Matt MacQueen

File under: The times, they are a chaaaaaangin’.
Will Visual Voicemail Kill All Voicemail? on PSFK - here’s a snip of the post:

If you don’t have visual mail then I pity you - you have to take time out to listen to your voicemail messages one by one. Every one a surprise. Not exactly a modern way to access information. Voicemail feels like it was a technology that was created to fill a gap - until something better came along. And now it has: Sure, ring me but there’s no need to leave a message - I’ll know you called and if you want to tell me something the emerging modern etiquette evolving is you should just text or email me - not leave a voice message.Either that or I’m just an anti-social miserable sod.

To make matters worse, leaving someone a voicemail means you’re hostage to the pre-recorded faux-operator blathering on with such helpful tips:as   “please leave your message after the tone.  When you’re done, hang up or press 1 for more options”.    Do we really need to be told to hang up when we’re finished?!

Voicemail doesn’t have to feel like voicejail.

Really nice read here on how using new products with unexpected / disruptive UI’s from the mainstream change your expectations and get you thinking and wanting more from your user interface.  Here was a nice excerpt.

Emily Chang - Blog: New Interface Paradigms
From an interface perspective, the XO’s operating system, named Sugar, has the opposite appeal than the iPhone. It’s not slick and speedy, but much more simplified in each interaction, relying on point and click like most modern GUI operating systems. Despite that, it engages in equally intimate ways. The language of the interface is much more human than previous computers as is the operating system. In the journal view, the search menus default to search “Anything” and “Anytime”. Instead of a file system browser like most computers, the XO operating system uses a “journal”, which is essentially a stream of all your activities and actions on the laptop. Every application saves files to the journal as you use the computer. I find this time-based and non-hierarchical view into my activity much more compelling than the the traditional file system view. Now that I’ve seen and used this paradigm, I wish it was also part of the Apple OSX.

Full article

Interesting thoughts about how conversations about content are happening, sometimes far away from the original source, and what this means for producers and consumers of user generated or linked content. Fragmentation will continue, but how can users keep an eye on it as conversations about, with and through the content itself proliferate?

The Conversation Has Left the Blogosphere - ReadWriteWeb
We’ve seen a lot of new aggregation services and lifestreaming applications come into play recently, and we’ve questioned whether they’re adding to the conversation or just adding to our information overload. (See our coverage on FriendFeed, for example). And today, MyBlogLog even added even more lifestreams to subscribe to.

The truth of the matter is, like it or not, the conversations that once existed solely in the blogosphere have now moved on. People still comment, but in a lot of cases, those comments aren’t on found on the blog itself. So the question is, has the conversation become diluted among all the different services and applications? Or is it just adding layers to the original topic? And most importantly, how can you keep up?

read full post here

Danah Boyd with a great response to the latest ink-grabbing story in Sunday’s NY Times

apophenia: how youth find privacy in interstitial spaces

The NYTimes ran a piece today called Text Generation Gap: U R 2 Old (JK). (Note: the article is very American-centric - in the States, older folks tend to be texting illiterate.) The article begins with an anecdote of a parent shuttling around his daughter and her friend. They are talking and dad butts in and they roll their eyes. And then there is silence. When dad comments to his daughter that she’s being rude for texting on her phone rather than talking to her friend, the daughter replies: “But, Dad, we’re texting each other. I don’t want you to hear what I’m saying.”

First and foremost, the notion of “privacy” is about having a sense of control over how and when information flows to who. Given the structures of their lives, teens have often had very little control over their social context. In school, at home, at church… there are always adults listening in. Forever more, there have been pressures to find interstitial spaces to assert control over communications. Note passing, whispering, putting notes in lockers, arranging simultaneous bathroom visits, pig latin, neighbor to neighbor string communication… all of these have been about trying to find ways to communicate outside of the watchful eyes of adults, an attempt to assert privacy while stuck in a fundamentally public context. The mobile phone is the next in line of a long line of efforts to communicate in the spaces between.

Here’s the rest of her excellent observation, taking a long lens.

