ADHPMD – Attention Deficit Hyperactive Product Management Disorder

December 22nd, 2011

 

 

 

Jackson Pollock's, Convergence, 1952

 

When was the last time you tried to find a great UX/product person for your team? It’s kind of challenging. This is why lool Ventures & The Junction are hosting LEANUXMACHINE 2011: THE HACKATHON this weekend.

As part of the day I’ll be introducing the process of product creation and product management, which means I’ll need a slide that goes something like this:

  1. You research the market.
  2. You understand the pains and needs.
  3. You reflect your conclusions in the Marketing requirement document.
  4. The product manager translates the MRD into the PRD (Product Requirement doc) that includes the wireframes.
  5. And then – and only then – are they, the designers, called upon to make something beautiful and usable out of the product manager’s dreams.

I’m supposed to share what product management is but I can’t!

The simple truth is that this is not how I create products myself…

Talk Your Walk:

I have no formal education qualifying me for my job. I’ve studied Arts. When I graduated I owned a picture framing gallery until one day I decided to close it and become a designer. I got a computer, installed Photoshop 3, taught myself design and started working as a web designer at the late 90s.

When the bubble burst the company I was working for at the time shrunk from 60 people to 20 and  I was gradually left as the only design/product person.

No one taught me what’s a spec, what’s an A/B test or what’s market research. We just had to create products and those – in their turn – had to be sold in millions or a lot of people would go home. So we created those products. Not all of them were great products, but most of them sold, the company survived and I became a product person.

The problem was (some would say still is :-) that I never followed the “right” process of product management. It seems I was creating products in a semi chaotic processes I can best describe as ADHPMD -Attention Deficit Hyperactive Product Management Disorder.

I would open an empty photoshop canvas having no idea what was about to happen. I would follow some kind of initial feeling, usually something vague. Then I would draft and draft until it hurt and a product would start to emerge. Only then would I dive into the specs and product definitions. For me design always came first.

Don’t get me wrong. Process IS important. You can’t build products/companies without it and our industry will be a mess without the great product people that can think and follow it as is. 

I’m just saying that there is more than one process and perhaps we should open ourselves to other options and try to expand the pool, and type, of people we assign the product posts. It looks like we typecast the product person and we’re now expecting certain patterns from those people. Is there an option that we’re missing out on other perspectives too?

  • How is it that 99% of people in product departments come from R&D or marketing backgrounds?
  • Why aren’t we growing some of our product teams from within the creative departments?
  • Why are we worshiping ”process” and avoid talking about the part of randomness, (chaos shouldn’t have used this term :) and pure luck in the process of product creation?

You are what you is:

So this is what I would like to tell those design student when I meet them.

“My name is Avi and I’m a ‘Product Person’. I’m not a product manager (I suck at management), I’m not a UX designer (too complicated), I’m not from product marketing, I’m a product person. I create products. I envision them, I design them, I spec them, I make them happen & when they’re ready I go and sell my dreams hoping people will use them.

You guys are design students. When you graduate the people in our industry will try to tag you. They will tell you that you have a preordained roll in this world. You are to design product that other people planed, manage and will market for you. They will tell you that there is a “right” process for creating products. That you guys, with your right-side brains, are not born for this analytical process of product management. Don’t believe them. There is no right way to create a product, and there is no one role for you in it.

You CAN think of yourself as a ‘Designer’, But you can also call yourself as a ‘Product Person’ and engulf yourselves in all aspects of product creation: from marketing, to design to development. You can start creating products today, YOUR products. Most of them will fail (mind you) but some of them will make a difference in people lives.”

 

 


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Singlytics – What’s Your SPI?

October 23rd, 2011

“Data driven culture”, “Data driven design”, “MoneyBall”, “KPIs”…
We all need data. We can’t run our businesses without it. I’m just wondering how much of it do we really need?

The problem with data is its tendency to inflate. It starts with a simple Google Analytics/Mixpanel set of events and before you know it you’re spending $1000 of your investor’s money on buying a 42″ screen to display your amazing “data driven” charts to everyone that visits your office.

When I read Moneyball what struck me most wasn’t the data driven decision making. As I read the book the words kept desolving until I was left with a single word… “Walks“. Understanding that walks, maybe the least sexy piece of data out there, is THE most important piece of data in Baseball is what made Billy Beane special to me.  It was his ability to see the single stat in the heart of it all that impressed me the most…. “Walks, Walks, Walks”. If you didn’t learn to walk you had no place in Billy’s team.

