Code, Camera, Action

Jeremy Toeman has a fantastic analysis of the Twitter experience for new users. Lots of lessons here for Twitter -- and for anyone putting together a new user experience.

Twitter needs to thoroughly overhaul the new user experience.  Forget “suggested users” and focus on “suggested uses.”

via livedigitally.com

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Judi Sohn thinks beyond nonprofit "vote for me" fundraising competitions.

Here’s a community challenge I want to see: Reward nonprofits for projects that require collaboration and networking. 

An example straight off the top of my head: A cancer support organization working with a meals-on-wheels organization and one that helps people with job skills designing and implementing a program to make sure that patients are eating right after treatment and can get back into the workforce after a long health-related absence. 

I think the possibilities are endless if we can get out of our silos long enough to consider them.

Extra points to the projects that require the most diverse organizations to actually work together towards a common goal. The general public can view and comment on the proposed programs, maybe even make suggestions of partners. Community insight and transparency is wonderful. Yet ultimately the funding decision is by a team that will evaluate based solely on the viability of the project and what will have the most benefit for the population it will serve. Not necessarily which will serve the largest population. Not necessarily which has the largest mailing list or Facebook fan page.

Nice dream. 

In the meantime, all I can do is beg corporations to think it through before the next challenge. If you sprinkle food at the top of the crowded pond, the fish aren’t going to say, “you know, I’ve thought about it and I’m not really that hungry to fight for it.” They’re going to eat each other up like it’s their very last meal. It’s the fish’s nature. It’s ours. It’s up to you to design your giving programs to make sure we’re helping each other to the next meal and we’re all being fairly judged on our own value, not purely in competition.

via judisohn.posterous.com

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David Brooks' column pulls no punches about the failure of development efforts in Haiti and the unpredictability of international development generally. His recommendation --

It’s time to promote locally led paternalism. In this country, we first tried to tackle poverty by throwing money at it, just as we did abroad. Then we tried microcommunity efforts, just as we did abroad. But the programs that really work involve intrusive paternalism.

These programs, like the Harlem Children’s Zone and the No Excuses schools, are led by people who figure they don’t understand all the factors that have contributed to poverty, but they don’t care. They are going to replace parts of the local culture with a highly demanding, highly intensive culture of achievement — involving everything from new child-rearing practices to stricter schools to better job performance.

via nytimes.com

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Hitwise's Sandra Hanchard reviews last year's web traffic trends. "The year of the status update," she calls it.

So if I had one standout message for marketers in 2010: ‘Brevity’ and ‘Relevancy’ of communications will be the earmarks of success for engaging with the 24/7 connected consumer.

via hitwise.com

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Back at the office Tuesday after a long holiday break. So lots of questions for me, and a busy day. Good to be back.

It was also the day that Google announced a new mobile phone, the Nexus. Early reviews all say it’s fabulous, as good as the iPhone in many ways. It’s got a much better screen, they say, but correspondingly worse battery life.

Not to be outdone, Apple has been leaking details of their next big thing – a tablet of some sort, to be announced late this month. There’s been lots of speculation about that on the blogs, of course. We can’t figure out what earth-shattering feature might differentiate an Apple tablet from previous, ho-hum tablets. Consensus is that it’s got to be different or Steve Jobs wouldn’t do it. Different and useful. More than “surfing the internet on the can” – which the iPhone and MacBook handle quite well, thank you.

If anybody can, I am sure that Steve Jobs and company will figure out what a tablet is good for – or at least how to wow us enough that we’ll want one, too.

But, wow, that it has come to this. Three years ago, the iPhone turned the cell phone handset business upside down. Now that the competition has caught up, Apple is moving on to something completely different – presumably an entirely new product line. They’ll still be printing money with iPhones.

And we have come to expect that the Steve Jobs won’t do something that’s not revolutionary.

Back to that Google phone. The hardware looks fine, an iPhone knock-off almost as minimalist as Apple’s wares. On the Nexus, the iPhone’s one-button-to-rule-them-all gives way to four buttons and a roller-ball nose.

(See Amit’s post on the back button vs home button design philosophies for the benefits of multiple buttons.)

Based on a brief hands-on with a Droid, I have no doubt that it will handle Gmail and Google apps much better than any phone on earth.

Oh but that home screen – it’s ugly as the Nexus’s name. Google’s marketing shows a wallpaper gray boxes that the reviews say ripple to follow your fingertip on the screen. The reviewers say it’s cool, but in still images make the gray cubes look ckunky.

And yet, in three short years the competition has gone from pushbutton phones (remember Motorola’s Razr) to two iPhone-quality choices – one an Android clone that’s better than the iPhone in significant ways.

And it sounds like Apple plans to respond with something completely different.

Tech products are becoming differentiated as much by aesthetics as features. It’s not about making products that secure a market position (though Apple’s app store policies use some of those old-fashioned tricks, too). It’s about fast teams. Teams that can get things done and drive products to market.

The Google and Apple competition is so interesting because of the firms’ different approaches to innovation. Google’s approach is driven by data, drawn from testing of thousands of users, in hundreds of iterations. Apple’s designs seem to come full-born from the head of Steve Jobs.

Exciting times we live in – and a great time to be shopping for a phone.

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