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That del.icio.us dominates the social bookmarking space is clear, but by how much? Where do the other players stand? We'll attempt to sort it all out and predict what's coming next for social bookmarking in this post.

A year ago in our Social Bookmarking Faceoff post, we looked at the state of the social bookmarking space. In the post, we used several techniques, ranging from counting the number of users who bookmarked a particular post, to counting posts with specific tags, to estimate the number of users for each service. Our conclusion back then was that the market was dominated by del.icio.us and StumbleUpon.

A year later we're passed the hype, StumbleUpon has been acquired by eBay, and during this digestion phase social bookmarking has largely become yesterday's news. In this post, we'll look at what happened to the other players in the space and look into what the future holds for social bookmarking.

Estimating The Number Of Users

We're using one of the methods from last year's post to estimate the number of users for each bookmarking service in this roundup. For each site we counted the number of links to cnn.com and apple.com/iphone (one is old and the other is relatively new) and then normalized using the recently announced number of del.icio.us registered users - 3 Million.

Please note that these are just ballpark estimates to give us an idea. Even between the first and the second data point there are substantial fluctuations. One way to use these estimates is to gauge how much more active some services were last year than they are now. In any case, it is clear that none of the services competing with del.icio.us are anywhere near it in terms of users. The runner up in the bookmarking space is Ma.gnolia, and we take a closer look at it next.

Ma.gnolia - Staging A Comeback?

When Ma.gnolia launched, it was pitched as a prettier alternative to del.icio.us. Indeed, for people looking for an attractive site, del.icio.us did not offer much. As time went by Ma.gnolia, like many other social bookmarking sites, discovered that just being a bit different from del.icio.us is not enough. Yet, ma.gnolia managed to build and retain a core set of users who are sticking with the service and some that are even coming back:

Image from the crawlspace|media blog.

That Ma.gnolia has managed to build a set of active users bodes well for the service. On the day we checked, its front page showed recent bookmarks that were dated that day and in fact, all 11 available recent bookmark pages, encompassing over two hundred bookmarks, were dated that day. Unfortunately there is no deeper history, so its hard to say exactly how many bookmarks are added in a given day. But the users, most of whom appear to be in the web design field, each have a solid number of bookmarks in general. In a random sample, we found no user with less than 200 bookmarks.

Yet, Ma.gnolia still has a ways to go before it can become a major player. The front page is very static and it is hard to figure out how to browse. Unlike the del.icio.us start page, whose hotlist section can drive a significant amount of traffic to web sites, Ma.gnolia's top links are not prominently marked. And the random Google ads all over the site are just plain annoying. Do these really make enough money to warrant their placement? It would be great for someone from Ma.gnolia to comment on that.

Simpy, Furl, Blinklist and Blogmarks - Still Ticking

Simpy definitely displays activity. According to the site's front page, people post something new every a couple of minutes - which is pretty intense. Unfortunately, we could not find a way to loop through all the bookmarks to really confirm. However, the most active user had slightly over 1000 bookmarks and the 10th most active user had only 200 bookmarks, which is low compared to the top players in this area.

Furl also has active members with new posts coming as often as Simpy - every few minutes. The activity per user varied. Among the random sample of 10 users that we checked there were half with thousands of bookmarks and the other half with just a few. So there is a core set of users that has been faithful to the service. The site, however, has not evolved since last year, so its difficult to imagine that it is doing all that well.

Blinklist comes across roughly equal to Furl and Simpy in terms of user engagement. The site exhibits the same sort of activity on the front page. It is more difficult to navigate around, though. Again the site has not changed since our last faceoff so we have to assume that it is just floating along.

Blogmarks is so painfully slow that it is difficult to imagine that it is being used. Yet there is activity on the front page. Several users that I had the patience to sample had thousands of bookmarks, which confirms that some people are using the service. Since each page load took over a minute there is not much more than I can say.

del.icio.us and Social Bookmarking 2.0

The image at the top of this post is "After The Battle," by Simon Gaon. It is meant to symbolize that the first battle of social bookmarking is pretty much over. The winner is the company that began the frenzy - del.icio.us. Yet, social bookmarking itself is far from over. It may seem that things are calm now, but this is just the calm before the storm. A new wave is coming.

Earlier this month del.icio.us launched a brand new, completely re-written beta site. Preliminary reviews, including the one written by Richard MacManus, indicate that with their new site, del.icio.us will take social bookmarking to a completely new level. Indeed, the path appears to lead to social networking, recommendation engines, and even search. The first phase of the game was about accumulating information. The second phase is likely to be about leveraging this information to help people discover and find relevant sites faster.

Conclusion

Social bookmarking and tagging started a social revolution and changed the way we live and work online. A truly pioneering service, del.icio.us blazed trails for web 2.0 and remains the winner of the social bookmarking battle. The outcome is that social bookmarking has become the de facto way that people keep track of web sites. It is now part of web infrastructure much like HTML or HTTP.

Beyond igniting our minds, del.icio.us ignited a battle between social bookmarking services. Other companies contributed to innovation, but ultimately could not succeed in capturing the market. But it is never over. New ideas from old and new companies alike are already on the horizon. Today's social bookmarking market may be quiet, but tomorrow is sure to give rise to new twists and spins that will improve upon what we currently use.

*** Update *** We got an email from Diigo pointing out that they are not covered in the post and also providing us with their numbers. Diigo has been doing better than some other bookmarking services that we covered. Specifically, there are 795 links to CNN.com and 15 links to iphone.

Also Diigo is also launching a new version at DEMOFall 2007 and Profy has the coverage.

*** Update *** We got a clarifying email from Simpy clarifying that number of links to CNN is actually over 600. This puts Simpy above Ma.gnolia and slightly behind Diigo for CNN.com links.

This week, after two and a half years, I moved Freelance Writing Jobs from Writers Row to its own domain. I’ve been considering the move for a while, but out of loyalty to my friends at Writer’s Row, I couldn’t bring myself to do it. With almost 3,000 visitors every day, I find myself with no choice. It’s not easy hosting a popular blog on a subdomain, and my recommendation is that anyone who is serious about blogging consider using one’s own domain from the very beginning.

The benefits abound.

1. You’re not at the mercy of the site administrator. What happens if the site administrator forgets to pay the hosting bill? Or what happens if she’s playing around and somehow knocks the site offline? Or what happens if the site goes down? If you’re part of a subdomain, you most likely don’t have all of the contact information necessary to get things going yourself. Moreover, if you can't get ahold of your site administrator you're screwed.
2. You have more space. With your own domain, you don’t have to worry about exceeding your bandwidth and can do more with images and video if you’d like.
3. It’s more professional. Your “brand” is more believable if it’s not associated with a .blogspot,.wordpress or another subdomain. If your host doesn't have a very good reputation, you'll have that stigma attached to you as long as there's an association..
4. You can have all the link love to yourself. When I was associated with Writer’s Row, many of the people linking to me linked to the Writer’s Row home page. From there, interested parties would have to click on my link to see gigs and writing advice. Now I don’t have to share the link love.
5. You can have a clean url. Things just look neater without all of those slashes and dots.
6. You’ll have better search engine ranking. Especially if the URL is well optimized.
7. You don’t have to follow as many rules. Not to stay you’re looking to do bad things with your blogs, but some subdomains comes with silly rules. Having your own domain allows you to be your own boss.
8. You have access to all of your own stats. This is one of the main reasons I left Writer’s Row. I didn’t have access to the site’s stats, only that of my blog. I have no idea how people got to the main page or forum. Were they coming to Writer's Row to look for job leads or for another reason? I only know what happened after they landed on me.
9. You have your own page rank,Alexa rating, etc. (For what it’s worth).
10. More advertising options. Many advertisers don’t want to deal with a subdomain and some blog hosts won’t allow you to place ads on your blog.
11. You can do more with your blog. You have access to your own style sheets and files. You can create your own templates instead of using the few that are available to you.
12. Your blog is more valuable. Even though FWJ has a PR5, if I wanted to, I couldn’t sell it. Not with the URL http://writersrow/deborahng. Who wants my name on their website? Now, with the new address I have a better chance of selling my blog if that time ever comes.

