Futurism
The Early Bird Gets … Left Behind?
Feb 10th
One of the fundamental principles of agile programming, and something that’s leaked out in to other less trendy development methodologies is the notion of “release early, release often”. In a nutshell it says you should release your software product quickly and then update it when you have a new feature or two. It’s fundamentally different to the old style approach of releasing an application when it was finished and everything was complete.
On the whole it’s a great way of doing things. It limits scope creep. It allows you to get feedback very early in the project. It ensures you’re moving forward. This is all brilliant. But that’s not to say it’s perfect.
The problem with “release early, release often” is that users often expect to see more than you’re giving them. Someone signed up as a “beta user” still has expectations that the product they’re using is going to work; releasing before your feature set has the minimum number of things required to make your product useful will put off the users who are most likely to be enthusiastic adopters of the product once it’s complete.
Broken things, ugly things, even experimental things are features a beta tester will take in their stride. Missing things though, especially things that limit the functionality of the product to the point where there’s no reason to use it, mean there’s no reason to carry on trying. The user will walk away.
That’s a key problem for a start-up. Coxing users back after they’ve given up on your app is far more difficult than getting them in the first place. I’m not going to mention any start-ups by name, but it’s something I’ve seen several times in the past month, and I have given up on the app each and every time. As yet I’ve not been back. I wish those apps well for the future, but I also know that the start-up I’m a part of at the moment will be learning from their mistake.
A long way down: Will Google survive?
Jan 21st
In the past six months the chaps at Google have been busy. They’ve been pushing products out the door like nobodies business. There’s Google TV, Google eBookstore, Google Hotpot, Boutiques.com (although you’d be hard-pressed to figure out that’s a Google project just from the site). They’re innovating and inventing exciting things at GoogleHQ.
There’s an obvious problem though. Mention any of the recent products to someone who isn’t a reader of tech news websites or Google’s blog and you’ll be met with a blank and vacant stare. People aren’t paying attention to what Google are doing any more. They’re old-hat. They’re not exciting. If anything, they’re actually boringnow.
This is not something that Google are unaware of internally. The recent change at the very top, with Eric Schmidt standing aside from the CEO job to let Larry Page take the reins is a sign that Google know that they’re having problems. The balance sheet is looking very healthy but the long-term prospects aren’t. Looking like a dull company with uninteresting and unexciting products means that Google won’t attract the best people – at the level Google operates whether or not someone wants to work for your company is down to the development challenge your products represent much more than money or prestige. As a developer with a reasonable amount of experience myself I’d be loathe to join Google; I’d much rather work for companies like Twitter or Facebook where the challenge is still current, or for a start-up doing something truly innovative.
Another issue that Google face is the fact Facebook is in the process of barricading users into their section of the internet. If Google aren’t making things that users look at then they’re not displaying adverts to anyone. That’s Google’s core business. Lose that, and Google’s other products are redundant.
To give them their due, Google aren’t down and out yet. They have an immense pool of resources that they can draw on. For an example of that you need look no further than what has happened with the start-up wunderkind Groupon. Google’s takeover offer of $6billon was turned down so Google have built Google Offers to take them on directly. Google have done that in a matter of months, and they’re leveraging their tools like AdSense and Google Local to bring in small business advertisers who might have potentially gone to Groupon if the Google hadn’t created their own service. That’s the sort of power that Google have. All they need to do now is make sure the users see those offers. That’s where Google’s ‘old school’ apps like GMail and YouTube give Google an advantage. Still, Groupon were first to market, and have a huge lead in the coupon website space, so beating them is going to be hard.
Looking to the future I hope that Google last, and continue to bring us great products like they have in the past. I think they need to focus on inventing rather than copying, and get back that reputation for developing cool tech that they once had. It’d be horrible to see them lose to Facebook.
Crowdsourcing Volatile Location Information
Jan 10th
Geolocation check-in apps, such as Foursquare, Latitude, Facebook Places etc, have become relatively mature in a very short period of time in internet terms. Foursquare, the market leader, has been in use for less than 2 years (although it is based on Dodgeball that was around for a few years prior to that).
As the apps grow their userbase they’re adding additional features such as photosharing (Foursquare), real time updates (Latitude), and better business tie-in (Gowalla).
While it’s nice to check in and add somewhere to a list of places you’ve visited, and perhaps add a picture or a note, those additional pieces of data are static, and frankly a bit boring in the main. Once they’ve been added by half a dozen users there’s no reason to add more. That limits the reason to check in to either telling your friends where you are or to try to win a ‘badge’. Those aren’t often reason enough to keep users checking in whenever they go out. I’ve stopped checking in to places entirely. I don’t care enough about being the major of somewhere to bother. What appears to be missing is the ability for users to share volatile information about the location they’re currently in.
