Ged Carroll

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  • Yahoo! Answers adoption

    Yahoo! Answers was one of the last projects that I worked on when I was inhouse, I will hold my hand up and admit that I was a hawk in the Yahoo! Answers team. The reasons for my Yahoo! Answers hawk status in terms of the product being a ‘killer application’ was mainly because it failed my own ‘test’ of how is this relevant to my online life. It also suffered from the Yahoo! services problem of an off-putting onboarding process. If you weren’t put off by the sign-up then would be greeted by a product that would be familiar to business online support services.  The prototypes that I saw internally reminded me of the self service customer solutions offered by the likes of RightNow Technologies and Transversal and the support forums provided by Apple for users.

    I thought that the opportunity may be in sponsored channels: Microsoft sponsoring an XBox channel, or Sainsbury’s sponsoring a recipe channel. But this was poo-pooed as an idea by my immediate director.

    In some ways I was wrong about Yahoo! Answers success (and I am happy to be wrong in this case).Windows Live QnA doesn’t seem to have gone anywhere, Lycos IQ: though superior in terms of design and features doesn’t seem to have got that much traction so far.

    According to Hitwise (via SearchEngineWatch), Yahoo! Answers is now the third most popular reference site online, however its 2.94 per cent market share is puny in comparision to the 16.76 per cent marketshare of Wikipedia which has a Googlesque sector dominance.

    Steve Rubel has talked about Yahoo! Answers on his MicroPersuasion blog Marketers will Answer to Yahoo! and sees the opportunity for sponsored sections, which kind of squares the circle in the way that I viewed the product.

    It offers yet another opportunity for direct interaction with consumers and a channel for cummunications, but not a full-on dialogue.

    Where it gets interesting is when you look at the Google Trends data on the service, most of the search enquiries for Yahoo! Answers seems to be coming out of India, rather than the US or Europe. This will alter the services attraction for advertisers in terms of the net worth of the consumer, whether they can capitalise on the clicks through presence in the marketplace and the quality of answers given for a global audience – quality control will be a critical ongoing issue.

    In addition, where similar services have been provided in the US before, they haven’t made much of an impact. More related posts here.

  • 8vo On the outside

    8vo On the outside

    Over my lifetime I have had a number of moments when I felt like I saw things with crystalline clarity: one time was when I was in the library doing a job search in the papers (this is pre-Monster.com kids).I suddenly came to the conclusion that even if I got a job that I would be in the same cycle soon again and I needed to get out of the blue-collar roles, even if it meant leaving vast tracts of my life behind.

    The next one was in April 2000, the internet business had gone mental, the PR agency I was employed in was in mid-flow of the dot.com boom and all the mini-bubbles that went alongside it like the Java boom, the Linux boom, the broadband boom, the web business marketplace boom, the mobile web boom and rise of the PDA.

    In fact, about the only thing that we didn’t promote was micro-scooters, though we did employ a German freelancer who commuted in from Brighton and rode one everywhere he had to go around London.

    Anyway, things got so busy that we had to interview clients and decide whether we wanted to work for them. I met a gentleman from an incubator fund and quickly decided that they were start-up roadkill, but I couldn’t work out why this man who was obviously a lot more clever than me was involved in the enterprise.I asked him what made his companies offering different, to which replied “Ged, I am surprised that you asked that, we are trying to move at internet-speed, so aren’t thinking about things like that.” I had a sudden jolt of crystalline vision and saw how horribly it was all going to end and that my pension fund wasn’t worth squat. The elemental truth in this moment is that common sense trumps eloquent words and intellect every time.

    Which brings me on to 8vo On the outside by Mark Holt and Hamish Muir. Steve bought this for me as a Christmas present and up until my move from Yahoo! and move back to agency life I hadn’t really had a chance to read the book in full.

    The book charts the rise and fall of the design agency 8vo, their work and puts into context their pivotal role in modern UK graphic design.

    The book is a collaborative work written by 8vo, former employees, former clients and industry observers. It is part history lesson focusing on design and the business of design, part a tale of technological change and part catalogue.

    The way the book is written it is almost as if it is therapy for Hamish Muir and Mark Holt, I found it in turns fascinating and uncomfortable as they progressed through their work and found some elemental truths in their approach to design.

    Much of their style of work has been co-opted by their modern day peers, so it is no longer remarkable, however what their peers lack is a good understanding of their approach to work. More book reviews here.

