user agent

Meetings without a specific agenda are evil.

A vague agenda isn’t good enough. It’s a waste of everyone’s time. Know exactly what you want to accomplish, and know exactly who needs to be there and why. Exception: if you haven’t had a 1:1 conversation with your boss or a particular underling in weeks, then you should set aside 30 minutes to do so. Agenda or not.

Standing Meetings are evil.

Are you meeting every day or every week just to see if there’s something to meet about? Are you a manager who created a standing meeting in order to keep tabs on details you don’t actually need to care about? Is the agenda vague, old, or nonexistent? Exception: Standing meetings that take up 10 minutes or less, with everyone literally standing, might actually be fruitful. Also, standing 1:1 meetings with boss/underling (see above) are a good idea, but probably don’t need to happen more than twice a month.

Two-hour meetings are evil.

For that matter, one hour meetings are evil. I’ve rarely been in a two-hour or even one-hour meeting where more than 20% of the discussion was relevant to me. Of course, I’m not a CEO. if I was, then I suppose all company business would be relevant to me. Still, if I was a CEO, I don’t think I’d want my people wasting 80% of two hours in a meeting just sitting there because the stuff their colleagues are saying is relevant to me. Exception: “Working” meetings (e.g. whiteboard sessions) where momentum is carrying things along, and the participants are still energized.

Midday meetings are evil.

It’s hard enough to get into a rhythm with all the unscheduled interruptions that occur throughout the day, but it’s hard to even try to get into a rhythm when you know you’re going to have to stop right before lunch anyway. Meetings should happen at either the very beginning or the very end of the day. Exception: Lunch meetings. You’re going to stop and eat anyway, so why not get something done? On the other hand, a pause for food should also be a pause for sanity.

A while back I wrote a post called my favorite web services, and I thought I would revisit it in the spirit of end-of-the-year (or decade I suppose) lists. However, the notion of “web” services has gotten blurrier and blurrier, so this time I decided to make this list more generally about my digital life and the various tools I use.

New since the last round…

Evernote: I once called this the best free application there is, and I’ll stand by that. I use it for everything imaginable. I take snapshots of whiteboards at work and save them in Evernote, and they become searchable. I use the iPhone app on the bus to quickly jot down the little ideas and inspirations I have. I do the same while driving, except I use the voice note feature. I forward useful emails – or snippets of emails – from local mailing lists like Urban Daddy and K & L Wines to my Evernote email alias. And lots lots more. I can’t believe all of this costs me nothing.

Dropbox: I work with a user experience designer who’s based in Israel and a development team based in Romania, and Dropbox has become absolutely essential to me. I keep all my current projects in a Dropbox folder on my Mac, which looks and behaves like any other local folder except that it syncs with a folder on the Dropbox website, plus a folder on my Israeli colleague’s computer, and one on my home computer, one on my iPhone, etc. So I’ll work on a file during my workday, and – with the time difference – my colleague in Israel takes over after I leave for the day. We can do this without changing our normal way of working.

Things: A basic to-do list app for Mac (desktop) and iPhone. I haven’t found the perfect to-do list manager yet – they’re either over-engineered or overly simplistic – but Things is pretty good.

Instapaper: One of those ideas that’s so simple, it’s amazing that no one did it before. Then again, its utility is very narrow and specific. I use it like this: I read my twitters on the bus ride to work, over a spotty 3G connection. Within any given tweet I might see a link to something that sounds interesting. I usually don’t want to read web pages on the bus, on my phone because of the slow connection, and also because I want to get through a day’s worth of my friends’ tweets in 40 minutes. So I just send the interesting links to Instapaper where they wait for me to read them later.

Twitter: I kept my distance from Twitter for a while and dismissed it as something that seemed trival, noisy and pointless. I was wrong, and I admit it.

Facebook: I’ve changed my tune about Facebook too. Now that no one seems to “poke” me much anymore, and I’m not constantly being challenged to quizzes, I find myself spending a lot more time on Facebook. I use it mainly for the news feed – to stay connected with friends.

