OraNA :: Web 2.0

Say it Ain’t So Rich, a Palm Pre?

Jake — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 18:03:20 PST

Rich (@rmanalan), a borderline Apple fanboi, told me just weeks ago when I was contemplating my iPhone dilemma, that he’d never give up his iPhone. They’d have to pry it from his cold, dead fingers.

Apparently, Rich died, and his alien leaders haven’t done their homework because he told me yesterday he had given his iPhone to his wife and was currently rocking a Palm Pre.

I nearly rolled off the exercise ball I use as a chair.

What happened?

He assured me it wasn’t an alien invasion, but I was expecting that. Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition.

So, we chatted a bit about the device and what he liked about it. I’m actually pretty familiar with the Palm Pre and its (very few) apologists, since I have friend (@unclenate) whom I like to tease about his Pre fanboi-ism.

It’s actually a pretty slick device, and if there weren’t an iPhone, it would give the Android devices a run for their money.

I’m not by any means a Palm hater either. I had one of the first 3Com-branded PalmPilots way back in the day. I probably still have it in a box somewhere in the basement.

The PalmPilot was the iPhone of the mid-to-late 90s. It allowed you to carry your calendar, to-dos, contacts and more all in a pocket-sized device. Plus, it even had add-on apps. It was way ahead of its time, and only the Blackberry could rival its coolness and popularity (at least among business types) during its heyday.

I eventually upgraded to the sleekier Palm V, which had a nice brushed aluminum bezel, but no major feature updates on the OS side. That one, I think got sold in a garage sale some years ago.

Even after I stopped using the device, I held on to Palm Desktop as my calendar app until a few years ago. Force of habit.

My wife’s first (second and third) smartphones were all Treos, which she adored, until the iPhone came along.

So, I’ve definitely given Palm a chance.

If you study the history of Palm, you’ll find a lot of twists and turns, ownership changes, political jockeying and intrigue. Even so, a lot of people (myself included) were excited when Palm announced its iPhone killer, the Pre, at CES in January 2008.

Cut to today, when I read that Palm’s share of the smartphone market dropped 2.1% between October 2009 and January 2010. Doesn’t sound so bad until you see that Palm’s share in October 2009 was only 7.8%.

Yikes.

So, what happened to Palm? By all accounts (well, two anyway), the Pre is a decent little device. I’m not alone in being creeped out by their initial ad campaign, but was that what did in the Pre and its siblings?

Anyway, this is good news for our team because instead of being three iPhone bigots and one Android guy (Anthony), we’ll now be much more balanced team with access to more mobile OS for tinkering.

If only we could find the time to tinker . . . more on that to come.

Thoughts on Rich’s turnabout or Palm?

Find the comments.Possibly Related Posts:

Fourface Exposes New Interface Paradigms

Jake — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 08:05:27 PST

Thanks to a tweet from the @foursquare team and a post from TechCrunch, I have a new app for checking in to foursquare, Fourface.

Yeah, I know foursquare and location generally have been getting a lot of ink here and other place. Get used to it though because heading into SXSW later this week, location is expected to be all the rage.

Before you move on, this post isn’t really about foursquare. It’s about interface paradigms.

Fourface uses foursquare’s API and OAuth to present functional data visualizations. By functional, I mean you can use them to checkin to venues, not just browse data. Although, like any good visualization, Fourface does an elegant job modeling the checking data, and is reminiscent of Digg Labs, one of my favorite data pr0n sites.

This is interesting to me because normally data visualizations can’t be used to create the data they model. So really these are new interfaces based on visualizations.

For example, here is the foursquare iPhone app’s checkin screen, or rather a leaked image of how it will look in their upcoming redesigned version.

Image from TechCrunch

Makes sense to you right? Probably because it follows paradigms you’ve seen in the past.

By contrast, here is one of the Fourface checkin screens, called arcs.

Image from Fourface

Fourface uses your location to build the visualization. In this case, arcs lists the five venues closest to you ordered as layered circles with the venue at the center being the closest. To checkin, you touch and hold the venue, or load more to get a new set of arcs.

Three of the four visualizations offered by Fourface allow you to checkin to foursquare using similar models. The fourth shows a heat map-like grid of venue checkins (current and historical).

Fourface also uses audible cues to help you, which I’m not in love with, but make it a bit easier to get over the usability changes.

So, who cares, right?

Even if you’re not into foursquare, this is an interesting study in UI because it removes all the usual trappings, e.g. buttons, labels, selection widgets, form fields, and substitutes a visually attractive, moving visualization that also happens to be functional.

I’m not saying I’ll be using Fourface exclusively to checkin; frankly, I’ll probably mess with it for a bit then forget about it, like many apps I download.

Still, the next time Rich and I have an interface to build and want to do something cool, I’ll remember Fourface, and maybe we’ll try something similar.

What do you think? Would an interesting interface make your favorite app more enjoyable, or would it just force you to relearn functions?

This is bordering on the simplicity and stupidityarguments, so I’ll leave the rest for comments.

Find them and leave one.Possibly Related Posts:

Is Simple Viable In Enterprise Land?

Paul — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 10:00:25 PST

The tradeoff between simplicity and features has been around for ages, but it was hotly debated on the web by two of the most forward thinking software luminaries: Jason Fried and Joel Spolsky. Their back and forth debate hit a crescendo last year around the time I attended the wonderful Business of Software conference put on by Spolsky.

The general notion is that the 37 Signals crew sees simple designs as not only better for users, but better for the product as well. Doing less means less code, less bugs, less training and among other things, a more focused clear experience. They advocate having a real point of view about your application and driving it from your own compass. Customers can ask for things, and they may get em, but not just because they asked and the tie goes to 37 Signals.

There is a lot to like in this model and I have always been a huge 37 Signals fan. Through their blog and book, I have learned many new things and validated some things I already figured out. No doubt they have helped countless others as well. Incidentally, the same can be said of Joel and his books. These are smart, experienced people.

