Seeing the Forest for the Trees

Writings from the Cahier, Bookmarks, & Twitter

• Links — June 30, 2009 — Permalink

  The effect of the rats on the rat race

  From Mind Hacks:

  Not Exactly Rocket Science covers an intriguing study on how people try less hard in a competition as the number of competitors increases.

  The researchers started off with a simple observation that US students tended to get better marks when they took their exams in smaller exam rooms.

  This brings up one of the reasons why you might not want to grow your team or business too much. When you have 50 designers, will they all work as hard and be as creative as when you had five? Will you still be the team you used to be?

• Links — June 28, 2009 — Permalink

  Visual Decision Making

  This may be my favorite A List Apart article ever. Patrick Lynch presents a thoughtful, well-argued position on behalf of visual design on the web:

  Recent design writing and interface research illustrate how visual design and user research can work together to create better user experiences on the web: experiences that balance the practicalities of navigation with aesthetic interfaces that delight the eye and brain. In short: there’s lots of evidence that beauty enhances usability.

  There’s not a whole lot that’s incredibly new here, but Lynch’s argument — which includes conscious and sub-conscious cognitive processing and a discussion of the difference in role between classical (clean) and expressive (Comm. Arts) aesthetics — brings a lot together quite nicely.

  Hopefully the non-visual designers reading this appreciated it as much as I did, and the visual designers didn’t stop reading three paragraphs in due to the relative lack of graphics and long paragraphs :)

• Links — June 27, 2009 — Permalink

  John Gruber on Copy and Paste

  John Gruber, in his overall write-up on the new C&P functionality on the iPhone, summarizes Apple’s philosophy when it comes to releasing these types of features:

  That we had to wait two years for the iPhone’s text selection and pasteboard is a good example of one aspect of the Apple way: better nothing at all than something less than great. That’s not to say Apple never releases anything less than great, but they try not to. This is contrary to the philosophy of most other tech companies — and diametrically opposed to the philosophy of Microsoft. And it is very much what drives some people crazy about Apple — it’s simply incomprehensible to some people that it might be better to have no text selection/pasteboard implementation while waiting for a great one than to have a poor implementation in the interim.

  I tend to agree with the Apple stance. Don’t let perfection be the enemy of the great, but do let greatness be the enemy of the good/fair/poor.

• Links — June 26, 2009 — Permalink

  Engineers Are The Best Deal - So Stock Up On Them

  TechCrunch sucks, but Auren Hoffman is a pretty smart guy, from the times I’ve met him:

  We’re all familiar with Moore’s Law – that the power of computers doubles every 18 months. In my 15 years of software development, I’ve seen 5x-10x productivity gains in engineers. Which could mean that the productivity of a well-trained engineer doubles every five years. (note that this Law is much harder to prove than Moore’s Law – but potentially just as profound). That would mean that the productivity of an engineer is growing at roughly 14.9% per year! That’s fast … really fast … much faster than the 2.6% yearly gains than the population as a whole is making.

  It’s true in my experiences working with new companies. Make sure there’s a developer or two on the team first, then worry about the other roles as you grow. Developers without designers may make something ugly, but designers without developers may make nothing but art.

• Links — June 24, 2009 — Permalink

  Bing and Google Agree: Slow Pages Lose Users

  Microsoft and Google presented the results of their user performance tests, and Brady Forrest at O’Reilly has a nice synopsis:

  Here are Brutlag’s and Schurman’s final points:

  • “Speed matters” is not just lip service
  • Delays under half a second impact business metrics
  • The cost of delay increases over time and persists
  • Use progressive rendering
  • Number of bytes in response is less important than what they are and when they are sent

  These are pretty consistent with the conclusions we’ve already had, and corresponds pretty closely with the talk I gave up in Halifax last month, but it’s great to have some metrics attached.

• Cahier — June 24, 2009 — 11 Comments

  Seeing the Forest for the Trees

  The web industry is beginning to move into its adolescence. Fifteen years after its birth, and eight years after a dramatic industry reset, we’re beginning to move past the simple questions around how to execute ideas, and raising more questions about how best to execute them.

