It’s rare seeing Mike Masnick from Techdirt write more than a paragraph or two covering a story — except when it comes to the subject of music copyright and DRM. Masnick’s post this morning challenges the statements made by Kiss rocker Gene Simmons on the theft of music.
Every aspect of the music business other than putting out CDs has been doing better. There are more bands making more music. There are more concerts and bands are making more money than ever before from touring. Tools for making recordings are selling better than ever before. Musical instrument sales are going up as well. More people are making money from music today than ever before. So it’s hard to take Simmons’ comments on the matter at face value. In fact some would argue that the whole reason that the recording industry is suffering is because they tried to follow Simmons’ idea of suing these kids. The interviewer tries to point out the Radiohead and Trent Reznor examples as to why he might be wrong, and he brushes it off.
I’m somewhere between Masnick’s opinion that music should be free and promote other things for artists and Gene Simmon’s radical view that more kids should have been “sued off the face of the earth.” As someone who has written a few dozen songs and was in a band in high school, I understand the hard work that goes into writing music. I don’t know what it’s like to write music that is successful, but one can look around and figure that out easily.
Being an artist is more fruitless than fruitful when it comes to success. All you have to do is visit indie music sites and see how much talent is out there that isn’t “making it” and be reminded that if they make all their music free to promote … what? Their next dive club or bar appearance? Their MySpace page?
I do see value in the songs and while I think a few songs given away or web events like Daryl Hall released last night and mentioned earlier this week can help raise awareness. If you like Hall & Oates music or Hall’s solo stuff, go listen to that, the quality is impressive.
But if you aren’t out touring, then what is the content to drive sales to? T-shirts? Coffee mugs? Pictures? The music is what most people are most interested in, maybe not fans and stalkers, but casual fans like me are going to respond with our wallets to the music.
But I don’t want to see anybody, especially kids, that aren’t reselling or profiting from the music they downloaded being sued. Bringing in the lawyers is a tricky thing when we’re talking about personal use. Come on, college kids downloading and trading music is hurting Kiss music sales how, Gene? Yeah, once they are hooked on “Detroit Rock City”, you mean to tell me they won’t go out and buy that somewhere? Ever?
We buy music and support artists. I encourage others to do the same. The music of these artists has made life more enjoyable and entertaining, they deserve to get paid something. The greedy record execs who have been sucking the life and profits out of musicians can disappear tomorrow. Good riddance.
In December 2004, we purchased a 2005 Saturn Relay.
It was a new SUV-type vehicle for Saturn that was loaded with features and seats seven. We planned to use it — and did, several times — for family vacations for the five of us. Plenty of room, DVD in the back, good sound system, it was all good. I blogged about the new car buying event with pictures of the new wheels (pictured above).
As I wrote when we bought the 2007 PT Cruiser in August, you never really know how good a car is until you’ve owned it a few years. Until you’ve had things go wrong, both minor and hopefully not major. The new vehicle elation can always cloud your judgement. That’s what car salesmen prey upon. It’s the reason they always want you to test drive the car and “feel those seats.” Time and experience is the only way to know if you bought a good or bad car.
The ultimate vehicle owner scare happened to us at 41,636 miles: the check engine light came on — and stayed illuminated.
Unsure of what this meant, we parked the Relay and made plans to take it into the dealer for repair. We have three vehicles in our household with only one driver, so not a major deal to park until we could get it into the shop. We were near the time for an oil change anyway. Over the weekend we went in for our Saturday appointment. Saturn charged us $51 to put the Relay on a diagnostic machine.
(Does this seem a little expensive to plug into a computer? I’m sure there’s more to this than that, but ok, we agreed.)
Turns out our EGR sensor is having problems. They indicated it would cost almost $600 to fix, and yes, it would be an out of warranty repair. My first thought, admittedly biased by past experience: here we go again.
Over 10 years ago we bought a brand new Hyundai Elantra GLS which worked great until it left the warranty period and then there were major transmission issues. We ended up sinking a stream of money into that dog. Terrible investment. Hyundai is on our Likely Never To Do Business With list again.
