Making better products

Orkut, the second largest online social network has a new look. Apparently they are rolling out the new redesign to select groups of users and their blog states that they will continue to do this over coming weeks.

One of their goals have to been to maintain the “true blue simplicity” but at first glance I find the white backgrounds and the rounded corners to be very distracting.

What do you think ? Leave me a comment.

Xobni, a new email-management service offered by the San Francisco-based startup company Xobni Analytics aims to empower the email user and help them “take back their inbox”. Xobni provides data on things like how much time you spend on email, how long it takes you to respond and what times during the day have the most important emails coming in. They are funded by Khosla Ventures, First Round Capital, YCombinator, and a group of angel investors.

Xobni claims that it will help you manage time spent on your email account much more efficiently.The new “Email me instead” allows you to send Facebook messages directly to people’s inboxes, saving the extra step of having to go into Facebook in order to read them. Users can sign up to receive news and updates on the Beta release. Until then, users can visit the site’s blog to correspond with the Xobni team.

They have a button for your blog and claim that users using this on their blog will get priority access for their release. Check this out.

Tafiti is a mashup that uses the resources of Windows Live Search driven by a Silverlight user interface. The result is a search engine with a totally new experience.

Tafiti (which is the Swahili word for “do research”) uses a desktop metaphor to search across media types and even filter your data result set multiple times.  So here’s my take on Tahiti

The good

1. Provides a stack view of my search results – Ability to drag multiple search results on to the right pane and to label a stack of results.

2.  You can email items of a stack to people, which is pretty useful.

3.  Ability to blog about a stack you have created on your Live Space account.

4. Ability to pivot the search results by RSS feeds, books, news items, images. I found this to be very useful . It does not stop here, you can in fact view contextual information on a book. (This feature however doesn’t seem to be working currently)

5. Here is one cool feature, though it took me some time to figure out how to get to this – On your web search results, there is a tree icon and clicking on which provides a real tree view visualization of your search results. You can choose to view how many results you wish to see and hovering over a result provides a brief description of the same. Very cool, but doubt if people will find value.   

The bad

1. A somewhat jerky experience throughout, not as smooth as WPF desktop applications.

2. There are some issues with resolution, does not run perfectly on lower resolutions.

3. No pagination for search results – there’s only a more link which is not great usability.

4. There’s a text box for filtering the search results – where you can actually type and I figured that it does a text comparison with the search results and pivots them. Not a common standard for filters - users might be expecting a drop down etc.

5. Try right clicking on the site and you will notice only one option called ‘Silverlight configuration’ clicking on which provides a note about silverlight. I am really hoping that this is customizable ?

6. It opens up all the search results in a new IE window, which is not great usability.

Overall, it’s worth a shot, though I am sure that Microsoft realizes that no one is going to use this as a search engine, it’s more of an effort to showcase the power of silverlight and maybe the future of rich internet applications.

  Here are some screenshots

Wow.. I have been amazed by this picture for quite some time now. Are you game to live in a web 2.0 world ?

This post is long pending. I have been fascinated by the new generation of composite applications which are very powerful and help in boosting productivity and operational efficiency. So let’s take this step by step.

What are OBAs ?

OBAs are basically a new breed of composite applications which enable information workers to work on their legacy systems and other systems in the backend with a Microsoft Office 2007 front end. These systems surface up the data from the Line of Business (LOB) applications and enable people to perform actions on them.

What is the need for OBAs ?

People typically perform significant additional work outside of the formal processes of a line-of-business (LOB) system as they collaborate with other people via phone and email, obtain information from multiple sources in the form of documents and spreadsheets, and switch between online and offline modes for meetings and business trips. OBAs help simplify this interaction by fitting within the informal processes that information workers actually follow. Organizations can use OBAs to build their won solutions, integrate with it and connect to an external line of Business (LOB) application so as to ensure that information is easily available and people can be more productive. This also rules out the need for getting resources trained on the Line of business applications.

Typical scenario for an OBA

Let’s look at a typical scenario where OBAs can be used and how they can help solve problems within the existing systems. The legacy systems are based on transactional processes that are necessary in order to accomplish specific tasks—for example, creating a Purchase Order. What is not effectively captured are the ad hoc, local people-driven processes that people do in order to accomplish a task like this. For instance – people have to collaborate with other members in their team to get required inputs from them for completing a purchase order. The purchase manager will also require to get information from suppliers and other requirements which need to be collated. Once he has completed the purchase order, he might also have to get it approved from his maanger. The exisitng systems do not support these activites and they are outside of the system.  So these systems are being used for merely storing the data and not for collaboration and decision making.

However using an OBA, the purchase manager can collaborate with other people in his team using a sharepoint team site, brainstorm on ideas using a wiki and then collate all this information easily as this available in one single place. He could also have ad hoc meetings and discussions if his MOSS portal is integrated with Live Communication Server, enabling him to start a chat conversation with any of his colleagues or suppliers. On completing the purchase order, he has a custom workflow which routes the document to his manager and once it is approved, he has it automatically sent to the suppliers. The business application simulates the actual way the work gets done rather than just being a repository for information.

If you are interested in browsing OBA solutions built by Microsoft Partners, check

This is an amazing picturisation of Web 2.0 and trends based on it. It also gives a nice indication of what’s hot and not

 I am sure that we are going to see a huge explosion in the growth of community and networking sites in 2007. Phew!