April 2003 Archive
iTunes Music Store
As you probably read elsewhere, Apple’s Music Store integration with iTunes 4 kicks ass. Now if they only had a few independent labels on board, they might actually make some money off me. Not to worry. I think the indy labels will sign on soon enough.
Later: Jason Fried of 37Signals chimes in with some great suggestions on how to improve the iTunes Music Store experience.
Could TrackBack Go Bigtime?
Forgot blogging going bigtime. Mena Trott talks about TrackBack going bigtime on Six Log:
Given the rare opportunity to be able to speak with Bezos, I made sure to throw my usual self-effacing demeanor out the window and pitch the idea of TrackBack-enabling Amazon’s Reviews to work with tools that support the protocol.
To those who aren’t familiar with the TrackBack framework, that basically means that you could write a product review, publish it anywhere on the Web, and an excerpt of your review would appear on Amazon’s product page with the rest of the reviews. Kind of like this:
The first review is a regular Amazon review, and the second is a fictitious “Web review” on my website. An excerpt of my review would appear after I pinged the Amazon product page.
Peace Posters and Government RSS
The winners of the brushstroke.tv Peace Poster Project have been announced. Thanks to Melanie Goux for sponsoring the contest, and congratulations to the winners for their beautiful work. Mårten Lindquist’s winning entry was also among my favorites.
In other activism news, Paul Ford proposes that government websites, such as the Senate and House of Representatives, use RSS feeds to increase citizen awareness of government activity. This is an excellent idea that could benefit a range of audiences. What else can RSS do for us?
Tab Manipulation Through JavaScript
Now that tabbed browsing has become a standard feature in many browsers, what is the future chance of tabs being manipulated with JavaScript, similar to the way windows can be manipulated with JavaScript?
Update: I found a Mozilla extension called Tabbrowser that enables similar functionality in Netscape 7, Mozilla and Firebird (previously called Phoenix). The extension can be configured so that links which normally open in new windows will open in new tabs instead. If you’re a tab power user, you might want to try it out.
Piles, Mirrors and Time
Recently spotted interface goodness:
Piles are a rumored feature of forthcoming Mac OS releases. Bruce Tognazzini described how they work in a previous AskTog article:
Developed by Gitta Salomon and her team close to a decade ago, a pile is a loose grouping of documents. Its visual representation is an overlay of all the documents within the pile, one on top of the other, rotated to varying degrees. In other words, a pile on the desktop looked just like a pile on your real desktop.
To view the documents within the pile, you clicked on the top of the pile and drew the mouse up the screen. As you did so, one document after another would appear as a thumbnail next to the pile. When you found the one you were looking for, you would release the mouse and the current document would open.
This demo by Richard Das might make the concept a little clearer. (via Mac Rumors)
Next, Mirror Worlds, the book that provoked Unabomber Ted Kaczynski nearly to kill its author, David Gelernter, was covered in the good Discover Magazine article, Emerging Technology: Reality Bytes by Steven Johnson. The basis of Gelernter’s idea is a data layer that is mapped to a virtual reconstruction of reality, a mirror of everything going on in the real world. (via Antenna)
Lastly, Thomas Vander Wal spotted Ftrain’s excellent Accordian Time, Liquid Time, in which Paul Ford proposes a new way of measuring time:
You could measure life in heartbeats per mile: infinite beats standing still in the airport, 10-12 heartbeats per mile on the plane, 600 per mile on the train and bus. There must be some way to measure time that is more accurate than seconds or minutes, a way to define liquid time pouring through smaller and larger openings. So far the system is ad-hoc: I am busy; I feel lazy; I have a minute; can I call you back; no, I’m not doing anything tonight.
Thomas Vander Wal notes the importance of understanding time and perceived time when developing interfaces:
A person who normally has time passing slowly may find most information is easily found, but if they are trying to trackdown the address for a date or interview in a relatively short time before the event the persons perception of time may increase. This impacts the perceived ease of finding information or re-retrieving that information.
I can’t wait until grad school.
Graduate School
If you’ve been following along, you know I’ve been debating what to do with the next year of my life. Well, I decided, and I’ll be joining the human computer interaction master’s program at University College London this September.
Thanks to my wonderful readers for their encouragement and advice.
