Idle Thoughts

In the headlong rush to be the most innovative startup around, people will change just about anything. Never mind the fact that, often, there is a reason things are as they are; change is the way of the internet, and all things must be changed.

This attitude is so prevalent because it’s an easy sell: if you don’t change anything, you don’t have a product, and to determine what changes are actually needed is time-consuming and expensive.

I was compelled to write this post after reading this post about “[t]he next generation vision of your future desktop”, whatever that means. It describes a technology called BumpTop, which is essentially a new desktop interface. Unfortunately, most of the changes, while visually appealing, serve only to make the system harder to use.

One is the concept of a three dimensional environment. Screens are two dimensional, displaying icons on the wall of a faux-3D room does nothing to improve usability, and in fact the perspective makes the icons less recognizable and the text less readable.

Another is the idea that, as you move icons around, they bump into and move each other. This is a phenomenally bad idea. A desktop is not a game, you want things to be accessible. Bouncing icons help nobody.

To their credit, they also implemented the ability to resize individual icons, which I can imagine would be very useful for frequently used items.

So not all decisions made were bad, but it would have taken very little thought to weed out those that were, and leave only the good.

Unfortunately, the industry doesn’t care much about marginal improvements: only overhauls ever get talked about. The developers are most probably as aware as I am that most of their devepments would actually detract from the experience, but nobody cares for the suggestion “like Windows, but with resizable icons.” If we want creativity to be directed towards solving real problems instead of arbitrarily innovating, we need to be more discerning in our judgements, and recognize work for its utility, not it’s innovativeness.

Bad Ideas

While not a new idea in the least, the inauguration’s massive online presence has prompted yet another suggestion that the government needs to get on top of providing broadband to all homes. This is a bad idea, or at least, an unsustainable one.

I’m not fundamentally against goverment aid in spreading technology, in fact there are many cases in which it’s just the ticket, but it’s only really useful for technologies which mark a fundamental change in the way things are done (installation of computers in schools, for example). People talk about broadband access as though it’s something entirely distinct from dial-up, a completely new way to access the internet, but this is rubbish, it’s just another step in the chain of bandwidth increases.

Certainly, there are services which dial-up users can’t reasonably access, video primary among them, but this will always be the case with some technology or other. Sometime in the next decade we’ll likely have gigabit internet connections at the top end, and what then? Should the government once again fund an upgrade? Should they do this for all time, constantly spending to ensure faster internet access? It would be a monstrous waste of resources, and an entirely unneccessary one.

Consider, for example, that the government don’t ensure access to the latest computers, because a better graphics card simply isn’t necessary for computer utilization.

Since broadband is only the second step in bandwidth development, it seems as though it is a fundamental shift, but in time we will recognize that it is just another stage in development, and there will be an endless succession of stages. As people with cheap computers can’t use the latest software, so people with dial-up access can’t watch videos, but this, while unfortunate, is not cause enough to warrant a never-ending series of goverment interventions. We must let the market do it’s job, because only the market can do it sustainably.

Politics

I’ve never been a huge fan of Apple. Their devices look great, and operate smoothly, but they’re a little too obsessed with simplicity, and they will often achieve it by removing functionality from a device. My iPhone, for example, can’t connect to my home network: it simply doesn’t provide access to the settings required.

But this isn’t always a bad thing. For some devices, simplicity is more important than functionality. Phones, in my opinion, are among these, and I’m not alone. More and more, people are finding advanced features of phones far too difficult to use. Even simple ones aren’t easy, because phone makers won’t give up on the notion that more is better. After all, you can just ignore functions you don’t want, can’t you?

Well, no. Extra functionality is what makes phones a pain to use. It’s why you have to go through three menus on many phones to send an SMS: for the very occasional time when you want to send a message as an email instead, or as an MMS.

This functionality is rarely used, so why provide it? Why can’t phones just guess what you want, particularly in areas where they’d almost certainly be right.

Note that, while my iPhone can’t get on to wi-fi, I don’t switch to another phone, because I can deal with small problems. I can accept that my phone can’t copy or paste, because it makes everything else so easy that I’m willing to live with it. It guesses what I want, and sometimes it makes a hash of it, but rarely.

It’s wonderful to see Microsoft learning from this, with concept screens from their upcoming system showing a much more user friendly interface. I just hope that everyone else catches on, or else I expect we’ll end up with about as much competition in phones as we have in MP3 players.

Phones

I was just reading “4 Things Twitter Could Learn From Jaiku” from The Next Web, and it struck me that some people seem to completely miss the primary benefit of Twitter’s simplicity: its extensibility.