  The public is now becoming reliant on the web as a major tool in everyday life, and even the most luddite audiences are beginning to use the products that only the earliest of adopters were using not long ago. The web is no longer a forum for geeks and deviants, but an unfathomably large, diverse, and mainstream medium, capable of handling nearly any form of information or communication on any topic.

  This growth and expansion has made the web a far more exciting concept, and the industry surrounding it has followed suit. Problems to tackle are greater in number, more varied in subject, and broader in their scope.

  Yet the broader the web becomes, the more specialized its practitioners have grown.

• Links — June 22, 2009 — Permalink

  Waxing Speculative about Amazon’s Business Model

  A quick post on the Viget UX blog about a discussion Barn and I were having at the office today. It spawned from a nugget in Jeremy Keith’s notes from Jared Spool’s AEA talk today:

  You can buy an iPod nano on Apple, Best Buy, etc. for about $149. Amazon sells it for $134. That’s probably cost price. It turns out that Amazon can sell almost everything at cost price and still make a product because of volume. It’s all down to the Negative Operating Cycle. Amazon turns over its inventory every 20 days whereas Best Buy takes 74 days. Standard retail term payments take 45 days. So Best Buy is in debt between day 45 and day 74. Amazon, on the other hand, are sitting on cash between day 20 and day 45. In that time, they can invest that money. That’s where their profit comes from.

  Right now there’s still a need for storefronts like Best Buy, but the rest of the post gets into speculating about how Amazon could make a play. Not that they would…

• Links — June 22, 2009 — Permalink

  A Toxic Paradox

  One of my favorite essays from Rands so far. He’s talking about people who not just don’t click with other personalities on the team, but in fact have very different goals and philosophies which make them the square peg in your organizational culture’s round hole.

  We need these folks, but it can’t be at the cost of the existing culture. Yes, this toxic person might have a core cultural contradictory belief that is key to the future of the business, but assess the risk. What if the cost of integrating that idea is half the team quitting because they can’t work with the idea’s toxic architect? Is that a viable solution?

  This is a really, really tough topic, and Michael’s nailed it here. Sometimes, an individual can be incredibly talented in various ways, but still be toxic to the rest of the team, which makes it even harder.

• Links — June 18, 2009 — Permalink

  Karroubi's Unlucky 7's?

  Nate Silver on the vote totals from towns in Iran:

  As you can see from the graph, there are a lot more totals beginning in ‘7’ than you’d anticipate from Benford’s Law. The odds of this occurring by chance alone are extremely remote — about 10,000 to 1 against. The odds of an anomaly of this magnitude occurring for any of the nine leading digits for any of the four candidates are also quite remote — about 140 to 1 against.

  I love Nate Silver. Even though this is a far-from-conclusive analysis, it’s this kind of geeking out that makes me want to change careers to statistics sometimes.

• Links — June 18, 2009 — Permalink

  Humans prefer cockiness to expertise

  This explains the internet.

• Links — June 16, 2009 — Permalink

  The End of Fail

  Anil Dash:

  FAIL is over. Fail is dead. Because it marks a lack of human empathy, and signifies an absence of intellectual curiosity, it is an unacceptable response to creative efforts in our culture. “Fail!” is the cry of someone who doesn’t create, doesn’t ship, doesn’t launch, who doesn’t make things. And because these people don’t make things, they don’t understand the context of those who do. They can’t understand that nobody is more self-critical or more aware of the shortcomings of a creation than the person or people who made it.

  Thank god. That took long enough.

• Links — June 16, 2009 — Permalink

  Is AT&T afraid of iPhone users, MMS and tethering?

  Jim Dalrymple:

  The answer seems quite simple: AT&T is afraid of what will happen to its network once millions of iPhone users start sending MMS and connecting their computer to the network.