Still awesome…

Google: I use Google for pretty much everything now it seems. Just today, we were ordering prints of some photos from Shutterfly Smug Mug, and we had a choice of matte, glossy and something called “lustre.” Unable to find a definition on the Shutterfly website, my wife asked me, “What’s ‘lustre?’” So I Googled ‘matte vs. glossy vs. lustre’ and immediately found the answer in the first search result. If a piece of information exists, then you can be pretty sure that someone has put it on a website somewhere, and Google can take you right to it. That is all.

Google Groups: This was essential during our wedding planning last year. The members of our group included me, my wife (then fiancee) and a couple of family members who were helping us with the planning. Whenever one of us would email one of our vendors, we would CC our Google Group’s email alias (groupname@googlegroups.com), and everyone in the group would receive a copy of the email. More importantly, the whole thread was recorded and available to all of us on the web.

G Reader: Blogs are supposedly on their way out (I don’t see it), but G Reader is still a big part of my daily web travels.

Delicious: I use Twitter and G Reader to discover things. I send the good things to Instapaper, which is kind of like short term memory. Delicious, then, is like long term memory. If something seems good enough that I think I might want to refer back to it a year from now, or share it with someone down the road, then I save it as a Delicious bookmark.

Wordpress: It’s just an amazing blogging platform. This year I customized a new theme. I also added Facebook Connect login, plus social sharing (at the bottom of each post), related posts (in my RSS feed only), Google Sitemaps support, and more. Each of these things took me about 10 minutes, thanks to the community of Wordpress devotees out there making the platform better and better every day.

Yahoo Pipes: I use it mostly to aggregate and filter RSS feeds, which I can then consume or republish. Check out my Bay Area food events Twitter feed to see an example: FoodFeed SF. It’s made up of a dozen or so RSS feeds, aggregated and filtered (to remove duplicates and irrelevant posts) then sent to Twitter via Twitterfeed.

Plaxo: I use it to keep my local address book and calendars synced with Gmail and my iPhone. Love it.

Pandora: Great music a click away, and the iPhone app is awesome too. I hook it up to my stereo and rock out. Also a great place to discover new artists.

Yelp: I rarely contribute anymore, but I still use Yelp all the time – especially the iPhone app. It’s effectively my Yellow Pages to San Francisco. I can find things near me, read reviews and then call businesses with one click.

Standing by…

Foursquare: I love the idea of Foursquare, but I haven’t carved out the time to start using it. I’ve been known to dis it and dismiss it like I once did with Twitter and Facebook, but I don’t want to eat my words again, so I’ll just say it hasn’t found its place in my digital life yet.

Also, tumblr, posterous, ommwriter

Awesome but not for me…

12 Seconds: I’m using this as an example, but I could just as easily use Ustream, Qik, Blip, YouTube or even my own employer – Kyte. Online video has arrived, and there are a lot of amazing tools out there. The mobile apps are especially exciting to me. I’m just not really a video guy. I don’t like to talk into a webcam or see myself on the screen. Just too introverted I guess.

One of the things that stood out for me amongst all the hype around the Motorola Droid before the device hit the market was the screen resolution: a whopping 480 x 854 pixels. At first I thought it was a misprint.

Once I verified the specs, I started making my design templates for the Droid in Omnigraffle, and I ended up spending a lot of time tweaking the scale of my document to get the right amount of stuff on the screen. I was struck by how different everything had to be compared to the templates I use to design for other devices. In fact, each of my device-specific templates uses a different scale.

This seems strange when you consider that the devices are all roughly the same size, physically:

I was suddenly curious, so I decided to see what things would look like if I scaled the various devices as if the pixel densities of their respective screens were equal, and everything else was relative to that (actual pixel density of each device is noted in the image below):

As you can see, when you adjust for pixel density, the Droid is practically a tablet compared to the iPhone.

To better illustrate the difference, here are the two images with one overlaid on the other:

I hear designers talk a lot about the differences in capabilities and design vocabularies across the range of mobile devices, but variations in screen resolutions are another challenge designers have to confront in the mobile world. It’s especially important with touch screen devices, since the right target size for a user’s finger tap is a physical question more than a matter of pixels. Apple’s guideline for buttons is a height of 48 pixels for example, but the same physical height on the Nokia N97 measures about 58 pixels.

