Category Archives: Internet

Notifications and emails

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Air Mail Envelope

Yet another vintage representation of Email

We all now that email, being a technology created a long time ago and developed organically into some sort of lingua franca of Internet persona and communications, has a series of problems. No easy ones. Manage the email is a problem of its own, and there are lots of articles about it on the Internet.

One of the most annoying is the notifications. We all receive too much email that are only reminders of something relatively interesting in a different app. That could be a new comment on a blog post, an update on LinkedIn, or even a new post on a forum (yep, that used to be a huge thing). GMail’s recent move to group together all notification email is a great example that this system is quite inefficient. It is difficult to find the balance between keep a user informed and not sending spam.

To increase the annoyance, notifications typically will be produced in bursts. There is some discussion in a blog, with 4 or 5 messages in an hour, then it stops for several hours, and then someone else post another comment, producing another couple of comments.

My impression is that any serious app that produces a significant number of notifications (not even very high, something like twice a week or more) and wants to show some respect to their uses should move to a notification system. Hey, Facebook has done it. Remember when Facebook used to send tons of mail everyday with new likes, friends and posts? They changed that to make a notification system in their page. That mean you can always close Facebook, and when coming back, you can easily go to everything since last time.

But, of course, Facebook is a special case, because most people keeps it open or at least check it regularly. Most of other apps that are not that frequently used needs to use email, or no one will check them.

So that’s the deal. Send only one email. One saying “You have new stuff on app X. go to this link to check your new notifications. No new email will be sent until you visit our page” And maybe send another reminder after a week (that can be disabled). This way, if I don’t want to go immediately to the page, no more spamy notifications are received. If I’m interested in the app, I’ll check every time I get that email, but the email is not spam. It allows a very interesting natural flow. And it also shows up respect for your users.

PD: Yes, I know that this is inspired by the way phpBB works, but in a more high level approach. Not sure why that way of doing stuff is not more common.

Only external comments allowed?

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where_are_my_comments

No spoilers will be tolerated. Thanks.

I’m noticing that recently there are a lot of blogs out there that are not allowing comments.

I am not talking about specific subjects that could be controversial, and have the comments closed to avoid flame wars or trolls. But the total removal of comments, since the beginning. I must confess I don’t understand it, as my way of approaching a blog is not as a closed book, but a place where discussion can improve the original post. Sure, when the number of comments reaches a point, there can be lots of duplicated or low level comments. But I don’t think that a reason to not allowing any. That’s why there are moderation tools.

But, ok, let’s say that I get the idea that a blog post is something complete, and nothing needs to be added to it, as it clearly expresses an idea. In that case, why are there some blogs that, instead of having their own comment system, they are linking Hacker News as a way to encourage discussion? Well, Hacker News is awesome, the community is great and there are lots of interesting discussions there. I check it frequently. But there are problems with that.

First, that you don’t have any kind of control over it. For example, I like to know what are the comments from the original writer. Sure, you can explicitly say it, but it’s not evident. I also like avatars, they help me keeping track of people writing more than one comment or in more than one post. I also like trackbacks. Maybe you prefer those details in a different way, in the exact way that HN is making them. But you cannot decide it.

You also don’t “own” the comments in any way, so if HN decides at some point to delete old comments, you can’t do anything about that. You can’t move them. You are also not notified with new comments.

And finally, my impression is that Hacker News favours the “for new content only”, making people not commenting old posts. That is probably happening everywhere, sometimes I feel that is “not proper” to comment after a couple of days has passed, or if the post is old. With HN comments I think that is exacerbated.

Again, I love Hacker News. But I think that only allowing discussion there is giving away too much.

 

UPDATE: As someone stated on the comments, there are also comments on Hacker News. So feel free to comment here or there! (This blog post wouldn’t be complete without this! :-D )

Say NO to web pages adapted to iOS

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I really really don’t understand why there are people that think it’s “better” to replace a perfectly good web look and feel for a stupid “adaptation” to iOS with sliding pages and different layout.

I mean, c’mon, If your page does not have a good design to start with, why not changing that? For both web clients and iOS devices. I remember when there the wordpress plugin for iOS was activated by default and all the blogs changed totally their appearance for a kind of “magazine” that, yes it looked good, but was much more difficult to read.
I get to have a responsive design to adapt the web to some sizes (like a mobile device), but changing fundamentally how your site looks and is designed is totally pointless…

There is one thing that is even worse. Apps that wraps a web site, removing all the functionality of the web browser for a stupid and independent, limited app. And even worse, they will constantly will bother you with reminders to download and install a pointless app.

