Waldo Jaquith argues that e-books done as applications is "both a bad idea on many levels and largely unnecessary", but I disagree vehemently with the claims and assessments made in the article:
What about in a couple of years, when Microsoft or Sony or Amazon releases a whizzy new e-book reader that you want to upgrade to after your iPad gives up the ghost? You can take your ePub files with you to that new reader . . . but your iPad-only, collectors-edition Infinite Jest application won’t run on your new device. You’ll have to buy those books again to read them.
The problem here, which Jaquith confuses entirely, is Digital Rights Management; not the publishing of e-books as applications. In fact, publishers have thus far indicated that they plan on using HTML as the format for the content of these new "e-book apps", and HTML is arguably more transferable than even ePub.
Any book published on the AppStore, ePub format or application, will be wrapped in DRM that prevents it from being transferred to other platforms. For those people who already have an ePub book file that they plan to sync to their iPad and then read on it, sure, but those ePub books are already not applications. Additionally, it's a rare occurrence that a publisher sells non-DRM'd .epub files straight to consumers.
As for the second part, the "largely unnecessary" claim:
From the perspective of consumers, it’s tough to envision how stand-alone e-book applications are better than simply reading an e-book in your e-book software.
If its tough to envision, perhaps Jaquith should refrain from dismissing the concept. I can easily envision many ways in which the book (or magazine) experience could be enhanced and improved by use of touchscreen-driven technology. In fact, I've been wanting the kinds of possibilities the iPad promises for the reading experience for many years now.
What we should be concerned about, however, is publishers needlessly adding audio and video content to books just to make them "richer"—almost all existing books will not become a better experience with video added in there somehow, because the books were not written and created with that kind of content in mind.
The user experience of a book, e-book or paper, has been largely the same for hundreds of years now. Suddenly, we're presented with a great opportunity and great technology that allows us to do something new. Books that have been written already were created without the idea of audio and video and interactivity; it'll demand an absolutely new breed of book, with a new type of content written specifically for this platform and its possibilities, to deliver a truly better experience for the user in this iPad-enriched world.
Until those new types of books start showing up, the idea has merit but the execution will likely be more a painful experiment than a truly enriched experience.
Whether its days are truly numbered or its true come-back is yet to come, the news that an analyst put Palm's price target at $0 has stirred up debate over the future of the company. As many have said in the past year or so, Palm really bet the company on the Pre and WebOS, and it's a bet they seem headed towards losing.
What went wrong? Is it really too late? Does Palm still have a chance?
Who knows, really. Undoubtedly, the executives at Palm are sweating it and trying to figure out how to prevent their company from going under—and just for the record, I truly hope they do. They have some great ideas in the Pre, even if some are perhaps ahead of their time (meaning, the technology isn't good enough yet to support them). Furthermore, having more competitors in this space would breed healthy competition and encourage additional innovation, and losing one who has innovated and inspired would be a loss.
Some of Palm's mistakes as I see them:
First, the cat-and-mouse game they played with Apple and the Pre's syncing functionality with iTunes. As strong a case as you might imagine making against Apple "abusing" (read: justifiably using) its power to keep a non-approved device from syncing with its software, it was a losing battle for Palm from day one because they had to rely on breaking USB-IF accordance rules; what they did was effectively faking Apple's hardware vendor ID in the USB connection to make the Pre appear as an Apple device. For Pre customers, this back and forth could hardly have been a worse experience to deal with.
Second, the positioning of the Pre itself: a direct competitor to the iPhone, instead of an alternative. Going head-on with Apple is an impressively courageous tactic, especially for a much-smaller company like Palm. But Palm was going after the exact same customers with the Pre that Apple is going after with the iPhone: people who want a beautiful, sleek device more than they want a decent phone with quality service. Google, on the other hand, positioned the Android platform specifically as an alternative to the iPhone, e.g. the phone you'd want specifically when the iPhone isn't what you like (for whatever reason: closed platform, AT&T / exclusive carrier, etc.)
Not branching out beyond the U.S. soon enough, nor widely enough. Demand for the Pre was pretty good around the world after it was first unveiled, but it took them many, many, far too many months before the Pre actually became available outside the U.S., and even today it's not available in all that many countries. When buzz fades out over your product in countries it's not available yet, the number of enthusiasts dwindle. On the Internet, such a phenomenon just looks like a general decline of interest altogether.
Not adding the 3D Games layer to the SDK soon enough. Games are a big deal, and WebOS by itself was just not capable enough to do really engaging games. Web technologies are simply nowhere near good enough for that yet.
