Long pages work continued
My long pages work post (a quickie really) got picked up: Dion Almaer over at Ajaxian says: "The iPhone is also showing that scrolling is a nice UI tool". Sean Kane provides some "it depends" input: "A long page with important messaging below the fold in this case could hurt sign-up rates." I have to disagree with this example though: long pages can be *great* for converting users to sign up for something.
Oh my god the Belgacom site sucks. I've been trying for hours to get online billing to work. Conclusion: it is broken, not to the point that you could persevere for a few hours, or get lucky, and actually get it to work, but it's broken to the point that, after you jump dozens of usability hurdles that'd stop an angry African elephant in its tracks and make it go back home shaking its head, that is, if you *do* persevere and use a few tricks only geeks like me would know about, and you do finally get access, you get a "this feature is temporarily not available" message. And all that after they send me a letter saying they set me up for online billing and please pay like that in the future.
They must really not want my money.
A new movie by Brian De Palma: "A new film about the real-life rape and killing of a 14-year-old Iraqi girl by U.S. soldiers who also murdered her family stunned the Venice festival, with shocking images that left some viewers in tears. Abeer Qasim Hamza al-Janabi was gang raped, killed and burnt by American soldiers in Mahmudiya, south of Baghdad, in March 2006."
shtikl.com » You don’t need a plan, you need skills and a problem.
shtikl.com » You don’t need a plan, you need skills and a problem."
1. Don’t start out with big plans.
2. Work on skills.
3. Apply your skills to a problem.
"Most plans are rubbish. Business plans are fake. Life plans don’t work. The big plan is unknown to mankind anyway. "
http://www.vlogeurope.com/ is this weekend!
I moved the XFML specification here, because I lost the domain to squatters.
IA for beginners: long pages work.
Long pages work. Just look at Wikipedia. In the 90s, we had a fashion where websites would cut up an article into 6 pages, 2 paragraphs per page, to get more page impressions. Luckily these days advertising runs on Pay Per Click more than Pay Per View (thanks Google!), so that practice is going away. But still, people seem to have a tendency to cut up good content, and often, they shouldn't.
Look at this page for example. Over 100 comments, and what's wrong with showing them all on one page? Sure, the page text is 116 KB, but that's not too bad. And it's compressed, so it's really just 21 KB, which is fine and fast even for a dialup.
What it does is that it lets people scan over the conversation, scrolling, and get to the end and contribute their comment. If I were to cut those long comment strings in pieces, the experience would be worse.
Scrolling works. Long pages work. Anything else tends to be informationarchitecturitis (which I define as "the practice of adding too much structure when it's not needed and even gets in the way").
Wiki travel guides
My poorbuthappy travel project is going well. The idea is to have a social site where we create wiki backpacker travel guides. It's in progress (I consider it alpha), but it's going well. The best proof I got is when I got sent a picture of this 71 year old backpacker traveling alone in Colombia, using a printed version of the Colombia travel guide. This makes my day.
Craigslist's mistake
Craigslist rocks (and for reasons similar to why eBay rocks), but their internationalization approach has a serious flaw, which I think is responsible for their limited success in many international markets: they don't localize their taxonomies. I'm not gonna write a long post, but here's a quick analysis I did of their Dubai site:
As you can see, many categories just sit there empty (the red dots), and only a few categories are active (the green ones). For the original Sanfran Craigslist, the screenshot would be full of green dots.
The result of this approach is that the site feels empty and inactive. The solution would be to remove most categories and build local specific categories. For example, "woman seeking woman" isn't particularly appropriate in Dubai society. Construction is booming on the other hand (foreigners cannot own property in Dubai itself, but clever businessmen as they are they have started building multiple artificial islands in the sea where property *can* be owned by foreigners), so one of the few active categories is "real estate for sale", and there could easily be more real estate categories (like "offshore real estate"), specific to Dubai.
IA for beginners: ordering stuff.
Digg is a smart ordering algorithm to show you interesting new stuff. Facebook's newsfeed is a fairly smart ordering system to show you interesting new stuff. Google is a very smart ordering algorithm to show you interesting stuff related to your keywords.
Conclusion: ordering stuff is really powerful.
Checking your analytics daily when working on a website is like weighing yourself daily when dieting: don't do it. It'll just make you obsess about the wrong things.
It seems Livejournal is still going ok (in red) and going up a bit, while xanga is on the way down. Both are somewhat similar community sites.
Mmm the new Bloglines beta isn't bad. Ajaxy and stuff. But ugly though.
What I wish they'd done instead of the ajaxy stuff was to make it more social and make it easier to find new blogs.
Kawasaki: "As a venture capitalist, I have to listen to hundreds of entrepreneurs
pitch their companies. Most of these pitches are crap: sixty slides
about a “patent pending,” “first mover advantage,” “all we have to do
is get 1% of the people in China to buy our product” startup. These
pitches are so lousy that I’m losing my hearing, there’s a constant
ringing in my ear, and every once in while the world starts spinning."
