reDesign

Tellmes know how to throw a great party. The annual St. Patrick’s Day party was a jolly good time. Colleagues from Microsoft’s Silicon Valley campus joined us in the courtyard for limerick and mashed potato sculpting contests. The winning sculpture? A bust of Steve Ballmer:

Ironically, on the train ride home I heard a Marketplace report about concerns that a Microsoft acquisition would destroy Yahoo’s culture. Who knows what would happen, but the report did contain at least one factual error: Microsoft employees do get free coffee. Tellme employees also get free cookies.

(RSS readers should click through to the post to see the slideshow.)

The announced Microsoft bid for Yahoo! means a lot of different things for lots of people. An emboldened competitor for Google. A stronger ad network for advertisers. Heightened acquisition hopes for AOL. Better benefits for Yahoo! employees. (Microsoft has the best benefits I’ve seen in the industry.)

But what does it mean for every day consumers? The biggest impact is likely to be in the mobile space. Microsoft’s ownership of the Windows Mobile OS and Yahoo’s large audience and mobile applications could revolutionize the industry.

As revolutionary as the iPhone is, it’s not a true network device. Apple did a terrific job integrating four devices – phone, Internet tablet, media player and camera – into one.

Even as our lives get more and more digitally connected, the cell phone remains a remote island of information. Someone needs to build a device that integrates the Internet seamlessly.

Some of the things I’d like to see:

• A network address book. You no longer have to use the 10-key keypad or a sync cable to keep your address book up-to-date. In fact, you don’t have to update it all – as your contacts move, those changes are automatically reflected. The address book would incorporate network presence so that you don’t call people when they’re in the middle of something.
• A network calendar.
• Integrated photo applications. I’ve been looking for a way to view pictures from my friends on flickr through my mobile phone or iPod Touch. The best efforts have been clunky. When I take pictures, they’re seamlessly integrated with my flickr account, without the hacks that are currently required. (Sprint has done a nice implementation of this kind of integration with Picture Mail, but their Web application is awful and little used.) The pictures could also be used for picture Caller ID.
• Richer data push to the phone. It amazes me that we’re still stuck sending 160 character text messages to each other. A network-integrated phone would allow for a better experience. Want to invite someone to dinner? Send them a message which appears complete with photo, address, review and link to driving directions.
• Web access to text messages and integration with IM. When you’re at your desk, text messages come in on your IM client. Leave and they get routed to your cell phone. All of your texts are available in your mail app. The carriers are an obstacle to making this happen (text messaging is highly lucrative), but a combined Microsoft-Yahoo might be able to pull it off.
• Network control of your phone. Phone stolen? No problem, send a bullet to erase all of the data. Forgot where you left your phone? See a map of where it is.
• Local search integration. Found a business that you like? Add it your network address book for quick and easy access. Click to rate right from your cell phone.
• Location-aware presence. The option to publish location to other networks, including IM networks. More on that later.

Some variations of a few of these features, like the network address book and calendar, exist in enterprise-focused devices. Yahoo! Go is an excellent consumer application that includes features such as a flickr viewer, but without integration into the OS isn’t as great as it should be.

Microsoft’s ownership of the phone OS, deep integration of Yahoo! Go and their combined consumer audiences could be combined to create a phone that out Apples Apple.

See also:

• iPhone as your social network
• Remote control for your cell phone

ObDisclaimer: These are my personal views and do not reflect the views of my employer.

Yahoo! Local has rolled out some new features to increase the Web 2.0-ness of its local search product:

• RSS feeds. You can subscribe to feeds of all reviews near you. If you find a reviewer you like, you can stay up-to-date on his or her reviews.
• A “first reviewed by” designation to highlight contributors who are the first to review a place.
• Attribute drill down. You can narrow your search using filters such as “family friendly,” “casual” or “elegant.”

It’s been a few months since I last checked in on Yahoo! Local. Overall, it’s a huge improvement. It has a long ways to go before catching category leader Yelp. (The metric being by my subjective opinion of product quality.)

Yelp has had the first two features for at least a year.

Among the local players, Yelp has had the best incentive system for contributors. Its “First to Review” designation is one of many things that Yelp does to encourage frequent participation. An “Elite” system rewards frequent contributors with a badge on their profile and invitations to parties. The front page of the site highlights a review of the day. Featured Yelpers also appear on the home page.

It may sound corny, but such incentives are important to keeping people engaged. Most social systems have some sort of perk system, including ODP’s edit-alls and metas and the Wikipedia cabal.

Although Yahoo’s design is more visually appealing than it used to be, it’s still cluttered.

Unlike Yelp, the map scrolls off the search results page, making it hard to see where results 3-10 are located unless you have a very large screen.

