At first I was fairly frustrated, but then I realized that the current Kindle product is really only intended for a fairly limited set of use cases and target users. The problem is that when people hear the words “e-book”, the first thing that comes to mind is “electronic version of the printed book”. The kindle is definitely not about to fully replace the printed book, but what “Amazon Kindle” means right now in terms of “value” is “Most recent hardcover releases available at $9.99 in electronic format, saving you $10+ over the book’s print list price.”

The Kindle’s persistent keyboard, which is one of the most incongruous features that people notice about it, could perhaps be explained by the Palm roots of several members of the Lab 126 team. (Lab 126 is the secretive Amazon company in Cupertino which designed the original Kindle, and Kindle 2. Looks like they’re having a growth spurt as Amazon continues to invest in Kindle development.)

So what’s missing from the World of Kindle?

1. The Kindle “Product Petting Zoo“

The Apple Retail Stores have done a tremendous job of evangelizing and promoting Apple’s products, while also providing customer education, troubleshooting, and instant (or near-instant) replacement of defective products. The power of this approach became apparent to me not long after the iPhone launch, when I headed into an Apple Store and saw two tables packed with people trying with the iPhones set out for people to take for a “test drive”. Those tables full of people could only help to close a sale.

When I recently took my Kindle with me on vacation, I was out in the sun reading a book on my Kindle. People would come over, ask me “Is that the Amazon Kindle? I’ve never seen one before…”, check out the Kindle, hear my thoughts on the gadget, and then would end up saying “I’ll probably go order one when I get home.” If they could have walked down the street and immediately bought one at the Apple Store, some of them probably would have.

But without their retail stores (and they definitely don’t have enough consumer electronics products on the market to justify their own stores) , what can Amazon do? Barnes and Noble, Borders, and other booksellers wouldn’t be interested in putting out a display of a device which undermines their future book sales, even if they do get a cut of the $270 purchase price. Which brings us to….

2. The Kindle and public libraries

This is a natural fit for so many reasons. If Amazon was able to give a single Kindle to every public library in America (a total of 123,129 libraries in 2009 according to the ALA), with access to all of the Kindle catalog of books for free, they could spark a huge amount of demand among patrons to use the device in the library or check it out and try at home.

One library tried this very experiment, which was embraced enthusiastically by the library’s patrons. “The [Kindle] units are never in the building unless they are waiting to be picked up…nothing but positive” feedback according to a March 2009 ALA article quoting the library’s assistant director.

3. Rich APIs for developers

Amazon does have their Digital Text Platform, which allows authors to self-publish books on Amazon via a web form. This is a simple platform for publishing books in the Kindle Store, which allows anyone to upload their own PDF or text file and make it available for sale (albeit under Amazon’s somewhat murky pricing policy, which apparently gives authors only 35% of the list price of their book [regardless of any discounts Amazon may offer in the Kindle Store]).

However, this is the same company that built web service powerhouses like EC2 and S3. They can offer more, and deeper integration into existing publishing systems. By offering a rich API for their Kindle publishing system, Amazon could allow other publishing systems to make it easy for their users to sell content within the Kindle Store. Imagine if web publishing systems like Derek Powazek’s MagCloud or Blurb.com had a 1-click “Publish this book for sale on the Kindle Store” option. This could be a great pipeline to bring more indie content into the Kindle Store.

4. The “iTunes for books” Kindle desktop application

The reason Amazon started with a Internet/cloud based perspective on books is the same reason that Apple started on the desktop — it’s the environment that they’ve already been developing in, and know the best. Speculation has already begun on Kindle for the Desktop, and it only makes sense that Amazon would do the same. iTunes was where Apple began their control of the online music space, and at some point Amazon will have to enter onto the desktop as well.

By having a simple desktop application that supported all of the same document formats as the Amazon Kindle (Kindle, PDF, TXT, Audible, Mobipocket, PRC), Amazon could allow you to organize your e-books on your computer. Supporting the same type of last-page-read synchronization that already exists between the Amazon Kindle and the Kindle iPhone app would make the reading process even more transparent as the user moves between platforms to read books.

5. Embracing the indie authors

Steve Jobs did a great job of reaching out to the indie music labels early on in the development of the iTunes Store, and Amazon would wise to do the same with micropublishers. I’ve seen a few examples of how micropublishing has started to succeed — the book Four Steps to the Epiphany has been cropping up a lot on the blogs and desks of my colleagues who help shape the future of the web. The publisher of this well-reviewed, $40 book? Cafepress.com. The notion of what a “publisher” does is changing fast, and Amazon could be on the leading edge of publishing if they continue to aggressively evolve their Kindle platform.

