First, an apology: like Seth Godin before me, I am learning the seductive power of continued riffing rather than taking the time to flesh out a new concept. So while bigger better ideas grow obsolete in unfinished txt files on my desktop, here’s more on Widgets and the larger phenomenon of the disintegrating Internet.
If you’re looking for quality content, skip this post.
Friend and swivel builder Huned sent over this great screenshot of Google search results for “drunk bitches.” Note the second listing.
Well, the NYTimes finally ran an article on Widgets, so it’s safe to say they’re hitting mainstream.
If you have a moment, check out the Banquet action sports website:
Alan sent me this link to Engadget’s review of Jobs’ Macworld keynote. Nothing new here for Macolytes, but I thought the email UI was very interesting.
To save space, they only display sender name and timestamp in the main message list; the message subject is bumped into the detail pane. This is a great example of feature prioritization, in terms of the UI and the audience. Apple is making great strides by targeting casual (non-business) users across their product line, rethinking commonly-accepted features that were originally designed to meet business users’ needs. Subject lines are very important in email-heavy business environments, but many personal emails are little more than Facebook-esque nudges, where subject lines are really only useful for identifying spam. A spam warning icon, though, might be useful…
In a previous post, Pete and I debated whether Kiva really was a valuable social service.
As it turns out, the masses have spoken, and they don’t like Kiva or prosper.com – instead, they prefer BURRITO PROJECT! Damnation! Why didn’t I realize that the handy, tasty obviously provides a far greater good to the world than complicated, boring, topics like “micro investments”. *Sigh* Kids.
A quick follow-up to my previous post on this topic: MediaPost surprised me by publishing a relevant summary of the debate over page views’ efficacy as a success metric in an increasingly Ajax-driven UI universe. The article includes a lot of links to other, more interesting commentators’ opinions on the topic. I particularly enjoyed Fred Wilson’s post on the topic, becuase he’s more interested the business implications than the geeky stuff.
First ebay came along and democratized commerce, created accountability on the web, and empowered thousands of small businesses.
Then Meetup showed up and got people out of their homes and into their neighborhoods. Activists, enthusiasts, and supporters found new voices and new support.
Today I discovered Kiva, which connects first world microlenders with entrepreneurs in developing countries. It looks like they’ve been around since 2005, but their current UI is squarely Web 2.0 (Widgets, social networking, soft color palette).
While gathering notes for an article on Internet marketing tactics for unfunded (and unfound) musicians, I turned up this great little rant on Mashable. With tech news ascendent in the public eye, some savvy geek-targeted marketing can create ripples throughout the larger media world.
Jeff recently forwarded me an article about Yahoo’s recent drop in page impressions as a result of implementing Ajax across their site. While this makes perfect sense to a technologist (Ajax is getting hype precisely because it allows users to access functions and content without full page loads), it spells a conundrum for less forward-thinking decision makers, like say, comScore.
Here’s the business thinker’s dilemma: when used appropriately, Ajax improves user experiences by speeding information retrieval and facilitating sophisticated interfaces. At the same time, it’s bad for Accounts Receivable if the company generates revenues from advertising, which is typical measured and invoiced based on page impressions (which are currently defined as full page loads). In a recent conversation with a prospective client, this same question came up: you’re not using too much Ajax are you? The fear wasn’t that we were going to scare away users with pointlessly advanced features but that we were going to provide a world of functionality in a single page impression.