What happens when what we want to search is primarily driven and filtered by those we know? Good bit herefrom MIT Technology Review on the implications and one player called Delver:

Technology Review: Social Search
People are flocking to online social networks. Facebook, for example, claims an average of 250,000 new registrations per day. But companies are still hunting for ways to make these networks more useful–and profitable. In the past year, Facebook has introduced new services aimed at taking advantage of users’ online contacts (see “Building onto Facebook’s Platform”), and Yahoo announced plans for an e-mail service that shares data with social-networking sites. (See “Yahoo’s Plan for a Smarter In-Box.”) Now a company called Delver, which presented at Demo earlier this week, is working on a search engine that uses social-network data to return personalized results from the larger Web.

Liad Agmon, CEO of Delver, says that the site connects information about a user’s social network with Web search results, “so you are searching the Web through the prism of your social graph.” He explains that a person begins a search at Delver by typing in her name. Delver then crawls social-networking websites for widely available data about the user–such as a public LinkedIn profile–and builds a network of associated institutions and individuals based on that information. When the user enters a search query, results related to, produced by, or tagged by members of her social network are given priority. Lower down are results from people implicitly connected to the user, such as those relating to friends of friends, or people who attended the same college as the user. Finally, there may be some general results from the Web at the bottom. The consequence, says Agmon, is that each user gets a different set of results from a given query, and a set quite different from those delivered by Google.

“We have no intention of competing with the Googles of the world, because Google is doing a very good job of indexing the Web and bringing you the Wikipedia page of every search query you’re looking for,” says Agmon. He says that Delver will free general search queries such as “New York” or “screensaver” from the heavy search-engine optimization that tends to make those kinds of queries return generic, ad-heavy results on Google. “[As a user], you’re always thinking, how can I trick Google into bringing me the real results rather than the commercial results?” Agmon says. “With this engine, we don’t need to trick it at all. You can go back to these very naive and simple queries because the results come from your network. Your network is not trying to optimize results; they just publish or bookmark pages which they find interesting.” As a consequence, the results lean toward user-generated content and items tagged through sites such as del.icio.us.

I like the premise of having the value to end user trick out the “commercial results” - more commonly driven by SEO tactics - to really look at your results through the social lens. I’ve oversimplified this completely, but there’s room for this kind of search and results and would be nice to see more search engines thinking this way.

As more and more mobile devices contain GPS, many handset MFGs and service providers are trying define more valuable and relevant user experiences that take advantages of location information. Here’s an interesting value proposition from the ever-socially focused Helio, still making a run at their tightly defined market. I think the key differentiator here is aggregation of services, not picking a single partner but leveraging the wisdom of many, including user generated as well as curated by editors. A good combination.

Helio Partners with Buzzd for Mobile Party Search
[Helio… ] is now partnering with Buzzd in order to bring users up-to-date information regarding night-life in their local region. This partnership more than reflects the type of user Helio is going after, as an all-out partnership means that Buzzd’s features will be more prominent than they would otherwise be through its mobile offering.

Buzzd offers editorially-driven event and venue information with real-time reviews and ratings from within your own personal nework and other users of the Buzzd community. Through Buzzd’s own partnerships with services like Flavorpill, TimeOut New York and CitySearch, the aggregate approach Buzzd uses can be applied in a couple of different ways for its users. This entertainment-centric approach to local search is an ideal fit for the Helio service and its average user, and may help Buzzd grow its own membership with national exposure to a wider pool of mobile users.

How many more “my private and professional worlds uncomfortably colliding” articles need to be printed before Facebook, MySpace, and others deploy more definitivie way to group people other than a binary way: “friend” or not? Privacy controls are beginning to affect usage and adoption, I predict all are working on other layers and solutions for this, but the time is so so overdue.

Even Flickr has pretty decent privacy settings for photos. Come on Facebook, your customers usage and trust depends on you cleaning up the user experience in this fashion. Here’s the latest short and sweet from The Times Online, but there have been several articles like this a week for the last couple months.

My online life: no hobbies, no opinions, no friends, no fun
Intrigued colleagues followed my boss’s lead and also asked me to create their online existence and make me their online friends. Soon I had to justify my choice of Anchorman and Zoolander as favourite films. I realised that once you admit a love of silly Will Ferrell films, bosses might doubt your professional judgment too.

My profile had to change, and so did my online behaviour. My favourite hobbies no longer included “working up a sweat, cooking up a storm”. In fact, I quickly had no hobbies, musical or cinematic preferences at all. I was quick to “detag” any compromising photographs posted by others as I didn’t want anyone to think that I had too much fun or was too much fun to be taken seriously.