Imagine if you could add things to your check-in that would be of interest to people who aren’t in your network though. For example, when you check in to a bar you could add how busy it is on a sliding scale from “Dead” to “Jammed”. People looking for a bar around your location could search for “Bars that aren’t empty”, hey presto your check-in becomes useful data. After an hour your information would be discarded because it’s no longer relevant.
If everyone go into the habit of checking in and supplying information about how busy a venue is then rather than a simple catalogue of where you’ve been a geolocation check-in service would become a must-have real-time data source for travelers.
If anyone at Foursquare is reading this you can have this idea for free. I’d find it very useful.
The Buzzword for 2011: “Magazine”
Dec 13th
Pinning down the number one theme for 2010 is a bit hard. “Cataloguing” certainly came to the fore; “social” grew up a bit; “semantic”, “Web 3.0″ and “cloud” were mentioned a lot, and “curation” started to hit the radar towards the end. For me none of those were really the defining buzzword for the year though. I think the key term was “trend”. 2010 was all about finding and highlighting trends in search, social networking, and apps. Every major graph provider opened up their APIs for app developers to sift through all their data and find what we were talking about. Some interesting projects came out of it.
Trying to work out what will be the big thing next year is even more difficult, but I’m going to hazard a guess. 2011 will be the year of the “magazine”.
It’s not actually a terribly insightful guess. It’s already started. Magazine style websites and applications are popping up all over the place: it started with the awful Wired iPad app, the interesting Zinio magazine marketplace, and Virgin’s “Project“. The trend will continue with Apple rolling out their new subscription payment service allowing user’s to pay for monthly content downloads for their favourite magazine apps very easily.
It won’t just be iPad and phone apps though. The magazine graphic style will start to permeate through web design. The design and layout ideas that we’re used to seeing when we’re flicking through our favourite periodicals will become recognisable on our favourite websites. Big images, gorgeous typography, elements extended outside of the grid, tons of whitespace, and so on.
Finally, we’ll see more “magazine” services that can take our lifestream (social, news, blogs, etc) and craft it into a beautiful and accessible format. It started this year with the amazing Flipboard, but more services are going to be becoming available in the next 12 months. One to watch in that regard will be TweetMag who’re going to be turning Twitter streams into magazines.
Threadspotting
Dec 8th
Location check-in websites have started becoming pretty popular over the last year or so. Most of us have at least heard of Foursquare and Gowalla, and perhaps Facebook Places and the Google backed SCVNGR. Where you are is an obvious thing to catalogue. Those sites work*.
More recently other sorts of check-in sites have cropped up too. There’s the strange GetGlue that let’s you check-in what media you’ve been consuming, and Foodspotting that combines photos of what food you’ve been eating with which restaurant you’re at.
Foodspotting is an interesting idea. It almost works. The problem, at least as far as I’m concerned, is that I don’t eat out enough to make it worthwhile checking in and uploading a photo when I do. Who wants to spend time looking to see where I’ve been out if I’m only updating every month or so. I imagine that’s more to do with the fact I fall a little way outside of the target group that Foodspotting is aimed at (affluent 20somethings who eat in fancy restaurants a lot). The idea is sound, it’s just not for me. But it has got me thinking.
What do we all do, everyday, that we might be interested in sharing with our friends? The answer I’ve come up with is “wear clothes”.
The idea of sharing your “look” with your friends is far from new. Lookbook.nu has been doing it for years. Fashism.com started quite recently (with money supplied by the likes of Ashton Kutcher). People are interested in fashion. By combining the location-awareness of a photo sharing app people could take snapshots of items they’re seen in their favourite store to ask their friends if they like the look. For businesses that’d be a good thing – it’d drive people to the stores where they’ve seen things their friends have shared. A discount or special offer could be given to people who share enough pictures in store. News about items and offers could be sent directly to people who have checked-in to the store’s location (with the added advantage that no personal data would need to be passed from the user to the business owner).
I’m actually rather surprised no one has launched anything like this already. It’s that obvious.
* Or worked if the latest stats are to be believed. Their popularity appears to be waining.
Twitter’s Next Steps
Sep 15th
Confirming what I have long suspected, that I am hopelessly addicted to Twitter, last night I actually stayed up to follow the Big Tuesday announcement live online. I found it rather entertaining. Yes, I know. It’s pitiful. I should get some sort of a life.