Since two of the four points involve the words "soon enough", the question that pops up in my mind is whether Palm simply didn't have enough manpower dedicated to the Pre (or manpower in general) to pull off their ambitious plan. But my main curiosity lies with point #2: the positioning of the Pre and Google's presence with Android.
Let's sidestep for a moment and ignore Palm as a company, and just look at Google. Google entered the smartphone market, competing mostly with the iPhone in that space, but principally with Microsoft in their approach: supply the OS and let handset makers run it on their phones. That approach didn't work so well: you end up with lowest common denominator products and apps, and customers just don't get excited by those. Thus, they made the Nexus One. Now Google is in a heated battle with Apple and the gentleman's agreement not to hire each other's employees has long come to a halt.
This is where Palm comes back into the picture. Remember all those former Apple employees that Palm hired away? Guess who would just love to hire those engineers now, if Palm goes under. That's right: Google.
Google stands to gain most with Palm going under, or simply Palm's shares going down; if they can buy the company for cheap, their position against Apple is strengthened significantly in one fell swoop (and even if Google isn't interested in the engineers, they know it would sting Apple plenty to buy them anyway).
The challenge for Apple has rarely been greater; they can hardly be the ones buying Palm when it is a den of people who turned their backs to Apple (mostly for money); on the other hand, having all those engineers end up at Google and being put on the Android or Nexus One project could prove even costlier.
All that said, Palm is still alive and kicking today, yet at this stage they have to perform an amazing comeback on top of their comeback. I'm also wondering if Google, with all its subtle power to influence people, might secretly have played a part in preventing Palm from re-entering the race. After all, the Pre is a great product by itself; you'd have expected more success for it. I'd rather not think of such evil plotting by Google, but I've been disappointed (and feel betrayed, e.g. Buzz) by them before often enough to not outrightly dismiss the notion.
As far as these three companies are concerned, I suspect we'll see a lot more below-the-belt punches happening in the near future, and that saddens me.
Post-Conference Tip: Three Simple Steps to Remember People You've Met
If you've ever been to a conference or work-oriented convention, you're undoubtedly familiar with this: meeting lots of new people, and a couple weeks later you no longer remember their names, or what they did. Business cards are helpful to alleviate these problems, but most people don't have the foresight to put their own face in there somewhere—and yet people's faces are the core association we use to remember them.
Here's a quick, simple, three step process for getting much better at remembering all those people whose business cards you've received, and perhaps even those you only remember talking to but never exchanged cards with.
Take your stack of cards and go through them one by one, pausing for a good 5-10 seconds on each to vividly remember the person's face and where at the conference you spoke with them. Do this on the very first day after the conference is over.
Repeat step 1 either two or three days after the conference.
Repeat step 1 about five days later.
By repeating the process a couple of times, you etch these people into your brain and your mind-map will be much stronger—strong enough that you'll be more likely to remember their names even a whole year of not communicating later.
When I was at SXSW Interactive recently, I twittered as much coverage as I could from each session. Highlights, insightful quotes, questions for the general audience and the back-channel to respond to: it all went on Twitter, and it was very, very bountiful in number. Some of my friends opted not to see this barrage of tweets about a conference they couldn't be at; others delighted in it, feeling like they got to go to SXSW from their desks at work.
Two specific Direct Messages—or DMs in common vernacular—were sent to me a couple days in. They were from friends thanking me for the constant updates on interesting things at SXSW, and expressing how much they enjoyed it.
Mind you, these are friends from the Internet: people I've met just about once in my life in person, but I still call them friends. If they were in town, I wouldn't hesitate to organize a dinner meetup for them and make sure we all got to hang out some more. In any case, their gratitude had a profound impact on me and it spurred me on to try and keep my momentum going as much as possible. It also encouraged me to focus more on tweeting useful things, even where I'd previously presume everyone already knows them.
Later on I noticed that I wasn't just making them happier: I was making myself happier by adding more value, and this is where I realized that value comes in many forms. Gratitude, all by itself, is value; the feeling of doing something that is appreciated, is value.
The Thank You culture breeds appreciation, which breeds value. The more valuable we feel our efforts are—valuable in multiple ways—the more eager we get to create even more value. Then the added value may beget more gratitude, and for businesses this often also means customers.
In today's increasingly social Internet space, value begets more value.
