Farhad Manjoo discusses what he believes is “a terrible problem for the Web marketing business” in The uncanny valley of Internet advertising:
Today’s Web ads don’t know enough about you to avoid pitching you stuff that you’d never, ever buy. They do know just enough about you, though, to clue you in on the fact that they’re watching everything you do.
Farhas also shares some very interesting examples of the issue. Great article.
(link via @karenmcgrane)
I recently tweeted that I’m fairly convinced that the most valuable (and most difficult) metric to grow in online publishing is RSS subscribers. I’d like to explore that idea a bit further.
Over the past few days I’ve done quite a bit of investigation to see if my hunch about the value of RSS subscribers is correct — at least on my own site. Apart from just typing in the URL, there are currently three ways to subscribe to updates on my blog: Twitter, a weekly email, and RSS. I’d like to share some metrics on each of those methods.
Since Twitter doesn’t have analytics on t.co links yet, I had to look at the bitly links on my main Twitter account as a proxy. On average, the clickthrough rate on links I post on bitly is between 2% and 3%. That’s really low. It’s also worth noting that bitly did some analysis that showed that the mean half life of a link on Twitter is 2.8 hours. That is an extremely short time before whatever you tweet pretty much disappears forever.
The weekly email performs a bit better. The open rate on that email hovers just under 20%, on average. That’s pretty decent, I think — certainly much better than posting links on Twitter.
On the RSS feed, the average reach (the total number of people who have viewed or clicked on the content in the feed) is 28%. This is by far the most engaged group of the three methods I provide to get updates on the site’s content.
From a publishing perspective, RSS subscribers are like magazine subscribers. When they invite you into their reader it means that they place some value on the content you create. They are also the people who share your content, and care enough to give constructive feedback when you suck. So if you have to look at metrics for your site or online publication, that’s where I think you should look for a reflection of its quality.
I also want to make a few points about the RSS reading experience, and why I think it’s superior to other methods. There’s no way to keep up with all the links that come across my Twitter feed every day. But whenever I read something I like, I always go to the site’s home page to read some other posts. If I like the general theme I subscribe to the RSS feed and relax, because I don’t have to worry about accidentally missing a new post. RSS is a very “Slow Web” way of keeping up with content you don’t want to miss.
The other reason I’m such a fan of RSS is that it is a completely open platform (not Android “open” — real open). There are a multitude of ways to publish and consume feeds, and there is no lock-in whatsoever. This is why RSS has remained so strong. Dave Winer sums it up best, of course, in Protocols don’t mean much:
RSS won not because of its great design, but because there was a significant amount of valuable content flowing through it. Formats and protocols by themselves are meaningless. That’s what I say about specs. Show me content I can get at through the protocol, and I’ll say something.
I do see one big problem with RSS: there is no way to build a community around the people who subscribe to your feed. Feedburner tells me how many people are subscribed, and there is some basic aggregated demographic information, but that’s it. I’d love for RSS to give users the option to reveal their names and/or email addresses when they subscribe to a feed. This might sound creepy, but if it’s an optional setting (with an ethical default as private), I think this could be really powerful.
There are many sites that I subscribe to that I won’t mind if they know who I am. Publishers could use this information to kick off forums or email discussions around certain topics, organise local meetups, or any number of community interaction initiatives. For all this talk about “open” social networks, the idea of loose connections around an open protocol seems pretty appealing to me.
Or am I crazy?
Anil Dash discusses App.net in You Can’t Start the Revolution from the Country Club:
In today’s world, where the social web is mainstream, innovating on the core values of tools and technology while ignoring the value of inclusiveness is tantamount to building a gated community. Even with the promise that the less privileged might get a chance to show up later, you’re making a fundamentally unfair system.
I am genuinely confused. If you take this argument to its logical conclusion, is he saying that everything we make should be free so that it doesn’t exclude anyone? Isn’t that how we arrived at the current situation where advertisers call the shots on major social networks?
