I reorg’d my bookmarks and put all of my regular hangouts into a folder named NO and that was that. I’m not swearing off email or IM. Even though you could make an argument that they are social media outlets, for my purposes I don’t view them that way.

Below you’ll find my diary, journal, blog post if you will of my week without: SOCIAL MEDIA!!!!

Day One — Tuesday

Technically just a half day. I didn’t look back at any site once I made the decision to take the week off.

Day Two — Wednesday

It’s odd. I haven’t been to Twitter, Flickr, Facebook, and all those other sites I frequent minutely for about 12 hours now. I don’t really miss them much at all. That’s the odd part.

I also installed Rescue Time today. Not surprisingly the activities tagged work are most of what I’ve done so far. I did get a lot of work done today. More than usual? Perhaps a little, but that could be because I am paying attention today to what I am doing and when.

When I got home, I really wanted to go on Y!Live to chat… but I resisted. Let hope tomorrow gets even easier.

Day Three — Thursday

OMFG!!!!!!!!!!!!1!!!

I’ve had a bunch of questions today that I’d normally just ask on Twitter, but I can’t! FUCK. I actually had to use Google a couple of times. Srsly!! Luckily Google still works pretty well and I could find the answers, but damn it was difficult to even force myself to do the work. I am SO out of practice.

I broke down a bit today and loaded up some muxtapes. Okay, maybe that isn’t a total breakdown. Once I loaded it I could easily go back to my work and just have the music in the background. But I felt a bit like I was cheating. And, to be honest, I did upload a picture to Flickr. And I did go to Flickr to see how the picture looked. But I didn’t look at anything else. Difficult, but I was proud of myself.

Day Four — Friday

Today was a bit easier as I got to experience some “social media” without the media. Well, some media, but since I don’t have a DS it wasn’t a big deal.

I hung out in the afternoon and evening with Patrick Haney, Jenna Marino, Dan Rubin, Shaun Inman, Ryan Sims, and for a short time Leslie Jensen-Inman (she had to go to a conference though and couldn’t hang out with us cool peeps).

Granted, I did upload some pictures of our night out, but I swear didn’t tag any of them at the time.

Day Five — Saturday

On the one hand, weekends make it easier to avoid anything computer-related. On the other hand, consuming all things computer-related helps me avoid my family. Granted, I get 40+ hours a week to avoid them (why else does one work but to avoid one’s family), but frankly it often isn’t enough.

Regardless, or if you are me and want to annoy Claire… irregardless, I was able to avoid the computer and spend time with the fam damily, only hyperventilating once. It also helped that we went to buy a new car. Shiny, drivey things are good to soothe the SMS.

Day Six — Sunday

Laundry. Cleaning. More avoiding. Ahhh, the life. I checked out a couple of pictures on Flickr, but didn’t feel at all anxious about it. I was able to walk away from the computer after only two minutes of listening to my daughter yell at me that the bathroom was on fire.

Day Seven — Monday

Last day. I did go out of bounds a bit by responding to a DM from Whitney Hess as to my whereabouts. But I just sent my update from last week explaining I was taking time off. An update she should have seen in the first place. Honestly, you’d think CMU would be churning out a brighter crowd.

I also uploaded a screencast to Viddler. I couldn’t help myself. I went to Shaun Inman’s site and immediately hurled. No, it doesn’t look bad. It’s just all the movement at the top of the page, and frankly I’d been drinking. Drinking, amazingly, also chases away the SMS.

What Did I Learn?

Biggest takeaway is I need to get some friends that live near me. Relying on the residuals of friendship I get from SXSW that are paid virtually via social sites isn’t enough. Last Friday was so much fun. Must repeat as necessary.

I also learned that I am just a wee bit addicted to the computer. That is probably true about most box-shaped electronic devices. That too must change.