Naturally, I went to iTunes, checked for the movie, and indeed it was available in the store. However, while the overall ratings for the movie itself were high, all of the top-rated reviews had user frustration and warnings in them:

“BOOOOOO! DUBBED. Watch Out.”
“Dubbed?! iTunes is kidding, right?!”
“PLEASE PUT THE REAL SWEDISH VERSION UP!!”

Now those are some frustrated customers.

As any good fan of foreign films (or kung-fu movies) knows, dubbing can really ruin the experience of a great foreign-language film. Subtitles are definitely the way to go. I first assumed that there’s no way that Apple would ruin the experience of a great foreign-language film by deliberately dubbing it, so is the lack of multiple-language tracks and multiple-language subtitles a technological limitation affecting movies sold in the iTunes Store or the Quicktime platform?

Not only does iTunes, the iTunes Store, and Quicktime support both of these features, but to my surprise, Steve Jobs was such a fan of these features that he demonstrated them at the MacWorld 2008 keynote (a brief subtitles / multiple languages movie example starts at 19:25). But it seems that to the disappointment of the diverse communities that enjoy subtitles in their movies, which ranges from foreign-language film fans, to the needs of the hearing-impaired, to people who just need to mute the movie’s audio and still follow the storyline, the number of movies in the iTunes Store that have subtitles available is extremely low. Here’s a quick survey of 3 genres in the iTunes Store, which I reviewed by using the Browse button in the iTunes store and looking for the “CC” logo:

Action & Adventure: 24 (out of 1,047 movies)
Classics: 2 (out of 127 movies)
Foreign: 0 (out of 64 movies)

Here’s a older screenshot demonstrating the state of subtitles in movies available in the iTunes Store — it hasn’t gotten much better as of the date of this blog post.

On top of this, the movie Let The Right One In was produced by Magnolia Pictures, which is owned by Mark Cuban, who sold Broadcast.com to my alma mater, Yahoo! for several billion dollars back in the Web 1.0 era. Mark and his team at AudioNet/Broadcast.com were some of the early pioneers in streaming media, and Mark is someone who firmly has his eye on the future of media.

Since I’ve given up Cable TV, Netflix, DVD rentals, and most other traditional video distribution channels in favor of the iTunes Store, I’m a serious customer and proponent of the iTunes Store, and in general it offers me a great user experience as a consumer. It’s replaced my old TiVo for being the place that I head to for acquiring archived content that I can watch offline (and lately I’ve been hearing an increasing roar of buzz that installing Boxee on my Apple TV is the way to go for watching free streaming web content).

That’s exactly why this issue seems so jarring to me — adding multiple language and subtitle support to and iTunes Store movie should be just an issue of encoding additional closed-captioning data and alternate audio track data from the DVD or other source material, and the studios are already (in many cases) used to providing this content to DVD manufacturers.

This one of the my favorite value propositions of digital media: It gives consumers the freedom to download once, and then choose when they want to watch their content, what device they want to watch it on, and how they’d like to view it — dubbed, with subtitles, with endless commentary by the creators, or just in its original format as the directors intended.

So why ARE subtitles and alternate language tracks missing from so many iTunes Store movies — is it the studios or Apple responsible for this data not being present in the movies that they’re selling?

Both the client and their existing engineering team were receptive to the change, and the product was pre-release with a goal of a public Alpha release. Agile process gave management the flexiblity they were looking for, while giving the engineers a more predictable development pipeline to plan their work against.

Our challenges in moving to Agile and Scrum were:

1. The teams were distributed between Northern California, Texas, and India.
2. Management was extremely date-focused (they had been using MS Project as their previous weekly product dashboard), and needed the ability to easily play “what-if” games with changing features and dates.
3. Management needed a high degree of visibility into the current product pipeline, but needed to delegate change to a formal set of Product Owners.

Point #1 above meant that we would have to use an online tool to share user stories and plan our sprints, instead of the traditional set of note cards with user stories written on them.

We looked at several tools, including Scrum Ninja (from our friends at Internaut), VersionOne (I still can’t understand why they force registration to view their intro movie!), and Pivotal Tracker (from the good people at Pivotal Labs).

