Overclocked

I was wondering how long it would take for someone to say this. Those Snap link previews that far too many reputable bloggers are bolting onto their sites serve no useful purpose whatsoever.

What do I care what a site looks like before I go? Aren’t I going there for the content? This has reinforced how little design actually matters in whether and how often I go to a site. At least this is very true for blogs.

I’ve put some work into the design and usability of this site, but you’d still come if it were just a white screen with text… right?

How many people are using RSS in the U.S.?

I’m not sure how that breaks down, but according to Nielsen//NetRatings, approximately 3.5 million people visited Feedburner in the last month. That number has been steadily rising over the last several months.

Am I stopping there? I will in terms of not seeking to expand the universe beyond that, though I’ll attack the question from another angle below. Feedburner is ubiquitous enough that most people interested in RSS feeds probably has one of its blogs in their library. The average RSS user will likely ping it at least once in any given month.

But I’m not interested in the total number that may have been exposed to RSS in any given month. I’m interested in the number of people actively managing their subscriptions.

So I approached this from a slightly different angle — abstracting the total RSS audience from traffic to the most popular web-based client.

Bloglines rings in at a monthly unique audience of about 300,000. Bloglines is about 20% of my readers — but comes in at 12% among the much hardier sample of TechCrunch readers, according to this incredibly useful post on the Feedburner blog from last September. I could also see how Bloglines is less popular in the tech space given the proliferation of Mac-based platforms. For the sake of argument, let’s just guesstimate Bloglines market share at 15%.

That would imply an active RSS subscriber base of 2 million.

And according to that post about TechCrunch, approximately 25% of subscribers will check in on their feeds on any given day. Depending on how you read these numbers, that’s an RSS-addled daily audience of between 500,000 to a cool million.

Before we start proclaiming the Death of Email from the rooftops, let’s remember that RSS is still in the early adopter phase. But judging from Feedburner’s skyrocketing traffic, it’s a medium with great, great potential still.

My favorite RSS reader isn’t Bloglines, NewsGator, FeedDemon, or even Google Reader (yet). It’s a little known desktop app called SharpReader, which hasn’t seen a major release since 2003. I think this screenshot will explain a little why:

SharpReader seemed alone among the free RSS clients in providing a seamless “Outlook-like” approach to the River of News. I open up a folder, be it “Key Political Blogs,” “Technology,” or “2008″ and see a stream of posts from my subscribed feeds organized in chronological order. No need to page through each of my feeds to see what’s new.

The only other free reader that does better than a passable job of this is the new Google Reader. While other readers strive to be the Outlook of RSS, Reader takes the sensible route of being the Gmail of RSS. In many respects, the Google experience still isn’t up to snuff — Gmail for the enterprise, calendar, and spreadsheets still have a ways to go. Google Reader is successful in clearing the bar, in that it at least matches Google’s offerings in the productivity space.

Before I abandon the desktop entirely for RSS, as I have for mail, I would like to see the following improvements to Google Reader:

• Tighter desktop integration, maybe via Google Talk. Yes, Google, more integration with the desktop can be a good thing, as the disaster that was Desktop Search should have taught you. A tray icon that runs in the background grabbing my feeds every 10 minutes with some relatively unobtrusive alerting mechanism would be really useful. This could be tightly integrated with Google Talk and Gmail Notifier, perhaps with some subtle color scheme differentiation. One of the disadvantages of a Web app is I don’t automatically leave it running all day — so I get the mother-lode of headlines from non-timestamped Google News or Technorati feeds all at once. Background processing helps manage the flow better.
• Search? I can’t currently search my feeds. Hello!? Isn’t this Google!? Port over your Gmail search pronto.
• Sort tags into bundles. My RSS reader is probably the only area in which I’ve embraced foldering (and subfoldering!) vs. tagging or search because I’d be drinking from a firehose if I didn’t. When I imported my OPML file, my folders were converted to tags. I have mixed feelings here. Multi-tagging would seem to create a lot of duplicate reading, so I’ve tended to avoid it. Maybe the light hierarchy of del.icio.us bundling would apply here?
• UPDATE: Customize the refresh interval. There’s no way to refresh my feeds every 10 or 15 minutes, leading to a data dump every three hours — inadequate especially for those Google and Technorati keyword searches.

What’s your perfect RSS reader?

So tonight I was on a tear trying to collect del.icio.us scalps, and ran across Seth Godin’s 59 Smartest Orgs online.

#1 seems very unique: Kiva.

You can use the site to loan to individual entrepreneurs in the developing world. Each one has a goal, some as low as $75, and the whole site is widgetizable. It’s a very cool way to know how you’re making a difference. The upside to working with third world charities is that a little money goes a long way. The downside has been accountability. Better technology can help explode that accountability barrier.

This is the kind of thing I was talking about earlier. Creative tie-ins between freely available content and paid extras for those who want it. The “24″ premiere that aired over the last two nights is now available for purchase as a DVD and for download on iTunes.

