Matthew Quirion

These two bits of online advertising irony sort of jumped out at me while surfing the web the last couple of nights.

The first is some rather prominent advertising of IBM all around an article about how IBM “doesn’t get it” when it comes to Web 2.0, or, at least, how IBM is too slow on the uptake. I love Charlie Brown, but I doubt IBM wants to be called “The Charlie Brown of Web 2.0.”

The second was discovered after a gadget blog lead me to what I have to assume is an attempt at a satirical blog called “The Art of Manliness.” So maybe the most prominent bit of advertising, a video promo for tween-tv show “Gossip Girl,” was knowingly tongue-in-cheek.

This doesn’t have a ton to do with IT, but it does have to do with marketing, and thus it has to do with everything.

Living in Chicago, and being someone who works in Chicago as well - the actual city of Chicago and not Winnetka - I often ride the “El” train to work and back.  At most “El” or CTA stations, the Tribune Company has one, sometimes two, poor souls braving the Chicago weather (and I do mean “braving”) to hand out free copies of a tabloid-format paper called the Red Eye.  The Red Eye is a publication that contains approximately 43 quarter-page ads per piece of actual quasi-news content.  That content is almost always written in some sort of “blurb” form.  It’s all short, somewhat to the point, and tries not to hold onto the fragile attention spans of Gen-X for too long, lest they cause all of Gen-X’s brains to explode.  As a source of news, the Red Eye is a very poor implementation.  As a marketing platform, the Red Eye is, I have to imagine, an excellent platform.  Usually.  And really you, me, and everyone else that might read it (but hopes to never get caught reading it by anyone we know), understands this and just doesn’t care because we just want something to stare at on the El other than one another (unless, of course, you’re creepy).  However, last week, the Red Eye was a self-defeating marketing platform.  Its makeup was actually destroying any value it might have had to anyone, particularly would-be marketers.

Last week, I think it was Wednesday, the publishers of the Red Eye included a relatively massive insert dedicated, I believe, almost entirely to automotive ads for local car dealerships.  The insert was, by my guesstimation, as massive as the Red Eye tabloid itself.   And as such, made flipping through the contents of the Red Eye unbelievably annoying to the point that the readers of the Red Eye had a choice to make;  They could either drop the insert from the tabloid, littering the floor of countless CTA busses and trains, or they could just close the tabloid and direct their eyes to something else, like the little ad placards near the ceiling of the busses or trains, or at the floor.

When I was faced with this very decision last week (I keep trying, and epically failing, to get into the The Brothers Karamazov, so I keep grabbing a Red Eye) I chose not to liter and to stare at “something else.”  And as a result, I noticed that my rather packed train car was full of young, probably well educated, probably pretty well paid consumers who had made the same decision as I.  The car was full of people holding folded up copies of the Red Eye, letting all that marketing go to a complete waste.

If the designers of that marketing had just stopped for a moment and really considered their audience, an audience of people reading a tabloid “news source” not at their desks or at their kitchen tables over coffee, but while they’re standing in a cramped train or bus, holding on for dear life with one hand, and a coffee cup and this tabloid with the other, they’d have realized that this rather hefty insert was a mistake.  And I hope that someone at the Tribune Company realizes it now, but that’s unlikely as there really aren’t a lot of great ways to gather metrics on how many people who accepted a free copy of the Red Eye actually read the Red Eye.  And the floors of CTA busses and trains were not, as far as I could tell, carpeted with inserts.  (By the way, Chicago, well done there.)

The entire episode just reminded me of so many sites on the internet that attempt to monetize by overloading with advertisements.  Half the blogs to which I subscribe are never visited by me because my eyes can’t find the content through the ads.  There are, luckily for consumers and marketers, people out there who are quite skilled at designing advertisements on the web so that they don’t destroy the consumer’s ability to find content.  Marketers should always listen to those people, otherwise we consumers may never listen to the marketers.

You told me so 5 minutes ago. And 10 minutes ago. And 15 minutes ago…

Here’s an idea, don’t pop-up a Twitter status message again until Twitter is back up. It’s a pretty common piece of functionality. You know, something that reads, “Twitter is Back!” and then instead of “reconnect” and “close” buttons, you can add a “tweet something” button.You can have this idea free of charge.

Thanks,

Matt Q.

PS - When can I have FriendFeed updates?

We all know about the little episode with HuddleChat, where some guys from Google went and re-wrote one of 37 Signals‘ primary products, ticked off “the developer community,” and then took the application down to not tick anyone off any longer.

We also know that the real Google product these guys were using HuddleChat to show off was the Google App Engine, a product that gives the “everyman” of web application development the power and flexibility of Google’s back-end capabilities (by the way, those very capabilities were identified in the most recent edition of Harvard Business Review as one of Google’s primary competitive advantages over, well, everyone.).  And, oh, by the way, Google App Engine currently only supports one language: Python.  And Python happens to be the language upon which Ruby on Rails competitor Django is built.