This big announcement turned out to centre on a new web client for Twitter.com. It looks rather shiny. There’s a new design, some new features, some refinements for the old features, but not much else. Some people in the social media space are saying it’s not really lived up to the hype. But I think there was something else in the announcement, something a lot bigger than the news of the website update.
Evan Williams, in his introduction, made a comment that Twitter is “a realtime information network”. This builds on a comment by Kevin Thau (Twitter’s VP of Business and Corporate Development) at a Nokia World presentation that “Twitter is not a social network”. Within Twitter there has been a shift in emphasis away from building networks of friends to talk to and towards pushing information out to a group of people. The expectation of a two-way conversation is being reduced. Evan went on in his presentation to describe how he wants Twitter to be useful even to people who don’t tweet. There couldn’t be a much clearer indication that they’re wanting to move away from “social”.
I think this indicates, for the first time in the past four years, that they’re publicly trying to move Twitter into a position where users expect things in their timeline that don’t call for a response, making business oriented Twitter accounts less about interacting with your customers and moving more towards pushing PR and marketing messages to a willing audience. Of course, Twitter aren’t being that overt about it; they’re saying it’s for “news”. But they would.
It’s almost a given; for Twitter to roll out an advertising sales platform that users are going to accept the users will need to accept those sorts of breaks in their timeline without complaining. At the moment it’s uncertain if they would. If you suggest twitter adverts most of the feedback is understandably negative. This is just the first of many necessary steps.
Just briefly it’s also worth noting another sideline announcement that Twitter made yesterday – that the new web client is built entirely on top of their existing public APIs. That means that there is no longer any difference between what is displayed on Twitter.com as there is in Twitter for iPhone, Tweetdeck, Osfoora, Hootsuite, and so on. This is another key factor in rolling out an advertising platform. Ads won’t work if they’re only displayed on Twitter.com – the users would just shift to a client that doesn’t display them. With every client using the same APIs every client will get the same content. Should they ever start pushing out adverts that means every client will get the advert data. They’ll be inescapable.
More positively, it also means that there’s a level playing field between Twitter and 3rd party app developers. There’s no reason why a talented team of developers couldn’t build an even better Twitter client than Twitter’s own official offerings.
5 (and a bit) Interesting Ideas
Aug 1st
There are millions of completely crazy ideas around the internet. Sites that you see and think “Really? REALLY?”. I’m not going to name names but I see them almost every day. Frequently they fade away without a trace, occasionally they grow to be incredibly successful, and I’m usually left scratching my head thinking “What did I miss?”.
What’s out there at the moment that’s piquing my interest?
Much as I hate blog posts that consist of lists, I’m going to sacrifice that notion to bring some of the ideas I’ve seen recently that I believe are doing great things (or will be doing great things in the future);
GetGlue – http://getglue.com/ – It’s check ins for media. Rather than checking in where you are, you check in what you’re consuming (tv, dvd, books, etc). It’s a great idea. The statistical profile data of who is doing what and how that relates to what other people are doing will be fascinating. There are rivals (Philo for example), but GetGlue seems to be the best one at the moment.
Zong – http://www.zong.com/ – It’s kind of like Paypal for mobile phones. To buy something you just use your phone number. I’ve been talking about the idea of a “walled garden” for mobile sites for a little while now, and I think this sort of service is exactly the kind of thing that needs to be in place before that can happen seriously. There’s another option in the form of Vento, but Zong appears to be a more mature product at this stage.
PlacePop – http://www.placepop.com/ – Another Foursquare “rival”, PlacePop have taken the idea of GPS enabled check in services and applied it more directly to businesses using a “virtual loyalty card” idea. If they can get traction from retailers I imagine they’ll be huge. Another FourSquare alternative that’s looking interesting is SCVNGR ( http://www.scvngr.com/ ). They’re taking the check in model and applying it to gaming allowing users to build games on top of their service rather like geocaching. It’s hard to see SCVNGR failing considering they’re backed by Google. I fully expect to see SCVNGR games appearing in Google Maps and Earth soon.
Hunch – http://hunch.com/ – Hunch takes a list of the things that you like and builds a “taste profile” of you enabling it to recommend other things that you might like too. It’s quite an obvious idea but the graph technology behind the site makes things quite exciting. “Taste engineering” seems to be something that’s cropping up a lot recently. Local start-up and Difference Engine veterans wishli.st ( http://wishli.st ) have something similar running as a beta.
