There is not a single new iPod that comes in white. Not one. End of an era?

– Derek Powazek

How to Make a Million Dollars (The New Way)

From Moonwatcher:

… given the frictionless way in which we can process individual transactions it’s actually easier and cheaper for us to sell 1,000 $25 licenses than do a single $25,000 deal.So how to make a million dollars? Create something that can leverage the Internet to drive your transaction costs to near zero and is interesting enough that other people will promote it for you for free and compelling enough that people will pay for it.

#1 Rule of Interface Design

From Bokardo:

#1 rule of interface design: the easiest action gets done most.

At least for public web sites, this is one of the truest, yet commonly ignored axioms. If a user wants to do A(fill a form), but B is just much easier to do (click a link), they just end up doing B. It sounds strange, especially from a traditional usability perspective, but this what I see happen all the time.

Dreamforce, The Google Phone and Valley Blindness

Nick Carr is moderating a visionaries panel at Dreamforce. W00t! And yes, George Lucas is gonna be there too 😉

PS: The Dreamforce site has talking heads and there’s no way to shut them up.

Let it not be said that I didn’t toss my worthless two cents into the Google Phone rumor mill. I learned from a certain CEO that reading recruitment ads can give you clues about what’s going on at other companies. This position, for example, may or may not have anything to do with a Google phone. But it’s fun to toss that out there.

Which brings me to what’s so wrong about this LinkedIn recruitment ad – the very last line “Local candidates only”. Like I’ve mentioned before, I detest the peculiar blindness people in the valley have towards the rest of the world. It could be anything from not getting why Nokia or Orkut is so popular to plain old reluctance to hire outside this little rat’s nest. I agree that it’s best to cast a local net first, or maybe even prefer a local candidate if equally qualified, but precluding non-locals? Tch tch. Contrast that with this interview with Jason Fried: “I don’t want my talent to be limited by geography.”

Watch the interview:

PS: If LinkedIn is hiring a new evangelist, what’s happening with Mario Sundar?

Breaking the Prime Directive

It’s a fascinating time to be involved in the “enterprise” world. The very word still screams Star Trek to me and it’s definitely going places where, at least, it has not gone before and shaking some very non-enterprisey hands. Some of the interesting places the stardrive is kicking towards:

1.  The established vendors are copying the scrappy startups, not the other way around. It used to be that web based alternatives tried to copy Microsoft Excel. But if you look at the latest version of MS Office, you could be forgiven for thinking that you were actually on a fancified website with tabs and hyperlinks and big honking icons for the most common tasks. I pity the poor startups that are touting a “desktop-like” experience.
2. It used to be a virtue that everything was private and locked down by default. Not anymore. Sharing models that make everything public within the organization are all the rage now. The Internet and Google and Facebook feed have all made a very clear case that information wants to be at least findable, if not free and in your face.
3. There is growing realization that the tools we spend 8 or more hours of the day with, shouldn’t suck. “Enterprise” software has been (justifiably) criticized for being the worst type of crap to come out of committee-driven design. Thankfully, at least some people are realizing it doesn’t have to be that way. Salesforce.com showed that if you make “enterprise” tools that looked and felt like the sites people liked to use by themselves, businesses would be a lot more successful getting them to work. I’m sure that the next generation of scrappy startups will soon be bringing the engaging experiences from Facebook and YouTube to businesses everywhere, and MS Office will start copying them just as soon as you’ve figured out how to mimic it’s current UI.

At the end of the day, work wants to be fun. The sooner we all realize this, the sooner we can stop making these unseemly distinctions between play and work. And then we can all get laid.

Four Scribbles

After reading Mark Cuban‘s and Amit Agarwal‘s posts, I just *had* to see if I remembered. I ended up cheating on the F in Malayalam, and realized that my Hindi’s much worse than the terrible shape it was in before.

Spammers Wax Profound

.flickr-photo { border: solid 2px #000000; }
.flickr-yourcomment { }
.flickr-frame { text-align: left; padding: 3px; }
.flickr-caption { font-size: 0.8em; margin-top: 0px; }

Spammers Wax Profound, originally uploaded by kingsley 2.0.

What can I say? My spam filters have no mercy.