I didn’t back App.net because I hate Twitter and want to move somewhere else. I love Twitter, and I have no problem with anyone who uses it because I get to choose whose tweets I see. I backed App.net because I want to see what innovation comes out of it. To illustrate my point, in 1970 a NASA director attempted to make the case for space travel to a Nun who asked how he could suggest spending billions of dollars on space projects at a time when so many children are starving on Earth. From Why Explore Space?:
I believe, like many of my friends, that travelling to the Moon and eventually to Mars and to other planets is a venture which we should undertake now, and I even believe that this project, in the long run, will contribute more to the solution of these grave problems we are facing here on Earth than many other potential projects of help which are debated and discussed year after year, and which are so extremely slow in yielding tangible results.
I understand that comparing an app to space travel is silly, but if you read the whole letter you’ll understand the sentiment that prompted me to back App.net. I believe that a community of passionate developers can use the platform to develop ideas that not only solve existing problems with web publishing, but also meet some as-of-yet unknown web user needs.
For me, it’s not about excluding people, or sticking it to The Man. It’s about funding a playground for innovation1.
Jim Dalrymple in Apple’s motivation for suing Samsung:
I’m not going to say that Apple doesn’t care at all about keeping its secrets, but this is a case of dealing with the lesser of two evils. Sue Samsung now and show some old prototype photos, but stop them from copying future products; or let them continue copying. […]
Although none us know for sure what [Apple’s future] products are, if they are truly disruptive, like the iPhone and iPad, it’s in Apple’s best interests to stop Samsung now. This will effectively cut off the worst offender of companies copying its products in their tracks.
Jim clearly has a bee in his bonnet about the Apple v Samsung case, and it makes for some excellent writing and analysis. In fact, I think The Loop is by far the best site to stay up to date on what’s happening in this case.
Michael Mulvey points out an interesting distinction between Microsoft and Apple in Very Soft, his response to the news of Microsoft’s first ever quarterly loss:
The thing is, Microsoft has never been a consumer-focused company to begin with. Windows was designed for businesses, not people. Microsoft got in good early in the enterprise market in the 80’s and 90’s and that trickled down to peoples’ home computers. “I have Windows at the office, I might as well get it for home.” That left Apple out in the cold until Steve Jobs came back in 1998.
Contrast that with:
Windows PC spread from the office to the home. In the past 10 years we’ve seen the opposite: Apple products are going from the home to the office.
This is true. As BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) policies become more prevalent, corporate IT departments are finding that many of those devices are iPhones and iPads, and they just have to find a way to deal with that. It goes even further, because these devices are “gateway drugs” that end in employees dumping Windows PCs in favor of Macs (see How the Editor of Windows Magazine Became an Apple Fanboy for a good example). And before you know it you have a groundswell revolt against Microsoft Office for Mac, and a loud push to switch everything to iWork and Google Docs.
It’s a difficult situation for Microsoft, because the shift is mostly driven by masses of individual contributors — not executives. And it’s a situation that Windows 8 is not guaranteed to fix.
When the news hit that Sparrow has been acquired by Google, you could almost hear the collective sigh from those who use and love this wonderful iOS and Mac OS X email client. Many people (myself included) took to Twitter to voice our disappointment with this move, especially about the fact there there will be no additional development on the app:
We will continue to make available our existing products, and we will provide support and critical updates to our users. However, as w’ll be busy with new projects at Google, we do not plan to release new features for the Sparrow apps.
The response from many others was that we should just get over ourselves:
Sparrow doesn’t owe you anything. You paid, you got software. They can sell and/or kill it if they want. No right to complain. Sad, true.
— Matt Gemmell (@mattgemmell) July 20, 2012
Matt is right, of course — Sparrow doesn’t owe us anything. The Sparrow team did everything right: they had a great idea, they worked hard on it, and they executed well. That’s why Sparrow is a great app that serves a real need, and why it’s so successful. This is how software development should work: make a great product, and sell it to people for money. The Sparrow team deserves enormous credit for doing that.
But the issue is not that we think Sparrow “sold out.” I don’t think any of us would have turned down Google’s offer if we were in their shoes. The Sparrow team deserve their success, and it’s their software — they can do with it whatever they want. It’s also a great strategic move by Google. If the Sparrow team end up making Gmail better, Google wins. If they don’t — well, at least they’ve eliminated a competitor, and they still win.
We need to reframe this argument. The real issue is much deeper than this specific acquisition. The real issue is the sudden vulnerability we feel now that one of our theories about independent app development has failed.