What you give up

If you were enjoying someone else handling technical issues, be prepared to give that up. With your own domain, you’re responsible for pretty much everything. If you’re technically challenged like me, that can be a problem. I do have people to help, so I’m not worried.

Plenty of bloggers are happy with a blogspot or Wordpress subdomain. And many, like me up until recently, were content to have a subdomain hosted on someone else’s website. What happens when your blog grows? What happens when you start to bring in a lot more traffic and revenue? It’s a lot easier to start out with your own domain than it is to move everything later.

Things are a lot different now then they were even a few years ago. Web hosting packages are cheaper and it’s hosting a Wordpress, or even Blogger blog on your own domain isn’t difficult at all. Don’t find yourself at the mercy of someone else’s site outages. Blog on your own domain.

Our post a few weeks ago, 10 Future Web Trends, received a lot of excellent feedback. The most interesting was from people offering alternative future web trends to the ones we had chosen. In fact there were some grumblings that our 10 picks were not futuristic enough - so in this post let's see if we can address that! There's nothing smarter than 'collective intelligence' after all...

From the comments and trackbacks to the original post, plus some hunting around of my own, here are 10 more future web trends:

1. Integration into everyday devices (suggested by Mark Schoneveld); As examples Mark mentioned your grocery-ordering refrigerator and your health-monitoring bathroom. Commenter #63, Jack, had a nice term for this: "device pervasiveness". One can imagine Microsoft and Google battling it out in this domain over the coming years.

2. Hyperlocal; Sebastien Provencher forsees "the transformation of the web into an exciting hyperlocal tool." He said that the combination of the social web, geo-tagging standards, GPS-enabled mobile devices, and the eventual arrival en masse of small merchants and online municipal governments "will forever change the way we see our city or our neighborhood."

On the same theme, commenter #66, Jacqueline, said that "local and hyperlocal content/news systems are going to blow up in the not-so-distant future; based on the whole citizen journalism trend (and things like iphones, twitter, and devices/apps that haven't even been invented yet will make it possible for people to post breaking news literally as it happens)."

3. Data retrievel/manipulation agents; Commenter #45, Bill, wrote that we can expect in the future a "a metaweb tool" that comes with "an AI program". This device will do data retrieval and manipulation for users, interacting directly with people.

In a way, this is what the long-running open source PIM project Chandler is attempting to do - provide software agents. Maybe by 2017 Chandler will have delivered its version 1.0 ;-)

4. Read/Write/Request Web (a.k.a. a "living machine agent"); this extends on the 'software agents' concept. Yihong Ding is a Ph.D candidate in Brigham Young University and his view of the future Web is complex. This is his description of a read/write/request web: "A web space will be no longer a simple web page as in Web 1.0. Neither will a web space still be a Web-2.0-style blog/wiki that facilitates only human communications. Every ideal semantic web space will become a little thinking space. It contains owner-approved machine-processable semantics. Based on these semantics, an ideal semantic web space can actively and proactively execute owner-specified requests by themselves and communicate with other semantic web spaces. By this augmentation, a semantic web space simultaneously is also a living machine agent."

5. User-controlled, open Internet Identity; Thomas Huhn pointed out that "forming your online identity, controlling what personal data you give to whom and aggregating all your and your environments lifestreams in an open social network is simply essential for the further development of the web." We're seeing this develop now (it's sometimes referred to as, you guessed it, Identity 2.0), but the scenario Thomas described is 5+ years into the future.

6. New forms of Internet Interaction; Chris Rijnders wrote that new types of Web interaction technologies will come to the fore. Things like "flexible OLED touch-screens, new visualisation technologies which present data in a new way, etc."

7. Extended Reality; in response to our original post, Stephen Downes wrote up 10 future tech trends - many of them drawing on science fiction. He mentions Bruce Sterling as one influence, although there's plenty of Greg Egan and Philip K Dick in there too! (two of my favorite SF writers). 'Extended reality' was one of his picks that was Web-related. According to Downes, it means "a digital version of the real world such that the digital version is as real as the real version. What that means, pragmatically speaking, is that if it hurts in the extended world, it hurts. We will have full sensory coupling with the virtual world, making the virtual world every bit as 'real' to us as the real world."

8. Expert Systems; mentioned in Steven Spalding's excellent post about "web 3.0", an expert system is "a software agent that takes user input, runs it through a knowledge database and then generates an output using fancy technologies like neural nets". Ten years from now, wrote Spalding, "Expert Systems won’t only be designed for general cases, but will be able to be easily generated to understand individuals tastes. [...] Imagine a world where your computer would generate a profile, a meme map about you based on your interactions with the web and refine your experience based on this map." While this has things in common with the agents described in #4 and #5, it is more about having a vast knowledge db to refine your daily lifestyle.

9. Personalized Medicine; this has been on the cards for some time, but in the not too distant future our medical details will be online and the networking aspects of the Internet will be utilized to improve the way medicine is prescribed. As a recent report noted: "Imagine this: you visit your clinician, undergo genetic testing, and then you are handed a miniature hard drive containing your personal genome sequence, which is subsequently uploaded onto publicly accessible databases." See also the blog ScienceRoll.

10. Blog reading automatically input into our brain; OK this is for all the critics who said my previous picks weren't futuristic enough ;-) In 10 years time, we won't have to worry about RSS Readers at all - everything we need to know on a daily basis will be automatically input into our brains each morning while we're eating our breakfast. This process will literally take seconds, but we'll have all the latest news at the end of it. Fans of The Matrix will recognize this scenario - remember when Neo became a martial arts expert in a matter of seconds after that 'knowledge' was input into his brain? Well this is the same thing, only for blog readers. Oh and btw, by 2017, the top blogs will be pumping out 1000 posts a day - so we're going to need it! ;-)

Robot pic: Tempusmaster

As far as I can tell, the only reason behind Dave Winer’s post saying TechMeme is a cesspool is to spam Techmeme itself. And it worked - it is now the top story on the site. I also noticed Dave is using TinyURL to link to blogs that he doesn’t like, obviously to avoid giving them any kind of link juice. Seems kind of petty overall, and the ad hominem attack on Jason Calacanis (calling him an idiot) is just childish.

I know Gabe sometimes edits stuff like this off of TechMeme to keep it stocked with real news. He probably isn’t doing that here since Techmeme is part of the story and he’d be criticized. But here’s one vote to get this kind of nonsense off the site.

It was intriguing for a day or two, but now it's clear that the Leaderboard was the dumbest idea ever, because now more than ever, people are gaming Techmeme so they can climb the list.