Joel and his product FogBugz would of course agree that simple is better. The issue arises when customers actually want something you don’t provide and they have options. See in the world of no competition life is easy. If you are the only car maker and you don’t have cupholders, big deal. People still need a car and you are the only game in town. Life is substantially different if you are an email provider who doesn’t allow attachments. You can be sure your customers are heading elsewhere.

But wait, adding attachments means another icon or label. More code. Perhaps a bit of training and potential confusion over how the feature works. Over time the storage of big files may me performance hit or storage issues (for you or the customer). What about maximum file sizes? You have to document that limitation and probably have some code to check and provide error messages. Should pricing change in this model? Hmm, this gets complex fast. Again, simple is so smart because software is so hard.

As you can see the rubber meets the road when you have two things: (1) unmet needs and (2) viable alternatives. Where there is profit, competition soon shows up. Whether you like it or not you are being compared. Even if it doesn’t matter to you, it matters to them. How do you decide what is a fair price to pay for a bar of soap or a burrito? You compare.

The trick is to be aware of competition, but not to let it drive you. I have written on this in the past. There are always alternatives (sometimes custom coded) and there are always features asked for that you don’t have.

IHMO you cannot ignore either missing features or competition in enterprise software. However, this does not mean you need to add every feature asked for or copy your competition. There are better ways, but first, let’s look at the big three drivers of scope issues in big business software: (1) Analysts, (2) Complexity and (3) Stakeholders.

(1) Analysts are paid to add more, ever complex/advanced features to their latest must have list. Customers read this and ask vendors if they do it. Vendors need to be positioned well in the latest magic grapefruit so they build away.

(2) This stuff is just complex. Approvals, workflow, audit trails, internationalization, integration, and more make it tough. Dealing with all these situations causes complexity.

(3) Very rarely is there one “buyer”. The “stakeholders”. Many times cross functional with different ideas on features and priorities. The less people involved, the easier the decision making, but it just isn’t reality most of the times. It is why you have countless sales books written about this exact topic.

So what if you take a stand? You listen to these ideas and politely state “we view payables or opportunity management or recruiting a bit differently”. “We know what is best”. “We understand your idea and see that you might think it is important, but we don’t think it fits with our perspective”. “We like our product as it is and we are the experts.”

You can imagine how that would go with the sales team, or the analyst relations crew, or your own management. Why? Because saying “no” is the death of the sale. The secret is to make sure that saying “yes” isn’t the death of the product experience.

The reason this fascinates me is that I see both sides of the argument as valid having built and run an internal social network for a number of years and having run product teams in the past. If you go ultra simple you inevitably limit your own business. If you go for the checkbox approach you get a very difficult to use product that looks good on an RFP.

Additionally, you end up creating a place for small competition who does one thing really well to come in. Incidentally, pride comes in as well. No one is proud of a product they have to apologize for – this has to be avoided as well.

Like most things in life, black and white views are great for marketing, but nothing is ever that simple. Here is where I ended up (doesn’t mean it is right, just my latest thought).

1. Cut Corners (cases): Make a feature work hard to be in a release. It should be something customers really need and something you agree with as a product manager. I have seen way too many things in products because someone, somewhere said something. This cannot happen. Any chance of simple ends with that type of process. This is your first gate.

2. Think holistically. Once something makes it into scope you now need to think about both design of the feature and impact on the system (most ignore this part). The real issue with new features is when it messes up something else. You have to look at the whole product and be willing to change things dramatically if need be. Otherwise you’ll have a confusing house of cards. Done right, a new feature may even add simplicity if it replaces something that was not quite right beforehand. Look for these opportunities.

3. Focus on Goals not Features. Users love to provide feedback in terms of features. The key is to listen to the intent. The problem. What are they trying to do? Users are not the best people to design your feature, you are. They are however very important and you need to listen. So listen, but when you understand the need see how you can best meet it. It may be they nailed it, but there may also be a more appropriate answer. Done well, this solves the sales issue. Being a product manager does not mean you are collecting requests unvetted.

4. SKU v Over Bloat. I favor new skus over a bigger single product. More features leads to more code that is harder to move and difficult to market. Try explaining to a friend the features of outlook or excel. Now explain the key features of a to do list or twitter. Different conversations.

The art is finding the natural break points. The joints. When you do, make sure they work well together. I like point solutions that naturally fit. I think it is a model that scales both in simplicity and sales. Incidentally, the iphone app model so popular now is playing this game.

The tough thing is that there are some really successful products (like Outlook) which do a ton of stuff. Wouldn’t we all like to fail like that? Then we look at Twitter and think how simple it is and how well they have done. But I think pointing to these high water marks is less than helpful. Correlation is not causation. Microsoft wins for a lot of reasons and maybe those reasons just overpower the feature bloat via brute force. In fact MSFT has recognized their challenges here with their UI revamp recently in Office. And Twitter works, but in that “buying cycle” there is no rfp, no analyst, no stakeholders – just you. You like it, use it. If tomorrow you hate it, stop using it. Life behind the firewall is just not that idyllic.

In the end, I find both arguments have valid points. Simple is smart for a lot of reasons and should be seen as a design goal. Making sales easy is also the right answer or else you won’t have much of a future. Being able to say “yes” to customers is a wonderful feeling, but there is a balance here that should not be ignored over a certain dogma. The art is in the middle and it is why being a product manager is so fun.

Enterprise software can stand for something. It can have an appropriately simple and elegant user experience. It can in fact have users who delight in its use and it can be explained clearly to the target users. Too often we give ourselves a free pass in these areas and this is the biggest challenge – our own standards and a sense that good enough is definitely not good enough should be our guide.

PaulPossibly Related Posts:

Friday Ramblings

Jake — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 15:42:04 PST

I started three different placeholders today that I thought might be post-worthy, but since it’s Friday afternoon, I decided to cram them all into a single post.

You understand.

Free does not mean open source.
Eddie tweeted a link yesterday that caught my eye called “20 Reasons Why Oracle is the World’s Largest Open Source Company“.

