BlogSat

Kevin Kelly stopped by the Google office a few days ago to talk about the some of the ideas in his book " What Technology Wants " There are a lot of great ideas in there; one in particular gave me some food for thought on the train ride back home. The idea that (paraphrasing) "Simultaneous invention is inevitable, and proof that technological progress is inevitable." Kelly cites a number of examples through history where a number of critical inventions/discoveries were arrived at independently - from the electric bulb (picture above) to the theory of evolution, to the atomic bomb. This happened even though in most of these cases the inventors were working in isolation and didn't know about each others' work. He postulates A lot of things in technology and progress are just inevitable But the details (i.e. how we get there) aren't and that's what our work tends to determine For example: "The Internet was inevitable, but its decision decisions...

Painters and sculptors sign their art. Writers have their names on the jacket of their books. Journalists get bylines. Their name is forever tied to the what they worked on. Some of this is the narcism that we all have and the desire to mark ownership we all crave, but I remember reading that it started as a way to take responsibility. You put your name on what you worked on so that people would know that it was your brilliance, and your errors and faults, that were on display. A question that I'm now teaching myself to ask and wish more people shipping software would ask themselves is "Would I ship it if it had my name on it?" Not just my company's or my products, but mine. Releasing products, especially in a fast-moving industry and in a launch-and-iterate culture is often about what you leave out, and what you will get to later. You have a vision to begin with or at least a plan, but then as deadlines approach or other evil things happen, you decide what features...

I stumbled on to this article  thanks to GigaOm It was a very timely reminder. A few months ago while trying to sketch some scenarios, instead of doing the standard "User does X; then does Y" ,  after some encouragement by a more senior Googler, I spent a little bit of time thinking about who the user was and wove stories around each use case (admittedly what I was working on lent itself to that.) I told a story about how Bob would use a certain product, why he was interested in it, and how it fit perfectly with what he did in the morning, and how his daugher would use it as well and how they'd pay for it...etc., etc. Two things happened: Firstly, it was just a lot more fun for me to work on! I like story-telling. :) Secondly, I thought it helped the product definition quite a bit. True marketing professoinals (especially in CPG) do this really well, and there's a lot to learn there. They create detailed profiles of their end users and think about them obsessively (l...

File this under "Something I thought about, while I should've been thinking about something else." Excuse the unnecessary Sixth Sense reference, what do you do with social networking profiles of people that have passed away? Social networking and online user profiles haven't been around long enough for this to be a problem yet, but at some point the major social networks are going to need to have a way to deal with profiles of those that have passed away. This week, Facebook , which has a relatively new feature where it suggests that you to "make Facebook better" for connections that haven't been active asked me to reach out to a friend that had passed away more than three years ago. LinkedIn did something similar where it told me people who had looked at the profile of the person that I was looking at at that time, were interested in the profile of another person that had passed away earlier in the year; this wasn't as bad as the Facebook use-ca...

I saw two examples in good design today: HP Retail site. When a product makes it much easier for you to do something than you expected (in the process delighting you!) that's good design! Simple lesson from HPs retail site: When I went back to the site, I did think about checking out a printer I'd seen earlier and right there (well-placed on the right towards the middle of the screen) the site made it easier for me to do so. Good for business; good for the user. Gilt Groupe. The illusion of scarcity is a great way to make people feel like they're getting something special. Today when I wanted to test this retail site, they made me sign up and get on a wait list. Tastefully, getting back to me a letting me know within a day (just quick enough so that I don't lose interest) that I'd been "selected" to join. In general I'd have expected to be annoyed by the pretentiousness, but given the positioning of the site (secret discounts on high-end retail) my...

Caveat emptor 1: Though, I work on YouTube I haven't really chatted about this with anyone that currently works on this feature. This just stuff coming out of my empty mind. Caveat emport 2: It is also based on how I use a certain product feature, and my usage patterns. For all I know, I may be in the minority. I've been favoriting a lot of vid eos lately, but I realized I'm probably not doing what the designer of the feature intended me to do. Let me start at the beginning. If I designed a feature to "Favorite": essentially a list of videos that I allowed the user to mark as ones she liked, I'd assume that the primary intention of this list was to allow me to save videos that I can come to visit later. Other benefits would be sharing this with others on YouTube, as well as implicitly ranking this video so that it can be considered for YouTube honors and in lists. However, I find that when I favorite something, my real intention is that it gets up by my Fri...

There are times when Andrew Chen is really, really good and then there's times when he's just brilliantly insightful. He ended up addressing something that strikes particularly close to home right now, in this post on how to think about and use metrics . I really liked the analogy of developing and thinking about reporting as a "Product Tax" Jeremy Liew adds two interesting points to the article as well.

GigaOm post on TipJoy . Me likey: two powerful ideas I've always been bullish about, and sad no one's done them quite right (or got them to work) yet: Micropayments and Voluntary Payments on the Internet I like their UI and will try their widget if I ever get around to re-doing my blog like I once planned to. :) Do you think this works?

Someone from work fwded this pretty slick presentation by Dan Olsen on Product Management for Web stuff. I really liked it! I liked the Slideshare site which was used to distribute it even more. Here's the TechCrunch post introducing the site from over a year and a half ago. The description of the site ("PowerPoint + YouTube") r eally sums it all up. There are some similarities in design and the way it tries to engage users. Its not the only one like it out there either. It works as a clean distribution medium from PowerPoint, just like YouTube works as way to distribute personal videos. But what I liked about it, is that like YouTube, it looks like its growing to be so much more. The prevalence of digital cameras, phone cameras, video and recording software and number of other complimentary technologies and cultural norms fueled the YouTube phenomena, even as the medium itself meant that people started communicating in a whole new way. Increasingly for every interest...