No, just don’t. It is totally stupid. Work on your web page, get a great design, and make easy for the people wanting to read it, well, easy. After all they’re the ones interested in you….

PD: I think the Android ecosystem is similar. The same applies.

Google Reader as a “Be careful with the cloud” tale.

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20130321181637!Google_Reader_logoI have been hit by the recent “readerpocalipse”. I use Google Reader daily heavily, and it is THE main access I use to consume information on Internet. I am taking a look at alternatives, and I (and everyone else that used it heavily) will survive. But I am worried about what impact can this have in the perception and operations of cloud services, specially by Google, but also in general.

During the last years, we have seen a lot of cloud services that the perception has been “this is going to be available forever”. Of course, we knew that it was not necessarily the case, something catastrophic can happen, like the company going out of business. But, in general, if it was from a big, profitable and established company (like Google) and it has a critical mass of followers, the feeling was that maybe it was not going to be upgraded, or could have availability problems, but it will be still there. We awake yesterday in a different scenario.

This is going to make me change my perception of cloud services. From now on, I’ll add an extra care when choosing a service, and that will probably make me use them less that I was doing it before. Specially if I start using it a lot, I’ll try to evaluate more seriously plan B’s and ‘what ifs’. Probably that’s a good thing, as I was probably being a little naïve about all this. I was keeping some minimum backups “just in case”, but I will now probably take everything more seriously and try to store less things in “the cloud”.

Internet y el fetichismo de los números

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Una cosa que no he entendido muy bien de la “cultura internetera” es esa reivindicación tan fuerte de los “followers”, los “likes” y la difusión mal entendida.

Y de todos, todos los colores

Y de todos, todos los colores

Vale, en cierta medida, si tu blog lo siguen 10.000 y no 10, llega a más gente y (se supone), es más interesante. Sin embargo, especialmente en España, se llega a casos ridículos al querer utilizar los números como arma arrojadiza ante cualquier situación… O, al menos, se justifica todo a través de ello…

¿Que no me gusta lo que has dicho en Twitter? Hago un unfollow que además lo canto a los cuatro vientos: “¡Eh! Que te fastidias que tu contador de seguidores baja, eh, ¡que lo sepas!”

¿Que te peleas con alguien? Sacas a colación el número de seguidores, las visitas a tu página web o el número de reproducciones de un vídeo.

Por no hablar de compañias que “venden” seguidores, tanto en Facebook como en Twitter. ¿Qué valor tiene un seguidor comprado?

Un caso claro es el hecho de mandar todo a Menéame, a pesar de que tus anteriores artículos los hayan puesto a caldo. El caso es que te lea gente, aunque sea una audiencia totalmente distinta a la que (en principio) debería ser tu target… Sinceramente, la audiencia media de Menéame (y otros sitios por el estilo) está tan llena de trolls, que yo nunca pienso que merezca la pena enviar nada, y mucho menos promocionarlo activamente, como hace mucha gente.

Creo que estamos locos. Nos estamos dejando llevar por querer ver “quién la tiene más larga” y no por “quién está más satisfecho con sus relaciones”. El número de seguidores / lectores de tu blog / etc es el tamaño de tu audiencia, pero es mucho más importante la CALIDAD de esa audiencia… Que nos olvidamos de que una visita, sin más, no implica nada. Puede ser alguien a quien no le aportas absolutamente nada (y, por tanto, irrelevante), o, en el peor de los casos, alguien que te pone a caldo sin motivo…. Especialmente si no vendes nada, como suele ser el caso (aunque, incluso si vendes, el hecho de que las visitas que tengas sean “de calidad” puede ser muy importante para tus conversiones)

Algo de promoción con cabeza no está de más, y es necesario. Pero creo que estamos sacando todo de madre y nos estamos poniendo el énfasis en el lado equivocado de las cosas.

Think a little about the readers of your web site

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This is a translation of a post by Ricardo Galli about some of the lessons he has learned on Menéame, a social news website in Spanish similar to Digg. I wanted to share some of the concepts with my co-workers, but I thought that it could be interesting to translate the complete work and share it with the whole world ;-) Any English errors are my own. I will also like to thank David Brodigan for help me reviewing the English version.

