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Chrome for Android...wow

noreply@blogger.com (steve) — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 14:10:29 PST

One site

Multiple Tabs

Syncs with your Desktop

Synced bookmarks

Some quick thoughts on Google Chrome for Android:

Awesome user experience. For a beta, it's incredibly polished. The animations on the Galaxy Nexus are smooth, and just beautiful. This is the mobile browser you want to look at. You can't see it in the stills, but when you dismiss tabs, they fly off the screen at an angle. Really slick.

The best execution of multiple tabs on a mobile browser I've seen.

It pre-fetches websites it thinks you want to read next - if you want it to. The default is not to do this on the mobile network. ( I wonder if it generates ad impressions for pre-fetched pages, or if they've created an API with Doubleclick to delay impressions somehow. )

When there are no tabs open, your recently closed tabs are there in a list.

According to html5test.com the browser implements 343 out of 475 of the necessary actions (compared to iOS5 Mobile Safari doing 305) and it does seem to render most websites better than anything else I've seen on a mobile device.

And it's fast. I'm sold.

It sure seems to me that the rate in which Android and its collection of apps and services are improving is faster than the rate in which iOS and its apps and services are improving. I personally find myself grabbing my Galaxy Nexus over any other phone about 90% of the time these days. My iPhone is getting jealous for sure.

Sharing Affiliate Links on Pinterest part of their model?

noreply@blogger.com (steve) — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 16:56:19 PST

I got an invite to Pinterest the other day, so I decided to play around with it to see what all the hubbub was about. The road is littered with web clipping services and bookmarking engines but this is the one that has seem to have found its niche, especially with the female demographic.

So I found a few guitars I liked, and pinned them up. To my surprise, I seemed to get some immediate engagement with people I neither followed nor followed me, which got me thinking...wow, what a perfect affiliate link vehicle.

So I decided it was worth a test. I found some pictures of camera bags I like, and generated some affiliate links for them via the Google Affiliate Network. I pinned them up.

Then I saw the related links:

and thought, wow, okay, so obviously someone else has thought of this too.

Accidentally or not, as it turns out there are a ton of affiliate links from GAN in Pinterest:

(unfortunately for whoever the original publisher was, most of the links are broken because of an encoding issue - the links on a lot of these products seem to have the ampersand URL encoded in the link so they don't work.

http://gan.doubleclick.net/gan_click?lid=41000613802215716&pubid=21000000000517668

)

My first thought was, wow, they're gonna get spammed, big time on this. But again, as it turns out they already know this.

This is from one of the boards in the search above. They've already detected that the links go to GAN and warn the user as such.

So smart, this is part of the plan. See how products convert on the affiliate networks, and then probably create their own affiliate network. I'm guessing that's their business model.

How does the MP3 album cost more than the CD?

noreply@blogger.com (steve) — Sun, 05 Feb 2012 17:38:31 PST

Really, how does this even happen? It seems nuts in this day and age that any MP3 album would cost $17.98 anyway, even if it is a double album. But for the CD to be less is even more ridiculous!

MacBook Air 11 inch vs 13 inch battery life

noreply@blogger.com (steve) — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 11:02:52 PST

A little over a year ago I wrote about how the battery life on my 13" MacBook Air was really great, a little over 6 hours when it was new. Plenty of juice to last a Chicago to San Francisco flight.

More recently I began using an 11" MacBook Air, to save a little weight in the backpack and to make it fit a little better on the airplane for those times when the person in front of you decides to recline their seat at full speed without warning, and thus crunching your laptop screen. (Karma would put such people in front of a 3 year old on their next flight who likes to kick the seat and open and close the tray the entire flight).

Now, this is not an apples to apples comparison because I have wifi on in flight versus not, but the 11" MacBook Air has a substantially weaker battery than the 13". At a 97% charge, I'm getting a 2 hour and 40 minute time, which I've found to be pretty accurate after a couple flights.

Dimming the keyboard after 5 seconds of inactivity gets me another 27 minutes. This gets me about what I need for a Eastbound flight from the West coast to Chicago, but not a Westbound flight where it's sometimes an hour longer.

Here's hoping that airlines that are good enough to have in-flight wifi will also consider providing power outlets. Actually, I need to read a few books an relax for the last hour anyway...

Motorola Xoom won't boot?

noreply@blogger.com (steve) — Sun, 29 Jan 2012 19:47:22 PST

My Motorola Xoom a few times has decided to just shut itself off and put itself in a state whereby pushing the power button will not turn it on.

The fix: hold down the power button and the "volume up" button for 3-4 seconds.

Not sure what causes this, but this always seems to fix it.

My New Relationship between Real-time Social Media and Sports

noreply@blogger.com (steve) — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 04:47:02 PST

Ah, the good old days....when I had enough time to watch college football most of Saturday, pro football most of Sunday, and could usually catch Monday Night Football to boot. You couldn't get soccer on cable back then, which left me enough time to study and get my degree.

Later on in life, we'd record games on DVR, and selectively watch later.