Strangely enough, I’m not (yet) a “24″ fanatic, but this gives me a perfect excuse to start.

Via Rex.

I recently did a drive-by bashing Second Life. Now that David All has joined the action, I figured I’d better flesh it out a bit more.

What I don’t like about Second Life is that it emulates the features of First Life that I don’t like: The fact that it’s so linear (everything depends on where you land at a given point in time), the clannishness, the finiteness and lack of scalability, and having to gain approval to go to open political forums. Eric Frenchman was at the Congressional Second Life gig the other week and had to email for a “seat” despite there being plenty available. When I had a staffer “sit in” on the Warner event in August, a single gatekeeper wouldn’t let them teleport over to an event with 30 people. And when they finally got in, nobody knew how to sit down.

Second Life is technology for technology’s sake. I’m even tempted to say it’s anti-technology. The Web brings people together based on common ideas and interests. It makes possible the kinds of interactions we’ve always wanted but could never have because of the limits of the physical space. Personal interaction brings a special element you can’t get online, but the killer app is the ability to share ideas instantly across geographic boundaries. Interfacing with an avatar is at best an incremental improvement over lively interactions based on ideas, whether in email, IM, or even on the phone. Call me old fashioned, but I think more meaningful conversation is possible in an e-mail or Google Talk thread than is in the walled garden that is Second Life.

On the Web, you don’t generally need approval to go into places, and when you do authentication protocols are up to more than single capricious arbiter. If you have a web chat, it doesn’t matter if it’s with 5 people or 50,000 people, so long as your servers can scale. If something face to face is more to your liking, Arnold Schwarzenegger’s live video chat is probably for you.

I downloaded Second Life, tried it, and have no desire to go back. And it seems that the public shares my point of view. Clay Shirky deconstructs the hype around the Second Life membership numbers. Best estimates suggest only 20,000 concurrent users on Second Life. MySpace it ain’t.

The case for Second Life basically boils down to “What the heck?” And there’s something to that — you always want to be testing new things. But from my admittedly cursory review of the product, I say it’s nowhere near as compelling as the Web for communicating independent of physical space, virtual or not.

UPDATE: The paper on this by Nancy Scola does little to convince me. Even SL proponents concede that it’s standard online interaction with some physicality attached. I’m not convinced the benefits of that outweigh the inherent limits of the medium. I’d personally find a virtual world built on top of Google Earth more compelling — something about it being “reality based.” As of now, there is no SL killer app for politics.

The currency exchange is fascinating from a sociological perspective. It’s remarkable than entire economy can be built with no tangible products or benefits.

When tectonic plates move, they sometimes create giant crevasses that form demarkation points between the old world and the new. (Ok, I don’t know if that really happens, but it sounds cool…) And big industries are left jumping without a net wondering how they can monetize on the other side.

The wave is hitting industry by industry. You don’t see very many One Hour Photo places anymore — since digital photography they’ve been replaced by Shutterfly, Snapfish, and some of the nimbler pharmacies that let you email in your photos for pickup. The wave fully crested in the music industry in 2000 and now CD sales are in long-term decline. Now Hollywood is facing the same dilemma with YouTube and digital media, with only the upteenth New York Times piece profiling this trend.

As we all know, the studios’ relationship with YouTube is love/hate. They love it when users hype their product. They hate it when users cross that fine line into copying the product unedited. Post the key fight scenes from 8 Mile and you’re good to go. Post the whole thing and you’ll get a cease-and-desist — for obvious reasons.

The RIAA’s unlikely success in strangling Napster in the crib shows that fundamentally, most people don’t like to steal music. (For the same reason, I don’t see Torrents being a huge factor.) But enough people like to do it — combined with iTunes being low-margin — that it wreaks havoc with the recording industry’s bottom line. It seems like an intractable problem, one that Hollywood is not eager to relive.

Perhaps the solution is separating content from the experience in entertainment. Content has always been leaky in that consumers have always found ways to get it for free — borrowing your friend’s CD, a Saturday night movie on a network, or the radio. What YouTube represents is a virtual extension of that for the consumer, though it may look different to a content owner. Maybe it’s time to focus less on content leaks and more on bolstering the consumer experience.

Users will pay for experience. Pirated DVDs are no match for the big screen. And movie downloads, free or not, are no match for your plasma, at least not till Apple TV gets here and maybe not even then. Sure, consumers can get the content free, but what they pay for is the experience of the big screen or the convenience of storing your media in plastic disks (a typical TV series is 250 gigs — try storing that on your hard drive).

The music industry which has felt this most acutely could do a lot better. In particular, iTunes is particularly good at providing a low barrier to entry by breaking up albums into per-song chunks. But what about the diehard fans who aren’t happy with just buying every album and the live ones to boot? They aren’t being given any more options than they were when they went to Sam Goody. What about more live recordings? Or concert video? Or discounts on concert tickets if you download the album? Or mashups? Or live streaming of sold-out shows? If released digitally, these shouldn’t be cost-prohibitve to produce, and really allow the industry to run up margins by satiating hardcore fans. Wired had a good piece on Beck a few months ago, and how he’s junked the album paradigm and is focusing more on big-picture experience.