As an example, social networking sites have always been difficult to extend. None of them offered solid APIs until recently, and though Facebook offers a development platform, all extensions have to be made within the relatively limited confines of that platform.

These limited prospects for development and extension resulted in many clones with functionality slightly extended in one way or another, but without integration into a large database of users, this just caused trouble for their members.

Twitter, on the other hand, is entirely open. They provide what amounts to a communication protocol, and allow third parties to develop whatever they want on top of it. Though, as I’ve mentioned previously, this is a bad idea from a commercial perspective, it’s great for users. All they have to do is pick an extension or two to help them use the service, and they can do whatever they want with it.

Some people use Twitter to discuss the share market, some to share pictures, and some just want a more user-friendly interface, but none of these is directly integrated. If Twitter were to integrate pictures, for example, the site would become more cluttered, which would drive people away. A change in the interface would likely annoy as many people as it pleased.

One service can’t suit everyone’s needs, but a multitude can. So long as Twitter avoids integrating all of these extensions into its primary offering, it can control almost the entire microblogging arena, but any specialization, and that control evaporates.

Microblogging

Belkin has been receiving a lot of flak today, rightly, for their attempt to buy positive ratings on Amazon. Marketing is inherently deceptive, but we have grown accustomed to it, and to an extent skeptical of it, with time. So at what point does marketing become unacceptably deceptive?

One obvious answer to me would be that it becomes unacceptable when the viewer is unaware that content is an advertisement, because they will then tend to drop their guard, and take information at face value. This would explain why Belkin’s plan was so badly received, after all, advertising agencies hire celebrity spokespeople all the time, who have likely never used the product they’re endorsing. So long as people are aware of the ad, it is relatively acceptable.

Why, then, is search engine optimization seen as acceptable? Certainly, some forms, like link farms, aren’t, but using keywords, rearranging content and the like are all quite normal. This is curious, since it’s entirely undetectable by end users. The keywords may be appropriate for a given site, but why should that site be pushed ahead of one which is more relevant to a particular search, simply because it gamed the system, in however minor a way.

If you consider this acceptable, why is it distinct from what Belkin did and, if not, why don’t you think people mind? I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments.

Marketing, SEO

Barely a day has gone by over the past couple of months in which I haven’t read about some company or other downsizing their workforce, cutting services or otherwise attempting to lower costs. Everyone knows that companies have to tighten their belts to get through a recession. Well, not everyone.

Andy Liu wrote a post the other day questioning the wisdom of such a response. He suggests that a recession is the perfect time to expand, when everyone else is contracting. Unfortunately, by using an analogy of a lemonade stand, he misses the key problem of his suggestion: it’s expensive to run a business during a recession.

If you’re business has very low overhead, or you have a lot of money banked away, it makes sense to expand; when everybody else is slimming down their business, market share can be bought relatively cheaply. But don’t fool yourself into thinking that this market share is going to pay for itself in the short term. You expand during a recession by accepting financial burdens that your competitors would rather avoid; if market share expansions paid for themselves, everyone would be growing.

While there is plenty of opportunity to expand during a recession, this isn’t helpful to the majority of startups. A site can only be run cheaply so long as it has comparatively few users. As soon as it begins to expand, hosting costs rise and staff need to be hired to maintain the system, all while earning next to next to nothing from it’s newfound user base, since the advertising market shrinks and users stop spending.

So if you think you have enough in reserve, go for it, grab every last customer you can, but be careful what you wish for: no-one yet knows when this recession will end.

Economics

According to this post from ReadWriteWeb, “[t]he era of dominance is shrinking. IBM dominated tech longer than Microsoft did, and Google’s period of dominance will be even shorter. ”

What a load of rubbish. IBM is the most profitable company in all of IT, Microsoft produces the most popular operating system on the planet, and Google controls almost seventy percent of the search market.

The article discusses the idea that Google has let the real time web slip it by, and now provides an outdated service which will somehow be replaced by an entirely unrelated service.

Real time search won’t replace Google, at best it will replace Google News. Most searches don’t need up-to-the-minute results, because most searches aren’t for news.

The author isn’t talking about dominance, he’s talking about newsworthiness. The companies to which he compares Google aren’t outdated, or failing, they’re two of the most successful companies in the industry, they’ve just ceased to be interesting as the services they provide fade into the background. This will likely also happen to Google, as search becomes as natural and invisible as a keyboard, or a browser.

Google, as it grows, will cease to be as significant a player in innovation. One day, we may discuss their attempts to integrate new technologies with the same derision with which we talk about Vista. We’ll Bleat about their failures, dislike them on TrendFeed, and it won’t give them a moment’s pause, because everybody needs  search.