I came to realize today that now things are different. I pick up on subtle real-time social media clues and join in on games in progress. All the time.

Take, for instance, today:

Hmm...we might have a game. Let me turn that on.

and

Hmm...well, I don't really care that much about the NFL playoffs now that the Bears are nowhere in the picture, but I better turn this on right now!

Of course there are still games I watch whistle to whistle when I can plan ahead, but this is mostly how it goes.

And it's not like I'm feverishly studying social media instead of watching these games; it's become a form of ambient music playing in the background - multiplexed into the 10 other things I have going on in the day.

I can hardly wait until each of those examples above has a "click here to join the game in progress" - but I have a feeling it's not that far off.

I don't understand Caribou Coffee

noreply@blogger.com (steve) — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 13:09:31 PST

Caribou Coffee goes a long way toward giving you a comfortable cup of coffee. There's usually a lot of tables, free wi-fi, lots of comfy couches and chairs. And a nice fireplace, which is awesome in the Winter. The coffee itself is good, and there's a great assortment of interesting coffee drinks you could probably put an umbrella in if they were Polynesian themed instead of North Pole themed.

But here's what I don't get: Caribou's baked goods suck. They are all pretty much horrible. Why go to all this trouble to spend on this great interior and then have such a crappy collection of baked goods? It's like they are running a marathon against Starbucks and fell face first 10ft before the finish line.

HUDs for text and tweets

noreply@blogger.com (steve) — Wed, 02 Nov 2011 04:47:47 PDT

Yesterday, BMW announced that 3 Series cars are going to get full-color Heads Up Display (HUD) capabilities. I was first introduced to HUDs through military fighter F16 video games and often wondered why they weren't in more cars. I've seen them in a few cars to display the speedometer, but I can't recall which models.

With texting while driving quickly becoming illegal everywhere, I think the killer app for HUD would be displaying texts from your phone via Bluetooth, and just being able to press a button to speak a response. This would allow the driver to perhaps keep his or her eyes on the road and not be distracted by the incoming notifications.

I could also see functionality to pipe selected tweets, DMs, or email subject lines as well, though responding to such things would probably be more challenging.

The reality is, I see a lot of people texting while driving, sometimes at stoplights, but mostly going 65 miles per hour on the expressway, and that's kind of scary. But I have to admit, there are certainly many times I am waiting for a message and when my phone goes off, I pick it up and have a look. If I have to respond, I will pull over somewhere and respond.

I'm sure I'm not the first one to think of this but look for this feature to be built into applications in the next couple of years if HUDs roll out to more vehicles.

techmeme vs hacker news traffic (one data point)

noreply@blogger.com (steve) — Mon, 17 Oct 2011 08:59:30 PDT

This is neither here nor there and just one data point, but I have always found traffic patterns on the web interesting, so I'm posting this mostly for my own self interest.

I always just assumed it would be better to get a link on Techmeme over Hacker News but for this blog at least, it's not the case.

Looking at one post that got one of the "related links" on Techmeme and a post on Hacker News, Hacker News provided over 100X more traffic than the link on Techmeme. Remember your Calculus 101 - the total traffic is the area under the curve of these graphs, not the max(y).

micro view

Even if you zoom it out and look at two separate posts spanned out over a period of months, the first one which was a "first class" link from Techmeme, versus an entry in Hacker News, you see the same pattern. It's almost fractal.

macro view

What most non-Google employees don't understand about Steve Yegge's post

noreply@blogger.com (steve) — Wed, 12 Oct 2011 13:54:09 PDT

Steve Yegge of Google accidentally posted a great rant on Google not forcing its product teams to encapsulate functionality and expose all data and actions as APIs...essentially that Google internally does not use a Service Oriented Architecture.

This is totally true and while I agree it would have actually been a heck of a lot easier to integrate products in Google if they did (something I know a thing or two about) - having one big codebase and database also had the benefit of allowing engineers to really understand what was going on in other parts of Google and forced them to work in a distributed environment across offices.

The web will make a big deal about his post, but I think what most people don't get about his post is that you see posts like this almost every day at Google. At least once a week. I enjoyed seeking out the engineers, PMs, and the occasional sales person, who would take the time to write a well thought out, lucid essay on something that could be changed, made better, or simply challenging a management decision like de-staffing certain projects.

Generally, the Google culture would hash this out, and at times, when appropriate, the exec team would address it. Eric, Larry and Sergey were almost always aware of these things because they would get asked about them in TGIF (company wide weekly update meetings) and they'd usually have a reasonable response.

So enjoy reading this, as it will give you a peek into the Google culture from a freedom of expression point of view, but it's otherwise not a big deal.

It's still all about building a loyal audience

noreply@blogger.com (steve) — Mon, 10 Oct 2011 22:21:04 PDT

Recently, I've enjoyed reading Dan Frommer's SplatF, a somewhat self proclaimed experiment in self publishing. I enjoy reading Dan more on SplatF than I did at Business Insider (née SAI, which he helped create) because it's more stripped down and not quite as blatant in its page generation schemes such as those "Top 10" articles that force you to step through page by page (and thus generating 10 page views).