Interesting article and definitely much closer to true now that the Sun acquisition has closed.The problem is that several of the 20 reasons listed are not open source, e.g. Oracle Express Edition 10g. Yes, XE is free. No, it is not open source.

Open source means the source code is available to anyone to use and modify, under a free license. To the best of my knowledge, XE’s source code is not available. Is it?

So, open source is free, but free is not necessarily open source. Although I can understand that calling something freeware has a seedy connotation.

I love open source and use a lot of it, and one of the main reasons why I’ve been geeked about the Sun deal is all the open source it brings to Oracle.

Welcome people of Sun.
While we’re talking about Sun, we welcomed them into the fold this week. Yesterday, I started to see Sun groups appear on Connect, and our traffic numbers spiked yesterday and today.

Sun had a large social presence internally and externally, where many employees blogged and tweeted. Jonathan Schwartz followed an open policy, which fostered a lot of open communication from and among Sun employees.

They seem to have taken to Connect, and I’m noticing an interesting trend. They post a lot of status updates. I can’t tell if this is by design or whether they’re accustomed to a publisher without any post types.

Most Connect users post questions, notes, links and media (all explicit post types), i.e. it’s a structured experience. Rich and I have discussed removing types in favor of hashtags or something similar to speed up posting, but I’ve always thought people would miss explicit types.

Maybe they wouldn’t though. For example, several of the status updates I saw today were questions. So, either our UI is failing at obvious, i.e. the question post type can’t be found easily enough, or post type doesn’t matter.

It might also be that most Connect users interact through groups, not from the Home page. We don’t offer status updates inside groups.

It’s possible I’m over-analyzing too. I do love behavioral patterns played out in software.

Conference call roulette is not that fun.
Chat Roulette is making the rounds, as is the Daily Show’s lampoon (h/t TechCrunch), which is worth the 6 minute investment.

I had the enterprise version of Chat Roulette today, con call roulette. I dialed into a call and found it was already in progress. And the topic was completely unfamiliar.

This happens every so often because we tend to use the same passcodes for meetings. So, if you’re hosting back-to-back calls and the earlier call runs over, you might provide con call roulette to attendees of the later call.

That ever happen to you?

Anyway, happy Friday.

Possibly Related Posts:

OK Go’s Epic Rube Goldberg Machine Video

Jake — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 10:04:27 PST

This video is awesome and brilliant, even if you don’t care for the song. There’s so much going on each second that it’s difficult to focus on any one thing.

Even more interesting, you might notice it’s a single Steadicam shot, no cuts. Apparently, that shot took 60 takes over two days to get. Wired has more details of this epic win.Possibly Related Posts:

Too Much Information Makes People Something Something

Jake — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 16:01:43 PST

When we started this team, three years ago, most people we talked to hadn’t heard of Facebook or Twitter and associated MySpace, assuming they’d heard of it, with something kids do.

Some people knew LinkedIn and that often helped get the wheels turning about social and how it could benefit work.

It was a lot like 1997 all over again, when the Internet’s best use cases for work began to gather momentum.

By 2000, every company had an external website and most also had internal ones.

The same is true for social; now three years later, seems like everyone tweets and facebooks, but I don’t feel like the work use cases have kept the pace.

I stated before that the best use cases have yet to be discovered, but it’s not happening as quickly as I expected.

Why? I suspect the firehose of information that comes out of Twitter and Facebook and n number of other sources has people completely overcommitted. Like Rich observed, we all try too hard to stay informed, which inevitably leads to backlash.

So, when you ask people to use something new or try this or that new product, they cry uncle.

This over-information problem is actually hampering innovation because the domain experts who would tinker with new product and apply their expertise to discover new use cases are already buried in email, feeds and half a dozen other tools they use to communicate and stay informed.

I’ve seen this lead to a new type of trolling, which manifests as continual griping about the lack of business use cases for social technologies.

A bit ironic, since presumably the person is too busy to discover use cases, but is not to busy to complain about how they are missing.

It’s a shame too. Facebook has more than 400 million users. Twitter is nearing 10 billion tweets.

And yet, the people using these services are too busy to apply what they like about social to their everyday work.

Maybe it’s going to take something like Google Wave to pave the way for efficient and useful collaboration first, or maybe existing tools like email, IM and content management are too deeply entrenched.

Or am I way off base thinking that innovation is being squeezed by a glut of information?

What do you think? Find the comments.

Update: Shortly after publishing, I realized I covered a similar angle a few years back in a post called “Too Busy to Innovate“. Since then, the load of information has gotten twice or thrice as heavy.

Too much information is a real problem for innovation, even innovation that would help control and filter the information suffers.Possibly Related Posts:

Do You Search or Organize?

Jake — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 16:10:31 PST

Photo by mcfarlandmo on Flickr used under Creative Commons

On a web conference today, I caught a glimpse of someone’s inbox.

Protip: Close your email and IM if you’re presenting something. Unless of course, you want me to see your email folders, including the ones where you store “house” email.

But I digress. The person’s inbox had probably 40 folders, some of them with nested folders, which I’m guessing isn’t that uncommon.

As I’ve stated before, I used to organize email into logical folders, but filing email always took too much time. Inevitably, some email wouldn’t fit nicely into an existing folder, prompting a new folder, causing an infinite loop of organizing and reorganizing.

Years ago, I switched to the flat inbox approach. No folders, just one long list. I now have a local email store of 35,000 emails, plus another 4,000 on the server.

I’m generally able to find email I need based on attributes like, who I think sent it, when I received it, etc. For any others, I use Google Desktop. It’s a lot like my workspace and personal paperwork, i.e. organized clutter.

This system works well for me. As a hopelessly neurotic organizer, I’m freed from the obsessive compulsive desire to file everything. I usually have a good recall of where something is based on its attributes, which is kind of like organizing I suppose, without the filing bit.

Of course, there are occasions when I can’t find something by searching, which is maddening, but they’re rare.

I know a lot of people file email (and dead tree documents) and many even use filters and rules to file email for them.