I am not going to go cold turkey on everything just to kick a habit. I am not that addicted. What I need to do is scale back what I get involved in and ask myself, with every interaction, is this creating something positive? For me? For others? If I am not creating something positive I am just wasting my time and in some ways, yours.

I don’t expect to be creating positive things 100% of the time, but I suspect if I begin to ask myself that question I’ll re-adjust my approach to things and the percentage will increase from where it is today.

In the future, I’ll be much more selective about the betas I get involved with. If you’d like to invite me, please do so, but with the idea that I’ll be assessing your app/site for ways to make it better. Not just securing “matto” as MY username everywhere.

WTF Did You Get All, Like, Serious, Yo?

Because all good things come to an end, and all good things end on Mondays.

I got my badge and my bag.

I realise that the contents of the bag are part of what pays for SXSW, but what a load of waste. Realistically, SXSW organisers could provide giant recycling bins right next to the bag pick up area. The pile on the right in the picture above is what is getting tossed. I realise that there’s stuff in that toss pile that others may find valuable, but having those recycling bins could also help with the passive voting on the efficacy of each company’s advertising efforts.

I’ve also been meeting a lot of people. Some of whom I can even recall names. This is the haul so far:

I attended two panels yesterday: Career Rev 342: Dabble Dabble, Toil and Kick Ass, and Battledecks II.

The first panel was pretty good. I unfortunately missed the first half hour as I was hanging out with Abi Jones, but even though the timing of some of the humour was off, I thought the panelists did a good job. And what they covered is something everyone should think about once a week. Basically the premise was how to stay fresh.

The second panel… oy vey. All I can say (and I must digress for a moment to note this is not a statement that stems from any man crush, fanboyness, or attempt to win myself some cred with the cool people) is that Anil Dash rawks my w0rld. And I am comfortable with letting people know that.

To be very fair, yesterday, from other accounts too, was about having fun and not about substance.

Today, Day the Thirde as you might guess, finds me attending 7 or so panels. A couple of which are going on at the same time. And likely after the first panels that sched will go out the window.

I’ll spare you the weather and flight/airport accounts as there seem to be plenty of those. I do plan on writing up my time here, but if you want to know what’s going on faster than here, follow me on Twitter. Assuming Twitter doesn’t die under the weight of SXSW attendees and their handy iPhones.

Stoopid iPhones. I SO don’t want one.

Knowing me, I had to write it down before I went to sleep lest I forget and since my computer was still on, I twittered it. To whit, I said, “thinking of doing an unpanel at SXSW. Anyone want to join? topic TBD. DM if you want to pontificate in public with me. :)” Most of the reaction was “un-what now?” Which makes sense. I’ve explained this idea to about 5 people today via IM. It just isn’t something that lends itself to being fully explained via Twitter, but I guess that’s why we keep our blogs around.

The Idea

Get 4 to 5 people to stand in front of an informal gathering of interested other people and talk about… something. Much like an unconference, this idea would have the topic of discussion driven by those who show up. I know those interested in speaking will come with a few ideas of their own, but I think audience participation makes for a more engaging experience. That would be the initial part of the unpanel. The second part would be an open Q&A, cleverly entitled “Ask Us Anything.” (Hat tip to Steve Marshall for helping me coalesce this part of the idea, based on his experience.) And by “anything” I mean anything. Likely the questions will stem form the conversation that preceded, but we all need to keep each other on each other’s toes, so anything goes. If you are offensive, expect to get back what you give.

Why?

A couple of reasons. Totally my reasons which you might share or completely disagree with.

I looked through the schedule of panels on the extremely helpful sched.org and was quite uninspired by the offerings. Some things I saw made me think, “Must. Get. Front. Row. Seat.” while most of them made me utter “meh” quite a lot. I also noticed a lot of the “same old names” cropping up. Most of those “same old names” I have a lot of respect for, but I’ve also heard them over and over and over again. And finally, having been to a couple of SXSWs (Westeses?), I know there’s a lot of smart people that attend who are not as well known as the “same old names” and potentially never will be.