What’s your SPI?

When we set to build MyFamilio we took a bit of drastic approach to analytics. We decided our SPI (Single Performance Indicator) for the time being is “moments shared” and we looked for a way that would reflect to us how well we’re doing.

What if a bell rings every time a family moment was shared on MyFamilio? If we suck then there will be no bells ringing. If we’re doing OK then the bells WILL ring. But only when they ring so often it make our lives unbearable will we know that we’ve succeeded. In which case we’ll need to find a new KPI to fight over.

And this is exactly what we did. Instead of displaying our Mixpanel charts on LCDs we tied our SPI  to an app and this app “rings a bell” whenever someone shares a moment with their family on MyFamilio.

If you choose your SPI bravely you’re about to be incredibly depressed. There is nothing more depressing than the silence that follows when people don’t use your service and the bells stop ringing. I’ve never found a more effective way of telling you “You’re not there yet… Go on what are you waiting for? Make those people happy”

We call this approach Singlytics. It changed the way we look at analytics. The question is… Can you handle it? :)



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The David & Goliath Syndrome

November 11th, 2010

Ask Boxee about Google/Apple TV,  Ask Wibiya about Meebo Bar/Facebook Bar, ask SohoOS about Zoho, Ask Followbase about  SalesForce and you’ll get a logical explanation about how their product differentiates itself and how they’re going to win.

Now ask the same question again but this time cover your ears, don’t listen to their answer and instead concentrate on the CEO’s eyes… The eyes always tell the truth. You’ll see that despite the logical explanation they’re giving you they don’t really understand why you even asked the question at the first place. Deep deep inside they don’t feel they’re any smaller or inferior to the giants they’re up against and if you ever saw a Chihuahua standing firm and barking on a Pitbull you’ll know what I’m talking about.

It’s because they’re suffering from the David & Goliath syndrome!

The Origins of  the David & Goliath Syndrome

If you want to understand the origin of the David & Goliath Syndrome you’ll need to get a feeling of the kind of place those entrepreneurs, who now lead most Israeli start-ups, grew up in. You’ll need to take a little trip down the time tunnel to Israel of the late 60s and early 70s…

For the first 30 years of Israel’s existence we were not so different from a modern age Sparta. A small nation, surrounded by enemies and breeding children to grow up as soldiers willing to die for their country. Israel was full of people who survived the Holocaust. You were either a child of a survivor or knew one. Every child grew up knowing that the alternative to a strong and surviving Israel was the death camps and the motto was “Never Again!”.

Just like in Sparta we had our elite worrier class, the ones who grew up in the Kibbutz. They were separated from their parents at birth (though their parents lived with them in the same Kibbutz) to grow up in children houses, crying at night for strangers instead for their moms, living in a collective where the individual was a tool serving the greater good of the whole. These were the ideal conditions for breeding the toughest, bravest soldiers and indeed most of those kids ended up in the best units of our army.

Daady is a Brave SoldierAliyah (Immigration to Israel), Security, Bread & Peace.The Best to the Air Force

But the origins of the David & Goliath Syndrome reach way beyond the borders of the Kibbutz. Every child in Israel of the 70s grew up hearing two mantras over and over again:

  • “It’s Good to die for our country” – Attributed to Josef Trumpeldor who supposedly said that at his death bed after being shot in the battle to defend Tel-Hai.
  • “A few against many” – This was drilled to us from day one. We are few and the enemy are many. We survive not because of our numbers but because we’re smarter and better. We’re David and they’re Goliath.

Don’t mistake my tone for cynicism or criticism. We had no other choice and there’s no way we could have survived as a nation without the sacrifice of the people who fought to defend it.

But growing up in this kind of atmosphere comes with side effects and one of them is the David & Goliath Syndrome: An inability to realize you’re way way beyond your league and to really face the fact that your competition can wipe you out with a flip of a virtual button.

So next time Israeli entrepreneurs sit in your office and you’re thinking “Who are those arrogant bastards sitting here telling me they’re the next Google”  know that this is not arrogance nor stupidity (maybe just a bit of Chutzpah). They really believe it. They can’t help it. They’re suffering from the David & Goliath Syndrome and their strategy is a one line bullet: “We’re better”.

10 minutes into their pitch you may be thinking “Why would I invest in those guys, they clearly don’t realize who their up against”, but you know what? These crazy people are exactly the kind of people that will keep fighting against all odds, the kind of people you want with you in the start up trenches. The only kind I ever want to work with.