I updated one of my two Macbook Pros to Snow Leopard yesterday, and although the official price tag for the new OS is only $29, the real cost is a bit higher. For one thing, I was running older versions of a couple of apps – specifically FontExplorer and Parallels – that are not compatible with Snow Leopard.

There’s also an opportunity cost, since the install itself took about an hour, and then I had to spend several more hours troubleshooting and fine-tuning to get everything to work satisfactorily.

So, here’s my breakdown…

Right now I’m running trial versions of the latest FontExplorer (which also doesn’t work with Snow Leopard) and Parallels 4 (which does). I may switch to FontAgent Pro and VMware, but this wouldn’t change my final price by much.

I’m not thrilled about all this, and I’m not going to upgrade my other Mac for now.

What if the company that made your computer forced you to use only their web browser and email application? (Remember, Microsoft was prosecuted for less than this). What if that company could dictate what software – of any type – other companies were allowed to make for your computer, what you were allowed to install and where you could buy it? What if these restrictions were only vaguely defined, then enforced in a totally ad-hoc way, on a case-by-case basis – after the software was already built?

Obviously that would be crazy, and obviously I’m talking about the iPhone.

After a week of high-profile App Store snafus (Google Voice, Ninja Words), there’s a bona fide Apple backlash a-brewin’. Leading the charge are the likes of Michael Arrington and Om Malik, who have each made a very public point of ditching their iPhones, and Jason Calacanis who wrote an epic 5-part case against apple. Last week’s hubbub was even enough to warrant a response from Phil Schiller, Apple’s SVP of product marketing.

The iTunes App Store process is broken in all kinds of ways, but few people question its basic premise: an app for almost anything, and a distribution model that (a number of hiccups notwithstanding) guarantees big bucks for Apple and gives developers access to a high-profile storefront. It’s proven to be such a cash cow that everybody is getting on the app store bandwagon. There’s the Android Market, Blackberry App World, Nokia’s Ovi Store, the Sony Ericsson Application Shop, plus stores from carriers like Vodafone, Verizon and who knows how many others. The game has changed. It’s all about mobile apps now.

Think about it though. In today’s web-powered world, imagine if you had to install a special app on your computer to use Facebook, plus another one for Twitter, another for YouTube, another for getting weather reports, another for checking your stock portfolio, etc. Multiply this situation by all the different mobile operating systems and form factors, and it’s essentially the same problem that has plagued mobile from the beginning. On the positive side I suppose, there’s no shortage of work for mobile developers when there are a half dozen different Facebook apps that need to be made.

Chris Messina posted a fantastic and provocative piece on his blog last week entitled Steve Jobs Hates the App Store wherein he argues that “the iPhone has always been about the web” and that:

…development for the iPhone platform is a distraction. It’s taking our eyes off the ball, and ignoring the bigger shift that’s happening beneath our feet. Developing iPhone apps now means postponing a better and more capable web until later, because so much energy is fixated on the cool whiz-bang effects in the iPhone platform that just haven’t been implemented in browsers… yet.

It’s like going back to the days of the CD-ROM, before the web as we know it existed.

Messina sees the future, and the future is the web. The only things he sees standing between the anachronistic, walled-garden, app-store-filled present and the glorious web-powered future are a good discovery paradigm (he compares the iTunes App Store to the “Yahoo! directory phase” of the web) and current browser limitations (e.g. Safari for iPhone can’t talk to the iPhone’s GPS or accelerometer).

I would argue, however, that the web has already given us a much more powerful discovery paradigm than iTunes. It’s called Google (there’s also Amazon and BestBuy and all the other places you shop for software, music, etc. online).

I would also argue that a third big missing piece is a business model. The most reliable way to make money from iPhone apps is to charge a one-time fee for downloading them. Ad-supported apps don’t pay for themselves, and Apple doesn’t yet support a subscription model (or maybe they do – various sources conflict).

