And that's about it - i hope it works!

In Resnick et al's paper "Reputation Systems: Facilitating Trust in Internet Interactions", newcomers must undergo the long task of earning their reputation, because this is the only way of ensuring trustworthiness. But i feel that in the real world, effective business is often done using another method -- that of having connections. There's the common phrase "it's not what you know but who you know", and many business deals happen not in a board room but casually on the golf course or over dinner and drinks.

To extend this into eBay terms, one can think of a reputations network - not ratings of isolated individuals (of course one could always stay isolated) but of people who know other people. Through this network, a buyer could determine the relative trustworthiness of someone based on that person's relationship to someone else. This way, newcomers who had friends who were long-time sellers could link up with these friends and earn, via this relationship, a degree of trustworthiness (if indeed their friends have a highly positive score). This would be done in some sort of percentage fashion, such that the newcomer would get a boost, but not of course have anything close to equal that of their long-time seller friend. Likewise, the long-time seller friend would share the relationship with the newcomer, slightly increasing their score when the newcomer receives positive scores, and also decreasing when the newcomer gets negative scores. This would be the incentive and the check-and-balance mechanism to prevent long-time sellers from just teaming up with anyone -- the newcomer had better do well, or else the long-time seller's hard-earned score will start to degrade.

So, i wonder: has eBay ever considered something like this? Would this enhancement work? If i don't post this idea here, it will sit bottled up inside my head forever, because i doubt i will be able to act on anything like this in the near future. But somebody else may... if so, can you spare maybe 10% of your million-dollar deal? :)

One reason for this is the age-old mantra "if it can be done..." (and you know the rest). For some situations (like migrating popular desktop applications directly to the Web, which I believe we will see in 2006), this makes sense. If people are familar with Word on the desktop, Word on the Web may not be that different.

Secondly, websites are often designed by people who are familiar with programs which have complicated interfaces (e.g. Photoshop, Dreamweaver, Flash). These designers are, understandably, advanced computer users, and they are at risk of becoming unaware of the much more elementary level of many common web users.

Thirdly, interactivity and new technology give a sense of sophistication and perceived maturity to websites, especially corporate ones. No one wants basic HTML anymore -- even Javascript and DHTML is getting old-school. Designers want slick transitions, dynamic loading without refreshing the entire page, buttons, sliders, contextual menus, rotating 3D objects, and new interface elements still left up to the imagination.

Finally, the simple argument is "why not?" Software developers can use such advanced interface elements, so if the only bottleneck is bandwidth and technology (a problem which is increasingly disappearing), why can't web designers do it too? The goal of this post is to show not only why they shouldn't do it, but why they can't do it.

Web designers should not design sophisticated (worse yet, complicated) web interfaces because of one important aspect: interface proliferation. How many people use more than 10 desktop programs on a daily basis? How many actually use even five? At work, i use Lotus Notes, Firefox, Visio, Word, Powerpoint, Excel, and AIM. This is seven, and i'm in an IT-related field. My mother, from talks i've had with her, uses about three at work, including software customized to her area of business. My dad uses five or less. And this goes on day after day, the three of us (and millions of other people just like us) using those 10 or less programs. We become familar with them, and we learn them over time.

Now, what does it really mean to "use" a website? We talk about browsing, surfing, going to a website. In any case, know it or not, people are getting information from those sites. And they need to understand the site, at some basic level, to find that information. How many website interfaces do users use in a given day? 10, 20, 30? While we use those sites for what we want, we encounter a new interface for each site. As websites have developed over the years, layouts such as the 'inverted L' and horizontal top navigation have become popular. They have allowed users to educatedly guess that important navigation is along the top and/or the side, and that body content is usually in the middle.

