james & internet

just awful

tommy's tenacious tumblr: What I've Learned About Smart People.

tmac721:

I can of course make no authoritative claims here, but I have noticed one overarching theme among smart people: they ask questions. When someone explains something new to me, I’ll usually just nod my head like I know what they’re talking about. If I don’t understand something, I’ll just Google it later. After all, I don’t want this person to think I’m a moron. Smart people are different.

Question everything.

Microsoft made an internal video last year entitled ‘Gmail Man’. It basically made fun of how Google scans your email for keywords, and delivers targeted advertising against it. WIth Google’s recent privacy changes, they’ve now taken it a little further and put it up on their official YouTube channel.

Fair enough, right?

Well, no. Not really.

Here’s a page on Microsoft Advertising extolling the virtues of targeted advertising in Hotmail. Hotmail uses 2 types of targeted advertising; domain advertising, and industry advertising. From their site:

Domain targeting allows you to target Hotmail ads at those receiving your own emails, giving you control over the environment in which your email appears, increasing visibility and driving opens, click-throughs and response rates.

Through Industry targeting, Hotmail ads reach those consumers who are signed up to receive emails from your broader industry sector. Targeting Hotmail ads in this way allows you to increase brand profile amongst a pre-engaged audience and ensure that your message is front-of-mind at a key point of influence.

Domain targeting seems to be relatively harmless. It basically allows you to put Pepsi Max ads in Hotmail when someone gets an email from @pepsi.com. Fair enough.

Industry targeting seems to be a bit more nebulous. It seems like Hotmail is making a decision behind the scenes about what industry sector your email belongs to, and delivers relevant ads against it.

Here’s a case study on how the clothing label OTTO used Hotmail targeted ads. From the case study:

Commercial email targeting displayed OTTO’s 160x600 skyscraper ads within users’ Hotmail inboxes whenever those users received a retail-related email. This ensured high-impact exposure for the swimwear range amongst an engaged group of consumers who had opted to receive retail emails.

How does Microsoft make a decision about what constitutes a ‘retail-related’ email? It seems pretty unclear to me. They don’t explain it on the site. As a certified armchair pundit, it’s hard for me to imagine how they’re achieving this other than some form of email scanning.

That’s not all the options available for people who want to sell ads against Microsoft’s properties, though. There’s far more, and according to the site, “Available for all brand campaigns running on Microsoft media properties including MSN, Windows Live Hotmail and Windows Live Messenger.”

Options include:

Those in contextual-ad glass houses shouldn’t throw stones.

11:24 pm “We have fantastic devices and a fantastic ecosystem that we’re building on.” He restates that RIM is about its network and its strength as a cohesive whole. He won’t split anything up.

11:24 pm “If it makes sense strategically and tactically,” he’s open to licensing BB10.

*11:25 pm But his “focus 1” is to develop RIM’s own products. It’s the same focus that “another fruit company” has.*

11:25 pm “You’re successful when you have the biggest value contribution” to your customers.

Thorsten Heins, reinforcing my pet theory that any modern CEO can’t resist comparing their approach to Apple’s, even if they have no idea what that actually means.

“We’re competing with ourselves,” Lee (Noel Lee, Monster Cable CEO) says of the Beats products he’s trying to outdo. “We can be the Apple of the headphones space, with or without Beats…”

“…He showed off the company’s offerings, which became available for preorder to distributors on Jan. 9. One $200 pair of in-ear headphones bears the name of the ’70s soul act Earth, Wind & Fire. A Miles Davis line has earbuds shaped like trumpets and a volume controller that looks like piston valves. In all, there are eight new lines in 50 different styles. “We hope people will recognize what we’ve done in terms of sound with the Beats products,” Lee says.”

Eight new lines, 50 different styles. Ah yes, that’s the Apple I know and love.

(via Business Week)

…Where it all goes wrong is with the space bar. It sits right above the system’s home key:

I find when I’m really on the move skating, I’m always hitting that home key by mistake rather than the space bar and so exit out of what I’m typing. This never happens with the iPhone or the Droid Charge, because they use “hard” menu buttons that you have to physically depress. You can’t accidentally push them.

A someone who is constantly pressing the dictation button on iPhone instead of the space bar, getting yanked out of an app for an accidental keypress would drive me mental.

