a couple noteworthy Google announcements recently caught my attention. So, I figured I share them and collect your thoughts.

Google Flu Trends
Google.org announced Google Flu Trends recently, which tracks aggregated search data to estimate flu activity in the US (and by state). So your search for any number of flu-related keywords alerts Google Flu Search to the possibility of an influenza rise in your state.

Pretty Orwellian, but cool. At first blush, the logic here sounded weak to me. After all, lots of Internet doctors exist out there (my wife is one), and this approach puts a fair amount of faith into a person’s ability to diagnose symptoms effectively.

Not to mention the fact that the usage of Google state-by-state may not represent a large enough sample to make these assumptions. So, interested, but skeptical, I dug more deeply.

Turns out this theory was tested last year, and it closely mirrors data collected by the CDC. Even more surprising to me is that the data generated by Google Flu Trends estimate with good accuracy the spread of flu, one to two weeks ahead of the CDC models.

Surprising to me and yet another example of what Google knows about us all.

Google Hosts Images from Life
Google announced (by way of Lifehacker) this week that they are hosting newly digitized images from the LIFE magazine photo archive, available for search on Google Image Search.

Only a very small percentage of these images have ever been published. The rest have been sitting in dusty archives in the form of negatives, slides, glass plates, etchings, and prints. We’re digitizing them so that everyone can easily experience these fascinating moments in time. Today about 20 percent of the collection is online; during the next few months, we will be adding the entire LIFE archive — about 10 million photos.

This is very cool to me. There are loads of great shots that have never been published by famous photographers of events and times long past. It’s a very interesting way to look back into history.

This is a good move by LIFE too, but what’s missing for me is the usage licenses for these images. I’ve mentioned Flickr as a great source for Creative Commons licensed work to use in presentations and blogs.

I suspect the licensing for these digitized images is highly difficult to sort out, considering that each photographer could have had a different agreement with LIFE, but still there’s not a single clue as to whether I can use them or not and why.

I hope they sort that out and publish it soon so these fantastic photos can spread around the ‘tubes.

Shizzow Expands Beyond the Rose City

Jake — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 13:40:29 -0600

I’ve mentioned Portland-based Shizzow a few times in the past in posts about geo-aware services and networking.

Shizzow has been open to Portlanders only until this week, but Tuesday they added the Bay Area. And now today, Seattle is also supported.

Full disclosure: I know all the principles that make up the little Shizzow operation. They’re all working on Shizzow as a side-project (read in addition to regular jobs), and they’re bootstrapping rather than taking outside money, a good call considering the current economy.

Oh yeah, what is Shizzow? It’s (another) geo-location social network. Its purpose is simplicity, born out of necessity. Portland has a huge nomadic geek population, bouncing around the many wi-fi coffeehouse and mobile working locations around town.

Shizzow’s goal is to make ad-hoc meetups and gatherings happen more easily. Rather than broadcasting the address of your current (or soon-to-be) location, Shizzow has a collection of human-understandable locations from which you can “shout”, e.g. if I’m at CubeSpace and I want to grab some lunch, I can shout my location as CubeSpace, rather than 622 SE Grand.

This makes it easier for my friends to know where I am. Shizzow has several ways to shout, web page (natch), IM, SMS, Google Gadget. Oddly, there is no Twitter integration. I’ve asked about that several times. The Shizzow web page interface supports Mozilla Geoge, which is nice when Geode has a clue about where you are.

If you’re wondering, yes, it sounds like Brightkite and Loopt and “insert geo-aware social network name here”. Dawn Foster, Shizzow’s community manager, differentiates for us:

We developed Shizzow to solve a specific need: the desire to find our friends and hang out with them. The other services had so much clutter that we weren’t able to effectively solve our need using any of the existing location-based applications. We aren’t out to convert our competitors’ users over to Shizzow; plenty of people find value in these other location-based services. However, if you are focused on connecting with your friends in the real world, and like us, you need a better way to find your friends, we hope you will give Shizzow a try.

I find Shizzow suffers from the same gap that all the other do; I can never remember to update it when I go somewhere. Maybe I don’t move around enough. That’s why I’ve been asking for a Twitter bot from the beginning; I’m on Twitter frequently. I sometimes remember to tweet when I’m on the go. Therefore, a Twitter bot would be the best way to get me to shout my location.

This was what I really liked about Firebot, the Twitter bot for Fire Eagle, which has since gone dark, a casualty of the loss of XMPP/IM integration.

Anyway, with a small development crew (three?) who all have day jobs, Shizzow has managed to do quite a lot. So, if you live in Portland, Seattle or the Bay Area, or have a bunch of friends in those regions and visit there a lot, drop a comment for an invite to Shizzow, or hit up @shizzow on Twitter.

Like everything, it’s a beta service, but of course, they’re looking for feedback. So, if you’re interested check it out and send your thoughts to them (or put them in comments here).

Although, based on the comments (or lack thereof) on the geo-related posts I’ve done here, I’m guessing not many of you will care very much.

Prove me wrong.

Found: Cool Stuff in Your Shared Items

Jake — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 15:49:26 -0600

So, I now have about five or six people sharing their Google Reader shared items with me, which is good.

These feeds function a lot like Twitter for me, i.e. the items in there are sometimes interesting and tend to tell me a bit about each person. For example, Paul shares a lot of gadget stuff from Gizmodo and Engadget, but mainly the vehicles, cameras, and AV stuff. This makes him my gadget filter for those items.

