razorshine
by riaz kanani
May 11, 2008 at 2:06 pm · Filed under: amazon web design
Amazon have redesigned their website.. My first impressions have to be “Where’d the books go?”. I still really only shop at Amazon for books but the only things I see is their credit card, cameras and gardening (?!). After that, I noticed Amazon search. They have given it much more priority overall in the site, and are definitely looking to have people navigate around using the search functionality. I like it, it seems to work and is quick. Thinking about it, I used to click the area and search before anyhow. Now I can just search.
Overall it does feel weird but I think given a bit of time I’ll like the new layout. It has emphasised Amazon’s shift to things other than books, which had been obvious by the number of tabs that kept having to be added in the old website. What I would really like is a customizable front page that lets me see the type of items I buy at Amazon now (yes I mean books. 
)
May 1, 2008 at 4:59 pm · Filed under: browser delicious magnolia online bookmarks sphere
So I am finally using Firefox 3 and it looks like its third time lucky. Having installed it twice before, the lack of plugin support made me uninstall it very quickly, I just lost too much productivity. It has been an easy way to identify the addons that I cannot do without.
The one addon that I could not do without was delicious from Yahoo who finally released a version for Firefox 3 a few days ago. The delicious addon allows me 2 crucial things:
First I can see all my bookmarks in the browser, replacing (or co-existing with) firefox’s own bookmarks. This means that I can search delicious and go to my bookmarks without going to the delicious website and then searching. Removing that single step turned me from a rare delicious user into one that uses it almost daily.
The second is that it allows me to add sites I want to bookmark at the click of a button, in a similar way to you would normally inside a browser. Again, this saves me having to go to the delicious website and adding it there. During this step I can also share the link with my friends or choose to make the link private and not visible in my delicious profile.
There has been a huge delay to delicious rolling out the Firefox 3 addon. It has taken them months. But, and this amazed me, none of the other online bookmarking services seemed to have the same level of integration with Firefox. They all offered me the second ability to add bookmarks to their service but none allowed me the first - letting me view them inside within Firefox. Over the course of recent months, I could have switched to Google Bookmarks or Magnolia without any regrets if they had let me have this functionality, especially Magnolia. I really like their site (though of course with the integration I’d be unlikely to ever go there!).
On a side note this is the sort of connected services that I think is going to really take off in the future. Not sure yet how you make money from it though. Maybe by paying a fee to use the addon in the browser? Or the more traditional web route of suggesting other paid for links similar to the one you are bookmarking at the time of saving it. Something akin to Sphere which I am using at the end of posts to suggest similar links.
April 15, 2008 at 8:06 am · Filed under: community culture relevance Rushmore Drive search Search Engines targeting
Corvida wrote an interesting post on a new ethnically targeted search engine called Rushmore Drive. She talks about it not being right to differentiate search based on skin colour. When put in that context it is hard to disagree with her thoughts. I commented there on her post but I wanted to expand on it here further.
Theoretically the idea is sound though if looked at in a different context - different cultures like (or search for) different things. That’s why they have different cultures, how bland it would be if we all wanted the same things! It’s natural that someone with a certain culture would use a search engine that is tailored to them - not because of their skin colour but because it finds them the results they want. Of course, it is a bit chicken and egg.. the service was designed for a certain community which you might be able to differentiate by skin colour, and yet it meets that community’s requirements. It may not be ethically a good thing differentiating software on skin colour but African-Americans (in this case) would be happier I bet to use a search engine which finds them what they want rather than have to search through Google.
That was the reason I left Altavista for Google in the first place.
I think over time though this specific search engine is irrelevent - Google (and the other major search players out there) will highly likely introduce profiles that tailor it’s results based on you (equally I would hope you could switch this off if you did not want Google to know that much about you).
April 11, 2008 at 7:37 am · Filed under: attention email facebook friendfeed life stream relevance services social networking
Dylan Fuller (from A Fuller View which I highly recommend subscribing to) commented on an earlier post asking what was the difference between life stream aggregators do and standard social networking - and even more importantly should he join them.
My short answer, was not right now. Here is the more longwinded answer!
Firstly, life stream aggregators vs standard social networking. Let’s list some of each to start with:
Standard Social Networks:
1. Facebook
2. Bebo
3. MySpace
Life Stream Aggregators
1. FriendFeed
2. Tumblr
3. Social Thing
If you look at the standard social networks they all offer pretty much the same thing with different emphases (MySpace was music, Facebook was connecting with friends). Here are some of the things they offer:
1. Ability to connect to friends
2. Photos
3. Public (and private) messaging
4. Status updates
5. News feed of events (usually) done by your friends.
Amongst Internetphiles, people have been moving more and more away from Facebook and towards individual specialised services and until recently there has been nothing to bring it all together.
Life stream Aggregators brings many of the different items (and more) listed above into one feed for all your friends across the web and across services. The real problem is one of scale.
It has one single feed and treats everyone the same. The feed gives so much information that you can never keep up with everything - and worse most of the information is not relevant. It suffers from the same issue as Twitter - if you follow too many people you lose the value of the service. What is needed is a way of saying I want to see in my main feed photos, news, mutterings from Group X, and only shared items and posts from Group Y. Even better I want to be able to have multiple feeds. Once this starts to happen, this could become a great tool to manage your attention data (ie see what you need to see at the right time).
In the meantime, if you are using specialised online services such as Twitter, Flickr, You Tube, Seesmic etc it is worthwhile keeping an eye on life stream aggregators (especially Friendfeed and Tumblr) and even worth trying with a small group of close friends.
On a separate note - I wonder when email will get integrated into this stream..
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Designed by Peter Andre Jensen. Edited somewhat by Riaz Kanani.