South By South West Interactive 2010 is over, the 16,000 attendees are returning home and the aftermath is felt all over the world by an explosion of blog posts detailing the many wonderful things that took place.
While some may assert that SXSW Interactive is dead, to me the opposite was true. My last SXSWi was 2008, when it felt like the conference had been taken over by "SEO Experts" and "Social Media Gurus", groups consisting of either people repackaging proper web design and web development principles as a (somewhat slimy) means to sell themselves to businesses, or people jumping in on a bandwagon without knowing what's what and simply shouting long and hard enough until they get noticed. "Thought leader" was part of the common vernacular in panelist bios, and the presence of a strong crowd of talented, inspiring web designers & developers was outmatched in all ways by people trying to sell their product or business.
That was two years ago. I questioned for the longest time in the run-up to SXSWi 2009 whether I should still bother, until that decision was made for me by my manager. I didn't go, and avoided dwelling on it and promptly ignored Twitter for most of a week (Twitter Lists were not around yet, a feature that's been employed handily by people not at the conference to temporarily unfollow those who are and who, like me, were tweeting constant updates from panels and sessions).
But this year things were different for me, so I was eager as ever to throw myself into the throngs of designers, developers and entrepreneurs. And, a little to my surprise, they were represented in spades. Nary a hallway meeting with a friend went by without meeting someone new, someone who didn't label themselves as "Social Media Guru" or anything of the sort. Impassioned discussions about the current world of Web, Mobile and soon iPad (in-betweens?) ran wild, and almost every session slot had at least one great panel, workshop or presentation about User Interface and User Experience design, exploring Interaction Design with these new paradigms, or simply discussed beautiful web design and called for more engaging websites.
Marketing? Sales? SEO? The only times these terms were featured in conversation was in reference to prior SXSW's.
Perhaps it was the difference in my own situation that skewed my perception of SXSW Interactive this year; unlike the last few times I am no longer working for Apple, which means I could openly and excitedly talk about the things I was doing. The excitement did not go unnoticed, as many of my friends (and new, prospective business partners) remarked that I seemed, and I quote, "really pumped" about my plans (more on which I will reveal soon). As a result, I was trying hard to attend every session that interested me, keep up via Twitter back-channels with the ones I couldn't be at, and meet up with everyone I knew to catch up on things. This meant avoiding the big, official parties as those are far too loud and crowded to allow for such talks, and instead navigate the bars and crowds to find quieter spots with friends—old and new—and talk shop for a while.
Now I sit here, in Dublin airport, reminiscing of the five days of sessions and parties, and I could not be more convinced that SXSW Interactive is more alive than ever. Sure, there are now many big sponsors with elaborate booths as if this is a Macworld or CES, but that didn't deter any of us from filling up every available seat at the panels and workshops.
Was the conference crowded? Sure. Was it heavily spread out between the many hotel ballrooms and convention center? Definitely. Was it one of the most invigorating and inspiring weeks of my life?
John Gruber points us to this Flurry report on sales of the three mobile handsets, but this snippet at the bottom of the report caught my eye:
Ultimately, however, developers support hardware with the largest installed base first. For Android to make progress faster, from a sales perspective, it needs more Droids and fewer Nexus Ones going forward.
This is obviously not true for everyone; the Mac platform is still much smaller than the Windows platform, but all the best, most talented desktop application developers I've come across build apps for Mac OS X. Similarly, Symbian enjoys a much larger installed base than the iPhone and iPod Touch combined, but there are far more developers building apps for the iPhone OS than there are for Symbian.
Good developers want to build great user experiences, and will sway towards the tools that work best to accomplish those goals. The Mac OS X and iPhone OS developer tools are widely considered to be the best tools for building great applications with. Installed base is a factor of consideration, but not, as the report suggests, the only factor.
Those following my Twitter stream have recently been inundated with tweets about South By Southwest, or SXSW in short. I'm at the conference and posting little snippets of insight (or amusing idiocy) to Twitter from the various panels and sessions I attend this week. Between sessions I'm grabbing quick bites here and there and trying to catch up with as many of my friends from the Internet as possible—we may be in touch more now than ever before thanks to Twitter and various other social networks, but you just can't beat human interaction and having a real talk, even if just for ten or so minutes.
Which brings me to the point of this post: being nervous. Why would you be nervous at a conference? Well, there are many reasons. A big one that most people new to conferences will be able to relate to is meeting your heroes. The people you admire, respect and, sometimes, envy for their tremendous talent and passion for whatever it is they do in our vast industry.