  I remember back in like 2002 hearing a Verizon Wireless employee warn a potential customer that they’re likely to use more minutes than usual with Verizon, since the network was much better than CellularOne’s.

  This is much the same thing. Once you’ve made a phone that makes features easy to use, people are likely to start using them.

• Links — June 16, 2009 — Permalink

  HTML 5: Could it kill Flash and Silverlight?

  HTML5 isn’t all about new elements, it’s also about new APIs which can be of great use to web applications. Canvas, local storage, and mutable DOM prototypes are among these.

  While Adobe, Microsoft, and Sun Microsystems (soon to be Oracle) duke it out with their own technologies to implement multimedia on the Web, HTML 5 has the potential to eat these vendors’ lunches, offering Web experiences based on an industry standard.

  I think this is still a long way off, but we can always be hopeful.

• Links — June 16, 2009 — Permalink

  Cascading Failure

  Ian Bogost’s site got script-kiddied, Google marked it as being a malware site, and then Twitter (which uses Google’s malware system to detect spam) took Google’s word and suspended his account.

  As Google offers more and more business to business services like malware detection, and more and more third-parties use those services, this particular type of Googlization can only grow in impact. And the worst part of it is, you can’t do anything about it. One can choose not to maintain a Google account or to use Google services, but one can’t prevent Google from maintaining you.

• Links — June 16, 2009 — Permalink

  Inc. Magazine Profiles Paul Graham

  Paul Graham, the noted essayist and founder of Y Combinator:

  Twenty-seven more companies will join Y Combinator in June, the program’s biggest class yet. Earlier this year, Sequoia Capital, the venture capital firm that backed Google, agreed to give Graham $2 million to put to work. Graham hopes to use the money to expand Y Combinator, to fund 60 companies or more every year. I ask Graham why he is so intent on growing. Why does the world need so many little software companies? He looks at me as if I’m insane. “Imagine that instead of starting Google, Larry Page and Sergey Brin had taken jobs in some research lab,” he says. “They would have written a little piece of an operating system that might not even get used and maybe some boring academic papers. Think of how much more they did for the world as start-up founders.”

  I’d love to work with this guy.

• Links — June 16, 2009 — Permalink

  Writing Microcopy

  Joshua Porter posts a good reminder about how important even the smallest copy can be:

  Microcopy is small yet powerful copy. It’s fast, light, and deadly. It’s a short sentence, a phrase, a few words. A single word. It’s the small copy that has the biggest impact. Don’t judge it on its size…judge it on its effectiveness.

  It’s also some of the most fun copy to write, especially if your product has a really strong voice.

• Cahier — June 16, 2009 — one Comment

  The Shackles of Simplicity

  Simplicity has been at the core of the web’s philosophy of design for the last five years. Whether it’s a major part of the visual approach, with large amounts of negative space, simple color palettes, and a focus on strong typography; the interface approach, with fewer things on a given page; or the product approach, with products that do “one thing well”; nearly everyone has carried the banner of simplicity at one point or another.

  But while this approach has indeed helped us make products on the web that can appeal to a mass audience, it is starting to show its limitations. After a few months (weeks?) of using a simplicity-centric product like Basecamp, you start to run up against its limitations: it may facilitate the way that the creators work best, but you’re not quite like the creators. Maybe you’ve outgrown the simple feature set and need more for your modestly-growing needs. Maybe you no longer have a few months’ worth of content in the system, but now have years of content, and managing it all has become a bear. Simplicity is beginning to fail.

  Part of the problem is that simplicity is the solution to a problem poorly-identified. Life is complex, and tools to conquer life’s complexity need to instead embrace it, rather than ignore it.

• Cahier — June 15, 2009 — 0 Comments

  Far from the Shore

  The three behemoths of the consumer tech world — Google, Microsoft, and Apple — announced new products in the last two weeks. Those announcements, all of solid products in and of themselves, paint a picture of exactly why Google and Apple are huge and growing, and why Microsoft is huge and in trouble.