In essence, I attempted to remove any indication of quirks to my colleagues. Quirks are good for your personality, but might be the reason you miss a deadline.
One problem with Facebook is that it cannot distinguish between the friend who knows all of your embarrassing secrets and those with whom you enjoy a two-minute chat.

This article from ultra-mainstream USA Today reaches similar conclusions.

Great summary article by Matthew Ingram that really captures the different (and in many ways polar) approaches to the music industry trying to make itself relevant again — to consumers born of the digital and social networking generation. Worth reading just for all the great examples of those who are embracing a new digital reality and innovating, versus litigating to defend a business model that has doggedly refused to adapt an outdated business model.

Music: Snapshot of an industry in turmoil
In many ways, the music industry’s dilemma is the same as that faced by other content industries, including the movie business (and the newspaper business, I feel compelled to add). The content that the industry relies on can be freely copied and exchanged almost instantaneously with millions of people, and lawsuits – at least so far – don’t seem to be putting much of a dent in that problem. As sales of physical products such as CDs continue to drop, online sales are rising – they climbed by 122 per cent in Canada in 2007. But they aren’t producing enough of a return to justify all of the embedded costs that the industry has built up as a result of its former business model.

To some extent, any content-based – or even service-based – business is likely confronting some of the same challenges as the music industry. What happens when your content or service moves online and becomes virtually free? Demand may increase, but revenue is almost certain to plummet. How do you make up for that shortfall?

If nothing else, the digital dilemma strips industries down to their essence, and forces them to try to answer the central question that all companies have to confront: What kind of business are you actually in, and what is your compelling advantage?

Interesting developments on the Scrabulous application on Facebook and those companies, their brands and new users. There’s a lot of opinions on this but I tend to interview with Matthew Ingram here the most. Why don’t these companies just buy, rent, or license the app? They can extend their brand into social networks without even doing the work. Taking games like this viral, digital and distributed is a way to get a younger “born digital” audience into your product. I really hope they can work out a deal with the app developers and do something that positions their Scrabble franchise is a positive way instead of as reactive dinosaurs who can’t see this as an incredible opportunity.

Hasbro and Mattel: Dumb, dumb, dumb - - mathewingram.com/work
From a legal perspective, Hasbro and Mattel are no doubt totally within their rights to have the app removed, or to sue, or do whatever they wish to protect their trademark. But from a marketing perspective I think they are missing the point. It reminds me of Coca-Cola’s initial reaction to the Eepybird video with the Coke and the Mentos — they said they were considering legal action, because “that’s not how we want consumers to interact with our brand.” Morons.

Eventually someone at Coca-Cola saw the light, thank God, and realized that how people interact with your brand is pretty much up to them, not you. If you’re smart, you will be glad they are interacting with it at all, and you will find a way to capitalize on it. I think another way to look at Scrabulous is as the online version of a tribute band, or like the fansites that specialize in fiction based on Star Trek or Star Wars — some companies see that as trademark infringement, others see it as an opportunity.

Thoughtful integration and aggregation makes such a difference to a good mobile UI, the new Google app really demonstrates this nicely with tabs for their major pieces of functionality, and hopefully increased functional integration across them.  Nicely done!

Google Prepares for a Better Mobile Web
Today, in the first day of MacWorld, Google will announce an update for its unified mobile interface, codenamed Grand Prix. Among the new features, the navigation bar will be customizable, Gmail will automatically show new messages without having to refresh the page, the compose page will include contacts, while Google Calendar will add a month-at-a-glance view. The updated iGoogle will probably be integrated in the interface.

“Google, which developed the first version of Grand Prix in six weeks, is introducing a new version on Monday, just six weeks after the first one. That is a speed of development not previously possible on mobile phones,” said Vic Gundotra, vice-president at Google.

Vic Gundotra expects that “consumers are going to demand Internet browsers [as good as Apple’s]” and the mobile web experience will improve.