Reminds me of something Ted Turner once said about how the Forbes list of richest people in the world was the worst thing ever for philanthropy. If you're super-rich, now you don't want to give it away because when you do, you move down (or off) the list.

Techmeme was already severely polluted by people saying stupid shit to rise to the top of the page. That was an ephemeral high. Now there's a way to accumulate points toward more persistent rank, and everyone who isn't on the list, wants to be on the list.

I'm thinking of this idiotic post by an idiot who's known for saying idiotic things just to get attention.

Or Scoble, who started on the list near the bottom -- is rapidly rising. How's he doing it? By saying extreme things that people will react to. That's how you get points in the Techmeme universe. Scoble ain't no idiot. If he wants to rise on the list, he rises.

A mind is a terrible thing to waste.

Well, this ain't blogging, and we're still getting ready to start a war with Iran, and the stock market is still acting weird, and there are still big ideas out there to pursue, and now Techmeme isn't even worth reading when the top item on a weekday is guaranteed to be some idiot procliaming himself king of the hill. It's worse than AM talk radio.

PS: A piece I wrote in May offering a vision for "Web 3.0."

PPS: Mike Arrington weighs in. "Gabe sometimes edits stuff like this off of TechMeme to keep it stocked with real news." Hmmm. I'd be surprised if that were true.

Blog software vendor Six Apart this afternoon posted a long rumination, with video, on the "social graph" and how vendors should relate to it. The social graph is the network of your networks, all your accounts and friends across multiple online social networks and other sites you participate on.

The company is clearly full of great ideas that unfortunately get a maddeningly geeky explanation today on the Six Apart blog. There's an experimental product alluded to as well, but that's not being released right now.

The whole manifesto-lengthed blog post is worth a read, but he best part is the statement of the following principles.

• 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

That's really nice to read from a software vendor. I wish decision makers at Google said things like that. Someday the social graph and all of our Attention Data are going to be brought together and those are some great statements to serve as a policy foundation.

Six Apart (LiveJournal at least) is by many accounts the birthplace of OpenID and they do a lot of very innovative work still. I hope that they can quickly translate this work on the social graph into something more accessible; that's something the OpenID community still struggles with.

For now, though, we'll have to all get up on our bidirectional XFN links, FOAF and hCard so we can ride towards the glorious sunset of user-controlled data portability and a better experience online. To think that I just found the kickstand on my TCP/IP.

That said, it's a great start. For some more accessible background on the questions raised by Six Apart, micro-format and Identity savvy dude Chris Messina recommends checking out the social network portability discussion at microformats.org, Robert Gaal's Making OpenID Your Only Online Profile and The Future of Everything is Social: Consolidate and take back your social network at the blog Four Starters. Mark those puppies "to read" because this stuff is here to stay.

Google hunters ferreted out a new feature late last night called Google Shared Stuff. The project is obviously far from ready to ship - but it's too late to squabble about that now! I've got high hopes for social bookmarking in general but this particular project may not be worth your time to check out just yet. To save you the time I've kicked the tires and offer below some of the best and worst things about Google Shared Items so far. In the end I've got some thoughts about what Google could do with this service to make it the best social bookmarking service available.

The Good News

There are a number of things that Google has done well already. It's hard not to compare this product to Del.icio.us in particular, the Yahoo! acquired product that most people would agree currently dominates the social bookmarking world.

Compared to Del.icio.us, Google Shared Items has great user profiles. No one fills out their del.icio.us profiles and it always drives me nuts. Google has a nice big profile section that screams out for info about you. See mine here. A photo, multiple links associated with your account and more room for text to describe you are all very nice touches.

There's no direct access to cached pages. Furl.net offers a personal copy of every page you bookmark, in case it changes or goes away. Google might not want to get into that, but they have a cached copy of all public pages - why not provide me a link inside my bookmark archive?

Speaking of Del.icio.us and Furl, the team behind Google Shared Items is obviously proud of their "support" for tagging items in Del.icio.us, Furl.net, Facebook, Reddit, Digg and SocialPoster. Unfortunately, it doesn't actually cross post anything, much less to multiple accounts ala OnlyWire. It just links out to your other accounts in a new window. If you want to post to Reddit, you might as well just use a Reddit button and skip Google.

The term label isn't used, "a historical accident" the Google team recently called it, tags are here to stay. There's just an empty field for tagging, though. Did I say this was the good news section?

Finally, though the "article preview" button too often doesn't actually provide a text preview of the article, it is nice. It's a straight rip-off of Facebook's image capture feature, allowing you to flip through the images on the page you're referencing to chose one to associate with that page. To be honest, Facebook borrowed the feature from elsewhere as well.

The Bad News

The worst thing about Google Shared Items is that it doesn't really work. I know that by now, for example, lots of people in my GMail contacts have saved something using the service. They must have. Yet I only see one person's single shared item on the page for friends' items. Likewise, I don't know how to get to any kind of general page, most popular or anything. I'd guess that Google didn't want anyone to use this service yet, but it's live and emailing friends about it is quite prominent.

The private bookmarking option doesn't appear to work yet and the ability to "preview my shared items page with this item on it" is just silly.

I'm sure all of those things will be fixed. Here are some criticisms with more substance.

There's no integration with Google Reader Shared Items. Everyone's mentioned that. There's also no search. It took years before search was integrated with Google Reader.

There's no data export. This is an all-too-typical violation of Google's responsibilities with regard to my data. It's my data, if the option to take my ball off your field and go home isn't available - then I'm not even going to start playing.

The metadata is a mess. The RSS feeds look awful. Item descriptions come through as item titles, there's no easy way to see the actual title of the page or the full URL you're considering clicking through.

Why is all of this going on outside the existing Google Bookmarks service? Perhaps they will be combined at a later date.

Hopes for the Future

You know what Google could do to absolutely blow everyone else out of the water? They could offer an awesome, cross-site recommendation engine. I'd like Google to look at my bookmarks and tell me what I'm missing that people with similar archives have bookmarked. More than that, I want to know who that I don't know has interests similar to mine - and I want to know who is the fastest at finding the items that fit those interests.

Finally, if Google's going to try to play nice with other sites like Del.icio.us, Furl and Facebook (you know all of them are being indexed) then I want these recommendations from users all across all these other sites. Give me that and give me the ability to export my data and I may never use Del.icio.us again. Joshua Schacter, the founder of Del.icio.us, says that a recommendation engine is on its way there (better than before) but who could scale that better than Google?

Summary

All in all, I'm excited that Google is investing more into this space - but it's a pretty tepid engagement so far. I wouldn't recommend spending time on the service until something really groundbreaking happens.

Watch out Tumblr, here comes Soup. Soup is an easy to use tumble blogging application that includes two killer features: social networking (kinda) and outside activity streams. It's sort of a cross between Tumblr, Pownce, and a social activity aggregator. [Ed: I had to look up "tumble blogging". Wikipedia defines a "tumblelog" as "a variation of a blog, that favors short-form, mixed-media posts over the longer editorial posts frequently associated with blogging." So now I know...]

At its core, Soup is a microblogging app, and a pretty easy to use one. Their tumble blog set up supports text, link, quote, image, and video posts. Sign up is a snap (you can actually begin posting to your tumble blog before creating an account), and like Tumblr, Soup blogs can be mapped to an outside domain.

Using Soup is easy: posting is all done directly on your Soup's page (i.e., your tumble blog page) while logged in. Posting forms and editing options are opened directly on the page you're viewing without refresh using AJAX. This creates a very cohesive experience that doesn't have you bouncing around from page to page in a content management system.