Once the app store bubble pops and we move to web apps, the one-time fee model will have to go away. Mobile ads will probably be a bigger market by then, but it still won’t be enough to support most services. So SaaS will probably become the dominant business model for mobile web apps. Many could be sold as value-adds to existing (desktop) web services. The death of the one-time fee model would be OK with developers, but Apple would lose their 30% cut. They’re bound to resist and push back against any big shift toward web apps, but resistance will prove futile.

Which brings me to my final point, and the title of this post.

Despite all the hullabaloo over Apple’s rejection of the Google Voice iPhone app, Google themselves took it in stride. And it seems they might simply relaunch Google Voice as a web app.

Vic Gundotra, Google Engineering vice president and developer evangelist told the Mobilebeat Conference last month that the web had won and users of mobile phones would get their information and entertainment from browsers in the future. He suggested it wouldn’t be cost effective for Google to support all the different native mobile platforms – from iPhone to Blackberry to Windows Mobile and all the flavors of Nokia. In his words:

“What we clearly see happening is a move to incredibly powerful browsers. Many, many applications can be delivered through the browser and what that does for our costs is stunning. We believe the web has won and over the next several years, the browser, for economic reasons almost, will become the platform that matters and certainly that’s where Google is investing.”

In a nutshell, Chrome for mobile is why Android will win. The Google Chrome mission statement is tailor-made for mobile. This bit in particular resonated with me:

To most people, it isn’t the browser that matters. It’s only a tool to run the important stuff – the pages, sites and applications that make up the web. Like the classic Google homepage, Google Chrome is clean and fast. It gets out of your way and gets you where you want to go.

Nowhere is it more important for browsers to “get out of your way” than on small screens. When Google makes a mobile browser powerful enough to run real applications, then native mobile apps will die a merciful death. And what would constitute “powerful enough?”

• The browser would have to talk to native device functions like the camera, accelerometer and GPS
• The browser “chrome” (pun intended) would have to almost completely disappear in favor of the application currently running.
• Irrelevant browser functions would ideally go away (e.g. the browser’s main menu gets overtaken by the web app’s main menu).
• The browser would have to retain user and session information better than today’s mobile browsers do
• The browser would have to have to be faster, more stable and basically feel “smoother” in the way it performs

Two parting thoughts:

First, there will always be a place for native apps. Games and other apps that don’t require any connectivity, and that involve a more “immersive” experience will probably always be better as fully-native apps. But 90% of the apps in the iTunes store are really web apps in disguise.

Second, borrowing from Winston Churchill, I’ll say the iPhone is the worst phone out there, except for all the others I’ve tried. Seriously though, I really like my iPhone, and I’m happy with the apps I’ve installed. I’m not giving these up anytime soon, but that doesn’t mean I think this paradigm makes sense.

I’ve spent much of my career working at well-regarded agencies – large and small, and I’ve worked with my share of brilliant people at each of them. At the same time, I’ve seen and worked on very few client engagements that I’d really consider successful. Even when the end result was satisfactory to everyone involved, it invariably came via a lot of bumps and birthing pains.

It was amazing how often we’d pitch a project and hear from the prospective client how dissatisfied they were with their previous agency. After we won the project and completed the work, I wouldn’t be surprised to find out they were saying the same thing about us to the next group. This is borne out by my friends who work on the “client side” and often complain about the agency teams they have to work with.

Agency failures and disappointments are expensive – often in the multi-millions, and sometimes I think people on both sides of the relationship delude themselves into thinking they’re satisfied with the results because the alternative is too painful to acknowledge – especially since the relationship is a temporary one. This state of affairs persists of course because companies only keep on staff the personnel it takes to keep them running. If they want to do something big or new, they need to seek outside help.

Given all this, there are few resources out there that compare agencies in any useful way. Perhaps the best is the Forrester Wave Report, but you’re supposed to drop $2,000 if you want to read it (or you can find the PDF on the Razorfish website for free).

The Wave Report is only as good as the crop of agencies it evaluates of course (I worked at a couple of the pack leaders – at least according to its conclusions), so hiring the “best” of the lot doesn’t guarantee a successful project. Case in point: of all the reference sites submitted by the agencies themselves to Forrester for the Q2 report, only one website got a passing grade based on Forrester’s website review methodology.