Update.
From a Google announcement (my emphasis): “These new features provide iPhone users with a desktop-like Google web application experience in terms of ease-of-use, speed, and feature richness but optimized for the iPhone. This experience is made possible by the iPhone’s general usability and the capabilities of its web browser, combined with Google’s innovative mobile web applications. We plan to expand this experience to international versions of the iPhone and to other platforms that offer similar usability and browser capabilities. One of our goals is to support platforms that are fulfilling the promise of the mobile web - like the iPhone - and to ultimately deliver unique and compelling mobile experiences that improve people’s daily lives.”

Another victory for users who want simple interoperability and portability of their purchased digital music to/from different devices… phone, PC, MP3 player, sonic cloud in the sky… we knew it would happen, it was a question of when and in what order the big four would try selling digital without restriction.  Seems the dominoes are coming down faster now, a late Christmas present for an industry who now admits they blundered for a decade instead of adapting to trends in user behavior and consumption of digital music. (Read: stop making my buy CDs if I don’t want them, let me play my music wherever I go). Yes, Sony, the same company who installed the infamous “rootkit” spyware on your computer, that garnered them more ill will from customers any any RIAA lawsuit could have garnered.

Sony BMG Plans to Drop DRM (via BusinessWeek)
In a move that would mark the end of a digital music era, Sony BMG Music Entertainment is finalizing plans to sell songs without the copyright protection software that has long restricted the use of music downloaded from the Internet, BusinessWeek.com has learned. Sony BMG, a joint venture of Sony (SNE) and Bertelsmann, will make at least part of its collection available without so-called digital rights management, or DRM, software some time in the first quarter, according to people familiar with the matter.

Sony BMG would become the last of the top four music labels to drop DRM, following Warner Music Group (WMG), which in late December said it would sell DRM-free songs through Amazon.com’s (AMZN) digital music store. EMI and Vivendi’s Universal Music Group announced their plans for DRM-free downloads earlier in 2007.
Getting Hip to the Internet

The impetus to lift copyright protection represents a sea change for the recording industry, which for the better part of a decade has used DRM to guard against what it considers illegal distribution and duplication of songs purchased online. In abandoning DRM on à la carte song purchases, the labels could create a raft of new, less restrictive ways of selling music over the Internet, such as through social networks like Facebook and News Corp.’s (NWS) MySpace.

full article at BusinessWeek

It was refreshing to read Chief Executive Officer of Warner Music Group Edgar Bronfman break down the “us vs. our customers” mentality in such stark terms:  respect consumer desire or die trying to go to war with them:

We used to fool ourselves…We used to think our content was perfect just exactly as it was. We expected our business would remain blissfully unaffected even as the world of interactivity, constant connection and file sharing was exploding. And of course we were wrong. How were we wrong? By standing still or moving at a glacial pace, we inadvertently went to war with consumers by denying them what they wanted and could otherwise find and as a result of course, consumers won.

via TechCrunch - Warner Music Boss: We Were Wrong

Great piece from Nov. 2007 on how social networks are like nightclubs, the portability of value, and why it’s so important to consider if you’re investing time in developing a social application.

Giles Bowkett: Facebook Apps: The Facebook Trap
Social networking Web sites aren’t platforms. They’re not circles of friends, either. They’re nightclubs. Some people spend all their time at these things. Some people never go once. A new social network becomes hot, everybody who’s everybody is there, and one day, suddenly, without warning, everyone is somewhere else. At most of them all you have to do to get in is show your ID.

There’s a lot of money in nightclubs. You go to the Winter Music Conference in South Beach, FL, you can easily spend a hundred dollars just to get into one particular club one particular night. And it won’t be the only club you go to that night. There’s a lot of money in club music, club clothes, expensive vodka, designer drugs, laser lights, and really big speakers. The people who work that system successfully do very well by it.

But if you’re building a Facebook app, you’re building a sound system you can never take out of the club. Spending money on something which won’t work anywhere else only makes sense if the payoff is immediate. It’s not really an investment, because assuming any given social network will persist for any given amount of time defies history. These things have been growing first hip and then stale on a cyclical basis for five years. A New York Times article blamed various executives when Friendster went from hot to not, but fashion features a great deal of randomness. Criticizing upper management for being unable to predict effectively random phenomena is like criticizing them for being unable to defy gravity. It might make a lot of sense to leverage social networking applications for business purposes, but it definitely doesn’t make a lot of sense to do so in a way that locks you into any one particular social network.

rest of the full article (complete with raver photo):  at Giles Bowkett’s blog.

