Musings on Business and Tech

Email is broken. In many ways. So are instant messaging and document collaboration. Google Wave was supposed to fix a number of these problems by making threaded and multi-user conversations easier to manage, and by introducing realtime chatting and collaboration into the mix. But Wave’s failure is also a fantastic illustration of a great idea and brilliant technical implementation totally overpowered by some absolutely awful product design.

Google’s famously spartan approach to search was the fuel for their explosive growth in the early 2000s. While sites like MSN and Yahoo were getting more complex and portal-like, Google offered an absurdly simple alternative: enter your query and click the search button.

Somehow over the years Google has lost this simplicity in many of its products, with Google Wave as the paradigmatic example. Wave was an engineering marvel, and I’m quite certain its mix of syncrhonous and asyncrhonous functionality will be used to good result in a number of other products, but the user interface was just dreadful. It made no sense and I couldn’t really ever figure out how to use it–and I work in software for a living. Imagine my mom using it.

Ultimately, I think Google Wave suffered from three fatal product design flaws:

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The internet has been abuzz the last couple of days about some admittedly clever viral videos from Old Spice (yes, that Old Spice).

It got me thinking that there’s been a lot less buzz lately about the BP oil spill, which is coming up on its 90-day birthday and shows no signs of slowing down. And now the presidential commission appointed to investigate the spill is recommending that the moratorium on deepwater drilling be suspended.

Are we all so distracted and ADD-addled that we’ve already forgotten the magnitude of this disaster? And while we’re at it, what about improving the financial system–did we ever see that one through to its conclusion? Are there still wars going on in Iraq and Afghanistan?

So I wanted to see exactly how much we’ve lost interest in the oil spill vs. how distracted we are by funny deodorant videos. I think this chart of Twitter trends from Trendistic.com says it all:

And here is a sad chart of the decline in Twitter mentions of the oil spill in the last 30 days:

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Last week I wrote about the strategies Quora.com employs to engage its users and keep them coming back to the site time and again. A big component of their strategy are notifications–the email and on-screen alerts the application uses to let you know that your attention is needed. Their notifications are tactful and largely welcome.

Unfortunately, however, like many other tools in the software architect’s chest, notifications can quickly cause insane levels of information overload when they’re used without careful thought.

Take for instance the Facebook iPhone app. Every time I open it and navigate to the main menu screen, I have some notifications waiting for me (usually people commenting on one of my wall posts or something similar). I’m alerted to this fact by a little bar on the bottom of the screen highlighted in a different color. This much I’m okay with.

However, if I then choose to close the app at this point without explicitly viewing the notifications, the app icon now has a little red number superimposed on it, telling me how many notifications I didn’t check. If you’re anal like me, this is torture. I now have to go back into the app and view the notifications in order to get rid of that annoying little red number.

“Unread” counts in email and news readers like Google Reader are another good example. Again, because of my mild OCD, I never let my inbox contain any unread messages. I even click on messages I know to be spam just so that they don’t keep notifying me of their unread status. Same goes for Google Reader. If I’m too busy to read everything and I have to skip some articles, I still have to mark them as unread so I don’t have to see that notification anymore. I’ve often thought that these applications should archive (or mark as read) any unread messages automatically after a certain amount of time goes by. If I haven’t read an email in 30 days, I’m probably not ever going to read it.

All of this information desperately begging for our attention leads to apathy at best and resentment at worst. It’s like the boy who cried wolf. Eventually we’re just going to tune it out.

I think the trick here is to think like the user before implementing things like this. Do I really want to receive more than one or two emails per day from a given application? Should notifications be persistent, or should they fade away over time? Should they be mandatory, requiring the user to take a certain action so that they go away? Or should they merely be indicative of an action that is optional? Should the notifications be opt-in or opt-out?

These are crucial decisions to make when creating software, decisions that could lead either to delight or disgust.

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I should preface this post by saying I know next to nothing about finance. What I do know I’ve learned over the past roughly two years by listening to NPR’s Planet Money podcast and reading books like the one I’m currently engrossed in, Michael Lewis’ The Big Short.

Last year my friend Steve wrote about the “complexity” of derivatives, arguing very convincingly that, even though the media liked to talk about how complex were the securities that nearly brought Capitalism to its knees, in fact they were generally being very lazy because these things weren’t really that complicated after all.