Censorship is So *Beep*ing Funny

From YouTube

Another Arbitrary Milestone Passes

So maybe I didn’t think that I’d eat canned food for more than three days in a row by the time I turned 30. Or that I would still enjoy wearing yellow pants. I don’t think I even expected to continue to love South Park. But by far, the biggest indication of this milestone’s complete unimportance is the fact that this song is my ringtone.

The Ajax Experience Conference is Great, Except …

The home page for the conference makes gratuitous, totally lame use of uhm, Flash. Oh the irony.

It has the kind of effects that are so trivial to do with Ajax/ DOM manipulation now, that it didn’t even strike me that anyone, least of all the designers for the website of “the” Ajax conference, would want to do this in Flash.

But curiosity got the better of me. When I kicked Firebug up to peek under the covers, it wasn’t prototype or jQuery that was staring back at me, but ugly Dreamweaver template cruft instead. Ugh.

Technorati Tags: ajax experience, ajaxexperience, ajax, conference

Nokia Kicking MotoButt. This is News?

Some days I just lose it over how US-centric the tech media is. I’m sure there’ll be a ton of surprised blog posts today about this BusinessWeek article about Nokia kicking Motorola’s butt. So here are some fact-devoid, totally my-impression-of-my-country nuggets for perspective:

Nokia has always been #1 in India, and I hear they’re pretty big in China and Africa too. Maaaaassive growth markets, people. Everyone has a Nokia in India. It’s the aspirational brand. Everyone also thinks Motorolas suck because they are fucking unusable (I know, cause I have one).

No one gives a shit about Rails. They’re writing Java and .NET code at work and writing PHP and ASP 2.0 (yes, that’s the one with Visual Basic) scripts when they’re playing.

What’s Digg?

Macintoshes are laughably irrelevant. Internet Explorer is still the browser of choice, even for people in the tech industry, but they’ve heard about Firefox, and some of them are actually using it. Yes, some of them do it just to be cool.

Orkut is waaaay huger than anything else. What’s Facebook? Hi5 seems to be pretty big too. Remember, social networking has strong, um, network effects. Combine it with the fact that South Asia’s and Brazil’s fast growing communities are hooked on Orkut, I wonder why a) Google is step-childing Orkut and b) Facebook isn’t quaking in its API enabled boots.

And oh, we swear a lot when we speak English, but we’re remarkably well spoken in our own mother tongues. I think it’s because harsh words bite harder when they’re close to your inner child, but what the fuck do I know?

DivX Stage6 is Streaming Video Crack

According to its creators (the folks who brought us the DivX video encoding), Stage 6 is “the next evolution in digital media”. That, it might be, but what’s really cool about it is that DVD rips of many full length movies are available on it and can be viewed in high quality streaming video.

The magic comes from the cross-platform DivX plugin that works with Firefox. The plugin is very small (< 1MB) and doesn’t require you to restart the browser. You will be surprised by how much clarity can be achieved in live, streaming video. The video started playing almost immediately on our cable line, and the clarity was good enough to view on a 5 foot projector screen! I wouldn’t say that it was DVD quality, but it comes pretty close. From my own subjective taste-tests, the quality was even better than Joost, and there was much less lag before the video started.

The player comes with the option of downloading the movie as you watch it. This comes in handy when you want to burn a DVD and watch it on your TV. Many DVD players (read: “mine”) are DivX compatible/ certified, so this is a great advantage over most other video sharing or streaming formats.

The player also has a number of nice details like a desktop dimmer, which makes the surrounding screen darker so that the details in the video stand out. Fullscreen and Windowed modes are also available natively. Why this is not part of the standard Flash player menu is beyond me.

Stage 6 is obviously going to get into serious trouble over the copyrighted content on their site. Regardless of how that works out, Stage 6 is a great proof of concept for how media could be distributed in the future. It is a solution that fits in nicely with users’ lives. There’s no overhead to watching good quality video and it makes downloading and making copies really easy. Here’s hoping that the media majors learn from it instead of killing it.

Update: As I was about to post this, I saw the Forrester report on how paid video has no future. Overall, I agree with the report. The battle against “free” is a losing one and as ValleyWag very astutely observes, it’s a battle in which Google & Youtube’s interests are aligned with the other side.

Technorati Tags: streaming video, stage 6, divx, streaming movies, movies

I Read This While Waiting to Make a Left Turn

From Deemix:

In 2004, UPS announced that its drivers would avoid making left turns. The time spent idling while waiting to turn against oncoming traffic burns fuel and costs millions each year. A software program maps a customized route for every driver to minimize lefts.

