Freemium

Tyler Nichols has a blog post that's making the rounds on the internet.  He talks about giving up the "freemium" business model after a very disappointing experience trying to make it work.  I have to say, I agree wholeheartedly with his argument:

I have come to the realization that most people who want something for free will never, ever think of paying you, no matter how valuable they find your service.

I can't argue with that.  In fact, I think that's it points to a very large problem in today's economy.  People expect high-quality products and services for free.  At the same time, Tyler is talking about giving up a business model that would have been baffling to many, many people as recently as ten years ago:

The site uses a freemium model allowing people to create personalized printable santa letters for their children for free. In addition to the free version, I also offered a paid version that includes a higher resolution letter, a personalized envelope and door hanger for a nominal cost.

He created a business that let parents create letters from Santa Claus for their children.  For free.  But they could pay for a higher resolution of the same letter they just got for free.  Really?

Let's play a game.  I'll give you a newspaper, competitive with any of the leading, daily, American newspapers, for free.  Or you can buy the same newspaper with fewer ads and nicer typography.  I'll give you James Patterson's next book for free.  Or you can pay to read the same book on thicker paper.  I'll let you watch next summer's blockbuster, say, Prometheus or  Men in Black 3, for free.  Would you pay to watch that movie on a bigger screen?  How much nicer would that paper have to be to pay for a free novel?

Let's play another game.  I'll give you Miles Davis' first album for free, but you're going to pay for Birth of the Cool.  You're definitely paying for Bitches' Brew.  I'll give you Haruki Murakami's first book for free, and I'll give you his second book for $2.99.  But you're not getting 1Q84 for free.  I'll give you a free letter from Santa, but you're going to pay for the followup "are you being a good boy?" letter from Mrs. Clause in June. 

#The tyrranny of the hashtag

Do you know what you should be talking about right now?  A TV show just told me what I should be talking about.  Most shows implicitly hope that you do talk about what you see, but this one told me–explicitly–to talk about it, and how to talk about it.

I used to watch quite a bit of the Food Network, and I credit Mario, and Emeril, and Alton, and David Rosengarten for whatever cooking ability I have.  I don't watch much of the network anymore, but I just watched an episode in the series that promises to answer the very pressing question, "Who will be the next Iron Chef?"

The episode featured a lineup of chefs I've seen on other cooking shows over the years competing in standard Top Chef/Iron Chef-type challenges, but it featured a new element.  Throughout the show, there was a line of text sitting in the top left corner: #NextIronChef. 

The #hashtag started as an interesting, original concept to aid searches.  It's a new step to have a show take up screen real-estate telling me just what #term I should use just in case I should happen to mention it on a social network. 

On Google Reader

Have you ever had a skill or a talent that everyone loved?  Well, everyone but you?  Like a talented juggler who cringes every time someone asks him to juggle at a party.  That's how I imagine Google feels about Reader.

Google finally unveiled their facelift for Reader.  Before today, quite a few people have been up in arms about Google's decision to kill the "sharing" and "following" functions.  I barely used those features, but it struck me as really odd to kill features that have very loyal fans (including Iranian revolutionaries) and cost nothing to maintain.

Reader is not a product for casual users.  It's a powerful tool for keeping track of of literally thousands of articles and posts from many, many sources.  It lets you make snap decisions about what to read, what to skim, and what to skip without navigating away from the Reader page.  If you polled a thousand users about interface updates, I don't you'd get too many responses begging for way less information per square inch of screen real estate.  But that's exactly what they did.

I get that Google+ is not the smash hit they'd hoped for, and I understand their plan to nudge more people into the service.  But how many times does Google get to take a hatchet to successful products with loyal fans before they lose their golden status?

It's like they decided to double-space everything.

They were good, until they weren't

 I like Netflix.  I immediately liked their DVD by mail service, and when I later started using their streaming service, I fell in love with it.  I was able to catch up on several TV shows I'd put off watching for years.  All three seasons of Arrested Development took me less than a week.  It was a great way to unwind after work, or over lunch.  It had a pretty good library, and it worked very well.


