Real-time: Search or Discovery?
Thursday, July 2nd, 2009Lee Hower has an interesting blog post saying that “real-time” search is actually discovery:
Search is when you know basically what you’re looking for in advance, discovery is when you want things to be revealed to you. Search experts talk about lots of different forms of search… recall or recovery search (when you know a name or a brand and are trying to locate it), research search (trying to learn more about a topic or concept), competitive or comparative search (seeking similar concepts or objects to one already known), etc. Most of the products we call real-time search today involve consumers and companies wanting to find out what’s happening right now and perhaps explore the conversation or draw high level conclusions from it. That’s discovery.
Herb & Dorothy
Sunday, June 28th, 2009Today, I was out with a friend, shopping for furnishings for her new apartment. While at CB2, it suddenly started to rain, which has been annoyingly typical these past few weeks. But we were hungry, so I used the Yelp iPhone app to find restaurants nearby. We settled on a cheap burger place called Soho Park, on Lafayette and Prince, and we sprinted over through the rain. The burgers were great, a solid 7 out of 10, The highlight was the endless bucket of fries, which came with a choice of two “speciality” dips. The service was shoddy, but the cheap price, good food, and easygoing company made up for it.
Afterwards, we wanted to see a movie, but we had already seen the good movies currently out, including Up and The Hangover. So I pulled up the Now Playing app on my iPhone, and it told me which movies were playing in which theaters nearby, and their Rotten Tomatoes rating. Given that we were in the SoHo/Greenwich Village area, we were able to find the nearby Cinema Village, a 3-screen cinema specializing in foreign and independent films. We quickly honed in on the documentary Herb & Dorothy, mainly because of its 100% rating on Rotten Tomatoes.
I’ve only had my new iPhone 3GS for a week now, and I’m really enjoying the fact that I can access the internet anywhere. Location-based services add a lot to the experience of going out and figuring out what to do. Rather than sit around wondering what is going on in the big and daunting city, location-based apps on the iPhone help me parse what I can do nearby, to certain broad or specific parameters. I firmly believe in planning in advance, but sometimes it’s nice to let the spur of the moment carry the day. I had read the hype about location-based services through blogs, but until last week, I had not had the opportunity to really experience it for myself.
How Cloud Computing Works
Tuesday, June 23rd, 2009Cloud computing is all the rage these days, but how does it actually work? The visualization of how cloud computing works, and the difference between cloud computing and traditional hosting. The key word here is scalability.
Fever: Social Aggregation and Curation
Monday, June 22nd, 2009I know many words have already been written about Fever, but I’d like to provide my own impressions of Fever after a few days of usage. Rather than try to provide “first impression” type reviews, I like to let my thoughts simmer.
Fever is developed by Shaun Inman, who also developed the Mint site analytics package. The basic mentality behind Fever is that it helps you curate the most important content from a large number of feeds. It does this with an additional top layer of automatic aggregation and curation on top of a traditional RSS reader. Fever semantically looks at which stories have been posted most often and lets those rise to the top. Fever distinguishes between two types of feeds: “kindling” and “sparks.” Essential, must-read feeds are designated “kindling,” and supplementary feeds that mostly repost links are designated “sparks.” Sparks ignite Kindling raising the temperature of items and links that should not be missed.
Recover Lost NetNewsWire Subscriptions
Tuesday, April 28th, 2009So I like to live my life on the edge and have about 3 GB of free space on my hard drive. I was running Windows XP in Parallels virtualization and designing using Photoshop CS4, so it was using quite a bit of disk swap space. Eventually, my computer slowed to a standstill and OS X warned me I had 0 KB left on my startup disk.
One side-effect of this was that my .plist preferences file for NetNewsWire was corrupted. So when I launched up NetNewsWire after resuscitating my computer, and all 335 of my subscriptions were GONE.
Luckily, I found instructions on how to recover lost my subscription list.
Self-Selectivity in App Store Reviews
Tuesday, April 21st, 2009Garrett Murray, developer of iPhone app, Ego, says that people only review apps when they are unhappy. It doesn’t help that the app approval process blocks quick updates or bug fixes.
