My memory's a little hazy about this but around 1997 or 1998 Craig brought on a woman to help him make CL into more of a business. They had a serious falling out and for a while the craigsllist name was in dispute. the woman split off to make a clone site called listfoundation and she somehow also owned craigslist.com while craig retained craigslist.org. It was a mess. Craig's a nice guy, I only know one person who's met him who doesn't like him but he's never had much of a head for business.
Craigslist has been an invaluable resource for me. I've found apartments, sold my furniture when I had to move out of said apartments due to unemployment [one of which was directly across the street from the CL office] and 3 out of my 4 full-time jobs from there.
Craig's a great guy but, as you can probably tell from reading his comments on the issue he doesn't always think things through and has a tendency to wing it. My hope is that the free spirit of Craig and the, well, corporateness of eBay don't end up at odds. Most of you probably don't remember the whole craigslist/ListFoundation thing and I don't want another repeat of that.
Of course the big brokerage houses are cool on Google because they see it as a threat to their powerbase and it has nothing to do with their P/E ratio of over 100 and a lack of voting rights for the shares.
It seems to me that the market makers aren't big on Google because they don't think they'll make a lot of money on it. If it ends up in the hands of individual investors primarily that will probably make it a worse bet due to the fact that they're much more volatile.
The N64 had a whole ton of other problems besides the fact that Nintendo treated third-party developers like crap. The cartridge + license fees for games was over $30/unit for an outside developer. Nintendo was still trying to exercise content control and the N64 was hell to develop for.
The only thing that Microsoft could do to 'take' Sony is to sign a lot of exclusive deals with pretty much every top developer. This round of consoles has shown that it doesn't matter how much more powerful the hardware is if you don't have enough games to please the market.
It's not like mainland China TVs are known for their high quality and reliability anywqay, they're aimed squarely at the "OMG I can get a 27" TV for $200!?!" crowd.
I look at it like multiplying numbers less than one. If Apex is a 0.7 and Microsoft is a 0.8 [I'm feeling generous] then the resultant TVs will be 0.56.
I personally know 7 or 8 people who only have a land line because they need DSL. I know several more [myself included] who went for cable because there was no 'naked' DSL option. In San Francisco cable internet has been very slow to spread because the cable system is so old and hacked together.
That said, I'm never giving SBC a dime of my money again if I can help it.
"Doesn't it occur to the RIAA that music fans have no need to buy the CD if the radio station is always playing a particular artist's music?"
Ah, you're going down the rabbit hole now. The major labels do this so that acts that they don't own don't get airplay. This is serious, calculated stuff going on. The labels keep just a broad enough variety of artists so that they're covered in all the main markets and demographics and then restrict what's played to only include their material. By limiting what is played on the air their consumers aren't even aware of non-major artists.
Quoth Anthony Pratkanis:
"You cannot control what people think. You can, however, control what they think about."
Isn't it time for Google finally to put some work into refining their results to exclude tricks like this?
It was time to do that at least a year ago. It's pretty much impossible to find good information on any popular consumer product and this is a problem that's been around for a long time.
But they're too busy making an email application with 9 frames and 200k of Javascript to pay attention to the reason people use them in the first place. It's a little disappointing, I'm an AltaVista alumni and I got to watch them forget about search and do a bunch of useless crap instead, then die. I was hoping Google would be different.
I hope this apparent lack of quality won't also be apparent in Roku's Soundbridge product, I've been pretty excited about that one. It looks like a good [non ugly] alternative to the Slim Devices stuff. The pricing is a little jacked though, the only difference between the 2 models is a bigger display and they want $250 for that.
I had a very brief poker experience in Vegas. I went to one of the crappy tourist tables with a low ante and low limits and proceeded to get schooled in the worst way possible by a couple guys who were actually good but felt like camping out at a newbie table because they were warming up for a big game. I'm not bad a poker and if it had just been the other random tourists at the table I probably would have done OK. Unfortunately that tends to not be the case in Vegas.
It can't be said enough: The graphics are not the interface.
A great UI should feel good as well as look good, but the 'feel' part is ultimately far, far more important. It's great that there's people who are contributing this sort of work to KDE and Gnome but the best icons in the world can't save you if the application is confusing. Pine has a good, easy to use interface and it has no graphics. Conversely you can get eleventy billion skins for XMMS but that doesn't make the dialog for selecting and adding files to a playlist any less cumbersome.
There's a quote in Tufte's Envisioning Information that I think about a lot:
"It is OK to decorate a building. It is not OK to build decoration."