You see, for a long time we’ve chanted this refrain wherever we could: If you’re not paying for it, you’re not the customer; you’re the product being sold. We point to Facebook and Delicious and ad-supported sites and lament the fact that we’re all just a set of eyeballs being sold to advertisers. So we came up with a solution. We decided that we don’t want to be free users any more. We decided that we want to pay independent developers directly so that they can have sustainable businesses and happy lives.
The philosophy is perfectly summed up in Don’t Be A Free User, a great post on the Pinboard blog:
What if a little site you love doesn’t have a business model? Yell at the developers! Explain that you are tired of good projects folding and are willing to pay cash American dollar to prevent that from happening. It doesn’t take prohibitive per-user revenue to put a project in the black. It just requires a number greater than zero. [”¦]
So stop getting caught off guard when your favorite project sells out! “They were getting so popular, why did they have to shut it down?” Because it’s hard to resist a big payday when you are rapidly heading into debt. And because it’s culturally acceptable to leave your user base high and dry if you get a good offer, citing self-inflicted financial hardship.
This is why I am a paid subscriber to services like Pinboard and Instapaper. It’s also why I paid for the both the Mac OS X and iOS versions of Sparrow. I believe in this philosophy. I believe we should pay people for the things they make, so that they can make it even more awesome.
But with Sparrow’s acquisition the cracks in the philosophy starts to appear. Marco Arment (creator of Instapaper) posted his response to the deal in Talent acquisitions:
If you want to keep the software and services around that you enjoy, do what you can to make their businesses successful enough that it’s more attractive to keep running them than to be hired by a big tech company.
But… that’s what I did. I paid full price for every version of the Sparrow app I could find. I told everyone who would listen to buy it. I couldn’t have given them more money even if I wanted to. So, as a customer, what more could I have done to keep them running independently?
This is the core of the disappointment that many of us feel with the Sparrow acquisition. It’s not about the $15 or less we spent on the apps. It’s not about the team’s well-deserved payout. It’s about the loss of faith in a philosophy that we thought was a sustainable way to ensure a healthy future for independent software development, where most innovation happens.
Brian Frank responds to That Newsweek Article that everyone’s talking about this week in Three Things I Believe About Technology:
Some critics write as if people are helpless automatons who’ll play Angry Birds all day, mindlessly clawing away like beetles turned on our backs unless a clever journalist or wise English professor comes along to flip us around and peddle us in the right direction.
That’s my favorite line, but read the whole thing — it’s an interesting post on some of the larger technology trends we’re currently experiencing.
Andre Torrez wrote a great piece about how his online habits are starting to change. From We met on the Internet:
I’ve been posting about this a bit, but I think my time off pushed me even further along to where I was going. I won’t say “off Twitter”, but I feel like focusing more on things around the edges of Twitter.
And maybe I am just looking for examples””seeing patterns where there are none””but a few things have appeared that makes me feel like other people are feeling the same way.
He goes on to cite some examples of this pattern — Mike Monteiro’s Evening Edition, Dave Pell’s excellent NextDraft, and Dustin Curtis’s Svbtle network.
I’ve also recently found myself yearning for these kinds of off-Twitter experiences that are more substantial, without closing the door on Twitter completely. Now I finally have a phrase for that, thanks to Andre: they’re things around the edges of Twitter.
I often wish I could move all my link-sharing off Twitter and onto this site, but I know that’s not really possible, because the readership isn’t quite there yet. But I much prefer not just tweeting a link, but also adding some thoughts, or even just trying to set the context so people can decide if it’s a link they would be interested in, or not. That’s an “around the edges” experience, since Twitter would still remain central to my workflow, but it wouldn’t be the main activity. Maybe one day I’ll get to do that.
Anyway, that’s quite a tangent. Please read Andre’s excellent post, and think about what that means for you. Does Twitter still add the value to your day that it used to? Bitly did some research recently and found that the average half-life of a link on Twitter is 2.8 hours. After that, it’s pretty much lost forever. Is that ok with you, or are you also starting to cherish the slower, more deliberate communities where you’re allowed to pause and take a breath before moving on to the next thing?
