user agent

Two years after Pinch Media released their iTunes App Store Secrets report, I still see this iconic curve on a regular basis:

It doesn’t matter whether it’s a game or a productivity app, free or paid, the typical mobile app is dumped like a cheerleader after prom night. Most are all but abandoned within a month or two, which means they’re either ill-conceived, poorly designed, or both. It’s especially sad when you consider how hard it is to get your app onto someone’s phone in the first place. With a million apps in the iTunes store competing for the same real estate, it’s tough to get yours discovered, much less downloaded.

Every developer wants to be one of the lucky few who break through, but they should also want to make their apps sticky. So what does it take buck the curve? To answer this, it’s important to look at the ways mobile apps are used.

I organize mobile app usage scenarios into concepts I’m going to call the 3 Cs, and the more of them that factor in to an app, the stickier it is.

Continuity

These are apps that keep you connected to things you can’t stand to be away from. The great grandfather in this category is mobile email, which is what made Blackberry into Crackberry. Newer, sexier examples are Facebook (iTunes store link), Twitter and any other app for accessing time-sensitive content (NetNewsWire, Sportacular). The common thread is freshness – a steady stream of new content. Push alerts are key to Continuity apps, since they tell users when there’s something new to see.

Context

Mobile devices and ubiquitous 3G and GPS created whole categories of apps built around the here and now. Location and presence. If you find yourself wandering around a city block in search of a public restroom, you can check SitOrSquat. Hungry? fire up Yelp, or Foodspotting. These apps keep you coming back because of their contextual relevance and utility. Yelp’s iPhone app has become my de facto Yellow Pages to the half-mile radius.

Capacity

Modern culture has killed our appetite for idleness. We’re uncomfortable with silence. When we have some extra capacity – for lack of a better alliterative term – we fill it as quickly as we can. Mobile apps are ideal for this, especially almost any kind of game. As far as stickiness goes, though, this is the weakest of the 3 Cs. Most games lose their appeal after a month or two, and there are certainly a lot of games represented in the Pinch Media curve.

The stickiest apps are the ones that span more than one of these concepts. Foursquare, for example, covers all three. There’s Continuity in the need to know where your friends are, Context in the location features, Capacity in the gamelike mechanics around acquiring status and collecting various rewards.

Mobile video apps make up another category that spans several of the Cs. People watch short-form videos during idle moments – while riding the bus to work or waiting in line for the ATM – which is another way of saying people use them when they have some extra Capacity. Kyte (my current employer) makes it easy to distribute video content to mobile devices, which enables publishers to keep it fresh, which in turn means Kyte-powered video apps check the box for Continuity. The Kyte Mobile App Frameworks take Continuity further with turnkey support for integrated Twitter updates and RSS feeds, giving brands and publishers a multi-dimensional engagement opportunity.

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.

What the hell is wrong with Nokia? It’s as if they got together as a company, identified all they ways their software could suck, and then aimed for the bottom.

I’ve been using some of the latest Nokia handsets at work for a few weeks now. The N97, for example, is awesome on paper. Big, high-resolution touch-screen display. Decent amount of memory, power, battery life. 5 megapixel camera – with a flash even. In person, Nokia’s handsets are still nicely styled – a good size, weight and form factor. But man oh man, the user experience of these devices has me shaking my head every time I try to do anything.

The touch screen doesn’t really work. The phone prompts me 50 times every time I need a network connection. And take today. I fired up my N97 Mini and it prompted me, “Do you want to check for software updates?”

Sure, I thought, and tapped the on-screen button to continue.

Then a dialog: “There’s an important software update for your phone.”

Cool. Go on… [tap].

A message. “Go to http://www.nokia.com/softwareupdate in your browser”

Wait, a message? I can’t just download and install the update using my phone?

OK, that seems dumb, but I fire up the browser and struggle my way through typing out the URL. Which takes me to a web page (not a mobile web page) that has a horizontal scrolling iframe containing all the Nokia handsets. I’m supposed to find my handset model, but I can’t operate the scrollbar/iframe using my N97.

Don’t ask me why I even bother pressing forward at this point, but eventually I find a search box, and I enter “N97 Mini” which brings up an image of my phone.

I click on the image, and I see the following message:

Nokia Software Updater can be used with most Nokia devices listed above and need only be downloaded once.

Requires: Windows Vista or XP, USB cable to connect your device to your PC.