More evidence that the connection between users/customers/participants and what they experience approaches realtime. Experience design becomes experience refinement. New job title: Experience Tuner?

Via Trendcentral - Technology

Blogging on location

As a way to create a more engaging, interactive and creative way for consumers to experience brands, stores and events, expect to see more “blog bars” (computer terminals which give the public the ability to post in real time and on location) to pop up in such settings. Consumers will have the opportunity to post fresh thoughts and reactions, pose questions, and receive immediate response. Art Basel recently featured a blog bar, and The Metropolitan Museum of Art is currently hosting a blog bar, with eight computer terminals, at their current blog.mode: addressing fashion exhibition. The public can post their reactions to the show and ask questions which curators will respond to; in short, the blog bar is meant to “provoke commentary.” …

Young people often tell us how important their online lives and identities are, so the ability to immediately link participation in a real world event to the online world only adds value to the experience. Additionally, expect physical spaces to increasingly include virtual components, creating a mash-up hybrid environment.

Funny enough, don’t expect this from the airlines anytime soon. What if you had a 2 hour delay on the tarmac and nothing to do but type in how it made you feel into the tray table? They couldn’t handle the deluge… then again, if you edited out the profanities, think about how rich and earnest the feedback would be.

Great thoughts from Karl Long about infusing fast experiments into the culture of large, typically slow-moving and process-based bureaucratic companies:

from : Trying Sometimes Cheaper Than Deciding (at Experience Curve)

So when the cost of deciding to do something becomes much more expensive than doing something, what do you do? Here are a few ideas:

* Empower teams to launch experiments
* Develop a process for manageing projects as a portfolio of experiments
* Evaluate projects regularly
* Killing projects should be as easy as starting projects and everyone needs to understand that, and the criteria
* Start cheaply
* Get ready to fail faster
* Prepare to fail in public and be ok with that
* Create a “beta” culture
* Put basic legal boilerplate frameworks in place that minimize risk, don’t reinvent it each time

People familiar with the iterative design mantra “fail early to succeed faster” for design prototyping will find this mentality familiar, but applying this philosophy at at macro level to bigger corporate design and product development organizations is something many companies just aren’t organized to handle today. Trying something out and just making/prototyping constantly - versus paralysis based on all the planning (and even IP ownership issues) that can really tie up a promising concept before it even can get off the ground. Most commonly this also relates to staffing - and how you prioritize the work a group of designers (UI, UX, Visual Design, Scripting/Prototype coders), which could be approached more like managing an innovation “portfolio” - like how a VC firm decides to juice a project with additional funding or resources to see the next level of promise an idea may hold.

It gets down to a having a progressive management philosophy, which is why Google has done well with this method.  Lots of things are tried constantly, many fail but the portfolio approach is stronger because so many good ideas are left to breathe and fertilize earlier.
Very great thoughts to begin 2008 with!

Good article by Alison Black about the pros and cons of ethnographic research. I tend to agree with Don “official curmedgeon” Norman’s kneejerk comment about Personas in his Core77 interview, (so many people obsess over Personas while ignoring the tasks and designs to achieve them) — yet reading her analysis of the bigger framing, she makes great points too. I believe personas are good for framing and context but not for tactical design criteria. They make a good intro to a potentially better use of scarce design resources: iterative rough prototyping. Give the article a read.

Shift6 » Is ethnographic research worth it?
The ‘question authority’ comment came about a third-way through the interview where Norman criticises the techniques used by companies who are committed to user-centred design. His comments focus particularly on ethnographic research and the creation of personas. Norman complains that, interesting as these processes are, they fail to connect to the engineers and designers creating products and services and so are, in effect, a waste of time. What Norman wants, he says, is processes that focus on the task, rather than on people. I know what he means, but worry that he’s throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

So let’s take a short step back from Norman’s comments and remember what preceded the typical user-centred processes many companies now use. Often, nothing.

Don is a great foil and antagonist to the overall practice of UX. Even when I don’t agree with him he makes me think harder about the underlying principles of my methods, and what I methods choose to push for and employ on various product design challenges.

