Web Usability Expert: Users Ignore Ads — Other Than Google’s
Wednesday September 5, 7:04 am ET

Web usability expert Jakob Nielsen says he conducted eyetracking studies to examine the degree to which visitors to web sites take note of ads, and reports that “at all levels of user engagement, the finding is the same regarding banners…: almost no [eye] fixations within advertisements… Often, users didn’t even see the advertiser’s logo or name, even when they glanced at one or two design elements elsewhere inside an ad.” Two notable exceptions: First, text ads on search engine results pages do get readers’ attention. Second, ads which are unethically disguised to look like editorial content also get attention. Nielsen’s conclusions explain the strength of Google’s ad business, and the weak pricing of Web ads relative to newspaper ads — a costly problem for Web content companies like Yahoo!, Time Warner, CNET, and TheStreet.com.

2) Quicksilver: a unified, extensible interface for working with applications, contacts, music, and other data. To be specific, I cannot imagine working without quicksilver. Here is an interesting video about the quicksilver features and customization.
3) Plaxo: an online address book and calendar that syncs with Microsoft, Google, Yahoo!, AOL, the Mac, Thunderbird, and your mobile phone. It works well and extremely useful.
4) Parallels: enables you to run Windows, Linux, and more side-by-side with Mac OS X on any Intel-powered Mac, without rebooting. With Parallels’ virtualization technology, you can run Mac OS X and your favorite Windows applications at the same time. You can even drag-and-drop files between desktops!

5) MacPorts: (for developers) aims to provide an easy way to install various open-source software products on Mac OS X.
6) A Better Finder Attributes: allows you to change file and photo dates and times, as well as other useful file attributes that the Finder won’t let you touch.

7) Chicken of the VNC: a VNC client for Mac OS X.

8) VirtueDesktops: a virtual desktop manager for Apple’s Mac OS. It offers features, eye candy and configurable options

Do you have any other favorites?

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/129

This project was announced few months back by Microsoft, but I still found this presentation very interesting.

Facebook released a brilliant new product few days ago: Social polling

polls are created by the users and then published within the facebook community (for a fee per vote). User generated polls can be limited to a certain demographic, which is a critical feature. Running polls on the general public is considered to be very expensive and therefore they are usually limited to a particular demographic in order to study the behavior of a subset of the population whose views are of interest.

Not only this is a new source of revenue for a company that is struggling with making money from traditional banner advertisements, but it also introduces a new golden opportunity to employ the massive facebook database without compromising user privacy.

Simply well done facebook.

It’ll be interesting to see how Google will integrate this app into Picasa and/or other properties.

While this feature is pretty impressive in terms of user experience and I could think of many cool future extensions to it, I really wonder if it is going to raise any personal privacy concerns with lawsuits written all over it. Imagine if you or your car gets photographed by Google’s cameras and posted on their map!

Last night I attended a panel discussion moderated by Michael Arrington on the subject of people search. The panel included execs from three “people search engines”:

• Michael Tanne (CEO of Wink)
• Bryan Burdick (COO of Zoominfo)
• Jaideep Singh (CEO of Spock)

For more information about these companies you can read Michael’s article here:
http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/05/09/war-of-the-people-search/

Considering that 30% of all searches on Google or Yahoo! are somehow people related, people search could potentially become one of the interesting vertical search wars to watch in the near future. But, what really intrigued me were the challenges in this market and how these three companies have failed to properly address them:

1) Monetization: Unlike product search, people search is very hard to be monetized. While people search engines could potentially have more data about their users (probably not as much as Yahoo! and Google), click through ratio on these engines are inevitably very low.

2) Data Collection: As Wall Street Journal noted, there are various issues with collecting and classifying data belonging to a particular person. (for example, there are 158 million results on Google for the query “John Smith”)

3) Data ownership: imagine if your identity on the web is falsely associated with the term “rapist”; this obviously will concern you and thus it’s very important to assign owners to update/correct the data. Hence, tere are two approaches:

1. Let the community own it. The approach will have the risk of incorrect/offensive data and a very probable set of lawsuits.

2. Let users claim their own identity. This approach is also troublesome simply because user authentication is a huge problem.

In summery, these companies don’t have a clear business model (except for Zoominfo which is subscription based), are facing major technical issues in regards to data collection and classification, and finally run the risk of completely misrepresenting an identity.

Now, here is my question: How on earth were they able to raise between 7 to 9 million dollars? Is that sign of a bubble or are the VCs rushing to get a piece of the pie?

therelay

Originally uploaded by farhad_massoudi.

This weekend, I ran The Relay with a group of friends.
The race was 199 miles long from Calistoga to Santa Cruz, CA.

What do you think?

It supports basic IM features plus chat history and MSN Messenger integration.

Yahoo Web Messenger is built on Flash 9, unlike most of its competitors. I am sure this will cause some controversy, but so far I haven’t seen any slowness. So, I am not going to complaining yet!