Netflix got a lot of attention for their unconventional policies:

At Netflix, the vacation policy is audaciously simple and simply audacious. Salaried employees can take as much time off as they'd like, whenever they want to take it. Nobody – not employees themselves, not managers – tracks vacation days.

 They also got a lot of attention for the stock's uphill sprint.  They could do no wrong.  Until they messed up royally.  The stock closed at $80.86 today, down from a high of nearly $305 just a few months ago.

This recent article, about Groupon, reminded me of Netflix's meteoric rise:

Only a few months ago, Groupon was the Internet's next great thing. Business media christened it the fastest growing company ever. Copycats proliferated. And investors salivated over the prospect of Groupon going public.

The title, "Groupon is a Disaster," manages to succinctly convey the writer's opinion of the company.  Time will tell whether Groupon and Netflix are solid companies who've hit rough patches, or whether they're two ships of fools who managed to stumble into favorable winds (and piles of money) en route to shipwreck.

A big company that turns out to be have been run by nitwits isn't exactly remarkable.  BP's oil spill and Borders' last decade in existence are good examples of this.  But it amazes me that there are so many tech giants with who can't definitively separate themselves from the Pets.coms and the Myspaces.  Facebook, LinkedIn, Foursquare, and Twitter all have long lines of eager, would-be investors, and long lines of fawning journalists at their doors.  Just like Netflix did a year ago.  

I found my To-Do progam

I've been looking for a great To-Do program for a while.  Google Tasks was promising, because I've usually got Gmail open in one tab, but it just never worked for me.  It took up a small corner of the screen, so if you've got 50+ items on a list, which is easy when you're trying to capture "open loops" like David Allen's Getting Things Done system recommends, you have to scroll through a large list in an unwieldy window.  And the fact that it shares the screen with your email inbox and–quite likely–Google Chat buddy list, means that you're fighting distractions every time you look at your To-Do list.

Google doesn't publicize this, but they have a website for Tasks.  It's used on smart phones, where you can't split the screen between email and a To-Do list.  Here it is.  It looks very much like your inbox, but for tasks.  No distractions, no frills.  You can organize your tasks into projects on the side, like Gmail labels.  Perfect for me.

E-tailing's beautiful argument

I'm not positive, but I'm fairly certain that random pedestrians–not paying customers–don't stroll in and out of Amazon's buildings all day long, clogging their toilets, breaking their toilet paper dispensers, and stealing their soap pumps.  I'm also fairly certain that few people have decided that Amazon's buildings are a good place to sit down and read a magazine or take a nap while they're drunk.  Or high.  Again, I can't be sure, but I'm pretty confident that no ever successfully wheedled, guilt-tripped, intimidated, or threatened their computer screen into giving an extra parking validation or into accepting an expired coupon.

I've seen lots of talk about how online retailers don't have the same overhead that brick-and-mortar stores have, and they have lower labor costs, etc.  There's one aspect that isn't talked about very often, at least not in brutally honest terms. 

E-tailers have a barrier that keeps out the 20% that aren't worth anyone's time.  You have to have a credit card and you have to be savvy enough to use a computer.  That means they can focus on the 80% who are interested in exchanging money for a good or service at the listed price.  They don't have to deal with people whose only interest in any given store is as a place to have a nice bowel movement or a good nap.  They can focus on the 80% who actually want to, you know, buy stuff.  They can deal with the 80% of consumers understand that haggling is not a generally accepted practice in American life instead of the 20% who think that a wink and a smile or a raised voice and threat to "speak to your supervisor" justifies the off-chance of a 50¢ discount.

Once upon a time, a customer could bang a can of beans again their shopping cart and noisily tell a clerk, "I'm a loyal, paying customer!"  There was a pretty good chance they'd get a discount on the dented can, or the scuffed book, or whatever it was.  I'll be amazed if there comes a point in my life where I can't go to some kind of store and buy a loaf of bread.  At the same time, I'll be amazed if I can still go to a store and buy a new book, poster, or movie in twenty years.  I'll be shocked if clothing stores look anything like they currently do a couple of decades from now. 

