It’s not for me, but there’s a certain unerring logic about SocialMinder: instead of leaving your social and business relationships to be tended by natural forces, why not automate them?
SocialMinder offers just that, by mining your LinkedIn and Gmail address books and notifying you when you last contacted that person. (This is called monitoring the health of your relationships.) It not only does that; it will dig out some news item related to the person in question—or from the organisation they work for, and prepare an email for you. Something like this:
which reads:
Hi Wicak;
I was thinking about you the other day, and then I saw this and had to ask how/if this impacts you..
ACES Int'l Certification Programs: Certified Utility Locator …
Here is the link:
http://www.acesinternational.org/Hope that you all are well…
Talk with you soon…
Needless to say, should I send this to Wicak he would be highly surprised as that’s not the way I talk to him (not enough insults and expletives), and the fact I’m pointing out his organisation’s own website to him might give him pause to wonder whether continuing our friendship is a good idea.
Some early thoughts:
This kind of thing occupies an odd space in the social/business networking pantheon. On the one hand, we all know there’s a lot of dodginess about networking. It’s all about back-scratching, and what-can-you-do-for-me about it all. But it still needs to be civil, and at least a pretence maintained that there’s more to it than naked mutual exploitation (actually, put like that it sounds quite fun.)
So how to monitor and nurture those relationships without putting in the effort that real relationships require? Hence SocialMinder (I suspect a better name would be SocialMiner without the ‘d’.) It’s pretty well executed, of course, and perhaps there are instances where this kind of approach might be useful.
But all SocialMinder really does is to remind you that relationships aren’t about quantity, they’re about quality. Even business ones.
Everyone on LinkedIn knows—I assume—that they’re on there because they want to make use of other people’s networks. These networks, actually, don’t really exist. They’re just a bunch of names, loosely tied, as Mr Weinberger might put it. It’s not that LinkedIn is not useful, but it’s not because we’re constantly sending our LInkedIn buddies emails about their company’s activities. It’s because we can use those loose connections to hear about jobs, or put out requests, knowing that it’s going to people who accept such emails as part of the networking process. Call it a kind of ‘business spam opting in’.
So, sadly, I don’t think SocialMinder will catch on. Indeed, you might argue it marks the apogee of the social networking trend. If we need to rely on software to direct our relationships then, I suspect, we’ve either entered another dimension from which there’s no turning back, or we’ll realise the limits of the medium and start to focus on the people behind the nodes.
Is it just me, or are software developers beginning to get their users? For a long time I’ve felt the only real innovation in software has been in online applications, Web 2.0 non-apps—simple services that exist in your browser—but now it seems that ordinary apps are getting better too.
Evernote, I feel, is one that’s really leading the charge. They’ve taken the feedback that us users have been giving them and have added, incremental release by incremental release, some really cool features. For example: now you can save searches in the Windows version. Reminds me of the old Enfish Tracker Pro, whose departure I still mourn. In fact, Evernote isn’t far off becoming a real database instead of a dumping ground for things you’ll read one day. Maybe.
Skype, too, have pulled their socks up. I hated 4.0 beta, not least for its big bumbling footprint. But the new version is better—a lot better. The main improvement is the option to make it look like your old Skype. But it has some nice new touches, including a chronology scroller that might interest Evernote’s legal department (Skype on the left, Evernote on the right):
Move the bar on the right and you can move easily through old chats. Legal niceties aside, I think this kind of innovation is great to see, and almost restores my faith in designers realising that we don’t just use software in the here and now, but also as repositories of past heres and nows, if you know what I mean.
In short, our decision to commit to software is largely based on how much we will be able to get out of it. Not just in terms of hours saved in what we do now, but in what past information we’ll be able to get out of it. We have been using computers long enough now to have built up a huge repository of interactions and memos, and we want, nay we insist, to be able to get that stuff back. Quickly and easily. And, increasingly, to be able to move it to other places should we wish.
Google understands this relatively well. A chat in GTalk, for example, can be readily accessed via Gmail. And, now, we can also see and search our other data held within Google’s silos, right within Gmail, via some widgets from Google’s Gmail Labs. Here are two widgets that let you view your calendar:
and here’s one to see your documents within Google Docs:
Note the window at the top for searching through your document titles. This means one less step to access your data.
All these things have some basic concepts in common:
As I’ve mentioned, it’s about being able to get what you’ve put in out. Skype have listened to their customers and realised it’s less about the interface and more about the information the interface gives access to. If they were smart they’d find an easy way to send old chats to your email account or at least make it easy to search all your chats from one box. (I’m told that, or something like it, is coming in the ‘Gold’ version of Skype 4.0 next year. Until now only group chats—three or more people can be saved to your contact list.)
