Mashable has a piece on FriendFeed and whether it’s destined to remain a niche service. The main reason for believing that it will be seems to be the poor interface design, but there appear to be others too.

But I tend to think that the key point here is that FriendFeed needs to remain something of a niche service in order to continue to function as it does today. As of right now most items on FriendFeed generate a manageable number of comments, and even mere mortals like me are able to contribute comments. We can engage in discussions with the illuminati of the blogosphere such as Robert Scoble, Dave Winer and so on and as such FriendFeed feels to me like the freshest and most accessible place on the web at the moment.

If it were to attract significantly more users I think the intimacy of the current FriendFeed would start to fade and that would be a great shame. I’m aware that sounds snobbish but it also gels nicely with another recent post - this one a guest post on LouisGray.com - about the accessibility of big hitters in the blogosphere.

Some have suggested that recent changes to Facebook create a FriendFeed like experience there. But the biggest difference is the closed user group that will participate in discussions on Facebook (defined by “friend” connections, ironically, whereas on FriendFeed no-one has to explicitly accept me as a friend in order for me to engage in a discussion with them.

In fact I think it’s probably almost inevitable that FriendFeed loses its niche status, or at least that it becomes used for other things than the friendly discussions I currently enjoy so much there, with its current function being demoted to a secondary role and a group of desperate hangers-on clinging to the old model.

PS wrote most of this on the iPhone app while waiting for a doctor’s appointment - worked pretty well but highlighted the significant limitation relating to the lack of a copy and paste function on the iPhone - hence, no hyperlinks unless you finish the project up on the computer or have a really good memory (and html skills)…

So I just posted from the iPhone app and although I now have a shiny new post on the site it’s clear that the app is a little glitchy (see screenshot). For some reason the app first posted an item with little title and text tags before posting my real post. In addition it seems the app doesn’t handle ampersands (&) very well. We’ll see if it does better when publishing…

(now posting from the keyboard - much easier)

It seems the ampersand didn’t cause a problem after all - just shows up funny in the categories list and in the “write” mode in the application. But the screenshot worked fine - not many options for how you incorporate an image like that - how you want text aligned, whether you want it linked to a larger version etc - but it’s probably best to keep things simple in a mobile app.

And no mystery tag post this time around, which means it was a one-off - I’ll have to test it on my other blogs to see if it happens every time you first use the app on a blog or if there was just an error somewhere this time around. At any rate, another useful application from the App Store - and best of all this one’s free, as many of the best ones are…

For info, this was the mystery post that showed up (which I’ve deleted to avoid clutter and confusion) - also viewable in its original format in the screenshot above:

!$title$!

July 22nd, 2008

!$text$!

Update: glad to see I wasn’t the only one with this problem: the venerable TechCrunch, no less:

Link apparently since removed, at least from the TechCrunch homepage.

Hurrah! WordPress finally released their iPhone app today, which was heavily trailed by WP. This is a test post that I’m writing using the app. Thank goodness for the auto correct feature on the iPhone which is preventing this from being an utterly tedious experience. I can’t imagine writing a long post on here but it will be great for the occasional short post on the run. Here goes!

So, I stood in line with about 100 other people outside my local AT&T store just under a week ago, in order to be one of the first to get my hands on the 3G iPhone. It was hot, and we were lined up down the side of the building in which the AT&T store is housed, which had a bright white wall, nicely reflecting all that heat back onto the waiting hordes, causing a nice sunburn and considerable discomfort. But, in the end, I got one, and almost the model I wanted - they ran out of black 16GB models just before I got inside, so I got a white one instead.

So was it all worth it? Well, as one man standing behind me in the line (possibly a Rabbi - in the center of the picture below) said:

You have to do something insane once in your life!

And that was more or less my opinion too - I don’t often stand in line for these things, but once in a while you want to be part of something like this. I sat out the first round - no 3G, stuck on a Verizon contract, don’t buy version 1 of anything and so on - but wasn’t going to do the same this time around.