This seems counterproductive to me. People complain endlessly about having too much digital communication, so why do they add meta-work to each artifact?

Maybe that’s why people cannot achieve inbox Zen because they enforce filing constraints on the process of “doing email”, rather than just doing it.

What do you think? Are you a filer? If so, why? Are you like me, i.e. a searcher? What works/does not work for you about that system?

Find the comments.

Update: Realizing I feel the same way about Facebook and Twitter lists, i.e. too much work. Search needs to be better.Possibly Related Posts:

Software is Hard

Jake — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 11:03:22 PST

Photo by jared on Flickr used under Creative Commons

I’m convinced that innovation on the consumer side of the web is great for enterprise software.

I’m similarly convinced that innovation on the consumer side of the web is terrible for enterprise software.

Reading Marc Benioff’s post “The Facebook Imperative” on TechCrunch last week reminded me of these mutually-exclusive conclusions.

On the one hand, as Benioff points out, the consumer web has driven new methods for delivering software, i.e. the xSP model to make enterprise software more like Amazon.

Well before that, the browser was facilitating collaboration and distributed work within the walls of companies, as intranets and networked software applied the concepts of the WWW to their businesses.

And now, Facebook is completing the old question “why can’t enterprise software be more like blank?”

Obviously, the consumer web has driven major innovation into enterprise software.

It has also simultaneously driven complexity and cost.

What do I mean by that?

Imagine you have a piece of software that does one unit of work, and this unit of work is critical to your business. Along comes Facebook, and suddenly, everyone wants to add a social on top of this unit of work.

It’s a good idea because people do that unit of work, and sometimes they cannot all be in the same room. So, adding a social layer will help collaboration.

By deciding to add social, you’ll now need to determine how to do it. Usually, the decision is between build or buy. Assuming you bought the software initially, it makes sense to see if the vendor has an upgrade that will add social.

If they do, you can go with the upgrade, but that will require an implementation team and careful planning because you cannot disrupt the working software because it’s critical to your business.

Plus, once the upgrade is ready, you’ll need to retrain your users because it’s a good bet that the addition of a new feature has changed how the software works.

If your original vendor doesn’t have the social layer you want, you’ll need to find a vendor that has what you want, and you’ll want that vendor to support some level of integration with the existing unit of work because the social layer will only add value on top of your existing software.

Many companies turn to analysts at this point because analysts know who offers what and have compared vendors to each other. They’ve done the legwork already.

Whether it’s produced by the analyst or the company, a request for proposal (RFP) typically follows. The RFP goes out to vendors who reply with their capabilities.

Software companies want to earn business, natch. So, once new items begin to appear on RFPs, e.g. social, they will need to answer, which leads to the development of features.

On the development side, you can’t avoid complexity by streamlining and removing features, or if you do, you do so at your peril. Facebook can redesign and remove features with impunity because their users don’t pay to use the service.

Enterprise software is obviously for-pay, and as much as you might like to be like 37 Signals, you really can’t expect to keep customers if you remove features they use.

What choice is there? If you don’t add new features, you won’t win business. If you don’t win business, you go out of business.

Once a vendor is selected, the implementation begins and typically follows the same path as an upgrade. It might take a bit longer due to integration testing with your existing software and new training for users.

Pretty involved process. Compare that to switching social networks or joining a new social network in the consumer world.

So, making enterprise software more like Facebook drives complexity, by adding features, and cost, by requiring new software.

Just like making enterprise software like Amazon did and making it more like the Internet and more like a PC did before that.

So, you can see the juxtaposition of good and bad here. That’s why I always say that software is hard.

The key is balancing innovation with complexity.

Thoughts?Possibly Related Posts:

We’ll Be at Chirp

Jake — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 16:17:17 PST

Not long ago, Twitter announced its inaugural developer conference, whimsically called Chirp, would be held April 14 and 15, 2010 in San Francisco.

It may or may not be coincidental that the dates are one week earlier than Facebook’s annual f8 developer conference.

Anyway, Chirp looks to be an outstanding opportunity to learn more about Twitter, the Twitter API and the developers using it.

The agenda is equally interesting. April 14 is an expected day of conference sessions about the API, its features, OAuth, strategies, roadmap, all the usual content.

April 15 is a 24-hack day, starting at 6 PM and ending until the following day at 6 PM. It’s not that unusual for developer-focused conferences to provide a space for around-the-clock hacking, after all, coding in groups can often produces the best code.

This is the first time I’ve seen an entire day of a conference devoted solely to hacking, but then again, I’m not a developer.

I do play one on TV though.

I hear you asking why we’re going to a Twitter developer conference at all, which is a fair question.

Reason 1: The Twitter API is the gold standard among application APIs. We could debate that, but it’s true. Twitter’s API handles a significant amount of their overall traffic, which was recently reported to be 50 million tweets each day.

From what I’ve read, it’s difficult to measure client traffic, but I’ve seen estimates that put API usage at about half, meaning half of Twitter’s users are tweeting via a client.

Since most so-called power users use clients (vs. twitter.com), it’s conceivable that the API could handle more traffic than twitter.com does.

Plus, the Twitter API has created an ecosystem of apps around Twitter, which in turn has launched other ecosystems, like oneforty.

So what?

Well, WebCenter 11g Patchset 1 has REST APIs for several of its services. We’re using some of them internally, and anything we can learn from Twitter about API scalability, design and implementation will only help us.

Reason 2: As the social web advances, companies are flocking to Twitter and Facebook (and LinkedIn to a lesser extent) to interact and build their brands, or if they’re not already thinking about this, the analysts they trust are.

This means demand for integration with these sites will make them list items on RFPs that sales will have to answer. Because I expect this will happen in the very near future, Chirp offers a timely way to get a bootcamp on the Twitter API.

Plus, it won’t be enough to build a client. Any integration, especially from within a corporate firewall, will need to use OAuth to be taken seriously, and OAuth just so happens to be a topic for Chirp, natch.