The shift from X% vs Y% in the online% vs brick-and-mortar% ratio is going to keep moving.  But I just started wondering how much of that is driven by retailers realizing that some customers just aren't worth chasing.

Was it a letdown?

Apple's big announcement–the Beatles are now in the iTunes store–let a few people down.  It wasn't a steaming music service and neither was it some combination of iTunes, Twitter, and/or Facebook.  I'm certain that I will, in fact, forget Tuesday, the 16th of November, 2010.  Still, it is interesting to see them working to fill the biggest hole in the iTunes catalog years after the Beatles' absence stopped being an issue.

The big reveal, part two

I'm already over Facebook's non-event.  This teaser from Apple is certainly making that even easier:

Quote for the day

It turns out that I, and whole lot of other people, were wrong about Facebook's big, new feature.  But they did introduce something that leverages stuff and integrates things and, well, I think Perez Hilton says it best:

This is pretty intense. And we don't really get it.

On Facebook

I had a thought halfway through my last post.  It didn't really have any place in my last post, so I didn't put it anywhere.  Here's my thought:  Facebook can't do anything right.

They were sitting in the slingshot right when people realized that Myspace was terrible.  They rode that momentum until they reached a critical mass.  Are you going to join a social networking service if only a fraction of your friends or colleagues were members?

IE 6 was really, really popular for a while.  Even today, with Firefox, Chrome, and Safari, it refuses to die.  It is–and always was–terrible.  Bud Light is a terrible beer.  Two and a Half Men isn't a funny show.  Facebook is a terrible service.

• They can't do privacy right.  Period.
• They can't give users features they want.  (Dislike button?)
• They force users to use features they don't want.  (Redesigns anyone?)
• They can't even get something as simple as chat right.

They fell into half a billion users.  They've upped the number of photos you can upload, and they've introduced newer algorithms for suggesting friends.  What else?  Can you imagine another tech company that could manage to be an industry darling for half a decade, acquire half a billion users, and still manage to never introduce a (really) useful or a (really) innovative feature? 

@facebook.com

When someone gives you their email address, do you judge them?  It's always interesting to find out that someone you had respected just moments earlier can be reached at sexy_manotaur19@something.com.  I don't see that very often anymore.  I still do, but most people have caught on to the fact that email is not just a passing fad.  But I'm still judging the second half of your email address.  Do you use Aol's email system?  Even in 2010?  My mother does.  She signed up for Aol sometime around 1995.  I don't know if she's learned how to attach something to an email since the last time she asked me how to, well, do that.  Whenever I see someone's @aol.com email address, I imagine that person and my mom struggling to send attachments to each other.

There's a rumor going around the internet that Facebook is going to unveil their own @facebook.com email service on Monday.  So what are you going to think when someone give you an @facebook.com email address?  Facebook can't even make a decent chat program.  Maybe that's harsh.  It's entirely possible that Facebook can make a chat program that isn't terrible.  Maybe they just choose not to.  I could be wrong, but I doubt that Facebook is going to unveil an email system along with a calendar, decent chat service, and a cloud-based productivity suite that's actually competitive with Microsoft Office.  And make it all of those pieces work with each other.  Seamlessly.

They're not going to do it.  So Facebook's email service is going to less capable than Gmail.  Less capable isn't necessarily unmarketable.  Lower common denominators can be very popular.  Factories churned out quite a few Yugos.  Is New York Magazine (and many others) getting hot and bothered by the rumor that Facebook is going to unveil their very own Yugo?

This is still a rumor, but it sounds like there might be something to it.  We won't have to wait very long to see.  Even if they don't introduce an @facebook.com email service on Monday, I wouldn't be surprised if they do eventually do something like that.  What would surprise me is Facebook creating something that's not an internet Yugo.

Was it worth it?

I'm not surprised that the Republicans had a big night, I can't say that the Democrats didn't bring it on themselves.  There's plenty to say about the elections, but so much has already been said by people with more talent than I have.

