business sales

RSS: Web 2.0’s Table Element

A recent interview at Daily Blog Tips showcased the thoughts of Coding Horror’s Jeff Atwood on RSS. It was an interesting viewpoint, and one that got me thinking.

RSS is a technology; it should be completely invisible to the average user. When it isn’t, you get stuff like Oprah redefining RSS as “Ready for Some Stories”. We should no sooner have RSS icons than we have HTTP icons.

The question I come to is: How necessary is it to display an RSS icon on a website? I’ve never really thought about it in depth before. After all, so many blogs and websites do it. It seems natural. And with the pros leaning that direction, what other example do we have to follow?

A List Apart's RSS Feed Link

Practically the source of classy, relevant web tips and practice on the web, A List Apart features a link to their RSS feed in their main menu.

ProBlogger's RSS Feed Link

Easily the #1 model for thousands of bloggers, ProBlogger has a link to subscribe to their content displayed prominently above the fold.

The Feed Reader (no, the human kind)

At first glance, it seems there are two type of readers when it comes to RSS:

Those who use it, and therefore don’t really need the icons and
Those who don’t use RSS and don’t really care that there’s an icon on the page.

Granted, there are gray areas on the spectrum. There are those who use feeds but need to be reminded of their availability (though I don’t know why), as well as those who don’t use feeds but will after enough visual training.

Honestly, the whole issue makes me think of those Valid CSS and Valid XHTML buttons that I used to see every once and a while. I always think those are silly and unnecessary. Now I’m beginning to see feed icons in the same light.

Standard Technology and Non-standard Visuals

I recognize that an RSS icon standard does exist, to an extent, but there is still a lot of creative liberty taken across the web. As Atwood alludes to in his quote above, at some point this showing off of different versions of the icon becomes just that—showboating. How necessary is it?

Everyone does it—heck, I do it—so I can’t really talk. But at one point that was the case with table elements. So what excuses do we really have? And, more importantly, how long before this fad fades out, just like the rest have?

Originally posted on August 21, 2007 @ 11:25 pm

Pownce, A Twitter Competitor? Or Just Stardom Hype?

Geekland was offered a new sensation yesterday: no one less than Digg rebel and star Kevin Rose, with friends, has started a new microblogging and file sharing platform. Pownce. Think a mashup of tumblr, twitter, jaiku with a dash of Box.net.

What’s Pownce?
Pownce is a great way to send stuff to people you know. Add friends, then send them big files, invite them to upcoming events, share great links, and whip off a note to anyone, everyone, or just a few people.

Of course Kevin’s popularity immediately set off a small hype, buzz, especially among blogging geeks. Comparisons with twitter immediately were made, but can Pownce really stand a chance against twitter?

Is the Kevin Rose factor bigger than the factor Evan Williams, creator of Blogger and Odeo, was for twitter? I remember when I joined twitter, I found a majority of designers, 9rulers from the early days and other geeks who soon used twitter as Q&A platform. Not as catblogging platform or for bathroom visit announcements.

Does today’s average twitter user, 140 character microblogger, need one more platform? Do people want to maintain one more profile? Especially now many a Facebook account, with integrated twitter application, have.

Are people ready to [try to] move their whole friends list to another service? Has anyone ever tried to convert twitter friends into jaiku users, to have the option to comment? How many people have left MySpace and successfully moved their core friends group to Virb? Has anyone been successful in this? I wasn’t.

Even if Pownce would become more reliable and sophisticated than twitter, does the most sophisticated and most stable platform always end up in front?

And last but not least, are you ready to share your tweets, your microblogging stream, with Kevin’s fan club, the average adolescent Digg nerd?

I think I will continue to twitter and create havoc at Facebook.

Mini-disclaimer: Having read Wisdump for a long time, I know the Grammar Police reads with me. I immediately apologize for blogging in my fourth language. ;-)

Originally posted on June 28, 2007 @ 5:55 pm

Apple Fans “Digg” at Surface

In case you didn’t already know, Microsoft today announced a table top computer that interacts with whatever is touching it. Zunes, Cameras, Credit Cards, Drinks, hands, feet, whatever. The new product titled Microsoft Surface was formally announced by Microsoft at midnight, however there was news leaked of the impending release several hours earlier. Within minutes of the story hitting Digg, Apple fans were swarming it and starting the age old fight of Apple vs. Microsoft.

First off, before I say anything more about the product or the main subject of this post, kudos to Microsoft for innovating something for themselves. Yes I implied that they knock off a lot of ideas, and usually from Apple. I don’t think anyone can say this would be one of those ideas. In any event go check out the video spots that show how it works. I will be like a kid in a candy store the first time I get to interact with this product! I am a little interested in how it picks up and works with the devices laid on it, but that’s another post.

Now back to Apple for a second. This is where where the release of this product gets somewhat aggravating. As I found the news story on Digg, I totally ignored the 800+ comments and went straight for the Microsoft site to check out the technology and was totally and utterly in awe. I immediately wondered what this would cost and when it might become available. For this I headed to the Digg comments section only to find the typical Microsoft vs. Apple war that happens at the launch of every product of each company. It’s not even the constant bickering that aggravated me but more a few Apple voices that poked fun at Microsoft saying the name is lame, and that Apple already has this in development, or Apple would be releasing this next month and beat Microsoft to the punch, and so on.

