A Knitted Bike? Only in Brooklyn...
Tech. Food. Music. Film. Life. All neatly bundled and ready for consumption.
Current:
http://www.sandro.org/
Past Output:
http://www.sooloos.com
http://www.redstapler.com
http://www.snoozebutton.com
Some other outlets:
Last.fm
Yelp
Foursquare
Facebook
LinkedIn
Lowest Common Denominator User Experiences
There are a two UX trends happening now that are absolutely infuriating and cause me to waste precious time every day: awful Mobile versions of sites, and popup login boxes that don't respect browser password managers.
These atrocious mobile versions of sites are replicating like cells because the publishers seem to think I have a circa 2000 era cellphone and want to force a lowest common denominator experience upon us. Between iOS and Android devices, there are probably about 200M users whose devices can render the real experience, so let us choose how we want to experience it. And while you're at it, please stop disabling pinch and zoom... The other huge gripe is that they have "full site" links, always at the bottom of an incredibly long scrolling page, which when clicked does one of two things: it doesn't work whatsoever, or if it does, it loads the full site at the root level (ie the homepage) of the site and not the page you were viewing. Neither of these are solutions by any definition of the word. As for the modal login boxes, they too are replicating because they're perceived to be an acceptable UX design pattern, which they're not. By ignoring browser password managers, they too cause a negative experience. I have my laptop locked down, but if for some reason someone gets in, I am not going to be too worried about whether the intruder has access to your blog or SaaS, so stop coming up with new ways to make me waste cycles. Just honor our choices and settings...Comments [0]
Kindle: There Ain't No Stoppin' It Now
Kindle will win and the reasons why are plentiful. It may have to share the pie with other players but those will only be small slices.
I've posted before on a platform based reason why Kindle will win but if you missed it, here it is:
Then there's the obvious advantage that Amazon has due to its status as the premier online retailer for reading materials.
The thing that sealed it for me is the genius of the product team and how they keep rolling out incremental features or UX that actually makes the core product better and not more cluttered of confusing. If you've ever made anything you know just how hard that can be.
Sure having it available on all desktop and mobile platforms makes all the sense in the world.
Making the text reflow nicely across those devices? Great.
Having your reading library and current position in each of your books automatically sync across all of your devices? Pure magic.
Adding bookmark/dogears, highlights and notes and having those sync too? Awesome.
This morning while reading Brad Feld's "Do More Faster" I went back to reread a couple paragraphs and noticed a line that was underlined/hyperlinked. I didn't remember the link being there last week when I originally read that chunk nor did I highlight it myself. I also figured that I was on the subway and not online so it couldn't work right? Turns out it was a sentence highlighted by most readers of the book. In essence they're passively crowdsourcing potentially important bits of the book I was reading. Genius.
The sentence in question?:
"It is said that with knowledge workers, the best employee is 10 times more productive and impactful than the average employee.". Amen to that.
Oh, and yes, you can turn off the feature.
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Cutting through Inbox noise with Apple Mail & Addressbook Smart Folders & Groups
Even taking into account the weird IMAP/Exchange refreshing bug¹ , Apple Mail's smart folders are a great way to quickly filter your inbox. That said, there's one option missing that's always irked me: if the sender is in your Address Book. Believe it or not, it exists as a mail rule option but not in smart folders. Go figure.
So, here's a quick fix:
Open Address Book and create a new smart group - I called mine "In Address Book". Then as criteria set it to "Card" "created after" and select a date in the past that predates your oldest entry, January 1st 1990 worked for me. You can confirm that it worked if the total contacts in both your All Contacts and "In Address Book" group are the same.
Now, the smart group will auto update whenever you add new contacts and always reflect the most current subset.
Then in Mail, create a new Smart Folder, I called mine "In Addressbook", and as criteria, select "Sender is Member of Group" and choose "In Addressbook" group. Make sure it matches messages that match all of the following conditions.
Now that smart folder will display only the emails from people in your addressbook. Helpful to quickly get a lay of the Inbox land.
