Technology

I bought a big jar of hand cream a while ago. I love it – it works great, it smells good, my hands always thank me.

But it comes with a screw-on lid. Not a big deal, right? I thought so as well. But I noticed that the jar has lasted me a long, long, long time.

Last week, I ordered more cream to put around the house. One of the options was to order a pump lid for an extra $1.50. I wasn’t sure it would work since the cream is really thick, but on a whim I decided to try it.

Two days after I screwed on the pump lid, I’ve gone through the rest of the cream and have transferred the pump to a new jar.

Amazing how something small like that can increase usage so dramatically. I think back as to why the old jar lasted me so long – it was because there was always an easier option around – a tube with a pop lid, a dispenser, something that was easier even if it wasn’t as good.

Imagine being the producer of a great product, a product that was clearly superior to everything else out there, but it was always a second or third choice because of how it was packaged and dispensed. The packaging and the dispensing is the user interface for the cream. And it was really holding the core product back.

If the cream manufacturer had given away the pump lid – something that probably cost less than 50 cents to manufacture – I would have gone through three jars instead of just one in the same time, increasing revenues and customer satisfaction at the same time.

When you build accessories/add-ons that make your product easier to use and increase usage, give that stuff away like candy! Your main goal is to get people to use and love your product. Anything that makes that easier is only a good thing.

As I tried to collect my “lifestream” data for my In The Moment tab, I first investigated the incredible land of WordPress plugins. This is one of the core reasons I use WordPress – the open platform means that there’s probably a plugin for pretty much anything you can think of.

There are several plugins that promise to collect all  your data from around the web. The primary issue with these is that they are just RSS feeds themselves. That means none of the data is duplicated onto your database. That’s fine if all you want to do is showcase the latest, but I actually wanted to duplicate it and have a copy myself.

1. Lifestream seems like the oldest one out there. But the plugin seemed complex and would require me to write a class file etc. Er… right. Also, given the date it was created, I wasn’t sure it would work with WP 2.6. Gave it a pass.

2. SimpleLife is display only, no archive. I understand why some people want display only. I just want more.

3. Lifestream (yes, another with the same name) is the newest and seems to work for a lot of people. When I tried it, the formatting was very messed up and I couldn’t figure out where to change it. And it still had the issue of not being in my db.

4. WP-o-matic is a plugin that pulls RSS feeds from anywhere and imports it into the database. This seemed perfect and I use it for other things on this blog, but it has two issues. One, it is highly temperamental and second, it populates the header and the body with the same content. So the content of a tweet would be the header and the body. Ugh-ly. I guess I could have figured out a way to change the template of a post based on whether it was in the category “In The Moment”, but it felt like complex code and I didn’t venture there.

5. Twitter Tools by Alex King does do a database import. However, it only works for Twitter and it also had the “tweet as header and body” issue.

Besides these plugins there are others that do the same thing including MyBlogLog’s “new with me” feature and the Profilactic WP plugin. I looked at them, but seeing they are all just RSS feeds, I skipped them for the same reason.

If you are looking for a plugin that will display the last 20 tweets or last couple of days of activity, one of these plugins is sure to meet your needs.

Since I was looking for database import (and backup of my dispered data), and a reasonably good presentation of the results, none of the plugins I could find met my needs. I gave up and decided to use Tumblr instead. More to come on the pros and cons of that decision.

With the Web 2.0 goodness, we are leaving tracks everywhere. Your photos are on FlickR, your videos on YouTube, your tweets are on Twitter, Identi.ca or Plurk (if you hopped on that passing craze). Your song choices are on LastFM or Pandora, links you like are on Digg or StumbleUpon and your blog posts are on WordPress, Tumblr or any of the other providers.

And all of this is *your* data. You created it, it is a piece of you – what you were thinking, looking at, watching, saying or reading at a moment in your life. I, for one, want a record of that.

I know there are websites that will aggregate that for you, but again – it is being aggregated somewhere else – someone else now owns your precious data and to get it you have to log in, sign up and hand them tons of information.

So I decided to just aggregate everything myself. It took a fair bit of investigation to figure out how exactly I wanted to configure things – enough to deserve a separate, followup post. But now I have what I want.

And voila – the new tab on my blog. In The Moment.

In The Moment is what I named my Tumblr blog when I started it. At that point, Tumblr was my repository for all my data – my blog posts, my tweets, everything. I’ve now repurposed it to collect all my non-blog “lifestream” data [Updated – i.e. the In The Moment tab *is* my Tumblog and the RSS feeds pull in all my dispersed data]. Right now it is mainly tweets, but all other things will be added in as well.

In The Moment is still a bit of work in process. Skinning my Tumblog to look like my main blog was more work with CSS than I had expected and there are little nits I am working through.