Technorati Tags: environment, global warming, deemix, ups, traffic

Make Art, Not Pipes

‘Cuz geeking can be beautiful. I made a craigslist + Yahoo! Maps mashup using Yahoo! Pipes to help me find a new apartment, and I realized I loved the sinuous pipes too much to make a mess of it.

Technorati Tags: yahoo pipes, yahoo maps, beauty, design, geek, craigslist, rss

Microsites Kick Viral Video’s Butt

I was reading this post at eMarketer, and it looks like cheap, easy-to-build microsites kick viral video’s butt in marketing ROI:

“Creating cool microsites” topped all other tactics, with 37% of very experienced marketers saying they produced great results. One-third thought that online games brought great results.

I had an experienced viral marketer weigh in on the email forwarding technique:

And in that spirit, I encourage you to forward this post by email to your friends 🙂

Technorati Tags: viral marketing, marketing, web marketing, online marketing, microsites, viral videos

Cheer for every click!

If a user clicks on a web page and there’s no one around to hear it, does it make a noise?

I like webware that celebrates every single thing users do on a website. On the IdeaExchange, for example, the first time you vote, we create a page on your profile for your votes to live on. Then, every time you vote, we tell everyone about it, yelling proudly that “joeuser” voted on this awesome idea. And if someone leaves a comment on the idea you voted up, we tell you the next time you visit.

Why is this so important? User attention is extremely hard to get. Just about 50% of all visitors even click on anything (and those numbers are far worse for larger websites). Any attention that you get is worthy of a celebration. Tell the neighbors. Break out the bubbly. Don’t forget to invite Google!

Add that vote to an RSS feed. Ping Technorati. Create a page to celebrate the mighty vote. Lavish attention on it like a new parent. Feature it on your home page. For behold, a user has deemed it worthy to click on our humble page.

Technorati Tags: community design, web community, social software, social webware

Prioritizing social features by copying Amazon

I found this image on Bokardo.com as an illustration of the number of social features Amazon.com has. The story for me is not so much that Amazon has these features, as much as the way they’ve laid them out. If I were running a social media startup, I would be using this top-down ranking to prioritize my features. The only possible addition I would make is to add embeddable widget code to some place on top.

Show Me The Photoshop

Ever since I saw the enthusiasm around RIAs (Rich Internet Applications. ie, Java, Flash, Flex, Apollo & Silverlight) at the Web 2.0 Expo, I’ve been trying to put into words my apprehensions about why they may not warrant such enthusiasm. The answer came to me while reading Ryan Stewart‘s post Will Adobe and Microsoft Depend on Rich Internet Applications to Survive?.

Ryan makes a point that I often hear from RIA enthusiasts:

Are you going to be able to recreate Photoshop or Microsoft Office in a browser? No way. You can do things like Google Docs, sure, but while that has 80% of what you need (in theory) for Microsoft Office, it doesn’t do it all.

What I find hard to accept, and it might just be my ignorance (I only read ~60 feeds related to web development), is why this hasn’t already happened, even in a lesser fashion. I’m sure that it would be far easier to write a spreadsheet in Flex than in AJAX, but why hasn’t anyone done it? I can vaguely remember some Java based productivity applications, but I cannot remember what happened to them. So, until I actually see a decent Office or Photoshop application written in Flex/Silverlight , I’m going to reserve my enthusiasm.

Part of the problem, I think (I’m in deep blind-hypothesis territory here), is that the companies sponsoring these platforms don’t eat their own dogfood. Why, if it’s possible to write even a 40% version of Photoshop in Flash, has Adobe not developed Photoshop-Lite already?

Flash and even Java seems to work great as embedded bits of traditional HTML/CSS/JS websites. They’re also great for distributing tiny pieces of content & functionality in the form of widgets. I think there’s enough opportunity and excitement in that space without having to hype up the potential of RIAs.

Challenges in the Design of Sponsored Search Auctions

If U running Internet-bisness, UR much liking this video. This veedio, it teaching how how adwords is working and all. If UR liking, putting vote no?

Am I Doing This For The Free Tickets ?

Hell, yeah! But my pal Clara’s team’s pitching “FindYourScene: A community website where people can find “their crowd” and post, discover, and rate social events.” And they really need me to have a few drinks and cheer for them.