Musings of a Program Manager
NetLife Research is a Norwegian based User Experience design and consulting firm. For the last cou
ple of years they have been releasing a bad usability calendar which is meant to show examples of bad UX and usability.
This year’s calendar has great examples of exaggerated use of web 2.0 design,social bookmarking proliferation, drop down menus, message feeds etc.
You can download this year’s calender here.
Interesting way to portray UX and design bloppers!
It’s now almost an year since I started blogging seriously - blogging about work, about trends in technology, product management, user experience and usability.
It’s one year down and this is my 50th post on this blog. Not bad after all, an verage of four posts a month, a post a week!
The other I was just going through my blog stats and wanted to check out the most popular posts etc.
Here’s an excerpt
Top 5 posts and pages of all time along with the number of views
| MOSS based internet portals | 766 | |
| Living in a web 2.0 world ! | 316 | |
| Apple form factor evolution | 247 | |
| Microsoft announces eScrum Tool | 132 | |
| Microsoft Cloud OS | 126 | |
| About Me | 119 |
Here’s the traffic snapshot over the last year. I think that this is fairly consistent, but would like to hear from experienced bloggers about this trend line.
Any finally search engine terms which brought me in traffic, here are the top terms along with the number of clicks
| Web 2.0 | 211 | |
| Product Evolution | 107 | |
| Apple | 75 | |
| MOSS Strategy | 64 | |
| Microsoft | 54 | |
| MOSS for internet | 25 |
Thanks for all your support, keep the comments and feedback flowing!
Trying to decide on a nice restaurant for a date in Koramangala and can’t decide where to go or what to do ? AskLaila, from Four Interactive comes to your rescue. Asklaila aims to answer common questions of Who? What? Where? When? Why? How? within your city.
Currently they have local information services for Bangalore and Mumbai (which was launched a couple of weeks ago). I had a chat with their team and they were telling me that you can soon expect to see asklaila in all metros and other major cities in India in next few months.
I think this product has some great potiential (especially going by the vision of their passionate team !) in the Indian consumer market and the next couple of years will determine how consumers actually percieve the real value from local products.
Below is a SWOT (Strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats ) analysis I did on their product.
Note : The opinions expressed here are totally from my perception of the product 
It’s all about MyTinyJesus - Saviour 2.0.
No explanations. No FAQ. Just a figure of Jesus which keeps on emitting random Twitter posts in cartoon-like balloons. Pointless? Probably. Cool? Definitely.
What do you think ?
Yahoo released their new version of the popular Y! messenger with an exclusive version built for Vista on WPF. This is 
currently only for preview. The UX is brilliant, and this app brings more of a human touch to conversations with smooth transitions and the likes.
The app however does not run on XP even if you have .NET 3.0 and the other jazz. But this looks and feels so much like a native Vista app, including the richness and the transparencies. This new version also provides a good deal of customization, with the usual laundry list of features. These two features were extremely useful
But the bigger question is, ‘What do you think provides more value’ - a quick and dirty IM chat client like Gtalk (also built into your gmail) or an app like this which provides a great UX.
This is a very interesting snippet of information. The table on the right says it all, of course it is heavily based on the valuation from the Microsoft deal, which happened a few days back.
The $15 bn evaluation makes Facebook No. 5 on the most valued pure Internet based companies in the US. Only Google, eBay, Yahoo and Amazon have larger market capitalizations than Facebook. This is quite incredible, considering the other honchos on this list.
The list of other top valued firms are below and Microsoft of course tops the list. Quite amazing that Facebook is valued more than AOL, MySpace and a bunch of other long timers.
Image courtesy : Techcrunch
After much speculation and rumours, looks like Microsoft has won the Facebook deal with a $240 million investment for 1.6% of the company. If Microsoft’s investment is indicative
of what Facebook is worth, its valuation is somewhere in the ballpark of $15 billion. After having lost out on some other high profile deals such as MySpace, this will be great joy for Microsoft.
The deal makes Microsoft the sole advertising provider for Facebook in the United States and internationally. With facebook’s mamoth user base, this definitely means serious business for Microsoft.
The crucial aspect is how Microsoft takes this forward and improves it’s partnership with Facebook. There is a lot of scope for Microsoft to leverage this deal and work on it and bring on enhancements which will enable some Microsoft Products such as Live Messenger and the Live platform as such to be integrated with Facebook.
My bet is that this is going to be a very interesting time for the Web 2.0 space as we see major players getting into this space.
Image Courtesy : Webcommunityforum
More coverage below
For Microsoft, Sharepoint and MOSS 2007 have always been dear products, with a lot of sales and marketing activity happening on this front. Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 
2007 is a key product for Microsoft - it has collaboration, business intelligence, content management, search and “social computing” capabilities (Microsoft’s idea for ‘web 2.0′, according to this page on Microsoft’s website).
Microsoft is going Web 2.0, and what better way than to go with Sharepoint. Some of my previous posts talk about MOSS 2007 and building Web 2.0 sites using MOSS.
