Tag: websites

A Rant About MySpace

Post ImageI hate MySpace. I simply cannot stand it. The navigation is horrible. The design is ugly. Their URLs are the most unfriendly ever. Random people add me to their “friends” list. Users have too much control over the look of the pages…which usually means that they end up making the pages painful to look at. Dancing text, repeating background images that were never meant to repeat, music that starts playing automatically, etc. I really cannot fathom how so many millions of people use MySpace on a daily basis.

Quite possibly the only thing I like about MySpace is that it runs on .NET and is therefore an excellent case study/example. But that would be the only reason.

Every single time I look at MySpace I cringe. Maybe I just don’t get it?

Wired News gets Odeo all wrong

Post ImageI think the staff at Wired News must have missed the memo about Odeo. In a list of Web 2.0 Winners and Losers published today, they included Odeo on the winners list. They praised the service, saying that Odeo “breezed in and de-mystified the podcast.” Huh, is that really what happened?

Not according to Odeo co-founder Evan Williams, who when giving a talk last week said Odeo failed for five main reasons:

  • “Trying to build too much”
  • “Not building for people like ourselves”
  • “Not adjusting fast enough”
  • “Raising too much money too early”
  • “Not listening to my gut”

De-mystified the podcast? That would explain why the vast majority of the population doesn’t know what a podcast is. They certainly know what MySpace or YouTube is though, yet MySpace appears on Wired’s losers list.

In some ways, the list that was voted on by Wired News readers is much more accurate – Odeo doesn’t appear on either list. This is the wisdom of the crowd at work! I don’t think they can be described as winners or losers yet, because Odeo seems to be finding their way still. I am willing to give them the benefit of the doubt, to wait and see if they can turn it around.

The funniest part of the Wired article is this:

In the interest of brevity, I’ve chosen five sites from each category. The web services industry certainly has more than five winners and five losers, so we’ve only highlighted the exemplars.

I’m not exactly sure what reporter Michael Calore considers the definition of “exemplary” to be, but I am quite certain it’s different from my definition. And probably different than the dictionary’s definition too. The first five that came to mind for me certainly didn’t include Writely or Odeo (mine would be Flickr, del.icio.us, YouTube, MySpace, and digg).

Read: Wired News

Apple Podcasting Site Broken!

Post ImageThe new nanos are great, Apple still rules digitial music with the iPod and all that, but they’ve broken podcasting. Well, they’ve broken their own podcasting site anyway. I went to look at the iTunes Podcasting spec, and noticed that the page can no longer be found! Seems the redesign for the new stuff broke the website. Well done Apple!

And it’s a shame too, because http://www.apple.com/podcasting was such a nice URL, wouldn’t you say?

A search for podcasting on the support site only gives the Podcasting FAQ. And the link on that page to the podcasting page remains broken. Fortunately, Google comes to the rescue. You can see cached versions of the podcasting page and the tech specs.

Maybe they are going to be updating the spec?

Google passed on MySpace

Post ImageThe July issue of Wired includes a feature on News Corp.’s Rupert Murdoch, and what might be his current crown jewel, MySpace. The main value that MySpace provides the company is “the power to make hits.” Ever hear of Dane Cook? He’s a really popular comedian probably because of his MySpace page. The Arctic Monkey’s are becoming popular in North America with help from their MySpace page. Lots of celebs have them now. MySpace is huge, and shows no signs of slowing down.

Of particular interest to me, Murdoch claims that Google passed on the opportunity to purchase MySpace, for about half the price News Corp. paid (which was still a steal). Murdoch says:

I like those guys, but theres a bit of arrogance. They could have bought MySpace three months before we did for half the price. They thought, “Its nothing special. We can do that.”

This, dear readers, is what happens when you’re a media company that thinks you’re a technology company. I’m not sure it’s arrogance, so much as it is this incredible desire to be a technology company that blinds them from making any rational decisions. Google’s big three (Larry, Sergei, and Eric) all have technology backgrounds, yet Google is very clearly a media company. Almost all of their revenue is derived from advertising, and they increase that revenue with more eyeballs, not necessarily great technology.