(link via @Mike_FTW)
The gap between the technical skills required to use the software we make, and what the majority of people are actually capable of, is widening at an alarming rate. Not only that, but we often appear to not even like the people we design and develop for. We champion empathy as a core tenet of user experience design, yet we are mighty quick to point out how bad our moms are at “computers”, and how we hate going home for the holidays because we end up spending all our time on family tech support.
I worry that technology is advancing so quickly that it’s no longer able to ground our thinking in a bit of reality. Some might see this as a good thing, but I don’t. Unless we make a conscious effort to get back into the minds of our users — and not chuckle at what we find when we peek in there — we’re going to run away with the web and leave most of the world standing around in bewilderment, wondering what just happened.
Don’t believe me that this is a thing? Ok, here are some examples. First, CNET’s Greg Sandoval describes the downfall of Netflix in his must-read article Netflix’s lost year: The inside story of the price-hike train wreck. It’s long, so it’s easy to skip over this sentence that perfectly sums up why things went so wrong for Netflix:
But even visionaries can misread their customers when they are blinded by their past success.
CEO Reed Hastings thought he had his customers figured out, but he didn’t. At all.
The second example is Digg, which, of course, made headlines last week because they were sold to Betaworks for $500,000 after once being valued at more than $160 million. From Kevin Rose: Digg Failed Because ‘Social Media Grew Up’:
Among the missteps: Digg botched its re-launch in the summer of 2010, and, more importantly, he said the company was slow to respond to the criticism. ‘We were desperately trying to figure out how to get traffic back,’ he said. ‘A bunch of the community had already revolted by the time we fixed it.’
Once again, they thought they knew their customers, and once again, they didn’t.
For the last example we’ll go even further down the technical totem pole, lest we forget what goes on in the bottom half of the Internet. In 2010 ReadWriteReb wrote an article about Facebook Connect and AOL Instant Messenger called Facebook Wants To Be Your One True Login. But their SEO was so good that if you went to Google and typed in “Facebook login”, that article would be the first result. It wasn’t long before they started receiving comments like this:
That’s right — people thought that they were on Facebook, and that the “new design” had inexplicably taken away the ability to log in. Things got so bad that they had to put up this message in the middle of the article, which is still there today:
The editors of ReadWriteWeb made one more mistake, though. They assumed that people know what a browser is. Watch this:
You may be asking yourself, “How do these people survive on the Internet? How do they get anything done online?” Well, we’d better believe it — they’re here, walking among us in plain sight. One can argue that things have gotten even worse since that article and video came out. Matthew Berk recently did an analysis of 1.3 Billion URLs and found that 22% of Web pages contain Facebook URLs. Google used to equal Browser for most people. Now Facebook is becoming the browser — it is people’s viewport to the Web.
And what are we doing about this? Well, mostly nothing, because we can’t be bothered to notice. We’re too busy arguing about Twitter’s API, and whether it’s worth reviewing a tablet that doesn’t exist yet. Speaking of the Surface, let’s not forget Greg Cox’s point about the people who are likely to buy it, which serves as another example for the point I’m trying to make:
Ha ha, we scoff. Who wants to do Microsoft Office on a tablet? Office is boring. And tablets have a completely different use case to laptops. Who would want one to run full Windows?
Answer: Lots of people. People with different priorities, working different jobs, living in different countries. People we don’t quite understand.
The rabbit hole just doesn’t end, no matter how deep you go. We haven’t even talked about YouTube comments or Clients From Hell. But I’ll stop here, and just say this: the landscape we create software for is scary. It’s terribly comfortable over here on Twitter, but how can we design software and applications for people we don’t hang out with?
It seems like such a simple problem to solve, but I’m not seeing much evidence that talking to customers is a widespread thing among startups and even many established companies. We love talking about User Experience Design in the abstract — especially if it means we can argue about whether it exists or not.
But you know who are the real heroes of UX (you know, if it actually exists)? The ethnographers. The user researchers (who had to change their name from “usability engineers” because definitions blah blah blah). The real heroes are the people who spend their days understanding user needs, and fighting with all their might to get people to make things that solve real needs, not things that floor us with their beauty and radiance and lack of utility. Douwe Osinga’s description of Google Wave comes to mind:
Wave started with some fairly easy to understand ideas about online collaboration and communication. But in order to make it more general and universal, more ideas were added until the entire thing could only be explained in a 90 minute mind blowing demo that left people speechless but a little later wondering what the hell this was for.