But it wasn’t only the EGR sensor, they said there were four errors related to the heating and air conditioning system? What? Now we were even more concerned. Maybe I’m being too naive, but I don’t buy a new car expecting problems this soon. 41,636 miles with one $600 out of warranty repair and another unknown repair requiring exploratory surgery which would also be out of warranty?
Dump or keep the vehicle?
Here we are three years later and we’re at a different stage in life as far as vehicle needs. While it’s cramped, we can pile into the smaller car for shorter trips and we’re not taking or planning on taking as many family trips. One of our teens will be graduating later this year and is talking job and looming in the distance is the inevitable: need a car. Until now we’ve staved off the whole kids driving thing because we’ve added the requirement: no job, no car, but that doesn’t seem viable much longer as our oldest son has a line on a job as a plumber as soon as he graduates.
Now we need to start thinking about the possibility of cars for at least one of our teens as well as my wife who has her driver’s license permit. She doesn’t want to learn on a stick (the PT Cruiser is manual), so now we’re thinking about selling the Relay and exchanging with a smaller car that Kara could drive initially and could be sold to our son down the line.
Talked to the Saturn salespeople and as you might expect, they were salivating over the prospect of a new sale. They showed us a couple different cars including a new 2007 Ion 3 Coupe. Any readers buy an Ion Coupe? Good? Bad? Consumer Reports gives the 2007 Ion 3 Coupe high marks but past year models haven’t fared as well.
As we did with the PT Cruiser, I went to carsdirect.com to check into the Ion 3 Coupe and printed out the pages. They are running a $1,750 rebate or 0% financing deal at the moment.
We were planning to head back to the dealer today to look at the Ion 3 Coupe and also to look at some other cars too, but the weather is starting get nasty around here, so maybe not. We didn’t think we’d be back in the car buying mode again so soon, but it appears we might be with this new information on the Relay and our needs changing. Then again, maybe we’ll just suck it up and pay for the repairs.
Cable television that has enjoyed being fairly regulation-free compared to over the air TV is in the crosshairs of the FCC regarding lowering the price of what they cable operators charge smaller television programmers for leasing space on spare cable channels. Also, the FCC wants a limit placed on overall ownership to no more than 30 percent of total cable subscribers.
Predictably the cable companies are crying foul, saying this will “cripple the industry” according the WSJ article below. The FCC points to history which says otherwise.
“In every other industry regulated by the FCC, there have been significant decreases in the price of services, such as in long-distance rates and wireless rates,” [FCC Chairman Kevin J.] Martin said in an interview last night. “But the one exception to that is cable rates, which have gone up almost 100 percent” over the past decade.
510 days ago, our family of five dropped TV, so I don’t have a dog in this fight, but that doesn’t stop me for rooting for the little guys. I’d rather the government wasn’t involved and the cable companies did this freely.
While we’re at it, let’s see a la carte pricing for channels. Instead of jamming hundreds of channels in packages at people, most of which have nothing worth watching, let people pick and choose the ones they want. Or has TV changed in the last 510 days that there is now a bunch of stuff worth watching on these package channels?
Just wanted to take this moment to thank StumbleUpon (SU) for helping me to discover thousands of hmm-inspiring pages. I doubt many readers haven’t at least tried SU and I’ve found a good amount of material to write about here using the service.
Whether or not you like serendipitous surfing, SU helps you explore (possibly) unchartered web waters. That’s a good thing.
Google tried to copy, comes up short
For those using the Google Toolbar, in April of this year they released a similar stumbling-type feature as an add-on button by clicking the dice icon which hasn’t caught on yet. Perhaps because there is more to SU than stumbling sites. You can form and/or participate in groups. I started the Blogs ‘R Us group at SU years ago and it now has over 1,400 members. Conversely with the Google toolbar all you can do is bookmark the page.
One strength of the Google Toolbar over SU is the ability to create your own button add-ons, so it would be possible to add more SU social-type features. Would be nice to see StumbleUpon add some sort of API/plugin structure to their toolbar.