Soup gives you control over which elements appear on your page (i.e., a list of friends, a tab showing your friends' post stream, dates, icons, feed badges, etc.), but the application's skinning tools leave a lot to be desired. You can only switch between 4 pre-fab layouts, change colors, and choose from among a handful of font styles. There is no access to the underlying CSS for advanced users.

One of Soup's killer features is the ability to import outside activity streams. You can import your activity from Digg, Flickr, del.icio.us, eBay, LiveJournal, StumbleUpon, Twitter, Vox, YouTube, Zooomer, and even Tumblr. Soup can also read from any RSS feed meaning you can import your activity from just about anywhere. Posts are automatically created on your Soup when new activity comes in from your feeds on other services. Those posts are marked with icons marking which service the information came from.

The other great feature Soup adds to the tumble blogging experience is friends. Adding friends is as easy as clicking a button on their Soup page. While there sadly isn't much interaction with friends (it would be great to have Pownce-style private messaging), you can keep tabs on your friends' activity from your Soup or from the site's main page (where you can also track the activity of all Soup users). You can repost anything other Soup users post with a single click -- reposted items are smartly not repeated back into the everybody stream on the main page.

Soup is certainly a little rough around the edges and a little feature bare in terms of the actual tumble blogging experience. But it adds some great new features to the core tumble blog service and it is certainly a start up to watch.

Every team and office includes people with potentially conflicting personalities and working styles. By applying the right relationship management techniques, you can calm tension, communicate more easily, and run your projects more efficiently. Keith LaFerriere shows us how.

 

Hide Your Shame: The A List Apart Store and T-Shirt Emporium is back. Hot new designs! Old favorites remixed! S, M, L, XL. Come shop with us!

Yesterday a select group of fifteen or so industry luminaries attended a highly confidential meeting at Google’s headquarters in Mountain View to discuss the company’s upcoming plans to address the “Facebook issue.”

The meeting was so secret that all attendees had to sign confidentiality and non-disclosure agreements strictly forbidding them from discussing what was shown to them at the meeting. Notwithstanding that NDA, I’ve now spoken with three of the attendees off record to get an understanding of what Google is planning. Google’s goal - to fight Facebook by being even more open than the Facebook Platform. If Facebook is 98% open, Google wants to be 100%.

The short version: Google will announce a new set of APIs on November 5 that will allow developers to leverage Google’s social graph data. They’ll start with Orkut and iGoogle (Google’s personalized home page), and expand from there to include Gmail, Google Talk and other Google services over time.

On November 5 we’ll likely see third party iGoogle gadgets that leverage Orkut’s social graph information - the most basic implementation of what Google is planning. From there we may see a lot more - such as the ability to pull Orkut data outside of Google and into third party applications via the APIs. And Google is also considering allowing third parties to join the party at the other end of the platform - meaning other social networks (think Bebo, Friendster, Twitter, Digg and thousands of others) to give access to their user data to developers through those same APIs.

And that is a potentially killer strategy. Facebook has a platform to allow third parties to build applications on Facebook itself. But what Google may be planning is significantly more open - allowing third parties to both push and pull data, into and out of Google and non-Google applications.

In the long run, Google seems to be planning to add a social layer on top of the entire suite of Google services, with Orkut as their initial main source of social graph information and, as I said above, possibly adding third party networks to the back end as well. Social networks would have little choice but to participate to get additional distribution and attention.

Google has a number of heavy hitters engaged in the project. Amar Gandhi, who apparently wasn’t at the meeting and whose title is the rather unassuming “Product Manager, Orkut,” was previously at Microsoft where he unsuccessfully tried to integrate social networking features into Vista. Brad Fitzpatrick, the chief architect of Six Apart until he joined Google in August, is leading the charge to make the Google project as open as possible. Patrick Chanezon, Google Evangelist, is herding the cats.

Lots of people noticed Fitzpatrick’s social graph post (linked in paragraph above), connected the dots to his new job at Google, and speculated that Google’s has been working on something really, really big in this area. This is now confirmed and, unless Google changes the launch date, we’ll be seeing the beginning of it on November 5.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

At the Social Graphing conference on Tuesday our industry went in full-blown madness. A panel filled with Facebook fans (and some investors) got so worked up they claimed--among other things--that:

• a) Facebook was worth $100 billion dollars
• b) Facebook would crush Google
• c) Facebook would crush MySpace
• d) Facebook application platform is as important an innovation as the graphical user interface
• e) The top Facebook applications were worth $500M

No, I'm not making any of that up. Those were the claims, and as Mike Arrington of TechCrunch correctly pointed out, this is the kind of madness that got us in trouble the last time around (i.e. 1999).

Now, to be sure, Facebook is a great product. In fact Facebook is the best social networking product ever made in my estimation. It has the best design, best UI, and best platform. Their team has done the best job to date--better than MySpace in fact. That's just an objective fact, and I don't think anyone in the industry could disagree with that.

They have done something very clever by opening up their application platform. At best, opening up their platform will be the creation of a new ecosystem for developers to leverage Facebook's social graph. At worst, Facebook's open application platform will be a way for Facebook to boost their traffic numbers and get a free R&D lab in the form of naive developers who will see their hard work incorporated into Facebook's default feature set over time.

The truth is probably somewhere in the middle.

However, back to the ABSURD claims on this panel and my thoughts on them (and yes, I realize I'm shooting two-week old dead fish in a barrel filled with six inches of water):


1. Facebook worth $100B.
First, a growing company with ~$100M in revenue this year might be worth 10-20x top line revenue in a hot market like this, or $1-2B. A company with $25M in profits (if Facebook has that) would be worth 50-100x that in a red-hot market, or $2.5-$5B. Those number are the number we heard folks were willing to pay over the last two years (i.e. Yahoo). So, to say Facebook is worth $100B is to say that Facebook is worth... wait for it.... 1,000x top-line revenue. In other words if Google makes $14B this year in top line they would be worth--according to the 1,000x revenue metric--$14 trillion (I've check my math 10x... I think that's the number).

I think you get the point... here's a graph:



Facebook had 30M uniques in September. Let's take a look at the value of each of these are the various valuation metrics. I think you get the point... Facebook users at the top end of this market would exceed the value of even cable subscribers who are paying a fortune to monopolistic companies with absurd margins.



2. Facebook will crush Google.
Yes, Facebook with no experience in the search business or pay-per-click advertising business will come in and crush Google despite the fact that MSN, Ask, and Yahoo have not been able to even *keep up* with Google. Facebook, with no experience in search, will just leap frog everyone with tens of thousands of brains working on the search problem. They will also do this while crushing MySpace. Sure they will. They will also move into autos since young people buy autos and they have young people eyeballs and attention. Look for a Facebook airline and cable channel soon as well. This is bubble talk at its best... oh wait, two more points to go!


3. Facebook will crush MySpace.
Facebook traffic is down 10% from August to September (33M uniques dropped to 30M uniques according to Comscore). MySpace was flat during that period with 68M uniques each month, or double Facebook's traffic. While Facebook is clearly a better product and a better platform, doubling your uniques is NOT an easy task. Additionally, people were speculalting that Facebook would have a major boost in September when people came back, but in fact it was the opposite (at least according to Comscore). I've heard some inside information on focus groups that were done by a VERY credible source outside of Facebook that found that students coming back found the applications to be annoying--the equivalent of spam.

