sylleptic - mark hopwood’s blog

Last week I bought an Asus eee laptop. It’s a tiny machine, weighing less than 2 pounds with a 7 inch screen, and it runs Linux as its operating system.

The experience so far has been really good. The machine works well, the software’s great, and for £250 I’ve got a machine that’s faster and more enjoyable to use than my very expensive work laptop. But what’s really impressive is the way that support, enhancement, improvement, has been taken up by the users of these machines.

Asus themselves provide some support, but the really good stuff is on blogs and wikis that have been set up by people who have bought the machines themselves.

If you compare http://vip.asus.com/ with  http://wiki.eeeuser.com/ it’s obvious that the open source offering is better, more up to date, and more responsive than the manufacturer’s. This is a very interesting trend. Actually, I’m happier that there is this community developing and that so much open information is out there than if I was reliant on a secretive, commercially sensitive company. Probably it’s so noticeable here because the eee is a Linux (i.e. open source) machine. You don’t see wikis cropping up for all products, so what makes one more or less likely to be a community hit?

Facebook is doing something very interesting in allowing advertisers to buy specific networks. This ad was (I presume) created for members of the Agency.com network. It’s extremely targetted: it mentions Agency.com by name, and it’s advertising a service people at our company could very well be interested in.

This kind of thing is valuable, makes minimal use of personal data and would seem like an example where they’ve been very smart.

Shame about the creative though…

Google have started selling print ads in the US, which is an interesting venture in its own right, but the most interesting thing in this example is the extent to which they’re using the ads to drive potential customers online.

Aside from the URLs in the ad, we’re also encouraged to search Google for specific search terms (doubtless incredibly well optimised for this advertiser). There’s also a QR code, or 2-d bar code, which is a machine readable image that contains a link or other information. The software to read these isn’t widely available yet, but the more organisations like Google support them, the more people will install the software. Next year, a large number of phones will probably have the QR code reader installed at the factory, so we can expect use of QR codes to become a lot more common.
Thanks to Blognation for the story.

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Tags: google, qr codes

Amazon used to be one of the text book examples of usability in e-commerce. Famously, “Don’t Make Me Think”, an excellent introduction to user centred design by Steve Krug, includes a chapter called “If you love Amazon so much, why don’t you marry it?”

Recently, I was given an Amazon gift voucher, and I’ve been using the site a fair bit as a result. I’m afraid the experience hasn’t been very good.

Firstly, the Amazon stock and the market place are mingled in the most confusing ways. I can only use my voucher on Amazon stock, and the fact that I’m going to have to pay cash for something isn’t made clear until very late in the checkout process. In fact, it isn’t really made clear in the late stages: I had to look very closely to see what happened, and in one case had to cancel a market place purchase after I realised they hadn’t used the voucher.

Secondly, tracking missed packages has become incredibly hard. You’d think clicking the “where’s my stuff” link in your account would help, but you have to go so much deeper than that, and the navigation is impossibly unclear. I felt like I was testing the site for them, and in fact the tracking didn’t work when I did find it.

Generally the whole site feels a lot more complex and clunky than it used to.

What did work well was the tool that sets up calls to their call centre, facilitated by estara (owned by ATG, who compete with Amazon in some regards).

When you compare amazon.co.uk with Amazon’s excellent Endless shoe site (still actually a beta) you can see what they are capable of, so why is the main UK site so poor?

http://adverlab.blogspot.com/2007/11/ad-zappers-for-facebook.html lists a variety of plug-ins for Firefox that will remove contextual ads from your Facebook experience.

It might get a bit tricky charging for ads that are being removed at the browser. Whether they’re counted as valid ad impressions before they’re removed isn’t made clear in the article.

I heard a terrific story at last night’s Roger Needham lecture, organised by the British Computer Society.

Mark Handley, who gave the lecture, asked his audience why the rockets on the side of the Space Shuttle are the size they are. It turns out they’re that size so they will fit through a train tunnel on their way from Utah, where they’re built. Train tunnels are the size they are because train tracks are a fixed width more or less worldwide: 4 feet 8.5 inches. Train tracks are that size because George Stephenson decided so when he built the first public railway in 1825. He settled on that size because it was the width of horse-drawn carriages, which had more or less been that size since Roman times, because that’s the width of 2 horses when put side by side.

So the rockets on the Shuttle are the size they are because of the width of a horse’s rear-end. Snopes (the popular urban myth debunking website) describes this story as “True, but for trivial and unremarkable reasons”. Mark Handley was using it to get us thinking about how things we are designing today are often constrained for the most peculiar reasons.

The Internet today is an example of that. Designed for a small number of military and academic computers to be connected together, it’s becoming the home for all data, voice, TV and mobile communications. It has real limitations around its security, how it routes traffic from one place to another without congestion and how to scale it to meet current and future needs.

We can’t just replace it by building and switching to a new, improved Internet, because there’s too much to move in one go. In the past, we’ve switched everyone’s phone number in London, we’re in the process of switching everyone in the UK from analogue to digital TV (a 10 year project in itself) but switching everything to a new, better Internet is never going to happen. So change happens incrementally, patch after patch.

Software developers know what this will eventually lead to: a system that falls apart because of the unplanned, undesigned interactions between all those patches. But change on a large scale to a better designed alternative seems impossible, so the questions that academics in this area ask themselves are very difficult to answer.

