It's 85 degrees outside, humid as hell, and I'm fully suited up for a meeting with a recruiter. God help me.

It was actually 90 degrees according to my car's on-board computer.

4:25:03 PM | Comments: | Topics: florida_living job_hunting 

From UserLand with Love

Today's big news: The New York Times on Radio UserLand.

At first I thought that Dave was pointing to an NYT review of Radio. Oops.

This is bigger. NYT content flowing through Radio.

Groovy.

Now if only UserLand would come up with a better interface for viewing feeds. Subscribing to many feeds, or even just a few that have high-volume, quickly results in Information Overload. Especially for people like me who only look at the aggregator perhaps once or twice per day. The "Magnifying Glass" view doesn't cut it.

I'm thinking that using DHTML to present a collapsed outline view would be a neat trick. The initial view just shows the feed names and timestamp. Clicking on a feed would expand it with a list of titles. For the feeds that include whole content, the content would be truncated to a single line or two in this view, and clicking and individual item would expand it to a complete view.

And while I'm thinking of cool tricks to improve Radio, how about a mechanism to e-mail an item? A new "Mail" icon in the Aggregator and Home view would open up the WYSIWYG editor as usual, but there would be a field for entering an e-mail address and a "Send" button instead of Post / Publish.

10:27:45 AM | Comments: | Topics: aggregation radio radio_wishlist 

WAP = CRAP

That was the headline on my former European blog after I had my spiffy new Nokia 7110 for a few days. In "I am Curious, Wireless", Glenn mentions the Billions of SMS messages that Europeans send and proceeds to state:

Contrast that with Americans’ experiences with WAP, which Jakob Nielsen and the Nielsen Norman Group effectively killed development on when their report came out [...] [80211b News]

Bit of an incongruous leap, SMS and WAP are two very different things. And NNG's study had nothing to do with the experiences of Americans, they studied Brits in London attempting to use local services. WAP effectively killed itself, no help from NNG required, by not being able to meet user expectations in an effective manner. A quote from the study:

[O]ne of our users calculated that it would have been cheaper for her to buy a newspaper and throw away everything but the TV listings than to look up that evening's BBC programs on her WAP phone.

WAP never took off anywhere. It sucked, and everyone who fell for the hype and paid full price for the latest WAP-enabled phone figured that out very quickly. I am amongst that group, unfortunately. Now I am older and (hopefully) wiser, and the bad taste that WAP left in my mouth plays a significant role in my pessimism over PDA-based phones and consumer-oriented wireless messaging in America.

In my posting yesterday I talked about why Americans really don't use SMS. Europeans use SMS because it's more socially acceptable than calling, it's often cheaper than calling since Europeans don't usually get many or any bundled minutes, and European carriers figured out that cross-carrier messaging was critical to adoption very early in the game.

Americans don't have the same motivations to use SMS in the first place, and the lack of carrier interconnections pretty much killed any possibility of early-adopter support. Not to mention that the carriers never promoted messaging: AT&T Wireless had SMS-style messaging with an Internet e-mail gateway years ago!

What the carriers are doing now is too little, too late.

SmartPhone-like devices are the next step. Synchronization with Outlook is the "Killer App." If the vendors (or a third-party) provide an Avantgo-like system like I described, in which phones will automatically retrieve and update the sorts of Internet-based information that users want, allowing for instant access, they will have fulfilled the promise of WAP while side-stepping it's primary failure.

Imagine stock quotes, weather, and movie times at your fingertips, without the wait, and without trying to type URLs on a numeric keypad. Americans will use that, and so will everyone else.

 

3:46:39 AM | Comments: | Topics: messaging wireless