I would also suggest adding additional rules to not display Sent mail, spam, or known entities that generate a lot of mail but aren't that critical.
Note 1:
The bug I have noticed is that my Mail Smart Folders sometimes don't update properly until I go back and select the actual inbox which triggers a refresh. That's as well as I can describe it, and why I use my Smart Mailboxes for focusing on groups of email rather than living in them.
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Skyfire: Spinning a Potential Disaster into a Great Story While Creating Demand and Urgency in the Process
I just read a post (below) about how Skyfire "sold out" in the Apple App Store. I was clearly taken aback because how is it possible that a digital product could sell out. As you can read below demand for their app clearly out stripped the "supply" of their infrastructure.
In case you don't know what skyfire is, it's an alternative browser for iOS that allows you to play flash by transcoding it on the fly into a non-banned format stream. Pretty nifty.
When they do start releasing more batches, users will no doubt jump on the chance to buy it before it "sells out" again, thus creating more demand and urgency in a possibly repeating cycle. Bravo.
From the Skyfire blog:
Skyfire for iPhone has been received with unbelievable enthusiasm. Despite our best attempts and predictions, the demand far exceeds our initial projections.
The user experience was performing well for the first few hours, but as the surge continued, the peak load on our servers and bandwidth caused the video experience to degrade.
Thus we are effectively ‘sold out’ and will temporarily not accept new purchases from the App Store. We are working really hard to increase capacity and will be accepting new purchases from the App Store as soon as we can support it.
We are very grateful for the demand. Within 5 hours, Skyfire for iPhone became the top grossing app, the third highest paid app overall and the top application in the Utilities category. Wow!
Please bear with us as we bring our capacity in line with the incredible demand – stay tuned.
Thanks, Robert.
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A Distilled List of iPhone and iPad Apps
A friend has finally upgraded to an iPhone and asked me to compile a list of iPhone apps that I regularly use. When it is was done I thought it worth sharing.
So, in addition to the much used default apps (Mail, Safari, Maps, Calendar, Contacts, Photos, Clock, Settings, App Store), here are, in no particular order, the best free and paid apps I've downloaded and use:
Note, several of these apps attain true awesomeness and usefulness when linked to cloud services or because they sync across multiple platform and devices.
Phone and Voice:
Ribbit
Jott
Ribbit
Jott
Skype
Google Voice (web shortcut but I use it enough to warrant a mention)
Weather:
Weatherbug
Utilities:
Light
TotalBaby
Downloader
Dropbox
Quickmark
TextExpander
Google Earth
Photography:
Hispstamatic
CameraBag
Autostitch
Flickr
Photoforge
CameraBag
Autostitch
Flickr
Photoforge
Camera Genius
Reading:
Instapaper Pro
NYTimes
Goodreader
Kindle
iBooks
Reeder
NYTimes
Goodreader
Kindle
iBooks
Reeder
Audio and Video:
Last.fm
Pandora
Shazam
Pandora
Shazam
iMovie
Boxee
Food and Drink + Guides:
Productivity:
SplashID
SplashShopper
Evernote
Toodledo
OmniFocus
FMtouch
SplashShopper
Evernote
Toodledo
OmniFocus
FMtouch
iFlash
Shoeboxed
Timebridge
Social:
Osfoora
Foursquare
LinkedIn
Facebook
GetGlue
Blockchalk
Boxcar
Bump
Stickybits
Hot Potato
Financial:
YNAB
MyWireless from AT&T
eTrade
Currency
eTrade
Currency
Travel and Getting Around:
Cabsense
NYCmate
Citytransit
Taxi
Tripit
Zipcar
Transit Maps
NYCmate
Citytransit
Taxi
Tripit
Zipcar
Transit Maps
Shopping:
Gilt
Redlaser
HunchableDesign:
Redlaser
HunchableDesign:
Adobe Ideas
Movies:
Fandango
IMDB
IMDB
Sports:
ESPN Scorecenter
Sleeping and Relaxation:
Pzizz Energizer
Pzizz Sleep
Asleep
iPad Only:
All the aforementioned apps' HD iPad versions
iThoughts HD
Adobe Ideas (mentioning this a second time because it's so much better and more useful on an iPad)
Corkulous
Penultimate
Prompster
Pages
Numbers
Keynote
NYTimes Editor's Choice
Financial Times Mobile Edition
Apollo News
Uzu
Hulu Plus
Starmap HD
Da Vinci HD
Magic Window
Maybe I'll get to describing these one day or even write about my use cases but for now names will have to do.
