I read this NYTimes story about Japanese mobile phones not going global and couldn’t help but remember a post I wrote 2 years ago about Japanese software. Here’s a short quote from the NYTimes story, referring to handsets in Japan:
“Despite their advanced hardware, handsets here often have primitive, clunky interfaces, some participants said. Most handsets have no way to easily synchronize data with PCs as the iPhone and other smartphones do.”
Yes, it looks like not much has changed.
Seems like everyone is talking about the new Google Wave product, demonstrated at today’s Google I/O event. Of course, it will be much easier to have something to say about it when we can all use it, but it looks very promising.
Not too long ago, all we had was email. Then IM came blog. And then blogs, wikis, Twitter and now Wave. All of these different communication tools bring something new to the table. What’s truly astonishing is how quickly communication technologies have morphed and evolved over the last decade.
One communication angle that I’ve exploring at Slife Labs that I haven’t seen too much out there yet is what I call activity awareness – communicating and staying in touch through the broadcasting of activities. I think there’s room for this form of communications in our arsenal of communication tools, but that’s a topic for another post.
Like many people, I’ve been using Twitter more regularly over the last several months. I’ve always been interested (and a big believer) in technologies that promote social connectedness and Twitter certainly falls in this category.
I am finding that I get a lot of value from it when I follow my friends – it’s an excellent way to stay in touch. However, it’s becoming really apparent to me that the Twitter interface presented to us by applications such as Twitterrific and TweetDeck leave a lot to be desired, especially when you follow people who are heavy users and post several times a day.
Case in point: Robert Scoble. Here’s a guy who attends dozens of tech events a year and whose job revolves around communicating ideas and sending links around. I want to follow him, I find that his content is good. But all list-based Twitter clients make following someone like him really hard. Here’s what my TweetDeck app looked like this morning:
I like to see what Robert is up to, but this interface makes it really hard to read all of his tweets and follow all the links. Not to mention that someone like Robert overshadows all of my friend’s tweets, a problem that can be mitigated in TweetDeck through groups. But that’s just part of the story.
Twitter is powerful because it’s a universal messaging platform – it’s used in so many different ways by so many people. I would love to see (and hopefully contribute to) interfaces that are designed specifically for certain uses, such as following a small group of close friends, or see what powerful networkers like Robert Scoble are doing and sharing with the world. One-fits-all interfaces like what we have today, especially at the desktop level, dilute the user experience any way you look at it.
I’ve been a user of Mint for more than a year now and really like the service. It’s quite impressive how much better their web app is today compared to a year ago. Here’s a company that is capitalizing on an opportunity, and executing really really well. It’s not surprising that they are approaching a million users.
Now, if you’ve ever shown any interest in personal finance applications, you’ve probably heard of Intuit, the company that makes Quicken. Intuit is also behind Quickbooks, an accounting package for small businesses that I use and don’t enjoy very much.
Truth is, Intuit used to be the big guy on the block when it comes to personal/small biz finance software but they stumbled and the Internet is now full of web-based applications for personal finance. Some of them are quite excellent, such as Mint and Wesabe, just to name a few. Intuit’s dominance is slowly eroding.
And then today, TechCrunch reports that Intuit sent Mint a letter questioning their adoption numbers and implicitly accusing them of false advertising. The letter became public and it’s embarrassing that Intuit chose to take this type of step to get in the way of a competitor that is running circles around them.
Having been involved in a legal imbroglio related to a trademark that completely slowed things down and cost a lot of time, energy and money, I am very critical of these sorts of legal maneuvers. If you can’t compete at the user experience level or product quality or cost, what do you do? Call the lawyers!
Music is everywhere, yet it’s very hard to find software tools that help people visualize, categorize and navigate through their music collections.
This demo from the MIT Media Lab shows what’s possible when you combine music metadata and information visualization techniques.
This reminds me very much of a project developed by a good friend of mine, back when we both worked at France Telecom R&D. Sadly the project was sent down the intellectual property path and now lives in the patent portfolio of a large telecommunications company. In other words, it probably will never see the light of day.
Via CrunchGear.
For many years now, there’s been tremendous industry push towards web-based applications. We’ve seen enterprise-level software move to the web and in the last 5 years or so, even applications that I would expect to stay put on the desktop a while longer have packed its bags and left. These are the “traditional” desktop applications – word processors, spreadsheets, contact managers and video editors. Today, you can enjoy all of these applications from the comfort of your favorite web browser.
Web-based software offers many advantages to developers and users, there’s no doubt. Developers have virtual universal reach with the browser and it’s possible to roll out improvements and fix bugs without requiring users to download a new version of the app. Users benefit too – they can access their apps and documents from anywhere and they don’t have to install any software in their computers. This is a dream-come-true scenario for companies and IT departments everywhere.
But there’s a problem with web-based software – the user experience suffers, and users notice. Despite the emergence of Ajax and other technologies that really improve the flow and responsiveness of web applications, they don’t make up for the difference completely. Back in the early days of the web, navigating pages and web sites as if they were pages of a magazine made sense. After all, most of the user experience was about consuming information. But in a two-way web world, with so much interconnectedness, services, APIs, mash-ups and community participation, the magazine navigation model fails to deliver.