But what about when sites' interfaces become even more complicated (such as those that can be made using Flash and AJAX)? I'm not saying Flash and AJAX websites are inevitably bad, but when content is hidden behind rotating menus, when a user can stretch, spin, rotate, slide, grab, drag, and otherwise click anywhere on a number of non-standard elements, prior knowledge cannot be directly applied to these sites. Instead, users must figure out how to use each one. The result? Usability crashes, and users either cannot find important content or turn away from the site entirely. For sites selling or advertising items on their site for purchase, having users easily find information on their site is critical for their bottom line.

This is why successful designers not only shouldn't do this, but they can't. Users not only will become annoyed and frustrated, they won't even be able to use parts of the site at all. Only if users spend significant amounts of time on a site (like they do with a desktop application) will they learn where content is 'hidden' and how interface objects work. But users do not spend hours every day with websites -- most spend a few precious minutes at each one. Even if there is a group of experienced users, websites inevitably have the large group of people that have rarely or never before visited the site. This group cannot be expected to learn a complicated interface, and in fact, they won't. Designers must know this, or else they will be left wondering why so few people are visiting parts of their sites.

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P.S. Comment are open now (for 30 days after each post). Let me know what you think about the above opinion.

So, while i enjoy your quibs, quibbles, and questions, they are being banned along with the spam -- for now. Please stay tuned for the reintroduction of the comments.

Thank you -- you will now be returned to your regularly scheduled program.

The above is an excellent albeit sweeping and short summary of Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia that anyone can contribute to. For those of you who haven't clicked on the article yet, Wikipedia is an online encyclopedia that consists of hundreds of thousands of webpage articles about almost any topic. And the trick to its breadth and depth is that simply by clicking on the 'Edit' button, you can contribute to the article, expanding or correcting it (only registered users can create new articles...).

As the article points out, there has recently been some controversy over the actual content contained within Wikipedia's open doors; because anyone can edit it, someone could write virtually anything. They could say that the Great Wall of China isn't actually in China, or that plants need soda pop to thrive. Wikipedia's supporters counter this by touting the site's rabid band of watchful volunteers, who rountinely monitor changed content, and update or correct it almost instantly (just see the Revision History for 'Abortion').

Some of this controversy has been abated by only allowing registered users to create new articles, removing some anyonymity from the article creation process and introducing a sort of reputation system into the mix. On one hand, identity and reputation is good on the Web, allowing authors to take credit for their work and readers to take confidence in knowing who is writing what they read. This is the basis for future Web research; one major arm of work is the Semantic Web, the ultimate goal of which is trust in web content. Over time, readers (or at least those searching for incorrect or purposely-misaligned content) will be able to sort out the good writers from the bad.

But on the other hand, one reason the Web has exploded in popularity is that people could add anything to it while being a 'nobody', and readers judged content for content's sake, not by who was writing it. With identity and reputation (and assumably popularity), suddenly the popularly known person's content would get read more often than the unpopular, unknown person's work, just by the name of the author. Content would no longer be judged by its substance alone. Maybe my fears are overblown however, as blog content (clearly not as well known as say The New York Times) has become a major news source without accredited journalists behind them.

Again, i'm all for trust and trustworthiness on the Web, as the past decade of development has been quite chaotic. But as people add certain levels of maturity to it, i wonder at the pure benefits of identity, and can't help but see positives to being a 'nobody' in some cases. The Web shouldn't take on attributes of the regular world just because it can; let's stop and think about what will be gained and what will be lost. The Web is its own medium; let's let it be itself and stand up on its own two feet.

* sorry, that title came out alot more bland and techy than i wanted it to...

How have worldly perceptions by people of the Internet Age changed from past generations? Defining the Internet Age as people who were at least 13 years old in 1996 (widespread Internet use begins), has the increased personal and journalistic communication (email, webpages, blogs) broadened people's view of people, places, and things? Are these people more accepting of other cultures? Are they more willing to look beyond their own city or country, to be concerned with and about people they may have emailed or read about on a global website? Or are people of this age group as idealistic as previous generations' young people always been?