We in the technology industry have a bias towards bells and whistles, but the truth is the public may not in fact like all these new applications. These applications might be a LIABILITY to Facebook. I know that's hard for some folks to swallow, but it is a possibility. Clearly some applications have great value (top friends, photo slide shows, and casual games), but many are just annoying and stupid (Zombie, food fights, etc). Facebook's challenge will be to throttle the bad and feature the good. This of course dovetails with the "should you trust Facebook with your business" discussion. In order for Facebook to catch up to MySpace--and they have a long way to go--they are going to have to control applications. So, if your application is good for you, but looked at as bad for Facebook guess who wins? Facebook of course.

Additionally, MySpace is going to announce some big changes in their partnerships with 3rd party applications developers very soon (yes, again, I have inside info). My gut tells me that MySpace will allow folks to run advertising on MySpace pages if they are approved (this I don't have inside information on). If MySpace does this then application developers should flock to MySpace's 2x user base over Facebook the same way developers flock to Windows of Mac.

MySpace has stagnated over the past year or so in terms of product, and their focus on community over platform is a long-term issue. However, counting out an incumbent with 2x the traffic is a dangerous call to make.


4. Facebook is more important than the GUI.
Facebook has connected their social network with a semi-open platform. This is neat, but it will NOT have anywhere near the impact of the Graphical user interface. Windows and the Mac made computing--the very idea of having a computer--mainstream. How can we compare the mainstreaming of computing to an application development platform that is not very powerful (by design) and not very open (by design) to the GUI?!?! That's just absurd. If you're going to make that claim then you can make the claim that the mainstreaming of the Internet is as important as Facebook applications (i.e. if the GUI is equal to the Internet, and the GUI equal to Facebook then Facebook is equal to the Internet... I don't think so).


5. Top Facebook Applications are worth $500M.
I don't even know how to start addressing this one... I mean, this is straight up MLM thinking: If Facebook is worth $50-100B than the top applications are worth 1% of that. Sure... and the top users on the top Facebook applications are worth 1% of that, or $5M each! Also, the fans of those top users are worth 1% of that, or $50,000 each!

All this being said Facebook is an AMAZING product. It is a better product offering than MySpace today, and it is obviously the best social networking system and management team in the business. If anything, the amazing team they have is the real value. Will Facebook be one of the ten most important internet brands over the next ten years? I think that's clear, but remember PointCast, Netscape, AltaVista, GNN, Lycos, Excite, and Geocities were also in the 10 most important companies in the Internet space for many years--and they went away.

NOTHING is a sure bet in this industry. In fact, social network is NOT a huge business today. MySpace with 2x the user base is still figuring out how to make money. Social networking might be the message board, chat room, and IM of Web 2.0: lots of traffic, little revenue.

As an industry we should NOT make absurd claims about companies as it does a disservice to the entire industry and the company itself. Facebook is really worth 2-5B right now, and maybe 5-10B if someone is desperate to make a move (i.e. Microsoft in terms of advertising), but let's not make ourselves look silly as an industry to say Facebook wins everything before they have.

Facebook worth a $100B might be the AOL/TW merger of Bubble 2.0 in terms of a milestone for the industry.
In fact, that gives me an idea... why doesn't Facebook just buy TimeWarner and settle this whole thing. :-)






Sanity check request: Kara Swisher, Fred Wilson, Mike Arrington, Robert Scoble, Jeremy Liew, Don Dodge, and Henry Blodget... can I get a check on my math and thinking above?

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Big trend coming out of TechCrunch40: data normalization services like Mint, Cake, TripIt, and Clickable.

DMS is a new category (I think I just named it) in which companies pull in data from 3rd parties, normalize (clean) it, and then leverage it. In Cake's case they suck in people's trading activity to share investment wisdom. TripIt normalizes desparite travel prodiders to provide clean trip itenearies. Mint, which one the TechCrunch40 event's $50,000 prize ($25,000 of which was technically my money!!!), sucks down your credit card and banking information to create a dashboard of your spending AND to save you money.

These services are creating a layer on top of existing services in order to do something that those services typically don't want done. In the case of Mint they might show you how your bank is ripping you off and get you better rates for your credit card or savings account. In Clickable's case they reveal the fact that you might be wasting money on a certain competitive keyword on Google AdSense and advise you to spend that money on the same keyword on Yahoo or Microsoft's search services.

Even mEgo, and avatar service, is normalizing data by pulling in your MySpace preferences and syndicating those out--via a syndicated, Flash-based avatar--to Facebook, your blog, and... wait for it... MySpace. In some ways these service are aggressive reactions to the lack of open standards. FOAF never took off? No problem, we'll login and suck down your data. That's what Flock's doing with their impressive social browsing features, which were also launched at TechCrunch40.

Of course, this is layering on top of layers. And, I'm sure at the TechCrunch40 conference in 2008 we'll be seeing a sertvice called Icing that pulls in your Mint and Cake information into one dashboard. :-)

Comments are open for 24 hours... be nice.

[ Second big trend coming up soon. ]

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Most, hogy új üdvöskéje van a hazai webnek a - mutasd.be-, újra előkerült a hálózatépítés kérédése és hogy mennyi bőrt lehet még lehúzni a területről.

Nekem az a bajom az egész üggyel, függetlenül attól, hogy szépen összerakott szolgáltatásról van szó, hogy továbbra sem látni, hogy miként fogunk átlépni a következő évezredbe a hazai web tócsájában, mert ezeknek a szolgáltatásoknak nem csak ismeretségeket kéne erősíteni és feltérképezni, de támogatni kéne azt is, hogy az emberek hozzáférjenek a weben elérhető értékekhez.

Akárhová nézünk nemzetközi szinten, jobb vagy rosszabb megoldások formájában az elmúlt két-három évben már minden hálózati szolgáltatás fő innovációja, hogy egyre magasabb és magasabb szintre emeli a hozzáférés lehetőségét a webhez.

Merthogy a web nem egy barátságos környezet. A web láthatatlan és céltalan, nincs benne semmi, ami segítene az eligazodásban. Az emberek adnak neki értelmet például ilyen hálózatokon keresztül és teszik láthatóvá egymásnak.

Először csak linkeken, aztán beágyazható objektumokon, aztán programozható API-kon, végül talán kompletten elérhető fejlesztői környezeten keresztül a hálózati szolgáltatások olyan kapukká válnak, amik értelmet adnak és rendszerezik a világ weben elérhető információit. Úgy, mint a Google, csak némi emberi kapcsolatot is csepegtetünk bele.

Kapukra van szükségünk, hogy a hazai weben legyen értelme fejleszteni, az egyszeri felhasználók több szolgáltatásra lássanak rá és szépen lassan mindenki átérjen a web “okosabb” oldalára.

Akkor biztosan elgondolkodnék a következő dolgon.

A Microsoft egyik stratégiát meghatározó emberével beszélgettem sokadmagammal ma este, írok majd erről is, de még vár rá némi emésztés, előbb a következő gondolatot fejteném ki részletesebben, ami a beszélgetés alatt jutott eszembe.

Nyilvánvaló, hogy egyre több ember azért vesz számítógépet, laptopot, hogy hozzáférjen az internethez, mert ma már több értéket ad, mint az asztal de a kettő együtt tud csak teljes élményt adni.