Then a button to download a 23 MB .exe file.

WTF? I have to use a special app installed on a Windows machine (I’m a Mac user) to update the software on my phone? You couldn’t have told me about five steps earlier in this process?

Whenever the conversation turns to Apple, there erupts a certain amount of troll vs. fanboy squabbling. Usually there are a few would-be referees in the mix too, telling everyone to shut up because the topic is worn out, or pointless, or both.

And so it has been lately with the iPhone App Store saga.

Nonetheless, I’m going to give the dead horse one more kick in the ribs.

In my last post, I linked out to some of the recent indictments of Apple on other blogs (Factory Joe, Calacanis.com, GigaOm, TechCrunch). In the comments of these posts were many devil’s advocates (the devil in this case being Apple), and the defense seems to come down to three main points:

1. Apple has always been closed, and Steve Jobs has always been a control freak, but it’s precisely because of this that Apple has had such a track record of quality and success.
2. The iPhone and the App Store are actually awesome. Seriously, the thing is sweet, and there are like a gazillion apps for it. Stop whining!
3. It’s really AT&T’s fault.

There’s certainly truth in all of these, but they ultimately leave me asking, “what is an iPhone, really?”

When Apple was just a computer company, and the Woz was still around, Apple catered to geeks and hobbyists, because they were the people who bought computers. Steve Jobs saw the future early, however. He knew that computers would be a mass-market product, and he helped make it so. He made it so by deciding (or understanding) that a computer should be like any other piece of consumer electronics – like your stereo or your tv. Most people don’t want to program those things, they want to play with them.

Apple took this philosophy to another level with the iPod – a bona fide consumer electronics gadget. No more, no less.

And now, there’s the iPhone, a product that is so firmly somewhere in-between (plus, a phone). And therein lies the problem…

Steve Jobs has always tried to have it both ways. He wants Apple to be the best computing platform on the market, and he wants Apple’s products together to make up a sexy, plug-and-play personal electronics ecosystem.

When you look at it this way, it’s surprising how well he’s managed to make this work.

So, what about the iPhone?

If the iPhone is a little computer, then I expect it to be open and infinitely customizable. Anyone should be able to make any kind of software they want for it, and I should be able to buy the software wherever they want to sell it. Furthermore, it should connect me to the Internet and all that the Internet offers.

If the iPhone is a personal electronics device, then first and foremost I expect it to be plug and play. It should be super easy to get my media onto it, and the experience of consuming or interacting with that media should be fun and easy.

If the iPhone is a phone, then well, first and foremost I expect the supreme suckage of the phone company. I expect to be able to make calls and send texts and get monthly bills that I don’t understand.

The problem of course is that the lines between these things are getting fuzzier and fuzzier. People are either satisfied or dissatisfied with the iPhone depending on which of these three perspectives they favor.

I tend to favor the idea that my iPhone is a little Macintosh computer, so I get cranky when I can’t install a different web browser or get rid of the stupid Yahoo! weather app.

But I also think it’s an awesome little gadget for listening to my tunes and my stories, and I appreciate the gazillion apps I can get for it.

Remember CD-ROMs? Remember how cool they were and how for a brief moment in the early 90s it seemed every possible thing was being CD-ROMified – from children’s books to topo maps to baseball cards? CD-ROMs were briefly so cool that people would pay $200 a pop for the latest and greatest titles. Then they became so ubiquitous that you’d get them as giveaways and even in your junk mail. Then after just a few years, the Web came along, and most CD-ROMs suddenly made no sense at all.

So what does this have to do with iPhone apps? Well…

1. There are a whole bunch of iPhone apps that are really just repackaged websites and don’t make a lot of sense as apps.
2. There are a whole bunch of apps that everyone would dismiss as pointless and annoying if they weren’t wrapped in an iPhone.
3. iPhone apps have a stupidly limited distribution model.

I want to focus on #3. The idea that our mobile phones are small personal computers is still somewhat novel. Other than the simplest of games, we’ve never been able to install software on our phones before, and so the App Store is a little like going from Communist Prague to the Las Vegas strip – except we still have a dictator (albeit a benevolent one) called Apple.

If Apple or any other company tried to exercise complete control over what people could install on their computers they way they do with the iPhone, the reddit kids would go absolutely bananas. Having just arrived from behind the iron curtain, however, we think the App Store is like the best candy store ever.

