Archive for February, 2007
It would all be so good without those pesky users
So today we all trouped along to the latest Mashup event, ambitiously called Web 3.0. Sorry chaps, but I really didn’t think it held together as an argument - primarily because it seems to be about the technology, not about normal users.
Two thoughts: normal users will do things you don’t want them to do; and clever technology is only clever if it has the potential to go mainstream.
People doing things you don’t want them to do
One of the panelists started questioning why it was that Ebay sellers slag each other off, and that anything less than a perfect seller rating is considered terrible. Not that difficult to work out. It’s not a tamper-proof system: if you really want to, you can buy from your competitor and give them a negative rating, or even make up fake IDs.
What I found amazing was the lack of comprehension as to why this should happen. Pornographers were the first people to really start to use the web to drive revenue. Message boards and most community sites contend on a daily basis with flames and other eccentric user behaviour:
- All people are a bit weird, and the web is a good place for this weirdness to come out
- The web attracts weird people: most obviously people who aren’t as comfortable communicating in real life as they are virtually
Clever technology is only clever if it has the potential to go mainstream
The bit that really got our goat was the talks on microformats and RDF (sorry, can’t be bothered to look up the accronym). I can just about see the value as a Firefox user of installing an extension that will display these so I can put them into my address book/calendar easily, but face facts, this is really, really geeky. The chap from XForms justified this with the immortal line: “Microsoft have agreed to make a plugin to IE” - as if most users will bother to install a plugin! Most users struggle with the idea of the Flash plugin, let alone one to render something they can easily live without.
Nuts. Until a major corporation can find a commercial reason to do this, that doesn’t jeopardise something already commercial (e.g. Adwords), it’s going to stay the preserve of us geeks.
Watch out, YouTube’s about
It goes without saying that the arrival of flash in the late nineties changed the web massively. It became a medium that was capable of entertaining, not just informing.
However at least initially connection speeds limited how much it could (successfully) be used. Cue the flash splash page.
As flash has improved and connection speeds increased the range of things that can be done with it has grown up to what must be the widest use of flash to date: YouTube.
But the more YouTube becomes vetted by Google, and more mainstream, the more the most popular clips seem to be people/animals falling over, being pushed over, making a mess or being surprised. It’s Candid Camera / Beadle’s About / You’ve Been Framed for the 21st Century. And just as funny.
Join the debate?
One of the ironies of The Times‘ ‘Join the debate’ motto used to be that their site didn’t allow you to debate anything.
This has been addressed in the newly relaunched Times site, which I initially hated, but am growing to, well, tolerate. One of the things it definitely does well is get a lot of style from CSS alone, without using images, something I think we’re going to see more of now sophisticated CSS design is very much mainstream. They’ve also crammed pretty much every sort of contextual link onto the page you could ever need, but it does rather look like they had a big brainstorm of all the things they’d like to put on the page, then argue about what order to put them in, rather than thinking about if people will really use them all.
The most interesting bit is something that may have been there all along, for all I know, but is Times Online TV (catchy name). As a keen subscriber to The Guardian’s Football Weekly podcast, papers are increasingly positioning themselves as general news and comment providers, not writers of words written on dead trees.
Surely time The Guardian site played catch-up?