So, what’s the role of desktop software in this increasingly web-based world? Functionally, I think that the line will become increasingly less distinct. Ajax will get better and new technologies will emerge, such as Flex and AIR, that will close the gap between the worlds of desktop software and the web. But the experience unification will only take place when the web browser frame completely disappears. Take a look at Mailplane and Fluid for examples of what happens when web apps shake hands with the desktop.
Over time, I think the prevailing user experience will borrow from both worlds, and will resemble the widgets we know today, except that they will be much more powerful. I like to call these new applications ‘wapps’. Wapps will be as responsive as desktop apps, in fact they will be desktop apps. But they will have the additional backing of a web service in order to offer personalization, social comparison, community, recommendation and much more. Maybe there would be an actual web service, accessible through the browser in addition to the wapp. That wouldn’t be a requirement, however, because all the service functionality would be provided from within the wapp itself.
Are there any wapps out there today? Here’s a small, simple example: Twitterrific. Personally, Twitter would be useless for me without Twitterrific or some other similar desktop client. I simply would not visit the site if I had to log in to type every message, to enter every tweet. In fact, if Twitterrific included all the functionality of the Twitter web site, I wouldn’t miss the site at all.
And in a sign of things to come, yesterday I found out about a new company called SignalApps whose business is to develop desktop clients for the popular 37Signals web apps.
Some more thoughts on the future of the desktop are here and here.
In my view, a desktop client experience makes all the difference in the world. Long live the client!
Finally, a brilliant use of the iPhone’s location tracking technology:
“iNap is a ‘next-generation’ travel alarm. Using the GPS in your iPhone it will determine where you are, and wake you when you are close to your destination!”
Great technology demonstrated at DemoFall2008 and TechCrunch50 with products such as Mytopia, Atmosphir, FitBit and others. Yet, the top prize at TechCrunch50 goes to a Twitter knock-off with a business model: Yammer.
Twitter continues to amaze me. The service and technology are pretty straightforward. It’s obviously addressing a real need, otherwise it would be hard to justify the amount of interest it generates, and how loved it is in some circles. So much so that we are starting to see spin-offs that are virtually identical to Twitter itself.
In terms of IP protection, I am not sure if Twitter has filed any patents protecting its technology or not. I believe it hasn’t. In any case, it will be interesting to see what Twitter will do next with challengers like Yammer trying to eat its lunch. I don’t think it will be able to block anyone in court. Honestly, I don’t think Twitter wants to play the IP game. I don’t blame it. Considering what they have, if I were in their shoes, I wouldn’t try to leverage any IP either. The value of Twitter is in the community.
What about Twitter’s business model? Until not too long ago, the service was a yo-yo in terms of reliability and uptime. Things have improved as of late, but how is it going to make money? It’s been more than a year since Twitter stormed SXSW and it’s still not obvious how they will monetize. The longer they wait, the more they tend to lose as others capture profitable niches. Yammer has a great model for charging customers and making money.
I think we are just getting started in this space of awareness and communications. There’s lots of room for innovation here. Things are getting interesting.
It looks like we have another option to choose from when it comes to browsers. Google is announcing that Chrome, their open-source browser, is ready to go. More details here.
The space is getting crowded, but owning the browser experience is important from a strategic point of view. That is especially true if you are building web applications that threaten the monopoly of one of your competitors, as is the case between Microsoft and Google. Google can’t afford to let Microsoft cut their air supply.
Despite the significance of this announcement and what it will come out of it in the future, today’s highlight for me was how Google announced Chrome. They hired the great Scott McCloud to design a comic book detailing the browser, explaining their motivation for building it, etc.
As a side note, companies such as Apple and Google have spent the last few years developing apps that detach themselves from Microsoft and let them set their own courses. Both Apple and Google now have their own browsers and office suites.
I would also sleep better at night if my products didn’t depend on Microsoft to succeed (or any other outside company for that matter). It’s an expensive move, but it makes business sense. And Google has the cash. Whether people will embrace it is another story. There’s been a growing sentiment lately among users that Google is beginning to know too much, track too much.
A few years ago, while working at France Telecom R&D, I was tasked with the development of an audio streaming plugin for the Opera browser in the Nokia 6600 phone.
I really enjoyed working with the 6600, which is a fairly open and ‘hackable’ phone. However, writing software on top of the Symbian operating system was worse than going to the dentist. I hated it. As a development platform, I think Symbian is awful.
So a couple of weeks ago, I was quite surprised when Nokia decided to acquire the rest of Symbian it didn’t already own. Supposedly, they want to challenge the iPhone and the upcoming Android platforms with Symbian. The mobile OS market is hot, everyone wants a piece of the pie.
Nokia, however, is going to have a lot of trouble wooing developers to Symbian. The moment developers jump in the water they will realize how unfriendly the mobile OS is. And most likely, they will switch to something else instead of sticking around.
Unless Nokia goes through the effort of modernizing Symbian, they might as well write off this $410 million and come up with a different strategy to stay in the game.