History
Back on January 18, 2004 I joined the site StumbleUpon, then a Canadian startup, today owned by eBay. Unlike Skype which has less synergy with eBay, you’d expect StumbleUpon would have more auction-related functionality. Stumble auctions button at least? Not yet. Also missing is the ability to add Stumble-thru to your own site. Matt created a random posts Wordpress plugin but that’s not related to the page you’re on (there’s a good idea for an improved SU-type Wordpress plugin).
After taking nearly four years to thumbs up 2,500 pages, I’m reflecting on how I’m still using Stumbleupon today. Customer (yes, I sent them a few bones for sponsorship, have you?) longevity is one of the greatest compliments for any product/service. I know a lot of webmasters like SU because they get extra traffic from people stumbling their pages, but the wave of webmasters and bloggers selfishly filling SU with too many subpar blog posts has damaged the quality of the service somewhat over the last year. No offense to bloggers who use SU non-selfishly, but I liked using SU better when it wasn’t used by as many bloggers, when it wasn’t part of eBay.
With that said, the good still outweighs the bad with this service. Thank you again, Stumbleupon.
Update 3:45pm PST: After an hour or so of dice button pushing in the Google toolbar I reached this screen:
That’s right, there’s a limit to the number of dice searches in the Google Toolbar. I’ve reached a wall with keywords in StumbleUpon before, but that’s never happened with the “all” category.
As of this writing I’m up to 11 widgets cycling in my Chumby: weather forecast, horoscope, stock quotes, word of the day, this day in history, IMDb died today, Rotten Tomatoes reviews, recent Chumby widgets, Google News - Tech, daily countdown to Van Halen concert and the default blue clock.
Since my Chumby post yesterday, some folks have asked for my opinion on whether or not they should buy the Chumby or if it’s just another gadget? Longer answer requires a detailed review which will take me some time to get to considering I want to explore and experience both the user and developer side of things.
Short and very premature answer? At this point is if you aren’t a programmer and/or don’t have a desire to do any programming, it’s probably better to wait to buy a Chumby until more applications come out. For example, the one and only Twitter client as of this writing doesn’t even allow posting to your Twitter account. I’m sure better widgets will come along that allows this functionality through the Chumby with time. Give us geeky programmer types more time to get up to speed with Chumby development and I’m certain an increasing number of interesting, entertaining and useful applications will emerge. Right now though, it’s not something I’d tell my non-programmer friends to buy.
With that said, I did shoot some high definition video of opening the box and unpacking Chumby for the first time. This shows how big it is, what comes with it, the neat Chumby stitched bags and more. If you have a High Definition TV then I encourage downloading the 197MB HD video below (thanks Blip.tv, I’m now a pro customer) and watch it there, or if you want the lower quality version maybe you’ve already watched the version above. Watching it in HD is almost like having the Chumby in your hands. The iPod and PSP versions still look pretty good though too.
(Sidenote: should I be writing ‘the/a’ Chumby or simply Chumby? The Chumby.com website seems to use Chumby both ways, so I’ll try to stick with Chumby when referring to it directly or a/the Chumby when talking about it as a device.)
And yes, I’ve seen some folks poking fun at the name. I definitely didn’t buy it for the name. Saw Chumby labeled “obscene” already but don’t think I’d take it that far. Lots of things have weird names these days. Sign of the times.
Here’s my virtual Chumby, which anybody reading can get one of these by simply registering at the Chumby.com website:
Now here’s the real deal which I received an invite to buy a few weeks ago because I registered at the Chumby website saying I wanted to be notified when they were available for purchase:
I’d love to get a http://store.chumby.com/ but I’m not one of the “cool” people who are allowed to.
This has nothing to do with how cool you are, Dave. This isn’t one of those private betas where only the cool people get invited. Friends of people who know other people, it’s nothing like that. I don’t know anybody behind the Chumby team, am not part of the cool circle that got to play around with the Chumby at Foo camp in 2006. Now, there is your cool club, Dave.