Secondly, software should, where possible, work with other people’s software. Emusic’s new download manager (above), for example, does something that has been missing ever since the service launched. Previously, if you wanted to include MP3 files you’d bought from the service in iTunes, you’d need to either drag them across into iTunes or re-introduce the folder into iTunes. The new version of the downloader tool now synchronizes automatically with iTunes, meaning you don’t need to do anything. Thank God for that.
There are tons of other things that software needs to do that it presently doesn’t. I could start listing them but I need to go to bed. But maybe in this downturn developers could take a note from some of these examples, and use the time to look more carefully at what users need, at how they use your software, and explore new and better ways for them to use it for what they do, not what you think they should do.
I make an appearance on the excellent Breakfast Club show on Radio Australia each Friday at 01:15 GMT and some listeners have asked me post links to the stuff I talk about, so here they are.
Follow football on your cellphone through vibrations: a team in Scandavia has come up with a way to convey movement of a ball via vibrations. This would allow folks wanting to follow a soccer game with the phone in their pocket, in theory.
This is how it would happen, as far as I can understand it: someone would watch a game and input data whenever the ball was kicked. This data would translate into vibrations—short if the ball is in midfield, longer and more insistent as it got nearer the goal. The researchers claim that users quickly figure out what is happening and can follow a game pretty well.
Reminds me of when I was a kid trying to follow a soccer match on a bad radio: You kind of guessed when things were getting exciting by the rise in crowd noise and the voice of the commentator.
Obama’s victory has quickly translated into an opportunity for bad guys. Sophos reports that 60% of malicious is Obama related, including what looks like a link to his acceptance speech, but which is in fact a trojan which, among other things, captures keystrokes and sends information back to the Ukraine. Obama-related malware has even been seen in the sponsored ads appearing on Google News.
EA has made another boo-boo: some copies of its Red Alert 3 CDs are missing a character on the serial number. “Try guessing the last character,” explained the support site until someone pointed out that this was dumb and encouraging amateur cracking.
Lost in translation: The continuing saga of Welsh being a language that non-speakers are never going to be able to guess at took another twist with a sign that, in English, reads “No entry for heavy goods vehicles. Residential site only,” but which in Welsh reads “I am not in the office at the moment. Send any work to be translated.”
I don’t think I need to explain more, except to say that the sign has been removed—apparently by the council that installed it. What Welsh truck drivers made of it has not been recorded.
Photo credit: BBC
WiFi has become a commodity, something we expect to be able to find, but marketers are slowly waking up to its potential to get the message out—by renaming the service. But is it such a good idea?
A Dutch company, according to Adrants, has started changing the name of its WiFi service continually—both to promote items and to nag freeloaders into buying coffee:
By continuously changing the names of their store networks to such things as OrderAnotherCoffeeAlready, BuyCoffeeForCuteGirlOverThere?, HaveYouTriedCoffeeCake?, BuyAnotherCupYouCheapskate, TodaysSpecialExpresso1.60Euro and BuyaLargeLatterGetBrownieForFree, the chain is able to both promote items as well as guilt patrons into realizing free WiFi really isn’t totally free.
Some boring questions are not answered in the article, such as whether users find themselves bumped off the network when the name changes (I guess not) to whether regular customers complain that they have to change their WiFi settings every time they log on.
And they’re not the first to try something like this: A German car rental company called SIXT has set up WiFi networks in airports with names promoting the car company’s brand. Select the WiFi network and you’re taken to the company’s home page.
The article doesn’t explain whether these WiFi networks provide real connections, or merely access to the company’s page. Needless to say, if it’s the latter any positive message may be undone. And, as the writer points out, this “wifitising” is a form of spam that people may not appreciate.
On top of that is the growth in dodgy WiFi networks that offer free WiFi but actually launch “man in the middle” attacks to eavesdrop on your passwords and other data as you use the network. A hacker last month, for example, accessed personal emails of guests using a U.S. hotel’s free WiFi network. A study by Cornell University’s Center for Hospitality Research of 147 U.S. hotels found that only six of the 39 hotels (HTML version of the PDF file, which requires registerig to download) offering WiFi were encrypting traffic. It concluded hotels were “ill-prepared to protect their guests from network security issues.”
The problems with changing the names of WiFi networks are obvious: They further confuse the user and reduce the chances of a standard emerging that may reduce people’s vulnerability when using WiFi. Of course, anyone can give a WiFi an official-sounding name, so networks are vulnerable to start with, and the Cornell report shows that using even legit WiFi leaves users vulnerable. So it’s hard to see this wifitising trend—small tho it is—as anything more than a fad, because if it does catch on, it’s going to make using public WiFi more complicated and misleading, rather than less so.
Renamed WiFi Networks Guilt Freeloaders Into Buying Coffee » Adrants