Pivotal Tracker clearly stood out as our favorite choice after a careful review of the tools. Their clear Pivotal Tracker introduction screencast was a handy way to introduce management to the what-if games, in addition to giving a quick overview into how to use the tool.

Within a week of deciding on the tool, we were up and running with our first sprint the following week, and thanks to the diligence of the whole team, the stories scheduled for the initial sprint were delivered. Our distributed team has quickly taken to the tool, and Microsoft Project documents are now a thing of the past.

The one caveat I have with Pivotal Tracker is that the bug tracking doesn’t appear to be as robust as some of the other solutions out there (such as FogBugz), especially since it doesn’t tie in bugs to specific code check-ins. But it’s nice to have at least bug references built into the system, so we can assign major bug fixes to specific sprints.

Pivotal Tracker gets an A- from us as a great software development project management tool.

A quick scan of the email headers revealed that it came from “trakken.google.com”, with the User-Agent string of “Neotonic Trakken/inject_gmr-2.58.4″. Trakken is the name of the CRM software that Google acquired when they bought David Jeske’s startup, NeoTonic Software.

It’s heartening to see that besides getting a great engineer (David and I overlapped briefly at Yahoo, and I was impressed with his talents after a brief meeting), Google is still realizing value from Trakken several years later (and I hear David has done some amazing work over there as well).

Smart acquisition tactics.

I’ve been an avid reader my entire life, and have been fascinated both by the promise of electronic books, and the amazing slowness at which they have actually evolved. E-Book readers have been around since Sony introduced the Bookman in 1991.

While I was intrigued by the Kindle’s debut, I kept in mind the many attempts to enter the E-Book market over the last 18 years, and didn’t buy one during the initial (and somewhat underwhelming) release. However, when the Kindle 2 was introduced, I was impressed by Jeff Bezos’ continued commitment to the e-book space, and I decided to dive in and try out the Kindle 2.

Overall, I’ve been impressed by the product. It Just Works. It’s easier for me to haul around more books, and I never have to think about which books I’m taking out with me. The battery rarely needs charging, and the latest editions of newspapers are automatically delivered to it as soon as they hit the presses. I’ve heard a growing buzz around the device from people I know in San Francisco, which means that they’re getting some traction from early adopters.

However, there are still a number of shortcomings with the Kindle as a product, and with Amazon’s current e-book strategy. I’ll point out a few of the current ones here:

1. I already own books.

I’ve built a wonderful library of books over the years. Now I’m supposed to buy every book on Amazon again? It’s just not feasible. And unlike the original iTunes Store, where the store was layered on top of my already-available library of MP3 content, the purchased Kindle store content is the only content available (without e-mailing PDF documents to my Kindle, a fairly odd process that would be better handled by a web-based “upload to my Kindle” system.) I suspect that Amazon’s long-awaited Kindle book viewer software application will include Amazon’s first take at an “iTunes for books”, which will include improved conversion and upload functions for Kindle hardware owners.

At the least, Amazon needs to provide free Kindle editions to me of all books I’ve bought from Amazon, or that I can prove ownership of through an MP3.com Beam-It system (remember that product before it was sued out of existence?) for books. Even better, there should be a consumer book scanning company (think ripstyles for books) to convert my home library to Kindle format. (God help us if we have to build our own book scanners.)

In the meantime, I’m keeping my purchases mostly to newspapers, where I’m quite happy to pay for a digital paper given the value I receive from the newspapers I read regularly.

2. DRM is so 1999.

Seriously, Amazon? Given that you control the system for loading books onto the Kindle, it would be fairly trivial to hide or obfuscate the individual books stored on the Kindle so they can’t be easily copied to the user’s computer. As far as I can tell, DRM on the Kindle format does is keep other companies from supporting the Kindle’s book format.

Amazon should have used its negotiating power to get publishers to put out content without the DRM.

3. Usability is good, not great.

Jakob Neilsen has done an excellent usability analysis of the Kindle 2, so I’ll just add a few of my own notes here.

The e-ink screen, while much better for reading than a backlit color LCD screen, still feels a bit like reading your books on an Etch-a-Sketch. There’s something that feels a little too “computer screen” about it, especially when I set it next to even the cheapest paperback book and compare ease-of-reading experiences.

The keyboard feels confusing — I rarely need to “search” a book, I usually do my reading in a linear manner. This feature would be better delivered as a slide-out keyboard or touch-screen keyboard.