In The Big Short, however, Lewis describes how many of the traders who were trying to short mortgage-backed securities described them as being “complex,” even though they had spent a lot of time researching them. When these traders first encountered these securities, they had no idea what they were looking at, but they took the time and had the smarts to research them and figure them out. However, even after that effort, they still called them “complex,” not because the concepts were difficult to understand, but because no matter how much they researched them, they could never really determine the quality of the underlying raw materials (mortgages) in any given security.

The Wall St. firms that created and sold the CDOs deliberately made them obtuse so that it was difficult to determine the actual risk contained within. Part of the reason the firms loved selling CDOs was because they were able to take low-rated mortgage bonds they couldn’t otherwise sell and package them into higher-rated derivatives that they could sell. On “first generation” mortgage bonds, it might have been clear what the risks of investing in them would be, since the firms did publish stats such as average FICO score or % of no-doc loans in the bonds. But the firms sliced and packaged these bonds into CDOs many times over, such that it became very difficult for investors to get a real sense of the quality of the underlying raw materials in them. So then everyone just trusted the rating agencies.

It’s like trying to determine the quality of mass-produced ground beef. You may know that one particular cattle farmer’s practices are sustainable and humane, but once you grind up his meat and combine it with the meats from thousands of different farms and feed lots, and then portion that ground meat into little hamburger-sized patties, it becomes almost impossible to determine the quality of any individual hamburger. So then everyone just trusts the USDA ratings and goes on eating.

Read The “complexity” of derivatives « Steve Reads.

I’ve been reading about Quora.com for some time now, but a few weeks ago I finally got an invite to participate in their closed beta.

For those who don’t know, Quora is a Q&A site with some social networking functionality built in to make it like Facebook or Twitter, but with much richer content. You can post and answer questions, vote responses up and down and comment on them, and follow a range of different topics, questions and people.

But the one thing Quora does exceedingly well is engage its users. I find myself wanting to visit the site every day. There are very few sites I do in fact visit every day, so when a new one comes up on my radar, it’s worth thinking about a little more deeply. How does Quora keep me coming back?

First, they give me things to do when I get to the site. The first page I see when I log in is my “feed,” essentially a list of questions and recent answers from the people and topics I’m following. The first thing I always do then is scan my feed and see if any interesting questions or answers have come up recently. If so, I click on them, read and vote on the responses, and consider whether I want to answer the question.

Another activity they ask of me is to classify unanswered questions. If someone enters a question without any topics, it shows up on my home page as an “Unorganized Question.” If I click on it I can then easily add topics to the question, which benefits the community as a whole without being too bothersome for me to do.

Lastly, Quora has perfected the art of email notifications. Whereas Facebook sends me an email for every dumb little thing that needs my attention, Quora, as far as I can tell, only sends me emails in a two specific circumstances:

• Someone posts an answer to a question I am following (you can follow any question you see on the site by clicking the “Follow” link, unless you asked the question, in which case you follow it by default)
• Someone sends you a private message

This means that the email load coming from Quora is low enough to keep it unobtrusive, but the emails themselves are of high enough value that I welcome them and will likely click on the links in them to come back to the site.

User engagement is the “holy grail” of making websites profitable, and Quora has found it. It’s all about giving the users activities to accomplish when they come to the site, as well as encouraging them to come back via infrequent but high value email notifications. If you’d like an invite so you can check this out for your self, let me know by tweeting me @jamieforrest.

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I got this error today while syncing my iPhone 3G with iTunes 9.2 today:

iTunes could not backup the iPhone “iPhone” because the backup session failed.

Re-seating the USB cable and restarting iTunes did not help. A Google search revealed various fixes having to do with firewall settings or 3rd party application conflicts, but none applied to my situation.

Ultimately I solved the issue by running a manual backup of the iPhone by right-clicking (or control-clicking) the iPhone in the Devices section of iTunes and choosing “Back Up.” Once that completed I was able to sync without getting the error.

UPDATE: According to the comments on this post, it may help if you first delete the old backup by choosing Preferences –> Devices –> Delete Backup. You should copy your old backup somewhere else before you do this. Your backup is stored in the Users/[username]/Library/Application Support/MobileSync/Backup folder on Mac, or C:\Documents and Settings\[username]\Application Data\Apple Computer\MobileSync\Backup on Windows.

UPDATE 2: According to the comments, Windows users may need to change their computer’s time zone to fix this issue.