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“f”

November 6th, 2010

It looks like people are not sure what Facebook Deals means for companies like Foursquare.

It will be very interesting to see what this means for smaller location services like Foursquare, which has been ramping up these types of deals in recent months. Will it be a case of all ships rising or everyone going over to Facebook?

My guess is that it will all boil down to a sticker… One sticker to lure them all, one sticker to find them, one sticker to bring them into the store and bind them

2010 was the “Like” year. Companies/businesses lost all touch with reality, and high on Likes, completely surrendered their brand to Facebook.

How many times, in the last year, have you watched a TV ad, read a magazine ad or a billboard and seen the Facebook Logo? Facebook has done what no other brand (online or offline) has been able to do in history. They got thousands of companies to display the Facebook logo, for free, next to their logo on every prime ad real-estate you can imagine.

If you try to reflect on the actual ads you’ve seen this past year you’ll see exactly how strong the Facebook brand has become.

A year ago you would have seen ads saying “Join us on Facebook” and displaying the full Facebook logo. Then, instead of using the full “Facebook” logo they started using the smaller version with the letter “f”. Nowadays companies simply add the “f” logo to their ad. That’s it. No “Join Us”, no Facebook logo, just an “f”!

From "Facebook to "f"

2010 was the “Like” year. 2011 will be the “f” year. The year when Facebook will cross the boundaries and extend their presence from hunderds of millions of people and brands online to millions of business in the real world.

If you’re still not sure how Facebook Deals is going to affect companies like Foursquare ask yourself: Which sticker are people more likely to recognize as they pass by a store? Which sticker will get them to check for local deals?

Local Stickers


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My Pathetically Lame Kindle

November 1st, 2010

A couple of weeks ago I was waiting, with a group of friends, for our flight back home to Israel. They were all playing with their iPads as I pulled out my Kindle. I can’t even start to describe the outburst of laughter and ridicule that followed as they were holding the THING.

It started when they tried to touch the screen and nothing happened and went on with the Kindle’s primitive looking page flips and ended up with them, almost lying on the floor, laughing at the description of how I need a flashlight to read at night.

I took it as a man :) And then I asked one of them “Do you read on your iPad?”. “Sure” he said “I read thousands of articles since I have the iPad”. “No” I insisted “Do you read as in reading a book”, “Oh” he said and immediately opened his iPad to show me how beautifully pages flip when you read on iBooks “I’m already at chapter number 3 of this book”.

You know what? They were right. My Kindle is pathetically lame. Using the five click navigation instead of simply touching the screen it annoying, the keyboard is ridiculous and don’t even get me started on the so called “browser”. The funny thing though is that while my friend read the first 3 chapters of his book (in the 3 months he has an iPad) I read thousands of pages worth of books in the 3 weeks I have my Kindle.

Reading articles will fill your brain, reading books will fill your soul.
From the amazing Gandalf to the unforgettable Druss. From Middle Earth to 12th century Kingsbridge. For every person I’ve met in life I’ve met 10 amazing characters in the books I’ve read. For every place I’ve visited in our world I’ve traveled to 100 amazing other worlds those gifted writers created for me. The people and places I’ve met in my books are as real, for me, as the rest of you guys and I can’t imagine my life without them.

In a world where content is consumed in chunks of 140 characters and 60 seconds videos, in a world of push email and Blackberries, being able to lean back and loose yourself in a book for 5 hours is a priceless gift.

It’s true, my Kindle IS lame but for me it’s simply a book, nothing more. A 10.2 oz book that gets me reading more than ever before… and for that I love it.

Kindle 3 6"


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The “Instafaces” Experiment

October 16th, 2010

The Instafaces experiment started on a whim. I asked @yanivg: “What if we went to Union Square, put a cardboard on the pavement with a pair of feet drawn on it, and whenever a person steps on it we’ll shoot their portrait?”… “hmmm, sounds cool” said Yaniv.

The next day, at lunch break, I went down to Staples and got a piece of cardboard, some sticky letters and a marker. I came back to the office and gladly enough Yaniv agreed to be the first “user” of Instafaces (bootstrapped with $18.69 :-) ).

Instafaces Photos Stream


We gave some thought about how to provoke the reaction we wanted, and Yaniv came with the brilliant addition of using a tripod. This creates a situation where the photographer is static and people from the crowed need to stop their flow and stand on the Instafaces mat for a 5 seconds magical moment with the photographer.