Az interneten az emberek sok mindent csinálnak, de ami a szoftverek szempontjából fontos, hogy ezzerrel kattintgatják a hálózatépítő oldalakat, kiemelten a Facebook-ot és azokat az alkalmazásokat, amelyek különböző “ködben” elérhető szolgáltatásokat integrálnak.

A Facebook az egyik új platform, amely összeköti a webes fejlesztőket és a közönséget. Jelenleg még nincs nagy súlya, de ahogy most látszik, a Facebook és a hozzá hasonló szolgáltatásoké a jövő felhasználóinak figyelme.

A ködben elérhető szolgáltatások győzelme a figyelem gazdaságban történik, blogok, hálózatépítő szolgáltatásokon és aggregátorokon keresztül. Ma már ugyanebben a térben versenyeznek részben és a jövőben egyre inkább az asztalon elérhető szoftverek is.

A felhasználó elsődlegesen a weben találkozik majd a választható alkalmazásokkal és a mellett dönt, amelyik képes a webes rugalmasságot - platformfüggetlenséget - kiegészíteni az asztal robosztusságával - offline elérhetőségével, gyorsaságával, stb. -.

Jelenleg ebben folyamatban az online szolgáltatások lerakható offline klienssel nyernek, mert sokkal jobban értik a figyelem gazdaság működését, az előbbire fókuszálnak, hiszen ahogy fent írtam előbbre is vannak a felhasználói folyamatban. Előbb felmegyünk a netre, alkalmazást választunk, majd el akarjuk érni offline is. Ez a folyamat.

Hogy a fejlesztők teljes élményt tudjanak adni a fogyasztóknak, kénytelenek asztalra telepíthető alkalmazásokat is integrálni az eszközkészletükbe. Silverlight, Air, Gear, szevasztok. A felhasználóknak még megvan az élménye a biztonságról, a stabilitásról és a gyorsaságról.

Az asztali alkalmazások ettől függetlenül még nyerhetnének is, ha nem lenne itt egy további nagyon fontos dolog. A felhasználók magasabbra értékelik a konzisztenciát a funkcióknál. Ha van egy termék, amely minden platformon ugyanúgy néz ki, de csak kevés funkciót tud, simán megfogja a platformonként eltérő eszközökkel de sokkal több funkciót kínáló gyakorlatot.

Az emberek egy email klienst, egy azonnali üzenetküldőt, egy táblázatkezelőt akarnak, amiatt hajlandók feladni minden olyan funkciót, amellyel a túlspecializálódott szoftverfejlesztők megkülönböztetik magukat. A versenyelőny tehát a konzisztenciára való törekvés miatt elveszhet.

Ami marad, hogy ki éri el előbb és fogja meg a felhasználót. Ezért kell a szoftver fejlesztőknek Facebook kimenetet fejleszteni és egyéb online integrálható alkalamazásokat amelyek zseniálisan integrálódnak a nehezen kifejlesztett asztali szoftverekbe.

Ha így tesznek, talán képesek lesznek a jövőben megfogni az online alkalmazásfejlesztőket, abból kiindulva, hogy offline alkalmazást sokkal nehezebb fejleszteni, mint online-t, ehhez azonban elsőként kiemelkedő online eszközöket kell fejleszteniük, mert az első csata ott dől majd el el a jövőben.

Even though Google offers many web applications that could replace traditional software, the integration between them is barely visible. The closest thing to an online desktop that displays your favorite applications is iGoogle, where you can set up themed tabs like this one.

To switch from Gmail to Google Calendar, you'll click on the navigation bar and open a new window or tab. While you can always resize the windows and keep both Gmail and Google Calendar visible, it would be nice if iGoogle provided a way to freely move the gadgets inside the window, like in yourminis.com.

With the addition of Google Desktop gadgets and the customizable layouts, the personalized homepage could really replace your desktop. But gadgets need to be more powerful and offer more than a list of links. Ideally, the Gmail gadget should have an expanded version that lets you read messages, compose mail and search inside the archive.

Max designed a small proof-of-concept that groups many of Google's web applications. "I think that it would be a good idea for Google to group all of the online applications in to a single web application. Something like an eDesktop," he writes at Google Groups.

Google Blogscoped got their hands on an internal video created by the Google Reader team where they discuss future plans for their popular service.

There’s a pile of interesting information; highlights include Google developing a new way for publishers to notify Google of updates, plans to integrate more social features into Reader including recommendations based on existing subscriptions, a new service called “Activity Streams” that will be a Facebook style feed of activity including integration with Gmail, and new ways to monetize feeds by tapping into Reader.

On the stats side, the video provided some interesting insights: two thirds of all feeds only have one subscriber, and are only polled for updates every 3 hours. Feeds with multiple subscriptions are polled every hour (so Reader is intentionally slow at picking things up). The Google Reader backend stores 10 terebytes of data from 8 million feeds, and according to Feedburner stats Google Reader is the most popular feed reader, followed by My Yahoo.

Its great stuff from the Reader team, and kudos for their ongoing innovation of a great service; but there was one negative: Google is interested in allowing users to comment on items they share, but this currently isn’t a priority.

Please Google, drop the idea altogether.

We all know about the constant battles Google has had with newspapers over Google News, and what seems by some reports so far to be a failed strategy of allowing comments on News Feeds. With the exception of the licensed wire stories which are now reproduced in full, those news stories are always presented only with a small fraction of the story itself, the equivalent to a part RSS feed; ultimately readers must visit those news sites to get the full story and the use of data in this way is usually argued to be fair use.

Google Reader’s share tools on the other hand republish full blogs post for all to read without obtaining permission from blog publishers. So-called link blogs in Reader already break copyright and in a small way undermine blogs and content creators. If Google offers a comment service on “shared” items they are in effect creating copyright infringing blogs; after all they’ll have chronological entries and comments so they’ll look like blogs, even if they don’t provide a fully customizable CMS.

There will always be those who argue that any syndicated content is fair game for republication; it’s the favorite defense of spam bloggers. RSS feeds are in the most provided for personal use/ viewing and are not provided (unless otherwise specified) for someone to use that information to republish on their own site in full, be that powered by Google Reader, Blogger or WordPress.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

This week I want to try something a little different and attempt a debate here at ProBlogger. The idea is simple - I’ve chosen two people who I think have experience around a debated blogging topic to argue the case for either side of it. These two opinions will act as the first speaker for each side and then I (as the moderator) will hand it over to you the ProBlogger readership to act as the 2nd and 3rd speakers for each side.

The idea isn’t to have a bun fight over the topic but to flesh it out and engage in some good conversation and learning.

The Topic

The topic for this debate is ‘Full or Partial RSS Feeds?’ - it’s a topic I get asked about a lot and which I know there are good arguments for on both sides.

The Speakers

I’ve chosen two speakers for this debate that I think will get a good conversation going. They are:

Arguing for Partial Feeds is Gina Trapani - editor of the famous Lifehacker blog.

Arguing for Full Feeds is Rick Klau - former VP, Publisher Services at FeedBurner and currently in Strategic Partner Development at Google.

I should say before we start that I put Gina in a position of having to argue for something that she isn’t convinced of herself. She generously agree to participate however.

So without further ado - here’s some thoughts from Gina and Rick to get our discussion going. Feel free to chime in with your thoughts in comments below - no matter what they might be.