Given all that I thought, why not see if those people have something to say? You are probably one of those people. In fact, most of the people who go to SXSW are one of those people. That’s a lot of people!

And Just Who Are These People?

So far I have received confirmed interest from Michael Montgomery, Julio Fernandez, the aforementioned Steve Marshall, Martin Ringlein, James Aylett, Alex Giron, Andrea Schwandt-Arbogast, and me. I think panels are optimal at 4 people so we’ll go for that as much as possible.

I’ve added: Lisa Brewster, Abi Jones, and Alex Hillman. So it’s very likely we will do 2 unpanels.

When?

The short answer is: no clue. Likely on Saturday and/or Sunday. Likely in the afternoon. Mostly it depends on the schedules of those who are going to speak and attend. I won’t be able to find the perfect time slot. If you want to know when it’s going to happen following me on Twitter is the easiest way to get updates. I’ll know more as the time approaches and will communicate what I know when I know it.

If you think this is a good idea, please pass the word so as many people as possible can chose to attend if they wish.

Unpanel?

I realize it isn’t the best name for it, but its what came to mind. I guess you could call it Impromptu Panel, Salon-o-rama, or Lawrence. I guess part of the thing about this is I think it’s something that could happen at any conference. Unconferences are all well and good (they really are) but I suspect there’s a lot of people who would benefit from an informal, lightly-structured session-with-a-session so to speak at any and every conference out there. Few conferences are 100%interesting for 100% everyone. So why not orgainze something like those meetings-between-the-meetings we are all so fond of saying are “when the real conference happens.”

I wasn’t able to go last year and found it to be unfortunately painful that I couldn’t be there. It’s the place where I see most of my friends in person so missing last year means it’s been 2 years since I’ve seen most of them.

I’ll be staying at the Hampton, sharing a room with Anton Peck and Matthew Pennell. I arrive around noon on the 6th and leave on the 12th.

Things I am looking forward to: bowling, eating at Moonshine, playing kickball, and meeting people. New people. Going to try and let my inner extrovert out more. One of my goals is to run out of business cards.

If you are going, please find me and say hi. I’m the guy who looks like me.

That definition works on my computer! … </tumbleweed>

There’s a lot of opportunity in that definition for “but what does that really mean” responses. It makes sense on its own, but when applied to your context of work, how does it fit? I think the problem is that most people don’t know how it fits. They don’t know who the users are so they can’t be specified. They don’t know what the goals are so those can’t be specified. And how can they make sure something is effective, efficient, and satisfying?

Get someone from Usability to look at it! Of course, you might not have someone from Usability available, or at all. Or have time to do usability testing. Or user research. Or, or, or. Most companies have this problem to some extent. Developers are often left on their own to figure things out and I suspect that’s the impetus of 3 Simple Usability Tips For Developers.

Jesper specifically asked me (and others, I’m not that special) to respond to his post and since I know my response won’t fit in a comment box… here we go…

Everyone Cares About Usability

Everyone cares, to some extent, about usability. “Good” usability means happy customers, silent support phones (ha!), and heaping great wodges of cash in the biscuit barrel. Who doesn’t care about that! No one, that’s who.

The problem, as ever, is no one speaks about usability in the same way. So Jesper boiled down the ISO definition of Usability to something simpler:

A usable system is easy to use, easy to learn, and difficult to make mistakes [with/on].

I have no issue with Jesper’s boiling down-ed-ness, but I think it does just that: boil down. As tips specifically for developers, I think different jargon is in order. Now, now… I know we Usability peeps are supposed to avoid jargon, but when you have a (relatively) singular audience, you design your system with their language in mind. Here’s how I would re-jargonize (man, I am making up words left and right today) the definition of Usability for developers:

I’ll give you a bonus if you make software that meets our customers needs, is coded as simply and securely as possible, has no known bugs, and works the same way on all the platforms we support.