I don’t like those cool clique private beta deals either. The instructions on the Chumby website were pretty clear: fill out your email address and we’ll notify you ahead of the general public to be able to buy from the Chumby store. That’s what I did, and that’s why they sent the password so I could buy one. As it turns out, my wife actually bought me one because she knew I was trying to decide over a Chumby and a Zune 2 which comes out later this month. She went on my computer, found the Chumby store password and made the purchase of the pearl Chumby shown above.
As of this time, anyway, there are only three choices of Chumby to choose from: basic black, latte and pearl. She bought me the pearl one.
How long to receive the Chumby?
The Chumby is made and sent from a company in China. It took a couple business days to reach Alaska, where customs inspected and then forwarded to the post office in Seattle which forwarded to Pacific which forwarded to Puyallup. A UPS tracking number was provided via email to be able to watch the Chumby on the way to our office.
Describing the Chumby
The Chumby has a beanbag like padding around it with a squeezable button on the top. Squeezing or pushing that button will load a control panel once powered on and updated. The 3.5″ screen a touchscreen. It also has a microphone built-in along the left bottom corner and if you shake it, there is a sensor built-in to detect that as well. Many different programming possibilities available. The Chumby even runs a small Linux-based web server!
On the back of the Chumby:
1 - USB port #1
2 - AC Adapter plugin. It is one of those side AC adapters which makes it easier to plugin to a power strip / UPS.
3 - USB port #2. You can use these ports to load programs from flash USB devices.
4 - Standard headphone jack. The speakers in the Chumby on the back to each side are surprisingly clear. When you first power up the Chumby a demo video walks you through the setup which I’ll cover by separate post in much greater detail.
5 - Power button. After plugging in the Chumby, press this button and you’re on your way.
After the setup, Chumby activation and software upgrade through Wi-Fi period, which took less than 15 minutes in my case — but I saw one other friend on Twitter say it took over 4 hours — you can start adding widgets. Adding widgets from the Chumby website is as easy as choosing the Flash-based widget you want and what channel it will display on the Chumby, setting the amount of time it will display (default time varies by widget and is controllable by you). The default widget is a blue clock with the Chumby in the background and big hands of the clock. You don’t have to set the clock unless there is no Wi-Fi signal, the Chumby sets the clock itself.
The first widget I added was the Astrological widget, I’m a Libra, BTW, and set the default time to 15 seconds. So then I had the time showing for 15 seconds and then the Astrological widget showing the forecast for Libra. Next, I added the countdown widget to the Van Halen concert, which I am about to reduce to five seconds. Then came the Chumby RSS widget using the Google News tech query. I see an error in the format that Chumby doesn’t like so I’ll be tweaking that going forward.
I played around with the Twitter widget last night but took it down because it didn’t update fast enough. Look GrahamEnglish, you’re a star on my Chumby:
Widgets you add from the Chumby will be updated within five minutes on the Chumby automatically. You can also go into the channel settings and force an update by touching the refresh button.
The Chumby folks could help out folks like Dave who would like to purchase one by changing the text to a definitive date when the Chumby will be available instead of: “The store will be open to the public very soon.” When is very soon? I understand Dave’s frustration, because it’s no fun wanting to play around with some new gadget or see the inside of a new website and be denied.
Ironically, I could say the same thing to Dave and others about the video service Seesmic.com by Loic Lemeur, that does seem to be only available to a cool club. I don’t have an invite for that and nobody has sent me one. I thought I filled something out at Seesmic to request one of these invites but maybe I screwed up and didn’t. As it happens, I see numerous people talking about Seesmic and linking up their Seesmic videos but can’t get involved. I just filled out the form to be part of the Seesmic Alpha (again, I think). We’ll see if I have any more luck this time around.
How to buy a Chumby now?
It appears like those who have passwords to the store can buy at least one additional Chumby. I just ran a test and the shopping cart let me choose one and took me to the credit card payment page. So Dave, perhaps all you have to do is contact somebody who already has bought a Chumby that you know (like me) and see if you can order through them? That’s the path I’d take at this point if you really want a Chumby ASAP. Billing address must be exactly the same as the credit card. Cost? $179.95 USD and shipping was included in our order, not sure if it will be that way on any future orders. I’m going to send a direct message on Twitter to Dave with a link to this post, so hopefully he knows somebody out there is willing to help him buy a Chumby.