The Argument for Partial Feeds

Gina Trapani - editor at Lifehacker
At Lifehacker.com we offer a choice of either a full-post feed (with ads) or partial feeds (no ads.) While giving the reader a choice is a good thing (at the expense of adding an extra step to the subscription process), I can see why a publisher or a reader might prefer less-popular partial feeds.

As a publisher, providing a pull quote in your feed instead of the full post gives you the advantage of seeing which stories your readers are interested enough to click on. A lot of people assume that publishers use partial feeds just for extra on-page ad views, and that may be true in some cases. But back when I published a personal site - and advertisement-free site - I used partial feeds for editorial purposes. The necessary clicks from feed items served as instant reader feedback. You simply can’t do the kind of traffic tracking with full feeds than you can do with partial ones.

As a reader, I prefer partial feeds in some cases, especially from news sources who can summarize the point of the article in one sentence. Skimming CNET’s partial post feed, which just includes the story lead, is a lot easier and more efficient than including the entire article.

The Argument for Full Feeds

Rick Klau - former VP, Publisher Services at FeedBurner and currently in Strategic Partner Development at Google.

More than half a million publishers have burned nearly 900,000 feeds over at www.feedburner.com , so it should come as no surprise how often we are asked which is better: full-text or partial feeds? While there is no single, “right” answer that covers all situations, there are a number of often overlooked angles to consider.

First, I’d like to clear up a few points of confusion. Clickthroughs alone are an imperfect (if not altogether inaccurate) measure of a reader’s interest in a story. Partial feeds often make it harder, not easier, for a reader to know whether they’re interested in a story at all. If you just include a sentence or two of a post in a feed, you’re asking the reader to click through to read the rest of the post - when the actual substance of the post is not at all obvious from those first few sentences.

Regarding Gina’s statement that “you simply can’t do the kind of traffic tracking with full feeds that you can do with partial ones” - I respectfully disagree. Publishers who use FeedBurner’s feed management services can measure both feed item views ( i.e., posts which are read in the aggregator) as well as clickthroughs - giving them an accurate view of both clickthroughs, and more importantly, the clickthrough rate. This is true for both full feeds and partial feeds… and is often the best way to measure how engaged your audience is with your content. It should be noted that in feeds who’ve compared full and partial feeds, we’ve seen no hard evidence suggesting that partial feeds alone increase the clickthrough rate.

Now for some reasons why full feeds are in a publisher’s (and a reader’s) best interest. I think Mike Masnick at TechDirt hit the nail on the head earlier this week when he posted about this question:

[F]ull text feeds actually … lead to more page views… Full text feeds makes the reading process much easier. It means it’s that much more likely that someone reads the full piece and actually understands what’s being said — which makes it much, much, much more likely that they’ll then forward it on to someone else, or blog about it themselves, or post it to Digg or Reddit or Slashdot or Fark or any other such thing — and that generates more traffic and interest and page views from new readers, who we hope subscribe to the RSS feed and become regular readers as well. The whole idea is that by making it easier and easier for anyone to read and fully grasp our content, the more likely they are to spread it via word of mouth, and that tends to lead to much greater adoption than by limiting what we give to our readers and begging them to come to our site if they want to read more than a sentence or two.

As I wrote earlier this year on our corporate blog, full posts also contain far richer information within the posts - hyperlinks - that can be exploited by services like TechMeme, Technorati, and other RSS-aware services. Those links are valuable indicators of the relationships between posts - which can yield tremendous context for readers who want to discover related content. Partial posts rob readers (and automated services) of that context, as the hyperlinks themselves aren’t included in the partial posts.

Commercial publishers who distribute feeds often worry about the lack of revenue - they make money on their site and are understandably concerned that they are “giving away” their content through the feed. But it’s possible to monetize your feed directly (through FeedBurner’s feed and blog ad network, among other options) - and if you buy Masnick’s argument above, traffic to your site will actually increase thanks to the fuller feed (which means your site revenue will increase as well!).

Readers clearly prefer full feeds over partial feeds; one need only see the outcry from Freakonomics readers (read the comments) last week when they switched from a full feed to a partial feed to understand that readers value the delivery of information in its entirety, to an environment (their newsreader) they prefer. Certainly there are occasions when a partial feed is required: many commercial publishers have licensing issues that prevent them from including full text in the feed, and in those cases, some content’s better than no content. But when it’s better for the readers (who get what they want, where they want it), better for the publishers (who can drive more revenue and satisfy their users), and better for the ecosystem (which get more information, which allows them to add more value to their users), it’s my opinion that full feeds are simply better.

Have Your Say

OK - Rick and Gina have kicked the conversation off - it’s time to have your say!

Do you use Full Feeds, Partial Feeds - or both? Why?

I'm sure there's a whole team of UI designers, programmers, and testers who worked very hard on the OFF button in Windows Vista, but seriously, is this the best you could come up with?

Every time you want to leave your computer, you have to choose between nine, count them, nine options: two icons and seven menu items. The two icons, I think, are shortcuts to menu items. I'm guessing the lock icon does the same thing as the lock menu item, but I'm not sure which menu item the on/off icon corresponds to.

On many laptops, there are also four FN+Key combinations to power off, hibernate, sleep, etc. That brings us up to 13 choices, and, oh, yeah, there's an on-off button, 14, and you can close the lid, 15. A total of fifteen different ways to shut down a laptop that you're expected to choose from.

The more choices you give people, the harder it is for them to choose, and the unhappier they'll feel. See, for example, Barry Schwartz's book, The Paradox of Choice. Let me quote from the Publishers Weekly review: “Schwartz, drawing extensively on his own work in the social sciences, shows that a bewildering array of choices floods our exhausted brains, ultimately restricting instead of freeing us. We normally assume in America that more options ('easy fit' or 'relaxed fit'?) will make us happier, but Schwartz shows the opposite is true, arguing that having all these choices actually goes so far as to erode our psychological well-being.”

The fact that you have to choose between nine different ways of turning off your computer every time just on the start menu, not to mention the choice of hitting the physical on/off button or closing the laptop lid, produces just a little bit of unhappiness every time.

Can anything be done? It must be possible. iPods don't even have an on/off switch. Here are some ideas.

If you've spoken to a non-geek recently, you may have noticed that they have no idea what the difference is between "sleep" and "hibernate." They could be trivially merged. One option down.

Switch User and Lock can be combined by letting a second user log on when the system is locked. That would probably save a lot of forced-logouts anyway. Another option down.

Once you've merged Switch User and Lock, do you really need Log Off? The only thing Log Off gets you is that it exits all running programs. But so does powering off, so if you're really concerned about exiting all running programs, just power off and on again. One more option gone.

Restart can be eliminated. 95% of the time you need this it's because of an installation which prompted you to restart, anyway. For the other cases, you can just turn the power off and then turn it on again. Another option goes away. Less choice, less pain.

Of course, you should eliminate the distinction between the icons and the menu. That eliminates two more choices. We are down to:

Sleep/Hibernate
Switch User/Lock
Shut Down

What if we combined Sleep, Hibernate, Switch User and Lock modes? When you go into this mode, the computer flips to the "Switch User" screen. If nobody logs on for about 30 seconds, it sleeps. A few minutes later, it hibernates. In all cases, it's locked. So now we've got two options left:

(1) I am going away from my computer now
(2) I am going away from my computer now, but I'd like the power to be really off

Why do you want the power off? If you're concerned about power usage, let the power management software worry about that. It's smarter than you are. If you're going to open the box and don't want to get shocked, well, just powering off the system doesn't really completely make it safe to open the box; you have to unplug it anyway. So, if Windows used RAM that was effectively nonvolatile, by swapping memory out to flash drives during idle time, effectively you would be able to remove power whenever you're in "away" mode without losing anything. Those new hybrid hard drives can make this super fast.

