A Twitter experiment — part 1

Posted on February 13, 2008 
Filed Under Effective Websites, Flash, Twitter | Leave a Comment

Right. I was saying Twitter turned out to be surprisingly useful. Lately I’ve been following a few people who have a sincere interest and involvement in advertising and every day they come up with a few links or observations that I normally would have missed.

140 — Twitter’s character limitSo I began to wonder about other people I might like to follow. Would it be as easy as thinking, “Ooh, [insert name of well-known person here], I bet s/he’s good on Twitter”? Face it—most people probably couldn’t be bothered. Then again, there are probably some interest groups with a much higher likelihood of taking part.

I’m into website development and standards, Internet usability, and Flash programming. I’ve been following some thought leaders in these areas for years. How many names can I list right off the top of my head? How likely is it they’d be on Twitter too?

Here’s the first set of names I came up with:

That’s 20. Seemed like enough to start with. And so far I’ve checked the first 10 on Twitter. How many did I find there? Are they active?

Tomorrow.

Hey, I just noticed. All 20 of the people listed up there are male. What’s up with that? I don’t think it’s me. Is it?

Twitter reconsidered

Posted on February 12, 2008 
Filed Under Twitter, Writing | Leave a Comment

TwitterWhen I first heard of Twitter, and for months afterward, my reaction was simple—sounds like a real waste of time. A 140-character limit. What’s that, two or three sentences? I mean, who the hell cares most of the time what you’re doing at this very minute? It didn’t help that most of the examples I heard seemed to focus on the trivial. “I’m having a Quarter Pounder at McDonald’s. With fries and a Coke. Yum!”

Give me a break.

Then I read something or somebody said something. I don’t remember who or what, but it made me reconsider. Whatever, I thought I’d dive in and give Twitter a chance. For the first week I twittered several times a day, but then I tapered off to once or twice a day. I have a few followers, mostly people I know. They follow me, I follow them, and we’re all pretty sporadic.

If that’s all there was to it, Twitter wouldn’t be anything special for me. But after a few weeks, I started following a selection of folks involved in the ad industry, people I don’t know but who were quite active on Twitter and who, it turned out, often made observations that really helped me in my work as a Flash developer for an ad agency. It might be a link to a website or a blog post, or comments on a new commercial or advertising campaign. Whatever, it involved me in a wider world of advertising than I was exposed to in my day-to-day work.

Little things here and there. Nudges. There’s stuff to learn and to be excited about. And it’s fun.

Now I have an experiment in mind.

“Left Vs. Right” — how do you measure success?

Posted on February 8, 2008 
Filed Under Effective Websites, Flash | Leave a Comment

Left Vs. RightPatrick’s behind the desk on the left with a blue background and Britt’s on the right with red. They’re waiting for me to ask a question or suggest a topic. Finally she starts flossing.

“Don’t do that here,” he says.

He looks straight out at me. “Please type something.”

It’s Left Vs. Right, a clever, good-looking Flash site promoting Microsoft’s Live Search. You can type in a topic and if it has any relevancy at all to the current political scene in the US, Patrick and Britt will have some witty dialogue in response. At the same time, you’re presented with a selection of more prosaic and useful search results in three categories—”Web”, “Images”, and “News”.

As a Flash developer myself, I have some idea of the amount of money, time and effort that goes into a site like this. All too often the result is not as usable nor as satisfying. Many, if not most, of these sites are little more than a parlour trick. You visit, you try it, and if it’s better than most, you pass on the URL to your friends and co-workers. Then you move on.

Left Vs. Right is good, but is it worth the investment? Beyond the design and technical development, there was considerable investment in copywriting, performance, filming, etc. I wouldn’t dare to guess, but they must have had one hell of a budget. Ultimately however, I don’t find myself terribly encouraged to use Live Search as a result.

On Left Vs. Right your topics have to be “political”. I entered “live search” and they obviously didn’t have anything prepared.

Britt takes the lead with, “If we told you that, we’d have to kill you.”

“And that’s not really our policy here on Left Vs. Right,” continues Patrick.

“Yet.”

“We could make some calls though.”

Usability is a moving target

Posted on February 6, 2008 
Filed Under Usability | 1 Comment

They are two of the Big Names in online usability—Jakob Nielsen and Steve Krug.

I wrote that sentence and then asked myself if there were others who should be considered on the same level. I wasn’t sure. I went to Amazon.com and searched for books on “usability”. The top two results:

I’ve read Krug’s book at least twice, maybe three times. It’s not just informative and packed with good advice; it’s easy and actually fun to read. I’ve learned a great deal from Nielsen’s website over the years, and I’m sure there’s still an awful lot I’ve missed. These guys are real experts and argue persistently for techniques of keeping websites easy to use. Because… a site that’s easy to use is an effective site.