  While Google and Apple are focused on making independently great products, Microsoft is focused on one-upping their competitor, and there’s a big difference between the two.

  Incremental improvement is the shoreline of safety: if you can see it, you’re sure to be okay, but you won’t be discovering any new oceans. Google and Apple, through very different methodologies, are willing to move away from that shore and explore the risks and reward potential of innovation.

  Microsoft, for all the smart people who work there and all the potential they have to obliterate the significantly-smaller Google and Apple, seem to only attempt to incrementally improve their own work or that of a competitor. It’s as if they’re afraid to come up with their own solutions to problems, and when they do, they get watered down by endless fear of risk.

• Links — June 15, 2009 — Permalink

  Teach a Kid to Argue

  Jay Heinrichs on the difference between fighting and arguing, and why he’s spent years teaching his kids to argue effectively:

  I had long equated arguing with fighting, but in rhetoric they are very different things. An argument is good; a fight is not. Whereas the goal of a fight is to dominate your opponent, in an argument you succeed when you bring your audience over to your side. A dispute over territory in the backseat of a car qualifies as an argument, for example, in the unlikely event that one child attempts to persuade his audience rather than slug it.

  I share his disappointment in our culture’s fear of a good, constructive argument. It’s reason and good argumentation that can help produce the best work, yet it’s all too common that we shy away and do only things that will be least likely to rub people the wrong way for fear of argument.

• Links — June 15, 2009 — Permalink

  Your Publication Can Suck As Badly As TechCrunch

  From Olivery Willis:

  1. Have your founder/editor always play the victim, and do so dramatically in public. ie “I’ve suffered so much in publishing this site, that I’m going to retire to my remote mountain lair to count the money I make from it. Tear.”

  See, I think they do it too well for mere mortals to really emulate. The folks at TechCrunch really are something special.

• Links — June 14, 2009 — Permalink

  University of the People

  Exciting concept: the United Nations is funding and sponsoring the newly-launched University of the People, an online university that is nearly free. Students from over fifty countries have already enrolled into programs in business administration and computer science.

  The only charge to students is a $15 to $50 admission fee, depending on their country of origin, and a processing fee for every test ranging from $10 to $100. For the University to sustain its operation, it needs 15,000 students and $6 million, of which Mr. Reshef [the university’s founder] has donated $1 million of his own money.

  There are good and bad things about this concept in my opinion — the second-class status of the liberal arts falling on the bad side — but I’m eager to see a program like this succeed.

• Links — June 14, 2009 — Permalink

  Canada Day Across America 2009

  Back when I worked at Grassroots, one of the few truly-designery projects I worked on was a logo for Canada Day Across America, the Canadian government’s crowdsourced celebration of their independence for ex-pats in the US. This was back in 2006 or so.

  Today, it looks like the program, and the logo, are stronger than ever. Hopefully, I’ll be able to make it back down to the Canadian embassy this year to celebrate on July 1.

  I’ve never been much of a visual designer at heart, but this is one of those past projects that I frequently look back on with some satisfaction.

• Links — June 12, 2009 — Permalink

  The Future of Facebook Usernames

  Anil Dash predicts the outcome of the days following the forthcoming rush on Facebook usernames:

  June 13, 12:45am: TechCrunch discovers that one of its writers can’t get his preferred spelling for his name, and notices that registrations in the system are running a bit slow. A Twitter search reveals four other people discussing the same problems, and one person that can’t get to the feature at all. The phrase “The Facebook Username debacle” is first used, and becomes the preferred sobriquet for the feature forevermore. 70% of commenters mention that “Facebook Username” can be abbreviated “FU”, and each thinks he is the first to think of it.

  Almost certain to happen.

• Links — June 12, 2009 — Permalink

  Direct and useful project feedback

  Good thoughts for clients and creatives from Seth:

  The third scenario is the one in which all sides want the best possible project and the team believes that you have valuable insight on how to make that happen. This only works if there’s mutual respect around the table. They have to hold you in esteem and trust your judgment (not organizational judgment, but judgment about what makes the project great). That means that, “because I said so,” is not effective feedback.