    Iain Tait over at Crackunit had a link to an interesting interview with Eric Reiss who learned the same elemental truths as 8vo, but via a different road: in his case Vinterberg and Von Tier’s Dogme 95 rules for film making.

    • Anything that exists only to satisfy the internal politics of the site owner must be eliminated.
    • Anything that exists only to satisfy the ego of the designer must be eliminated.
    • Anything that is irrelevant within the context of the page must be eliminated.
    • Any feature or technique that reduces the visitor’s ability to navigate freely must be reworked or eliminated.
    • Any interactive object that forces the visitor to guess its meaning must be reworked or eliminated.
    • No software, apart from the browser itself, must be required to get the site to work correctly.
    • Content must be readable first, printable second, downloadable third.
    • Usability must never be sacrificed for the sake of a style guide.
    • No visitor must be forced to register or surrender personal data unless the site owner is unable to provide a service or complete a transaction without it.
    • Break any of these rules sooner than do anything outright barbarous.


    Oh one completely useless piece of information that I found out today, the ZIP in ZIP code stands for Zone Improvement Program.

  • Chocolate as a name

    I was walking down Oxford Street and struck by how the LG Chocolate stuck out from the rest of the phone models in phone shops that seem to have sprung up like weeds right along the road from Regent Street to Tottenham Court Road tube.I am not a number, I am a free man

    Whilst I am sure that LG would assure me that Chocolate is the cats meow, and I am sure that they have bought prominent placement with discounts and shelf space payola, I think that it stands out cleverly because of its name.

    Motorola has played at this with the SLVR, RAZR and PEBL; an ironic take on text-speak and talking about the tactile properties of their phone. LG with its challenger status as a mobile handset manufacturer can afford to be daring and has gone much further.

    Chocolate implies:

    • A certain size and is an interesting (maybe unintentional) reference to the way customers used to describe the Sony CMH 333 a decade before and the industry term of ‘candy bar’ to describe the classic Nokia form-factor of the late 1990’s and early 2K’s
    • An affordable luxury or indulgence providing the product with a certain cache
    • Implies the easy-to-hand convenience that a mobile phone provides to on-the-go lives, which the role chocolate plays for them as food

    Product naming is a tricky and lucrative business with people who advocate numbering pointing out the success of BMW. Numbers also prevent arguments based around subjective criteria that everyone who can be bothered getting involved has an opinion about; I launched a web-based product where senior management changed the name of the product 72 hours before launch.

    Bringing a consultant, usually a move to get around the internal choke points outlined often just makes the whole thing worse as the Royal Mail / Consignia debacle proved.

    However for every BMW there is a 100 companies that you know the company name but the products themselves don’t have a distinctive brand personality (the Sony CMH 333-example being a case in point). Only my most nerdy friends would be able to tell you what model number of Motorola StarTac phone they had, but they remember that they had a StarTac, I bet it will be the same way with the RAZR.

    I remember when I was working on the launch of the Palm m100, Palm’s entry-level PDA designed for college students and first-jobbers; its project codename was Kelvin.

    We hoped that it would launch with this name as Kelvin gave it a personality that matched what the product wanted to be.

    Eventually the company adopted what are to my mind bland and meaningless range names: Tungsten and Zire and then inherited Treo from the Handspring acquisition; but what do these names mean to the average consumer?

    If you want to continue the debate on names or numbers, free free to leave a comment below. More related content can be found here.

  • Linspire + more news


    Hyp2
    LLinOriginally uploaded by renaissancechamba    Linspire

    Linspire have finally released a free distribution of their Linux operating system. This is an interesting move, which could see Inspire moving away from being a z-list box shifter to being the iTunes of consumer software through CNR. There is lots of tired Gateway and Dell boxes out there that could be given a new lease of life by Linspire through the installation of Freespire provides a good way of removing and helping proof against malmare targeting the Windows platform.

    It would be especially attractive in wi-fi enabled homes were computer access is at a premium as kids and parents currently duke it out over two or more computers.

    For any tech-heads passing its based on the Debian distribution like Linspire.

    AOL

    AOL promises that it is releasing a MySpace product for the rest of us that will be ‘kick-ass’ according an AOL spokesperson quoted over on a Business 2.0 article at CNN Online. Looks like they’ve finally figured a way to leverage their huge instant messenger user base.

    17 inch MacBook Pro

    Apple have released a 17-inch version of the MacBook Pro, but it isn’t really news as the rumour sites had it down pat for a few weeks now. Over at Crack Unit Iain Tait has been talking about life with his new MacIntel companion.