We set off for Union Square and set up our Instafaces mat near the Subway exit, and Yaniv started stopping people, pointing to the mat, and guiding them to stand on it so that he can shoot their portrait. What followed was truly amazing. Initially it took us about 5 minutes per shot and people hesitated (it’s in the human nature to think that everything has a hidden motive) but gradually people started coming.

The first question they all had was “What is this for?”, so we decided to A/B test (a product manager is a product manager:-) and drew the Facebook “F” logo on the mat so people will understand these photos are going to be uploaded to Facebook. It’s amazing how powerful the Facebook logo and brand have become. Adding the Facebook logo increased conversion by a 100% and we we’re shooting a portrait every 2.5 minutes or so.

What we decided to do next was much more dramatic for conversion. We simply took the Instafaces mat and put it in the middle of the sidewalk, effectively blocking the traffic and making people go around us. At this point we were taking a portrait every 30-60 seconds (compared to the 5 minutes it took us at the beginning). I had to stop when a cop came to me and told me I was blocking the traffic. I was so overwhelmed with Adrenaline that I actually asked him if he would agree to have his portrait taken before I leave, very, very stupid move in the US, but luckily I encountered a nice cop who replied with a simple “no”.

One minute later, when it all ended, I stood there in Union Square and my whole body was shaking. It was only then that I realized what a rush my body was experiencing from this amazing, unmediated, random encounter with hundreds of people, including the many that said “no please” because that was an important part of it too.

WOW, I’m sure this is not the last time I’m going to do this. I do have some “Product” insights, both about the Instaface mat itself and about the “interface” between the photographer and the people. The most important being that we must have a card with the URL of the Instafaces Facebook page the photographer can give to the people so they can see their pictures and spread the love, starting with you.


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Tweetpasana

October 6th, 2010

Like many horror stories, this one started with a stupid commitment I took on myself.

@yanivg challanged me, and I took an oath – I will not be visiting Twitter until we finally deliver Facebook Connect on AOL Answers. Oh, I was sure it will take us max 1-2 weeks – no big deal.

However, priorities changed and it ended up taking 3 months.

I did try Tweetpasana in the past, not tweeting for a month or so at a time. However, this time it was the real thing. I cut myself completely from Twitter, not even looking at it to see what others tweet.

We’ve met the challange, and I can tweet again! Yay!

Except…

The funny thing is that I find it hard to tweet now. My self-forced Twitter exile ended almost a month ago but I tweeted only once. You see, tweeting suddenly feels almost like shouting. It’s noisy. It actually feels like the first tweets I ever did back at 2007.

There were additional consequences. I noticed that I have an urge to unfollow every person I don’t care about on a personal level from my stream. After being away for 3 months from my stream, when I finally visited it again, it felt like “What are all those strangers doing here”. I’m tired of all those links and “valuable” tweets and I actually miss the days when Twitter was a window to people’s lives, as in a way to know what @idancohen was cooking for dinner.

Oh, I’m sure I missed a lot of “valuable” links and important industry news – but I think it was worth it.

I’m not going to tell you my life is changed, but I will recommend you consider trying this.
Why?  Because we’re the same people who spend our lives creating those social ecosystems and one of the most important things to keep (in any profession) is perspective and, as it is, the only way to have a proper perspective is to take a step back and look at things from afar.

alone thinking

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Never Believe Your Own Story

June 14th, 2010

The StorytellerCreating new products is a delicate balance between the future and the present. If you want to really push the envelope with a product you need to see beyond the current market, but if you look too far you’re giving people nothing to hang on as they transform from their current reality to the future your company is creating.

What fills that gap between future and present is good old storytelling. Any entrepreneur is, first of foremost, a great storyteller. For the entrepreneur storytelling is like a ferry enabling investors to cross that river that separates the present and the future and just like any ferry boarding the entrepreneur’s ferry will cost you, a sack of gold given for a promise of riches.

The Problem with stories though is that at some point you may start believing them yourself. When you’ve heard/told the story for too many times, you may stop questioning its validity or worse, stop asking what were the facts the story was span around.

Reality Check
Innovation and startups couldn’t exist without a touch of storytelling. What’s important is that you remember to conduct a reality check from time to time.  Make sure that your story, just like any great story, has a beginning, middle and end and at every stage of the story ask yourself if the facts indicate there is enough truth in your story.