So, from an insider’s perspective, here are some things you should know about agencies the next time you’re looking for one to help you:

Every agency has a comfort zone – Some agencies excel at making killer microsites. Others design big, complicated internal systems. Still others are on the cutting edge of social media strategy. Most claim they can do it all. If you’re clear about what you need, then make sure the agency you hire has a strong track record of doing that thing. It sounds obvious, but this is a mistake I’ve seen companies make over and over again. And make sure it’s a recent track record – agencies are revolving doors for talent. If you’re not clear about what you need, then find an agency that has a strong track record of helping companies figure that out. Don’t commit to that agency for doing the rest of the work (be aware, though, that they will “figure out” that you need them). Finally, forget about the person you know at agency X who did such great work for you at agency Y. Agency X might be totally wrong for this new project.

Agencies have no bench – At agencies, it’s all about billable hours, so they don’t want people around who aren’t working on something for a client. The reality though, is that work comes in waves. This means the full-time employees are usually over-extended – especially the really good ones. The best staff are typically booked at full utilization on one project, supporting several other projects and helping the sales team pitch new work. When a wave of new work is signed, agencies scramble to hire contract help to fill the gaps – freelancers who have little context and little vested interest.

You aren’t likely to get the team that pitched you (no matter what they promise) – The agency brings its best and brightest into the important pitches. They want to put these people on your project, they really do, but even if they become your team on paper, you have to realize that that crack Art Director is still finishing up the last project (which is running a couple weeks beyond its original deadlines), and she’s being asked to do spec work for two new pitches that are suddenly more important than anything else in the whole office. No matter that the agency promised this would not happen.

You won’t work with the thought leaders - Every agency has these people. They appear on panels. They have blogs and lots of twitter followers. They write articles. Their job is to make the agency seem smart and cool and up on all the new trends. They are just celebrities though, and in reality, these folks are pretty irrelevant to what you’re trying to do. They will swoop in to pitch meetings and kickoff meetings and they’ll woo you with all kinds of buzz words about social media and stuff. I don’t mean to suggest they’re not smart and up on stuff, but they are not rubber-hitting-the-road kinds of people. They have some influence on the kinds of ideas the team brings to your project, but much less than they or the agency would like to believe.

They always know the answer (even when they don’t) – Clients ask all kinds of questions, expecting the smart agency dudes they’re paying to have answers. “Are people still doing podcasts? Should we be podcasting?” the client might ask, and the smart agency dude is not going to say, “That’s a good question. We should investigate that. There might be some opportunity there.” Nope. He’s going to give you his gut response. I don’t mean to suggest there isn’t value in a smart agency dude’s gut response. Just know what you’re getting.

They don’t know your industry - You, the client, are the subject matter expert. There might be a few people speckled around the agency that know your industry, but agencies don’t have a good way of identifying or finding these people. It goes something like: “I think Rob might have worked on some XBox stuff when he was with AKQA. Do you know if he did?” To pitch you, and to staff your project, good agency people will dive into some research, but it will be the first research those particular people have done with respect to your industry. So when it comes to knowledge, you have depth. The agency is the fresh pair of eyes.

They don’t know your organization - Your company is a big variable as far as the agency – and the success of the project – is concerned. Variables equate to risks. You and the agency will try to anticipate the risks, but you can never really know what form they will take. Agencies are used to moving faster than most client companies move. They want to get the work done and billed so they can move on to the next thing. You want to get maximum value out of the agency. These things are in natural opposition. There are new and strange deliverables and milestones that you and your bosses are seeing for the first time. There are milestones and deliverables you require that the agency has no experience with. There are personalities and politics. And then there are more mundane risks – like your IT organization refusing to give the agency VPN access to your company’s network, even though the project suddenly can’t move forward without it. Every project that involves an agency has a certain amount of this stuff, and it always causes pain.

That’s my insider scoop. I hope this information is useful the next time you’ve got the agency pitch guys coming your way.

The economy is in rough shape these days. Nobody’s job seems secure, and no industry is safe, but the Web is an especially hard place to make a living.