I do have one observation.  Over the last two years I've been frustrated, exasperated, and downright angry at times.  But I often felt that the party in power was looking out for my interests.  I don't anticipate that same feeling from Boehner and company.

Reading more

I love my RSS reader.  I use Google's Reader, and I've been adding feeds for about two years.  At first, I was obsessive about reading, or at least skimming, everything in my list.  That could be a few hundred items a day.  I wouldn't actually read three hundred items in a day, but I'd read the headline, the first sentence or two, and then go on to the next item.  If it was interesting and short, I'd read the whole thing (maybe 20-50 items a day) and if it was interesting and long, I'd open the story in a tab in the background (maybe 5-10 items a day).

I've cut back quite a bit from that, but I still read many news stories and blog posts in my reader.  But I've been questioning how few I can actually read.  Every hour I spend reading news is an hour I don't spend reading books, and I usually get much, much more out of reading books.

I know what I'm missing, but not why

I'm not a baseball fan, but I used to play once in a while, mostly at picnics.  I wasn't very good, but I knew why I wasn't very good.  I always swung at the ball too soon.  I noticed this, I just didn't care enough to actually practice.  But I had a totally different problem than someone who swings at where the baseball was two seconds ago.  Or someone who can't even get the bat in the same plane as the ball.

I've been working on setting goals for myself, and sticking to them.  I noticed that I knew much more about why I never could hit a baseball than why I go on and off diets, or why I can't stick to an exercise routine, or why I can't take that next step with my job, life, education, or whatever it happens to be.  I don't ask myself, "Why didn't I make that call?"  I'll think, "I didn't make that call, but I didn't eat potato chips.  I'm batting .500."  Time to start asking why.

The internet's potential

This blog post, "Beware The Internet As Liberation Theology," from Forbes.com pushes back against some recent claims that Peter Singer  has made about the potential of the internet.  But really, it pushes back against anyone who still thinks that's it's just a matter of time until the internet opens our door (soon!) to the new Golden Age that's impatiently waiting for us on our doormat.  From the post:

What does it mean to say that everyone now has access to the world’s greatest libraries when studies show that many Millennials – the generation born and raised after the arrival of the Internet – can barely use Google to search the web? What does it mean to say that the power of corporate media has been broken by independent bloggers when, increasingly, those corporations are crowd sourcing content from bloggers for little or  (as is mostly the case) nothing?

There are times when I think about the fact that out of, say, 50,000 or 100,000 or 200,000 years of human existence, I'm living in an era that's defined by technologies that have only existed during my lifetime. So what's with the cat pictures and the Youtube fights? 

Instant search

Google unveiled another new feature today: Instant search.  Start typing search terms into Google, and results appear as you type, in almost real time.  

I could be wrong, but I have a hard time imagining very many people who would get something out of this feature that they don't already have.  Search engines already predict what you're going to search for based on what you're typing as you type.  Google's page on Instant tries to make a case for the new feature:

Before Google Instant, the typical searcher took more than 9 seconds to enter a search term, and we saw many examples of searches that took 30-90 seconds to type.

I can only think of one person I know who might take a minute and a half to type in a few search terms.  He types with one finger, and doesn't look at the screen while he's typing.  Would shaving "2-5 seconds" off each search, as Google promises, make up for this massive increase in complexity?  If you take a longer than average time to search, are you the kind of user that wants thousands of results flashing in front of your eyes and flitting away as you type each letter? 

At the opposite end of the spectrum, away from hunt-and-peck typists, I don't think power users will get much out of this either.  If I hadn't read about the new feature, I might have never even noticed.  I use Firefox's search bar for almost all my searches. 

But it is an interesting experiment, and I give them credit for continuing to roll out new features even though their search engine is already really really good.  Keep in mind, they're sorting through enormous amounts of information and presenting it all onscreen at a pace that was the stuff of science fiction a decade ago.