4. Book covers are a lost branding opportunity.

One of the great built-in marketing systems for books are their covers — people see what you’re reading and they can note it down for themselves, ask you about it, use it as an excuse to strike up a flirtatious conversation, whatever.

The leather kindle book covers look great, but they don’t tell the world a single word about what I’m reading.

5. Where are the libraries?

The iTunes Store has successfully convinced users that they should pay near-CD prices for music that they cannot resell, and it looks like this expectation has already been set successfully for Kindle users with hardly any debate.

But libraries are another matter. These institutions play vital roles in learning and the community, and it is overdue to have them included in this platform. Imagine being able to access the Library of Congress, or the catalog of your local library branch, from Whispernet! There is a huge opportunity here that Amazon is missing — Kindle for Libraries could be one of the items that pushes the Kindle towards being the e-book standard. As it is, the libraries are already figuring out for themselves how to integrate the Kindle into their borrowing communities, and Amazon seems confused about how to leverage the powerful distribution channel of the local library.

If Amazon wants the Kindle to be the e-book standard, they need to pay  careful attention to how they fit into the current book ecosystem. They’re moving in the right direction, but they need to be making overtures to libraries and existing bibliophiles to show them the path towards the Kindle augmenting (and eventually replacing) their existing paper libraries.

Built with Brent Fitzgerald from Taco Lab, our product aggregates the travel advisories from the U.S. Department of State, Canadian Foreign Affairs Department, Australia Smart Traveler, and New Zealand Safe Travel. We normalize and average out the data, creating an overall risk rating for the country, in addition to providing the ratings given by each country as well.

The idea for this product came during my around-the-world trip, when I was looking for a site that provides this data but couldn’t a site that aggregated this data in an easy-to-read format. So we solved the problem by building the site and putting it out there for everyone else to use. It’s a very simple Ruby on Rails site, and for all of you mashup geeks, we’ll have XML APIs for coming soon for all the travel advisory data.

Our goal is to provide more transparency to the travel advisory system and provide a 1-stop website for users interested in the current advisory status for a specific country. We WANT people to travel, and we’re definitely not trying to discourage people from traveling, just to make it easy to discover the travel advisory information thats already been published.

So give it a try! Check out some random countries, or take a look to find out the average opinion about whether it’s safe to visit South Africa or safe to visit Mozambique, two countries that I’m headed to later this month!

As the site footer says, “Keep traveling”. If you have any feedback on the product, we’d love to hear your opinion in our forums on Get Satisfaction.

A unique set of “popular tags”

Evidently some of the Thorn Tree users have learned how to game their tag cloud. And the Lonely Planet staff maintaining the Thorn Tree site have somehow missed this hilarious collection of tags… not to mention the fact that there are hardly any relevant tags being displayed besides the humorous ones.

What can you learn from this experience?

1. Don’t add features without knowing WHY.

This Tag Cloud feature was probably added as part of a misguided effort to add standard Web 2.0 functionality, without having a strong use case to back up the feature. Instead of just dropping extra features into your product plans, have your site functionality be driven by user stories which fulfill the goals of your target audience.

2. Be actively involved with your product and your community.

You’ve got to live the product. This means being in close touch with your community, using the product on a daily basis, and actively participating in the site. You should spot trends like these as they’re emerging, and address them. It certainly appears that the Thorn Tree users did… months ago. Where is the Chief Community Officer at Lonely Planet?

3. Keep shipping new features, iterating, and evolving.

The Thorn Tree could definitely benefit from a continued evolution of the site. (From my perspective as an occasional user, they seem to go large updates rather than little ones.) Little-used (or abused) features like the Tag Cloud should get removed, and new features need to be added. There is a tremendous amount of momentum and activity on the Thorn Tree message boards, and adding a series of user-inspired features could go along way towards ensuring that the Thorn Tree continues to be the main discussion forum for independent travelers.

Web standards issues aside, one key reason to keep using the heading tags is to optimize your page to be a search engine crawlable as possible. The Trif3cta blog has an excellent article on how to apply page heading tags for SEO, which reviews a series of cases on how to apply page heading tags to a webpage. I highly recommend reading this article in detail for suggestions on how to handle different cases where you’d need to use page heading tags.

A few key points to keep in mind:

• Use <h1> for the main content title on your page (ie. for your homepage, your site name is the <h1> content. For your news section page, the news section page title would be the <h1> content. And for a news article, the article title would be the <h1> content.)
• Use <h2>, <h3>, and so forth, to call out logical subheadings on a page.
• Try to only use <h1> once a page.
• Don’t skip header levels (ie. don’t only have <h1> and <h3> tags on a page without any <h2> tags).