I love the device. It’s a fantastic experience, and certainly the most fun I’ve ever had with a new phone. To date, I’ve downloaded and installed 23 applications, requiring four home screens altogether on the device (I have a separate one for web clips). I did have activation problems on the first day, along with everyone else, although they were relatively minor and solved by the evening.

I’ve read a lot of articles denigrating the iPhone in pretty strong terms over the past few days - two examples. The thing that strikes me about these articles is that they seem to assume that the iPhone is taking over the world. The Lifehacker article is titled, “Why You’re Better Off Avoiding the iPhone” and the other suggested the iPhone is going to kill the Internet.

Let’s tone that done a bit, shall we? For starters, Apple sold a total of 1 million phones in the first weekend and has since been largely sold out. Compare that with Nokia, which sells more devices than that every single day of the year, and you are quickly reminded that Apple does not dominate the mobile device market (or even the smartphone segment). Secondly, no-one is being forced to buy an iPhone - you have a choice about buying it as you do with every other device out there - and as a consumer you will weigh the pros and cons as you would with every other device. If you don’t like the relatively “closed” ecosystem and approach to applications, you don’t have to buy the phone. But, if you want the design, interface, web browsing, ease of use and so on and think the closed application environment is a small price to pay, then you’ll want to buy it anyway.

The most alarmist and hostile stuff I’ve read comes from the Free Software Foundation, which seems to have a definition of “free” which is much narrower than most people’s would be. But again, it seems to somehow assume that Apple has some kind of monopoly and that everyone is somehow tied into the Apple model whether they want to be or not. The Apple DRM approach in particular has come in for a lot of criticism, which is funny since it’s done at the behest of the record companies rather than any particular agenda Apple has. In order to secure for itself a strong position in online music sales, it acceded to the requests of the record companies to provide adequate copyright protection for their music. As the record companies have become more enlightened in their approach, Apple has begun releasing music in non-protected formats. But again, you have a choice - Amazon, Rhapsody, Napster and plenty of others offer alternative models for purchasing digital music online, and files bought from all those companies will play on iPods and iPhones.

Overall, I think Apple is adding a lot more to the mobile industry than it is taking away, and on a personal level I love the device and especially the ease of use of the device itself and the process of adding applications and media to it. It may not be everyone’s cup of tea - the FSF recommends the Free Runner, which strikes me as being an utterly uninspired (and uninspiring) device. But whatever floats your boat - and that’s the real point here: you have a choice. Stop moaning about the way Apple does things, and find a company that does things the way you like, and buy their stuff instead.

This popped up on Techmeme this week, and was an interesting reminder of Chris Anderson’s Long Tail theory and its appeal but also its weaknesses. Kudos to Anderson for highlighting this research himself, and he does a reasonable job of illustrating why it’s not totally contradictory to his own research.

The long tail theory has a lot of appeal - it instinctively makes sense to most of us (we’ve all bought things online we could never have bought in our local store) and the data seem to bear it out, at least as far as the buying patterns go. However, I think one of the weaknesses of the theory is still the viability of any business case based on the long tail. Very few specialist retailers have been able to make a living off the tail itself - most have to focus on the head first and add the tail second - blockbusters in any business still do constitute the bulk of sales, especially from ordinary consumers. As Anderson points out (and the study he cites confirms) heavy users (i.e. fanatics and aficionados) are more likely to consume from the tail, which also makes instinctive sense. But it’s terribly difficult (and market limiting) to focus on the fans and not the core market. 

Still, perhaps the parties that benefit most from the long tail are the producers of long tail products and content: they benefit whether suppliers sell just the tail or the head as well, as do we as consumers.

This past week or two I’ve been spending some of my spare time building up the professional side of my social networking profile. I’ve been a pretty active Facebook user now for a year or so and have Friendfeed and Twitter accounts that I’ve half-heartedly kept up with too. I’d like to use these tools for work purposes too but was always uneasy about mixing personal and business audiences with these various streams of my output. Either I would cut out all the personal stuff in order to enable me to feel comfortable with my business audience, in which case it would more or less cease to be social networking altogether, or I would continue to limit my business audience for fear of over-sharing the personal.