It’s probably just the 6 cups of coffee talking, but this seems like a real shot across the bow of 37 Signals, and all smaller (and less recognizable), but popular application-as-a-service firms from Google.  “Either join us, or someone else will just replace your offering with our (Google’s) backing, and we/they will do it quickly.”   Afterall, given enough time, say, a week or two, could a few Google guys go and completely replace/re-write all of 37 Signals’ product offerings?  And wait, don’t tell me, you clever Googlers, that you guys write all of your python-based web apps from scratch with no help at all from some sort of in-house-soon-to-be-in-perpetual-public-beta framework full of goodies similar to and in direct competition with Ruby on Rails.  After all, another big, competitive advantages that HBR article cited was your ability to prototype ideas quickly.

By the way, it’s been voiced by others, but taking Huddle Chat down was ridiculous.  I suppose it goes with the whole, “Don’t be Evil” thing, and I suppose your “customers” to whom you wish to market App Engine are all part of the “developer community,” but, show of hands, how many people outside of that little community know 37 Signals?  Now how many know Google?

Sometimes.

This story reminded me about something I’ve been thinking about while searching for a new apartment.

I love Google Maps. I’ve used it to develop situational applications for various companies to great success. I use it any time I want to view the location of… anything. And recently, I’ve used it to get a sense of the neighborhoods of Chicago apartments in conjunction with my “Craigslisting.” And in doing so, I’ve often been struck by how often Maps will lie to you.

It’s not intentional. It’s just that Google decided to give Maps the excellent “Street View” feature, and the otherwise wonderful feature has one problem: Every photo used to create the street-level views are temporally static. They only represent a snapshot of a particular street from a particular angle at a single point in time.

But users don’t really catch on to this. Users want to go to online and see “what that neighborhood looks like.” Which means they want to see what it looks like right now, not however many months or years ago the Google Maps pictures were taken. And in a neighborhood like mine, where condos go up (and sometimes down) like Sim City on overdrive, the Google Maps pictures are pretty incredibly inaccurate. And that inaccuracy might very well hurt, or help, home values. Real estate listings are becoming inextricably tied to virtual representations like Google Maps Street View, and those representations could certainly affect a listed property’s ability to attract buyers - for good or bad. So what does that mean for Google in terms of their responsibilities and duties to society or the economy at large? If I’m looking for a new home not next to a large construction project, does Google have the responsibility to sellers of homes ’round the world not currently next to large construction projects to show me the current state of the involved neighborhoods? Or is it okay for Google to misrepresent that current state and show me a picture of a neighborhood that once had a large, but now completed construction project of a dozen condos? Because I tell ya, I’m going to see large construction projects in Google’s pictures and cross the corresponding available listings off my list.

Now, obviously, Google can’t provide real-time, street-level views of every street in the country, let alone the world. Yet. But they don’t need to do so. All they really need to do is provide the users with one last bit of information: A time stamp of every view. And I’m pretty confident that’s information Google already has somewhere in their memory-banks. All they need to do is spit it out to the end user’s screen, and that would probably provide enough context for the user to help improve their expectations of how the street-level views match up with reality. That way, when I see that the half-finished, large construction project next to the property in which I may be interested in was snapped 28 months ago, I can very well expect that the construction project is no longer a construction project, but a fully completed development.

Um.

 

Updated:  The folks at CraigsToolbox have given the world a Greasemonkey script: Image Preview for Craigslist Listings.  It’s solved one of my biggest gripes with Craigslist, at least in a “good enough” sort of way.   Nice to know I’m not the only one that finds some of Craigslist lacking.

My wife and I are looking for a new apartment here in Chicago. As such, we’re doing what every other Chicagoan does at times like these: We’re reading over every listing for a 2+ bedroom within our preferred neighborhood and price parameters on Craigslist.org. This is a remarkable thing, considering the miserable user experience the Craigslist real estate listings present to the world.

Today, in modern web/software application design, “simple and clean yet powerful” is the hot new thing - it’s been so for quite a while, actually. Just ask Google, 37 Signals, Twitter.com, and the like. And at first blush, Craigslist accomplishes “simple and clean yet powerful” in its own way. But let me present a list of things that I can’t do or that I find annoying about Craigslist. Some of these things may actually have a solution within Craigslist about which I’m not aware, but if that’s the case, as someone who’s pretty web-savvy, I’d argue that it’s Craigslist’s fault that I’m not aware of the solution.