I put the bonus part in there because I believe developers need incentive. The bonus could be doughnuts, not necessarily cash.

Meets our customers needs. You can see this in the current definition of Usability, but I believe when put this way, a developer that you want working for you will ask, “Who are our customers and what do they want.” And by gum if a developer ever asks you that you’d better kiss them (don’t actually kiss them). The easiest way to find out what people want is to ask them. Surprisingly, they usually want to tell you.

Coded simply and securely. You want the simplest solution possible to the problem. Most of the developers I’ve seen tend to write 30 lines of code when 3 would suffice. Create an environment where elegantly coded solutions are more valuable than crap code. But you also want secure code, so no PHP. If you have a situation where you have to choose between simple and secure, make sure you communicate what’s more important given the context. To figure out the context, see previous paragraph.

No known bugs. No bugs is a pipe dream. There will always be bugs in software. If you test all cases you’ll never ship, so go for no known bugs. Shipping with no known bugs means you need to have a good stock of test cases to work from. To get good test cases you need good use cases. “How will people use this software? Let’s test it to make sure it works like that!” To get good use cases, see the paragraph above the one above this one.

All platforms. I throw this one in because web development is becoming so prominent. Companies are relying more and more on the web to make money and get things done. That means more web apps and most of those web apps are being written by life-long COBOL programmers. Choose which platforms (and browsers) you will support and run your test cases on all of them. Listen to your developers when they say it’s not worth testing on anything below IE6. Developers, please start saying it isn’t worth testing on anything below IE6.

What is Usability Really?

Usability is a lot of things and it’s mostly not usability testing.

Bugs in software are a huge problem. Bugs slow down or keep users from completing tasks which costs you money because you didn’t do it right the first time and because the user may not buy your product again. Bugs increase calls to support and even if you offshore this it’s expensive. Bugs are something developers think about.

Now that I think about it, that’s a better definition!

No known bugs.

To get to that point, you have to do a lot of the up front work right. Doing that up front work will often solve (read: not introduce) usability issues.

Shorter Next Time?

Yes, I could have left an, “I agree!” comment on Jepser’s blog.

But I’ve often said I see my job as a translator for all parties involved on a project. I translate what the users want to the business people and the developers. I translate between the business people and the developers. To me, that’s the value of a Usability person. They learn to speak the language of their customers and on a project, everyone’s a customer.

So to developers I say, “no known bugs.” To business people I say, “reduce calls to support,” and “increase sales.” To users I say, “it just works.” To everyone, in some respect, it’s about the end result being useful, usable, and satisfying.

No known bugs are useful because it means you don’t have to fix past mistakes; you can work on new (necessary) functionality. More money is always satisfying. Software, when usable, means your customers don’t even think about your product.

And that’s the best compliment of all.

Unfortunately, the problem I was having with mbta.com earlier in the day was not happening when I went to do the show. Curse them for working properly! :) Fanfiction.net was submitted by a viewer and we talked about ways to make the community of fan fiction writers more inviting and easier for online reading.

Coming Up

This is the third time I’ve done the show and since the first one, it’s been difficult to get people to show up. I have some ideas about this. First, the time of the show is probably not ideal for most people. Second, as was pointed out to me last night, usability just isn’t funny or gross, so of course no one is interested. Third, I am not an attractive, friendly woman.

So given that so few people are showing up, I might retool this. I still plan on going forward with next week’s episode, but some rethinking needs to be done. And I’d like to hear what you think about it.

I really want this to be an opportunity for you to get free advice on how to make your web site or app better. How can I make it easy for people to get involved with that?

Plug: I’ll be doing my show tomorrow night at 8pm ET. Live reviews of web sites and apps that you choose. Come see the show and participate too. It’s more fun that way.

