- Facebook Deals was released a few weeks ago, and it's likely going to be a big game changer. Of course Facebook is going to tap into its gigantic user base to compete with the current leaders of the "grouped deals" market: Groupon and Living Social. Facebook doesn't take any cut on deals from retailers (as opposed to its competitors), and it has the most accurate data regarding its users' demographic and tastes... Groupon and Living Social will have to change their business model, and fast. Good news for the retailers, for whom the Groupon experience hasn't always been the promised dream.
- A podcast on Holacracy and polarities. Holacracy is an "operating system" for organizations. It aims at freeing organizations from the forces of people's egos. A sort of organizational Jedi, if you will. I love it.
- Vivek Haldar blogged 2 months ago about treesaver, a HTML5 webapp designed to reading on screen. I've been waiting for a good reading interface for a long time, and Treesaver provides the best simple experience I've seen so far. It's like reading a magazine. You flip pages, the faded view of the adjacent pages gives some context to the current page, yet is unobtrusive. Here a demo with Wide Screen magazine.
- Ubuntu 11.04 was released on April 23, code name "Natty Narwhal". The big change in this release is a new desktop environment: Unity instead of the famous GNOME. After DOS, I've always been a Windows guy. When I first tried Linux with Ubuntu 4.10, Gnome didn't really work for me. I installed Mandriva Linux and I liked KDE better, but I eventually left the Linux world all together because it was taking too much time to tweak. While many seem unhappy about the abandon of GNOME, it might be the opportunity for me to install a dual-boot on my netbook to try Ubuntu again, 6 years later.
- Famous French web accessibility champion Alsacréations blogs on the benefits of Mockup designs before jumping to Photoshop. He provides some cool web apps to make Mockups, which can be used for any kind of sketching: Mockflow | Pencil Project | Balsamiq Mockups | Mockingbird | Cacoo
- Is there a life beyond HTTP? Google says yes: SPDY, a new protocol more adapted to the modern web, and web apps that require continuous two-way connections. HTTP is already 20 years old and we all got used to it. Well it will change, and it's huge. We can think what we want of Google, they do make the web evolve.
- Hackertyper: type like a real hollywood hacker. But where are the annoying bleeps?
Tuesday, May 10, 2011
Mishmash...
Monday, May 9, 2011
Those noisy newsletters!
How often do you read email newsletters? If you're like me, it has become a habit to unsubscribe from as many as you can, except maybe for one or two. Most of the time, newsletters are a pain. I sometime find useful information in one of them, but please, please, if you have to send me one, send me something interesting, simple, easy-to-read, and to the point.
Sadly, most newsletters I see are terrible. They are so inexpensive to send that many organizations don't invest much resources in designing good newsletters. Newsletter senders, please get inspired by these few principles below, or run the risk to be an annoyance to your reader. Please STOP WASTING MY TIME.
The way newsletters are made has not evolved much in the last years. However the way people interact with online information has, emails included. The amount of information we read online, in particular, has increased drastically (14% of all information hours Americans receive come from the Internet (p. 18)). Users are learning to be more selective with the information they grant their attention to. With the amount of emails we receive everyday, consider your newsletter as a potential annoyance for the recipient, and a sign of trust on their part when they open it. This trust is precious, hard to earn and easy to lose. Sending a newsletter just to send a newsletter is the easiest way to lose it. For many people, your email is the visible face of your organization. If you think it's only one more email, you're missing out the context. Your email is a statement about who you are and how you view your relationship with the reader.
You can't design your email with in mind the click-through rate as ultimate goal and measurement of success. It's a valuable metrics, but more important is that your reader keeps trusting you enough to open your next newsletter. If he or she doesn't, you lost them. How to do then? Focus on pleasing your reader - just like you would if you sent an informative email to a friend. Don't try to trick them with deceiving offers, don't try to get their attention if your content is not worth it. Respect their time!
I'm sure you want to tell me all about your business, but don't try to force feed it to me in an email: it is not the right medium! That's what websites are for. It may seem radical, but in newsletters good content is little content. Give me one or two content items, no more. If you have no way to prioritize between four news items, it's likely that none of them are worth sending a newsletter about. Maybe you should consider blogging instead - readers can consult your blog whenever they like, they can even subscribe to a RSS feed. Send an email only if you have something important to share, and in that case, share only that, all the rest is noise. Nothing stops you from linking to your blog, why not even with the titles of the last three posts published.
Just consider how you read your emails; do you often spend more than 7 seconds reading an email not personally sent to you? Me neither. So if you take my time with an email, make sure you have top A content for me, not B not C. It's okay to share B quality content on a blog, it is not okay to waste my time with it in my inbox.
The good thing with little content is that there is more space for nothing. AAAH what a waste? No, empty space is a rare commodity on the web, everyone trying to fill each pixel with value-creating content. There is great value to nothing. First, in the noisy web, it is resting, and users appreciate this comfort (look at the success of Google's homepage when competitors were filling their pages with news, ads and fluff). Second, space contrasts with content, so it emphasizes it without having to use noisy tricks like bold, italic, colors... And third, empty space loads pretty damn fast with every connection :-) In short, empty space is not nothing! Designer Mark Boulton has written a good article on the use of whitespace.