Getting reviews is more work than it should be. Yahoo! breaks its 69 reviews for The Italian Store across 29 pages, 3 at a time. Yelp shows all 42 of its reviews on one page, making it very easy to scan.

Then there’s the ads. I’m all for ads — I work in the Web space and like to get paid — when they’re relevant. The ads on Yahoo! Local are anything but. Here is an example of the ads that appeared above the listings for restaurants:

The top two ads are for services that compete with Yahoo! Local. Ads on the side (not shown) pitched “Watch mouth-watering videos of Oklahoma’s best restaurants” and one from Target offered “Find restaurant online. Shop & Save at Target.com Today.” (I’ll admit to clicking through on the Oklahoma ad just to see what would constitute a mouth-watering video of Okahoma restaurants. Unfortunately, they linked it to a video of a bad rendition of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.)

I understand that local advertisers are scarce, especially outside the Bay Area. But Yelp takes the right approach. If you don’t have something interesting to say, keep your mouth shut.

More on: local search, yahoo, yelp

Disclosure: I used to work on local products for AOL.

I wrote the other day about MapQuest’s new beta launch and how they’ve so far missed the mark on mapping innovations that have occurred in the last two years.

Maps can serve many purposes. Finding a business or a place and then getting turn-by-turn directions to it is just one purpose. This is an area where most of the mapping sites do a “good enough” job. Whether you’re using Google, MapQuest, Yahoo! or MSN, you’ll usually find a business and get directions. There are differences in the freshness of data, the quality of the user interface and enhanced features (like Street View). This kind of mapping is increasingly turning up in our cars and mobile devices.

MapQuest, more than any of its competitors, has focused on basic maps and driving directions. But maps can do so much more than get us from Point A to Point B.

Maps can help us to better understand our world. There are many examples of this in the offline world: historical maps that show us how the country grew, the red-and-blue maps that the TV networks show on election night to illustrate how divided the country is. Online, this type of map is largely dominated by mashups with Google Maps, as developers have overlaid data onto maps using Google’s APIs. Some examples of this are Slate’s Map the Candidates and Chicago Crime Maps. Trulia’s Hindsight, built on Microsoft Virtual Earth, lets you see how housing patterns developed.

Maps can help us to connect better with communities of people that share our interests. At Platial, you can collaborate with others that share your interests to build community maps, such as this musical map of London or the world of bugs. Hikers, bikers, kayakers and other outdoor sports enthusiasts can share maps with detailed route information and pictures at Everytrail. With tools like these and Google’s My Maps, anyone can create a map covering the smallest niche.

Lastly, maps provide us an easy way to explore our world from our computer screen. We’ve been able to do this to a limited degree in the offline world with travel guides, but tools like flickr’s map and Panoramio allow you to get up close and personal with a country, city or even one of the wonders of the world.

The king of this market is Google Earth, where you can layer just about anything onto high quality satellite imagery – pictures, videos, census data, congressional districts. My two favorite layers are GigaPan’s panoramic images and Rumsey Historical Maps.

What’s next for maps? The biggest thing I see is real-time or near real-time data on maps. You can already overlay movie showtimes, buses, airplanes and traffic. Imagine pulling up a map and seeing parking availability or which restaurants have tables available. If the information is tied to a location and can be collected and digitized, you’ll be able to see it on a map.

More on: maps

The latest beta of MapQuest shows how far behind MapQuest is in the functionality race with Google and Yahoo! There are two big improvements in this release:

• MapQuest finally supports a single search box for entering addresses. The current version of the site requires you to break an address in to four components: address, city, state and zip. For those manually entering data, it’s a slight inconvenience. But for users who copy and paste addresses from emails and Web sites, it’s enough of a hassle to warrant using another product.
• The number of ad links has been dramatically reduced compared to the version at MapQuest.com, from 26 to 15 by my count.

This beta has done nothing to address a number of innovations that have come to mapping services over the last several years:

• Basic user interface. One thing I love about both Google and Yahoo! maps is that they intelligently size to your screen. If you have a big screen, they take advantage of it and present more map data. If you shrink your window, the map shrinks so you don’t have to scroll. Both also have inset maps to help you orient yourself. With Google, you can use the scroll wheel on your mouse to zoom in and out. The maps themselves are still ugly compared with Google’s and Yahoo’s.
• Venue information. Despite having access to AOL’s terrific CityGuide data, MapQuest ignores user ratings and reviews. (I suspect that this is because AOL has all but killed CityGuide.) Google has long crawled other Web sites for ratings and reviews and added its own review feature in June.
• Changing routes. Google allows you to drag a route line to change the routing, for example if you want to take the more scenic route.
• Public transit. Google and Yahoo! show subway stations on maps. On Google, you can search for businesses using subway stations as a reference point. For example, “restaurants near foggy bottom metro“. Google also offers the ability to get directions using public transit.
• Street View. It’s not in all cities and some find it a little creepy, but it can be valuable to get the feel for a neighborhood.
• Embeddability. Google allows you to embed their maps on your own Web site.
• Traffic. Both Google and Yahoo! offer live traffic. Google even offers estimates of traffic delays during rush hours.