Google, Real Time Web

America’s unemployment rate is the highest it’s been in sixteen years. It sounds terrible when you put it that way. And it is, but not as bad as you might think. 92.8 percent of people who wish to work are currently employed. In the best of times, that figure can rise to 96 percent, a 3.2 percent difference.

People don’t live on their savings, they live on their incomes, so lost wealth, while significant, shouldn’t have a strong effect on people’s day-to-day lives.

This means that, besides a slight real difference in wages this year brought about by smaller raises, 96.8 percent of people will be in the same financial position they were in at this time last year.

By extension, 96.8 percent of people should be spending about the same amount this year as they did last year. While not insignificant, most businesses would be able to withstand a drop in revenues of 3.2 percent (this is lazy maths, but you get the picture).

Unfortunately, they’re having to face a much more significant problem than this. In addition to those who have lost the ability to pay for services, many who would otherwise continue to patronize businesses have started saving instead, in preparation for possible worse times ahead, when they too might lose their job.

This isn’t an unreasonable concern, but it is relatively unlikely; even less so if they would continue spending, since businesses would perform better and hence be less likely to lay off employees. This a a perfect example of the prisoner’s dilemma: everyone would be better off if nobody saved money, but each person can maximise their personal wellbeing by hoarding as much as possible.

The root of this problem, though, is the news. If people didn’t insist on being so well informed of what is happening around them, they wouldn’t be aware of the recession. They would therefore have no reason to stop spending, which in turn would minimize the recession, if not avert it altogether.

I’m not saying we should avoid news, it is significantly more beneficial than it is detrimental, and avoidance would be impossible anyway given the ease of information dissemination today, but it is worth noting that the economy isn’t in an inherently poor position. While some wealth has been lost, the majority of the effects of the recession are a result of people’s responses to the news of impending economic turmoil.

Economics

Investors and pundits are forever lamenting the lack of revenue in web business today. Many ventures don’t attempt to monetize their services at all, while the majority simply place ads on their sites. Social Media in particular has become infamous for it’s lack of imagination where revenue is concerned. But what changed? Why did entrepreneurs lose their ability to profit from their ideas?

Well, it’s not so much that entrepreneurs have changed, as that their circumstances have. In realiy, they’ve never been any good at monetizing ideas, because it wasn’t a skill that needed cultivating in the past; so long as you were able to think up a product or service people wanted, you could sell it to them. But this hinged on the fact that it cost you something to produce: build a product, mark it up by a few percent, and there’s your profit.

This system breaks down, however, when products stop costing anything to produce. The cost of provisioning service to a single user of a site is effectively zero, close enough that it can seem worthwhile to give it away in order to expand your userbase. Unfortunately, in doing so, you lose the revenue stream which has supported businesses since the dawn of commerce.

Note that it’s not only web-based startups which are running into these problems - all industries, even established ones, whose marginal costs drop to zero have to find new business models, and none of them are very good at it - just look at the music industry.

Entrepreneurs now need not only to be able to come up with a good idea, but they have to be able to find an innovative way to monetize it. They haven’t lost a skill, they’re just being forced to learn a new one.

Startups

Generate traffic. Reach critical mass. These are, without a doubt, the most important considerations of early-stage web startups today. But is growth good for everyone? Can a site grow to the extent that it ceases to be useful?

Some sites, certainly, only grow more useful as they expand. Most social networking sites, for example, need as many members as possible, to ensure that all of your friends can be found there.

On the other hand, I was browsing Seesmic earlier, and thought that it may encounter problems with growth. Seesmic is, in essence, a commenting system using video in place of text. This aspect of the business I don’t see in any danger of being damaged by growth, but the main site, a forum in which all comments are made by video, faces a less certain future.

While looking through the various threads, I noted that some of them have well over a hundred videos, the most popular having over two thousand. In this, I see a problem: there is no way I could join such a conversation, because it would take too long to catch up. The main problem is that video isn’t scannable. As the site grows, many, if not most, conversations will grow to have similarly large numbers of posts, and any visitor will be drowned in content, which I think will drive them away.

After considering this for a while, it occurred to me that I’ve seen a similar phenomenon before - the Twitter public timeline. While it was probably interesting when the site was small, there are now so many updates that it’s impossible to follow, so it tends to be ignored.

This led me to an interesting thought about social websites: content has to be fragmented in order to be useful. Popular sites these days receive such a lot of traffic that one can’t follow what everyone is doing, so they need to focus on a small subsection. With Twitter, this is your ‘following’ list. With Seesmic, video comments on blog posts.

Seesmic will continue to grow with their commenting system, but I think that their homepage will go the way of the Twitter public timeline, along with any other site which doesn’t provide an adequate breakup of information.

Growth