[paraphrased and unattributed, my copy is at work]
The solution is tough, in my experience a lot of coders aren't keen on letting a 'mere' designer criticize their software and the number of good UI designers with spare time for OSS projects is pretty small.
Hey, does anyone else keep getting a little frustrated with the fact that Google seems hell-bent on introducing new services [orkut, gmail, etc.] but they haven't really done anything about the fact that 'optimizers' have basically cracked PageRank?
I worked at AltaVista in 1999, when I started there they were the dominant search engine and the #4 site on the internet. They made the same mistake of taking their search engine business for granted and pursuing a bunch of other non-related features. Guess what happened? A tiny little company came out of nowhere that had clearly superior search results and completely ate AV's lunch. That company? Google.
Now Google doesn't have Rod Schrock and his Harvard B-School crew of useless cronies at the helm so they do have a chance at being successful but they'd be best off focusing their efforts on their core business.
Of course, if there as something truely novel assocated with it then perhaps a patent would be appropriate
It's the job of the USPTO to decide if something is sufficiently novel to deserve patent status. That's the whole point of the thing.
One of the things about UIs is that the truly great ones seem obvious from the moment you use them. There was a time in [most of ] our lifetimes when there was no such thing as Cut, Copy and Paste on computers. Someone had to actually invent that. Thinking about it now it seems trivial but it was a revolutionary idea. It didn't get patented but that to me definitely qualifies as "sufficiently novel" especially given that every different DVD case I see seems to have 4 different patents regarding its disc retention system and the plastic tabs that hold it closed.
I'm just confused as to why software patents are all evil but patents for physical inventions are OK. A lot of people claim that it will hurt OSS but I see the opposite. Instead of ham-fistedly aping existing dominant UIs like cluttered toolbars maybe people will have to come up with some new ideas. I've [unsuccessfully but that's for a different thread] participated in open source projects in the past.
The interface is not the graphics, it's the underlying structure of the way the user interacts with the software. The graphics make a difference but UI design is the act of problem solving and creating solutions for how users interact with the information. There's plenty of unusable software out there with shiny buttons and nice icons.
In the case of iTunes the solution was the multi-paned interface in which an information hierarchy is established from general to specific through the browse parts of the window [moving from general > specific with 'results' filtered at the bottom.
Designing a novel, useful, original UI is as difficult as any other aspect of product development in the business world. If I can patent the design of a remote control [which wouldn't send the/. crew up in arms] why is it such a logical stretch to patent the interface for a software product that has the same type of functionality? In the case of the iPod the interface is both hardware and software. Doesn't Apple deserve the benefit of developing it just like a carmaker would for a braking system or a drug company for a new medicine?
UI design is [b]hard[/b] and good solutions require careful development.
But what happens if the innovating companies go away? What happens if nobody bothers with R&D? Who will Linspire rip off then?
Well, much like there's a lot of folks here who like to tinker with code in their spare time there's a few of us UI designer folks who like to do the same thing with interfaces.
I don't think companies are going to stop pushing for better UIs at all. In fact, having a superior interface is now a competitive advantage. All I know is that it was a lot easier for me to get a job 6 months ago than it was 2 years ago.
Ever since the advent of both online news and realtime cable ratings journalism has been on its way out. Being that all of our news outlets are businesses [not that I'd prefer state run media], there is no slant, there is no editorial voice. All there is is the publishing of whatever they think will get the most ad views. Fox News wasn't designed as a neocon cirlcejerk, it evolved into that as the heads of the network watched the ratings needle rise and fall, and that's all that matters. Matt Drudge broke one important story almost a decade ago but his histrionic style and willingness to print anything means that his readers keep returning. And you can bet that he keeps a better watch on his server logs than the veracity of his sources.
Now with the ease of publishing online any can be an authority as long as they have enough people reading their sites. I'm not making a value judgment about it as it has both good and bad sides but I think the average media consumer believes in the credibility of having an audience.
Long ago the FCC gave spectrum to the broadcast networks with the mission that they existed to inform as well as entertain. TV news only exists because way back when the networks were obligated to do so. Now the 'inform' part is out the window and our news media is just another form of entertainment.
I personally get my news from the main wires through My Yahoo or from Google News, at least with Google you can find several stories on each topic.
"The news is just a TV show, get past it" - Dilated Peoples, [i]Proper Propaganda[/i]
I guess this can double as a usability test for Wikis as well. Not that they're an unusable system by design but it depends on all the contributors documenting every node they make and name very well and according to a good architecture.
Am I the only one who knows that the main reason the N-Gage was and will continue to be a failure is its complete lack of good games? There's only 14 titles out now for it and not a whole lot more on the horizon.
It doesn't matter how good your hardware is without titles to back it up you're tanked.