Let’s stop that from happening to the things we make. We don’t have to leave this job to The Researchers. We can all talk to the people who use (or might use) our software. We can go to a coffee shop and get feedback on wireframes for the price of a few cappuccinos. We can sit and watch some of our family members use the web, and make notes. We can try to spend a fixed percentage of every week talking to users. If we don’t, we’ll continue to widen what Jakob Nielsen calls the Usability Divide:
Far worse than the [digital] economic divide is the fact that technology remains so complicated that many people couldn’t use a computer even if they got one for free. Many others can use computers, but don’t achieve the modern world’s full benefits because most of the available services are too difficult for them to understand.
Whereas the [digital] economic divide is closing rapidly, I see little progress on the usability divide. Usability is improving for higher-end users. For this group, websites get easier every year, generating vast profits for site owners. That’s all great news for high-end users, but the less-skilled 40% of users have seen little in the way of usability improvement. We know how to help these users — we’re simply not doing it.
We know how to help these users — we’re simply not doing it. We don’t have a choice, we have to talk to them. It’s easy to start: take your laptop with you on one of your coffee breaks, and ask some people if you can show them what you’re working on. They’ll love giving you feedback, and you’ll walk away with a better understanding of the usability divide — and some very real ideas about how to narrow it.
The impact of the Internet on society and relationships is a common theme on this site. I recently stumbled on a few articles on this topic that I think are worth highlighting. Yes, this idea has been covered a lot, and Sherry Turkle’s recent New York Times article brought the discussion to the forefront yet again. But don’t roll your eyes — there are some interesting arguments in these articles. As usual, I’m going to quote some key sections from each, but I highly recommend that you queue all of these up in Instapaper and read them in order. It’s great weekend reading!
It all started with Nathan Jurgenson’s The IRL Fetish — an excellent reflection on the stark (and fairly recent) distinction we make between being online and offline:
We are far from forgetting about the offline; rather we have become obsessed with being offline more than ever before. We have never appreciated a solitary stroll, a camping trip, a face-to-face chat with friends, or even our boredom better than we do now. Nothing has contributed more to our collective appreciation for being logged off and technologically disconnected than the very technologies of connection. The ease of digital distraction has made us appreciate solitude with a new intensity. In short, w’ve never cherished being alone, valued introspection, and treasured information disconnection more than we do now. Never has being disconnected — even if for just a moment — felt so profound.
He goes on to describe the obsession with the analog and the vintage — like the resurgence of vinyl — as the “fetishization of the offline”. An interesting, provocative phrase. The core of his argument follows:
In great part, the reason is that we have been taught to mistakenly view online as meaning not offline. The notion of the offline as real and authentic is a recent invention, corresponding with the rise of the online. If we can fix this false separation and view the digital and physical as enmeshed, we will understand that what we do while connected is inseparable from what we do when disconnected. That is, disconnection from the smartphone and social media isn’t really disconnection at all: The logic of social media follows us long after we log out. There was and is no offline; it is a lusted-after fetish object that some claim special ability to attain, and it has always been a phantom.
Nathan’s essay kicked off a slew of thoughtful responses that commend him for the article, but also disagree on some key points. First, the always brilliant Nicholas Carr responds in The line between offline and online:
I’m going to resist the temptation to quote some Wordsworth or Thoreau, but I will say while our present age may be tops in some things, it’s far from tops in the area of solitary strolls. The real tragedy — if in fact you see it as a tragedy, and most people do not — is that the solitary stroll, the camping trip, the gabfest with pals are themselves becoming saturated with digital ephemera. Even if we agree to turn off our gadgets for a spell, they remain ghostly presences — all those missed messages hang like apparitions in the air, taunting us — and that serves to separate us from the experience we seek. What we appreciate in such circumstances, what we might even obsess over, is an absence, not a presence.
I find that comment interesting because where Nathan claims that being online is inseparable from the experience of being offline, he doesn’t say anything about the negative effects of that. Nicholas points out that even though online experiences can enhance our offline relationships, it’s also true that those relationships can be affected negatively by our inability to let go of the online.