• I can’t really search by neighborhood. For apartment listings in Chicago, I am able to select tabs like, “Chicagoland” (which, according to anyone living in “Chicagoland” who doesn’t actually live in Chicago, could somehow include towns like Minooka, IL), “City of Chicago” (which, also, apparently, includes places like Joliet or various small towns in Indiana), or “North/South/East/West Chicago.” We’re North Chicago people. A lot of people will roll their eyes at that, but we’re quite comfortable with it. So when I do a search for 2+ BR, $xxxx - #x500/month, “Lakeview,” I don’t want to see listings for Bucktown or Albany Park. And I sure as heck don’t want to see listings for South Loop. So why am I seeing listings for South Loop?
• I can’t “bookmark” listings that I particularly like within Craigslist. That’s not really a huge deal, as I can just bookmark a listing with my browser or my del.icio.us account, but there’s still no button or link on any of the listings to make such an action that much easier.
• I can’t see the actual location of most of the apartments. Half the time, when you see a listing that interests you, you get tricked by the location listing. “Beautiful 2BR + Den, AC, Huge Windows (Andersonville)” actually turns out to be located in Roger’s Park once you contact the landlord/management company. This sort of deceit runs so rampant on Craigslist, I’ve been tempted to go on a flagging campaign of every listing I’ve found that does this just on principal. But what is one man against Craigslist and the forces of the real estate market? Anyway, this is particularly frustrating because the Google Map listing for a particular apartment might be totally inaccurate, so when you use the trusty street-view of Google Maps to get an idea of the neighborhood, you run a 50/50 chance of being duped.
• Landlords/Realtors/Management Companies can seemingly list the same apartment as many times as they wish, even on the same freaking day. So the results, “Gorgeous 2 BR, Nice Bath, Granite, SS, DW” for $x500 is the same as “Newly rehabbed, gourmet kitchen, plenty of space,” and “Cute, cozy, perfect for small family.” This causes Craigslist to commit what I consider one of the biggest sins in the web industry: It wastes my time and not in a good way.
• I can’t search for listings and filter our those listings that do no provide pictures of the property. You can check a check box in the search form labeled “has image.” About 75% of the time, “has image” for a listing means, “has an image of the Real Estate company’s logo.” Again, it’s all deceit on the part of the party that placed the listing on Craigslist, and not Craigslist itself, but in a world of “user-generated content,” how does the end user really draw the line? And since my time is being wasted, do I really care?
• There’s absolutely no consistent formatting between listings. Some of the listings are just in paragraph form. Some have bullet lists. Some actually include an embedded page from the listing party’s own site within an IFRAME! Some listings have huge pictures. Some have tiny pictures. Most have no pictures at all. And all this means that Craigslist is, again, wasting my time! I can’t quickly skim listings as I click them to mentally filter the bad from the good because my eyes have to adjust to ever listing in order to find the pertinent information.
• There’s apparently no required data for a listing. Some give nearby street sections. Some give contact phone numbers. Some give information about nearby restaurants. Half the time, I have no idea whether a property offers a dishwasher or not. None of the listings I’ve seen supply the consumer, me, with everything I need to make an “informed, rational decision.”
• There’s no way to use Craigslist to compare multiple listings to one another. Since there’s no consistent format to the listings, and, from what I can tell, no real validation of any data entered in a listing anyway, there’s no way that Craigslist could give me a nice “grid view” of selected listings so I can compare and contrast my choices even if Craigslist was so inclined to supply such an interface (I’m quite confident that they are not.).

And those are just the complaints I can think of after having used Craigslist for the last hour. Give me 2 more hours (2 hours that I’m quite sure I’ll spend on Craigslist within the next 24), and I could probably quadruple this list. And yet I and everyone else I know still uses Craigslist!

As someone who spends a lot of time developing web applications for clients ranging between massive enterprises and small charities, I find this phenomenon (there’s no other word for it) amazing. In web application development, we spend hours and hours thinking about how to make the tools we develop easy to use, “simple and yet powerful,” and, frankly, pretty. We try to find every possible way to empower a user with cleverly designed, intuitive tools to make the initial user experience even better. Craigslist seems nearly completely unconcerned with this, but I don’t mean to use this post as a rant against or an indictment of Craigslist. I mean to use this post to applaud Craigslist. Because, based on their popularity, they’ve clearly figured something out.