Slashdot Mirror
My memory's a little hazy about this but around 1997 or 1998 Craig brought on a woman to help him make CL into more of a business. They had a serious falling out and for a while the craigsllist name was in dispute. the woman split off to make a clone site called listfoundation and she somehow also owned craigslist.com while craig retained craigslist.org. It was a mess. Craig's a nice guy, I only know one person who's met him who doesn't like him but he's never had much of a head for business.
Craigslist has been an invaluable resource for me. I've found apartments, sold my furniture when I had to move out of said apartments due to unemployment [one of which was directly across the street from the CL office] and 3 out of my 4 full-time jobs from there.
Craig's a great guy but, as you can probably tell from reading his comments on the issue he doesn't always think things through and has a tendency to wing it. My hope is that the free spirit of Craig and the, well, corporateness of eBay don't end up at odds. Most of you probably don't remember the whole craigslist/ListFoundation thing and I don't want another repeat of that.
Of course the big brokerage houses are cool on Google because they see it as a threat to their powerbase and it has nothing to do with their P/E ratio of over 100 and a lack of voting rights for the shares.
It seems to me that the market makers aren't big on Google because they don't think they'll make a lot of money on it. If it ends up in the hands of individual investors primarily that will probably make it a worse bet due to the fact that they're much more volatile.
Well they could, then Wall Street would send their stock down to nothing.
I'll bite and be the one that actually types 'zeroconf' into google for you:
f orge.net/
http://www.zeroconf.org
http://zeroconf.source
The N64 had a whole ton of other problems besides the fact that Nintendo treated third-party developers like crap. The cartridge + license fees for games was over $30/unit for an outside developer. Nintendo was still trying to exercise content control and the N64 was hell to develop for.
The only thing that Microsoft could do to 'take' Sony is to sign a lot of exclusive deals with pretty much every top developer. This round of consoles has shown that it doesn't matter how much more powerful the hardware is if you don't have enough games to please the market.
It's not like mainland China TVs are known for their high quality and reliability anywqay, they're aimed squarely at the "OMG I can get a 27" TV for $200!?!" crowd.
I look at it like multiplying numbers less than one. If Apex is a 0.7 and Microsoft is a 0.8 [I'm feeling generous] then the resultant TVs will be 0.56.
I personally know 7 or 8 people who only have a land line because they need DSL. I know several more [myself included] who went for cable because there was no 'naked' DSL option. In San Francisco cable internet has been very slow to spread because the cable system is so old and hacked together.
That said, I'm never giving SBC a dime of my money again if I can help it.
"Doesn't it occur to the RIAA that music fans have no need to buy the CD if the radio station is always playing a particular artist's music?"
Ah, you're going down the rabbit hole now. The major labels do this so that acts that they don't own don't get airplay. This is serious, calculated stuff going on. The labels keep just a broad enough variety of artists so that they're covered in all the main markets and demographics and then restrict what's played to only include their material. By limiting what is played on the air their consumers aren't even aware of non-major artists.
Quoth Anthony Pratkanis:
"You cannot control what people think. You can, however, control what they think about."
It was time to do that at least a year ago. It's pretty much impossible to find good information on any popular consumer product and this is a problem that's been around for a long time.
But they're too busy making an email application with 9 frames and 200k of Javascript to pay attention to the reason people use them in the first place. It's a little disappointing, I'm an AltaVista alumni and I got to watch them forget about search and do a bunch of useless crap instead, then die. I was hoping Google would be different.
I hope this apparent lack of quality won't also be apparent in Roku's Soundbridge product, I've been pretty excited about that one. It looks like a good [non ugly] alternative to the Slim Devices stuff. The pricing is a little jacked though, the only difference between the 2 models is a bigger display and they want $250 for that.
I had a very brief poker experience in Vegas. I went to one of the crappy tourist tables with a low ante and low limits and proceeded to get schooled in the worst way possible by a couple guys who were actually good but felt like camping out at a newbie table because they were warming up for a big game. I'm not bad a poker and if it had just been the other random tourists at the table I probably would have done OK. Unfortunately that tends to not be the case in Vegas.
A great UI should feel good as well as look good, but the 'feel' part is ultimately far, far more important. It's great that there's people who are contributing this sort of work to KDE and Gnome but the best icons in the world can't save you if the application is confusing. Pine has a good, easy to use interface and it has no graphics. Conversely you can get eleventy billion skins for XMMS but that doesn't make the dialog for selecting and adding files to a playlist any less cumbersome.