One of the (many) great things about RoR is that it gets you up and running quickly, but one thing that you need to still do manually is to plan out a set of clearly readable “friendly” URLs for your website structure. (There are volumes of debate on how importnat the second item is, but I’ll leave finding those as an exercise for the reader.)

Search engines use a combination of URL, page title, and page content to index content on a site. Having clear URL structure will significantly impact the ranking of content in search results.

Here are some simple suggestions of how to structure your own site URLs. I thought I’d share them with you and save you paying me my consulting fees just to learn something that everyone should know.

HOMEPAGE

Should always be linked to as ”/” (so the homepage URL would always be “http://www.downtempo.net/” and never “index.htm” or “http://www.downtempo.net/page/2”).

TOP-LEVEL PAGES

Should always be linked to as the section title, using dashes or underscores instead of spaces. Use short, descriptive names that either match or are a derivative of the page title (ie. a page titled “The People of Downtempo” would get a url of “/people/”)

For example, the top-level page URLs on the Downtempo site are:

http://www.downtempo.net/work/
http://www.downtempo.net/process/
http://www.downtempo.net/people/
http://www.dowtempo.net/blog/

SECOND-LEVEL PAGES

Second-level pages (sub-sections) should always be linked to as an abbreviated form of the second-level title, using dashes or underscores instead of spaces.

For example, if i had a news section on the people site, and i had it broken down by subsections called “Featured News”, “News from Partners”, “Press Releases”, and “News of the Weird”, my URL structure should look like this:

http://www.downtempo.net/news/featured/
http://www.downtempo.net/news/partners/
http://www.downtempo.net/news/pr/
http://www.downtempo.net/news/weird/

THIRD-LEVEL PAGES

Third-level pages (ie. specific articles or images) should always be linked to with the full title of the article or image in the url, using underscores (or dashes, depending on your personal preference, it doesn’t make a difference with regards to SEO) instead of spaces, and removing any non-URL-compliant characters (ie. don’t urlencode characters like quotes ” just strip them out).

NOTE: If the user later changes the title of an article or image, this should NOT change the URL. This gets set only once, when the article/image is first created (although you may want to have a special override in later for cases where they REALLY want to change this—a lot of blogging platforms have this feature).

all URLs should always be less than 255 characters to avoid problems with some spiders and web form fields (they might want to use a URL as their IM status, for example).

A few examples of how to apply these guidelines:

1.) A news article article at “http://www.somenewssite.com/news_item/2″ should have this URL instead:
“http://www.somenewssite.com/news/article/bush_announces_unprecedented_step_to_address_financial_crisis”

2.) The press release at “http://www.somecompany.com/releases/2008/10342.html” should have this URL instead:
“http://www.somecompany.com/news/pr/revenue_grows_100_percent_over_last_quarter”

3.) The image at “http://www.somephotosite.com/image_set/2″ should have this URL instead: “http://www.somephotosite.com/photos/sutro_tower_in_the_fog”

Using an XML sitemap will help ensure:
1.) All site pages are crawled and indexed.
2.) Frequently-updated site pages are crawled more often.
3.) New site pages are quickly indexed.

The standard XML sitemap structure is available at http://www.sitemaps.org/protocol.php - for an example of a sitemap that i used with my travel blog, see http://www.goneliving.com/sitemap.xml.

I recommend posting the sitemap at the standard filename (sitemap.xml) and location (your website’s root directory), so your website’s sitemap would live at “http://www.yoursitename.com/sitemap.xml”.

The sitemap should contain URLs to every page on the website, which means that it would need to be automatically updated by your website CMS every time a new page is added to the system (or manually updated if you don’t have a CMS).

When you’re ready to submit your sitemap to Google, you can submit it at http://www.google.com/webmasters/. it will also give you valuable feedback about how pages are ranked at Google from the site, and also let you know of any 404s or other problems with the sitemap. (Note that Yahoo! has a similar product with Yahoo! Site Explorer, available at https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com)

To ensure autodiscovery of your sitemap from all search engines (like Ask, MSN Live Search, and so forth), you need to add this line to your website’s robots.txt file:

Sitemap: http://www.yoursitegoeshere.com/sitemap.xml


And you’re done! You’ll see an improvement in how your website is indexed, and get a lot of valuable data from products like Webmaster Tools and Site Exporer.