Next up, Michael Sacasas has similar objections in his piece In Search of the Real, but he also adds this thought on the distinction between being offline and online:
I would not say as Jurgenson does at one point, “Facebook is real life.” The point, of course, is that every aspect of life is real. There is no non-being in being. Perhaps it is better to speak of the real not as the opposite of the virtual, but as that which is beyond our manipulation, what cannot be otherwise. In this sense, the pervasive self-consciousness that emerges alongside the socially keyed online is the real. It is like an incontrovertible law that cannot be broken. It is a law haunted by the loss its appearance announces, and it has no power to remedy that loss. It is a law without a gospel.
Aha — now we’re getting somewhere. The distinction between online and offline is legitimate, but calling one experience real and the other not doesn’t work. Instead, the only part of this discussion where the word “real” should come in, is when we talk about our realization/self-awareness that there is a distinction between online and offline — and it behooves us to figure out what that distinction means.
Adam Graber takes the discussion in a slightly different direction in Offline:
The same is true for every technology. It makes new things possible, but it also alters what we consider normal. Every technology is a new normal. The point though is not to try and “fix” it by logging off or downgrading or abandoning technology altogether. The point is to be aware of it. To understand not only what technology makes possible, but also what it normalizes, and even what it makes impossible.
There’s the “awareness” concept again. He continues:
Impossible like living offline IRL and seeing a beautiful sky without being tempted to Instagram it or having a brilliant idea and not writing a blog about it. Because online, the only things that exist are the things you put there. Otherwise, offline, all the ephemeral grandeur and intricacy of our daily lives does not exist unless we somehow capture it with our technology. The only other way to revel the fleeting moments of our lives is to experience it with someone else — a meeting of sorts. But technology makes it so we don’t have to.
The theme is clear by now. Online and offline experiences are both real, but they have positive and negative effects on each other. As we discussed earlier, online experiences can enhance offline relationships because we bring our online interactions into those relationships, but they can also be broken down by online’s constant and relentless hold on our consciousness.
Finally, Nicholas Carr weighs in again and pulls it all together with I was offline before offline was offline:
But the fact that we now consciously experience two different states of being called “online” and “offline,” which didn’t even exist a few years ago, shows how deeply technology can influence not only what we do but how we perceive ourselves and the world. Certainly we didn’t consciously choose to look at our lives in this way and then formulate the technology to fulfill our desire. The defense contractors who started building the internet didn’t say to each other, “For the good of mankind, let’s create a new dichotomy in perception.” And when we, as individuals, log on for the first time (or the ten-thousandth time), we don’t say to ourselves, “I’m going to use this new technology so I’ll be able to think about my life in terms of being online and being offline.” But that’s what happens.
It’s not that technology “wants” us to think in this way — technology doesn’t want a damn thing — it’s that technology has side effects that are unintended, unimagined, unplanned-for, unchosen, often invisible, and frequently profound. Technology gave us nature, as its shadow, and in a similar way it has given us “the offline.”
Some might say that these types of discussions are a waste of time. That people react with hand-waving alarmism every time a new technology emerges — the telephone and the printing press were going to make us stupid long before Google might be doing it. And it’s true that for every good discussion about this, there’s an equally bad one (looking at you, Newsweek). But I think that we have to keep talking and arguing about this, because it is in the extremes of these arguments that we find the middle ground that approximates the true impact of technology on our lives.
I recently went searching for my first tweet, and it’s about as inane as I expected:
I have no idea how this thing works
— Rian van der Merwe (@RianVDM) April 4, 2008
I can honestly say that after more than 4 years, I still don’t know how this thing works. I know that being connected has altered my life in profound ways — some good (I get to write here!), some bad (I definitely struggle to put the phone down). But I think I’m ok with not knowing as long as enough people are coming together to try to understand how this online/offline thing affects us — and to challenge each other’s ideas in a thoughtful way.
I agree with Nicholas — technology doesn’t care what we do with it. But we cannot stumble blindly ahead without striving for the self-awareness that this still-real new reality requires. Because once we understand it, we’ll truly be able to regain control over the technology that is shaping us.