Stripped from this SAI framework, Dan's a really good writer and seems really efficient at coming up with thoughtful analysis of what's going on in tech - and recently he published a quarterly report, in which he details some observations of how it's going to far.

Will his experiment succeed? I'm not sure what the parameters are, but for me the question is really "can he succeed without resorting to backpedaling to all the revenue generation techniques of SAI". That is, can he succeed with catchy headlines, quality writing, and perhaps by inventing a new combination of techniques for how to monetize a blog.

I think the thing that grabbed me the most from his month-after and quarterly report is that in this post-RSS reading, social media world, he's still really concerned with building a long lasting audience.

Why?

Because a transient audience doesn't pay the bills.

Witness, he ditched Google AdSense after a couple months for Say Media placements because it didn't generate enough revenue. Well of course. AdSense has never been a great fit for the "intermediate blogger" that doesn't do product reviews or otherwise create content that's also good for search ads OR be really really large scale like Techcrunch or SAI. The Google Display tools for buyers are great at selling audience ads for large traffic pubs - not so good for small ones.

His traffic spikes are still coming from link-love from Daring Fireball and a few others, but with each of these spikes comes more Twitter followers. More Twitter followers means more clicks from Twitter and more importantly from repeat users. With 140 characters to work with, users have to click through, and I've already found myself clicking through from Twitter multiple times per day.

Repeat users means a loyal audience to understand and monetize by CPM. If he keeps it up, he will hit an infection point where these numbers all accelerate.

So maybe it's only surprising to me, but it's still about building a loyal audience.

See this blog in mosaic mode

noreply@blogger.com (steve) — Tue, 27 Sep 2011 19:06:48 PDT

Wow - this is really cool. Blogger added a dynamic view mode that allows the user to view a blog in a number of different ways. My favorite is "mosaic" today that I think can provide in a snapshot what a blog is all about. Blogger is just one example of how Google can breathe new life into a product by "rotating" it to a new team and it's great to see that they keep innovating on a product that's been around for so long.

Here's the link to this view: http://steveobd.blogspot.com/view/mosaic

but you can change it to one of the other dynamic views with the menu in the upper right.

So much for blogging regularly again

noreply@blogger.com (steve) — Sun, 18 Sep 2011 15:00:48 PDT

Yes, that's right. A post with no substance. Well almost no substance. There's many reasons that I haven't been blogging in "long form" for some time, but I owe it mostly to the "medium form" availability and engagement on Google+ where I guess this is my profile.

But I do have a few posts brewing so this space will not be intentionally left blank for long.

The Loudness War and Remasters (Rush - Moving Pictures)

noreply@blogger.com (steve) — Wed, 01 Jun 2011 20:38:36 PDT

Recently I've become fascinated by reading about the alleged "Loudness War" going on in the music industry, whereby every time a label issues a "remaster" they are essentially just making the recording louder and more compressed in addition to supposedly making it sound better.

In addition, I presume, to get suckers like me to buy my favorite albums again and again - the reasons listed for doing so is to actually get the songs to be mixed for the iPod - as loud as every new recording released today and downloaded from the iTunes Store so you don't have to mess with the volume switch and be audible outdoors with background noise mixed with the Apple ear buds.

I always assumed these remasters were for audiophiles, but apparently that isn't always the case.

One of the remasters I bought recently was Moving Pictures - Deluxe Edition [CD + Blu-ray], which also comes with a 96kHz/24-bit DVD or Blu-ray (two separate versions) so I thought I'd take a look for myself if this was the case.

I took the remastered version of Red Barchetta and compared it to an older version released on the Chronicles and lo and behold, it's louder!

Throwing both versions into Garage Band, it's pretty easy to compare both MP3s side by side as they both play.

Just looking at the volume meters, you can immediately see the difference. Now if you were born anywhere between 1965 and 1970, you probably spent a good bit of time recording LPs to cassettes, and in doing so, you would have had to fool with the levels so that those meters just barely ever went "into the red", otherwise you would end up with one distorted cassette tape. Basically you were doing the same thing as any sound engineer: make it as loud as possible without distorting it.

Original on top, remaster on bottom

Well, it turns out digital recordings on CDs and MP3s don't distort at the same frequencies as cassettes so you can indeed make them a little louder, but if you make them too loud, you have to start compressing, which is essentially throwing out the outliers on the highs and the lows.

Original

Remaster

These two clips are from the same part of the song (where Geddy Lee sings "Wind in my hair shifting and drifting...") and you can see how the signal is made as loud as possible going to the limits of the digital playback range in the remaster, and it gets nowhere close in the original version that was just dumped to CD way back when.

Here are some close ups from a few beats later.

Original

Remaster

So while I think this remaster sounds pretty darn good, especially the 24 bit versions, it certainly is louder. The drums do indeed sound a little "punchier" in the original master but with a good pair of headphones I'm not really hearing distortion.