The biggest problem with MapQuest is that it’s still stuck in a Web 1.0 world. (AJAX to support map panning notwithstanding.) MapQuest is too dependent on InfoUSA to provide the point of interest data that is searched.

Google and, to a much lesser extent, Yahoo! have made an effort to incorporate data from the wider Web into the listings. Google provides extensive tools to create and share your own maps and the data from these maps can be used to improve the overall quality of Google’s data.

MapQuest has also done little to get its maps and data used by other sites. Although MapQuest offers an API, when was the last time you heard of a MapQuest mashup? Google’s APIs are the defacto standard for startups looking to incorporate maps into their sites.

TechCrunch reports that some of these features will be coming to MapQuest over the next few months.

MapQuest’s biggest asset remains its brand. When we did focus groups and usability testing, one of the things we’d ask was where people would go to look for specific types of information. Among the various things we asked — movies? weather? news? research paper? — the answer was almost invariably “Google.” The only question that got a different answer was “where would you go for maps and directions?” People stuck by MapQuest.

That advantage is going diminish as the core maps and directions business moves from the desktop to navigation systems and mobile devices.

Disclosure: I worked at AOL (MapQuest’s parent company) and launched AOL’s Local Search product in 2005.

via TechCrunch

John McKinley, former AOL CTO and now VC, asks “Who will be the first major (Google/Yahoo/Microsoft/AOL) to break ranks and apply a fundamentally new metaphor to email?” There’s been a proliferation in ways to communicate — IM, Facebook, Twitter, blogs, Wikis, SMS, comments.

People have more compelling, more contextual, more effective, and more convenient options to share and interact than ever before, and incumbent forms of communications will be the losers here.

Email as we know it has changed little since the mid-90s. Most of the features have been incremental. The biggest breakthrough was Webmail instead of client-based mail — and that happened in 1996.

John has some great thoughts. Here are my additions, in priority order:

Spam control - One of the reasons I like Facebook messaging is that I know that messages are much more likely to be real — no Viagra or stock pitches. I’d say more than 70% of the mail I get in my Gmail account is spam. I also have had numerous cases of false positives with important personal mail getting sent to the spam folders. As a domain owner, I also get to deal with the bounces from spammers forging my domain name. We need to move to a model where we focus on identifying the good email. (See my blog post on Picture ID for one example.) If the big four would work together to secure email sent among them, it’d be a big step forward.

Security - This strikes me as a business opportunity for the big 4. It amazes me that this far into email, it is less secure than paper mail. I’d love to sign up for e-billing with all my credit card companies and utilities, but it’s a pain. The lack of email security requires that I get an email reminder (hope that the email doesn’t get spam filtered), log into their site and then view a PDF. I just want them to send me a copy of my bill that I can view, store and search. You could probably charge for this - 1 or 2 cents per bill is a lot cheaper than the post office. You could also provide the ancillary service (which is becoming even more important) of authenticating the emails to prevent phishing.

Smarts - I wrote a blog post about smart email a while back. Many of the emails I get are from computers - banks, credit card companies, airlines, etc. They’re all generated off templates. Understand them and do the right thing. Put my bill due notices on the calendar, along with my itineraries. Show me when that package from Amazon is going to arrive. Automatically archive all the sales and deals that have expired. I don’t think entity extraction is good enough for this. Google has been trying for a while with Gmail and the results have been fairly poor. It will likely require the mailers to follow microformats and append the data in machine readable form. But if the Big 4 were to agree on a framework for the formats, it would take off. You could start with vCal and work from there.

Recommended reading:

• Why Private Messages Suck

ComScore is changing the methodology for its qSearch market share ratings. Instead of just counting search activity at the major search engines, comScore is expanding the definition of search to include searches at sites such as Wikipedia, eBay, Amazon, MySpace, Mapquest, Craigslist and other vertical players.

Searches across multiple tabs for the same search term will also be counted separately. For example, if you search for “hurrican dean” in Web search and then click the tabs for news and pictures, that will be counted as three searches.

For those who were hoping this might shrink Google’s share of search, think again. Under the new methodology, Google’s share grew 6 points in March compared with the old methodology. The additions to Google (which include YouTube) are greater than all of TimeWarner’s search traffic (which itself benefits greatly from the addition of Mapquest).