Jumo – http://www.jumo.com/ – Jumo is a site that will, once it launches, aim to bring together volunteers with volunteer organisations. I don’t yet know much about how they’re planning to do it, but it’s definitely worth watching as it’s been founded by Chris Hughes. Hughes was a roommate of Mark Zuckerberg and a co-founder of Facebook and the brains behind MyBarackObama.com, Barack Obama’s online presence during the 2008 presidential election campaign.
Canv.as – http://canv.as/ – This one is a complete mystery. There are no clues to what it is, or will become on the site whatsoever. Like Jumo though, it’s of interest because of the person behind it – Canv.as is the brainchild of Chris “Moot” Poole who founded 4Chan (the site that gave the internet “rickrolling” amongst other things). Poole is clearly good at community building, so I’m keen to see what comes from his next venture.
The Death Of Internet Advertising
Jul 13th
Here’s an interesting number: 1.7 billion. That, according to the ITU, is the number of people who’ll be accessing the internet using a mobile device by 2013.
Here’s a second interesting number: 70%. That, this time according to mobile ad and content provider Buzzcity, is the percentage of times that a mobile device is to access the internet from the user’s home. People only go mobile with their mobile about 1/3 of the time. I imagine the other 70% are people who’re too lazy to get out of bed or off the sofa when they want to look something up.
What does it all mean?
It means that using mobile internet in the home is going to be pretty big. People won’t be turning their computer on to check Facebook or to look up the name of that actor who was in that thing or to tweet what they’re having for tea. It’s also going to spell the “death” of internet advertising. Of course, it won’t actually be the death of internet advertising at all, I just put inflammatory statements in so I get links (like every other blogger), but it will spell a paradigm shift in the way advertising works.
When a user checks something on their mobile phone using the internet they’re very focused. Far more so than a user on a desktop PC or a laptop. You fire up your mobile browser, look up the thing, and switch off. You’re very unlikely to be distracted. This presents a problem for traditional (in internet terms) in-page advertising. Pay per click adverts only raise revenue if the user is willing to leave the website to look at whatever is being advertised to them. If they aren’t, and mobile users generally aren’t willing to leave, then PPC can’t work – users won’t click adverts, no money comes in, no funds for the business. Per impression advertising is a possible solution, but advertisers aren’t keen for obvious reasons. Even with the advantage of geospacial or device specific targeting PPI is unlikely to be the answer.
What is?
I believe there are two options. The first, and rather more positive idea, is a cross-site micropayment subscription model. I foresee the development of something akin to a massive walled garden that any website can join in with. The user would pay for credit to access any site within the paywall at a minimal fee (in the region of £1 per 1000 pages) perhaps as part of their mobile phone payment scheme, and the website providers would get paid when users view pages. This idea is not new – it’s been trialed on many hundreds of website and website collectives in the past and never really worked. I think the situation will be different for mobile though. People are much more receptive to paying for mobile content; be it texts, call time, apps, or ringtones.
The second idea is one I hope doesn’t happen. Website providers might simply close the door to mobile users. I use websites like Thinkexist.com quite frequently for looking up facts. If they realise that they’re making an overall loss from mobile users they’ll be left with either charging for subscriptions, accepting the loss, or blocking the users. Some websites will accept the loss in the name of being fluffy and nice to their users, perhaps in the hope that they’ll come back to the website from a PC and click on adverts. I fear more won’t be so generous though. They’ll block mobile browsers, either permanently or with a click-through advertising splash page (see IMDB.com on an iPhone for an idea of how that works).
Either way, the burgeoning mobile internet market is going to bring about some sort of change. Exciting times.
The Future of Search
May 26th
A couple of days ago I was at an interesting series of talks about Search Engine Optimisation at a local geek event SuperMondays. The talks covered a range of topics; myths of SEO, using the IIS SEO Toolkit, and ‘stuff The Hodge does’.
These talks got me thinking.
I don’t actually use search engines very much these days. I still use them, but only for technical information. I can’t remember the last time I used a search engine to find a product to buy. I can’t remember the last time I used a search engine to find something distracting to while away half an hour. I can’t remember the last time I used a search engine to find a friend of mine online. I certainly don’t “web surf” any more. 10 years ago I would often spend a couple of hours just looking for cool new websites, things to do, new ideas and so on. Those days are gone. The landscape of the internet has changed completely.
The advent of social networks and community websites has meant that we tend to stay in the same places on the internet now. If you build a relationship with your online friends you’ll continue to return to the same website to engage with them rather than spending time on any number of different websites.