But it is up and it is active. And it is me… as I live in the moment.

This image is just brilliant.

It is from Fred Wilson’s Web 2.0 Expo talk. Created by Gyroxide.

Having lived in Silicon Valley, I concur wholeheartedly. We need a better term. One of the greatest cities in the world is not an “alley” – not in the context of the tech world or in any other dimension.

It is now my desktop background.

I caved and got an iPhone. No, I didn’t get AT&T and lock myself into their egregious pricing and business policies. A very kind friend upgraded to the 3G and donated his 1G 8MB phone to me! It is unlocked and worked on T-Mobile (and will work with any SIM card I so choose).

The form factor is great. Sleek and elegant. I miss the keyboard, but not terribly since the predictive typing is excellent. What makes the phone is the software.

My smartphone journey started with the Blackberry in 2002. It was an incredible email device and everything synced with my work needs – contacts, calendar etc. In 2005, searching for more functionality, I switched to the Treo. What was great about it was the Palm OS and the plethora of apps available. I had a very customized alarm clock, the NYC subway map in the palm of my hands and a whole load of little games to keep me occupied.

But the Treo’s form factor was terrible – it was just too huge. And it handled media relatively poorly. Especially music.

The iPhone is like the Treo on steroids. The form factor is great, the integrated music, videos and photos are excellent and most importantly, the apps make the phone.

Right now, I have a whole bunch of apps on it that I could not imagine living without – organizational apps, to-do apps, location-based recommendation apps, games, the much loved NYC subway map… I basically walk around with almost all the critical data that I need while mobile.

But… while the apps are great, the basic OS is merely acceptable. It is slow – when I hit the SMS icon, it takes a while to load up the messages, same with address book and other apps. It doesn’t offer basic functionality – like the much talked about cut and paste, and most importantly, it is locked to AT&T and Apple continues to spend valuable resources ensuring the lock stays is place.

What this means is that if Google does a halfway decent job with Android¹, there is a market that is ready to switch over. Give me a solid OS, an app store that is truly open and multiple carriers and I would switch. Now, the device has to be sleek, but I’ll even live with a slightly bigger form factor if I don’t have to constantly worry about bricking my phone.

Treo started the trend, but dropped the ball. It will be interesting to see who fulfills the promise in the long term.

_{Image courtesy this Wired article. Wired and Leander Kahney own all rights.}

1. No, Windows Mobile will not cut it. I’ve tried it and it is potentially the worst mobile OS in history! ↩

A couple of weeks ago, I was at the MoMA design store in midtown Manhattan. I love that store since they have such innovative product designs across a spectrum of products.

I happened on this contact lens case and immediately fell in love. As someone who will likely have to wear contact lenses forever, the case is something I interact with every day. And contact lens cases are extraordinarily dull.

This case was so cute – bright, cheerful and shaped like eyes. Seeing it would brighten up my day for sure, so I bought it. Seven bucks. Fine. Most contact lens cases come free with solution or you get them from your doctor – seven dollars is therefore somewhat expensive for a case (even if it is not an expensive purchase in general – 1.5 Starbucks coffee!)

I went home and started using it. So cute… I did notice that since the base is colored, it is hard to see the lens floating in it, but I could live with that.

Then, last week, I needed to get my eyes examined. Knowing the doc would want to see me with my lenses on, I grabbed the case, planning to throw it in my bag. As soon as I picked it up and walked out of the bathroom, the fluid was sloshing over my palm. Huh. Weird. I grabbed a tissue and ran out of the door. Must have been an accident, right? No. Definitely not. By the time I got to the doc, the tissue was soaked and the lenses were in microscopic levels of liquid.

What is the purpose of a lens case? To keep the contacts in the solution. One presumes that the case should be movable while still fulfilling its goal for existence. This was a stunning failure. Thank god I found this out in a non-critical situation. What if I had traveled with these cases on a trip? It would have been a disaster.

I’m more than surprised that MoMA has these cases. Cute? Definitely. Filling the basic function? Absolutely not. And something that doesn’t work doesn’t deserve to be in the store.

Good design is where the form is exquisite while also meeting all the function requirements of the product. Incredible form with terrible function does not work for me¹.

The same principle holds true in online design. Interaction design is the most critical aspect a website. If your site is super-pretty but a user can’t figure out how to get through the flow without falling out, there’s no point to it.

It always makes sense to start the question “What does the product need to accomplish”? In this case, it is to keep the contact lenses safe in the solution. In the case of an ecommerce site, it is to enable a frictionless transaction. Whatever the goal is, figure it out and make sure that there are no distractions along the way. Even if the site is ugly, if it enables the customer to fulfill her goal, it is infinitely better than having an pretty site that is hard to use.