I can't wait to look at a few more of these to see what the differences are.

Why Twitter should create their own ad network

noreply@blogger.com (steve) — Tue, 31 May 2011 11:04:10 PDT

In the past, I've written a little about why I think Twitter is primarily a protocol, and as we will continue to see innovative applications like Flipboard that make great use of this protocol, embedding links that can be rolled and unrolled to carry more than 140 characters.

Twitter is doing two things with this:

1) Writing their own applications such as the clients on the web, mobile clients on iOS and Android, and I believe a host of other clients for other devices that use the Twitter protocol in the way the company currently envisions their network being used

2) Providing an API for other application developers to create their own applications, that use Twitter data as well as data from other sources (such as Facebook, RSS, photos, videos) to create rich applications.

There's a limited number of #1s and lot of #2s. Though Twitter's own applications will always have a lot of traffic, I think we will see the number of applications in category #2 continue to increase as the ecosystem figures itself out.

There's a lot of speculation that Twitter will start to put ads directly into the stream based on what the user is interested in, placement of which will probably be based largely on which Twitter accounts the user follows. As twitter wraps more data to go through their own redirectors at t.co, I imagine it will also be based on what the user clicks on.

If you go to t.co it says:

Twitter uses the t.co domain as part of a service to protect users from harmful activity, to provide value for the developer ecosystem, and as a quality signal for surfacing relevant, interesting Tweets.

It's the last part that is most relevant. Remember, whenever anyone lists three reasons, the first two are just filler.

So, while I'm sure that Twitter will experiment with putting interest based ads into the stream, I'm somewhat less confident that direct response based advertisers will find the click through rates and conversion rates they would hope for there.

Brand and awareness advertisers may find more success here, but their usual medium is through display advertising such including rich media units with audio and video. Those type of units in-stream where the payload is 140 characters just don't make a lot of sense to the user experience.

Integrated advertising is certainly all the rage, but I think it's difficult to put integrated advertising into a protocol, especially when the applications that use the protocol are myriad and vary greatly in presentation.

I actually think the right approach in the end will be not to monetize the protocol, but the applications that use the protocol.

My hunch comes from looking at a lot of "in-stream" data over the years in RSS feeds that ran through the FeedBurner Ad Network and Google's AdSense for feeds products, which share some of the same characteristics from a user's point of view.

Performance of ads varies greatly from application to application and it's naive to think that a one size fits all approach in the stream is going to give user or advertisers exactly what they want.

A lot of this has to do with user intent at the time they are interacting with the content, as well as the mode and mobility of the user. So an ad you put in the stream better be different on the desktop than it is in the mobile client which must also be different in a third party application such as Flipboard if you want advertisers to keep coming back for more.

I think ads in the stream will just be part of the story.

So back to the title of this post which is "Why Twitter should create their own ad network" and what I mean by that.

I think for Twitter the right approach to monetization should be to look at all the different use cases of client applications that use the Twitter protocol, and build appropriate ad units for ALL those specific types of applications. They should of course use these units in their own applications but then also allow developers to embed the best ad unit for the developer's application with a revenue share.

So for instance, I would slice up the ecosystem into Web Stream Readers, Tablet Magazine Applications, Small Screen Phone apps, Television Applications, Vertical News Aggregators, Curation Applications, Photo Sharing Applications and everything else that the Twitter Business Development team has seen come through the office - and then build appropriate ad units for those applications with the right offerings for advertisers on the back end.

There should be something for mobile local transactional advertisers, as well brand display advertisers. but it shouldn't be one size fits all.

Specialized advertising networks always outperform generalized advertising networks. This is why at Google, each particular advertising product that exists in it's own medium and mode has it's own full time product manager (sometimes many!) whose job it is to analyze the specific data for their product and then tune and optimize the heck out of it with their engineering team(s) to optimize revenue and performance.

Twitter should organize the same way and on the back end of this all should be their own relevance engine, which uses all the available signals, such as the aforementioned list of subscription topics and click data, to create the best advertising product for each specific application use case.

There's nothing stopping a third party from creating this network, but I believe Twitter's strategy should be to simply create the best ad network that outperform's any potential competitor.

They are in the best position to be able to create this network as they have the most complete view of all the data and applications that are in the pipeline. Their own applications will serve as a proxy to performance for each type of unit, and then they will also have data signals from all their developer's applications that use the network.

If they can start to pump advertiser money back into the ecosystem, it will fuel development and innovation even further in that same ecosystem. Not to mention silence the pundits.

Streaming Netflix in the car

noreply@blogger.com (steve) — Sun, 29 May 2011 16:27:02 PDT

Fred Wilson posted today on the evolving model of using you mobile as your "primary" device, and this is the model his family uses for audio.

In fact, in my family we've been using this model for video for quite some time. Our Acura MDX has a DVD player and a screen for the kids to watch on their commute, and although for many years we primarily used the DVD player, more and more, we are now just plugging in an iPhone or iPad into the AUX jacks and playing video that way.

