Tom Karlo - Karlo.Org

Add Retweet Links to Your Blog Entries in Moveable Type

After reading Amy Iris's post on encouraging retweeting, I wanted to add an option for users to easily retweet posts on this site. Unfortunately, the method that Amy's recommending is very manual, and I'm a little bit lazy about things like that (especially anything that makes it harder to post something to the site, and won't work for automated posts from services like Posterous and Flickr.)

"Native" chat for the iPhone - Please!

Exchanges like the one on the right are why I'm really, really wishing the iPhone had a built-in chat application (not just SMS) that could run in the background, even though I don't own an iPhone myself. (I've highlighted the time stamps to make it obvious how little time I had to respond before Marissa dropped offline.) Because folks are using an installed, application to reach their IM logins (most likely Google's own Google Talk app), they're not able to stay connected unless that application is in the foreground, because Apple doesn't allow third-party applications to run in the background. So you get that contant login-message-logout pattern from iPhone users. In an ideal world, Apple would let third-party apps run in the background, but on a mobile device I can understand why they don't. So they should at least provide a "built-in" chat application that can connect to the major IM networks and stay logged in even when in the background, given that instant messaging is as common a method of real-time interaction these days as voice calls or SMS (at least for certain people.)

If Apple is just doing this to force folks to SMS via the AT&T network, they should be ashamed of themselves. There's no reason users should have to be paying on a per-message basis for sending 140 character text clips when they have a TCP/IP connection available for web browsing, etc on an unmetered basis.

Even my Blackberry Curve handles this issue better than the iPhone -- and it's pretty rare that I say that for anything unrelated to its hardware keyboard.

SNIFtags: Social Networking and Exercise Logging for Your Dog

Marissa and I came across a what seemed to be a really nifty product on the web yesterday: SNIF tags. These tags, developed by a startup founded by a number of MIT Media Lab grads, both monitor your dog's activity level and upload the data to the web (acting essentially like a networked canine pedometer) and, more interestingly, will detect when your dog has met another dog wearing a SNIF tag and connect them as "friends" on the company's web site, in theory allowing your dog to have is own social network - a doggie Facebook, if you will.

It seems great (Marissa did point out that in our dog Mochi's case, it might be embarassing to have an online record of the fact he probably spends 20 hrs a day immobile and asleep.) But there are some pretty major issues, and while I don't think they're the fault of the designers, I do think they're endemic to this kind of product and need a better solution.

Designing with Patterns... the good (and the bad)

I'm a huge fan of using patterns when designing web services, especially when it comes to user interaction and non-core tasks. There's a number of reasons why:

1. You can focus on what differentiates your service, rather than re-designing what others have already worked out through trial and error
   
2. Users are happier with interaction flows they expect -- and generally, they expect what they've seen before when using other products
3. If you're working with a team, they'll generally understand and build a known pattern faster  and more correctly than a totally new design, even if the new one might be marginally better
   

Sometimes though, using patterns can get you into trouble even if they do fit the immediate requirements. As part of building IsAlternateSideParkingInEffect.com, I utilized a very standard pattern for validating new users -- sending an email to a user with a unique token, then requiring that they provide the token from the email to the system in order to fully activate their subscription.

Frankly, it worked well -- too well. Only about 50% of users would complete the validation (and I assume that the number of spurious submissions is well below half.) For a service where the risk of a faked registration is almost nothing, the pattern was costing me way too many users in the process of guarding against them. The guards were protecting the front gate, but they were eating all of the villagers' food.

I've since changed the process to an "opt-out" model - when a user submits their email to the site, they are immediately "activated", but every message they receive from then on has an unsubscribe link at the bottom. Making this relatively simply change from the established pattern immediately doubled the yield rate of subscribed users per unique visitor to the web site. It was simply a case where the "best practice" pattern didn't fit with the realities of a very specific service design, and acknowledging that reality.

Daring Fireball: iPhone-Likeness

Figure out the absolute least you need to do to implement the idea, do just that, and then polish the hell out of the experience.

-- John Gruber on iPhone Application Design. In a world where services are moving online, and people aren't so much buying your software as choosing to use your service, I'd argue this applies to not just the iPhone but almost any "non-sovereign application" -- pretty much anything short of a word processor, web browser, or spreadsheet program.

Quoted: John Gruber on Arial

"There are two types of people in the world: those who can't tell the difference between Arial and Helvetica, and those who despise Arial."

Daring Fireball on the New iPhone-Optimized Mobile Flickr Web Site

Facebook's new UI Hints

I'm definitely liking the little transient prompts that Facebook is employing to educate people about their new interface. FB faces an interesting GUI problem in that they're a web site that has a user base ranging from first timers and very occasional users (both of whom see it as a "transient" application) and daily users for whom it's a "soverign" application that often stays open all day long. The prompts allow FB to make the new interface a little easier to learn, but once you acknowledge them, they don't show up any more. This technique has been around in software applications for a long time, but you don't see it as often on web sites, perhaps because fewer sites ever make the transition to sovereign status, or because they do but are so simple it's unecessary (e.g. Twitter.)

Thanks for the Help, Microsoft

This is the current status of the help window for Microsoft Excel 2008 for Mac this morning. Look, I know sometimes web servers go down, SQL databases hiccup, etc. But really, couldn't you have a more graceful failure mode than this? Say, maybe, rolling back to good-old "offline" help pages?

Not a good outcome. And not helping me with my financial modeling.

(I was able to switch it to offline help manually... but how is a user supposed to know that?)

Wordle - Beautiful Word Clouds

Wordle.net is a fun little Java utility that turns any block of text (or, as in the case above, my RSS feed) into a beautifully rendered word cloud. Lots of fun to play with and coincidentally adjacent to some work I've been doing lately with my new project (more on that later.) Wordle gives the best result if you tell it to block out common words in the language you're submitting (for English, "if, and, but... etc.").

[via The Morning News]

Facebook's New Profile Layout (Coming Soon)

If you have a Facebook account you can go here to see the new profile page design. I understand what they're trying to do with it - focus folks on user activity rather than static profile boxes - but I think they're going to take a lot of flack for it.

It's very much like FriendFeed or Tumblr - which is great for people who spend all day posting little tidbits for everyone, etc. But a lot of Facebook users are much more casual net users who are using it as a substitute homepage. By removing all of the application boxes that users had been employing to customize their profile, Facebook is disrupting one of the reasons why it's become so popular.

I've always thought of FB as "blog light" - the next step in the evolution from HTML to MoveableType/Wordpress to Typepad and finally to Tumblr/Twitter. Each has respectively reduced the barriers to entry for users. FB takes it even further by basically bringing your real world friends right to your "blog", which is what most private individuals want anyway (you're not posting photos of kids for random Internet readers, you're posting them for Aunt Ida.)

Application developers are going to feel particularly slighted as well... their profile boxes, which users used to be able to place wherever they wanted on their profile page, have now been relegated to the "boxes" tab, a virtual interface ghetto. Facebook says this is because they wanted to isolate the sometimes unruly interfaces of 3rd party apps, but that's kind of a weak excuse -- after all, it was users choosing to put these applications into their profiles and use them, so obviously the interface issues weren't causing that many problems.

(Part of the lesson here is how difficult it is to remodel a product once it's released to the public. The people who have adopted it were the ones that liked how it was laid out, even if it wasn't optimal. Going to a new, better layout isn't always going to get the response you might expect, although sometimes it does.)

Update: It seems like different people see slightly different layouts in the new system, but there are similar comments regardless... as seen on another blog talking about the new UI.