UPDATE 3: According to the comments, Windows users may also need to kill the AppleMobileBackup.exe process and restart iTunes.

Twitter’s uptime is generally over 99%. Every now and then they dip below that (less so now than in the past), and whenever they do, the internets freak out. You’d think the lives of children were at stake.

Feeling the pressure of a million tech bloggers waving their fail whale flags wide and high, Twitter published a mea culpa yesterday that not only recognizes the “gravity” of the situation, but also promises some more fail for the foreseeable future:

Should Twitter have been ready?
Record traffic and unprecedented spikes in activity are never simple to manage. However, we were well aware of the likely impact of the World Cup. What we didn’t anticipate was some of the complexities that have been inherent in fixing and optimizing our systems before and during the event.

What’s next?
Over the next two weeks, we may perform relatively short planned maintenance on the site. During this time, the service will likely be taken down. We will not perform this work during World Cup games, and we will provide advance notification.

How magnanimous of them to schedule their downtime around the World Cup games! Could the world have survived without a few hours of vuvuzela tweets?

Okay, I’ll give you that Twitter was somewhat important last year during Iran’s Green Revolution, when, at the request of the U.S. Government, they actually delayed some planned maintenance in order to keep the site up.

But seriously, no maintenance windows during the World Cup? Are we all so addicted to the dopamine squirt from reading 140 character messages that we can’t possibly enjoy some soccer matches without it?

If Twitter is so crucial to the world’s infrastructure, then it needs to be an open format supported and maintained by a federation of the world’s governments. If not, we don’t have much right to complain when the service is down for a few hours here and there.

Yesterday I followed the iPhone 4 announcement live on Twit.tv, which was rebroadcasting a bootleg audio feed from the WWDC keynote. I was amazed by how much passion and enthusiasm a frail Steve Jobs could convey even through this distorted audio.

Though he’s been accused of peppering his speeches with superfluous accolades like “incredible,” and “awesome,” there’s really no one else out there who, through his presentation style, can make you care about things you didn’t know you cared about. Before yesterday, I didn’t know I cared so much about screen resolution, for instance, or video chat or 3-axis motion control. Now I care about them so much I want them in my next phone.

If Jobs weren’t also one of the best product people in the world, this skill would be enough to make him a very successful man.

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Yesterday, Twitter announced that it would no longer be permitting third party ads in the timeline. It struck me how similar this felt to when Apple recently changed their developer agreement, prohibiting apps that were cross-compiled using third party tools.

Let’s compare. First, the juicy part of Twitter’s announcement:

As our primary concern is the long-term health and value of the network, we have and will continue to forgo near-term revenue opportunities in the service of carefully metering the impact of Promoted Tweets on the user experience. It is critical that the core experience of real-time introductions and information is protected for the user and with an eye toward long-term success for all advertisers, users and the Twitter ecosystem. For this reason, aside from Promoted Tweets, we will not allow any third party to inject paid tweets into a timeline on any service that leverages the Twitter API. We are updating our Terms of Service to articulate clearly what we mean by this statement, and we encourage you to read the updated API Terms of Service to be released shortly.

Now, Steve Jobs’ “Thoughts on Flash:”

Our motivation is simple – we want to provide the most advanced and innovative platform to our developers, and we want them to stand directly on the shoulders of this platform and create the best apps the world has ever seen. We want to continually enhance the platform so developers can create even more amazing, powerful, fun and useful applications. Everyone wins – we sell more devices because we have the best apps, developers reach a wider and wider audience and customer base, and users are continually delighted by the best and broadest selection of apps on any platform.

Without Jobs’ outspoken stance on Flash, I’m not so sure Twitter would’ve had the gumption to make this kind of a decision, one that could potentially alienate such a large swath of their developer base. But I respect them for doing it. It’s a gamble, but one I think they’ll win.

I’m starting to see a pattern in which companies are coming down really strongly in favor of user experience, even if it pisses off third party developers. User experience should always be the primary concern, and developers should agree. I can see how some developers may see this as another “Fuck You” from Twitter, especially because announcements like this usually and conveniently tend to favor the platform provider over the little guys in the ecosystem, but I think it’s a move in the right direction. And they can certainly afford to make these kinds of wagers when they have so much inertia in their user base.

via Twitter Blog: The Twitter Platform.

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