It’s OK to change your story. It’s actually even OK to completely dump it and write a new story from scratch if you feel your product’s story has evolved from an inspiring piece of fictions to a piece of fantasy. It’s better you have the guts to face your investors/customers and tell them you want to share a new story with them than keep telling the same story hoping that if you tell is over and over again it will become a reality.

Never believe your own story blindly because once you do you’re in danger of finding yourself in a Never Ending Story.


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What’s Behind The Google.com “Wallpaper”?

June 3rd, 2010

Google announced they’re now enabling people to personalize their Google.com experience by selecting their own background image. This is not a particularly innovative feature - Ask.com and companies like Groovle have been supporting this feature for ages, But unlike these prior arts, in the case of Google.com, This may be more than a simple personalization feature.

My guess is that this is part of a larger product plan aimed at gradually migrating people from Google as a Home Page > to Google as a Cloud Desktop > to Google “Operating System”. This is how things may roll:

Step 1 – If it has a wallpaper it’s a desktop

What’s a desktop? It’s a bunch of icons with a wallpaper. Take an empty page like Google.com add a “wallpaper” and suddenly you got a very “desktopish” filling to it.

When climbers need to climb a very high mountain they need to stop in several base camps along the way and stay in those camps until they acclimatize and can move on to higher altitudes.

The Google.com wallpaper, even if it seems like a minor feature, is a crucial base camp in Googles climb from homepage to cloud desktop. It’s a crucial psychological step enabling people, who are used to a very clean Google.com, to “acclimatize” and get ready for the next step: The introduction of Google’s “desktop icons” on the google.com homepage.

Step 2 – If it has a wallpaper and icons that open all my favorite apps it’s a cloud desktop

Once people are used to the desktopish look of their Google.com Google may add the second “personalization” feature and display the icons people need in order to access their main productivity/fun application directly from their Google.com homepage.

Step 3 – If it has a wallpaper and icons that open all my favorite apps and runs on my desktop is an operating system

So we have people who got used to the desktopish look of their google.com homepage and are now used to accessing their main application using the google.com “desktop icons”. The last step in the plan would be to encourage people to install the desktop version of their google.com experience.

I can see the banner on google.com “Want Your Google.com to be Crazy Fast Click Here”. When people install the Desktop Google.com app they will be presented with a “Run Google when I start my computer” option. And before you know it you got Windows/Mac users running Google OS on and they haven’t even noticed it .


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Twitter’s PUBLIC Window of Opportunity

May 20th, 2010

Basic Social Features on Twitter

What Facebook did, when they released Open Graph may have been too drastic. Instead of “taking the stairs” and guiding people from a semi private experience to a public experience, step by step, Facebook “took the elevator” and pressed the PUBLIC NOW button.

When people came out the elevator door, and saw the public reality, they where frightened. Messy integrations like the Yelp one did no good to relieve their fears and the public outcry started building up.

Personally I think that, despite the current outcry, 2 years from now, Facebook’s vision of “a web where social (public) is default” would be realized. The web will evolve from an opt-in to an opt-out experience.  An experience where, by default, you’re loged in to you favorite social network.

But until that day comes, and people get comfortable with being public, the current situation presents a great opportunity for Twitter.

Twitter has one major asset right now. 100 million people that understand the true meaning of PUBLIC. Those people are not scared when their status messages are publicly displayed for all to see and are perfectly OK with their “friends” list being public. They feel this way because they’ve been public on Twitter from day one. They’d been “imprinted” with public.

When you look at Twitter’s product roadmap in the last 2 years it looks as if they’ve been doing all they can to keep their product almost unusable. They’ve deprived people from the most basic features you’d expect in a social netwrok. I wonder what would happen if Twitter lost their product inhibitions and finally made Twitter the social network it can be?

The beauty is that they don’t need to sacrifice their core product and their simplicity. The experience you see when you land on twitter.com doesn’t need to change at all. The only thing Twitter needs to do is enrich the publishing options and take control over the second click, on what we see once we click links/images/videos etc.

So Twitter. These are some of the the features I would like to see. The features that may get people to use Twitter, instead of Facebook, as their main communication platform:

  • Photo upload + Image galleries
  • Comments + Discussion view
  • Events
  • Extended Tweets (AKA Facebook notes)

@twitter, you say you want to be the pulse of the planet? Well, my friends ARE part of this planet. You guys have a chance, a window of opportunity, to take 100 million people, and turn us to the best ever ambasdors of the “public web”, a web Mark dreams of, the web you already own.