Microsoft recently announced two strategic partnerships, with enterprise software 
company Atlassian and RSS solutions vendor NewsGator. The partnerships link togther Microsoft’s SharePoint product with Atlassian’s wiki collaboration product Confluence
and a new offering from Newsgator called ‘NewsGator Social Sites’, a collection of site templates, profiles, Web parts and middleware for SharePoint.
The big picture which Microsoft is of course looking at is to sell SharePoint as a social collaboration platform rather than just an enterprise productivity platform by adding more Web 2.0 features such as collaboration, user generated content etc. The other IMHO is of course the limited out of the box functionality which Wikis, blogs and other web parts provide in MOSS 2007 and customizing these can take quite a hit on the timelines and cost of a project.
According to this source, Microsoft has around 80 million users on SharePoint and is reported to be worth $800 M per year in revenue for the Redmond company. Atlassian has 4,100 Confluence enterprise customers. So this definitely seems to be a win win relationship and a great advantage for SharePoint users.
There is in fact a new connect launched by Atlassian which is available for download.
Social networks are quite the buzz in 2007, with more and more people waking up to Facebook and MySpace, as they feel these networks are changing the way they manage and maintain their relationships.
Facebook and MySpace continue are leaders in this segment, and it looks like for the first time Facebook might actually be gaining more popularity.
To me, it seems quite obvious why more and more are favoring Facebook. Going beyond the consumer space, it offers much more features to the business community to network and showacse their products.
One of the key aspects of Facebook’s success has been due to their open architecture and the ability for the dev community to create apps on top of Facebook. Facebook currently has an entire category of business applications with over 227 different applications offered today, none of them built by Facebook itself. This is a new value proposition to corporates, moving from the old paradigm of creating groups or microcosms within a social network for their particular organzation.
Using the new open architecture, companies can actually showcase their products to a wide audience of engaged, tech savy users willing to use some of these biz apps in their everyday life. Life Zoho’s Office suite Facebook app which allows you to access your documents through Facebook. Their is a lot of opportunity for a company like Zoho to leverage this - for instance linking Zoho Calendar into Facebook so that you can link up your events from Facebook into your main Zoho Calendar which you use at your company.
Or probably have contacts imported from Zoho CRM, and network with these contacts on Facebook ?
Business applications for Facebook include offerings from well known companies such as eBay, Zoho, Jobster, and Blue Nile that offer integration with their home sites and data. There are other small business apps which provide To Do lists, appointment management, managing business cards etc. Other popular business apps include virtual stock exchanges, job finding widgets, and small content management packages.
But an interesting trend is that, none of these business apps have a user base which is close enough to other popular Facebook apps. Is this because social networking as a concept has not been understood by corporates or probably they haven’t realized the need for having a Facebook presence. Whatever the case is, Facebook with it’s open architecture is definitely moving us towards the “Web as a platform” era and this holds out a lot of promise for large corporations in advertising, media, CRM, and other departments in traditional businesses.
How do you think Facebook can be better leveraged by the business community ?
The Expression around the clock event happened yesterday in Bangalore at Fuga, a cool venue for an even cooler event. This was a global designer conference(taking place simultaneously in 10 venues around the globe) aptly themed “Design is back!”
The event started with out with registration, Microsoft had a very strict registration and confirmation process for this event and inspite of that the place was packed with people. There were about 200 people and seating was available only for about 70 people.
The event kicked off with a keynote from Shelly Armstrong of the Microsoft Design team. Shelly has been involved in various projects in Microsoft, including the interaction design for the XBox and the Zune. Her talk was totally targeted towards designers and tips on improving UX, design, importance of keeping up with latest trends, networking etc.
After this there was a break, with the bar being opened up [:)]. There was more action ahead though. The next session was by Supreet Singh, an UX designer and Pandurang, a dev. They started out with a desinger dev duel and demostrated how Expression Studio supported the designer-dev collaboration with ease. This was pretty interesting, with Surpreet putting in a video on to his canvas and then Pandurang writing a bit of code for the play and pause functionality.
The dev, (as they put it, didn’t have much idea about UX) and hence he puts up text messages for play and pause. Surpreet then takes this XAML and immediately ports this message into a cool button.
The next part was demos - impressive stuff overall, though I had seen most of them before. The demo which impressed me the most, was the one of a Silverlight video player being able to play 10 high definition videos simultaneously with ease, and the ability for the user to seamless switch between them with no system overload.
Post this was the usual networking session (with more beers though!). Met a couple of interesting people and managed to market ADITI’s UX blog. People seemed to be very interested by this, especially because we are not a design only firm.(Thanks Ram ! for mentioning our blog in your post.)
At the end, Microsoft gave away a goodie bag to each participant. It had a 60-day trial of the Expression Studio, a design magazine and a Reebok t-shirt!.
Add this blog to your social bookmarks