So now we've got exactly one log off button left. Call it "b'bye". When you click b'bye, the screen is locked and any RAM that hasn't already been copied out to flash is written. You can log back on, or anyone else can log on and get their own session, or you can unplug the whole computer.

Inevitably, you are going to think of a long list of intelligent, defensible reasons why each of these options is absolutely, positively essential. Don't bother. I know. Each additional choice makes complete sense until you find yourself explaining to your uncle that he has to choose between 15 different ways to turn off a laptop.

This highlights a style of software design shared by Microsoft and the open source movement, in both cases driven by a desire for consensus and for "Making Everybody Happy," but it's based on the misconceived notion that lots of choices make people happy, which we really need to rethink.

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Google has just quietly launched a new social link sharing service called Google Shared Stuff.

According to this help file, you can add links to your “shared stuff page” by adding a bookmarklet to your web browser’s “Links” or “Bookmarks” bar or by clicking this button, which currently only seems to be available on Google Video but is likely to be made available for embedding on any website.

When the bookmarklet is clicked, the popup allows you to choose whether you want to share a thumbnail image and article preview taken from the website or just the link. You can also email the link or share it on popular social networks like Facebook, Furl, del.icio.us, Social Poster, Reddit and Digg.

It’s possible to view the most popular shared stuff, also available filtered by tag and domain, or shared stuff from a particular user. At the moment, many of the shared items are from people testing this service, and I’ve also seen quite a few “adult” links and images in there, so it will be interesting to see how useful these pages are once more people start to share links. (The “most popular” page certainly doesn’t seem to be showing the most popular links based on the number of people who have shared them or viewed them either.)

When signed in to your Google Account, you can also view shared stuff from people you know, which seems to show any items that have been shared by any of your Gmail contacts.

Reto Meier wonders whether this is Google’s “Maka-Maka” social effort mentioned in the leaked Google Reader training video which will apparently become the infrastructure for social networking across all of their applications.

With Google tracking how often a link is shared and viewed, it will be interesting to see whether this data is used by their ranking algorithms, especially since users are asked to tag their shared items.

[Thanks Ben Allen, Ionut and Reto!]

[By Tony Ruscoe | Original post | Comments]

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Walking barefoot over a cobblestone path is possible, and no step in particular will injure your feet. But the overall experience isn’t nice. It’s the same when a website has minor usability problems piling up: none of the issues taken on its own is disastrous at all, but taken together, the site ends up being a slightly bad experience. I wanted to take a minute to illustrate such a collection of minor usability issues with the new Live.com, Microsoft’s search effort. All in all shows that the Live.com team doesn’t have people with a 100% focus on usability.

Let’s start with the frontpage as it presents itself. Nice design, looks like a search engine, not too cluttered. Good. (Not original, but good usability is not about being original... often the opposite is true.)

Cobblestone 1. Low contrast. The contrasts for a selected tab vs an unselected tab are too low. Clearer colors, using underline, bold etc. could help.

Cobblestone 2. Real interface vs screenshots confusion. Can you guess which elements in above part of the page can be used, and which are mere screenshots? Answer: everything is “real” except for the search box. It makes sense when you know what this is supposed to be – an illustration of a browser search box – but it’s not intuitive. Screenshots of interfaces fit much better in e.g. a blog article like this one, and even then one needs to take care to make a screenshot look more “screenshot"-like (e.g. via blur shadows, cropping, resampling, borders and so on).

Cobblestone 3. Text clutter. It’s important to not clutter the screen with information that is not important at this part of the user interaction stage. If the information isn’t critical or has mere informative nature, like this abundance of orange “Beta” signs which draw most of the attention in this drop-down, then the information shouldn’t be included at that point. (The situation would be different if most of the menu items would be of “normal” status, and only one was in Beta – then, the orange “Beta” would carry more relevant information, and perhaps deserve extra attention.)

Almost-Cobblestone 4. Removing the 3D border of input elements. This one is actually mostly OK as the Live.com design uses a darker background color behind the search box, and at least the border has a bevel design (usually, input elements use an inset 3D border, and buttons use an outset 3D border). But in my experience it starts causing misunderstandings if you remove the inset border and use the same color as the background, even more so when the button next to the input element has a flat border too. The highest user understanding is only achieved with an actual 3D border, even though these tend to look old-fashioned (e.g. I’m using a 1-pixel border on this site).

Cobblestone 5. Inconsistent tab order. From the homepage, I selected the “Video” tab and searched for google. The video tab was in third position on the homepage, but now it moved to the right of the “more” dropdown into 7th position. Not only doesn’t this make much sense and is confusing due to a lack of consistency, this approach is also inconsistent in that it’s not repeated when you e.g. choose the “Image” tab (as that tab will not move to the 7th position). The user model doesn’t match the programmer’s software model: the “rule” here seems to be that Video is in Beta and thus somehow must move to the right on search results (and results only), but this rule is too arbitrary to be intuitive. Programmers & designers should always try to match the user model, that “mental understanding of what the program is doing for them,” as Spolsky says.

Cobblestone 6. Hiding crucial information by default. On image search results pages, you need to hover over an image to see information like the domain the image is from. In general, hiding non-relevant information is a good approach as it unclutters the design, but if the information is too crucial, then making the user to hover first starts to become a barrier.

Cobblestone 7. Non-underlined links. Underlined links are still more recognizable as such, even in this day and age. Above screenshot of the upper part of an image search result does not make it 100% obvious how to change the SafeSearch setting. In this case, perhaps that’s done on purpose as “child safety,” and for sure adults will be able to figure it out. It’s still a good reminder that links you want people to easily find need to be underlined.

Cobblestone 8. Inconsistent “more” dropdown. The “more” dialog on the homepage doesn’t match the “more” dialog on results pages. Neither in its design – from vertical to multi-rows etc. – nor in its behavior. E.g. dialog 1 expands without animation and remains open when you move the mouse away, while dialog 2 expand with an animation and collapses when you move the mouse away. In a good interface, sufficiently similar things look & behave similar, and sufficiently different things look & behave differently.

Cobblestone 9. Unclear purpose of interface elements. When you do a Maps search, there will be a temporary loading window before the map appears. This window has an “X” button to close it, though its exact purpose is hard to understand. Try to guess: Will it cancel the search... speed up the loading... or minimize the “loading” window? (Spoiler: I think it just minimizes the “loading” window.) It sure sounds nice on the surface to empower the user to do something with the “loading” window, but as Spolsky says, sometimes choices equal headaches.

Cobblestone 10. Pimping your own products to the detriment of the user. Originally I expected the “MSN” tab in Live.com to take me to the MSN homepage at MSN.com, or perhaps do something in relation to MSN messenger (called Windows Live Messenger these days, but you never know). What it actually does is search for your query across msn.com properties, like MSNBC.msn.com or groups.msn.com. It’s easy to imagine why Microsoft wants people to search through these properties specifically, but why would an average search user want that on a regular basis (it’s a main tab after all)?

[By Philipp Lenssen | Original post | Comments]

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