As these communities have grown I’ve started relying on human search more than search engines – If I need a hand with some coding I’ll ask on a developer community forum first. If I’m looking for a band I’ll start with Facebook or MySpace. If I want to know the name of a good restaurant I’m far more likely to ask my Twitter followers than I am to search for a review on Bing. Communities act like a pre-filter; asking people with similar tastes and experiences to my own mean their recommendations are much more likely to coincide with something I like. Search engines can’t do that without knowing a huge amount about me first.
Online shopping is similar. Online shops have been around long enough to build up loyalty. We tend to stick with the ones we know rather than Googling for another. If you want to buy a book you’re very unlikely to search for an online bookshop in which to buy it; you’ll either go to Amazon or the online store of a bookshop you like on the highstreet. If you want to buy a television or a computer you might search online, but in a price comparison website rather than Google.
What search engines gave us 10 years ago was a way to find things that online communities wouldn’t know. The communities were too small. Google’s knowledge pool, despite being incredibly “dumb”, in the sense that it had no personalised filtering, was so large that a search for any topic brought back something. A community of 500 people couldn’t do that. That is no longer the case. Our communities are tens of thousands strong. Now a question on Twitter, if it gets a handful of retweets, might reach millions of people. That’s enough to bring back intelligent, filtered recommendations of things that people use and trust. Over the next decade Facebook, Twitter, and whatever new networks spring up will be in a much better position to recommend websites to you than Google could ever dream of.
What does this mean for Search Engine Optimisation?
Rather than guessing at the algorithms that Google are using to rank the ability of a website to deliver content relevant to the search terms that a user has entered optimising a website for human-to-human recommendation is actually going to be quite easy. Humans are predictable. The key factors I think are going to be important are;
- A usable, accessible website. If your website isn’t usable no one is going to tell their friend about it. That’s painfully obvious.
- A short, memorable, and unambiguous name. If your website address isn’t easy to remember and easy to find people won’t be able to recommend it. (Caveat: Navigational searches in Google, such as searching for “ebay” to get to www.ebay.com, will still be available, so the name of the website is all that will really matter)
- Short URLs. Particularly on microblogging services such as Twitter and identi.ca, the shorter the URL for your pages the better. Some major websites have already started building in their own URL shorteners (eg flic.kr, youtu.be). This will become a pretty standard feature on all websites.
- The mobile space will become much more important. Mobile browsing is booming already, but it’ll be more important than ever but having a website that works properly when someone in the pub pulls out their phone to show a friend the site they’re recommending will be vital. If you’ve been shown a website and told it works well you’re considerably more likely to return to it rather than look for another one.
Of course, while this is happening Google et al aren’t going to be resting on their laurels just letting human search take over their business. They’re working on solutions already. If you take a look at your dashboard ( https://www.google.com/dashboard/ ) you’ll see a list of everything that they know about you. They already know my postcode. When I search for “chinese restaurant” I get a map centred on my house with the local Chinese restaurants highlighted on it. That’s just the beginning. If Facebook and Foursquare let Google mine their data then Google’s listings could push the restaurants that my friends visit to the top of the page.
Whichever wins, be it humans or Google, searching online is going to change a lot in the next ten years.
Google Chrome 5 Beta, now even faster!
May 5th
The latest version of Google’s browser, Chrome, is out (Windows, Mac, Linux), and now it’s even faster than the fastest stable browser in the world, which happens to be Chrome 4.
It’s considerably faster in fact. In a swathe of benchmarks it outperforms other browsers Chrome 4 by 30%, Firefox 3 by about 75%, and IE9 Platform Preview by twice as much. That’s fast. There are a whole raft of other changes too such as Flash being integrated into the browser core rather than as a plugin, a new set of HTML 5 APIs, and so on.
I think this is rather exciting. Although it resembles, to a worrying degree, the “browser wars” of the late 1990s between Netscape Navigator 4 and IE3 where each development team was chucking out a new version every few months with more and more features and the gap between what each browser was capable of grew wider and wider, much to the annoyance of web designers and developers, this time around we’re not going to suffer that again.
Google, Mozilla, Opera etc are doing a spectacularly good job of sticking to the W3.org specifications for the new technologies that they’re rolling into their applications. While it’s true that we as developers need to code things that will gracefully degrade if the particular API we’re trying to use isn’t available, when it is available we can be reasonably sure that the way whatever it is will work is going to be the same between different engines; for example, navigator.geolocation is the same in Chrome as it is in Safari. That is incredibly good news.
Looking forward, I can only see good things that are going to come from the new(ish) competition between browsers. As far as the end user is concerned the web is going to be a pretty astonishing place in the years to come.
