Excerpt from a recent conversation with a friend over GoogleTalk within Gmail wherein he discovers GoogleTalk for the first time.
me: you busy?
friend: whoa! is this something recent? i’ve never seen this function before.
me: hahahahahaahahahaahah!
To the gals or guys on the mobile team at Flickr (http://m.flickr.com):
Can I get a next link and (I know I am pushing it) a previous link under the picture on the individual picture pages? The page with several pictures has a “more” button to navigate to the next page of pictures, but the individual page doesn’t have any way (as far as I can tell) of navigating to the next picture in the photo stream. Since our screens are so small, the images can only be enjoyed on the individual picture pages. It would be nice to be able to simply click to the next image from there.
Thanks for all you do. If I haven’t said it before, I love you.
Officials at Heathrow Airport calculated that as the population grew older it would need to install more bathrooms. They made this decision by noticing that older folks went to the bathroom more often than their younger counterparts.
Turns out the old folks were going to the bathroom to hear their flight announcements!
via Ballpark
Can someone please explain why Snap.com’s Preview Anywhere is a useful feature? People are adopting it in droves, so I must be missing something. To me, there are two major drawbacks which make the feature not worth any of the benefits.
First off, by the time I have moused over a url, I have already decided to click it. Blogs that have enabled Snap create, what I believe to be, a huge usability issue. The problem goes something like this.
Secondly, it would be useful if I could get a preview of the actual content I am being directed to. That would be… um… fresh. But getting a screen cap of the look and feel of the site with outdated content from the last time Snap took a snapshot is… not so useful. As I mentioned above, I have already decided to click the link. This decision was mostly based on my trust in the source (i.e. the author) who has pointed me to a particular page. Is a screen capture of the site really going to cause me to second guess the author’s suggestion?
Now that I think about it, this would be an extremely useful invention for email. Sometimes I get strange spammy sounding emails from my friends and if I could preview the link in that context I would love the feature. But as implemented in blogs and other trusted sources, this feature seems intended to fix a problem that doesn’t exist.
As an aside, “free preview” cracks me up. I assume Snap means that the tool is free to bloggers to provide previews. But I always read it as they are providing me with a “free preview” of a website, which is, of course, already free.
Update: Brad Feld mentions that Snap claims to have over 40,000 users. Despite that, Feld decided to remove Snap from his blog and AskTheVC. Fred Wilson threatened to remove the feature a week ago, but hasn’t pulled the trigger as of this morning.
Did you know that if you press the ALT button and click on any word on the New York Times website a pop-up window opens with the word’s definition? The feature is powered by Answers.com.
Does anyone know when they added this feature? Not that the newspaper uses to many 10 cent words, but the feature is clean and useful. Now, if the ALT-click opened a window with a Wikipedia entry for the clicked word, that would be extrememly useful.
Update: It appears that this feature works on individual articles, but not on section pages (e.g. the homepage, business, sports, etc.)
This post and the one before it stem from a post I read this morning by Charlie O’Donnell about the future of the calendaring industry. While Charlie raised many important points, I was struck by the quote below:
I hardly know anyone who uses any calendar other than one their job forced them to… and less than half of the Outlook users I know put personal items on their work calendar. (italics mine)
We have different identities based on the various relationships we have. And software isn’t designed to help us easily maintain these identities. It is painfully evident in the calendaring space but is a problem in many areas of digital life.
I have a Google calendar that tracks my birthdays, social engagements, doctors appointments, Browns games, and other goings ons about town. I will have a work calendar when I start my new job in a few weeks that will be dominated by meetings (and my secretary). And never the twain shall meet. This is primarily due to the fact that the existing software can’t easily handle the problems of trust levels and interoperabilty. It can be done, but not seamlessly.
I face the same bifurcation issue with email. In a few weeks I will have a new work email address to add to the host of personal addresses I maintain. Again, the software isn’t up to the challenge of easily handling correspondance with various constituencies from one interface. I want the work address and boilerplate to be used when I contact a client or a colleague. I want my personal address to be used when I contact a friend. And I don’t want to have to manually adjust these settings with each message.