Those who are speaking or on a panel will know all about feeling nervous, too. What if your presentation or talk goes wrong? What if people don't laugh at your jokes? What if, what if, what if.
Sometimes, it can be something as seemingly innocent as asking a question—into a microphone with an audience of hundreds, even thousands all listening to you. What if you stumble on your question, or ask something that everyone else thinks is totally obvious?
Turns out, we worry ourselves needlessly. All the time. Your heroes? They're people just like you and me, and they love to meet you and talk with you and hear from you. Presenting? Your audience is there to see you shine and hear what you have to say, not to be mean at you if something goes wrong. Asking a question? Trust me, even if the speakers or the panel brushes off your question, many others in the audience were wondering the exact same thing—but you had the courage to stand up there and ask it.
I was thinking about this last night after first, in the afternoon, my friend Justine told me she was nervous about meeting Ze Frank. This seemed so odd to me; Justine is a highly popular tech & video blogger with a huge following on Twitter, not someone you'd expect to be nervous about meeting a fellow video blogger. But then later that day, I myself was nervous as can be asking a question to the Zeldman-Kissane-Ford-Holton-Brown panel. I couldn't figure out why at the time, but I was.
So as I thought back to all that later last night, I realized something: we all have our insecurities. For me, it was a worry that my question wouldn't be stellar and on the same level as the panelists' discussion. For Justine, it might have been something to do with Ze Frank being really cool, successful and famous—who knows, really, but more importantly, who cares? We're all here at SXSW. It's a conference, you're supposed to meet new people, ask (potentially dumb) questions and learn new things. No one is here to see someone else fail, or stumble, or embarrass themselves.
We're here at SXSW in Austin because we're the cool people. We care, we want to learn, we want to grow and succeed, and we're not going to do it all by ourselves. All of us will fail at least some of the time; but that's when we pick ourselves up, or have our friends to lean on, and we learn from the mistake and move on.
There's no need to worry about it. Embrace it, and enjoy. And if you're here at SXSW, come find me (via Twitter or Sitby.us) and say hi. I'd love to meet you.
The recent debate has diverged from Flash on the Web in general to ad-blocking plugins and the (invalid) entitlement people express in multitudes of blog posts. Just the other day, I quickly summarized my view on Flash & Ad blockers on Twitter, which sparked some discussion on both Twitter and Facebook (where my non-reply tweets get sent to). In addition, I got an email from Peter Strømberg criticizing my dislike of Flash because it hurts publishers who need the ad revenue to continue publishing.
All this called for an elaboration post, which you're reading now.
There are many reasons to install a Flash-blocking plugin like ClickToFlash for Safari or Flashblock for Firefox, but the primary reason most people seem to have aligns with my own: Flash is buggy, crashes too often, and even a reasonably benign Flash ad can slow the browser down noticeably. This is all the more true on the Mac, but remains a valid point on Windows.
As for Ad-blocker plugins, there is only one reason to install those: you hate ads, and don't want to see any. A fair preference to have, and no one can force you not to install them.
The fact that many ads on the web are done in Flash is a separate issue entirely, and is cause for some confusion, especially among people in the publisher's camp who deeply understand the need for advertising to drive revenue.
The biggest argument that is often overlooked in these discussions is that most ads suck leafy green donkey balls. They are obtrusive, annoying, frustrating, tasteless and rarely, ever so rarely, really worth seeing or watching (or listening to). They work, sure enough, but the vast majority of them work by being so obtrusive, and are shoved down your throat so regularly, that their effect stems more from those traits than from their quality.
You know which ads work well? The Deck ads. Fusion ads. These ads are tastefully and beautifully designed, and are clearly made with the intent to be worthy of your attention and time. They specify certain requirements, which is perfectly fine because that's how you make things work well.
If more ads on the Web were like the Deck and Fusion's ads, people would not be quite so inclined to install Ad blockers. Also, Flash blockers wouldn't affect the ad revenue because these ad networks don't do Flash ads (as far as I know).
Publishers complaining about people making them lose revenue by using Ad blockers should consider the nature and quality of their ads. Obviously, no single site can be held responsible and all sites suffer equally once someone has an Ad blocker installed, but a start has to be made.
One last example I'll point out: I refuse to use Netflix because of their infuriatingly pervasive pop-under advertisement that tarnishes much of the Web. I'm sure those ads work really well, but until they stop that practice and find a method that doesn't annoy me constantly, I vote with my wallet.