Also, I know I have omitted some apps that I have installed and occasionally use, or are city specific (like the city apps I load when I travel) but I needed to trim the list a bit ;)
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My Twitter Environment aka Twitter Tools I Use
Going through the never ending process of hearing about or searching for and then evaluating new Twitter tools, I felt that this was as good a time as any to put forth a snapshot of which tools I currently use and how I use them.
There is one huge caveat and problem with all of these services with how they score original style (RT) vs new style retweets. New style retweets seem to be easier to measure and track via the Twitter API while old style retweets seem to not be tracked as well or if at all. From my own experiences with these services, specifically Klout, Tap11, Twitalyzer (Jeff Katz, Product Lead @Twitalyzer set me straight on their RT monitoring, see comments below), Tweet reach, et al, I have found that they usually miss old style retweets. This is really unfortunate because I loathe the new style retweet because I can't add my $0.02 to it, and I suspect I'm not alone.
So, in no particular order, I have broken the tools into these categories: Ranking/Influence, Metrics, Maintenance, Tracking, Search, Backup, Reading/Posting and Photos.
Ranking/Influence:
Influence is a helpful way of gauging your and others' reach and impact. Each of these services have different approaches and use different criteria, so scores will vary from service to service. Also, you may find anomalies in one service's score for a period of time (see Klout below). Both of these reasons are why I use several services to come up with a more meaningful overall number.
Klout http://klout.com/
I have always liked Klout for putting forth their Klout Score. That said, recently my Klout score dropped in half even though I added 15% more followers, doubled the lists I am in, had a significant number of conversations and retweets. Not sure if it's problems on their end or due to inconsistent Twitter API fun.
UPDATE: I have heard back from the Klout team and they looked into the problem and it was in fact caused by the Twitter API problems of the last month or so.
TunkRank http://tunkrank.com/
This is an adaptation of Google's PageRank and measures inbound and outbound attention. A much better description is available at: http://thenoisychannel.com/2009/01/13/a-twitter-analog-to-pagerank/
Trst.me http://trst.me/
This is put forth by the data junkies at Infochimps and is their take on porting Google's PageRank to Twitter. A good explanation of their approach is at: http://trst.me/about
Tweetreach http://tweetreach.com
This measures reach and exposure for your Twitter identity by calculating how many people your tweets actually got through to.
Metrics:
Tap11 http://tap11.com/
I first heard of them at Chirp and really loved their approach to visualizing your Twitter analytics. I also really like their keyword tracking and performance tools. They were in beta until recently but are now pay only with the base tier costing $49 a month.
Twittercounter http://twittercounter.com/
This is a nice tool for visualizing your follower growth. They also have a great widget and follower button which you can embed on your website or blog.
Twitalyzer http://twitalyzer.com/
This has many influencer metrics: impact score, influence type, scores for a variety of indicators, and some recommendations on improving your
TweetPsych http://tweetpsych.com/
This service will analyze your twitter stream and tell you whether you tweet more or less, by percentage, than the average user on 21 different categories including: Sex, Learning, Media, Time, Emotions, Senses, Work, Constructive, Primordial, Thinking, Control, Negative, Conceptual, Numbers, Anxiety, Self Reference, Present, Social, Future, Leisure, Money. They also provide you with "People Who Think Like You". I need to check that feature out a bit more.
Maintenance:
Tweepi Flush http://tweepi.com/tools/flush
With this service you can identify users that do not follow you back. Once you login, you're presented with all the users you follow who don't follow you back. You can then unfollow any combination of users. This has been really helpful to me as I am currently butting up against the 2001 follow limit.
