This is one of those weeks where I've got more material than time.  So here are some quick thoughts on some things that have been floating around my browser this week.

(1) A new startup launched this week called Grand Central.  According to Life Hacker, Grand Central "lets you consolidate all of your phone numbers into one number, meaning someone can call you on your GrandCentral phone number and all of your phones (cell phone, work phone, home phone) will ring."  That's just sort of the starting point with this service too.  Sounds awesome.  Looking forward to giving it a try. 

(2) There is an interesting post on Forever Geek that debunks the Myspace claim to have 100 million users.  It puts the number of actual users at around 43 million.  Not sure about the methodology, but there is no doubt in my mind that that 100 million number is bogus.

(3) Saw an interesting post entitled 10 Things that will Make or Break Your Website.  Best advice comes in the first bullet: "EASY is the most important feature of any website, web app, or program."

(4) The Wall Street Journal published a fascinating article on the email overload problem that afflicts most of us.  Great read for anyone that feels like a slave to their inbox most days. 

(5) Michael Kinsley wrote a great article for Time Magazine this week called Do Newspapers Have a Future?  Money quote: "Newspapers on paper are on the way out. Whether newspaper companies are on the way out too depends."  IMO, the key to survival is figuring out how to use the Internet properly.  We'll continue to beat that particular drum. 

(6) Mark Warner got a lot of attention for appearing in Second Life a few months back.  We wrote about it.  The appearance was short and he didn't take any quesitons from the audience, saying he would come back for a full townhall in late September/early October.  Did they ever schedule this?  I haven't heard a peep about it since the initial burst of coverage.

(1) Create a graphic design that says something about the candidate.  Most candidate websites are cookie cutter in terms of design.  Stand out by creating a graphic identity that actually speaks to who the candiate is.  The Kinky Friedman for Governor website is a good example of a site design with some personality.

(2) Give visitors stuff to do besides just give you money.  Ask them to knock on doors for you.  Ask them to plan their own campaign event.  Ask them to write letters to the editors at local papers.  Ask them to hold their own voter registration drives.  Use your site to invite people to participate in your campaign and give them tools they can use to do it. (more…)

If you needed information about your city, it makes sense to head over to the metropolitan website to begin figuring out what's what. A research study by Cleveland State's Leo Jeffres and UConn's Carolyn Lin appears in Indiana University's Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication. The study examines how the websites of the 50 largest metropolitan areas in the US represented their cities and how well their websites communicated with the public, both residents and visitors, through their sites. The researchers found that while some websites offer quite a lot of useful information, they still have a ways to go to be perfectly useful, especially since the Internet is recognized as a superior platform for democraticizing society and fostering community. 

Jeffres and Lin are, in their investigation, asking a larger question, of whether or not the internet can (and has so  far) help(ed) build and support community and engagement in civic life for a variety of stakeholders, not limited to current and prospective residents, business owners and tourists. In this study, they directly ask whether or not the sample of 50 major metropolitan websites offer the kind of diverse information/content one would consider of great importance to the abovementioned stakeholders. (more…)

When I first read that Apple was recalling batteries on certain laptops, I didn't think for a minute that the iBook G4 I own had anything to do with it. Sure, the battery did get extremely hot at times, but if anything, it was comforting, not unlike a sleeping cat. I certainly didn't (want to) think that my innocent little iBook would ever explode. But remembering the burnt out cab of the pick-up truck pictured on the front-page of The New York Times compelled me to scratch in "Check On Apple Recall" on my To-Do list.

Check on Apple Recall I did. I googled "Apple Recall" (I no longer bother with extensive webpage searches) and came across the link that directed me to the page on Apple's Battery Exchange program. (Having an overactive imagination, I thought that the idea of a Battery Exchange was far more exotic than a Battery Recall. I conjured up visions of sending my Apple battery off to study theatre in London or study the culture of the Maasai in Africa, only to return a more cultured, worldly and sophisticated battery than when it had first arrived. Also, the word "recall" to me seemed to imply that I'd bought a cheap product, one where manufacturers give very little thought to quality. After all, I never hear about Maybachs getting recalled.) (more…)

John Voelcker, an interactive media strategist, released a review of the top ten technologies that are changing the world. His list is based on technologies developed by social entrepreneurs who thought through the development , usability and financing of their solutions. 

Voelcker's list is as follows, followed by summaries (based on his paper) of what these products actually do:

1. The Enviroloo by Enviro Options (Pty) Ltd of Kya Sands, South Africa.

Sewage treatment poses a problem in the developing world. People are exposed daily to disease carrying insects and contaminated water. In response to this problem, South Africa-based Enviro Options Ltd. introduced a new system, the Enviroloo, which uses heat and ventilation instead of a water-based system.   

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Over the past few years, microfinancing has grown in popularity with a number of internationally focused entrepreneurs and international development workers. The concept of microfinance was introduced by Dr. Muhammad Yunas, who began an experiment in Bangladesh in the mid 1970’s. The professor gave a group of 42 women only $27 to start a bamboo chairmaking operation.  He found that that $27 allowed the women to take care of themselves and their families, sell their chairs and repay their loans. In the early 1980s, Dr. Yunas began the Grameen Bank, which extended small loans (typically less than $300) to the poorest of the poor to help them onto the road of self-sustainability.  The loan repayment rate is around 98% and the bank is now hugely successful, it’s worth having been estimated at nearly $2.5 billion. Grameen’s operations have been modeled by a number of similar microfinancing institutions in a number of other countries, including Nepal, India, Norway and even in the US.