The key is this cable from Apple:

In fact, we've actually been using this to stream Netflix into the car as well. It works pretty well. Luckily I have a grandfathered unlimited AT&T data plan.

This same cable I carry with me when I travel as well. It plugs into most hotel TVs and provides a great way to use your mobile as your "primary."

No interest in the Nintendo 3DS in my house

noreply@blogger.com (steve) — Fri, 29 Apr 2011 06:37:30 PDT

I think it was Matt Shobe who first said to me a few days after the first iPhone came out something to the tune of "Wow, this is going to kill the Nintendo DS, my kids are playing Super Monkeyball non-stop."

I was a bit more skeptical. "Ah, there's no D-Pad, how far can the iPhone get with games without a D-Pad?" As a die-hard portable sports gamer who doesn't leave home without a way to play FIFA or NCAA, I couldn't see a virtual D-Pad ever providing the same tactile experience as a hardware button. At least I was right about that. Virtual D-Pads all suck. But I digress.

The Nintendo DS used to be a staple of every family vacation, long car ride, and even (gasp!) a restaurant trip with the kids where my wife and I wanted to enjoy some normal adult conversation.

But those days are long gone. I can't remember the last trip we took where we even packed a DS.

But curious as I always am about new products, I gave the Nintendo 3DS a good half hour or so of play at the Game Developers Conference this year, and just came away with. "eh, that makes me sick" - I couldn't play the 3D games.

On a recent trip to Target, the kids tried the 3DS for a couple minutes. I asked "What do you guys think? Is that something you want to put on your list?"

"It's cool, but nah - I want my own iPhone"

And that was that. The snackable, immediate gratification laden format of the games on the iPad and iPhone won the day, D-Pad or no D-Pad.

Note to gadget manufacturers: rules for designing chargers

noreply@blogger.com (steve) — Thu, 21 Apr 2011 22:25:31 PDT

Is anyone else getting tired of carrying 3 or 4 chargers around with them? I'm not an electrical engineer and I guess I'm not really talking about laptops here, but if you are a manufacturer creating a phone, tablet, or some other similarly sized gadget, I'd love to know why you would choose anything but Micro USB as your charging interface. I understand that some batteries are bigger than others. I understand that some batteries mothers are bigger than other batteries mothers....but surely this is a solvable problem.

Okay, if you are Apple, you have a bazillion other accessories that are already out there in consumers' hands that use your special iPhone connector pinout...and we all have an iPhone and probably an iPad charger...and ahem, why are those different? So that's okay.

If you are Sony, I will let it slide that you chose Mini USB before Micro USB was popular or existed and so the PS3 accessories and PSP (kinda) will charge with Mini USB. And I have a Mini to Micro USB adaptor. It's small enough to not be a bother.

If you aren't Sony or Apple, please make your device charge by Micro USB so I don't have to carry yet another charger. It's okay if it charges slower than a second dedicated power source, but just make it charge through Micro USB.

Android tablet manufacturers I am looking at you.

Hoping Larry Page says "Damn the torpedoes"

noreply@blogger.com (steve) — Sat, 16 Apr 2011 09:41:07 PDT

Wow, Ben Horowitz really nails it with his Peacetime CEO/Wartime CEO post. I think the first item in his litany about halfway down is amazingly salient:

Peacetime CEO knows that proper protocol leads to winning. Wartime CEO violates protocol in order to win.

and also

Peacetime CEO aims to expand the market. Wartime CEO aims to win the market.

Google has been at a distinct disadvantage in that everything they do is under the microscope. Google has deep pockets and people love to sue them when they mess up. Externally, they can never admit who a certain feature might be competing with or outflanking with things like competitive feature matrices in marketing material. Users have to figure that out for themselves.

While at Google, I worked on features in my products were never launched because lawyers were concerned about potential legal actions of their direct competitors, and there were times I was asked to reword or redact statements in interviews for fear of seeming too competitive. Meanwhile we had to watch as smaller competitors and launched the exact same features and make the exact same statements with impunity. The result is that instead of providing features the users want, features got watered down. It's the nature of the beast but it was truly a shame because the users lost, and Google lost users.

At the startups I have been involved with, the ones that have been the most successful (including FeedBurner) were the ones where the wartime strategy (redundant because most startups are always in wartime) was "we are going to crush competitor X and we are going to outflank competitor Y." There's no better way to pull a team together and motivate them than when you have a solid opponent to rally around and beat.

A reason I'm bullish on Larry Page being in command at Google is I think he will take more of a "damn the torpedoes" approach to some of these risks and actually compete publicly. He needs to be a wartime general and not a peacetime diplomat. At least that's what I want as a Google user.

The obligatory "I've moved on from Google" post

noreply@blogger.com (steve) — Thu, 14 Apr 2011 11:46:27 PDT

A little personal news - after a little over three and a half years from the sale of FeedBurner to Google, I have decided to move on - and left Google about two weeks ago. I've taken a few weeks off and have just gotten around to updating this blog with that news.