All we’re asking for in return is the most basic features needed to express ourselves, engage in real conversation and keep in touch with our friends.


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Public is the Best Privacy Policy

May 16th, 2010
David Blaine

Public Privacy

I’ve been quietly listening to all this privacy whining going around lately but it’s getting a bit tiring.

I feel that in a sense, people’s expectations for privacy on the web are somewhat childish. What Facebook did now, and Google did in their Buzz and Street view fiascos is nothing but a welcomed wake up call… GET PUBLIC.

The difference between private and public on the web is one line of code. I’ve have lived by this law for years. I send emails knowing anyone I write about may have full access to my emails. I store my family photos knowing any photo can can find its way to the web… And so on. There’s no real digital privacy. What is private today may become public tomorrow because of a policy change, or a bug, or a hacker. But public it will be. Hence, public is the best privacy policy for me.

We already live in a very public real world. Our world, and I’m speaking of the real world (remember there’s that world too) is anything but private. We hate thinking about this everyday, all day, so we repress this fact but our moves are being constantly captured on CCTVs, our phone calls are being automatically monitored by commercial companies and by state (And this is just what we know about).

It’s OK that every single move/phone call/email/sms we make can potentially be recorded by the state but when Facebook/Google “invade our privacy” and publish our precious status messages or share our “secret” friend list for everyone to see we wake up and whine.

Just like a kid who told a secret to his best friend, only to find out the next day there is no such thing as a secret, we all whine to our collective moms and start trashing Facebook in countless blog post crying “But Mommy Facebook promised not to share my secrets”… And Mommy gives us her most compassionate look and tells us “Next time kid think twice before you share your secrets”. And you know what Mommy is 100% right.

We all want the most amazing products.  We want to be able to share endless amounts of data, gulping amazing amounts of storage, we want those services to be fast and most importantly we want them to be free. But nothing is free. Don’t you ever listen to Mommy? Everything comes with a price and the price we pay for the amazing free services we get is our privacy.

We’re not paying anything we’re actually gaining our freedom. Because when you got no privacy no one can invade it.


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Daddy I Want a Farm – Losing Facebook One Corn at a Time

May 9th, 2010

Yesterday Zynga announced that they’re going to branch out of Facebook and launch their own Zynga Live gaming network.

Is that bad for Facebook? I’m not sure. I actually think this can end up as one of the best things that happened to Facebook in 2010…

Imprinting

Imprinting

As a product person I always felt that one of the hardest things to do is to control your product identity. In “identity” I specifically refer to what people answer when they’re asked “What is Facebook?” (or, in my case “What is Yedda?”).

What is Skype? Ask people what Skype is and 99% will tell you it’s a cheap/free way to call people, even though it’s a full fledged IM… Ask people what MS Messagner is and 99% will tell you it’s an instant messenger, even though it’s a full fledged VOIP client. Why is this happening?

My guess would be “Imprinting“. People associate the product with the first activity they engaged in when they’re exposed to the product. What’s even more important is that they will go on and “sell” the product to their friends using the same terminology. In the case of Skype this resulted in hundreds of millions telling their friends “Did you try Skype already?… No? you don’t know what Skype is… you must try it’s a free phone”.

Once imprinting happens changing people’s perception of your product is almost imposible and even millions of dollars in marketing expenses wont guaranty a result.

Facebook did an amazing job building their product “identity”. Go ask people what Facebook is and 99% will tell you “it’s where I keep in touch with my friends”. Becoming that kind of communication channel for hundreds of millions of people is nothing short of amazing.

2 weeks ago I relented and opened a Facebook account for Shahar, my 7 (and by that I mean 18 of course) years old daughter. She was begging me to do so for weeks, kept going “Dad I want a farm, ppppplease, dad I want a farm can I have a Facebook?”

If you ask Shahar what Facebook is she will tell you “It’s where my farm is”. In her case Facebook lost the product identity battle. The imprint is done, and for her Facebook would always be a gaming site. The best scenario Facebook can hope for now is that she will think of Facebook as a social gaming site… But there is already a better social gaming site than then Facebook… it’s called Zynga Live

What’s Next

Zynga is a classic example of a parasite growing so much that it start threatening its host. Zynga threatens the core of Facebook, their identity. Each time a person sees a corn/cow in his news feed Facebook’s identity is shaken and that person has to ask himself if he just signed into a social gaming site or a social network?