In the end I decided to start doubling up on profiles - one for my personal life, one for my business life - on these major sites, and so far it’s working well. I now have a business-centric Facebook profile, a business-centric Twitter account, a new account on Friendfeed and work-centric IM accounts with all the major providers (janovum on Yahoo!, Google Talk, AIM, Live/MSN and Skype). My choice of username might eventually be a problem if and when I leave Ovum, but for now it’s easy to remember but most of all has the salient virtue of being available on all these services (have you ever tried picking a username that will be available on all of these, including AIM and Yahoo!? Very difficult). 

If you’d like to connect, please feel free to look me up in one of those places - I’ll be happy to “friend” you, add you to a “buddy list” or be followed by or “follow” you. I’d like to make these networks as inclusive and broad as possible, and also hope to make them as interconnected as they can be - I already have Twitter and Friendfeed apps running in my Facebook profile, for example, and Friendfeed itself is pulling in my Tweets, blog posts and shared items from Google Reader. 

Some day, I’m hoping that all these services will allow me to be a single individual with multiple profiles for friends, family and work, for example. A while back I heard that Moli offers such split profiles, and I did try that service out, but until it’s used by a lot of other people it’s not all that helpful. But I do believe that splitting the social and business aspects of your life in a single profile will become an increasingly important feature of these sites going forward. It’d certainly be a lot easier than my current approach, which involves using different browsers for different profiles (when I’d much rather live in Firefox in Windows or Safari in Leopard) so that I can stay signed in to each service. 

How have you handled this problem? Do you just mix both in a single profile and not worry about mixing business and pleasure? Have you found another approach that works better?

This is intriguing. One of the “inventors of the Internet” (I’ve heard this title applied to quite a range of people, Al Gore included, of course), Lawrence Roberts, is involved in a company which is providing network boxes that throttle P2P traffic in order to allow other traffic to flow freely. So far:

You’ll find Anagran bandwidth fairness boxes (also called FR-1000s) in university settings now, where the P2P file transfer problem is most acute. Anagran doesn’t currently have any commercial ISP customers, but I’ll bet that they’re all looking at them.

Absolutely, and no doubt Comcast is among them. I still maintain that the best approach to dealing with P2P traffic is having an explicit public statement about your policy towards it that all your customers can read and be aware of, and then throttle/shape the traffic in such a way that other forms of traffic are unaffected during periods of network congestion. At any rate, this is another wrinkle in the always interesting net neutrality debate.

This seems to be doing the rounds at the moment. It’s the text of an email sent by Bill Gates to various Microsoft employees about an intensely frustrating experience he had using the company’s own website and products - essentially, user feedback, from user number 1 at Microsoft. Here’s how the email starts out:

I am quite disappointed at how Windows Usability has been going backwards and the program management groups don’t drive usability issues.

Let me give you my experience from yesterday.

I decided to download (Moviemaker) and buy the Digital Plus pack … so I went to Microsoft.com. They have a download place so I went there.

The first 5 times I used the site it timed out while trying to bring up the download page. Then after an 8 second delay I got it to come up.

This site is so slow it is unusable.

It sounds just like so many of those experiences we all have with Windows and with Microsoft sites. How great that Bill Gates himself was willing to take his team to task and ask for improvements. Except that the date on this particular email is January 15, 2003. Meaning the team has now had almost five and a half years to solve these problems. But they haven’t. We’re still all having them. Have you tried to buy the home and student edition of OneNote from the Microsoft website lately? I have. It’s not possible. You can buy a boxed version from Amazon, but not from Microsoft.com (or at least I haven’t been able to figure out how). And Windows itself remains as unintuitive an experience as it ever was, with some new annoyances added with Vista.

So what’s the problem? Did the staff get so many of these emails from bgates@microsoft.com that they started ignoring them? Or are they pathologically unable to implement this kind of basic user feedback? Does someone at Microsoft actually believe this all makes sense? Who are they doing their formal user testing with? And can we replace those people with Mac users? How can a company so successful still be so bad at the user experience? How hard would it be to hire a slew of user experience designers to solve these problems?