As I led the negotiations pre-sale and post-sale integration activities of merging FeedBurner into Google, and have always looked at Google as a place I liked and wanted to be, it was a difficult decision, but it was definitely time.

Most recently I had been working with the Mobile Display Advertising and AdMob team on their rich media strategy and implementation, and I'm glad I had the chance to work with that talented team, but I felt that was in a good place with some new product managers that joined the team, so the time was right to move on.

This will read like a lot of these blog posts - I have no regrets, and Google was an amazing place to work and learn. From a technologist's perspective, it's hard to imagine a place that can put more interesting pieces of technology in front of you on a daily basis than Google.

Mostly, though, I'll miss the collection of smart and talented people I had the chance to interact with on a daily basis. Watching how Susan Wojcicki, whom I had the pleasure of working for my entire time there, built and operated her team was a model for how any product executive should run business at Google's scale - and although she doesn't get enough credit for Google's success, I'm hoping her new role as the SVP of the Ads business unit will bring that. Bringing Product and Engineering together under one leader is the right thing to do in all these announced focus areas, in my opinion. It should have happened a long time ago.

What's next for me? I'm taking some time to figure that out with the many people I've met before, during, and after working at Google, while continuing to advise and invest in the startup community where I think I can offer value. I also have a few ideas of my own I'll be incubating.

I hope to finally have a little time to pick up the guitar again - music is something I spent countless hours on earlier in life but just dropped off for me around the time we started FeedBurner. And hopefully, I can write here a little more often - I have a ton to say about my experience with FeedBurner and Google that I think can help other entrepreneurs.

I'll post more news here when I have some!

One explanation on why Twitter wants to control the User Experience

noreply@blogger.com (steve) — Sun, 13 Mar 2011 22:47:34 PDT

"Those who don't know history are destined to repeat it." - Edmund Burke

Ryan Sarver recently posted to the Twitter API Announcements Group some new guidance for developers in what are and what are not good businesses for third party developers to be in when building on top of the Twitter platform along with some specific Terms of Service changes to their API. This has caused quite a bit of angst among their third-party developers. I've followed the debate and can see the positions on both sides.

However, it all caused me to think - why would Twitter announce this in the first place? Is there a plausible explanation beyond the fact that their investors are Venture Capitalists, not Venture Socialists?

This is all conjecture* but it would seem to me that you need to look no further than how a lack of consistent user experience in the RSS ecosystem hindered its wide scale consumer adoption.

First off, I can say with confidence that RSS is not dead. It's a nice bit of hyperbole and great for link bait, but it's not true. I've spent a good few years looking at the traffic graphs for both FeedBurner and Google Reader, and the traffic to and from RSS feeds continues to grow along with the growth of the internet. It's steady growth, and not necessarily hockeystick growth, but it is still getting bigger.

In fact, as confident as I am in proclaiming RSS still alive and now just a good part of the stack of internet infrastructure, I am also confident in admitting that RSS has never, and probably never will reach that fabled escape velocity, that mass consumer adoption that the early adopters and technorati hoped it would as a first class consumption technology.

Why?

There are surely many reasons for this but one reason that has always been apparent to me is that the user experience behind RSS subscription and consumption has always been remarkably inconsistent and fragmented. You might say it sucked. No one controlled it. Businesses like FeedBurner existed to try to help solve this problem, and although I am of the opinion that we certainly helped RSS gain adoption, we couldn't have every solved it because we didn't ultimately control it. I'm not saying we should have...no no no, don't misunderstand me there, but I'm saying it was ultimately an unsolvable problem by any one company in the ecosystem.

The user experience to me was a lot like exploring a Tokyo street - lots of mysteriously marked doors for which you have no idea what you might find behind them, minus the mystery and romanticism of being in Tokyo.

You had orange icons, blue icons, rss chicklets across many version numbers, Atom chicklets, feed count chicklets, "Subscribe" links for subscription, and then on the other side of the click you had raw xml, browser friendly stylesheets, direct links to feed readers, and if you happened to get Google, a page that asked you if you really meant to go iGoogle or Google Reader.

If you did manage to subscribe to a feed, you also would have a wildly inconsistent experience. You might just get links to headlines, you might get the full text of an article, you might get a summary of an article, and sometimes none of the above. You would get some amazingly professional and useful applications, and applications that were five lines of code greater than Hello World.

The technically inclined (this author included) who understood the power of choice, the openness of RSS was the greatest thing ever. We could install five different RSS readers for different purposes and spend hours exploring feed content using the myriad of tools and readers at our disposal. I still do this on a daily basis on mobile devices as new RSS capable applications pop into the iTunes Store and Android Market every day. It's awesome.

But for the hundreds of millions of other people out there on the internet, this was and is confusing. It was just never a dead simple enough experience for most users.

So why, in the position that it is in with its own platform, would Twitter not want to learn from the mistakes of the past and not try to do everything possible to make sure they can reach escape velocity to ensure their own longevity? Why not try to fix these problems of inconsistency and try the opposite of what didn't work by guiding both the user experience and the underlying protocol?