Facebook can’t continue being passive. They know that and have already started restricting “apps” from doing stuff like flooding people’s news feeds with their updates (and guess who’s going to be most affected from that move?)

But this is only one little step. Facebook is facing a crucial junction and they’ll have to take a decision in the next couple of months. There are 2 main options I see here (and I’m sure I’m missing many others:)

Option 1 – Acquisition:
Don’t laugh. What we’re seeing right now might be part of a weird courtship ritual (think lions) where, to the onlooker, the whole thing looks really aggressive but ends up in… acquisition. This will cost 2-3 billion but will enable Facebook to gain control of their identity and branch out Social Gaming from Social Networking by introducing a separate brand/sub brand

Option 2 – Pest Control:
There is only one way to get rid of a parasite that aims to choke you… force, brute force. If things go down this road we’re about to see one the ugliest battles in the history of the web. It will make Apple/Adobe look like a child play.


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The Perfect iPhone Browser

May 3rd, 2010

Safari is a good iPhone browser. But is it the perfect iPhone browser? I’m not sure. I’ve tried out browsers and other readers but I still haven’t found THE one. So I’ve been thinking… What If we could take Safari and add to it the browsing features we love in other apps? What kind of iPhone browser will we end up with. Well Lets see.

Font size

This is something that drives me crazy from day one on the iPhone. Why can’t I change the default font size of the browser when I find too small/too big to read? Sure I can zoom in but reading pages when they’re zoomed in is not really practical.

Some apps like the Opera Mini will let you set the font size in the app settings. Other apps like FT Mobile would let you set the font size per item using +/- buttons. But My favorite by far is Stanza. What they did is utilize the pinch zoom in the most natural way. Their product manager thought, rightly, that if you’re playing with the zoom you’re probably having visibility issues and so each time you finish a pinch zoom action the app “asks” you if you want to “Save this font size?”. If you say you do it will recalculate and render the page with the new font size. Smooth :)

Edit font size

Multitouch gestures

There’re countless options you can create combining different gestures and 1/2/3 fingers. But lets start with a basic gesture: Two fingers right/left gesture for back and next navigation.

Tabs

Tabs are a painful issue for ADHD people like me :) We’re used to work with 88,656 open tabs and switch between them. Here I must say I haven’t found the ideal solution but I know what I want. The Safari pages are very easy to use but require leaving the page you’re currently browsing. Opera tabs, on the other hand, are a mess to use but the fact that they hover over the current page, and enable you to switch tabs without closing the tabs slider, make tab navigation fun and smooth. What I would love to see is an hybrid…  the Safari “pages” navigation shrinked to 50% of its current size and overlaid on top of the current page in a similar manner to the Opera tabs.

Lock screen rotation

God Apple! how basic is this one? How can you guys miss a basic features like letting us relax and browse the web while lying on the bed without the screen rotating on us all the time?

Some apps will let you block screen rotation as part of their settings. Others apps, like Kobo, add a button on their toaster menu. But the most beautiful screen lock implementation I’ve seen is the one the guys at Read It Later Pro did… When they detect a screen rotation they let you know that they are “considering” rotating your screen and ask your permission. They do it, without disturbing your browsing experience, by showing a transparent ”lock” icon for a couple of seconds giving you a chance to tell them “can’t you see I’m lying in bed? Please don’t rotate the screen”. Try this once and I promise you you’ll be wondering how come Apple didn’t think of this first.

Seamless Share

This is a must! Let me press a link and get an option to share the it, using any sharing/bookmarking service I want, in one click and without disturbing the browsing experience. While you’re at it how about letting me replace the Safari bookmarks with my own cloud based ones?

Text only display

We’re still far away from the day where all sites are mobile friendly. Until this day arrives we need an option to see specific pages in text only display. If you think this is redundant I strongly recommend you get the Read It Later app and experience their text only implementation. After using it for a while many web pages seem so messy that you find yourself asking yourself “where is that text only button?”

PDF

Why do I need to get a separate PDF reader? The Safari PDF reader is almost unusable. font size is so small that the only real way to read anything is to zoom in, which results in a constant need to scroll left and right… not fun at all. What I would love to have is a normal PDF parser that converts the PDF into a readable format in the same fashion that apps like Stanza do.