But people don’t really want one company to dictate what they can install on their phones, even if it’s Apple. There’s no reason Apple should be able to force me to keep the Yahoo! “Stocks” app on my phone, or prevent me from installing a pair of virtual iBoobs (somewhat NSFW). And developers – not to mention companies – would love it if they didn’t have to deal with the whole iTunes Connect process in order to make their apps available to you.

Here’s a hypothetical example: If there’s a problem with the New York Times website, or they want to add a new feature, they have complete freedom to make any changes they want. Not so with the New York Times iPhone App. First they have to find a developer who knows the iPhone platform – a much smaller labor pool than that of web developers. Then, once the work is done, they have to submit it to Apple and wait. Usually about two weeks. And there’s no guarantee that Apple will accept it into the iTunes store. If Apple doesn’t like the way the New York Times has decided to, say, monetize the app by displaying ads, then the New York Times has no choice but to change it, re-submit and wait again. There’s no way the New York Times can make their app available to you outside the iTunes store (jailbroken phones excepted).

Now you might say the New York Times makes no sense as an iPhone App, but why should Apple get to make this decision for the market?

Apple has a huge advantage right now, not just because of their head start. Their SDK is light years beyond anything I’ve seen from Nokia/Symbian, Palm, RIM or J2ME. Apple provides better tools and guidance than anyone else for creating amazing, beautiful, elegant apps. Philosophically, Apple looks at the phone differently than those traditional players do, and this is Apple’s real advantage. They see the phone as a software client first and an extension of the phone company second (and the latter as a kind of necessary evil at that). Android is the only other platform that looks at the phone this way, but at some point in the not too distant future, this is just what phones will be.

When you think of the iPhone as just another computing platform, then it doesn’t make sense for Apple to hold a monopoly on distributing software for it. The iTunes store might always be the best and easiest place to get apps for your iPhone, and Apple surely loves their 30% cut, but someday nothing will prevent people from selling you their apps by way of their websites or Amazon or even in the form of… gasp… CD-ROMs from old-school retailers. Count on it happening sooner rather than later.

Apple always has impecable timing, and they will probably open things up right around the time that Nokia’s new app store comes online.

I’ve worked on a few online video sites in my career, and on every one of those projects we confronted the question of whether to have ratings. In this web 2.0 world, the answer seems obvious on the surface: Of course, you have to let your users rate the videos!

Kyte, for example, added ratings to their platform right before I joined the company.

But let’s take a step back and think about why we rate things on teh interwebs. On sites like Amazon and Netflix, we rate things to help their robots give us better recommendations. Our ratings are one input into a mechanism called colaborative filtering. Associating our ratings with other data – like product details (media type, author/director/artist, genre, price, etc.) and broader purchase metrics (other people who liked this also liked…), those sites try to predict what else we might like to buy or watch.

On sites like Yelp, we rate things for two reasons: The first is that we want to reward or punish… businesses in Yelp’s case in order to improve the overall ecosystem of businesses out there, and the second is that we want to participate in a system that helps ensure our own satisfaction as customers of said businesses (i.e. we can choose to patronize only those businesses that have high ratings).

But what about YouTube? I suspect people rate videos on YouTube for reasons similar to Yelp. That is, we want to congratulate people who produce good stuff and punish people who produce crap, and we want to guide everyone else (and perhaps YouTube’s editors) toward the stuff we liked. When you look at the numbers, however, people don’t appear to think rating videos is very important.

Looking at 20 videos from my personal list of favorites, I found that on average just 3 out of every thousand viewers bothered to submit a rating. And there was not a lot of variance. Most videos were very close to the average, so in this case 20 videos is a sufficient sample for a cursory analysis.

It would be interesting to know what percentage of the view count belongs to registered users of YouTube, since you have to be signed in to rate videos. I suppose it’s possible that just 0.3% of visitors to YouTube are registered and signed in, and that would fully account for the disparity between views and ratings.

But there were a couple of outliers that suggest otherwise. Of the 20 videos I looked at, two had elicited twice the average number of ratings. One is a virtuoso piece of editing work (not to mention research), and it represents a point of view that many people passionately share, so the higher number of ratings makes sense. The second video is by Don Hertzfeld. It’s not one of his best (and oddly it’s the second of two parts), but he’s a hero to those who know his work, so his fans have an interest in promoting him.