The ideal solution, of course, is to have a product that can do both. Those are the products that deserve to be in MoMA’s design store.

UPDATE: Apparently I had a defective one. The new one I have has a seal that works. So, apologies to the MoMA and the designer. That said, the underlying point of the post holds – great design is when a product is exceptional at what it does with great design.

1. For example, super-high heels are a completely failure in this regard and I refuse to wear them and suffer just because it makes me look better ↩

I’m spring fall cleaning my digital life. It is truly incredible how much digital junk one can collect and how many digital chores exist. And just like the offline world where every new acquisition of an item leads to extra work (cleaning the item, taking care of it, insuring it if appropriate etc.), every user account, every digital image and every blog needs work.

The volume of data is just ridiculous. Let’s start with email – I started sending email in 1993 (CompuServe baby!) and while I don’t have those emails, I have email dating back to 1995! Maybe it is because I am a bit of a pack rat when it comes to email, but sorting through, categorizing, importing, archiving and ensuring the email is in the right format (making all the Windows emails Mac compatible) has been quite a task.

Then there’s the music. A few years ago, R and I combined our music. We have over a 100 gigs of it… figuring out a solution where we can both share the music but keep it in sync has been a huge challenge. It still doesn’t work all the time, but at now, we set up a Mac Mini as a shared server and plug the music drive in to share it. Works most of the time…

Photos have exploded this year. And again, it’s something we want both people to have access to. So, you need to tag them, sort them and ensure the memory cards are downloaded. Oh, the tags have go cross platform (windows and mac). And if you shoot in RAW, you need to convert them to JPGs to store them on your computer and the “negatives” can remain on a hard drive. Damn, the work flow is complex!

Online passwords have to be maintained. I have no idea the number of sites where I have passwords, much less which email I used with it and what on earth the password even is.

Oh, and le blogs… is it so hard to pop open a tab and update it? Not really, but given all the other digital cleaning I’m doing, I’ve felt overwhelmed and reluctant to post…

And given all this digital organizing, the real world organizing has taken a back seat. So for a few weeks, I’ll have to focus on that and while I do, my digital stuff will get messy again. So I will focus on the digital for a bit again and while I do that… the cycle of life… argh!

_{Picture from the Apple store}

When the iPhone first came out, I desperately wanted one, but refused to switch my carrier to AT&T (which has incredibly bad service in Manhattan). Plus, I needed a phone I could unlock so I could use a local SIM while I traveled out of the country.

And by the time the first gen iPhone was unlocked, the 2nd gen one was looming large. So I waited.

Now the second gen iPhone, the 3G one is out. But… it is not yet unlocked. It will most certainly be jailbroken¹, but unlocked ²? Not sure.

So I am spending some time this weekend following the incredible hackers from the iPhone Dev Team. Here’s hoping they can unlock the 3G baseband. Then I can *finally* have the phone without having to live with terrible service.

1. Jailbreaking an iPhone is where you can run any application on it, not just Apple approved apps ↩

2. Unlocking an iPhone makes it usable on any GSM carrier – T-Mobile in the US and any GSM carrier worldwide ↩

In the past couple of years, Social Networks have changed online behavior. If you want to dig deeper into Social Networks, Social graphs, games, apps and all the other buzz words doing the rounds these days, the Graphing Social Patters conference in Washington DC is the one to go to.

If I was more mobile, I’d schlep out there from June 9th through the 11th.

Besides the speaker list and all the panels, another thing that makes this conference much more interesting is Mr. Facebook himself, my buddy and the Program Chair, Dave McClure 🙂

Dave wanted me to let you know that –

If you are a starving geek, you can get a 30% off discount by using the following reg code: gspe08fgd

And if you’ve built an app & want to enter the AppNite demo contest, you can get a 50% off discount by entering your app here.

Good luck, Dave – I am sure it will be awesome.

Every time I post on Craigslist for a part-time position for Web work (coding, design, etc.) I get a ton of replies from CURRENT eBay employees who all say they can work up to 20 hours a week on moonlighting freelance. One person we hired for a facebook application was absolutely horrendous – but I still am amazed at how he often came to our office in the middle of the work-day (long lunch???) to do milestone meetings. Is life at eBay that slow & boring that you have to look for outside work? Or do they not pay enough? Inquiring minds want to know….
yumio.net » What is up with eBay employees?

Wow. That’s just… amazing. Shocking. Mind-boggling.

When I worked at eBay , none of us had time to breathe. It was go-go-go all the time. I didn’t have time to go to the doctor or dentist till it became an emergency…I know someone who worked from a hospital room while recovering. I know someone who slept on a conference room floor to ensure something rolled out. I know someone who checked email right after getting married.

While that might be one extreme, I wonder what’s changed over there. Once apathy sets in, reversing it is going to be really, really hard.