Reason 3: People. A 24-hack day with Rich and Anthony should be a fun (and intense) experience, as we go from concept to reality at warp speed, fueled by chocolate, Mountain Dew and coffee. I always enjoy working with my team on real projects.

Plus, there will be a ton of great networking with other developers and with Twitter employees.

So, as we head into March, we’ve got about six weeks to kick around ideas for a hack day project. Rich has one already, and I have some nebulous thoughts that might make an idea.

This is where you can help. Drop your ideas for what we could build in the comments.

Or just comment. Ideas are not required.

And hey, if you want to attend and hack with us, sign up now, the more the merrier.Possibly Related Posts:

Apply Caution to Interwebs, Rinse, Repeat

Jake — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 06:42:38 PST

Photo by chokola from Flickr used under Creative Commons

Last week’s kerfuffle about foursquare and how it exposes you to would-be burglars was hilarious to me.

More accurately, it’s Twitter that poses the risk, which isn’t a new problem. Foursquare encourages people to socialize their game-playing by adding friends from Facebook, Twitter and GMail. As with any service, this is to their advantage.

Although, I would argue foursquare is not a classic social network and should not be played with the same cast of interwebs characters with whom you tweet, the majority of people join foursquare and immediately invite their entire list of followers.

So many people merrily broadcast their movements about town to a network of people they “know” from Twitter. Not something I’d recommend, but hey, what do I know.

This obviously isn’t a fourquare problem.

The tongue-in-cheek burglary site points out a different problem, i.e. that if you’ve authenticated Twitter, you can broadcast your checkins there as well, which in turn announces your location not only to your followers, but to everyone on the intertubes thanks to Twitter search, Google and Bing.

By announcing to everyone that you’re not home, you’re making yourself easier to rob.

ZOMG.

Thankfully there have been many level-headed responses (my favorite) to this attempt to “raise awareness”. First off, I’d expect that a burglar savvy enough to find this information would steal identities, rather than take a meat life risk.

Second, in order to rob someone who’s not home, you have to know where they live, which is not something as easily garnered from Twitter.

Yeah, it’s risky to tell Twitter you’re not at home, but let’s be honest, on the internet thar be dragons, quickly becoming my favorite quote, so it’s all risky.

What turns out to be the biggest risk about foursquare is that many people checkin to their homes and their friends’ homes. Since foursquare has an API, you have no way of knowing who’s using your checkin data for what.

In actuality, none of these are foursquare problems, they’re simply misunderstandings on the user’s behalf. Although, as we’ve seen with the recent “facebook login” hat dance, it doesn’t always matter where blame falls.

Sound off with your thoughts in comments.Possibly Related Posts:

Raimonds Updates ActiveRecord Oracle Adapter

Jake — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 06:06:13 PST

Ruby enthusiast and friend of the ‘Lab Raimonds Simanovskis (@rsim) just released a maintenance update to his ActiveRecord oracle-enhanced-adapter, bringing it to version 1.2.4.

This will be the final version of the adapter for Rails 2, after which he’ll move it to Rails 3.

Last month, he updated ruby-plsql.

As you know, we’re big fans of Ruby in all its incarnations, and if you’re an Oracle developer, you know PL/SQL. So, the great thing about Raimonds’ work with Oracle and Ruby is that allows you to build dynamic web apps against data in Oracle databases leveraging skills you already have.

Of course, now the Oracle database stable also includes MySQL, which is the database for Rails apps.

So now you can use Raimonds’ adapters to build dynamic and modern web apps against Oracle databases using your existing skills and expand those skills by tinkering with MySQL and the tens of thousands of Rails gems out there built for it.

It’s a good time to be an Oracle developer.

Are you planning to learn MySQL and/or Rails now that the Sun acquisition has closed?

Find the comments.Possibly Related Posts:

Coined a New Term: Computer Plumber

Jake — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 10:04:32 PST

I did some printer support over the weekend, which reminded me of the whole “facebook login” fiasco from earlier in the month.

Long story short, the person I was supporting couldn’t get Windows to recognize the printer.

The PC tower was under a desk and in a difficult spot to reach. The area was so snug that the cable actually did feel like it was in a port, but when I finally got in there, turns out the printer wasn’t plugged into the back of the PC at all.

The USB cable was resting snugly between two other cables directly over the port, but it wasn’t actually making contact. I finally found an open USB port nestled between the network port and two occupied USB ports.

No way I could have found that just by touch.

This diagnosis made the person feel stupid, and before you agree, let’s examine the facts.

This isn’t as obvious to everyone as it may seem to you. The instructions from the printer manufacturer can’t be specific for every single computer configuration out there. Case in point, what if you have an iMac?

The iMac’s design removes the need to dig under a desk, and the ports are separated enough to ensure you don’t get the same bogus feeling that a cable is plugged in when it ain’t.

Still, if you had an iMac, you might not be able to follow the instructions for a standard PC tower. So, this was a combination of generic instructions and cost/space-saving design.

Add to that the fact that this particular user wasn’t very spry and couldn’t dig around like a computer plumber under the desk.

If the “facebook login” fail hadn’t been top of mind, I probably would have been less forgiving, which leads to another problem: geeks breed arrogance.

I don’t think of myself as arrogant, but in this situation, what seems dead obvious to me leads me to question the user’s savvy. That’s not the way technology should work.

The power of technology is its ostensible ability to make life easier, but there are too many caveats and too much to learn.

Recalling my days in consulting, the worst part of the job was training users, not because of them, but because I never felt I could give a good answer to questions like “Why can’t I do this like I did in the old system?”

Training is painful, and retraining is a nightmare.

This whole thing and the iPad discussion had me thinking about design. Even good design is trumped by the backwards compatibility demon.

Once you release a feature, you can never take it away because someone might be using it.

Or more accurately, if you take away a feature, you’d better be ready to defend yourself or ignore the revolt.

I’m reminded of a few years back when serial ports began to disappear in favor of USB ports. A buddy of mine made a laptop decision solely because he needed a serial port to connect to machines in his data center rack. He was peeved.