Rich shares mostly Rails posts (surprise) and some theory of development stuff. The Ontario Emperor shares a lot of political stuff. It’s an interesting way to learn about a person’s interests and to cross-pollinate them with your own.

Plus the recent addition of the notes feature to shared items lets you add specific thoughts to each item. Hmm, sounds a lot like blogging (or micro-blogging, to turn a phrase). I’ve not tested this, but I wonder if I share an item with comments that was shared with me if the comments also propagate. This would be equivalent to blog comments.

Case in point, two people shared this item about the Infinity Bookcase, which is a sweet design. I wonder how you physically get to the books inside each loop though.

I love design, form and function. So, now I’ve got a new resource (Make), and I know a bit more about these two Intertubes friends. Very cool stuff, classic network effects in action.

Compared to Twitter, it’s a nice alternative to Tiny URLs on Twitter that lead to Rickrolls; at least I can see what is shared before clicking through on it. Incidentally, Rickrolling my phone is only funny once, and no I won’t link to how it’s done.

Ironically, as I wrote this, I saw an item in the Ontario Emperor’s shared items feed by Sarah Perez of RWW, called “Am I A Google Reader Over-Sharer? Are You?” I may be an over-sharer. This is moot though, since just as with Twitter, you’re not required to follow me. Reader is asynchronous too, since you can subscribe to the feed and remove people from “Friends’ shared items”. So, I can follow your shared items without requiring you to follow mine.

Yeah, it’s a lot like FriendFeed, but I’m getting more out of Google Reader Shared Items than I do out of FriendFeed because I use it everyday anyway.

Your thoughts belong in the comments. Comments get lonely too.

“Looks Good, Works Well”

Rich Manalang — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 11:45:28 -0600

Last night, I was lucky enough to see Bill Scott (of Yahoo Design Pattern Library, YUI, OpenRico, Netflix fame) present at my local Ruby user group. He shared his thoughts about the successful design patterns that have defined today’s web. As someone who enjoys brilliantly designed “things” including web apps and sites, I found his talk very interesting.

Designing Web Interfaces

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: rich ajax)

Most (actually, all) of his talk was devoted to the consumer web. My head is almost always focused on how to take the good stuff coming from the consumer web back into the enterprise web. Bill’s ideas made me realize how little we (as enterprise web app developers) pay attention to the minute details that go into producing web apps that customers love. Bill is currently the Director of UI Engineering at Netflix. If you’re a Netflix customerfan, you’ll know that Netflix.com is a superb site. Netflix’ business depends entirely on the success of its site. Very small incremental changes could drastically affect their business. All of the changes they make to the site go through rigorous testing with real users and are carefully measured.

With the enterprise products I’ve been a part of building, we’ve spent some time on usability tests. However, they’re usually done before the product is even passed over to development. They’re usually done during the visual design phase. Once the UX teams have finalized their product designs, they’re approved and passed over to the developers to start building. However, most of the time, the product doesn’t end up matching what was designed by UX.

This process wasn’t always this way. I remember back in the PeopleSoft client-server days, most products didn’t go through any usability tests. I suppose the reasoning is that back then, most of the “ERP” apps were focused on back-end users who were trained to use the software so usability wasn’t that big of an issue. Today’s focus is in building apps that anyone can use without training. Aside from testing usability, I don’t know if we focus enough on learnability. In order for software to be easy enough for anyone to use, it needs to provide enough queues for users to be able to learn how to use it. Bill provides a lot of examples in his presentation above of how to do this.

The problem with the the visual design process in the enterprise today (as I see it) is that it doesn’t follow good software development practices like agile. Once a visual design is finalized, it’s passed on and never really iterated for improvements. Some enterprise software development cycles could take over a year or two from concept to design to build to release. Over that time, new UI patterns could have emerged as well as totally new ways to solve the same problem that the software originally sought out to solve. This is the reason why agile methodologies exists.

What Bill described as his overall process for building good looking web sites that work can be reduced down to an agile process for visual design. It doesn’t make sense to design once then move on. The process needs to be iterative. Feedback from real users with real data need to be used as a way of testing ideas and measuring success rates iteratively. I’m no expert with UX, but this process makes a lot of sense to me.

Anyone out there in Oracle UX land care to comment? Are you guys already doing this? If so, how’s it working?

BTW, Bill’s got a book coming out on this topic… added to my wishlist.

More iPhone Apps

Jake — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 11:41:55 -0600

Here’s some more iPhone goodness, and a teaser to whet your appetite.

Fake Calls
Thanks to Floyd for this tip. I started out to review three fake call apps, but quickly realized there are a lot more than three. Eleven apps matched the keyword search “fake caller” in the App Store, and only one didn’t fit the search.

So, if you ever felt the need to fake a phone call to get out of a personal interaction (conversation, meeting, date, movie, etc.), you have ten iPhone apps to choose from:

Fake-a-Call (free)
Fake Calls ($0.99)
Fake Caller Free
Fake Call ($0.99)
Fake Caller Premium ($0.99)
GottaDash ($0.99)
GottaGo ($0.99)
exitstrategy ($0.99)
HottrixPhone PRO ($2.99)
Phony ($1.99)

This is really funny to me; until today, I had never thought of this as an app, and I can’t even recall using a fake phone call excuse to get out of a situation.

But now my eyes are open, and from now on, I’ll be suspicious when someone with an iPhone gets a call and bails on a meeting or a conversation with me. The end of innocence I guess.

The question is do these fake call apps make the iPhone more “for business”?

Teaser: Rich has been tinkering with iPhone development. Stay tuned for more on what he’s doing.