Bored of having to wait more than 5 seconds to display a blog’s page? Annoyed with those sites with dozens of widgets, gadgets, AJAX effects and mashups that take hours to load? Troubled because you have developed a very efficient program for the last hot framework and “it’s slow”? Me too, and that worries me a lot, These sites are incredibly crap pieces of work that don’t take into account the basics about usability and human interface: Response time perceived by the user.

You can criticize everything else about Menéame, except its speed or that we have not taken into account this very important aspect, that’s why I’m sharing the few rules we have been following very strictly. We already knew some, but we have also learnt many more during these past five years of development .

There are a lot of parameters to take into account to develop “fast” websites. Not only the server speeds, or the time it takes the server to generate dynamic HTML, there are other parameters that directly affect the browser and user’s perception.

In July 2001 I wrote an article at Bulma [in Spanish] where I explained, according to measurements made during the development of the first sites of Diari de Balears and Última Hora (during the years 1997-1998), the fundamental technical parameters to measure and take into account: response time, return time, download time and “display time”. That last parameter, display, is the one that has the most impact for the user. The user expects a quick response, and that’s mostly perceived as the time that takes for the page to start to display on the browser.

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La información infinita

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Ayer me enteré de algo gracias a Internet que desconocía de alguien que conozco. El qué no es importante. Lo importante es que posiblemente hayamos perdido el anonimato. Buscar tu propio nombre en Internet es algo bastante común, que todo el mundo hace de vez en cuando, o eso dicen las estadísticas al menos…  ¡Si hasta puedes hacerte un perfil para que Google sepa qué enseñar cuando la gente te busca!

El caso es que, si nos buscamos, o buscamos a algún amigo de la infancia, posiblemente nos salgan resultados. Y ya sabemos que eliminar un resultado de Internet es algo muy complicado, así que pasados los años podemos tener practicamente nuestra vida. Quizá una entrada en nuestro blog (que ya abandonamos) diciendo que estamos enamorados, otro en el post de una amiga de nuestra ex diciendo lo mal que estámos por haberlo dejado. Unas fotos donde un amigo te ha etiquetado. Unos comentarios en el blog de horticultura, que nos dió por ahí en su momento. Un video en YouTube de cuando hiciste el corto ese en la Universidad…

Y así, pasando el tiempo, tu vida está en la Red. El problema es que es posible que estén las cosas que, bueno, bien te interesa, bien no te importa que estén. Pues igual una foto en la promoción de tu carrera, o haciendo una presentación en un ciclo de conferencias, pero tambien va a estar toda esa información que no quieres que esté. A lo mejor alguien te pone a caer de un burro. O tienes una foto vergonzante que te sacaron. Lo más típico son las fotos de una noche de juerga, pero no está limitado a eso. O a lo mejor, simplemente no te da la gana contar tu vida, porque eres pudoroso y estás harto de que te recuerden la foto vestido de almirante de flota de tu comunión… Quizá la gente de mi edad y mayor tenga siempre oscura su infancia y adolescencia, pero la gente que tiene a día de hoy 13 y 14 años posiblemente tenga siempre ahí esa novia que se echó en el instituto para toda la vida encontrable de alguna manera.

No voy a entrar si es bueno o es malo. Lo que parece es que es inevitable. ¡Estoy convencido de que saldrá dentro de poco un buscador específico para personas, que buscará los rasgos en todas las fotos, correos, nicks y demás! ¿Estaremos condenados toda la vida a estigmatizarnos por un error de juventud? ¿Rezaremos porque nuestro jefe nunca vea las fotos de “esa” juerga? Todo este mundo de información abre las puertas a un nuevo tipo de relaciones personales, donde quizá no juzguemos tanto a la gente por un sólo aspecto de su pasado, si no que seamos capaces de ver más allá. Y posiblemente también tomemos mucha más conciencia de nuestro “posicionamiento en la red”, al menos hacer que nuestros primeros resultados tengan un sentido…

Realmente esto de Internet está cambiandolo todo a pasos agigantados.

PD: ¡He logrado encontrar, rescatado en na cápsula del tiempo, mi antiguo blog WrongSideOfMemphis! El estilo me gustaba más, pero WordPress.com no me deja toquetear mucho con este… De todas formas, intentaré recuperar los artículos antiguos, hay algunos que me gustaría tener por aquí…