• What should the next evolution of the Internet look like?
• What’s the smartest way to migrate to that state?
• How can the change be best managed?

These questions are particularly difficult when network operators don’t really see the commercial imperative for change, when they’re so busy dealing with immediate, short and medium term problems.

For the non-engineer, there were some interesting observations about successful and unsuccessful innovation. Successful innovation generally seems to have obvious financial benefits attached to it, to be easy to implement and pick up, to be flexible enough to accommodate unexpected uses, and to be extremely well-timed. Timing seems to be the most important element for success: too early and nobody will want it, too late and something else will already meet the need, and the best solution isn’t always the one that wins.

I’ve been to 3 BCS lectures this year, and every one has given me something new to think about, but they all also deal with some common themes:

• The unplanned effects of technologies once put into large-scale use
• The complexity (generally unnoticed) of the systems we are building today
• The need to make ethical decisions about how we use and control technology

On this last point, we only have to look at how the Internet was effectively shut down in Nepal recently, and how Yahoo! have been accused of providing evidence to support persecution in China, to see how non-neutral technology has become.

A few months ago I put myself on the mailing list for something called myfootballclub, a group that was going to attempt to raise enough support and money to buy a football club. The subscribers would then be involved in setting the direction of the team, player selection and such like.

A couple of months ago they emailed me to say they had enough supporters to collect our money (£35 per supporter) and that they were in discussion with various football clubs about acquisitions. I paid my £35, frankly wondering whether anything more would happen, or whether someone was going to an awful lot of trouble to con me.

This morning I found out that we’d bought Ebbsfleet United, a team in the Conference League, currently in 9th place, and it all seems to be legitimate, because it’s been reported all over the media. All I know about the team so far is that they’re based in Kent, and if they get promoted they’ll be in the Football League for the first time in their history. Oh, and their nickname is “the Fleet”, imaginatively enough.

Their website is down this morning, because of high volumes of traffic. The Wisdom of Crowds thesis is about to be tested in a very interesting way. It’s a very English web 2.0 story.

From the Snow Valley blog it seems that Amazon are going to offer same day delivery on Christmas Eve, if you order certain products, and your delivery is to London or Birmingham. Good news for those of us who leave Christmas shopping to the last minute. It got me thinking about how early Christmas seemed to start this year, though. At the risk of sounding like an old git, it used to be that if you saw any Christmas advertising before November 5th, it was too early. It seemed to start in October this year.

There are lots of reasons for this, but the one I think is the most interesting is the shift in Christmas shopping from offline to online. If we need to wait for deliveries, and the Royal Mail made sure that was the case this Autumn, then we need to remember to order earlier. So it seems likely advertisers brought everything forward a bit to allow for that.

We’ve been keen to do something with QR codes for some time, and have run up against practical obstacles to their effectiveness each time, so it’s good to see an example that does make sense. Thanks to Blognation for the details.

QR codes are 2 dimensional bar codes. They look a bit like this normally.

This one directs you to my blog, since it contains the URL “blog.markhopwood.com”.

The idea is that you download a piece of software to your phone, then when you see one of these funny squares, you take a photo of it with your phone, and you’re directed to a website with related content. In the newspaper example, people reading an article about Radiohead might see one that links to a mobile site with one of their videos on it.

Why is this idea better than others I’ve seen (like this one that Iain Tait pointed out). The basic problem is that the software isn’t pre-installed on all our mobile phones yet, like it is in Japan. So the experience when you see one of these posters is pretty shallow. No software, no link. Maybe you think it looks cool, but that’s about it.

But if your favourite newspaper or magazine starts using them, you’ll have lots of reasons to download the software in each edition. And because it’s something printed, in your hand, rather than something on a poster or the side of a bus, you’ll still have all those QR codes when you’ve downloaded the software. And they can print instructions (like the ones below) on what to do when you see one of the codes. In short, there’s a bigger incentive to get the software, instructions and help with getting it, and it’s clear that it’s an ongoing thing. So it’s more likely to get used.

The best thing is that once you’ve loaded the software for your newspaper, you’ll have it the next time you see a poster in the street, so it’s driving technology adoption across the board.

This article in Director (the monthly magazine of the Institute of Directors) contrasts the start-up options of the US with those of the UK. The US situation sounds extremely favourable:

• Rents are low
• Investors are very open to investing in start-ups
• Bright people want to work in start-ups, rather than big established businesses
• The market is huge compared to the UK, meaning you need a much smaller share of the customer base to be a success, and you don’t have to do lots of translating if you don’t want to

There are several people in the article who started out in the UK and moved to California to really get their businesses off the ground. From personal experience, I’ve seen a wide range of ways that funding can be obtained for start-ups in the UK, but it is really hard work, and it sounds a lot easier in the US.

It was nice to read about some UK success stories, though, including Zoomf.com:

But a growing cluster of successes is beginning to provide UK graduates with an alternative. Zopa, Garlic, Monitise, OnOneMap, Nestoria, Zoomf and Zubka are all original, scalable UK tech firms. Says Klein: “Not only is there access to an amazing ecosystem of talent, but you now have sophisticated venture capital. People are being myopic when they think of Silicon Valley as the only place to build Web businesses.”