(via marketingland.com)

Love that old 1st-gen iPhone. I read in the Steve Jobs bio that he thought that a stainless steel finish (like the back of the iPod line) aged really well over time. That scratches & dings in the material really added to the device’s character, and that covering them up with ugly cases stopped that from happening.

Can’t help but think that the current line of iPhones has no way to age well that I can see; there’s no finish that is really susceptible to aging like the iPod & original iPhone. Even the newer plastic-based 3G/3GS models don’t age particularly well.

(via designmind)

Andrew Munn:

“A laggy UI breaks the core affordance language of a touch screen. The device no longer feels natural. It loses the magic. The user is pulled out of their interaction and must implicitly acknowledge they are using an imperfect computer simulation. I often get “lost” in an iPad, but I cringe when a Xoom stutters between home screens. The 200 million users of Android deserve better.”

A long, but really interesting discussion on why Android is still laggy, and why it won’t be fixed until they do a major overhaul of the entire operating system. Also of note is this quote:

“Beyond the perception issue, lag is a violation of one of Google’s core philosophies. Google believes that things should be fast. That’s a driving philosophy behind Google Search, Gmail, and Chrome. It’s why Google created SPDY to improve on HTTP. It’s why Google builds tools to help websites optimize their site. It’s why Google runs it’s own CDN. It’s why Google Maps is rendered in WebGL. It’s why buffering on Youtube is something most of us remember, but rarely see anymore.”

This is a great point. For a company who crows over optimising search results by mere milliseconds, who introduced displaying search results before you have even finished typing, it seems bizarre that this hasn’t been priority #1 for the Android team.

Google engineers: less face unlock, more dedicated UI rendering thread development.

Renai LeMay from Delimiter:

“I’m betting that Acer have given this school a massive fat discount to roll out Iconia Tabs instead of iPads. To put it bluntly, I think the choice of an Android tablet instead of an iPad for students at this point is a foolish one. I don’t yet regard Google’s Android platform as being a mature operating system for tablets, with it needing at least another year to become fully baked into this form factor.”

I’d say Renai’s prediction on this is absolutely spot-on. 

Education is all about the apps. And it’s an interesting area, because it’s not really about the breadth of app selection, but the depth of app selection that’s critical.

Breadth is important for the standard consumer. Does the Android tablet ecosystem have a Twitter app? Does it do Facebook? Does it have Angry Birds? Does it have an app for reading books? For playing music?

Depth of app selection is an entirely different notion. For example, you might have an app for teaching spelling in K-12 schools. The app for teaching spelling in Grade 1 (drag out letters, phonetic sounding, spell CAT & a cat leaps out etc) would be an entirely different experience for the one focused on Grade 4 (could involve typing, multiple word meanings, multi-syllabic words etc).

For education to work well, you not only need a good selection of apps as a whole, but you need good selection within the niches.

That’s where I think the iPad is years ahead of their competition. They’ve been filling out those app niches since launch. I don’t think the Android tablet ecosystem is even close.

“Using designs intended for a full screen on a 7-inch tablet is like squeezing a size-10 person into a size-7 suit. Not going to look good. But that’s what the Fire is trying to do. Accessing full (desktop) sites on the Fire was a prescription for failure in our testing. Users did much better when using mobile sites.

Using sites optimized for 3.5-inch mobile screens on the bigger 7-inch screen felt luxurious — somewhat like using a regular website on a 30-inch monitor.”

This is something I noticed when I saw the original 7-inch Galaxy Tab, but reading this study has reminded me again of this problem.

Most websites are designed with 2 sizes in mind — desktop, and mobile. When you’ve got a 7 inch screen, you’re trapped in a usability middle-ground. Desktop designs end up with tap targets that are far too small, and mobile designs looks sparse and unwieldy.

The question seems to be; will designers start to build websites optimised for all of these screen sizes? So far, we have:

• 3.5-inch screens (iPhone, iPod touch & many Android phones)
• 4 to 4.7-inch screens (More modern Android phones, some WP7 phones)
• 7-inch tablets (HTC Flyer, Kindle Fire, PlayBook, Galaxy Tab 7.7)
• 10-inch tablets (iPad, Galaxy Tab 10.1, HP TouchPad, Acer etc)

My sense is that designers & companies will target the 3.5-inch & 10-inch sizes for their market popularity, and the rest of the devices will work, but ultimately but either awkward-looking, hard to use, or both.