I think doing this is kosher because Chumby mentions “gift wrap” inside the sales area. If this is not “cool” then somebody please let me know and I’ll update this post accordingly.
Just so it’s clear, I am not volunteering to be the unofficial Chumby order desk, but instead willing to try and help the following people, of which are many in number:
1. readers who have left at least one comment on this blog before today (that’s thousands of different people)
2. friends who follow me on Twitterbefore today (84 friendly folks)
3. anybody I’ve met in person like Dave at conferences, blog meetups, etc., (lots)
These people if interested in buying a Chumby will need to pay with their own credit card.
I guess, somewhat hypocritically, this my cool club, except the difference is anybody reading this could have gotten into this club with a very small bit of effort prior to today. Like filling out one’s email address on Chumby’s website a few months ago. If you don’t fit into this category, then check with somebody else who has bought a Chumby or has a Chumby store invite and perhaps they can help you. And do one or more of the three listed above.
And now, somebody, anybody, send me one of those Seesmic invites please. I’d like to see what’s behind that curtain.
Update 11:38am PST: Steve from the Chumby team responded in the comments below saying that next week anybody could get a Chumby through the website as part of some beta program. Good. Also, Dave responded to me as well saying he submitted his email and was waiting.
While doing grocery shopping today we came across this bottle of Mountain Dew Game Fuel ($2.28 at Winco):
I looked around to see who else had already written about this and saw a fair amount of commentary and some pictures of the cans (Jake at 8bit Joystick has a nice review) and some on the plastic bottle which were part of a Halo 3 promotion and supposed to be produced for only 12 weeks from the middle of August. However, a cursory search didn’t reveal many folks talking about the aluminum bottled version (more rare?) — although a search on eBay revealed a few sellers ($4.99 a bottle + $6.99 shipping? Ouch.) — so I decided to create this post with pictures. Check your local Winco, they had a whole bin full of them at our local store in Puyallup. Still seem kind of pricey at $2.28 a bottle to me, but they feed into the whole collector’s thing.
There is an official website that goes along with this promotion at mountaindewgamefuel.com where you can learn more about the drink. 230 calories per bottle, and then there is this promo video which makes me a bit nervous tasting what’s inside.
As for the taste? Kind of like Cherry Pepsi, but sweeter. Did I get the sugar shakes like the gamers in the vid? No foaming at the mouth, no.
Keep in mind I’m a water guy, preferring an icy glass of water over other drinks. I tried the Game Fuel with an open mind but just too sugary for my tastes. If you can find it at your local Winco or have already tried it, what did you think of the taste?
And what about these promotions? Seems like a good branding opportunity.
Google’s latest disruptive move, the OpenSocial API, which they are being careful to couch as not being GoogleSocial and instead an open move for the good of users sort of launched last night. It was like attending a fireworks celebration and seeing gigantic rockets in the distance, but a few people coming out in front of a poorly lit campfire holding sparklers saying, “this is all for now.”
Facebook is claiming they weren’t briefed on OpenSocial, says Techcrunch, and yet there were a couple Facebook developers in attendance at last night’s campfire, go figure.
The developer view
I was excited, and still am about OpenSocial but was disappointed this morning to read first thing from the API documentation: “All of the details are subject to change, but this preview should give you a general idea of what the API will be like.”
The SDK is still not available.
I was under the impression — wrong it seems — that this was what was launching last night. What actually launched was the document and a 57 minute video showing what companies are involved with OpenSocial and a few demos of how it works. If it’s working now behind the scenes why not release the SDK?
There will be three main data APIs: People, Activities and Persistence. The last one generates the most questions. It’s a neat idea for me to be able to save user activity at our sites using the Persistence data API, but unless my initial review of the docs is flawed, this still has Google directly involved, managing the Persistence layer, yes/no? Or will it be the provider, meaning we can save this data on other people’s servers?
our site’s user activity (OpenSocial enabled) -> persistance layer -> receiving site
Currently it appears the only sandbox environment for OpenSocial is Orkut, with Ning maybe launching a sandbox tonight. If we can send information to be saved on other servers that will help with the traditional data bottlenecks and scaling, but could present some interesting security challenges. I’m very curious how this part will work and need to study some real world examples.