Boxes and Arrows Up for a Webby
Who would have expected Boxes and Arrows, just over a year old, to be nominated for a Webby? Congratulations to all the staff and authors who made this happen! Needless to say, the competition is stiff.
If you’ve enjoyed the great work that B & A has put out over the past year, show your support in the People’s Voice.
New Yahoo! Search
The new Yahoo! search came out yesterday. My first impression was good. As others have pointed out, with its clean and simple interface, it’s a pretty clear shot at Google.
Then I saw the search results page and was much less impressed. My results didn’t start until the middle of the page because Yahoo! took lots of room to show me what’s inside Yahoo that’s related to my search and sponsor search results. I understand Yahoo! has to make room for branding, and I understand that they need to make a dime, but starting my search results in the middle of the page makes my search look pretty unimportant to Yahoo! It’s ironic because search is why I’m there.
The new search uses Google (see the tiny print at the bottom of your search results) and identical search terms on the two sites turn up the exact same results. But Yahoo! takes Google’s index and combines it with some of their own features to create a useful results page. First, they default to showing 20 results at a time, which seems like an apology for sometimes taking up half the page with search junk. Second, they use some thoughtful wording. Instead of saying “Category: Arts > Music…” they say “More sites about: Rock and Pop > The White Stripes,” which is a friendlier label that points to their own directory, not the Open Directory as Google does. Next, they use Google’s ability to restrict a search to a specific site and provide a “more results from this site” link. This made me wonder if they found “more results from this site” more useful than Google’s “Similar pages” in user testing. The finding wouldn’t surprise me. I rarely use “Similar pages” and would much rather see more focused results from my search than a list of similar sites, a task not directly related to my search.
Two particularly cool features are search shortcuts and what I’ll call Yahoo! keywords. Search shortcuts allow you to display specific information at the top of your search results. For example, weather columbus shows my local weather. 15531 pizza shows a few pizza shops near my parents. Where Google usually guesses what type of information you’re looking for, you have to specifically ask for it at Yahoo! This brings up another usability balancing act: Yahoo! chose to rely more on the user than on complex algorithms. Perhaps they found that users often know what they want when they search, so they gave them the power to ask for it using shortcuts. This makes sense to me as I usually know exactly what I want and prefer Yahoo!’s shortcuts to Google’s guessing.
The other feature, Yahoo! keywords are simply Yahoo specific shortcuts to their products and services. Pets! takes you to Yahoo! Pets. Travel! takes you - guess where. This is extremely handy and shows the advantage of being a search engine with many other services. However, if Yahoo! wants to position their search more as a command line to Yahoo! (as Google is a command line to the Web), they’ll need to include the search on all of their pages. A command line isn’t much good if it’s not always there. Of course, if you use Internet Explorer, you can install the Yahoo! toolbar, which will then always be at the top of your browser.
Finally, I’d like to touch on their use of tables and CSS. I’m happy to see that they’ve used CSS extensively throughout their new search site, but they’re still relying heavily on tables for layout, especially in their page headers. I can only attribute this to laziness as they’re not doing anything on their pages that CSS can’t handle. If ESPN can go all CSS, Yahoo! can too.
Update: Douglas Bowman created an all CSS version of the new Yahoo! Search. As usual with Doug, excellent work.
The new Yahoo! search is definitely a big step in the right direction and I’d like to congratulate Christina Wodtke and the rest of her team at Yahoo! for their hard work. I’m anxious to see what Yahoo! does next to shake up the search engine world.
Sympathy For PeterMe
Peter Merholz explains why he stopped blogging:
I was also growing increasingly frustrated with the echo chamber effect of weblogs. A meme drifts out there, and then 38 different people post their take on that meme, and they all link to each other, and, as a reader, you bounce from post to post, the semantic feedback growing until it’s deafening. I needed to remove myself from that for a while. To prune a tree. To look on as my g/f and another friend weeded my garden. To get licked in the face by a dog. To prepare my taxes. To watch work out while watching TeeVee.
I completely sympathize with Peter because I’ve had many of the same thoughts over the past month or so. I’m not going to stop blogging, but I’m not sure if I’ll ever blog as much as I used to. Not that I was ever a prolific weblogger, but the daily links suddenly seem so old.
There are plans, but rather than explain things that may or may not happen, I’ll just see how it all plays out. Until then, thanks for reading. I hope you’ll continue to visit. It looks to be an exciting year.
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