This week is the last of my self-imposed new-father-holiday, so from next Monday I'm back in business. Let me know if you need some information architecture-itis done.
Which brings me to this question: why hasn't anybody tackled the problem of managing mailing list subscriptions easily? It's not that hard, I think it's just a lack of imagination.
- What does a true, next-generation Internet word processor look like, one that deeply embeds the browser and community? -> very good point.
If you're not subscribed to Simon Willison's blog, btw, now's a good time.
Have I mentioned, by the way, http://ameliavandijck.com?
Een leuk Belgisch blog, maar ik vind maar geen contact info? Als je dit leest: jij wou toch een informatie architect in je linkedin? :)
links for 2007-08-04
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Pretty detailed backpacker guide to Colombia to print out
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Starting India backpacker wiki travel guide.. not loads of places yet but good info on Mumbai etc
Mediatemple's gridserver *is* much faster than Dreamhost
Mediatemple offer this buzzwordy "gridserver" hosting for 20$/month, and Dreamhost offer a great regular hosting service for 7$/month and up. I have an account at Dreamhost, and I am keeping it, it's great, and they have a great control panel and good support. Cheap!
However, I moved poorbuthappy.com (my travel project) to Mediatemple a few days ago, and the difference in speed is incredible. Pingdom has some really nice tools to measure speed. Before the move (on Dreamhost), pages would load in 2 seconds (2000 milliseconds), 4 seconds and more. Sometimes up to 10 seconds.
After the move, the core html of the page loads consistently in about 400 to 600 ms. That's professionally fast. That's about how fast Flickr loads. That's almost as fast as Google's pages (they tend to be around the 300ms). I am very impressed.
Below are some screenshots from pingdom.
Google maps shows India in English, Thailand in (?) Thai. Curious, for some reason I wouldn't have expected it to be localized like that.
My Google Analytics tracking stopped working (went down to 0) yesterday. I can't for the life of me figure out what's wrong with my tracking code on this page - any thoughts?
Documenting locales
I've been playing around with different diagrams that attempt to explain the various locales on a website. Here is an example:
Does this make sense as a diagram? Does it help you understand?
via Simon: a damn cool javascript widget to crop pieces in a photo (like on Flickr): http://www.julienlecomte.net/blog/?p=6
Language codes: "Some of the most heated discussions on the request for new projects
are about the status of a language; is it a language a dialect and
often the arguments are of a political nature. The inclusion of
languages in the ISO-639 has been political in the past. With ISO-639-3
many of these arguments have an answer with the many new language codes
that have been created."
2 observations today: Gmails' antispam seems pretty good, and why hasn't OPML taken off more as a way to share feed lists?
I have to very much agree with this: walled garden sucks, Facebook is just making us build stuff for another propietary platform.
However, they do have a good idea there: I can add my app to your app. There's no open way to do that yet that works.
Actually, pingdom.com does provide mostly free response time stats. 2000 ms (2 seconds), is that acceptable or not?
Apart from actually measuring page generation time within the website's scripts and storing that in a database, I still haven't found a good way to track the speed of a website over time. I would have thought an outside service coudl do that, but I haven't found one. Any ideas anyone?
There seems to be a theory that the busyness or clean-ness of websites is related to the personal distance (the "bubble") of the culture that the website is for.
A great, tiny step by tiny step, example of editing a screencast (or any interview) by Mr. Udell.
Rashmi's slideshare just launched slidecasts: PPT slides + audio. It's the logical next step in sharing slides, but it's hard to do right, so they took some time to do it. It rocks, they're way ahead of any of the competition now.
Wow http://todoist.com/ really rocks for making to-do lists.
Europeans can be sooo ridiculous. I do truly admire the US entrepreneurial spirit. It's incredible, especially compared to what people (don't) do in Europe.
So Bin Laden has most likely been dead for a while and the white house doesn't want to talk about it. When your Most Evil Opponent dies a peaceful death, you'd better keep that quiet to keep your Wars going.
Names in the world: Icelanders prefer to be called by their given name (Björk), or by their
full name (Björk Guðmundsdóttir). Björk wouldn’t normally expect to be
called Ms. Guðmundsdóttir. Telephone directories in Iceland are sorted
by given name.
amazon s3 vs flickr for photo backup
I started backing up about 30 gigs of pictures to Amazon S3 using Jungledisk is taking about 20 days (on low priority). And that's ok. The jungledisk software is free, the Amazon bill for storing this should be about 5 US$/month, ie 60 US$/year. That's worth paying to safeguard my photos.
But then I started comparing: Flickr is 25 US$/year, and you get "unlimited" storage. If it's really "unlimited", that's a much better deal. Should I try Flickr instead to backup my 30 Gigs of photos?
Winer: "the reason we're occupying Iraq is that it makes money for the people who run the country."
I added a talk with lots of details on Youtube scaling to my scaling page.
Fact: Cuba has a lower infant mortality rate and a longer average lifespan than the United States.