• Links — June 10, 2009 — Permalink

  Managing Werewolves

  A great read by Michael in this week’s ALA:

  In reality, most meetings aren’t high-pressure, survival-of-the-fittest lynchfests. Many meetings are well structured affairs with hardly a drop of blood spilled. But each time you speak in a meeting, you get a moment in the spotlight to demonstrate that yes, you understand what’s going on, you are clear about the rules of this particular game, and you’re in it to win.

  Sage advice, and a great analogy.

• Links — June 10, 2009 — Permalink

  iPhone 3G Upgrade Policy Makes Sense

  I posted this just about a year ago, when people were upset about the 3G upgrade policy, and it still holds true for the 3GS:

  AT&T subsidizes the price of every phone it carries, by about $200. So that RAZR phone you got a few months ago for free was actually about $200. You’ve probably seen these un-subsidized prices if you’ve ever damaged a phone and had to purchase a new one at full price.

  The new iPhone 3GS coming out has a similar policy, except that there is no grace for 3G owners since the 3G, unlike the original iPhone, is subsidized.

  If you’re not near the point where you’ve paid off your subsidy — and usually that means being more than 18 months into your plan — you’re not eligible for an upgrade at the subsidized price. You can purchase an early upgrade for $200, which is essentially paying for a significant part or all of that subsidy, or you can purchase a plan- and subsidy-free phone for a $400 premium.

• Links — June 04, 2009 — Permalink

  Yes! 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to Be Persuasive

  This book is definitely pop-psych, but the review breaks it down to a pretty decent list of the effects of cognitive bias as it relates to persuasion. Some can be used for good, others seem more likely to be used for evil. Some are just amusing:

  Tired people tend to be more receptive to arguments. No wonder those magic bullet infomercials run so late at night. Both groups were presented to product demo, and then asked to evaluate the possibility of buying it. Group A was tired and a bit sleep-deprived, group B was in good physical condition. Group A was much more prone to buy.

  Definitely worth a skim and a bookmark.

• Links — June 03, 2009 — Permalink

  A Deep Breath

  A beautiful article from Rands/Michael about getting it together in a crisis, and then making progress based on that experience. A little bit about communicating with employees, a little bit about running meetings, a little bit about staying same, and a lot about being a great manager.

• Links — May 22, 2009 — Permalink

  Getting Past the Pie Chart

  Great article on Seed Magazine about the shortcomings of many of the data visualization methods we often see these days:

  Some of the most confusing new visualizations are the popular network diagrams, which are intended to show connections between nodes and invite inferences about the forces that govern the connections. Numerous groups have produced maps of social networks, internet traffic, and other complicated phenomena, but the impression one gets is merely of connectivity, rather than of any of the patterns the visualization purports to convey. Few obey the principles of perception-informed design or Edward Tufte’s rules for graphical integrity, which state that graphics should make viewers think about the subject matter, not design.

  As is often said, great design should be invisible. Crazy infographics may be cool, but they often don’t really make things more understandable than a more simplistic approach

• Links — May 22, 2009 — Permalink

  Data.gov

  The government has released the long-expected data.gov catalog of public datasets. Not a ton on there yet, but it’s a good place to watch and a potentially-invaluable resource in the future. I prefer Ali’s conceptual mockups to their design, but with the exception of the overuse of boldface text, it looks decent.

  Now if only they’d stop with the use of the word “raw” (in quotes on the site too). It’s all over the place, visually distracting, and annoying. It’s like they wanted to be hip, but some bureaucrat decided it needed to be obviously figurative. Lame.

