Month: January 2005

Shopping for Don Park

I searched myself on Web's Biggest (via Ross Mayfield) and got this ad-sponsored search result:

Shop For Don Park Large Selection
MonsterMarketplace features over 2000 merchants. Compare prices on Don Park and save

Hmm.  Apparently I am on sale.  So I followed the link and got:

Dog Park at Amazon.com
Amazon.com/dvd
Save up to 35% on top sellers. Qualified orders over $25 ship free

Ergo, I am a dog park available for 35% off at Amazon.  I wonder if being a dog park is better than being a fire hydrant.

Unease of Use

Designing user interfaces is hard but designing products or services is even harder.  Why?  Because, with user interface design, you are only concerned about making user interfaces easy to use.  With product or service design, you have to also consider when, where, and how to make things difficult to use.

Services should be made easy to start using (i.e. one-click registration and subscription) but difficult to stop using.  Idiot designers will think in terms of walls, slopes, and mazes.  Smart designers will think in terms of incentives, habits, and addictions.

Fortunately (?!?), market moves too quickly for anyone except a handful of companies to do either properly, creating an atmosphere of tolerance for the mediocre or even torturous user interfaces, products, and services.

Killer Mobiles for Killer Apps

Continuing my series on mobile platforms, I now think killer mobile apps need mobile devices designed like game consoles, meaning that it has one or two slots for application cartridges.  Each cartridge contains one or more applications.  Cellphones would come with a built-in cartridge containing the phone app as well as others.

Adding a cartridge adds new apps.  Applications have two modes: running and stopped.  The Next-App button (aka Appy button) activates (brings to front) each running apps in turn.  Some apps can activate itself when an event fires (phone call received).  To see the list of available apps, keep the Next-App button pressed for a second.

Eventually, app cartridges will be advance to become platform cartridges, taking over the full functionality of the mobile device to offer better application platform services than the one that came with the device (i.e. easy to use app download service that auto-configures apps for your device).  If you don't like the built-in calender, just stop it and run a third-party calendar instead.

Evil Twin

Evil Twin (via Dave Winer) Wi-Fi vulnerability is another example of typical boneheaded security designer's mindset: single-side authentication.  While Wi-Fi users have to identify themselves to protected Wi-Fi routers, routers don't have to identify themselves to the users.

The Next Mobile Killer App

The first killer-app for mobiles is the phone calls.  I believe static downloadable audio contents such as music, audio books, and podcasts will be the next killer-app. Only design problem is sharing one battery for both critical (phone calls) and casual (listening to audio) uses which calls for smarter power management and more powerful batteries.

Great user experience and clever hardware design is where Apple excels at so I expect Apple to introduce iPod phones within a year or two at the latest.

Unfortunately, screen-based applications and dynamic audio contents, driven by voice browser technologies, will continue to struggle in the near future due to tedious user experience.  Mobile killer apps must be available at the user's fingertip, not hidden behind a wall of patience.

Mobile Platforms

The last time I've done any intense development work for mobile devices was 4~5 years ago.  At that time, I've looked at Palm, Pocket PC, J2ME, and WAP and concluded that mobile platforms were not yet ready.  Last week, I've looked at the mobile devices and OSes again.  My opinion is that it's still not ready despite the amazing change in capabilities and capacities.

The main problem that prevents emergence of killer apps on mobile platforms is that applications are treated as second-class citizens, placed in a straight-jacket and pigeon-holed.

To receive or make a call, one just flip-opens the phone or press a button.  To use an application. one has to navigate around a typically hierarchical tree of functionalities.  Some devices have separate buttons for built-in applications but they either cannot be remapped to another application or controls for remapping is buried and lost in that confusing tree of functionalities.

In addition, functionalities are not tightly integrated and offers wide array of modal experiences depending on where you are on the tree.  On top of the default phone mode, browser mode, SMS mode, e-mail mode, address book mode, and various preference modes, each application has its own mode.

Before killer apps can emerge, mobile platforms must be changed drastically, removing modes and allowing applications to add their functionalities without being boxed in.