Peter-Paul Koch makes a good argument for elevating HTML5-based web applications to "HTML5 App" status, to make them more buzzword-y and thus appealing to markets. The glaring omission, however, is in selling the apps. Not to clients, which he has a "2-year old take" for, but to customers. Without a clear, easy way to sell these HTML5 Apps to customers, very few businesses will be interested in investing in them (compared to the iPhone platform, which attracts so many developers precisely because of the centralized channel that is the AppStore).
Among those who plan to purchase an e-reader in the next 90 days, 40 percent said they will buy the Apple iPad. That's well ahead of the 28 percent who will opt for an Amazon Kindle, 6 percent for the Barnes & Noble Nook and 1 percent for a Sony Reader.
There's no surprise here; Amazon started promoting the Kindle as their "#1 Bestselling product on Amazon" the week before the iPad was announced, and have sent out noticeably more email campaigns promoting Kindle ever since. They're visibly worried, and rightly so.
The primary warning about designing for the iPad is: more screen space doesn’t mean more UI. You’ll be tempted to violate that principle, and you need to resist the temptation. It’s OK to have UI available to cover your app’s functionality, but a bigger screen doesn’t mean it should all be visible at once.
For too long, the act of printing something in and of itself has been placed on too high a pedestal. The true value of an object lies in what it says, not its mere existance. And in the case of a book, that value is intrinsically connected with content.
People sometimes say that "you can never have too much of a good thing". People are also often wrong, and in the case of those saying that, they definitely are. Too many vitamins may not kill you, but they'll mess up your biological system. Sunlight? Skin cancer. Sleep? Talk to former coma patients. Even freedom can come in the form of "too much". And, so can one of my favorite things in life: travel.
My grandfather passed on to my mother what my mother passed on to me and my sister: a deeply rooted appreciation for travel, for exploring the world and discovering new cultures. Seeing how different the people are on this beautiful planet we live on, and how much we all have in common nonetheless, is a valuable experience at any stage in life, but mostly so in the younger stages.
From Grand Canyons to hyper-modern metropolises, my days of traveling started almost immediately at my birth. Growing up in a small town in the Netherlands, traveling across the United States at the excitable age of 11 was quite the eye-opening experience—and one whose impact only increased later on in my life. My parents suspect that my love affair with the USA was born during that trip; be it true or not, there definitely is something about this country that appeals to me in ways no amount of words seem able to describe.
But I've learned something new regarding travel. Something obvious, yet subtle enough you may not have realized it about travel—just like I had not.
Travel kills your focus for work.
Ordinarily, this is a good thing—people tend to travel primarily while on vacation, away from work. Conversely, not everyone has difficulty maintaining focus over a long period of time while on the road; in fact, some people absolutely thrive on it.
Me, I thrive on the excitement of it, but I don't get more productive. More inspired, yes; I usually end up with countless new ideas and exciting opportunities every time I travel somewhere. It's liberating in a variety of ways, and as a results ideas get born and projects get started. But executing on them? Following them through? For me, that requires some routine.
Routine is powerful. Routine is useful. Routine helps you get the mundane and menial things in life done without any real investment on your mind's behalf. Laundry, cooking, cleaning, travel to and from the office… when you live in a routine, none of these require any serious effort to accomplish. If you're traveling, on the other hand, they can weigh you down, steal an ounce of attention here, a teaspoon of focus there, and before you know it your day is over and it seems like you only got the basic things done.
Travel can interfere with a schedule like nothing else—but boy is it fun! In the past six months I've stayed no longer than 24 days in any one single place, traveling over 12,000 miles by car, flying across continents multiple times, and I can safely say that they have been some of the best months of my entire life. It's just so damn hard to get work done when you're hanging out with a friend you typically only get to see once a year.
On a side note, CarbonFund.org will be seeing a pretty big donation from me soon to offset all that traveling—because it's important to be responsible, environmentally and otherwise.
Traveling for such extended periods teaches you many things, like learning how to pack light, and not forget or lose things. Or, at least, it gives you the opportunity to learn these things—regularly. Traveling also broadens the mind, expanding one's personal horizon. It offers new takes on things, and it is up to you what you do with this. Me, I try to make use of every little new experience, and will continue to do so as I travel around the world. But if I'm to turn any of these ideas into actual concrete plans, I'll have to tell myself to hunker down from time to time and just create my own routine; you know, to get things done.
I'll still consider travel as one of the best things any human can do in his or her life, but from now on it will come with a small warning: like with other good things in life, travel in moderation.