As you might tell from my admittedly jumbled thoughts, I’m still trying to piece this together. I wish the SDK was available now so I could point out specific code. There are examples in the API documentation but I’m reluctant to quote something Google admits can — and probably will — be changing. Guess I need to play around with the Orkut sandbox.
The non-developer perspective
And now for those of you reading who aren’t developers: should you care about OpenSocial? Short answer: wait and see which sites become OpenSocial enabled that you care about.
In theory OpenSocial should make it easier for developers to produce widgets to run inside other sites without additional code. This should make aggregating activity for services like Friendfeed easier to deploy, which means you might have more Facebook-like widgets to insert into other OpenSocial-enabled websites. For example, let’s say this blog became OpenSocial enabled and each commenter had a Hmm profile you could add these widgets to your profile page or perhaps take your comment activity here — if it was made part of an activity stream — elsewhere.
One of the best real world summaries I’ve read so far comes from the Tim Lee at Techdirt:
The fundamental problem facing Orkut, Friendster, LinkedIn and the other social-networking also-rans is that people don’t want to sign onto a dozen different social networking sites to keep up with all their friends. They want to sign up with a single site and see updates for all their friends in one place. As long as each social networking site is a walled garden, only allowing users to connect with other users on the same site, the largest sites will have a huge advantage because people will naturally gravitate to the site most of their friends use.
Someday I believe everybody will have their own home internet address — a virtual home address — just like your physical home address. Those who have their own personal websites that they host on their own domains already do have this home to some degree. Sure, some people will continue to rent which is the web equivalent of spending a lot of time at any third party website over your own (MySpace, Facebook, Live Spaces), but buying a domain and sharing your social network there makes sense. Having thousands of profiles at different sites seems more like a marketing thing than something practical. When these also-rans, as Tim put it in the quote above go offline you could still save the data and activity from these former sites on your own home site. That to me is one of the most powerful parts of OpenSocial for users in the future.
Time isn’t always on our side when it comes to the web
As shared here before, I’m reluctant to spend too much time at third party sites because I’ve seen so many go by the wayside over the years and my time and activity there, unless they offered an export function, went with them. OpenSocial could help change this if our favorite sites become OpenSocial enabled and share our activity streams. This way new connections you make at some third party also ran site can come with you without having to sign up to be your friend again somewhere else.
Powerful, indeed, if that’s how it works.
Or for the cynical types: not enough of the sites we spend time at will care to do the extra work to be OpenSocial enabled and share the activity stream, thus making it a feature that was a big deal for trendy web pooh point oh sites and little else.
We’ll know the answer in a couple years, looking back. Kind of wish I had a time machine on this one to know which one to put effort into. I’m leaning toward opening up activity streams for users across as many of our sites as possible simply because it seems the right thing to do. The most valuable possession for any human being is time and we should seek to never, ever waste that.
Congratulations to all the people around the world who have contributed to make the Sony PS3 Folding@home project the most powerful distributed computing network in the world! Back in March, I pointed out that the PS3 may have been selling poorly but was doing very well with distributed computing.
The record was initially set on September 16, 2007 as Folding@home surpassed one petaflop(*1), a computing milestone that has never been reached before by a distributed computing network. In addition to this, the collective efforts of our users have enabled PS3 alone to reach the petaflops mark on September 23, 2007.
The record is a testament to the widespread participation of PS3 users from around the world—currently more than 670,000 unique PS3 users have registered to the Folding@home network, bringing the overall computing power of the program to more than a petaflop.
Another exclamation mark for petaflop! So what is all this computing power being used for? This enables scientists to make greater progress studying diseases like Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and some forms of cancer. Great cause, I need to join one of these teams and let our PS3 do more folding@home work.
Any readers with PS3 not involved with the Folding@home project?
Let’s embellish on some Quiet Riot: Bang your head. Web sites that will drive you mad!