I won’t argue with that.

But then it just so happened that I visited their websites on the same day. Go ahead, take a quick look (but don’t forget to come back):

Those are two butt-ugly sites. You have to ask yourself—does an effective site have to look like that? Or have users evolved over the past decade to the point where we can identify a link even if it’s not blue and underlined? Further, could it be that an attractive design actually makes a site more usable? Let’s say you have a user who doesn’t know who these guys are and this user opens one of these sites. Do you suppose that user might just think, “Whoa, what a crude and ugly site. So 1990s. Can I really count on good advice from someone who can’t do a better job than this?”

Nowadays you can expect visitors to your site to be more sophisticated, and probably more demanding when it comes to design. Usability evolves with the users and we have to keep up.

“Gonna Fly Now” or not?

Posted on February 5, 2008 
Filed Under Ads, Television | Leave a Comment

It’s the day after Super Bowl XLII. We’re all talking about the game and we’re talking about the commercials. As usual, there were some fun commercials, but overall I can’t help but feel disappointed. Okay, nothing new here—every year I feel disappointed. You hear how this is the Big Event and how much it costs to air a 30-second spot and you think they’ve got to be more than just good. They’ve got to be worth all that money and all that hype.

Why can’t the ad industry, or the clients who pay them, meet the challenge? There are some amazing and effective spots out there all through the year, so why don’t we actually see more of the best during the big game?

Maybe our expectations are just too high. Or could it be that the ads are so damn good, we’re quickly sated and nothing stands out?

I don’t think so.

Maybe it’s just me. Apparently even the experts have difficulty agreeing on the ads that did work. David Armano, whom I truly respect, says via Twitter, “Laura Ries picked Budweiser ‘rocky’ for best SB ad? I want whatever drugs she’s on.” She likes it and he isn’t that impressed, though he doesn’t say why. Is this an “in crowd” thing—as in, if you really understood advertising, you’d know why the Budweiser Rocky commercial isn’t so great? I liked it. Apparently a lot of people did.

Or is general popularity an ironic kiss of death when it comes to television advertising?

Update: David Armano comes through again. Via Twitter, he refers us to “The BEST Superbowl Ad you never saw on Superbowl Sunday”. Excellent.

A second post — about first posts

Posted on January 22, 2008 
Filed Under Blogs | Leave a Comment

So I began to wonder how did the other bloggers start? How many have left their first posts online for curious folks like me to search out? Maybe I could find some reassurance that even the best began with just a bit of stage fright.

I started by checking some favourites. How far back do they go, and can I be sure the earliest post I find is the actual first post? For example, I really enjoy David Armano’s Logic + Emotion. Well, I enjoy a lot of blogs but his tends to be one that I find myself emailing again and again to the folks I work with. The earliest post I could find was “Amazon Music Store: The Future Amazon Shopping Experience?” (February 2, 2006). No indication at all that it’s the first post, except that it’s the earliest I could find. He seems to have decided to take the less self-conscious route. (Or maybe he erased the evidence.)

Guy Kawasaki has been a big name in technology and entrepreneurship for a long time, so it was surprising to find that he didn’t start blogging until Dec. 30, 2005. The first post on his How to Change the World was the wonderfully titled “Better Late than Arrogant”, which began: “Welcome to my first attempt at blogging. Admittedly, I’m three years behind the bleeding edge, but I had to get over the inherent arrogance of blogging: that people would give a shitake about what I have to say.”

And just to be on the safe side he was careful to point out, parenthetically, “Not that I’m committing to daily blog.”

In my limited search for first posts, one that really stood out is by Douglas Bowman of stopdesign fame. He wrote in “Something New”, “It’s with great humility that I hammer out this first post. Humility, because I enter the game way after many others.” How should this make me feel, knowing that he wrote it on August 12, 2002?

He went on to say: “The fact that you’re reading this probably means one of three things: 1.) You somehow discovered this log in its infancy, either by accident or by some referrer log that claims I linked to your site. 2.) I’ve somehow managed to continue blabbing about something interesting enough that you actually went back in time through thousands of posts to see what I wrote for the very first entry. 3.) You’re my Mom, and seem to remember me telling you something about a ‘block?’”

Going waaaay back (to 1997!), there’s The Best Page in the Universe for which the earliest page is now only available as a screenshot, but it started: “Welcome to The Best Page in the Universe. This page is about me and why everything I like is great. If you disagree with anything you find on this page, you are wrong.”

So much for stage fright.

This experiment could go on forever. If you’re interested in more samples of first posts, check out the appropriately named First Post!

There are millions of blogs already. They all started somewhere, somehow, and now…

Here I am, and this is my second post.

First Post

Posted on January 21, 2008 
Filed Under Blogs | Leave a Comment

I’ve been wondering how to start. This is it. Moving on…

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