Definitely a corner case, but an unhappy one.

So, I’ll be watching the iPad’s debut and rollout with interest. We’re at an interesting time now, where the bell curve’s requirements are driving simpler, easier design, which is leading to sanitized intertubes and locked down systems.

As geeks, we rebel against these things, but is it because we want freedom for all or it is because we want to preserve our mystique? Probably a bit of both and some other stuff too.

Find the comments and discuss.

Semi-related update: Found another instance of “facebook login” here for “cancel google” h/t Google Blogoscoped. There have to be tons of these out there.Possibly Related Posts:

Learning from Buzz

Paul — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 10:22:39 PST

In life if something doesn’t work out, at least you can learn from it. That is the power of doing. The beauty of being a human being is that we are exceptionally good at learning from others. As I watched Google launch Buzz, and the ensuing mess, it got me thinking. Why did a project like Buzz not exactly work out (as of yet) when something like Twitter did? They are both kinda the same, right?

I am sure the guys at Google have a whole lot so say on the matter, but from my outside perspective I gleaned a few lessons:

1. Big Bang is Tough – Anytime you do a big launch you are placing a bet that you got it perfect. The fact is that you never will. There are always people who love you and those that can find something bad to say about a free pizza. Such is life. So we best just accept it and do something we think is great and hopefully, slowly, others will find us, and agree. Making everyone happy is not a real goal. Let’s just make ourselves, and maybe a few others happy. Remember Cuil?

2. Solve A Problem, Don’t Create More - The reason a site like Twitter worked was that it filled a niche. It enabled very simple broadcasting (and consumption) of information. No one on twitter expects a reply. Email is different. IM is different. Those are tools for private communications and they work very well. However, when you want to tell the world that you slept in and missed the bus, where do you turn? Thankfully we have Twitter. Whether we think it is useful or not is irrelevant, it fills a missing element in the communications continuum. Buzz was just doing the same thing. Was anyone really asking for more noise in their inbox? Doesn’t everyone already feel overwhelmed by the volume they already have? If not, just turn off the spam filter and enjoy.

3. Networks Hate Competition - Why is it that we are ok with a million twitter clients but not Buzz? It comes down to the network. Personally, I’d love a single network, but my request to the Internet Gods has fallen on deaf ears and I have both Twitter and Facebook. The problem is not having the network or assembling it – It is managing it. The whole point of a network is to communicate with it. I don’t think people have the energy to be witty in 3 places – it is hard enough to blow people’s minds regularly on Twitter. In fact, I have even linked my Twitter and Facebook publishing to avoid just this issue.

4. People Hate Change - I don’t care what you are doing, if people are even remotely content, you will lose. You need some serious dissatisfaction for people to change what they do. If you ask them to lift a finger, even the baby pinky finger in zero gravity, forget it. You ever wonder why there are no Facebook group called “I can find 100,000,000 people who can’t live without the next Facebook redesign”. Did you ever wonder why iphone apps took off and dashboard widgets never did? We are all lazy, and telling me I now have to do something to get what I already have is a non-starter. Uh, no thanks.

Ok, so I never like pointing out issues without at least shining a light on possible answers.

The net of this for me is that if you want to play in this space, don’t copy. If you are into collaboration, realize that the 1:1 and 1:Many problems are solved quite well. However, that means that the small group collaboration (1:Some) market is wide open. Being able to share very, very easily with a few people privately could be a very useful tool people might adopt. They might also just stick with email (see #4).

Another possible answer here is to tame the noise, as Rich has alluded to. Now if you want solve this problem and unify existing networks and magically figure out what is important I commend you. Just realize (a) that is a monster problem, (b) do it for yourself and no one else, and (c) you need something to call your own. No product built on someone elses value lasts long without their own value. Amazon sells other people’s books, but has an incredible end to end buying experience. Google maps uses someone elses map data, but now adds user maps, street view, etc. So aggregating is not enough, think hard about what you will do that no one else does. Yes, I know, it will be your algorithm.

Technology is tough. It moves very fast, people can be unforgiving and failures are very public, but don’t let that stop you. Every now and then people will root for you if you step out into the darkness like Google did with Buzz. The fact is that no one remembers the critics. So get out there and be amazing.Possibly Related Posts:

My Anti-Social Experiment

Rich Manalang — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 11:22:56 PST

In an IM conversation I had with Paul this morning, I decided to embark on an experiment. I’ve decided to drop out of all things social (online) for a few weeks. This includes Twitter, Buzz, Facebook, blogging, etc. The only thing this doesn’t include is email and IM — those are essential.

My online activities can be broken down to about 95% consumption and only 5% contribution. I know… I should give back more. If I were a “Jake”, I would. The thing is, I get more value from the intertubes by consuming it. I have no real excuse for not giving back as much as I consume. Reciprocity is something I need to practice more in general.

Anyway, the big reason I’m doing this is that since last Tuesday, I’ve sunk a lot of time into futzing with Google Buzz. That’s time I’ll never get back. Meanwhile, I have yet to see the real value of Google Buzz. Before Buzz, conversations and information sharing were already fragmented. Between Twitter, Facebook, blogs, etc., it has become increasingly difficult to consume information — especially for someone who spends 95% of their online time doing it.

The goal of my experiment is to figure out if I’ll miss using these social tools as a way to find new and interesting content — and, more importantly, if I’ll miss out on something I might find important. I didn’t include Google Reader in the list because out of all the tools I use online Reader is actually one that brings order to chaos… even if I have 1000+ unread postings. In the end, I’m hoping to filter out some of the noise out of my day. I spend 9-12 hours staring at a screen and would love it if there was less clutter that distracted me from actually getting things done. If I happen to miss one of these channels at the end of this experiment, I’m going to figure out what I miss and why, then I’m going to try to improve my process in order to bring order to it all. This all started because Paul sent out a link on OraTweet (Oracle’s internal version of Twitter) pointing to the “Side effects of developing for yourself” — a post about the positive consequences from solving a problem for yourself by the creator of Instapaper. Well, this is my problem… and this is the start of how I’m planning to solve it.