Sadly, most newsletters I see are terrible. They are so inexpensive to send that many organizations don't invest much resources in designing good newsletters. Newsletter senders, please get inspired by these few principles below, or run the risk to be an annoyance to your reader. Please STOP WASTING MY TIME.
Purpose: Beyond the click-through rate
The way newsletters are made has not evolved much in the last years. However the way people interact with online information has, emails included. The amount of information we read online, in particular, has increased drastically (14% of all information hours Americans receive come from the Internet (p. 18)). Users are learning to be more selective with the information they grant their attention to. With the amount of emails we receive everyday, consider your newsletter as a potential annoyance for the recipient, and a sign of trust on their part when they open it. This trust is precious, hard to earn and easy to lose. Sending a newsletter just to send a newsletter is the easiest way to lose it. For many people, your email is the visible face of your organization. If you think it's only one more email, you're missing out the context. Your email is a statement about who you are and how you view your relationship with the reader.
You can't design your email with in mind the click-through rate as ultimate goal and measurement of success. It's a valuable metrics, but more important is that your reader keeps trusting you enough to open your next newsletter. If he or she doesn't, you lost them. How to do then? Focus on pleasing your reader - just like you would if you sent an informative email to a friend. Don't try to trick them with deceiving offers, don't try to get their attention if your content is not worth it. Respect their time!
Good little content
I'm sure you want to tell me all about your business, but don't try to force feed it to me in an email: it is not the right medium! That's what websites are for. It may seem radical, but in newsletters good content is little content. Give me one or two content items, no more. If you have no way to prioritize between four news items, it's likely that none of them are worth sending a newsletter about. Maybe you should consider blogging instead - readers can consult your blog whenever they like, they can even subscribe to a RSS feed. Send an email only if you have something important to share, and in that case, share only that, all the rest is noise. Nothing stops you from linking to your blog, why not even with the titles of the last three posts published.
Just consider how you read your emails; do you often spend more than 7 seconds reading an email not personally sent to you? Me neither. So if you take my time with an email, make sure you have top A content for me, not B not C. It's okay to share B quality content on a blog, it is not okay to waste my time with it in my inbox.
Empty space is soothing
The good thing with little content is that there is more space for nothing. AAAH what a waste? No, empty space is a rare commodity on the web, everyone trying to fill each pixel with value-creating content. There is great value to nothing. First, in the noisy web, it is resting, and users appreciate this comfort (look at the success of Google's homepage when competitors were filling their pages with news, ads and fluff). Second, space contrasts with content, so it emphasizes it without having to use noisy tricks like bold, italic, colors... And third, empty space loads pretty damn fast with every connection :-) In short, empty space is not nothing! Designer Mark Boulton has written a good article on the use of whitespace.
Saturday, April 23, 2011
Mishmash...
3 years, 5 months, 12 days after my last post, I decide to blog again. Needless to say, I'm a completely different person, and good news: my English has improved!
Did I mention the web is a passion of mine? oh, well. Let's start with a"Mishmash" post.
Did I mention the web is a passion of mine? oh, well. Let's start with a"Mishmash" post.
- Distillate content from webpages and liberate it - the future of the web? This visionary article by Cameron Koczon on A List Apart explains how cool little bookmarklet apps such as Instapaper and Readability may pave the way for a new web era.
- Chrome? Firefox? Though a long time Firefox user, I wondered for a week. I finally settled for Firefox. Firefox 4 includes the "Do Not Track" feature, which Chrome has NOT implemented.
- Tristan Nitot, chairman of Mozilla Europe, reminds us that choosing a browser has political implications [fr] - it is the interface between us and the web.
- The "Learn Startup" (and part 2). Eric Ries presents his view of a management methodology integrating constant feedback from users/reality. A good example of fifth order / self-transforming mind applied.
- My friend Erik told me about Processing, a programming language dedicated to visual animations and interactions. Particularly interesting is the sister project Processing.js, a javascript library that converts the Processing language into javascript, css and HTML5. Data visualization using web standards and without any plugin! Check out the result with visuals on the evolution of default privacy settings on Facebook, or the Letter-Pairs Analysis.
- I missed a cool event just next door in Berkeley. On April 17, an interview of Steven Levy from Wired, author of In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives. I haven't read it but it's now on my list. This event was organized by Berkeley Cybersalon and the Berkeley Startup Cluster, which I had never heard about. Berkeley Startup Cluster is a collaboration between institutional agents of Berkeley to attract startups in downtown Berkeley, while Berkeley Cybersalon seems like a more idiosyncratic setup by the enigmatic Sylvia Paull...
- Lately I've been equipping myself with ergonomic computer devices because of a painful repetitive stress injury. I'm now using the Goldtouch Adjustable keyboard and the Evoluent VerticalMouse 4. Along with a lot of rest, it is helping quite a lot. The Goldtouch takes some getting used to and my partner hates it. The vertical mouse is great, but minor problem: with a vertical hand, all the weigh rests on the side of your hand, narrower than your flat wrist, and it quickly gets to hurt on a hard surface. Since I find wrist resting pads inconvenient, I'm going to get the Imak Computer Glove to compensate. It takes a lot of Google search to find good information on (not too expensive) computer ergonomic solutions...
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