Face it, neither your websites or ours are perfect. We need help. We need to listen to what visitors are saying aggravates them and do something. One good way to becoming a better listener is being accessible through services like Skype, answering email and replying to comments (instead of claiming you’re too busy), perhaps even [gasp] getting involved in social networking where your site niche is relevant.
The list scene is hot right now. Some days I think maybe that’s all we should do is just sit around and make lists. Would probably increase the traffic to this site tenfold. One interesting list I came across today was from PC World.
Noticeably missing from their 10 Biggest Web Annoyance list is something very annoying:
Unnecessarily spanning pages for articles — almost always to artificially increase page views — that could easily fit on one one page. It’s inconvenient and insults reader’s intelligence. Note that PC World’s list spans four pages instead of one. Shame on them. Why didn’t this make the top 10 aggravation list? Are there people out there who actually like having to click multiple times to read one article?
PC World’s list of 10 aggravations
With that said, let’s check out what is on their list and suggest some possible tips for how to combat aggravating site visitors and readers.
1. Dubious Privacy Policies. Aggravation factor: 69 percent. Privacy concerns continue to abound on the web. Do we need any more evidence that people visiting your site want to know what you’re doing with their information? If your site collects anything from people, what is the site doing with this information? Can they get it back out through an export function or non-crippled API?
How to avoid aggravating tip: Spend some time reading and going through and stripping the legalese in your privacy policy. Shorter is better. We need to do that with our privacy policy at Hmm. Short and straightforward privacy policies are better than long and convoluted.
2. Difficult Online Forms. Aggravation factor: 65 percent. I wonder how much we should thank spammers for this? The need to incorporate CAPTCHA or other less and more complicated techniques to trick the bots has added complexity to online forms. Also, with a growing desire to collect more information at some sites (see #1).
Tip: forms gotchas to avoid:
illegible CAPTCHA. Offer quick refresh option like we have in the comments below using reCAPTCHA.
forms with too short timeout. Ticketmaster, anyone? Not everybody is a speed typist.
should allow entering in secure passwords. Why have a password field if one can’t enter in a secure password? This means allowing for password lengths as much as 12-24 characters, allowing symbols, upper and lowercase as well as digits. If your password doesn’t allow all of these or forces passwords smaller than 12 characters it is insecure.
let us enter in valid emails with a + in them. A frequent gripe. It’s a handy Gmail filtering technique, although I picked up another one recently using a period in the email address (e.g h.m.m at gmail same as hmm at gmail).
too many items on a single form. Unlike page spanning articles, I’d rather see page spanning for large forms. Let me go through the process in stages rather than show me a bunch of different things that are wrong.
3. Overcommercialization of the Web. Aggravation factor: 62 percent. I think with popup blockers in the mainstream we’re past that, but publishers and advertisers still have plenty of other annoyances to throw at us. I’m not a fan of those hover over text ads. They always seem to get in the way. The Flash overlays that run across the article you’re trying to read suck. And let’s not forget interstitials — those “skip to next page” full page ads.
Nice bit of honesty from PC World:
At MySpace, Yahoo, and even (we have to admit it) PCWorld.com such advertising has grown more aggressive, increasingly annoying, and impossible to avoid.
Tip: Laser focus about where to put ads and instead of adding more advertising, add more content. Keep the content to ad ratio no less than 70% content to 30% advertising on each page. Shoot for 90% content to 10% ad or better. Your visitors will love you and bookmark. So will the search engines.
4. Need for Standards. Aggravation factor: 58 percent. From the publisher side, trying to design sites that look good in all the major browsers isn’t quite rocket science, but feels like that with all the competing formats. We experienced this recently trying to get the search box CSS in the header in Internet Explorer (thanks again to web designer reader, Mikull).
Tip: Use tools like browsershots.org to see how your website looks in different browsers and work with designers — or do it yourself — to get your site looking good on the most popular browsers. And don’t forget about mobile users.
5. Trolls in Forums. Aggravation factor: 58 percent. Free for all forums aren’t about Free Speech, they are about free abuse. I’m in the crowd that strongly believes in at least some moderation of public areas. I’ve yet to see any completely unmoderated area that hasn’t devolved into a spam, flame and troll infested swamp. Yes, some of the comments from the “anonymous cowards” are funny, but too much and they turn people off.