Twenty-eight years after Dr. Yunas first loaned the $27 to the bamboo chair operation, a staff member of the Village Enterprise Fund, Jessica Flannery, along with her filmmaker husband, Matthew, learned that they could use Paypal to essentially wire loans to rural communities through a field operation volunteer who was with the Village Enterprise Fund. The couple worked tirelessly to figure out how they could get involved in microfinancing. They came up with this: an Internet driven microfinancing operation they named Kiva. (more…)

Despite the rain here in Washington, the dreaded April 17th Tax Day has been pretty uneventful. The line at the post office near us isn’t remarkably long and no one looks particularly panicked. Most people I’ve spoken to have used some form of tax software to prepare their returns. I was going to use one myself, but decided that doing it by hand might be educational. I simply printed the forms off the Internet and asked any questions I had online and on the phone. This morning, as the postal clerk affixed postage to my manila envelopes, I wanted to ask her why I couldn’t mail them for free? Then I started wondering, why can’t I just file them online without using a software program I would have to buy? What about a software program developed by the IRS?

According to the Public CIO Blog, Treasury Secretary John Snow had a few thoughts on this matter already:

“We aren’t tax preparation people. We’re not software development people,” Treasury Secretary John Snow told a House Appropriations subcommittee last week, according to the Associated Press. “There’s a private market out there that does that and does it well.” (Truman Lewis of ConsumerAffairs.org reminded readers in his article that Snow chose to ignore “the fact that IRS runs a huge data processing operation” as it is.) (more…)

The first ten years of the Internet are over. The web is no longer a new thing. It is an ingrained part of our lives.Studies show that users form their first impression about a website in 1/20th of a second. What are they going to think if that time is spent watching Flash animation load? Or watching a marquee slowly scroll through a list of headlines? Or searching for creatively placed navigation? They’ll think it’s time to visit another website.

As Internet users get more sophisticated and impatient, the need for designs that emphasize usability becomes paramount. Here are a dozen guidelines for web designers that we’ve developed over the years. We try to have these principles guide all of our design work.

1. Know your audience. Not only in the marketing sense. Know the technical boundaries you’re working within. The user experience for a high school math student in Jersey and a journalist in Zimbabwe are very different. Bear this in mind when making initial decisions.

2. Understand the purpose of the site. The client can lose sight of this, but the designer must not. If the site’s purpose is to raise funds, that component must be ever-present in the design. If the client decides to punch the site up for the sake of visual impact, this must be addressed immediately, before the project loses its focus.

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I recently had an insight about the interfaces of two extremely popular social networking websites: MySpace and Facebook. These sites allow you to create a page on their network where you can post a photo and profile of yourself, allowing your friends to contact you online. However, these two specific sites take very different approaches.

MySpace is centered around independent bands and grew out of a desire to promote the LA club scene. Personal profiles almost always feature music and often have several music videos playing. You can customize the layout, background, color scheme, and just about anything else on the page (there are actually external websites offering free MySpace layouts). Everyone can be a groupie. The site can be slow at times, but that doesn’t seem to stop millions of users from spending hours there.

College campuses are the unifying factor of Facebook. Your invitation is sent to your school e-mail account. The pages are relatively uniform with very little customization, but they always load quickly. Facebook allows you further define the details of your “friendship” (common clubs, you both lived in the same dorm, you’re brothers, etc…). Mark Zuckerberg created the site as a way of putting faces on the flat listings of the Harvard directory.

Both sites accomplish roughly the same thing and are highly successful, yet take almost opposite approaches. What does this tell us about software development? Know your audience. Grassroot campaigns should give users the ability to personalize the way they’re spreading a message. Corporate consortiums should make it easy for members to quickly find and contribute accurate information. Both are important and need very different user interfaces.

To follow up on Todd’s post below, I went to Google Finance and typed in HP, looking for the stock activity and news for the Hewlett-Packard Company. Look what I got.

1. Stock graph is for the contract oil driller Helmerich & Payne, but the news items on the right are about Hewlett-Packard (HP). And some of the stock data points (captial letters) correspond to Google HP articles. Obviously bogus.

2. I made the mistake of thinking HP was the stock symbol for Hewlett-Packard. It’s HPQ. Google made the mistake of thinking the abbreviation, HP, was the oil drilling company (which it could be).

3. And to add to the silliness even further, Todd’s blog post made it to the #2 spot on the Google Finance page for Toyota (see bottom right.)

4. Getting names right is very hard. Aliases, abbreviations, mispelling, etc. In this connected world, shared vocabularies, meaning and context really do matter. Otherwise there’s all sorts of nonsense, as displayed on Google Finance.

Joel Spolsky, the guru behind Joel on Software, has a straightforward and on point definition of usability:

“Something is usable if it behaves exactly as expected.”

By that definition (and just about any other), the beta web search currently available off of Microsoft’s Live.com website isn’t usable. Here’s the problem:

Generally speaking, when I do a search, the first link I click on doesn’t do it. Unless I’m looking for a specific website, searching usually involves clicking on multiple search results links until: (a) I find exactly what I’m looking for, (b) what I’ve learned from the multiple results I’ve clicked on satisfies my research needs or (c) I give up.

So when I search, I have an expectation that when I click the “Back” button the results will appear as they did when I left them. If I’m on the third page of results, I want to see the third page of results when I click back. The Ajax-driven Live.com web search doesn’t meet that expectation. It loses your place. (more…)