Whitney Hess wrote a post today comparing Bloglines Beta and Google Reader. I thought I’d write a response here for a number of reasons: 1) I am usually in the top 5 for Bloglines vs. Google Reader and I’d like it to stay that way. 2) Whitney asked me to comment about something (which I will point out below) on her site but since I have my own blog I really should be commenting here. 3) It’s been over a year since I compared Bloglines and Google Reader and it’s likely time for an update.

Bottom Line Up Top

If you are a long time user of either Bloglines or Google Reader, you’re likely going to be happiest sticking with what you’ve got. If you are new to either product, you’re probably better off going with Google Reader. I feel the scores are more tied than Whitney’s assessment, but given how fast Google seems to iterate and how slow Bloglines seems to iterate, you will likely have a better experience, sooner, with Google Reader.

How Did We Get That Bottom Line?

Like Whitney, I’ve been using Bloglines Beta and like the improvements I’ve seen over the current non-beta site. I’ve used Bloglines almost since it came out as I’ve always been on multiple computers (and platforms) so a web-based reader made sense. When I did my initial comparison of Bloglines and Google Reader, I came out in favor of Bloglines, easily. At the time Google Reader wasn’t much in my eyes. But as I said, over a year has passed.

For this, I am going to use Whitney’s comparison list.

Sign Up. I don’t feel like pretending to be a new user to either of these products, so I’ll trust Whitney when she says Google Reader is the winner on this.

Start Page. I like blank start pages from somethings. Firefox opens to a blank page every time I start it. I feel overwhelmed with Google Reader each time I visit. There’s so much on the screen.

Bloglines is more inline with how I read.

I don’t really want to read based on what’s newest. Depending on how many unread items I have, I may start at the top of the list on the left and work my way through, or I may pick through the list and read the sites I like more. I feel like Google Reader is forcing me down a set path.

That said, the blank page is only acceptable (in my mind) for the experienced user. And even being an experienced user, I have no idea why I would drag a feed there. Not explaining the why of that dashed-lined box in the content area on Bloglines is a huge fail.

I don’t feel Google or Bloglines really wins this one. Partly, it’s driven by use case. If you sit in front of your reader all day and always want to see the latest, go with Google. If you like to pick and choose what you see first, go with Bloglines. I consider this one a tie (Whitney gave it to Google).

Adding Subscriptions. In Bloglines it is usually 3 to 4 clicks (depending on how many feeds it finds at the URL I enter) to subscribe to a feed. For Google Reader it’s 2 clicks. Fewer clicks is better. Bloglines is cool in that if it finds more than one feed it gives you a choice. But that’s also it’s failure. If it only find one feed, it still makes you choose. If Bloglines would fix that I’d call this a toss up, but for now give this one to Google Reader.

However, do many people really use this method for adding a feed? I am curious if they do. As a Firefox user, I subscribe to feeds in an entirely different way (which I still think could be better).

Importing Subscriptions. Most people are still figuring out what RSS is. OPML? What’s that? Okay, I know what an OPML file is. And while I think it’s great that both products allow importing of OPML files, I don’t think it’s that big of a deal unless you are switching from one product to another. In which case, I agree with Whitney on this one: Bloglines does a better job of helping you manage your subscriptions overall (importing and exporting) and dealing with duplicates.

Searching for New Feeds. Honestly, I’d give both products a -1 on this and as such, it’s a tie. Google Reader makes it too difficult to figure out how to find new content and when I finally find where to search, the results are less relevant than Bloglines. Bloglines makes it easy to search and select, but doesn’t tell me the ones I’m already subscribed to until I try to subscribe to it. Why? Since the serach results currently display in Bloglines non-beta, one would assume it’s not a bug per se which just means bad design.

Reading Posts. Tie again. If I was comparing Bloglines non-beta with the current Google Reader, I’d go with Google. But both products provide you with essentially the same reading experience from views to keyboard shortcuts.

Whitney mentioned you can’t get rid of the feed list in Bloglines Beta. At this moment that is true. However, just this morning the functionality was there. Press the M key (in both versions of Bloglines, but the U key in Google Reader) and the left nav is disappear. At least that’s how it should be working. No idea why it stopped.