As Om Malik points out, Google really, really, should have bought MySpace when they had the chance:

As widely reported, MySpace is now the largest source of search traffic for Google, accounting for over 8% of their inbound traffic as of early May. That essentially means that MySpace is responsible for about $400 million of Google’s annual revenues. Knowing this, MySpace is trying to capitalize by holding an auction for its search business. If Google wins, it will end up sharing a significant percentage of that $400 million with MySpace… John Battelle thinks the split to MySpace will be close to 90%. And Google would need to pay it every year. Needless to say, had Google acquired MySpace, no such payments would have to be made.

Om also points out that Google+MySpace=Largest-Site-on-the-Web. Or at least, that’s what could have been. More eyeballs than anywhere else. A media company thinking like a media company would have purchased MySpace, no question.

News Corp. doesn’t have any such delusions. They’re a media company. They purchased MySpace.

[In case you’re wondering, my very plain, very boring MySpace page is here.]

Read: Wired

Flickr Gamma

Post ImageFlickr launched a new redesign yesterday, and upgraded the site from Beta to Gamma. I heard the redesign mentioned at Mesh by Chris Messina, who wasn’t exactly ecstatic about the changes. I for one love the new design, and think it is long overdue!

  • The menu at the top has been simplified and now contains dropdown menus to access various areas of the site. I found the old, two-tiered menu structure kind of confusing, so for me, this is a welcome change.
  • Search has been improved, and no longer just looks in tags.
  • There’s a new person menu on buddy icons.
  • Your Photos now shows to columns of photos instead of just one.
  • The Organizr is vastly different, and I haven’t really had a chance to play with it yet.

Great job Flickr, keep it up! I hope the site does eventually leave it’s greek editions to go final, but at least they are not stuck on beta forever. Perhaps a lesson (and new model) for others to follow?

Read: Flickr Blog

YouTube Popularity

Post ImageInteresting piece up at News.com about YouTube and the phenomenal success it has been having, at least in terms of traffic. No one is quite sure how they are going to make money, or if they have staying power, but they certainly do not have a lack of users:

According to numbers provided by traffic-tracking company ComScore Networks, YouTube received 4.2 million unique visitors in February. Those numbers are good enough to outpace Apple Computer’s iTunes (3.5 million) and put it within spitting distance of eBaumsworld.com (4.4 million) and AOL Video (4.7 million), both of which have been in business longer.

Personally, I think YouTube is going to run into very big problems. Lately when I have been on the site, I have come across a lot of videos that display a “removed due to copyright infringement” message, and I can only guess that it will get worse before it gets any better.

Like most Web 2.0 companies, they plan to use advertising to make money:

“We’re experimenting with different business models,” she said. “It’s not going to be a traditional model, that is for sure. Right now, we don’t want to disrupt the user experience. But eventually, we’re going to introduce extremely relevant ads that will benefit users and won’t disrupt the service.”

I’ve said it many times before and I’ll say it here again – Google is an anomaly. I don’t think advertising is a truly sustainable business model, and even if it works for YouTube, they’ll never reach the levels that Google has. I think they need something besides simply advertising to truly make it.

Read: CNET News.com

Judging websites in a flash

Post ImageThere’s a very popular article (according to NewsGator) at Nature.com today titled “Web users judge sites in the blink of an eye“. Even though you think you’re giving a website a chance by taking a good, long, hard look at it, chances are you’ve made up your mind in less than a second:

We all know that first impressions count, but this study shows that the brain can make flash judgements almost as fast as the eye can take in the information. The discovery came as a surprise to some experts. “My colleagues believed it would be impossible to really see anything in less than 500 milliseconds,” says Gitte Lindgaard of Carleton University in Ottawa, who has published the research in the journal Behaviour and Information Technology1. Instead they found that impressions were made in the first 50 milliseconds of viewing.

Lindgaard and her team presented volunteers with the briefest glimpses of web pages previously rated as being either easy on the eye or particularly jarring, and asked them to rate the websites on a sliding scale of visual appeal. Even though the images flashed up for just 50 milliseconds, roughly the duration of a single frame of standard television footage, their verdicts tallied well with judgements made after a longer period of scrutiny.