Am I the only one with this problem?Possibly Related Posts:

Facebook Knows When You Need a Hug

Jake — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 15:34:49 PST

Halfway through a blah post about Google Buzz, I ran across this post about the correlation between Facebook relationship status and happiness.

I’ve largely ignored Facebook for a while now, and it didn’t occur to me until Pete Warden released his initial observations about Facebook and US geography how much statistical gold exists there.

Turns out Facebook has a team of people crunching data and producing analysis like today’s gem, and they keep a happiness index for the US based on word sentiment analysis of status updates. Sounds like Twistori, only more serious.

I find statistical and data visualization pr0n fascinating, and I’m both geeked to see this analysis and mildly unnerved that it exists at all.

Not surprised though.

With 400 million users pumping their emotions into Facebook, it only makes sense that someone would mine the data. Google does it with keyword searches, e.g. Google Flu Trends.

The emotional aspect is interesting. Sure, analyzing sentiment based on words isn’t foolproof; who out there hasn’t had a sarcasm fail over email or IM?

Still, with so many active users, Facebook could produce a decent, real-time emotional pulse of the World, which is pretty cool and totally scary all at once.

For example, check out the Gross National Happiness (GNH) index for the week Michael Jackson died. It dipped below zero pretty noticeably, indicating how Facebook’s US users were feeling.

Of course, these trends help (supposedly) to target better ads, e.g. relationship status and Valentine’s Day suggestions, but it starts to get creepy when ads target changes here, e.g. grief counseling based on an RIP status message or a recent change in relationship status.

And of course, even though we all agreed to the terms, selling these data and they accompanying analyses walks the ever blurring privacy line.

Anyway, something to think about next time you update your Facebook status.

So, what do you think? Surprised? Intrigued? Hoping to game the system with bogus updates?

Discuss in comments cause that’s where the good stuff happens. Mulling over a post on that too.Possibly Related Posts:

The Obligatory Google Buzz Review

Rich Manalang — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 11:10:43 PST

It’s been a few days since Google Buzz was born and it’s time for an AppsLabber to review it, so here are my thoughts.

Day one

It was a lonely experience — akin to showing up to a party you knew was going to be fun, but you ended being one of the first ones there. After a few hours more people started to show up and I started to engage more by following more people since hardly any of my Gmail contacts have showed up. I broke out of my usual shell and started following people I’ve never met in meat and virtual life. I felt sort of strange, but it felt good to engage with “outsiders.” I remember feeling, “wow, Buzz is cool… it’s what I’ve been waiting for, etc.” Just like feelings I get with shinny new things, I felt “buzzed” by the thought of it all. I tried to get more friends into it as well… not sure they felt the same way I did when they joined the party.

Day two

Day two was when most people started showing up. I noticed that some of the people I started following — big names like Scoble and Rose — started to take over my stream. All of the sudden the people I was more interested in hearing from started getting dominated by those with larger voices and larger crowds hovering over them. This sucked. I don’t want to be forced into a crowd of people having a convo about stuff I didn’t care about. This is when I discovered the “mute” feature. I knew about the mute feature with Gmail and it’s cool that Buzz takes advantage of that. However, one of the things I expected Google would be good at is extracting signal from noise, Sergey claims this himself. I’ve gotten so used to Twitter’s simple pattern of showing you the most recent posts and showing trends to let users keep track of the conversations that are happening. I guess I expected something similar with Buzz, but instead Buzz forces you to pay attention to the larger conversations happening inside your circle. Google Buzz team: I don’t always want to be forced into a conversation I may or may not care about. So, I think the sorting and filtering of buzz items need to be worked out. Otherwise, my finger’s always going to be hovering over the “m” key waiting to mute items — that’s not a good pattern to encourage. By the way, the “mute” feature doesn’t work. Every time I “mute” Scoble’s postings it pops back up a few minutes later.

Day three (today)

Today, I’m starting to see real friends buzzing about. Most of them are confused — like they were forced to be a part of something they didn’t want to be a part of. Some are finding it useful. And others are just going with it, but aren’t sure what to do.

If it were me calling the shots, here’s what I’d do:

Don’t require GMail for Buzz. It should have launched as a stand-alone app with close links to Gmail and the ability to launch inside Gmail (as it does today). I find it confusing that you can use Buzz from your mobile devise in a stand-alone app, but you can’t from your desktop. One of my Google buddies did tell me to be patient when I told him about this, so maybe that’s in the works. Either way, it should have launched as a stand-alone app. The motivation for doing so means that you can capture people who don’t have and want GMail accounts, but maybe it was Google’s intention to require GMail. Also, for those that don’t think your social network should start with your inbox (I’m not one of them BTW), this would have been a good way to separate the two.
Fix the signal-to-noise algorithms. I ended up sinking lots of valuable time avoiding and muting items I was being forced to see over and over again. This is not something I expect from Google. Fix it.
All the usual patterns we’ve come to know and love from Twitter would be nice: hashtag support, search, trending, and a solid API out the gate are keys to success.
Better profile pages. I appreciate Google’s sense and discipline for spartan user interfaces, but when you give me my own page to allow me to share a piece of me to the world, I’d love it if you can allow me to add my own flair and dress it with my own unique style. It doesn’t need to be fancy… just allow me to change the background and colors around and use a better looking font. Google profiles remind me of profiles you’d see in a company directory, bleh.

Start with those. With that, here’s what I do love:

Media handling. I love that when I put a URL in, it extracts images from the site, very cool.
Longer postings. I love that I can post more than 140 characters, but the UI serves as a subtle suggestion that this isn’t a place for posting essays.
Private postings. I’m not sure why I’d post a private message that only I could see, but I do love that I can share privately to a group of people.
Shortcut keys. I love that Buzz has some of it’s siblings DNA and allows me to wade through posts using the same shortcut keys.
Aggregation of other sites. I love that Buzz follows FriendFeed’s lead on allowing users to share more than just messages but also twitter posts, blog posts, reader items, flickr images, etc. I just wish we had the ability to cross post to Twitter/Facebook… highly unlikely this will happen though and I understand.