Apple fan, get over it! If there is one thing that drives me nuts about rabid fans of either side, it is their inability to recognize something that is cool technology that “their” company didn’t create. It almost sounds like a couple of 8 year old kids saying they won’t touch one another because the other has cooties. It’s technology, we use how many brands of how many different products on a day to day basis, so why is Apple vs. Microsoft the big issue that it is today?

Surface is a cool technology weather you want to admit it or not, Microsoft happened to create it and market it first. One comment I read stated that if Apple would have created the “ISurface”, it would have been Apple fans going into rabid MacWorld Expo type of frezies, much like when the IPhone was announced. If Apple created it, it would still be a cool technology and maybe even more so with the things that they have put out lately, but that’s just not the way it happened.

Now since I will undoubtedly get slammed as a Microsoft fan let me say that admittedly I am. Although I am indifferent I like to take shots at the couple of guys I work with just because I know that most Apple fans are in fact very loyal to the brand. At the end of the day though I don’t own any Apple products, but I would never say I won’t. In fact the IPhone is a very cool concept. I was on the bandwagon to buy the AppleTV until I found it had no DVR capabilities. My wife is wanting an IPod which we will probably purchase in a month or two, so I am by no means a snob about my technology companies and I guess I don’t see why others are either. Cool technology is cool technology no matter who makes it, just like a cool car is a cool car regardless of if it’s made by Honda, Ford, or Buick.

The basic fact is it doesn’t matter who makes it. What matters if it accomplishes what it is supposed to do. Forget all the technical issues of this or that, because the fact of the matter is that everything has it’s issues. When you look at the raw technology that is exposed, that is where you should be making your judgment. Not your bias towards one company or the other.

Originally posted on May 30, 2007 @ 11:19 am

Flock Never Stood A Chance

I am sure everyone has heard of Flock by now. It was almost impossible not to read about it at least somewhere with the amount of hype it had going for it. I would like to jot down some quick thoughts on why Flock never stood a chance in replacing Firefox as the default browswer of the non-IE crowd or even have a chance of penetrating any markets. I know it’s still early in the life of Flock, but where’s all the positive buzz now that it’s available to download? I know saying that Flock never stood a chance is a bit harsh and comes across as downright foolish of me to say, but I figured that in this instance I should pick a side and stick with it instead of sitting on the fence.

I have yet to actually try Flock and therein lies part of the problem. I never tried it because I didn’t see a need for it. I don’t need another browser and I certainly don’t need another way to blog or view del.icio.us links. Flock simply doesn’t solve any problems that I am having with my daily computing experience, while Firefox did back in the days.

Part of what made Firefox so successful was that it came at the right time. It came at a time where many people were frustrated with IE and businesses were getting tired of IE’s vulnerabilities. When a company switches software there is a good chance that people will go home and begin to use the software, but companies don’t switch unless there is a underlying need to do so. I can’t think of any reasons why a company would need to switch from Firefox over to Flock.

Why would a normal home user be enticed to switch over to another browser when they just got used to using Firefox over IE? If they blog I am assuming the majority of them are comfortable with using the web-based interface that comes with their blogging package. If they are power bloggers then there is a good chance they use a desktop application to handle their blogging duties. How does Flock properly fit in?

Last week I spoke about branding and the message of a company and this is an area where Flock could use a lot of help. Their website offers no insight into what they are trying to do or even worse what Flock is really all about. A “social browser” tells me nothing.

Notice how nothing that I have written about has to do with how good or bad Flock is? If you are a lover of Flock you would almost prefer that Flock handles all the issues above and releases a shitty product because a shitty product can be fixed (ask Microsoft). It’s funny reading people write about how Flock will make money, but nobody talks about how they will even get the number of users to an amount that will help them make money. Maybe they have plans to stomp out these issues, but I’m just not seeing it happen.

One final thing that I think hurt them was that they simply used the hype machine a bit too well. They got overexposed before the product hit the shelves and you could just sense the blogosphere (yeah I used the word) waiting in anticipation for some great failure. A little buzz never hurt anyone, but a lot of misplaced hype can be killer. When I visited San Francisco I had the opportunity to meet some of the Flock team and you got the sense that they were also getting caught up in their own hype. Hell, it seemed that everyone in SF was getting caught up in the hype of whatever they were developing because it’s such an insular community. But that’s another issue all on its own.

Originally posted on November 1, 2005 @ 12:16 pm

Start.com: What a waste of a great domain name

One of Microsoft’s latest ventures is their Start.com portal site. This is an easy target for this series, but I felt the need to write about it because I can’t stop seeing links on how cool the site is with its AJAX featureset. Going to the site you will see this statement in the footer:

this site is not an officially supported site. it is an incubation experiment and doesn’t represent any particular strategy or policy.

I am going to try and keep this in mind when I go over the site, but seeing how it’s Microsoft and they control more money than the Roman Empire I find it hard to believe that even non-official sites have to be this crappy.

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Originally posted on August 8, 2005 @ 11:12 am