A while back I was at a Cisco analyst event where a guy who used to work for Apple and Frog Design and now works for Cisco spoke about how they are approaching UI design. He shared several examples of how the Mac OS does things compared with how Windows does things, and they were all obvious big differences and in the vast majority of the cases it was obvious too that the Mac version was better. With all the copying Windows does from Mac OS already, how hard would it be to copy some of the design principles too?

Advertising Age recently published its annual review of spending by the 100 leading advertisers. I was curious to see how the telecoms companies ranked in their data, and spent some time crunching the numbers.

First headline: The telecom players ranked in the survey end up as follows:

1. AT&T: 2nd overall, with spending of $3.2 billion in 2007
2. Verizon: 3rd, $3.0 billion
3. Sprint: 15th, $1.9 billion
4. Deutsche Telekom (T-Mobile): 52nd, $0.8 billion
5. Alltel: 93rd, $0.36 billion

(The only company spending more than AT&T and Verizon in 2007 was Procter and Gamble.)

Let’s crunch those numbers a bit. First, let’s look at how much these companies spent in relation to their revenues:

• AT&T: 2.7% of revenues
• Verizon: 3.2%
• Sprint: 4.7%
• T-Mobile: 5.9%
• Alltel: 4.1%

With the exception of Alltel (more on them in a minute), the trend is very clear among the first four players on the list: the smaller they were, the greater a proportion of their revenues they spent on advertising. It’s obvious why: if these companies want to have a similar impact to the larger companies, they need to spend as close as possible to their larger competitors, but that amount is a (much) greater proportion of revenues for them. In fact, only Verizon actually approaches AT&T in size of spend (and it increased its spend 8% in 2007 while AT&T reduced its spend by 4%, perhaps thanks to the advertising Apple did on its behalf with the iPhone, but likely also because it was able to consolidate spending once it had unified its brands).

This is a massive scale advantage for the larger players, and a massive scale disadvantage for the smaller ones. For Sprint and T-Mobile to even remotely compete with the two big guys, they have to eat into their profits considerably more, which creates further disadvantages. Alltel, as to some extent a regional carrier rather than a national one, perhaps spends its money a little more carefully, realizing that large national campaigns are going to hit a lot of people not in its core service areas.

Another interesting set of data to look at is the media these companies spread their advertising over, and the portion of total spend that goes to each. One might think it would be fairly similar, especially for the larger players, but in fact there’s quite a range, as you can see from the chart below.

Alltel spends 71% of all its ad spending on TV advertising, while Verizon only spends 42% on TV. Verizon and Sprint spend 32-35% of their money on newspaper advertising, while AT&T thought that medium was worth only 15% of its spend. Meanwhile, Internet spending is a fraction of the total for all five carriers: from 5% for Alltel to 8.8% for Verizon. However, this reflects overall Internet ad spending trends as much as carriers’ reluctance to advertise there: Verizon is the third highest spending company on Internet advertising, while AT&T is eighth. But what drives this difference in the media used for advertising? Even if you allow for the fact that the balance between mobile and wireline offerings is different for these five carriers, that doesn’t seem to explain it. They just seem to have fundamentally different views of what’s likely to work best for them.

On another note, there’s no category in here yet for mobile advertising - for all the hype, it’s still tiny. and even Internet advertising, another category telcos could have a stake in, is just 4% of total advertising spend today (although rising relatively quickly). But it amounts to just $4 billion in total for the US in 2007, not a big pie for telcos to try to take a slice of. TV advertising seems a much better bet, to the extent that they can take a chunk away from the cable operators, with almost $35 billion of spending in 2007. Meanwhile, the cable companies themselves (with the exception of conglomerate Time Warner) don’t make it into the top 100 at all.

Following up on the last email I received which did something funny with my name, this one appears to illustrate the perils of auto-correct:

January, sorry.  I will make sure you get the info.

I guess they have their auto-correct set to replace the word “Jan” with the word “January”. Haven’t had that one before, I have to admit…