Tracking:
Mr. Unfollowr http://twitter.com/unfollowr
Follow Mr. Unfollowr and he will DM you with the identities of people who have unfollowed you. They usually send the DM approximately once a week. This is very useful in dealing with the Twitter trolls who follow you to get you to follow them back and then promptly unfollow you. That is simply not cool and I am happy to reciprocate.
Qwitter http://useqwitter.com/
Another unfollower alerting tool that sends a daily email.
Listwatcher http://twitter.com/listwatcher
Follow listwatcher and they will DM you when people add or remove you from public lists. Again, this is helpful in monitoring your brand and engagement levels.
Chirpstats http://chirpstats.com/
Another follower tracking tool which when followed, DMs you stats about your net gain/loss.
Search:
Naturally the most complete search available but I found it to be inconsistent but it is getting better
Icerocket Twitter Search http://www.icerocket.com/?tab=twitter
Another take on Twitter search.
Oneriot http://www.oneriot.com/
Real time search results bundled into trending topics.
Backup:
BackUpMyTweets http://backupmytweets.com/
A free service that backs up your tweets and makes them available for export in HTML, JSON and XML formats
Pinboard http://pinboard.in
This is wonderful bookmarking alternative to Delicious which can optionally import all of your Tweets and make them searchable.
Reading/Posting:
YoruFukurou [OSX] http://sites.google.com/site/yorufukurou/
This is my OSX app of choice for so many reasons - too many so I'll just enumerate a few here: it has a minimized view; I can quicklook photos; it actively tracks read/unread tweets for the main timeline and lists; it has a tab view; I can create custom filters based on strings or even grep to ignore annoying trends; it color codes my timeline based on conversation and sender/replies; it shows me in realtime whether the follow status is mutual; there is a drawer with all of a person's info; and so on. It really is a swiss army knife. It does have one point of failure though, it doesn't allow one to schedule tweets.
Osfoora [iPhone, iPad] http://www.osfoora.com/
By far and away my favorite client for both the iPhone and iPad. It has a great UX and provides easy access to everything you'd expect and need: list and drafts access; read/unread tracking; multiple image, video, link shortening services; instapaper integration; textexpander integration; autocompletion of user names and hash tags for tweeting and search; google map integration for showing nearby tweets; full contacts list and views.
MarketMeTweet http://marketmetweet.com/
This Adobe AIR app supports posting from a Brand, ie. it shows you how to create a Twitter app and then post from that app. In other words, you know when you look at a tweet and it says "sent via web" or API or Hootsuite? Well, with MarketMeTweet you can set it up so it can say "sent via Whatever_You_Want". Pretty cool for brands.
SocialFlow http://socialflow.com
I first saw them at the ReadWriteWeb NYC Summit and was really taken by their approach of attempting to calculate the optimum time to publish a tweet. Amid all the noise, it really is about timing your tweets so that you reach the maximum number of people. I suspect I will be using this quite a bit once I get my invite code (hint).
Hootsuite / Cotweet http://hootsuite.com / http://cotweet.com
For team based workflows, with scheduling and approval processes, these are the two tools I go to and recommend.
TwitLonger http://twitlonger.com
I occasionally use this when I need to get past the 140 character limit but I really try not to as it breaks many of the systems I have in place, makes users click to read, and no doubt adversely impacts tracking and metrics.
Photos:
Flickr http://flickr.com/
Flickr offers up a simple way of posting to your Flickr stream and cross-posting to Twitter via email. I can't remember if it requires a Flickr Pro account or not but it's super simple to set up.
TwitPic http://twitpic.com
A great way to quickly get photos up and into the Twitter ecosystem. I use this occasionally when I don't want a photo to pollute my Flickr stream
Posterous http://posterous.com
The dead simple email to blog service have an iPhone app which allows you to take and collect photos on your iPhone and assemble them into a collection, and then upload them to your posterous blog. Very cool.
I hope these help and I don't doubt they will update over time. Follow me on Twitter, drop me a message/@reply or DM me with feedback or other services that I missed.
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