There's a quote in Tufte's Envisioning Information that I think about a lot:[paraphrased and unattributed, my copy is at work]
The solution is tough, in my experience a lot of coders aren't keen on letting a 'mere' designer criticize their software and the number of good UI designers with spare time for OSS projects is pretty small.
Hey, does anyone else keep getting a little frustrated with the fact that Google seems hell-bent on introducing new services [orkut, gmail, etc.] but they haven't really done anything about the fact that 'optimizers' have basically cracked PageRank?
I worked at AltaVista in 1999, when I started there they were the dominant search engine and the #4 site on the internet. They made the same mistake of taking their search engine business for granted and pursuing a bunch of other non-related features. Guess what happened? A tiny little company came out of nowhere that had clearly superior search results and completely ate AV's lunch. That company? Google.
Now Google doesn't have Rod Schrock and his Harvard B-School crew of useless cronies at the helm so they do have a chance at being successful but they'd be best off focusing their efforts on their core business.
One of the things about UIs is that the truly great ones seem obvious from the moment you use them. There was a time in [most of ] our lifetimes when there was no such thing as Cut, Copy and Paste on computers. Someone had to actually invent that. Thinking about it now it seems trivial but it was a revolutionary idea. It didn't get patented but that to me definitely qualifies as "sufficiently novel" especially given that every different DVD case I see seems to have 4 different patents regarding its disc retention system and the plastic tabs that hold it closed.
I'm just confused as to why software patents are all evil but patents for physical inventions are OK. A lot of people claim that it will hurt OSS but I see the opposite. Instead of ham-fistedly aping existing dominant UIs like cluttered toolbars maybe people will have to come up with some new ideas. I've [unsuccessfully but that's for a different thread] participated in open source projects in the past.
The interface is not the graphics, it's the underlying structure of the way the user interacts with the software. The graphics make a difference but UI design is the act of problem solving and creating solutions for how users interact with the information. There's plenty of unusable software out there with shiny buttons and nice icons.
In the case of iTunes the solution was the multi-paned interface in which an information hierarchy is established from general to specific through the browse parts of the window [moving from general > specific with 'results' filtered at the bottom.
Designing a novel, useful, original UI is as difficult as any other aspect of product development in the business world. If I can patent the design of a remote control [which wouldn't send the /. crew up in arms] why is it such a logical stretch to patent the interface for a software product that has the same type of functionality? In the case of the iPod the interface is both hardware and software. Doesn't Apple deserve the benefit of developing it just like a carmaker would for a braking system or a drug company for a new medicine?
UI design is [b]hard[/b] and good solutions require careful development.
It's not that bad when it's small, just pretend it's Megaman's head.
Well, much like there's a lot of folks here who like to tinker with code in their spare time there's a few of us UI designer folks who like to do the same thing with interfaces.
I don't think companies are going to stop pushing for better UIs at all. In fact, having a superior interface is now a competitive advantage. All I know is that it was a lot easier for me to get a job 6 months ago than it was 2 years ago.
Actually, Apple has switched almost entirely to the Myriad family over the last few years.
...and audience metrics killed it.
Ever since the advent of both online news and realtime cable ratings journalism has been on its way out. Being that all of our news outlets are businesses [not that I'd prefer state run media], there is no slant, there is no editorial voice. All there is is the publishing of whatever they think will get the most ad views. Fox News wasn't designed as a neocon cirlcejerk, it evolved into that as the heads of the network watched the ratings needle rise and fall, and that's all that matters. Matt Drudge broke one important story almost a decade ago but his histrionic style and willingness to print anything means that his readers keep returning. And you can bet that he keeps a better watch on his server logs than the veracity of his sources.
Now with the ease of publishing online any can be an authority as long as they have enough people reading their sites. I'm not making a value judgment about it as it has both good and bad sides but I think the average media consumer believes in the credibility of having an audience.
Long ago the FCC gave spectrum to the broadcast networks with the mission that they existed to inform as well as entertain. TV news only exists because way back when the networks were obligated to do so. Now the 'inform' part is out the window and our news media is just another form of entertainment.
I personally get my news from the main wires through My Yahoo or from Google News, at least with Google you can find several stories on each topic.
"The news is just a TV show, get past it"
- Dilated Peoples, [i]Proper Propaganda[/i]
I guess this can double as a usability test for Wikis as well. Not that they're an unusable system by design but it depends on all the contributors documenting every node they make and name very well and according to a good architecture.
Am I the only one who knows that the main reason the N-Gage was and will continue to be a failure is its complete lack of good games? There's only 14 titles out now for it and not a whole lot more on the horizon.
It doesn't matter how good your hardware is without titles to back it up you're tanked.
Who double-clicks an MP3? You drag it into iTunes, duh.