The research is particularly interesting for website designers like myself. And students of visual design, for that matter. Chances are if someone likes your design better, they’re going to like the content better too. I know I am guilty of that. I hate reading a plain black and white HTML page with only text, but I don’t mind reading something that is styled attractively, even if the content is the same.

What’s your flash judgement on this site? Be honest now!

Read: Nature.com

Flash Websites Suck!

I realize that the title of this post is a very wide and sweeping claim, but hear me out – I have quite a few good reasons for why I hate Macromedia Flash-based websites. I don’t think I have always disliked Flash, but lately the hatred has grown. There are just so many things to hate:

  1. Flash websites go against the true nature of the Web! This point will probably be the easiest to disagree with, but it’s also a more subtle point. How does the web work? You basically move along by clicking on hyperlinks, from page to page and site to site. What happens if you want to go back to a certain page? You can enter a URI, you can use a back button, or a bookmark, lots of ways. Flash breaks this functionality! You can’t really link to a “part” of a Flash site. Sure you can click links out of the Flash, but they aren’t standard links either – they are not picked up by link crawlers, and they don’t conform to the display standards set in your browser. You don’t always notice this, but it drives me nuts when you need to actually interact with links in a “normal” fashion.
  2. Flash sites are slow and take forever to load! Basically when I load a Flash website, and see some sort of progress bar or percentage, the website is saying to me “I think I’m so great you’re going to have to wait until I am good and ready to be displayed!” What the heck is that? When I visit a web page, I want the page to load, not the entire site! And Flash sites that show the progress bar just for looks piss me off even more. I have high speed for a reason morons!
  3. Flash sites require you to learn a new interface each time! I admit, this point is also sort of easy to argue against, but think about it. How different are HTML-based websites? Really different? Not really. They typically all have some sort of textual or graphical menu along the top or one of the sides. Almost all of these websites are fairly similar in the way you navigate them. Flash sites on the other hand are completely different! Some sites want to you click different objects in a 3D world, others have pictures with no words. The links are often scattered around the Flash animation which means I have to hunt around. And the most annoying part of Flash navigation is that often times you click a menu item, only to be shown a submenu with no way to get back to the original menu! It’s frustrating to say the least.
  4. Flash sites don’t “fit” my screen! Most websites will resize depending on how big or small my browser is, and how large or small my screen’s resolution is. Not so with Flash sites! Almost every Flash site I have come across has a set size, and too bad if your screen/browser size doesn’t work out.

Those are the main things that bug me about Flash sites – as you can see, they are pretty logical and straightforward. There’s some other minor things that get under my skin too:

  • Lots of Flash sites don’t have a text-only or HTML-only equivalent!
  • Why must every musician or band in the world have a difficult to use Flash site?
  • Most of the time trying to copy text from a Flash animation is impossible.
  • I realize it’s hard to get a browser that doesn’t have Flash, but requiring a user to install a plugin to see any of a website is kind of dumb, Flash or not.
  • Show me the source! Sometimes I like poking around the HTML, CSS or javascript – it’s a useful way to learn from others. I can’t see the source of a Flash site though!

I really don’t care how good you think Flash will make a website look. I’d take usability over looks any day (with very, very few exceptions), and that’s really why I hate Flash sites.

Google Analytics Very Slow!

Post ImageI’m not exactly sure when Google released their new Analytics service, but it was recently. Apart from being the cleanest looking of all the various Google offerings, it looks like one of the most useful services too. Who doesn’t want to know more information on their website traffic? Here’s what Analytics is all about:

Google Analytics tells you everything you want to know about how your visitors found you and how they interact with your site. You’ll be able to focus your marketing resources on campaigns and initiatives that deliver ROI, and improve your site to convert more visitors.

Unfortunately, I haven’t really been able to evaluate the service! I added their tracking code two days ago, and my account still says waiting for data. A quick blog search reveals that lots of people have encountered the same problem. How long is it supposed to take?

After you first install the tracking code, it generally takes 24 hours for report data to appear in your account. Google Analytics generally updates your reports every 24 hours.

Well I’m clearly past that 24 hours, and I’m still waiting. I just hope the data is up to date once it starts showing up. More later.

Read: Google Analytics