But I wonder why this is important. As Whitney implied, if you have 100 Gizmodo items to read it’d be good to get rid of the “distracting” left nav. I don’t think this is the case. When you drop the left nav, the line lengths become longer in the content area. Much longer than the ideal 50-ish characters that are ideal for online scanning and reading.

Saving and Sharing Posts. Google Reader wins. Google just makes it ridiculously easy to share items with people. For each of the other bits of functionality related to saving it’s pretty much a tie. But sharing is where Google Reader stands out. Bloglines Beta doesn’t have the feature yet and Bloglines non-beta… bah. Not worth more characters.

Managing Subscriptions. I mentioned above that Bloglines does this well. And I think once Bloglines Beta catches up with some of the same functionality it will be much better. Until then, given a straight up comparison between the two, I’d edge on the side of Google Reader. I am not sure bulk editing of feeds is something I’d do on a regular basis, but Google Reader allows this to happen where Bloglines Beta doesn’t.

I think editing individual feeds is done better by Bloglines though. But again, how often do you really need to edit feeds (or the associated meta data). The only editing I do to a feed once I have it is unsubscribing. Bloglines Beta makes that slightly easier. This is a tie in my mind.

Settings. This one’s hard to compare in a way. For Bloglines, the setting seem more about me. In Google Reader the settings seem more about the feeds. Which is a way is neither here nor there. Both products make it apparent there are settings and make it relatively easy to change said settings. Google Reader has more settings, so I guess it wins this one. Although more isn’t always better. And yes, I do live in the US and still can say something like that. Strange, I know.

Mobile Access. I haven’t used Google Reader while on the go but once so I can’t say much about it right now. As such, I’ll go with Whitney’s assessment for now: Google Reader wins. Though I have used Bloglines Mobile and find it to be very straight-forward and quick enough. I think it’s one of those things that if you use the main site of one, you are likely going to use the mobile site of the same company.

The Score

Bloglines Beta gets 1. Google Reader gets 5. They tie on 4. Google wins from my point of view too, just by less of a margin. Still a big margin though. :)

What Next?

Even after a year, there are still some issues with both products. A year and a half ago I wrote: Bloglines has 3 months tops to step up, otherwise Google Reader will win over the market share, just like Google does with everything else. Unless Bloglines really steps up the pressure on themselves to deliver a great feed reader, I think Google will win over even old skool Bloglines users like me.

I was thinking about switching when Bloglines came out with their beta. I stuck around because I wanted to test it out and even finding Google Reader the winner above I’ll still stick with Bloglines for a bit for the reasons I outlined at the beginning of this: familiarity.

What’s missing from your perspective? What could either product do better or do in the first place?

It was out for under 10 minutes and looked like it took out most of my ZIP Code as everything south of us was dark, but on the north side of Route 9 the lights were still shining. The only thing that was lighting the room when the power went out was the display on my laptop.

Power goes out, battery kicks in.

My first thought is, “Well… at least I’ll have something to do while the power’s out.” Except, of course, you need power to run the wifi. Power to run the modem. Power to get to the damnable internet!

My second thought, after the brief trip to “oh, duh” was, “Well… this computer is useless now.”

This $1200 computer, with thousands of dollars of software on it was useless with the power out. Because I couldn’t get web access.

How much to I really need the web? Apparently really really.

I didn’t do much to advertise this week’s show as I’ve been sick (as you can plainly tell by watching the show). So no one showed up, but that’s okay. I had always planned for that possibility. As such, I took a look at a problem on Lego.com where they don’t do a good enough job of letting you know a product is not for sale.

Toward the end of the show I got a little distracted by looking at cool Lego stuff. But I blame the fact that Lego is cool and I have a cold so I get distracted easily anyway. :)

I’ll be doing the show next Wednesday at 8pm ET, live, and as always you are welcome to join me.