Startups are scrambling with greater urgency than ever to find the cash to keep going – either in the form of investment (despite the fact that VC investing is way down) or through business models that could actually sustain them. Twitter might be exploring both – looking for more funding as rumors fly about how they might employ advertising.

Outside funding is only a stopgap, however, and self-sustaining business models for Internet-based businesses are hard to come by.

The Atlantic Monthly published a widely-discussed piece this month pondering the death of the New York Times, hypothetically before this summer. Many people predict the New York Times will go all-digital at some point because that’s the only way it can hope to survive, but the truth is the New York Times makes more money from its 1 million daily print readers than it does from its 20 million daily web visitors. Again, the web is a tough place to do business.

As a case in point, my Flickr Pro account expired a while back, and I delayed renewing it for months despite the fact that Flickr Pro only costs $24.95 a year. A year. It’s a fantastic service that I use regularly, and it costs a fraction over $2 a month. In the “real” world, this would be a no-brainer.

Just yesterday, for example, I spent $16 to park my car and another $6 for a very mediocre tuna sandwich. That’s what I paid because that’s just what what it costs. I’ve been conditioned to accept the fact that a few hours of parking in San Francisco costs me more than a paperback book, a CD or eight months of Flickr Pro.

Unfortunately, I’ve also been conditioned to believe that everything I do on the Internet should be free. I balk at $24.95 a year for Flickr or $2-3 dollars flat for an obviously killer iPhone app, when I know it’s a steal, when I have no problem dropping that and more on a some coffee I will pee out an hour later.

I can’t think of a single business in the “real” world that basically gives away a product as great as Flickr, Delicious, Evernote, Yelp, Adium (to randomly pick a few) or any of the others that are essential to my digital life, but that’s what we expect online businesses to do.

How did we get here, and is it working?

I received my weekly BayCHI job bank email today, which has always contained at least twenty or thirty postings.  Today, however, it was so thin that I mistook the email for some other kind of announcement, and I scrolled right past the one(!) job posting it contained:

Senior User Experience Designer at H&R Block – Cambridge, MA

One job posting in the BayCHI job bank, and it’s not even a Bay Area job. Despite the economy melting down, the market for User Experience peeps has been blessedly unscathed, but I haven’t seen the BayCHI job list this thin since the great dotcom bust of ‘01.

Here we go again folks.

I’ve been doing battle with the CSS on this blog recently, and I’d gotten it to an acceptable (if not optimal) place in Safari and Firefox for Mac. My friend, however, just let me know that this blog was completely unreadable in IE on Windows. My apologies to all Windows/IE users who have visited my blog over the last couple of weeks.

I fired up Parallels to see things through Windows for the first time in ages. It seems to be fixed now.

Lemee know sooner next time!

The Business Technology blog over at WSJ reports on a recent study of more than 100 corporate social networks. Ed Moran, a Deloitte consultant, found that:

Thirty-five percent of the online communities studied have less than 100 members; less than 25% have more than 1,000 members – despite the fact that close to 60% of these businesses have spent over $1 million on their community projects.

Moran’s conclusion is that companies get seduced by the technologies involved without understanding the terrain. These sites fail, he believes, because companies don’t invest enough money or manpower in supporting them, and because the things the companies measure don’t really align with their professed business goals.

The title of the article – “Why Most Online Communities Fail” – is misleading, since Moran is talking specifically about corporate social networks, and the very premise of these sites is flawed if you ask me. I haven’t seen the list of companies he looked at, but I would guess that most of them actually have thriving online “communities” whose activities just happen to be distributed across the Internet. People are twittering. They’re posting about those 100 companies on their blogs and MySpace pages.

I understand the urge that companies have to contain this activity, but it’s a pipe dream. You can build the snazziest playground in the world, and most of your community still won’t show up. If you want to connect with them, you have to do it on their turf. If you want to quantify their effect on your brand perception or your sales numbers, you have to find tools that can do that.

That’s what my most recent venture, Scout Labs, is aiming to provide, and that’s why I believe in their product. Companies are willing to spend millions on the fantasy that they can bring their communities to them because they don’t have very good ways of tuning in to the communities that are already out there.

But that’s changing.