Tip: moderate public areas and employ policies that keep some level of civility.
6. Buying Event Tickets. Aggravation factor: 54 percent. A whole annoyance devoted to Ticketmaster ticket fee gouging? Guess I don’t buy enough event tickets through Ticketmaster to get upset by this one. I’m thinking there are bigger annoyances than this, although it’s interesting that Pearl Jam thinks TM has a monopoly.
Tip: I don’t have any tips for this one, do you? Use the comment section below to suggest how to get a better deal buying event tickets online.
7. Web 2.0 Help Doesn’t Help. Aggravation factor: 49 percent. This could have been classified better as ‘Unhelpful help.’ I’m not sure who started the whole knowledge base scene, but I cringe when I’m being sent to one of those for help. The more technology employed, the higher the level of possible compatibility problems, I get that, but our browsers and OS can stay caught up.
Tip: don’t send people to a knowledge base or customer support form for support. Try using live help, provide Skype or other IM options. Don’t staff those live support options with people who follow moronic scripts.
8. The Expense of E-Books. Aggravation factor: 41 percent. I wonder if the expense of eBooks (or is it E-books?) have hurt the medium as much as the fact that people don’t want to read books on a computer screen? There is a distraction factor associated with computers. Some people associate — perhaps rightfully so — that the computer is for work, not for pleasure. I’d argue against this perception that the computer can be used for work and pleasure. Work hard, play hard, but I understand those like my wife who would rather relax with an old-fashioned paperback book over an eBook any day of the week.
Tip: If you release an eBook version, make it half the cost of the paperback version, at least.
9. Disappointing Web Video - Aggravation factor: 38 percent. No, they’re not talking about Scoble’s seemingly endless raw footage … or are they? It’s criticism of not enough top shelf tier content. Projects like NBC’s Hulu might help which bring more of the shows we see on TV to the computer screen. The subpar resolution and bandwidth constraints are a real issue. I’d like to see more HD quality video being released over the web. People are shooting HD video but then compressing the hell out of it so that it looks like pixelated crap when shown on a larger monitor or TV screen.
Tip: Shoot and share more high quality video using sites like blip.tv (better quality videos than YouTube). Use the medium (edit, edit, edit!). Don’t waste people’s time.
10. Boring Virtual Worlds. Aggravation factor: 9 percent. Since being active in virtual worlds since December 2005, I’m convinced those who label virtual worlds “boring” just aren’t trying hard enough. Go spend some time and really, really try to have a good time in virtual worlds. There are tons of things happening covering thousands of different interests. To say virtual worlds are “boring” is a statement about one’s own ability and effort, not about virtual worlds. The 9% aggravated need to be more creative.
Tip: the group blog I’m part of, VTOReality, is having a Halloween Avatar Contest tonight at 6:36pm PST. Dress up as your favorite avatar, create one from scratch, buy one from one of the virtual stores, and stop on by. Maybe we’ll judge yours as the best and you’ll win some L$.
Parting thought on the importance of listening
Stop a minute and ask yourself how good a listener you really are? Lately I’ve been trying to increase my listening skills by getting much more involved with a few third party sites/services that focus on social networks. I hope if you enjoyed or disliked this post you’ll take a second and either rate it above and/or leave a comment. Give me something to listen to, good, bad or indifferent.
Now we need to start thinking about the possibility of cars for at least one of our teens as well as my wife who has her driver’s license permit. She doesn’t want to learn on a stick (the PT Cruiser is manual), so now we’re thinking about selling the Relay and exchanging with a smaller car that Kara could drive initially and could be sold to our son down the line.
Facebook is claiming they weren’t briefed on OpenSocial, 
Face it, neither your websites or ours are perfect. We need help. We need to listen to what visitors are saying aggravates them and do something. One good way to becoming a better listener is being accessible through services like Skype, answering email and replying to comments (instead of claiming you’re too busy), perhaps even [gasp] getting involved in social networking where your site niche is relevant.