• Twitter — Jul 03, 2009 — Permalink
  Checking out some minor league baseball at the beach. http://yfrog.com/1741scj
• Twitter — Jul 03, 2009 — Permalink
  327 kcal today as part of #30dayEA. @brucefloyd is gonna have a hard time beating that one. @cindyli: skipping rest day today?
• Twitter — Jul 02, 2009 — Permalink
  @cindyli @brucefloyd 260 kcal burned today on #30dayEA.
• Twitter — Jul 01, 2009 — Permalink
  @reagent that looks like it would make rails way more attractive to me
• Twitter — Jul 01, 2009 — Permalink
  @karonev Great to have you back in the neighborhood :)
• Twitter — Jul 01, 2009 — Permalink
  This sore throat seems to be getting worse as the morning goes on, not better. That’s not gonna help make this long day any shorter.
• Twitter — Jul 01, 2009 — Permalink
  Happy Canada Day! Wish I could make it down to the Embassy today, but it looks like work isn’t going to let that happen.
• Twitter — Jun 30, 2009 — Permalink
  Accidentally just saw that some woman won $1M on Wheel of Fortune. I swear it was an accident… just waiting for Jeopardy.
• Twitter — Jun 30, 2009 — Permalink
  @Kwilcox123 those are worth what, more than most new yorkers make in a month, right?
• Links — June 30, 2009 — Permalink

  The effect of the rats on the rat race

  From Mind Hacks:

  Not Exactly Rocket Science covers an intriguing study on how people try less hard in a competition as the number of competitors increases.

  The researchers started off with a simple observation that US students tended to get better marks when they took their exams in smaller exam rooms.

  This brings up one of the reasons why you might not want to grow your team or business too much. When you have 50 designers, will they all work as hard and be as creative as when you had five? Will you still be the team you used to be?

• Twitter — Jun 30, 2009 — Permalink
  Three recordings of the same piece. One is 4:30, one is 5:28, one is 6:49. That’s a pretty healthy spread.
• Twitter — Jun 30, 2009 — Permalink
  @bonsai I would say it means going around and doing things to get those ideas rolling, rather than just evangelizing.
• Twitter — Jun 30, 2009 — Permalink
  Looks like @felskia got some fun press from her panel yesterday. Some nice quotes mentioned: http://bit.ly/tyj7A
• Twitter — Jun 29, 2009 — Permalink
  Holy crap, this week is already insane, and it’s barely started.
• Twitter — Jun 28, 2009 — Permalink
  Waved hello to @lizaard on the way back, and got in a pretty good ride with @felskia. Have to say, the last 3 miles (of the 23) were tough.
• Twitter — Jun 28, 2009 — Permalink
  Getting ready to head out for a quick morning ride with @felskia. Probably the W&OD + Mt Vernon + Custis loop.
• Links — June 28, 2009 — Permalink

  Visual Decision Making

  This may be my favorite A List Apart article ever. Patrick Lynch presents a thoughtful, well-argued position on behalf of visual design on the web:

  Recent design writing and interface research illustrate how visual design and user research can work together to create better user experiences on the web: experiences that balance the practicalities of navigation with aesthetic interfaces that delight the eye and brain. In short: there’s lots of evidence that beauty enhances usability.

  There’s not a whole lot that’s incredibly new here, but Lynch’s argument — which includes conscious and sub-conscious cognitive processing and a discussion of the difference in role between classical (clean) and expressive (Comm. Arts) aesthetics — brings a lot together quite nicely.

  Hopefully the non-visual designers reading this appreciated it as much as I did, and the visual designers didn’t stop reading three paragraphs in due to the relative lack of graphics and long paragraphs :)

• Twitter — Jun 27, 2009 — Permalink
  @Kwilcox123 what are you up to? when are you heading out?
• Twitter — Jun 27, 2009 — Permalink
  @semanticwill I love the Beacon. Used to be an almost-regular when I worked downtown.
• Twitter — Jun 27, 2009 — Permalink
  @troll08 sounds like the meal @felskia and I had tonight. except replace grilled with stewed and pasta with rice. Close enough :)
• Links — June 27, 2009 — Permalink

  John Gruber on Copy and Paste

  John Gruber, in his overall write-up on the new C&P functionality on the iPhone, summarizes Apple’s philosophy when it comes to releasing these types of features:

  That we had to wait two years for the iPhone’s text selection and pasteboard is a good example of one aspect of the Apple way: better nothing at all than something less than great. That’s not to say Apple never releases anything less than great, but they try not to. This is contrary to the philosophy of most other tech companies — and diametrically opposed to the philosophy of Microsoft. And it is very much what drives some people crazy about Apple — it’s simply incomprehensible to some people that it might be better to have no text selection/pasteboard implementation while waiting for a great one than to have a poor implementation in the interim.