When it comes to this blog, I feel the push and pull of these competing parts of my life. There are stories I would tell, thoughts I would share, if not for the fact that this blog is in the words of Stephen Dunn, “open on all sides, in cahoots with thin air.” Setting up a second blog would only make thebifurcation more permanent. I want to present a public blog and filter certain posts for friends and family. I am sure I can set up some sort of pass protected site, but no blog software has made it easy as far as I can tell.
I guess in the end, I want technology that works the way I do (and, I surmise, we all do). I may be asking too much, but any company that can create software that changes identities - seamlessly - depending on the relationship involved, will come out on top.
I switched from to del.icio.us to Yahoo’s MyWeb awhile back because MyWeb saves cached versions of each page I bookmark. I recently decided to switch back to del.icio.us (I wasn’t using the cached versions enough to sacrifice the ease of use of del.icio.us). However, when I imported my bookmarks they all defaulted to private. I was told by del.icio.us support team that I would have to share each link individually (the reason, which is fair, is that if the import tool, as it currently stands, allowed bulk sharing it would be abused by link spammers).
I have over 1700 links currently bookmarked.
Has anyone “found” a faster way to do this?
Update: According to del.icio.us support (who, I might add, are really quick to answer emails!) they are working on a solution to this problem.
Yesterday I commented on a post by Seth Godin here on this blog. I did this because Seth chooses not to enable comments (which is totally cool by me). He has enabled trackbacks however. I drafted my thoughts and published the post. In Wordpress this is all one has to do to join a conversation. But when I returned this morning to see how the conversation had progressed over night, my post was nowhere to be found.
It took me several minutes to realize that my post hadn’t registered as a trackback because Seth uses Moveable Type (MT). Why is this significant? Wordpress (the platform that powers this blog) automatically handles trackbacks. When I publish a post, Wordpress attempts to notify the blogs I have linked to. If it is successful, then my post is registered as a trackback and the author I have linked to is notified. Similarly, whenever someone links to a post of mine, Wordpress notes this and includes the trackback along with any other comments that have been left on my blog. In short, whenever I want to join a conversation, all I have to do is post my thoughts. Like the good wingman that he is, Wordpress magically handles the introductions.
The same is not true for Moveable Type. Each post on an MT blog has a trackback url that is different from the permanent link of the post. Before I could join the conversation on Seth’s blog, I had to locate the trackback link of his post. Then I drafted my post - linking to the permanent link of the post for human readers - and then had to add the trackback link (the computer readable reference). The trackback link has to be entered into an obscure field in the Worpress Admin screen which, presumably, exists solely to trackback to posts on MT blogs.
It’s not a huge deal, but little platform quirks like this inhibit the natural flow of conversation. When I link to another blog, in my mind, the gesture has been made. Moveable Type’s trackback process is like telling a woman you like her shoes and then, upon returning home, drafting a handwritten letter to the same effect.
Update: And sure enough, I forgot to add the trackback to for this post!
I am joking, but I enjoyed reading that Seth Godin had come to the realization this morning that products - of all stripes - are too complicated these days (Seth tried washing his clothes in a washing machine with 125 different settings).
Seth ponders whether “good enough” might be the next big idea.
The team over at 37signals would certainly agree. They have staked their future on the notion. And it seems to be working.
One note though, “good enough” will smack of mediocrity to some. Perhaps “simplicity” gets to the heart of it. Very few would demand a complicated product. But every one thinks they deserve great (which is the perceived as the opposite of “good enough”).
Google recently added a “all my services” link to the top of the Gmail page that links to a central page that catalogs (and links to) each of the Google services I am subscribed to. Before this move I wasn’t even sure if the Gmail folks new I was using the calendar, or the analytics package.
But from a navigational perspective, this solution is half-assed. Clicking on the link opens a new window which lists all of the services I use. Clicking on one of these links takes me away from the list to the requested service. If I want to go back to the list I have to use the back button. It’s easier to just type the damn url in the address bar.
How hard would it be to provide a common navigational scheme that spanned across all of the products that I am subscribed to? It needn’t be elborate. Even a drop down menu would do. For a team of geniuses, they should be able to figure out how to let me toggle back and forth between services - in one window - by lunch time.
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