It all started from an idea by my old F&M and College Dispatch buddie John Parsley (along with Kyle Grieser). I admit, i wasn't completely fascinated by it back in May, but now i'm totally in love with it -- it's like my child, and i didn't even come up with the original idea! :)

We went live on December 1st after several months of design and development by my team of three from Michigan and Texas. Meanwhile John and Kyle provided edited content, design revisions, and overall direction from NYC. It truly has been a long-distance event, and i've learned alot from it. I also never knew how hard it is to work on a team when i'm leading it. :)

Now that Dec. 1st has come and gone, i can relax (a bit, tho this thing is hardly finished) and work on increasing readership. So please, come visit LOST Magazine; check out the great articles, post a bit on the Classifieds, and tell your friends. LOST is here to stay, but we need readers and writers like you to keep us going.

Past and Present Timeline:
- Google is a household name because of search
- Google introduces photo searching
- Google introduces Froogle, the online shopping search engine
- Google launches GMail, a direct competitor to Hotmail and Yahoo Mail, and in some ways Outlook, b/c it allows POP access and AJAX-enabled advanced UI features
- Google launches GoogleTalk, a direct competitor to AIM, MSN Messenger, and Yahoo Messenger. This also integrates VOIP free internet phone calling, competing directly with Skype (now owned by Ebay) and beginning to threaten long-distance companies
- Google launches Google Maps and Google Earth, allowing it to geographically pinpoint any place on earth and link it up with its vast amount of internet search data
- Google quietly buys miles of dark (unused) fiber optic cable (used for high-speed Internet connections), possibly allowing itself to create its own part of the Internet
- Google starts an initiative in San Francisco to offer free and secure wireless internet access points across the city
- Google demos ability to search TV and video streams, and advertises position for GoogleTV product manager
- Google makes a partnership with Sun Microsystems, a long-time Microsoft competitor (think Java), allowing it access to OpenOffice and OpenSolaris, open-source (free) software suites that are competitors to Microsoft's Office and Windows packages.

Now, all of this is what has already happened, as of today. As you may know, i like rumor and speculation, and so what could this all mean?

[Possible] Future Timeline:
- Google makes free wireless internet available in all major U.S. cities; people only have to download a simple Google VPN client to login
- Google develops web-enabled version of OpenOffice called GoogleOffice; people use this online, from any browser, on any computer, with no installation necessary
- Google creates customer support (the biggest thing missing from open-source software) for Google Office via Google Talk - people need only to make a free VOIP call on Google Talk to get help
- Google finishes scanning all of the world's books into its system, housing the entire collected knowledge of the world (in written, published form)
- Google finishes indexing all of the world's TV and video, housing all visually recorded information
- Google allows users to save (and never delete) their Google Office documents on Google servers (just like GMail messages)
- Wireless internet phones (that use VOIP) become available, and Google offers free mobile phone calling over its Google wireless network (call it Google Mobile)
- With the abiliy to compare Amazon to every other e-commerce vendor, people begin to use Froogle for all their online shopping needs
- Google search, Google Office, GMail, Google Talk, GoogleTV, Google Mobile, and Froogle are used by 95+% of people to write documents, send messages, make phone calls, watch TV and video, and make purchases; with all this data saved on or passing thru Google servers, Google soon has access to every bit of information written, spoken, photographed, video-recorded, or purchased by almost everyone in the world
- Free Google wireless internet is used by 95+% of people; in combination with Google Maps, Google can pinpoint the exact location of anyone using its services, and link that to all the data the person has written [using Google software]
- Google becomes the most popular, and soon only, source of information acquisition and creation, transitioning from being the juggernaut of the software industry to the overlord of all the world's information.