Twitter's user base has surely blown past the early adopters, and is on it's way to locking up celebrities and traditional media publishers, but for the monetization math to work, they still need to become ubiquitous and consistent on every device to end users. However they end up monetizing the platform, it's a classic x * y * z equation, where if x = publishers, y = advertisers, and z = end users, the number that is the most critical in this equation is z - because end users are also a subset of x for Twitter.

So they've decided to make it dead simple and consistent across all current and future consumption platforms to try to get widespread adoption. It doesn't sound that crazy to me. You go to a device manufacturer - say "here's the spec, build it" or "here's the implementation, embed it." And as a user moves from device to device it's all the same usage and verbiage.

I'm not really going to comment on the handling or messaging to third party developers here. As I said, I can see both sides.

Developers creating innovative applications on the platform are all a part of increasing that end user number. Historically though, creating vanilla RSS readers didn't turn out to be fantastic businesses either - so developers should probably look at the history there too and be driven toward developing something innovative anyway.

*Although I worked directly for Dick Costolo for over fifteen years across six or seven companies (depending on how you count them), I have never talked about this subject with him or any other Twitter employee.

Mobile Batteries and the Cloud: another rant

noreply@blogger.com (steve) — Wed, 16 Feb 2011 07:40:45 PST

To follow up on my last rant on the need for next-generation batteries, here was my use case this morning that ended in a huge failure.

As and aside, the Nexus S is winning me over in a big way. I'm finding about 90% of my dual-wielding phone life is being given to the Nexus S, and about 10% to my iPhone 4. Two months ago, these percentages were flipped. But I digress.

Today:

7:06 AM Unlplug Nexus S from the charger
7:10 AM Check some email
7:16 AM Walk out the door and fire up Rhapsody, listen to a streaming album over T-Mobile
7:18 AM Check some email, see battery meter is at about 90% already. Holy moley. Go look at the batter meter, I used Google Maps last night to find a destination, it has been running in the background chewing up battery. The app says it's been using 16% of the battery life. Hm.
7:34 AM Get on the train. Continue listening to another streaming album (Oasis - 'What's the story morning glory?' in case you were curious)
7:35 AM Turn off display and put Nexus S in my pocket.
8:30 AM Arrive at work, look at Nexus S - see less that 10% battery message, connect to charger. Look at Battery Meter. Rhapsody now using 16%, Maps using 10%.

So let me sum up here - doing nothing really but listening to streaming music, my battery lasted one hour and twenty-four minutes. One hour and twenty-four freaking minutes!

This is the promise of "The Cloud". The Holy Cloud. One hour and twenty-four minutes of Cloud.

So who is to blame here? Rhapsody? Google Maps? Android? T-Mobile? Samsung? My Klipsch headphones? They are unpowered headphones, are they drawing all the power?

Probably a combination of all, but I'm still saying Lithium Ion batteries aren't up to the task of how we want to use our mobile devices in the coming years.

ars technica ran a timely article yesterday called "What's the best way to use a Li-ion battery?" and essentially the advice is "always plug it into a charger whenever you can." You better just hope you are near one every hour and a half!

Nokia, farewell, until we meet again.

noreply@blogger.com (steve) — Mon, 07 Feb 2011 10:41:11 PST

Nokia, I tried. I used to love you. But now we've grown apart.

From my first time I held a 8890 Tri-band GSM on Voicestream in my hands I knew I loved you. As you got older I was with you through your awkward phase as a 3650 with that crazy round dial pad, through your slim times as a 6670, and your thicker days as an E70. You became a 3G world traveller as a 6680, the form in which I brought you with me to Japan all six times.

But I was lured away. First by the half-Swedish, half-Japanese bird Sony Ericsson. She photographed beautifully and played beautiful music. And later by a pair of California Girls both Brian Wilson and David Lee Roth could be proud of - Apple and Android.

But I never forgot you. I saw you reinvent yourself as the N8, and I had to see if we could make a go one more time. But it was not to be. When we got together this time after all these years, I immediately knew something had changed. Or maybe I changed and you didn't. It's not you, it's me. It wasn't to be. I hope we can still be friends, and I will always miss you.

Yep, last week, I was going to write a post that I was going to try to use a Nokia N8 for a week as phone and report back on what I found. But the truth was, I couldn't stand it. I lasted about 3-4 hours and and I popped the SIM out and put it right back into my Nexus S.

What specifically was the problem? It's hard to put my finger on it, but the whole user experience with Symbian^3 was just horrible. I'll try though.