Twice the average number of ratings is still only 0.6% of view count, however, and that’s dismally low. The bottom line is people aren’t interested in rating the videos they watch.

Which brings me to a final observation. You almost never see videos on YouTube that have a high view count but a low cumulative rating. High views almost always means 4-5 stars. The only exceptions I could find were videos that elicit a highly polarized response – with political content for example. These end up with a 2-3-star average which doesn’t really reflect the true spectrum of mostly 1 and 5 star ratings.

So no matter how you evaluate it, ratings on YouTube are not a useful way for anyone to discover interesting content. The useful metrics are views and most-favorited. View count tells you what the masses are watching, and most-favorited tells you what people really found compelling (enough to want to watch again).

So, given this, if you were to launch a YouTube-like site, would you have ratings or not?

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.

On many occasions and even in a recent post, I’ve said that I just don’t get twitter. I was certain I didn’t want to tune in to the minutiae of my friends’ lives, and I was not interested in sharing mine. A few short weeks later, I’ve totally changed my tune, and I can say that twitter is now one of my favorite games. Yes, that’s what I said.

I like the strange blend of personal and professional I find on twitter at any given moment, and in this respect, twitter is somewhat unique. Blogs and other content and publishing vehicles (like magazines or television shows) do much better when they specialize – when they focus solely on, say, beer or esoteric music or bespoke tailoring. Even when we consume blogs, we tend to organize them – within RSS readers – into genres and categories. Other types of user-generated content – I’m thinking of forums and discussion boards (and Gmail) – are organized into threads.

But the beauty of twitter is that it’s neither specialized nor organized. At any given moment in the twitter stream from my friends, I might see a quirky observation… next to a plea for support… next to a bit of self-promotion… and so on. Even the stream of tweets from any individual friend will span all these flavors and more over the course of a day or two.

This variety gives twitter a game-like quality in the sense that there’s always the possibility (but never a guarantee) of surprise and delight – a textbook example of a random reward schedule. This is a well-known concept in gambling and game design (as discussed here, here and here), and it’s what keeps people coming back for more. Basically, there are a few different “schedules” a game or other activity can apply in the way it rewards players:

• Fixed interval: Reward players every X minutes/seconds
• Variable interval: Randomly reward players, but with an average interval of X minutes/seconds
• Fixed ratio: Reward players after every X responses
• Variable ratio: Randomly reward players, but with an average trigger of X responses

As you can see from this graph, the variable ratio schedule is by far the most effective:

When it comes to simply consuming the stream of tweets, you could argue that twitter applies either (or both) of the variable schedules, but when you start to interact with the stream it’s clearly variable ratio. I’m officially hooked.

And thanks to TwitterFon, twitter is with me all the time. I’ve become compulsive about checking it. Incidentally, there are numerous twitter apps for iPhone, but none is as easy on the eyes or as fun to use as TwitterFon. And recently, when the app was crashing (due to a JSON parsing issue on twitter), the makers of the app issued freequent updates on their blog and via @twitterfon until it was fixed.

So I’ve gone from flirting to the first strains of a romance. It’s not a full-blown affair yet, because there are so many ways to use twitter, and I’m only scratching the surface. I tweet a couple times a day at most, which makes me a kind of twitter voyeur I suppose. I resolve to start tweeting more, although I never want to be as noisy as @guykawasaki (who I eventually stopped following because he posted almost as much as all my other followees combined) or @Scobleizer. And there are a lot of third-party twitter tools and add-ons I’m not using.

The only fancy thing I’ve done with it is to use twitterfeed to tweet my blog posts automatically (which might be how you got here).

As a user experience guy, one of the things I do for my job is try out every new web service that comes along. Most of them don’t really stick, and some I avoid simply because of god-awful naming. I’m talking about you, Frrvrr. Seriously, the Web 2.0 Company Name Generator could have done way better. Anyway, the following is the shortlist of the services I actually get value out of on an almost daily basis…

del.icio.us
There’s too much good stuff on the Internetz. I find a handful of things every day that I don’t have time to read right away. I also read a lot of good stuff that I know I’ll want to find later or refer back to. Enter del.icio.us. I must have a couple thousand URLs bookmarked in there now, but I never have trouble finding them. The social component is a nice value-add, but del.icio.us would still be essential to my Internet survival without it. My only complaint is the lack of support for multi-word tags. Commas would have been a better choice than spaces as a delineator.