And as they say, information (a.k.a. knowledge) is power ;)

Uh, ok, so maybe the last part is a wee bit extravagant. But the 'Current' section has already happened, so look out! And if you don't agree with my future predictions, make up some of your own and tell me in the comments. :)

With all the globalization and telecommuting and people simply communicating far away on a daily basis, i found myself wanting a better way to communicate. As you might know, i'm collaborating with two other friends to create an online magazine, called LOST. They're both in one city, and i'm about 12 driving hours away, which makes face-to-face conversation difficult. We chat mostly over email, sometimes on the phone. But i still feel that a conference call would be better, to get everyone's opinion during the same conversation. Even better, a video conference would be best, to make it as personal as possible. Now you say, "well, you can already do that Matt!", and indeed, you can. Just put together a computer, a USB camera, some video conferencing software, and a fast internet connection, and voila! ... you've got one. Much better than the technology was 5-10 years ago, surely. But this blog isn't about 'good' things that are current, is it? :)

The caveat to the above setup (and the situation of being geographically separated) is that we are also becoming increasingly mobile people. Cell phone sales are off the charts, and i personally don't even have a land-line anymore. At work, home, or play, wherever those happen to be, you can get in contact with me -- audibly. Want to see me tho? Uh, let me take a fuzzy picture of myself with my phone's camera and email it to you (very slowly over my phone's 'Net connection...).

So, getting back to the main point, in order to video conference and be a mobile person too, you'd either:

    a) have to carry your notebook around with its camera and wireless (perhaps cellular) internet card, and set it up and take it down whenever you moved around;

    b) have to somehow simultaneously (or with a second phone) take pictures of yourself every second and email them to your conference buddies (like a crude motion picture) AND find the brainpower to hold a conversation...

As you can see, not the best solution (as far as i know, which is what you readers/commenters are for). But, imagine if you *could* video conference with your cell phone, with it taking video of you automatically and streaming it to your meeting attendees, while you only had to think of what to say.

"Outrageous!" you say? Well, consider two things. H.264, a new compression standard for video, is creating low-bandwidth, high-fidelity video that is perfect for conferencing. Second, third-generation cellular networks (3G) have been overdue in the U.S. for a long time, but they will be coming. Combined with H.264, this will provide a large enough datastream (from 384Kbps to 2000Kbps in CDMA2000 and W-CDMA) for H.264 to run quite well.

Then you could walk around (or sit down in a park, please), holding your phone out in front of you, seeing the person's head (or people's heads, maybe a scrollable menu of heads!) on your screen, while you see their's, and talking and listening via a little Bluetooth earbud (that you see so many bigcityfolk using). Cool, huh? Yes, this will require those things i mentioned above, plus a significantly powerful cell phone processor. But when i see phones being advertised that have 150Mhz processors and 32MB RAM, playing nice-looking driving games, all on a tiny full-color screen (yes, tiny -- remember, we're not asking it to decode HD video here), i can see this being not too far down the road.

Example site: Housing Maps.

CNN article citation: http://www.cnn.com/2005/TECH/internet/06/09/google.map.hacks.ap/index.html

First, before my UX (user experience) critique, three cheers to the magical coders of Google Maps. Despite being a 'beta' version (in classical Google form), Google Maps achieves what no other known web map program does, and with wonderfully simple finesse -- it allows continuous scrolling without full page reloading. I cannot say how fantastic this is. (And if you haven't yet, check out the Satellite option, using the recently acquired Keyhole software).

But anyway, back to the critique. Like all good map programs, Google Maps offers direction mapping, where the user may type starting and ending addresses, and Google marks out a suggested route between them. The start and ending points are marked with obvious red and green 'pushpins'. This i have no gripe about, and in fact I applaud a very good first effort. However, these useful pushpins are nowhere to be seen if a user simply types in a single location (say, Ann Arbor, MI).

In the single location situation, Google Maps draws the area, at appropriate viewing distance, and centers the screen on the desired location. However, if the user zooms out, the specific location can be easily lost amid larger scale items such as highways and major city locations. At even 1/4 zoom, any reference points to Ann Arbor completely disappear from the map, showing only highways and nearby Detroit. A user unfamiliar with the area then has no idea where Ann Arbor is: is it below US-94, east or west of US-23? Moving one's eyes around on the map while scrolling just increases the chances of losing where the specific location is.