Priority inbox

I was ecstatic when I first heard about Gmail's new feature, Priority Inbox.  I was then furious when my Gmail account didn't get the feature until almost a week after they started rolling it out.

After I did get it, I was disappointed.  It seemed like it could be very useful for people dealing with very high volumes of email.  In Priority Inbox, emails from important contacts go in the "Priority Inbox" that sits on top of your regular inbox, where and all other messages go.  But I've already built my own system with a combination of filters and labels to assign different values for incoming mail.  I've got filters that "star" emails from a handful of really important people, as do notices from my bank.  My different newsletters, shopping notifications, and Facebook updates have their own labels.

Priority Inbox uses stars to indicate correspondence that needs a follow up, and I don't use them that way.  I didn't like how the new system left starred messages at the top of your inbox.  It if you don't have any unread, important messages, there's a big banner saying, "Woohoo! You've read all the important messages in your inbox."  That instantly went in my top-ten-most-annoying-things-ever list.  After a couple days of playing with the new set-up, I stopped using it.  Until I noticed that you have a lot of power to customize how Priority Inbox works.

Right now I've got it set up so that if I don't have any "important" messages, my inbox looks just like it always did.  If I get an important message (or a few) then the Priority Inbox kicks in.  I used to have any work emails that went to my personal account (either emails from coworkers or emails forwarded from my work account) get a certain label.  I wish I'd had Priority Inbox back then, because you can tweak your settings so that a particular label, like "Work," gets sent to what's basically an inbox within an inbox. 

I'm still playing around with the settings, but I love it.  I've seen a few gushing reviews for Priority Inbox, but I haven't seen any point out the customization that's possible.  (Full disclosure: I have not made an exhaustive search for any and all review.)   I just can't believe that I almost shelved a really powerful tool for taming my inbox.

I've missed reading Andrew

Today, Andrew Sullivan returned from his annual vacation from blogging, and one of his first posts he emphasized a theme that he's talked about a lot in his coverage of Obama.  I've been getting more and more dispirited over recent political turns, but now I see the same pattern that Obama has consistently followed in his dealings with his opposition.  Sullivan says it better than I can:

Yesterday's speech by the president, if you missed it, was a barn-stormer. Yes, it's the same old, same old pattern: he allows the opposition not just to vent and criticize (as they should) but to control the discourse for months, to drown out every other sound, to vent and crow and vilify and intimidate the cable news weenies into quivering puppies in need of crate-training. And then he comes back with a speech like that one.

Animated Google

Google changes the logo on their frontpage from time to time.  Most of the time, they just work the Google logo into an image that relates to something happening at the moment, like the football-related logos that were up throughout June. 

The most famous is very likely the Pacman tribute they posted a little while ago.  (Best of all, it's fully playable!)

Responsible for a global drop in productivity

Today, their logo is a bunch of small, colorful circles making up the letters in "Google."  If you move your cursor over them, they zip around the window, zooming in and out until they return to their starting positions. 

 

 Google's animated homepage

This looks just like a lot of pages that web designers have made to show off the power of HTML5, the next revision of HTML that would incorporate a lot of the things, like animation, that designers currently use Flash for.  They might just be showing off.  But they might be trying to make a whole lot of people sit up and notice what HTML5 can do.

Your language and you

This article, from The New York Times, has been making the rounds on the internet lately, and it's one of the most thought-provoking pieces that I've read in a while.  The title, Does Your Language Shape How You Think?, tells you what the article is about.  I'm a language geek, so it's natural that I'd be interested in things like this:

When your language routinely obliges you to specify certain types of information, it forces you to be attentive to certain details in the world and to certain aspects of experience that speakers of other languages may not be required to think about all the time. And since such habits of speech are cultivated from the earliest age, it is only natural that they can settle into habits of mind that go beyond language itself, affecting your experiences, perceptions, associations, feelings, memories and orientation in the world.

Back in the "bad, old days," the assumption that one's language reinforced nationalist and sometimes racist stereotypes was all too common.  That view has been largely banished, but this article is fascinating examination of the ways in which your language does color your perceptions