Good one from Umair at BubbleGeneration, one of my favorite blogs for pithy bits on disruptive innovation and emergence.
Research Note: Competition At The Edge

Noise Between Stations: When Design Innovation Comes Down to Execution

Matt, formerly of Nokia, counters the notion that Apple alone has the best touch user interface ideas, but also that it’s not the idea that won that race, but execution…

Funny and honest critique of Facebook by Cory Doctorow, great read!
How Your Creepy Ex-Co-Workers Will Kill Facebook — InformationWeek

Facebook is no paragon of virtue. It bears the hallmarks of the kind of pump-and-dump service that sees us as sticky, monetizable eyeballs in need of pimping. The clue is in the steady stream of emails you get from Facebook: “So-and-so has sent you a message.” Yeah, what is it? Facebook isn’t telling — you have to visit Facebook to find out, generate a banner impression, and read and write your messages using the halt-and-lame Facebook interface, which lags even end-of-lifed email clients like Eudora for composing, reading, filtering, archiving and searching. Emails from Facebook aren’t helpful messages, they’re eyeball bait, intended to send you off to the Facebook site, only to discover that Fred wrote “Hi again!” on your “wall.” Like other “social” apps (cough eVite cough), Facebook has all the social graces of a nose-picking, hyperactive six-year-old, standing at the threshold of your attention and chanting, “I know something, I know something, I know something, won’t tell you what it is!”

Also more about the difficulties of making relationships so black and white, when really it’s all grey area.

You’d think that Facebook would be the perfect tool for handling all this. It’s not. For every long-lost chum who reaches out to me on Facebook, there’s a guy who beat me up on a weekly basis through the whole seventh grade but now wants to be my buddy; or the crazy person who was fun in college but is now kind of sad; or the creepy ex-co-worker who I’d cross the street to avoid but who now wants to know, “Am I your friend?” yes or no, this instant, please.

It’s not just Facebook and it’s not just me. Every “social networking service” has had this problem and every user I’ve spoken to has been frustrated by it. I think that’s why these services are so volatile: why we’re so willing to flee from Friendster and into MySpace’s loving arms; from MySpace to Facebook. It’s socially awkward to refuse to add someone to your friends list — but removing someone from your friend-list is practically a declaration of war. The least-awkward way to get back to a friends list with nothing but friends on it is to reboot: create a new identity on a new system and send out some invites (of course, chances are at least one of those invites will go to someone who’ll groan and wonder why we’re dumb enough to think that we’re pals).

Good one recapping the NY Times piece about sad state of the mobile web, and what it means when you’ve “had enough”

Technology Innovation Is Driven By Deep Dissatisfaction - Publishing 2.0

On one end of the spectrum, you have the technology enthusiasts who defend the current state of technology and blame the users for the not being good users. On the other end, you have innovators like Nathan Eagle, who are driven by a deep dissatisfaction with the current state of technology and a belief that it could be so much better.You won’t find people like Nathan Eagle telling you that you just need a better mobile web browser or a better device and some better hacks. No, people like Nathan are busy taking a sledgehammer to the current underperforming technology and completely reinventing it.

That’s how innovation happens — seeing the deep flaws in how things currently work — and how things can be so much better.

Six Apart - News and Events: We Are Opening the Social Graph

An open social graph is just as important as an open identity.

• You should own your social graph
• Privacy must be done right by placing control in your hands
• It is good to be able to find out what is already public about you on the Internet
• Everyone has many social graphs, and they shouldn’t always be connected
• Open technologies are the best way to solve these problems
• We’re going to release code and demos soon

We believe in openness. We were early supporters of RSS and Atom for content syndication. We pioneered the use of the metaweblog and Atom publishing APIs. We developed the Open Media Profile for OpenSearch standard, which makes it easy for tools to both syndicate and consume custom search results. We helped create, and then quickly deployed the rel=”nofollow” microformat to help limit the impact of comment and blog spam. Most of our code is open source, and we’ve announced a GPL distribution of Movable Type that will be available later this year.

Two of our platforms — Vox and LiveJournal — are social blogging applications. In developing and running those products, we hear from our users and customers all the time about the challenges they have around discovering new social networks, registering as a user and identifying people they already know on these new services. We believe that the problems our users are facing are not unique, and that there is an opportunity to use open standards to simplify and streamline the user experience when joining a new service that has social features at its core. This isn’t just about making our services better; it’s about helping you manage your social network on all of the services you use.