Why, oh why, Google, do you not use your little pushpin to highlight where a [general] single location is? This way, a user could zoom in or out, without losing the exact point of their desired location. I don't want to have to memorize the areas in all four cardinal directions so i can successfully locate my city when i zoom out. The program excels in every way except this -- please Google, add a pushpin to your single location map search!

But did you ever wonder who the other co-founder of Intel was? Everything always reads "Gordon Moore, co-founder of Intel." There must be somebody else...

Enter Robert Noyce, who actually invented the integrated circuit in 1959 at Fairchild Semiconductor and was Intel's first CEO. He apparently was also a brilliant businessman, pioneering many of the Silicon Valley practices currently in use.

Credit this revelation to PC Magazine's EiC Michael J. Miller (6/28/05). Also check out Noyce's book.

This story sounds alot like the double-Steves of Apple: Steve Jobs * is the Mac/iMac 'Renaissance Man' poster-boy, but Steve Wozniak was actually the inventor of the original Apple I computer. Just goes to show that the obvious history is not always the whole truth.

* Ironically, Noyce was Jobs' mentor during the early Apple days...

What if restaurants offered, instead of a paper menu, an interactive kiosk-type screen embedded in the table, in front of every customer? That way, the customer could sit down, look at the screen, and see full-size color photos of every item on the menu. They could even see additional details (oooh, metadata!) about the item, including price, description, and nutritional information. This way the restaurant would not have to print hundreds of menus, never have to update the prices with little stickers, and never print new styles of menus. The customers could even order their food via the screen (altho i recommend keeping waitstaff, just because it's good to have a person there, and customizations are easier to do via a human).

I agree this would be quite a techy approach to what is a classic human behavior (perusing a paper menu and telling your order to a waiter/waitress), but it would provide more info to the customer while being cost saving to the restaurant. Has anyone ever seen a place like this? McDonald's already has something similar (touch-screen kiosk things for ordering fast food)...

So, i thought, "why don't companies do this for personal use?" Why can't i go to my favorite computer company and lease a computer, similar to how i would lease a car (provided i could afford a car now...) ? I pondered the details of such a business endeavor, and came up with the following:

-- leasing period would commonly be for one year
-- after one year, the customer could trade-in their computer for a presently comparable one, downgrade to a simpler one, upgrade to a better one, or change models (desktop to laptop, etc.)
-- they could buy upgrades along the way (faster graphics card, more RAM)
-- leasing cost could be about a $2/day for an entry-level computer, about $5/day for a nice gaming-style powerhouse)

And here's the clincher: let them keep their own hard drive. Personal data is the only reason people don't want to part with their computer -- upgrading or changing computers is easy, except for the data preservation task. If you allow the customer to keep their data, you simply take the old hard drive out of the old one and plug it into the new one. And if they want a new OS or a different HD or whatever, offer a simple data migration service for a small fee. This way they have no fear of someone else getting their computer and 'resurrecting' their supposedly deleted information.

Trading in these used computers shouldn't be that difficult of a situation to solve: consumers already purchase 'refurbished' computers for a discounted price, and big companies already have leasing programs that take back businesses' used computers, so they are doing something with them.

Apparently Dell used to do something similar to this idea with a program called "Consumer Leasing". Currently however, it seems they discontinued it, allowing only businesses to lease computers, and offering personal home/office consumers just the 90-day no-interest financing deal. There are also a number of 'rent-a-pc' companies out there, but they seem to be 'mom and pop'-style ones, with (pardon the insult) sketchy and simplistic websites and outdated equipment. They also seem to be renting equipment for a very short time, like days or weeks (more like renting a car during vacation, not leasing a car long-term).

So, is this not a profitable business? Or do big companies just make more money selling computers outright for $500 a pop? It would seem to me that, especially for consumers looking to not spend a lot, leasing would let them get a considerably nicer computer for a small initial sum of money.