Don’t shed crocodile tears for the YouTube agony gripping Hollywood. Eastman Kodak was forced to adapt. I’m sure the entertainment industry can do the same.

Running ads on my own site has really clarified for me a bit more what’s compelling and what isn’t.

To be successful, ads have to pack a punch. One way to do that is to focus your message in a small space (Marissa Mayer’s “creativity loves constraints”). This is why text ads are successful and buttons are popular. It turns out that less is more.

Off to the side of Overclocked is a 300×250 ad unit. Back in the day, I did creative for banner ads, and the 300×250 rectangles were always my favorites. Why? They are more coherent and self-contained than either a leaderboard or a skyscraper. They packed more of a punch. You didn’t need to scan your eyes to get the message.

Now, there are some ads in this slot that are frankly embarassing, including a bunch of teenybopper ones I’ve tried in vain to turn off. The pool of graphic advertisers on AdSense is probably smaller because banners don’t work as well for conversion. But the two that have caught my attention didn’t have any branding or words on them at all, not in the conventional sense. One is a “Network Protocols Map” — a rich diagram with dozens of multicolored boxes. Makes me want to click through to see what’s in them. Another is a smiling mountain climber on a snowy peak. No words. Just a compelling visual. I have no interest in scaling Everest, but I wanted to click through (honoring my AdSense agreement, I didn’t).

Maybe AdSense display advertising can work, but only if “less is more” and you treat it like the envelope of a direct mail piece that opens the argument instead of trying to close the sale.

Read/Write Web wonders about Amazon’s Mechanical Turk and its failure to gain traction. From reading this, mTurk seems to fall into the “this is crazy” category as opposed to the “just didn’t catch on” category.

One of the most fascinating aspects of Web 2.0 is how people will work their hearts out for micropayments that are in all likelihood tiny supplements to their income. The image I have in my head is the blogger slacking off at his insurance job as he makes minor tweaks to improve his AdSense CPMs or his Amazon referrals — all for that extra $100 in beer money. If he redirected that energy to his job, he’d probably get a raise worth a lot more than $100/month.

From this vantagepoint, micropayments make little economic sense. They aren’t about the money (certainly not when Guy Kawasaki is clearing $3,350 a year) but about pride of ownership and getting rewarded for doing something you love. The comparison I make to my wife about this is that creating a web presence is like tending a garden.

Having gone off on this tangent about the vices and virtues of micropayments, what Mechanical Turk is doing is nuts, even factoring in the low economic bar set by micropayments. 5 cents for an hour’s worth of work? Umm, no thanks. One problem is asking an educated-if-bored audience to do menial jobs. The lesson of micropayments is entirely different: high-net individuals will do interesting work for little pay. The second problem is a high barrier to entry before seeing any payoff. Most social sites work because they have very low barriers to entry.

Here at Overclocked, we don’t shy away from sweeping generalizations so we’ll come out and say this: deus ex machina doesn’t work when dealing with serious web apps. We’ve seen a tangle of products like Cha Cha that hope to demystify the Web with guides that will help you find that needle in a haystack, but almost always the AI of Google or the “wisdom of crowds” of the blogosphere works better. Even when individual opinions come into play, they are almost always aggregated into a collective wisdom that’s greater than the sum of its parts.

David Pogue probably has the most readable review of the iPhone. His conclusion: the web browsing interface is game-changing (I agree; it throws a serious wrench at SMS and Web standards). Main downsides: Apple ignores the practicality of the keypad and tactile feedback; think of how you jab your finger at an ATM machine because you’re not sure if it’ll read right. (I still want to know what that glass does when it goes crashing onto the sidewalk… Again, Wii strap, Wii strap, Wii strap.) Also: lack of extensibility. This thing can only be programmed by Apple.

And most insightful on this point goes to Nick Carr who writes:

Like the iPod, the iPhone is a little fortress ruled over by King Steve. It’s as self-contained as a hammer. It’s a happening staged for an elite of one. The rest of us are free to gain admission by purchasing a ticket for $500, but we’re required to remain in our seats at all times while the show is in progress. User-generated content? Hah! We’re not even allowed to change the damn battery. In Jobs’s world, users are users, creators are creators, and never the twain shall meet.

Which is, of course, why the iPhone, like the iPod, is such an exquisite device. Steve Jobs is not interested in amateur productions.

That’s true. Geeks who believe in stuff like open source and user-generated content are the ones who worship at the Altar of Steve. But Jobs’ strategy is the old Bill Gates strategy, except done right: build walled gardens and charge admission. The ethos that creates great extensible success stories like Firefox is alien to iTunes or the iPhone. But open source Mac acolytes won’t care, because Steve is a benevolent dictator.

UPDATE: Scoble is dialing back.