Happy new year everyone! (To my 3 faithful readers - yes, that's you - thanks for reading.)
Good post on user/profit numbers for freemium models.
6 good reasons to choose a categorization system (and I'm not being glib). "5. I can pass the blame onto Apple."
So of all the things to do while sitting in front of a computer, programming is definitely the most fun.
Dave Winer is brilliantly bootstrapping again, this time with an element to indicate where to find a thumbnail of a picture.
- The size (in Kb) of webpages and the amount of objects has increased since 1995 on a nice graph.
- 100ms extra loadtime on Amazon.com caused a 1% drop in sales.
- Yahoo did a test: added 400ms to some important pages. Result: 5 to 9% increase in people that click BACK before the page even loaded.
- Google added 500ms, this caused 20% less searches. (!)
Cross-cultural product design.
Victor Lombardi is doing some great work around tools and techniques for concept design - the phase before the actual "design" phase (where we usually start working), when you're still exploring different concepts.
Some questions just catch you. Are the laws of nature more like habits?
Funny thing: the word
"school" is actually the ancient Greek word for leisure. The idea was,
if you had the means to live a life of leisure, then of course you'd
spend it learning and talking about cool stuff with other similarly
well-off people.
Alphabetical ordering and Dutch last names.
"This has to be one of the most difficult challenges as a single parent,
having travel plans undermined and vetoed by your ex-partner."
“I was looking for website designer but the kind of website i wanted is similiar to facebook, or myspace. I was wondering if you guys know anyway of doing that type of website and if I bring you the designe I want then we can make it happen. Email me with your respone and if yes how much would it cost me.”
Facebook uses 800 servers supplying over 28 terabytes of memory through Memcached.
futurepractice2 is the twitter tag of Indi's webinar on mental models that just finished. Check it out and see what people say.
Amelia now blows her food (to cool it down). And yesterday I found her trying to open the lock of a closetspace in the living roomd with a key she found. She didn't figure out how to put the key in the lock.. just yet! She know where we kept the key (on top of the closet), so she put a little stairs next to the closet, got the key, and tried to open it. Smart.
The law in Belgium speaks of the race category as "so called race", in order to clarify that there is no such thing as race scientifically. The law in the US has a different approach I believe, I think they define it (for use in the census) as being self-assigned (so you decide yourself what race you are).
So it turns out you *can* actually track members versus non-members with Google analytics.
Is there a way to use Google analytics to distinguish between logged-in users and not logged-in users?
Frozen *homemade* burritos, that is.
Today, I discovered the wonderful usability of frozen burritos.
Bloglines is gonna be down for 12 hours while they move to another data center. Pft. I think I'm finally gonna give in and move to Google reader.
Presentation tip: at most conferences, you get 45 or 50 minutes. Leave 5 as buffer, 5 for questions, speak for 40 minutes max, which means you should aim at about 30 slides max.
So I don't forget: Amelia ate spicy Thai crackers and loved them this week (I'm so proud!), she's babbling like crazy and she spoke on the phone for the first time with her mom (instead of just listening) :)
Quick and easy explanation of Facebook development, using Slideshare's audio feature (which rocks).
Very exciting: Google analytics can track ajax interactions now.
The travel with kids forum is getting active. Check it out!
(via Simon) Amazon SimpleDB a complete flop?
Categorization problems in programming.
Mobuzz (the Spanish videoblogging company) is closing down.
Lou Rosenfeld is getting started with his new webinars series. Top UX people (and authors of books with him) give in-depth seminars on a specific UX topic (like webforms). It's a geat learning opportunity, and you save an airfare to a conference. Plus, you get access to a edited version of the lesson online so you can review it later.
This code will get you a 25% discount: DIJCKWBNR
Go check it out: http://www.rosenfeldmedia.com/webinars/
Categories embedded in infrastructure.
Arrington is right, the new Google stuff sucks, I've been trying my hardest not to click any of the bazillion new little buttons on the search results page.
Cultural localization
It's always hard to customize your technology for a specific culture. Customize your features and UI too much, and you loose the advantages of scalability (speed, cost, ...), customize too little and you're open for local competition that is focused more on how the local market is different.
Here's a good example: Google India now has a specific cricket item showing when you search for cricket (India is cricket-crazy). (A regular Google search just shows the Wikipedia result for cricket first).
I like it. It's subtle, culturally-specific and non-intrusive.
Here we go, http://prezelect.com
A multilingual forum (4 languages are mixed within threads) about Belgium & Europe. I am a big fan of mixing languages in forums, poorbuthappy.com does it too. Many people speak more than 1 language. There are plenty of language-related UI tricks you can use when the forums get really busy or the amount of languages gets out of hand.
- On social networks they mostly hang out with their real-life friends (Facebook, Myspace), not with people they don't know. They pick up social and technical skills while hanging out, it's a good thing.
- On niche content sites, a much smaller number hangs out with other people they didn't know before around specific interests. They get all geeky, which, contrary to popular belief, is actually a very social activity. This is where adults can also be part of the group, functioning as role models and experienced peers.
Gmail looks slightly more blue today and it's really freaking me out.
Lou signed some great writers for a book on remote user research. Looking forward to it!
Amazon now exands its S3 storage service with a content delivery network. That means that you can make your site (especially images and videos and stuff) much faster, using the same techniques that the big boys use, very cheaply.
I didn't know this, the first iteration of Wikipedia was called Newpedia, and was based on a custom CMS with a 7-step review process ;)
Lou Rosenfeld is planning a book salon tour - passionate discussion about UX books. If someone knows UX, books and their intersection, it's Lou. And if someone can organize an interesting meetup, it's lots of people, but definitely also Lou. So go check out the blogpost and sign up for updates.
Anders explains how Twitter gets a UI bit wrong (the "reply" feature), I agree with him.
The Google Appengine team is doing some contextual-inquiry style studies :)