Posted by tibbetts
Fri, 10 Nov 2006 13:27:00 GMT
I got invited into the Beta at Me.dium, a new collaborative/social browsing system. It's no dis-similar from the third-party-comments system I was pondering back in the spring, if anyone remembers that. However, rather than being focussed on comments, it is also focussed on real-time browsing. You get a side-bar that shows you what people are looking at. It also has a facility for inviting your friends and sharing browser state with your friends. If anyone is interested in an invitiation, let me know.
The model of being more-realtime has it's problems. In order to use the tool, I need to expose everything I do in my browser (when I don't remember to turn off the tool). The upside is the medium system gets more information, which may make it more valuable to other users. The downside is I have less control over what goes into it. The system I was conceiving of, which would be similar to Pearl Comments, would just be focussed on collecting comments that users actively gave.
Pearl Comments is actually an interesting bit of technology, which is being under-utilized in its current incarnation. They use it to moderate interactions between web designers and clients (it enables clients to privately comment on any page, and to see other comments from the developers or clients). I think a system like that, extended in a social way (so I put comments into groups, and my friends are members of groups, and I see all comments from groups I am a member of) would be better.
Let me know if you want a me.dium beta invite. It's not going to be very interesting unless a bunch of people use it.
Posted in Web | 1 comment | no trackbacks
Posted by tibbetts
Thu, 26 Jan 2006 22:17:16 GMT
I was reminded again today of the number of smart people that have been swallowed up by Google. Google seems to have hired everyone in San Jose, according to Indeed.com's new job numbers. They have offices in New York, and I hear they are opening new offices in Philadelphia and Boston. They seem to be willing to acquire entire companies just to get their employees.
The big question is, what are they all doing? The stock market seems to think that they are secretly working on The Next Big Thing. Based on Google stock price, investors expect that any day now we will see a beta of cancer.google.com. "Just click here and our AJAX-enabled Web 2.0 service will cure your cancer." That isn't too far from the truth though. Google seems to be adopting a similar model to big pharma. They are doing drug discovery. But what they are trying to discover is the next big idea.
However, much like big pharma, they are failing. A large number of researchers packed into a company, with too many PhDs, is unable to justify it's cost. Sure, Google will produce neat new things. They've produced several. But when you consider that they employ thousands of people, several good ideas just isn't cutting it. But much like big pharma, Google has enough money to decide that next year they need 30% more innovation, and hire 30% more PhDs. Of course, that isn't going to work. Each new good idea is going to cost Google more and more money.
Most good drugs in the pharmaceutical industry come from startups. A biotech startup gets together a few good people who believe in an idea, does the preliminary implementation, and gets it through a few rounds of trials to show that it works. If it does work, a big company comes in, buys the idea, and applies their knowledge of scalability and marketing to finish the idea.
That is exactly what Yahoo is doing with Web 2.0 companies. They are letting startups be the proving ground for new ideas, letting them put the ideas through human trials, and then buying up the good ones. And since there is no FDA driving up costs, the companies (and their ideas) come cheap. Order of $10 million a pop. For $10 million, how many PhD-years can Google buy? Not enough.
Posted in Web, Business | 2 comments | no trackbacks
Posted by tibbetts
Wed, 25 Jan 2006 15:28:10 GMT
I just happened to catch a Google ad for propsmart, and I'm glad that I did. I enjoy regularly browsing real estate listings in both Michigan and Massachusetts. The web-based browsing systems have been gradually improving, but none of them have yet got it right. propsmart is a big step in the right direction. For those of you who have seen Housing Maps, this is basically housing maps applied to MLS and several other data sources, rather than just Craigslist.
In particular, all the previous services I have used have been attached to one brokerage or another, and have considered it their solemn duty to exclude FSBO properties and maintain the real estate agent oligopoly. A service like propsmart, or a similar one, has the possibility to greatly improve the FSBO market, and improve information flow in the real estate market in general.
propsmart is far from perfect. But it is much better than anything I've seen. Check it out.
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Posted by tibbetts
Sun, 29 May 2005 15:17:00 GMT
37 signal is one of the neatest
companies out there in terms of advancing the state of the art in web
design. It seems like they do almost as much as Google, presumably without spending such
embarrassing amounts of money. If you haven't check out some of their
projects, like Basecamp, Ta-da Lists, and Backpack, you really should. They
build really nice web apps. Not only that, but they give back to the
community with things like the yellow
fade technique and a presentation on How
to make big things happen with a small team (slides)
(summary).
Jesse Vincent just shared with me a
copy of their book De
fensive
Design for the Web: How to Improve Error Messages, Help, Forms, and
Other Crisis Points. It was a very quick read this morning
before breakfast, and I think also worthwhile, even though I am not
currently a builder of real webapps. I find well designed web
applications interesting, and like learning more techniques for doing
it. This book is mostly about user-level guidelines, rather than
technical detail. But that is important too, since when building
technical frameworks it is important to enable the right kinds of user
interaction.
The book is pretty good. It gives a set of 40 guidelines with real
examples of sites that break and sites that follow the guideline. The
guidelines mostly focus on what to do when something goes wrong or how
to keep something from going wrong. The core idea is that when looking
at the usability of your website, the error cases are as important as
the non-error cases.
One area in which I disagree is their support of restrictive forms.
They encourage sites to prevent users from entering incorrect data
through the use of drop down lists (for things like states or dates)
and client-side validation with JavaScript. The principle is that if
you keep users from ever entering bad data, then you are sure they
won't have a confusing experience fixing errors. I tend to find that
these restrictive forms harm my user experience more than they help
though. I'd rather type a free-form address, or phone number, or date,
and be corrected, than have to mouse- or arrow-around in 6 drop down
lists to enter two dates.
Combining client- and server-side validation of form data is an
interesting challenge for framework development. Is it possible to
easily combine these so that site developers don't have two divergent
code bases (most likely in different languages) to maintain?
Consolidating this functionality probably requires JavaScript code
generation, so that the server-side encoding of the validation rules
can be pushed down to the client. I'm not aware of any JavaScript code
generation that really makes for a usable system, so maybe this idea
would be doomed anyway.
Because it ignores technical details and focuses on user experience,
De
fensive
Design for the Web is a quick read. It's guidelines are not
perfect, but they are reasonable. It presents you with a helpful
checklist which can be used to improve your crisis points, and thus to
improve your sites whole user experience. And it is lightweight enough
you can throw it at a coworker without be charged with assault. I
recommend it for people doing webapp development.
Posted in Books, Web | no comments | no trackbacks
Posted by tibbetts
Sun, 10 Apr 2005 15:48:28 GMT
I'm trying out Typo, web log software, and liking it. It uses Ruby On Rails, and seems to work quite well.
Posted in Tools, Web | no comments | no trackbacks