    Yahoo!

    I have left Yahoo! after being made redundant and about to start a new role agency-side (which is both exciting and kind of scary all at the same time), I now feel that I can now say nice things independently about the Yahoo! family of products on here, without it being construed as the insepid scribblings of a paid shill. I used to be a European buzz marketing manager working on various bits of the business including Yahoo! Search, My Web, Answers, Delicious, 360, Flickr, Research and the technology development team which put me pretty much right at the centre of the web 2.0 vortex.

    You can find some of the good stuff that was happening here.

    Not so much a product big-up but Carole McManus – community manager of Y!360 in Sunnyvale has put up a useful posting on how to blog. Obvious I know, but some good tips on writing style and getting around writers block (also check out the comments section on the posting).

    Ok, a question to leave you with: how can the scribblings of an engineer like Robert Scroble or Jeremy Zawodny be considered to be great communication but a PR person’s postings be always viewed with suspicion (except when discussing the dark arts of misdirection and deception)? Answers on a comment below please.

  • WSJ Online tenth anniversary

    10th anniversary of WSJ Online

    The Wall Street Journal Online or as it calls itself the WSJ Online has been celebrating its tenth birthday with some retrospectives and future gazing.

    WSJ Online dot com disasters

    A couple of the articles caught my eye.The Best of the Worst by Kathryn Meyer (May 3, 2006) celebrates the suckiest ideas of the first dot com boom.

    CyberRebate

    CyberRebate did what it said on the tin; they charged you an outrageous price for an item and then promised you a rebate, they hoped to make money on the redemption drop-out – they were overwhelmed and drowned in a sea of debt.

    Digital currency

    Digital currency ideas (Beenz and Flooz) withered on the vine as they weren’t as universal as Mastercard or cash. PayPal survived because it kicked Western Union’s ass and we could all be credit-card merchants.

    iSmell

    iSmell was a device designed to release smells appropriate to the pages you surf (don’t even think about it, get your mind out of the gutter this instant) like some kind of b-movie experience enhancement craze of the 1950s.

    CueCat

    CueCat plugged into your PC (Windows only if you please) and allowed you to scan bar codes of magazines into your computer to get further information or content. This idea seems to have caught on in Japan with mobile phones and specialised software, so maybe they were too visionary?

    3Com Audrey

    The 3Com Audrey internet appliance was a great well engineered device killed by the ever decreasing price of PCs. I still rate its QNX-based OS and I like the product design on it.

    PointCast

    PointCast the push technology service that was a richer more engaging experience than RSS is today, but then I was sat at the end of a fat pipe whereas most users were on dial-up. Also marketers knowing the price of everything and the value of nothing used the service to carpet-bomb users with unwanted ads.

    Tech trends

    Tim Hanrahan’s piece on Tech’s 10-year Creep (May 8, 2006) brings out some interesting trends that have occurred. I have paraphrased and commented on his trends below

    Anytime, Anywhere: Push email and wireless internet access mean that getting online whilst traveling or wire-free on your couch or at Starbucks — is possible for $60 a month or so. However it eats into the work life balance.

    Think Better! Google basically.

    Putting Yourself Out There: Originally people liked their privacy, caller ID on phones was pushing the envelope in terms of social disclosure. Over the past five years people have gotten used to sharing personal information online. Chat rooms, forums, online dating followed by social-networking sites; to blogs and MySpace came to dominate. Easy-to-use tools, cheap to free storage and online social interaction brought out the pioneer spirit ‘Go web young man‘.

    The Post-Stuff World: Music downloads, ebooks, ripped movies. (But if its that post-stuff why is Amazon so successful selling books, everyone’s iPod is full of music ripped from CDs and people love their laptops, mobile phones, PDAs, crackberries, Nintendo and Sony handhelds). This techno-minimalism bollox didn’t wash with me.

    Free Information, Free People: People are exercising their free speech and there is a maelstrom of content out there that Technorati struggles to handle. The social web has replaced the techno web – (though when Soledad O’Brien hosted a show on MSNBC that featured a young Max Headroom-type avatar sidekick named Dev ten years ago (good gosh, was it that long ago?) was it precient of Second Life?) CNN now covers blog content as if it was matter-of-fact, though blogs often don’t have the same rigorous process behind them as well-written journalism.

    Picture of Soledad O’Brien courtesy of CNN.com. More related posts here.