I’ve moved a few relevant posts from this blog to the new one and have disabled comments here in order to keep all the discussion in one place.

Connect the dots from the green pin to the boxy thing

I never would have guessed that the best way to get something from Pennsylvania to Boston is through Tennessee. But then, geography was never my strong point.

(Memphis must be FedEx City.)

Here is where my expected experience completely deviated from the actual experience.

What I thought would happen is that Amazon would ship the other books right away and once the pre-ordered book became available, they would send that out. That’s how it works in regular stores – if something is available in-store, you can pay for that and walk out with it, but you can also pre-order something else at the same time and come get it when it becomes available. So I waited. A week went by and my books hadn’t arrived. Then another week went by. At this point, I got worried and logged back on to Amazon to see the status of my order. I was shocked to see that they hadn’t even shipped it yet! Apparently, they were holding back my entire order until the pre-ordered book became available.

While I understand that in order to save on shipping Amazon needs to combine orders into as few packages as possible, it was the last thing I would have expected that they would hold my entire order because one item was not available. It just doesn’t make sense. What Amazon should have done is one of three things:

1. Make it crystal clear that the order will not ship until the pre-ordered item is available.
2. Ship the available items right away and send the pre-ordered item when it’s available.
3. Don’t give customers the option to mix pre-ordered and available items in the same transaction.

While #2 is my preferred option, any of these would have been acceptable. As it was, I lost two weeks waiting for an order that didn’t come and then had to go through the trouble of canceling the entire order and re-purchasing the available items separately. Thankfully Confessions of a Public Speaker comes out next week and I’ll finally feel safe ordering it. And in the future, I’ll steer clear of Amazon’s “pre-order” system.

It’s been a couple of weeks since our round of usability tests at the SAP BusinessObjects User Conference (rolls right off the tongue, doesn’t it?) and I wanted to share a couple of thoughts about the experience. This was the first time we did usability tests since I joined the team back in March and it was also my first time meeting our community of users in person.

The first thing that struck me was the willingness of people who use Xcelsius to come and participate in the testing sessions. There were 13 sessions total, with room for one tester and one observer, and we had most of them filled before the conference even started. Our recruiters said they had people practically busting down the doors, trying to get into the sessions. This kind of support is exactly what we need in order to improve our product. For those who couldn’t make it, this is what it looked like:

The second thing that really impressed me was the quality of feedback we received. I have to admit, I was a little nervous going into these sessions because I know a lot of our users get frustrated with some of Xcelsius’ shortcomings. However, everyone that participated was very supportive and provided great constructive feedback. We learned a lot from watching people use the product – some of which we expected, and some that took us by surprise. Spending 13 hours looking at Xcelsius through the eyes of our customers was a very enlightening experience.

Finally, the thing I enjoyed most was meeting everyone in the Xcelsius user community in person. I follow many discussions online (including on LinkedIn, SDN, and Twitter) and it was very exciting to be able to put a face to the names of people I have come to respect through these discussions. I tried to meet as many people as I could, through lunches, networking events, the Xcelsius Community event, and the usability testing sessions. Through all of this I learned a lot about what people do with Xcelsius and their top concerns. There were two questions that I heard more than any others, though, and I’ll leave you with the answers here:

1. Q: When is the next version of Xcelsius coming out?

   A: Unfortunately, I can’t comment on that. All I can say is, “soon.”

2. Q: Are you related to Matt Lloyd?

   A: You know how some people are related by marriage? Well, Matt and I are related by product. Beyond that, there is no relation. It’s just an awesome last name.

Also, if you want to see photos from the Xcelsius Community event, you can find them on Flickr.

For example, say I’m thinking about buying a Kindle. I can go to Amazon.com and read through the 5000+ reviews. But what if I just want a summary? Amazon provides ratings, but that doesn’t tell me what I really want to know. In particular, what are the key things people are talking about? And how do they feel about them? Sure, I could copy/paste the URL into some tool and get the analysis, but that’s way too much work and I’ll probably forget about the tool when I need it anyway.

This is where Ubiquity comes in. Ubiquity is an add-on for Firefox that gives you the power to do more within your browser. For instance, you can select an address and immediately see a map. You can quickly shorten the URL you’re looking at so you can post it to Twitter. You can even tweet directly within the context of what you are reading. The beauty of Ubiquity is that it doesn’t interrupt your workflow to accomplish related tasks. You can read more about it here: http://labs.mozilla.com/ubiquity.

It’s easy to see that Ubiquity provides the perfect platform to incorporate the kind of analysis provided by OpenAmplify. It can expose the hidden information in a website that you otherwise could spend hours hunting down. This is where my Ubiquity command, “amplify”, comes in.