But what? What did they figure out? Does Craigslist just capitalize on some sort of “underdog” phenomenon in which consumers will use a site that has, to put it politely, limited usability simply because those consumers love the fact that it isn’t some bright, shiny, super-slick site? Does Craigslist have thousands, perhaps millions, of fans because they truly believe that the company behind the site isn’t really out to make a fortune and is really out to help people find, sell, and buy things they need? Or does Craigslist just cater to the lowest, and thus largest, common denominator of end users? If I had to guess, I’d guess it’s a combination of those three things, and probably a few others that I can’t think of right off the bat. Ultimately, it’s a matter of Craigslist somehow being “good enough.” It’s not ideal, but really, how often is any user really hunting for apartments? Maybe once a year, and that’s only if that user does a consistently poor job of finding a good apartment. So you have a user base that’s willing to go through a less than optimal user experience in order to find a ton of rental options, and you can supply the users with that ton of rental options because you place nearly zero governance, validation, or restrictions on the parties that want to advertise their listings. So you’ve made the people that “just want to find their options” happy enough, and you’ve made the people that “just want to get their inventory out there” possibly extremely happy. That’s as much of a win-win as I’ve ever seen. And it’s all possible because Craigslist has made their apartment listings service so simple, even a cave man could use them. Which is appropriate, because Craigslist real estate listings are the web equivalent of smashing things open with a rock when it comes to refinements.

If anything, Craigslist serves as a big reminder to all who would do business in today’s landscape that sometimes you can over-think things. Sometimes it’s best just to give customers what they want rather than “more than what they want.” And that may especially be the case when the customer, for example, someone who doesn’t spend a huge majority of their time thinking about the internet and web applications, doesn’t know what they want. In other words, it’s especially true when your customers or user-base aren’t a bunch of “power users.” Still, when my 18 month-old niece can already turn the family desktop on and find Elmo online, how long until “the lowest common denominator” is, essetially, a bunch of “power users?”

I use Google Reader as my RSS reader. I like it because it’s portable; anywhere the web is, there’s my reader. I also like it because, as Reader itself is a website, I’m using it within Firefox, and so when I click on something in Reader, it opens up in another tab in Firefox, meaning less bloat for my machine. Plus, being built by Google, it may not be perfect (in fact, it’s imperfection is the reason for this post), but at least it’s an application provided by a known quantity. But there’s one feature I really, really want to see in Google Reader: Comments on Shared Items.

As users of Google Reader know, you can already Email an item in your feeds that you find interesting to anyone with an e-mail address, and you can also share items that you find interesting with any “friend” (anyone in your contact list that is also a Google Reader user). But what you cannot do is share an item using Google Reader’s “share” mechanism and send along a comment on exactly why you find it so interesting and share-worthy. I get a lot of shared items from friends, and I often have little understanding initially of why they find those items interesting. I could just go ahead and read the items, but I’ve also got a ton of feeds coming into my reader thanks to my own subscriptions. I can’t read them all. At best I skim half of the incoming items and actually read half-a-dozen to a dozen a day with any level of care. So I want a sort of “executive summary” on shared items - something in the way of “this is cool because…”

This seems like an obvious feature, and I’d like to think that the Google Reader team is already working on this and ready to deploy it at any moment, but we’ve had the ability to share items in Google Reader for nearly two years now, and I can’t find any mention of such an effort on their blog.

With the big primary night last night, and the contentious race between Obama and Clinton for the Democratic nomination, I keep hearing various talking-heads talk about “the calculus” when trying to determine if Clinton can actually win the Democratic nomination.

It’s not calculus. It’s arithmetic.

Arithmetic or arithmetics (from the Greek word αριθμός = number) is the oldest and most elementary branch of mathematics, used by almost everyone, for tasks ranging from simple day-to-day counting to advanced science and business calculations.

All any of these pundits are doing is taking the number of delegates already pledged to a candidate and then adding (or, in weird cases subtracting) numbers based on best guesses of results for the remaining state primaries.

The usage of the phrase, “the calculus,” drives me nuts. And it’s not because I’m a math-head. This is calculus…

…and I have no idea what it means.I guess it just drives me nuts because it’s a form of “hype.” It’s almost as if the pundits use it to make the “math” seem more mysterious and difficult - something that only they can figure out. It’s sort of pompous.

It was a fascinating thing to see the closure of nearly every Starbucks in the US in action last night. I went to the gym after work, so between my trip to the gym from the office in the loop and my trip from the gym on home, I passed by six different Starbucks locations, and in each one of them were 12-20 very bored looking Starbucks employees. I have to wonder if the new “commitment to perfection” really sank in.

In all, about 135,000 Starbucks employees underwent training at roughly the same time. That’s a remarkable undertaking, and one that is sure to have some sort of effect on Starbucks’ contribution to the GDP. But what I really wondered about is what sort of effect this closure had on GDP not directly created by Starbucks. Walk into any given Starbucks location, particularly in my neighborhood, and you’re likely to see at least one or two “entrepreneurs” who are “working” in between double-decaf-half-cafs-with-a-twist-of-lemon. What did they all do while their “offices” were closed for a few hours yesterday? How much did it slow down nation-wide innovation? Did it screw up the creation of the next Youtube? Or, even worse, the next Amazon.com? What ultimate effect will this elephant sneeze have on this world?