Here is a comparison of core search and expanded search metrics based on July 2007 data:

Using the expanded definition, Ask drops from #4 to #7, being passed by TimeWarner, Fox Interactive Media (MySpace) and eBay. TimeWarner moves up from #5 to #4, based largely on Mapquest traffic.

The numbers don’t seem to include Facebook, which according to its blog does more than 600 million searches a month. If that number were comparable to qSearch data, Facebook would be at #5 in the expanded search.

More on: AOL, Google, Yahoo!, Facebook.

Disclosure: I used to work at AOL Search.

Hallelujah! From the AP story on Nielsen’s move:

A leading online measurement service will scrap rankings based on the longtime industry yardstick of page views and begin tracking how long visitors spend at the sites.

The move by Nielsen/NetRatings, expected to be announced Tuesday, comes as online video and new technologies increasingly make page views less meaningful.

In my post on creating killer products, I mentioned avoiding page view metrics.

In today’s Web world, they’re a terrible measure of user engagement. A user who spends 10 minutes watching a video or 15 minutes engaged in a flash game counts the same as a user who hit your site by accident from a search engine.

Even for non-multimedia experiences, chasing page views can create terrible user experiences. Consider some examples:

• Splitting news stories onto separate pages. Each page of the story counts as a page view. Not only is the paging annoying to the user, it hurts the way your pages are indexed making it harder for people to find your content in search engines. It’s been a while since I worked in the news business, but I’d love to see what the drop offs are at each page.
• Pointless confirmation pages. Many sites take you to confirmation pages just so they can count the additional page.
• Popups/popunders/etc. I read a story while back about a publisher using popup- and popunder-ads to pump their page view numbers.

Ignoring page view metrics has created some great experiences:

• Google Maps. If you drag the map around the screen, you count as one page view. But to the user this is much easier and a much better experience than the old model of clicking an arrow on the side of the screen and waiting for the page to refresh.
• YouTube’s embedded videos. If they’d been chasing page views, they never would have allowed users to embed videos on their own blogs.
• Yahoo’s streaming quotes. You don’t have to refresh the page to see the latest stock price.
• Flash-based instant messaging. You can chat with your friends without having to download and install a special client.

Not only are they much better experiences, it can save the publisher money. It takes less bandwidth and processing power to send down just the updated information than it does to generate and send an entire page.

Nielsen’s time-on-site measurement is an improvement over page views, but as with any single measurement it can be gamed. The best managers will look at a range of metrics specific to their situation.

One of the things on my map wishlist (and the to blog about list) for a long time has been finding maps on the map.

Say what?

There are many venues that are gigantic. Think the Smithsonian’s Udvar-Hazy Center, Giants Stadium, the Mall of America, Cedar Point amusement park or Disney World. Places like this usually publish maps online. I’ve wanted to be able to find those maps when I zoom in to a street map. Yahoo! has launched a protoype that begins to make that a reality.

Here’s a map of the National Mall with a tourist friendly map layered on top. This map of Philadelphia International Airport identifies the different terminals. The map below plots the Freedom Trail on to the streets of Boston.

The Yahoo! approach is labor intensive. Maps are aligned so that the images line up with the underlying map. It’s the right long-term solution, but it’s less scalable than I was envisioning.

It would be much easier to provide a map icon link on top of each venue. This would have the added benefit of allowing users to get additional details, such as which airlines fly out of which terminal.

More on: maps, Yahoo!

There was a big bike race outside my door yesterday. Thousands of people showed up to watch pro cyclists from around the world in the 100km CSC Invitational. What’s the best source to find out about what happened yesterday? Oddly, the answer is flickr.

Although the Post ran a blurb telling people that the race was coming, there wasn’t any coverage of the event. On flickr, there were pictures from at least four people (including me) that came up for “csc invitational”. They provide a good cross-section of the race, kids events, featured presenters, some color and the winner.

Are the pictures as good as those of a Post photographer? Most aren’t, but some are. But it’s a moot question because the Post didn’t run any pictures from the event.

And it’s not just about pictures. YouTube has several video clips from the race.

We’ve seen the power of flickr when it comes to big international events like the London Underground bombings. I can only imagine the flood of pictures that would have existed if flickr existed on September 11. I remember going to the “Here is New York” exhibition of pictures from amateur photographers in SoHo shortly after. The Web site offers a pre-flickr view of the impact of ordinary people photographing extraordinary events.

Flickr and other social media sites have strong potential to enable ordinary people to cover ordinary events; events that major media outlets don’t cover.

They aren’t there yet. In this case, you have to know that the CSC Invitational took place and go search for it. I would love to see a news view of flickr that would show me the most recent happenings in a given area. The building blocks are all there: tags, GeoRSS and geotagging.