Full screen

Some times you just want to hide Safari’s bottom menu, to maximize reading space, but you can’t. Many readers enable this functionality and the solutions range from a settings option, to “maximise/minimize” buttons and to auto hide. My favorite is auto hide.

What’s Your Take?

What features would YOU like to see in your iPhone browser?


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Is COPPA Really Protecting Our Children?

March 30th, 2010

Facebook Children Protection ActCOPPA (Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act) is a United States federal law, effective April 21, 2000, that applies to the online collection of personal information from children under 13.

COPPA doesn’t prevent the collection of personal data from children under 13 but rather sets the guidelines online services should follow if they’re directed to children under 13 or have actual knowledge that under 13 children are providing personal data through their service.

Most major sites you visit are, in theory, “COPPA Compliant”. Most of these sites though take the easy route to support COPPA – they simply require you to state during sign up that you’re older than 13 or 18 years.

The creators of COPPA may have had good intentions but ask around next time you visit your children’s school and you’ll quickly relise COPPA is a complete failure…

There isn’t a single kid in my children’s school (10 and up) that doesn’t have a Facebook account. Plus, many first and second graders have accounts as well (YES). And if you go by their Facebook profiles those kids are all “18″.

Is lying about your age really the first lesson we want to teach our children as they enter our social networks? If you really want to protect children the first rule should be that children should register as children. If a child is 8 years old then her profile should say so and a whole different set of regulation should apply. For example:

  • The profile should be approved by a “parent” Facebook account
  • The parent’s details and profile images should apear in the kid’s profile so when she “walks the streets of Facebook” people see she’s not walking alone
  • All friends requests should be aproved by the parent Facebook user

… and so on and on

This long list of parenting features is painful to implement and enforce and this is why sites like Facebook choose to hide behind COPPA. They have no problem enjoying the millions of $ our kids generate (playing games like Farmville) but choose not to comply with their moral obligation and create a safe world for those kids.

Facebook has become a “nation” and when you “rule” 400 million citizens you need to govern as well. It’s time Facebook acknowledges that and starts enabling parents to extend their parenting responsibilities into the virtual world too.

Just like like we held our kid’s hands as they learned to cross the street for the first time, we should be able to hold their hands as they make their first steps in the social virtual world.


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Should Facebook Connect Allow Anonymity?

March 28th, 2010

Facebook has influenced the web in countless ways. One of the least appreciated changes Facebook drove, a change we now take for granted, is breaking the barrier of anonymity.

Before Facebook came around there was a clear division between our real lives and our virtual lives. Putting our real image in a profile and sharing our personal details and daily experiences on the web was something most people wouldn’t consider doing. Facebook changed all that and if I had to choose the most important Facebook achievement I would say this is it.

Facebook is the closest thing to an “ID” we currently have on the web. Your Facebook IS you and this assumption is the foundation of Facebook as a product. If you break this basic tie between people’s real identities and their Facebook profiles you’re ripping out the core of the product.

So What does this have to do with Facebook Connect?

Facebook Connect is a 2 fold offering . On one hand it serves publishers, enabling them to build “instant communities” around their content and on the other hand Facebook Connect serves us, the people who visit those sites.

From the publishers point of view Facebook Connect is a very compelling offering. They get instant access to amazing amounts of data about us and get to leverage our social graph. A couple of months ago Facebook even removed the last barrier that prevented many publishers from using Facebook Connect by enabling the publisher to email people if they allow this. All in all publishers have nothing to complain about.

What about us? Is Facebook Connect the ideal offering from the people’s perpective? I’m not sure. What I do know is that people will start asking themselves these questions in the next few months as the new Facebook Connect bar becomes massively popular.

We engage in all kinds of activities on the web. In some cases we have no problem with linking the activity and our Facebook profiles but in other cases… probably less so :)

In spite of the fact that we’re gradually becoming more public on the web most people like to keep their share of anonymity and in this need for anonymity lies one of the greatest dilemmas Facebook will face in the next year.

Mark is currently asking himself: “Do we allow anonymity on our Facebook Connect bar? Do we allow multiple personas?” and there is no straight forward answer to this question.

If Facebook allow us to create multiple personas (like Yahoo and Google do with their profiles) they will dramatically increase the reach of their new Facebook Connect bar. But this reach will come with a huge price. Facebook will risk losing their greatest achievement, the core of their product, by telling us it’s ok to connect our Facebook account to fake identities. Once this notion sinks in this could have great consequences.


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