  I tend to agree with the Apple stance. Don’t let perfection be the enemy of the great, but do let greatness be the enemy of the good/fair/poor.

• Links — June 26, 2009 — Permalink

  Engineers Are The Best Deal - So Stock Up On Them

  TechCrunch sucks, but Auren Hoffman is a pretty smart guy, from the times I’ve met him:

  We’re all familiar with Moore’s Law – that the power of computers doubles every 18 months. In my 15 years of software development, I’ve seen 5x-10x productivity gains in engineers. Which could mean that the productivity of a well-trained engineer doubles every five years. (note that this Law is much harder to prove than Moore’s Law – but potentially just as profound). That would mean that the productivity of an engineer is growing at roughly 14.9% per year! That’s fast … really fast … much faster than the 2.6% yearly gains than the population as a whole is making.

  It’s true in my experiences working with new companies. Make sure there’s a developer or two on the team first, then worry about the other roles as you grow. Developers without designers may make something ugly, but designers without developers may make nothing but art.

• Twitter — Jun 26, 2009 — Permalink
  Memory consumption right now: itunes, 55mb; mail.app, 61mb; adium, 85mb; netnewswire (well-used), 98mb; yammer, 165mb. that’s messed up.
• Twitter — Jun 25, 2009 — Permalink
  terrible master indeed.
• Twitter — Jun 25, 2009 — Permalink
  Hmm, I guess this news means I can’t make jokes about my own name for a while… too soon.
• Twitter — Jun 24, 2009 — Permalink
  racing downtown to pick up @felskia and then back to @viget for tonight’s @adcmw event. that’s lots of @s
• Links — June 24, 2009 — Permalink

  Bing and Google Agree: Slow Pages Lose Users

  Microsoft and Google presented the results of their user performance tests, and Brady Forrest at O’Reilly has a nice synopsis:

  Here are Brutlag’s and Schurman’s final points:

  • “Speed matters” is not just lip service
  • Delays under half a second impact business metrics
  • The cost of delay increases over time and persists
  • Use progressive rendering
  • Number of bytes in response is less important than what they are and when they are sent

  These are pretty consistent with the conclusions we’ve already had, and corresponds pretty closely with the talk I gave up in Halifax last month, but it’s great to have some metrics attached.

• Twitter — Jun 24, 2009 — Permalink
  @theorchid: Isn’t that pretty much the only way the Nats could win?
• Cahier — June 24, 2009 — 11 Comments

  Seeing the Forest for the Trees

  The web industry is beginning to move into its adolescence. Fifteen years after its birth, and eight years after a dramatic industry reset, we’re beginning to move past the simple questions around how to execute ideas, and raising more questions about how best to execute them.

  The public is now becoming reliant on the web as a major tool in everyday life, and even the most luddite audiences are beginning to use the products that only the earliest of adopters were using not long ago. The web is no longer a forum for geeks and deviants, but an unfathomably large, diverse, and mainstream medium, capable of handling nearly any form of information or communication on any topic.

  This growth and expansion has made the web a far more exciting concept, and the industry surrounding it has followed suit. Problems to tackle are greater in number, more varied in subject, and broader in their scope.

  Yet the broader the web becomes, the more specialized its practitioners have grown.

• Twitter — Jun 24, 2009 — Permalink
  Essay finished, I think. How do you think about generalists on the web? http://bit.ly/EOJlF