Overall, I think Buzz is cool. The “buzz” I had on day one is gone, but I still think it’s got potential. Great job Google! Next time, however, please leave it in the oven a little longer.

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These Are Our Users

Jake — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 10:37:42 PST

Computers shouldn't make people feel like idiots.

A post from Signal vs. Noise titled “Computers shouldn’t make people feel like idiots“ has been open in a tab for nearly a week.

Reading it, and other iPad coverage, has me torn. I know that I exist in a world populated by geeks, and I know that many outside this world are uncomfortable with computers. I have seen these people IRL and helped them.

But how uncomfortable are they really? Comfort is impossible to quantify, Sleep Number bed notwithstanding.

Well, this post helped a lot. You should read it.

The short version is:

ReadWriteWeb posted “Facebook Wants to Be Your One True Login“.
Google indexed the post.
The post became the top result for the keywords “facebook login”.
People using Google to find their way to Facebook were misdirected to the post.
The comments on the post were littered with unhappy people, unable to login to Facebook.

There are more than 300 comments on this post, the majority of them from confused Facebook users.

Despite the fact that RWW added bold text to the post, directing users to Facebook, and the fact that the post is no longer the top result for “facebook login”, people continue to arrive there by accident, looking for Facebook.

I wonder how many people made this mistake and didn’t leave a comment, either giving up or recognizing their error.

Thousands? Tens of thousands?

It’s easy to laugh, but take a second to read the Signal vs. Noise post now, or read it again. I’ll wait.

I think it’s fair to say that computers shouldn’t make people feel stupid. After all, they dominate our lives more every year, both at work and at home. It’s impossible to avoid them.

The people who made the Facebook login mistake should be frustrated and angry. They had figured out a way to get to Facebook, and it wasn’t working anymore, without warning.

Turns out computers are hard and using the intertubes is no exception. Remember when Google asked people on the street what a browser is?

These are our users, like it or not.

Thoughts? Find the comments.

Posted via email from Thoughts by Jake

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Evolution of Design

Jake — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 18:12:45 PST

Thought of something interesting (see disclaimer) yesterday, namely observing the evolution of how design solves problems with software.

Take a common requirement for the interwebs and its viewer, the browser, like wanting to view more than a single web page at a time.

In the first few iterations of browsers, this was possible only by launching multiple instances of the browser. I’m not even sure that was possible with some of them like early versions of Netscape Navigator and IE 3.

At some point, the HTML spec updated to allow new windows to be opened by clicking a link or just viewing a page, and the dreaded pop-up was born. Spammers and advertisers everywhere rejoiced.

Yeah, I’m glossing over the technical details.

Unbridled window propagation, the hallmark of IE 6, was always something I have always intensely disliked. So, the primary feature that attracted me back to Netscape and then to Firefox, was tabs, which IE would not have for several years.

Tabs elegantly solved the root problem of having multiple web pages open at once.

However, tabs created new problems, like massive memory consumption, which limited the utility of the feature.

Lately, stream-focused apps like FriendFeed, Facebook, Brizzly and Google Buzz (and Connect) have evolved the design even further with inline viewing.

By providing a viewer for content like photos, videos, audio, and other known file types and adding web page previews, stream apps have removed the extra click required to view another web page.

So, to recap, we’ve gone from single web page only, to multiple windows, to multiple tabs, to inline viewing.

And I doubt this will be the final design iteration.

Anyway, this type of design evolution fascinates me because I guess I’m that guy.

Do you have favorite examples of design evolution?

Share them in comments.

Posted via email from Thoughts by Jake

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And Now, Google the ISP

Jake — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 13:40:54 PST

So, Google has been busy announcing products this week. Lost in the Buzz news was this bit that Google is planning to build its own high-speed fiber network.

Mmm, fiber.

Their goals are:

We’re planning to build and test ultra high-speed broadband networks in a small number of trial locations across the United States. We’ll deliver Internet speeds more than 100 times faster than what most Americans have access to today with 1 gigabit per second, fiber-to-the-home connections. We plan to offer service at a competitive price to at least 50,000 and potentially up to 500,000 people.Our goal is to experiment with new ways to help make Internet access better and faster for everyone. Here are some specific things that we have in mind:

Next generation apps: We want to see what developers and users can do with ultra high-speeds, whether it’s creating new bandwidth-intensive “killer apps” and services, or other uses we can’t yet imagine.

New deployment techniques: We’ll test new ways to build fiber networks, and to help inform and support deployments elsewhere, we’ll share key lessons learned with the world.

Openness and choice: We’ll operate an “open access” network, giving users the choice of multiple service providers. And consistent with our past advocacy, we’ll manage our network in an open, non-discriminatory and transparent way.

Sounds pretty sweet, but as will all Google products, lingering privacy concerns, well, linger.

Check out the video and rally your state and/or local officials to bring the Google pipe to your neighborhood.

OK, am I the only one who remembers the April Fools’ 2007 and the Google TiSP? Seriously, how close to true is that joke now? I’ll bet someone floated (puntastic) that idea in a meeting.

Posted via email from Thoughts by Jake

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Where’s the Middle?

Jake — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 16:59:14 PST

Writing and maintaining a blog requires a fair amount of effort. Hence the rise of micro-blogging, which is almost frictionless (one of my favorite interface-isms), creating mountains of content, a long tail for blogging as it were.

That’s actually pretty funny, since blogging was initially the long tail of online content publishing, which was kind of the long tail of publishing in general.

Makes you wonder about how long that publishing tail really is and where you are on it.

Anyway, there has to be some tool between the blog and the micro-blog. I’m hoping Posterous can help me find it.

As the experiment continues, find the comments to let me know what you think.

Oh, and picture is unrelated, but awesome. Wish I knew the credits.

Posted via email from Thoughts by Jake

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