Here is how it works:

1. Go to any website, like the Kindle reviews page on Amazon.com.

   
   Kindle reviews on Amazon.com

2. Activate Ubiquity (Alt+Space) and execute the “amplify” command.

   
   Results of the “amplify” Ubiquity command

That’s it. You don’t need to open a new window, launch an external tool, or do any keyword searching. You get the sentiment analysis right in context, and that can reveal interesting insights.

So, how do you get this set up on your computer? It’s easy:

1. Install Firefox.
2. Install the Ubiquity add-on for Firefox.
3. Subscribe to my “amplify” command feed.

Here are some ideas (besides my Kindle example above) to try out once you have the command installed:

• Amplify CNN.com and compare it to FoxNews.com.
• Open up an e-mail in Gmail, select the text, and Amplify it.
• Go to your favorite blog and Amplify it.

Any other ideas for this type of sentiment analysis? Please share in the comments.

I recently learned about OpenAmplify, a web service that uses Natural Language Processing (NLP) to extract meaning from text. I’m very familiar with NLP because I’ve worked on the Text Analysis team at SAP (previously with Inxight Software), so I was very interested to see OpenAmplify provide this capability for free and online. It’s the first such service that I’ve heard of and I wanted to try it out.

So, I put together a little demo using Twitter and Xcelsius, the product I’m currently working on. Here’s how it works:

1. Twitter supplies the data.
2. OpenAmplify analyzes it for semantic content.
3. Xcelsius displays the data.

Try it out for yourself. (Note: Only single-word keywords will work right now.)

Those who are geekily-inclined can continue reading for the “how.” The rest of you can stop reading now.

Getting this set up was actually really easy and quick. Both Twitter’s and OpenAmplify’s APIs are easy to use and easy to connect. Here is what an OpenAmplify API call looks like when using Twitter as the data source:

http://portaltnx.openamplify.com/AmplifyWeb/AmplifyThis?apiKey=[your API key]&sourceURL=http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?q=[keyword]

To get this into Xcelsius, you first need to create an XML map to that URL in your Excel spreadsheet. Then, you set up the XML Map connection and with a little concatenation, link the URL to a cell that inserts the keyword at the end. (Feel free to e-mail me if you have questions about how to get this working.)

That’s all there is to it. Seriously.

In terms of functionality, I think OpenAmplify is rather limited. In their “About” page, they claim that OpenAmplify “identifies the significant topics, brands, people, perspectives, emotions, actions and timescales.” While that’s probably true, it would be nice to see the data by type (e.g., who are the people? what are the perspectives? what are the emotions?). As it is, you just get a list of “topics” and “actions” with ratings for polarity (positive, negative, or neutral). It would also be nice to get the supporting evidence that shows why each topic got the rating it got as a list of all the positive statements and all the negative statements. The style analysis (“slang” and “flamboyance”) might be fun, but I have a hard time imagining real uses for it. The demographics data, on the other hand, is very useful and I’m glad the OpenAmplify team says they will focus more on this in the future.

The latest release of OpenAmplify seems to have some good improvements in it, including performance improvements and the addition of “intentions” (what are people doing or intend to to). Just note that if you want to use the latest release, you actually have to use a different base URL for your API call:

http://portaltnx.openamplify.com/AmplifyWeb_V11/

rather than

http://portaltnx.openamplify.com/AmplifyWeb/

[A note for any OpenAmplify folks who may be reading this: You might want to update your documentation to point to the latest release URL. Not everyone reads your blog.]

I did not use this latest release because I wasn’t aware of the difference in URLs, but I’ll try to upgrade to it in the future and see how it works.

Overall, I am impressed with OpenAmplify for two reasons. One, it provides a valuable service for free, and two, it uses a community model. Rather than building applications themselves, the OpenAmplify team provides the tools for other people to do it. This can be very powerful, as demonstrated by Apple’s App Store, and I hope it takes off for natural language processing as well. Twitter seems to be a popular choice for analysis at the moment, but I’m really interested to see what other applications people find for OpenAmplify and NLP. I think there is a lot of potential here.

UPDATE: This little app was blogged by OpenAmplify!

Clearly identifying a bill’s due date when the user is scheduling a payment.

Citibank’s calendar widget clearly indicates when the next payment is due.

Bad Idea

Telling the user to remember a bill’s due date while scheduling a payment.

ECSI’s student loan bill pay options require you to know your bill’s due date. Note the two notes. Also note that the due date does not appear anywhere else on this form.

Read more on Opinion Road »

The new Wolfram|Alpha “computational knowledge engine” is the coolest thing I’ve seen in a long while. My first impression was that this was just a big fancy calculator to help people solve NP-complete problems and complex differential equations and whatnot. Not that this wouldn’t be impressive in its own right, but it’s not exactly something I would use (though I could have used it back in college, when I was smart). The really cool thing about Worlfram|Alpha, though, is that it has a myriad of possible uses.

Read more on Opinion Road »

Taken at the "Importance of Presence in Presentations" session at the
UPA Boston Mini Conference.