Friday, November 30, 2007

Pandora: New Design Same Problems

Pandora recently expanded the user interface to include 'Pandora Extras.' But Pandora did not fix 2 irksome issues:

  • Lack of Running Time or Time Left/Time Elapsed per Song.
  • No enforcement of unique Favorites. You can bookmark songs and bands more than once. Pandora should either simply not re-enter the item, or it should give a little note such as "You had bookmarked X July 22, 2007." As it is, I bookmark an item, then click the link to Show All bookmarks, and then have to do a Control-F to see if it already exists. But then again, I guess this doesn't really matter, unless the favorites are weighted into the system that generates songs I might like.

Monday, November 26, 2007

Undisclosed at LinkedIn

LinkedIn, a middling dowdy professional network web site, suffers from a number of shortcomings in its user interface. Today we address the issue of concealing your present employer. LinkedIn does not provide a systematic way to hide your present employer's name. Instead, you are left to use your own words to denote anonymity into the company name field. Some members choose "Undisclosed;" others, "N/A" or similar verbage. Thus, when you log in, and are informed of possible connections, you might see a message such as "50 new members at Undisclosed" because LinkedIn thinks that "Undisclosed" is a company!

All that is required is a setting, a switch, to show or hide the name of present company from Public and your network. HotJobs and Monster give members the option of such a screen.

Monday, November 12, 2007

Flickr and Blogger are on Speaking Terms, but not their Owners

It's becoming common for computer systems to be on speaking terms, but not the owners. You may have noticed various social networks offering to search your email addressbooks in order to make it easier to enter those email addresses into the social system. It's a popular example of open-access, remote logging. You enter your username and password, and authorize the System at Hand to pull information or publish information to an External System. We can assume it is secure because the Big Heavies--Yahoo, Hotmail,Google--are cool with it. But what are we to make of one system that doesn't know the present name and condition of an external app, yet syncs with that system without a glitch? Doesn't the ignorance of that system's management erode our trust in its ability to connect to the other. That was my experience when I set up a Flickr account and permitted it to publish to my Blogger account. Flickr refers to Blogger as Beta Blogger, a status that has been inaccurate since Google upgraded it to 'live' 8 months ago.

What's going on? The machines are doing their jobs, but where humans are needed, the humans are failing. The system's are speaking to eachother via XML. Yahoo Flickr is properly transmitting to Google's specs. It knows the tag names. It knows how to authenticate users. So, we know that these things were set up properly by the engineers. But some things are not contained in xml. This would be information of a higher order, of a singular or irregular fashion. It requires real eyes and ears to stay in tune with such info, and to make manual edits to HTML content. Apparently, such content is not regularly reviewed by the likes of Flickr. The dismissal of the beta status was big news at Blogger and impacted its millions of users, but the news fell between the cracks at Yahoo.

Perhaps the news occured between Content Updates at Flickr. It's unfortunate. Each system need not trumpet any marketing initiative of the other, but each does need to be informed of the basics. Perhaps such basic info should be included in the XML, as a tag that is agreed to by the Heavies and other players. That way, the 'Name of Service,' or 'Service Image' would update itself. Otherwise, these various networks are going to have to hire folks to more often update HTML landing pages.

Tuesday, November 6, 2007

Google Wises Up: Link to iGoogle

Google has updated its portal, there is now a new link "Back to iGoogle." As I noted in earlier post, the only way to get to iGoogle was by clicking on "Web" which also means 'web search results.'

In that earlier post, I describe how a simple search can produce errors and confusion. As well as Google has performed, it has probably lagged due to poor search user interface. If Google makes searching and navigation consistent, and does not generate errors, then it will enable an even larger share of searches. Meaning, more moolah.