User input. When you have the N8 in "landscape" mode, and you click on an input field, you get a keyboard like you might expect. However, when the phone is in "portrait" mode, which is generally how I operate a phone, you get a 1-9 dialpad and are expected to enter text using T9 or the tap-tap-tap method. In a text field. Sometimes it lets you rotate the phone once you've realized this mistake and other times it doesn't. Hm.
Accepting user input. And then when you are done typing in any case, the green check box which signals "ok, done, or go" is in the bottom left corner. For those of us who read left to right, you don't know how awkward this is until you try it.
Intrusive Alerts. Things like software updates aren't messaged to you in the background or totally passive like iOS, you get modal dialogs. This somewhat reminds me of the Adobe update alerts you get in Windows machines and it's bad, bad, bad.
Fonts. The Facebook and Twitter apps look pretty much like their Android counterparts, except the Fonts look like those of out a stock SUN Solaris install cerca 2004. Really difficult to read.
It's slow. For a top of the line flagship phone, the N8 feels really slow and non-responsive. It seems like this is more the OS than the phone itself, because things like videos play at pretty normal speeds.
Couldn't successfully setup email. I consider myself to be reasonably technical. It just would not connect to Gmail no matter how I tried.
The app store. There are actually some decent apps in the Ovi store. But there were lots of unexplained installation errors that have no explanation. After a few tries you just give up.

I really took for granted how the Apple user experience has shaped our expectations on mobile phones. Android isn't quite there yet, but the pace will get them there soon. The N8 feels like any other Nokia phone did five years ago. Maybe they spent too much time figuring out how to be a Camera Phone, instead of a Phone that happens to have a Camera.

I feel like this phone would work for the die hard Nokia fan that never experienced an iPhone. Someone who would rightly thing it's a better Nokia phone than the previous Nokia phones. Someone that one day will see what the best had to offer, and will feel duped.

To be clear, I'm being critical here, but it makes me a bit sad. There's some great hardware here, and in fact the camera on this phone rocks.

From what the press is reporting, this post is news to no one, including Nokia. I'm sure there's been more than a few internal meetings in the board rooms of Espoo on whether or not they should just make hardware and install Android or Windows 7. I look forward to seeing what happens with Nokia.

Until then, farewell. I hope we meet again someday when we're old and gray.

Next Up: Windows Mobile 7

Next Gen Batteries, where art thou?

noreply@blogger.com (steve) — Mon, 31 Jan 2011 06:33:19 PST

Three months ago I wrote this post on how much I loved my MacBook Air, largely because of it's 6 hour plus battery life. Now I sit here, not even 90 days later, and this same machine fully charged lasts under two and a half hours.

Before

After

Incredible bummer? Yes. Surprising? Not in the least. This is the third MacBook Air I've owned and none of the batteries in any of these machines can hold a decent charge anymore. I'm too lazy to go wait in the insane lines at the Apple Genius Bar to get these replaced.

But it's got me thinking about batteries in general, and how important they are to the ~~mobile~~ internet.

Really, batteries are the lynchpin to the future of the internet and our connected lives.

It's one technology that I haven't seen improve exponentially in my career so far. There's always a huge huge tradeoff in functionality of product versus battery life, and the consumer electronics industry needs to get past that.

I look at the best Android phones today like the Nexus S and see the same problem that's existed for years: A state of the art mobile phone can't make it 24 hours of normal use without a charge.

I think about working with mobile phones for the last ten plus years and things haven't really improved. In 2003 the Sony Ericsson P900 was introduced which was really a state of the art smartphone at the time, and its batteries would only last 12 hours or so per charge. It's the same now with the Nexus S. Why hasn't this improved?

Actually, I guess what I am saying is that I'm sure that the capabilities of these batteries have improved, but they've only kept pace with, not exceeded, the needs of the functionality increases of the devices. Brighter, more colorful screens, Wi-Fi, 3g/4g and Bluetooth all at the same time, faster processors - the demands of mobile devices have surely become more demanding as well.

What's difficult to know is how much of this "keeping pace" are hardware optimizations and how many are software optimizations. The first Wi-Fi phones put out by HTC were absolutely horrible at knowing when to use and not to use the radio, but OS releases throughout the life of those phones made things better without changing the hardware.

There are a ton of hacks like Tasker on Android that can make things a whole lot better, but these shouldn't be necessary. They are patches on the real problem: our batteries can't handle the "normal" use cases we need today for connected devices.

I actually have another post brewing about why I still use an iPhone as my primary device. To spoil that post, among other minor things, it's the battery. My iPhone can actually keep a charge for my entire waking day without plugging it into a charger. Sure, the tradeoff is that the multitasking is a bit weak but it's actually functional and not dead.

I could continue on with this litany of failed battery use cases and how we are patching it, and I'm sure everyone reading this has their own disappointing battery story to share as well. I see plenty of my colleagues carrying an extra battery with them and think that a replaceable battery is a feature - but I don't necessarily agree, and if I have to carry around an extra battery, what's the point of making a device as slim and lightweight as possible?

It seems to me there should be tons of VC money being poured into solving this hardware problem. Maybe there is, but I don't see it. There's money being spent on faster charging and other tangential solutions that perhaps gets us part way there, but doesn't seem to solve the real user issue.

I'm going to watch this space a little more and see what develops. Feel free to educate me if I'm off base here.

Rainbow over Breck

noreply@blogger.com (steve) — Sun, 16 Jan 2011 15:54:31 PST

Rainbow over Breck, originally uploaded by steveobd.

Kinda cool