Trust Syndication

Online identities of today are just a bundle of information submitted by a person, stored somewhere, and protected somehow, typically with just password.  You can get free email accounts and use that to sign up anywhere claiming to be anyone.  Not only you but anyone with the password can as long as they are polite enough to restore changes they made before you notice.

And what does all the new identiy technologies do about this problem?  Basically nothing.  But they are great for efficiently sharing untrustworthy data among interested parties so the user don't have to deal with countless passwords and forms.  What do the identity services get out of it?  They get to lord over that pile of untrustworthy data.  Fantastic.

What I find really amazing is that all that keeps this house of cards from flopping is: honesty.

IMHO, the missing piece in online identity is identity sponsorship by businesses based on transaction history.  They are like little boyscout patches except they are issued by everyday businesses with which the user had extensive business with.  The user's identity is the shirt onto which those patches are sewn into.

For example, Bank of America or BlockBuster could issue me a patch that I've been their customer for more than a decade.  They can do it to retain customers or as a new source of revenue.  There is no privacy issue either since the patch could just be a set of numbers, each representing a trust vector.

Hmm.  We need a fancy term for this.  How about Trust Syndication?

What m i?

Scott Loftesness agrees with parts of my Who r u? post but he prefers consumers over users and feels that enterprise market environment is different.  I think it is the same, if not more so.

In the consumer market, who is more important than what.  But in the enterprise market, what is more important than who because each person plays one or more roles.

If I, as an enterprise user, need to communicate with an IT administrator, I am not really interested in knowing who the person is.  I just want something done that an IT adminstrator can handle.  If I send a message to Bob, the admin, at bob@docuverse.com and Bob gets run over by a truck, the message is lost.  But if I sent it to admin@docuverse.com, then I am fine.

Names are still useful for better user experience and context recognition (I told Bob something last week so he should know what I am talking about this week).  But do they have to real names?  What if Bob was just an alias for admin and interaction history is easily accessible using a service that logs past interactions between 'Bob' and I?

The other day, I was thinking about wars in the future.  In one of them, soldiers were robots remotely controlled by kids sitting in front of a game console far away.  The question I was toying with was whether the make up of each squad has to be fixed, meaning each kid is assigned to a squad permanently.  If so, then most if not all the squads will be underpowered when they are deployed.

If kids are assigned as they login, then teamwork is lost because each soldier would not know nor trust others in his/her squad.  The solution I saw was to profile-based on-demand assignment.

Simplified version of the idea is this:

If it walks like Bob and talks like Bob, it's Bob to me.

My apologies if your name happens to be Bob.

Who r u?

Identity is big.  Too big.  And unnecessary for the most part.  IMHO, there is no technology on earth at this time that will assure someone else that I am who I am with absolute certainly.  So what is all this clamoring about identity?

Who needs to know my home address?  No one except a handful of delivery companies like Fedex.  Does Amazon needs to know where I live?  No.  Does my bank need to know?  No.

Who needs to know my email address?  No one.  They don't need my email address.  What they need is a way to send me a message.  An anonymous mailbox will do in 99% of the applications.

Who needs to know what my real name is?  Heck, I've been using my Americanized first name, Don, for all of my life in America, 28 years, instead of the name I was born with.  Only time I had to use my real name was at the DMV and at the airport lately.  My real name is DO-PIL.  In most situations, real names are unnecessary.

So what else remains in the identity basket?  Not much.  Certainly  not enough to warrant calling it identity in the sense most people seems to be thinking.  You want to know when I was born?  You want to know what my mother's maiden name is?  Why r u scrapping my skin cells to solve your problems?

Let's face it.  The online world is not screaming for identity services.  We are.  By we, I mean developers, entrepreneurs, marketeers, and reporters.  Control over identity mean nothing to the users.  It's control they are not even aware they need to have.  Giving users full control over their identity amounts to giving them full control over new chores they have to do.

User don't want control.  They don't want identity.  They just don't care.  What they do care about is all the forms they have to fill out, forms which offers zero benefits to them.  Trolls are what they are.

What about online businesses?  Do they really want all that customer info?  What they really want is money.   To get the money, they want to sell things to the users.  Somehow, that translates to pulling teeth from users.

Hogwash.  Forget identity.  Focus on the problems that seemingly calls for identity.  The ball is on the first base still folks.