I’m far more likely to get 15 one-star reviews when something goes wrong than I am to get 15 five-star reviews when everything goes right. Perhaps it’s just frustration speaking here, but when Apple ties my hands behind my back and lets users punch me publicly in the face without allowing me to at least respond back, it’s hard to get excited about building an app.
Apple is creating an ecosystem of the kind of customers I don’t want.
A fundamental way newspaper sites need to change
Tuesday, April 21st, 2009Insightful post by Adrian Holovaty about how the change in what is being delivered is more important than how it is delivered:
But the goal for me, a data person focused more on the long term, is to store information in the most valuable format possible. The problem is particularly frustrating to explain because it’s not necessarily obvious; if you store everything on your Web site as a news article, the Web site is not necessarily hard to use. Rather, it’s a problem of lost opportunity. If all of your information is stored in the same “news article” bucket, you can’t easily pull out just the crimes and plot them on a map of the city. You can’t easily grab the events to create an event calendar. You end up settling on the least common denominator: a Web site that knows how to display one type of content, a big blob of text. That Web site cannot do the cool things that readers are beginning to expect
Complex
Wednesday, April 1st, 2009“A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. The inverse proposition also appears to be true: A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be made to work. You have to start over, beginning with a working simple system.”
John Gruber makes a good point that a feature that is needed is different from a feature that is nice to have
The iPhone exemplifies this strategy. There’s a long list of features many experts and pundits claimed the original 1.0 iPhone needed but lacked. Ends up it didn’t need any of them. Nice to have is not the same thing asnecessary. But things the iPhone did have, which other phones lacked, truly were necessary in terms of providing the sort of great leap forward in the overall experience that Apple was shooting for.
SuperNews! Twouble with Twitters
Monday, March 23rd, 2009Hilarious trailer for upcoming Current TV web show SuperNews! “Who are you talking to?” “Everyone. and no one.” With a cameo appearance by the fail whale.
iPhone In-App Micropayments
Tuesday, March 17th, 2009Announcements for the new iPhone OS 3.0 today were endless, with much emphasis on cut-copy-paste and MMS. I believe that these features should have been there from day 1, regardless of Apple’s perfectionist processes, so I won’t elaborate on them. However, I believe that the new in-app micropayments have much greater implications on the future of the iPhone and mobile as a platform.
The ability to set up in-app micropayments is particularly intriguing, since it opens the door for additional revenues for developers as well as additional extensibility in features for consumers. Developers no longer need to resubmit the entire app for minor changes, and consumers can receive add functionality and features without having to update the entire app.
It will be interesting to see what effect in-app micropayments will have on app piracy, which is still an issue, particularly for small developers. The generic file sharing sites on which the major cracked app sites host apps typically show thousands of downloads for the more popular apps. It is unclear how many of those downloads would still exist if cracked apps did not exist. Owen Goss at Streaming Colour recently posted some rough sales figures for his game Dapple. Before significant attention from Slashdot, PocketGamer, and other sites, Owen had sold only 131 copies of Dapple. Without coverage from popular blogs, Owen might not have received enough attention, and sales would have continued at the same slow rate.
With the new in-app micropayment system, it is unclear how easily users will be able to pirate digital goods within an app. We can look to the existing MMORPG model, where significant revenues come from the purchase of digital goods, rather than the initial game purchase. The key is for the developer/publisher to set a balance of built-in and add-on features to purchase.
Furthermore, initial reactions fear that the system leaves the option open for uneven pricing schemes where the majority of the content needs to be unlocked through additional purchases. However, the liquid nature of the App Store so far, for example with pricing, leaves little room for error. The trite saying says, “The customer is king.” This is most reflected in the App Store, where a bad average rating can doom an app, even for popular apps. For example, I believe that Super Monkey Ball could have capitalized further on the hype, but dropped the ball on calibration. Any abnormalities and exploitations of the in-app payment system will be quickly reflected in the reviews. It is in the developer’s best interests to choose the right balance of built-in features and additional features.