I discovered Plaxo a few years back when I was trying to consolidate and clean up a few different address books. It was good then, and it’s awesome now. With hooks into Gmail, Google Calendar, Yahoo Mail and Calendar and LinkedIn, plus a sync tool for Mac OS, Plaxo is the keystone of my personal information management. Recently they added a social networking suite of features called “Pulse,” which makes sense, but I have no use for it myself. I’m not sure what it does that, say, LinkedIn doesn’t already handle for me.

I used to alternate pretty much equally between Pandora and Last.fm, but eventually I found myself using Pandora more and more and Last.fm less and less. Pandora just picks better music. Last.fm is a social network, but all I’m interested in is a steady stream of good tunes. I’m sensing a pattern here, three apps with social networking components I don’t use. I’m an introverted person. Case in point I suppose. Last.fm uses collaborative filtering – the opinions of your friends and peers – to choose music it thinks you’ll like. Pandora uses a proprietary algorithm based on an editorial analysis of hundreds of attributes of each song. What’s more, Pandora learns from your own consumption of the music it plays and gets better and better.

Maybe I’m not so anti-social after all. I started using LinkedIn as a way of keeping tabs on people I worked with in the past, especially as they moved and changed jobs. Beyond that, I used it occasionally to help friends find jobs and to recruit people to work for me. Recently, they launched an “Answers” feature, where people post questions and the community responds. I’ve asked a few questions myself and gotten useful answers, and I enjoy browsing the pool of other people’s questions.

I don’t know the exact ratio of good luck to good thinking responsible for the wonderful world called Yelp, but they’ve managed to create something incredibly useful and utterly addictive. The various ways to connect and communicate with other people are especially engaging. You can rate other people’s reviews along several dimensions (useful, funny, cool) and send each other quick little compliments that are then displayed for all to see. Add talk threads, a local events calendar and a host of other useful features – all wrapped in a smart and efficient UI.

Wikipedia
My route to Wikipedia usually begins with a Google search for some obscure tidbit of trivia. A few hyperlinks later and I’m hopelessly hooked, and I can kiss an hour of work goodbye.

Specifically Google Reader and Google Analytics. I used to use Bloglines to follow my feeds, but I switched to Google Reader because it’s able to keep track of exactly what posts I’ve read (and not read). Simple as that. As for Google Analytics, I get a darn good analytics app for free, and Google gets some data about my website and my visitors that it couldn’t get any other way. Win win.

The engine that powers this blog. It just keeps getting better and better, and it’s free. The WP community gives you help when you need it, and they’re always cranking out new ways to extend the core software. Code is poetry indeed.

Notably absent from my favorites are a few very popular services. People tout these all the time, and some of my friends give me dumbfounded looks when they find out I’m not a fan of…

• Twitter – I just don’t feel any need to get constant up-to-the-minute updates about anyone, and I have no interest in keeping anyone that updated about me.
• Facebook – I hate how Facebook forces you to spam everyone. Imagine ordering a cup of coffee at Starbucks and having to order drinks for everyone else in the store in order to pick yours up. I am, however, totally addicted to Facebook’s new Boggle-like game called Prolific.
• Flickr – I’m actually a fan of Flickr, but I’m a casual and infrequent photographer at best. Also, I can’t stand the pressure to come up with witty captions for everything.
• Technorati – I use Google. Rubel was right. Enough said.
• Last.fm – See Pandora, above.

Finally, there are a number of services that really intrigue me and have great possibilities. They are doing interesting things, adding value to the web and pushing it in the right directions. They just don’t fulfill a frequent or persistent need of mine, so I don’t have any compelling reason to use them on a regular basis.

• Ning – New-ish venture from Netscape founder Marc Andreessen. An application platform that promises, “Create Your Own Social Network For Anything.” I have friends who think it’s the bomb diggity, but I’ve only scratched the surface of it myself.
• Dapper – A web service that enables you to turn any website into an API. It’s pretty slick, and it’s tools like this that are pushing us ever closer to a truly semantic web.
• Yahoo Pipes – This is a preview for how basic software engineering will be done in the future. Oooh the future.
• Freebase – More semantic fun. A database of “the world’s information,” drawn from large open (structured) data sets.

I know this list might seem pretty random. I’ve failed to even mention quite a number of notable services, many of which I have used and enjoyed to some extent. They just haven’t graduated to the level of the things that benefit me every day.