Google. It’s a noun. It’s even a verb, for God’s sake! It’s the sweetheart brand that continues to revolutionize the way we digest a large amount of information. They have the largest search market share (46.3%). They are redefining vertical, geographical and horizontal diversification. They have limitless funds, genius, energy and clout. So, how is it possible for Google to be outdone by one of the smallest (2.3% market share) search engines?

The answer is not money, clout, or brand. The answer is: user experience. Ask.com has figured out that there are three types of users: 1. those who know what they are looking for and find it, 2. those who think they know what they are looking for and can’t find it, and those whose inquiry is satisfied with a collection of sites.

Google is a great tool for one of those three users: the ones that know what they are looking for and find it. Users that think they know what they are looking for and can’t find it are completely out of luck using Google search. And as for the users whose inquiry is not answered by the information found in one site – well, there is always del.icio.us.

In contrast, Ask.com allows users who know what they are looking for to find it just as easy as Google – well, with one MAJOR difference: you can preview the site before going to it. Using Google, people have to go to the site, find out it’s not the one they were looking for, hit the back button and start again. Some people even open sites from their search results in new windows to avoid having to click the back button.

For people that think they know what they want but can’t find it, Ask.com offers them the opportunity to narrow or widen their search. That alone is not all that revolutionary – what’s interesting about what they have done is how they have contextually exposed their controlled vocabulary. This allows users to narrow or widen their search with terminology that more closely aligns with what they are really trying to find. It’s like getting bumped into the right groove.

Finally, the most impressive thing that Ask.com has done to shame Google is the del.icio.us-like functionality layered over their search results, allowing users to hunt, gather, and tag their own taxonomy over their search results subset. Brilliant!

I revealed Ask.com to my class last night. These guys have the deepest loyalty to Google – and after I was done showing them what Ask.com was doing, about 30% of them said they were going to switch. I too have switched.

Google got caught with its pants down and I am curious to see what their next move will be. Stay tunned!

When I checked my email this morning I was pleased to receive a very complementary email about one of my latest ClickZ articles from Stefan Engeseth, CEO of Detective Marketing. After perusing his site for a while I came across this list of "10 Tips For Becoming More Creative." They rock! Try a couple and see for yourself.

1. Hire people who have different talents than you.
2. Install a random control in the elevator so that everyone ends up on the wrong floor. Get a head start by pressing the wrong button today.
3. Exchange Filofaxes with each other.
4. Bring your children to work.
5. Invite your customers to participate in projects at an early stage.
6. Invite someone from the street to attend your next meeting.
7. Mix people in meetings: for example sales people and marketing people.
8. Change the setting of the meeting. Why not hold your next meeting at a kindergarten?
9. Create imbalance. Stand on one leg during a meeting and seek imbalance. Seek imbalance in the marketplace.
10. Use simple language. A good idea thrives on simplicity.
11. Always go the extra mile and do a little more than what’s on the list.

This morning, the GE repairman came to my house to fix our refrigerator. The fridge’s internal light wasn’t shutting off because the door dropped about a quarter of an inch on its hinge, missing the light shut-off contact. It turns out, that little light cranks out as much heat as a toaster oven – by the time we figured out what was happening, everything in the fridge was more or less cooked.

Anyway, the repair person came exactly at 8:00AM. And he was gone at 8:03 AM. He said that the hinge screw just needed to be turned a couple of times. We asked him if we owed him money. He said, “No, I am going to put it down as customer education.”

I wish I have had the wherewithal to take a picture of this guy so that what I am about to say would make more sense. As the repairperson explained what he had done, he shifted his weight around nervously, finding his shoes more interesting to look at that us, and speaking as if he was in a rush. What I am getting at is this: “customer education” can’t possibly be “his” term. It is drenched with marketing finesse and acumen. Yet, here he was telling us that we were dummies in a way that didn’t feel bad. And he did so innately – the words rolled out as if they were his own.

How do marketing concepts geared to improve customer experience transcend ten billion layers of management down to where the rubber hits the road? What’s more, how do marketers help people internalize this message so well?

Once again, we find ourselves looking at and learning from a business entity that has been around forever. In our industry, our response to a similar situation is “user error” or “carbon based error.”

We have been very defensive as an industry from day one. Our field is new and every discovery and advancement rattles our understanding and process. We are in constant flux. We are perpetually defending designs and code that is outdated three heartbeats after it is published. With so much change, it is no wonder that users have such a poor and inconsistent experience on the internet.

There are measures that we can take as designers, strategists and technologist to ensure that our work is useful and timeless. However, when the inedible problem comes up, our industry could learn a lot from GE (and thousands of years of business etiquette): the customer is always right.

I'm not entirely sure what to think of this, but apparently Russians have come up with a way to combine two staples of Russian life-- mass consumption of alcohol and chess -- into a new competitive sport. Players use different colored shot glasses filled with different colors of tequilla and have to "drink" their pieces as they're captured by their opponent. This, of course begs several questions: 1) why tequilla? and 2)why? Why? WHY?

So I am late to the delicious game. I am catching up primarily because "ambient findability" guru Morville wrote that these collective tagging taxonomies are potentially the most comprehensive and coherent because a GROUP put them together. So I will dig in deep and report on my experience.

Netscape recently released version 8.1. Yes, it is shiny-shiny. Yes, it smells new. Yes, the thought of Netscape making a comeback is romantic. But why, oh why would they go completely out of their way to make our (wearing designer/developer’s hat) lives more complicated?

There was a time when Netscape was the leading internet browser on the Internet. I even used it as my email client back in college. It was sick! Then Billy came and took over. For a while both IE and Netscape had version-pissing wars, and in the end, Netscape’s stronger brand and superior product lost to Billy’s market penetration. It was a sad outcome for all avid Netscape fans. But on the flipside, we finally got some standardization (and when I say some, I mean some – which is always better than none)

Netscape recently released a new browser version (NS8.1). They have created a shell that allows users to select either the Firefox or IE rendering engine. From a strategic point of view, this is a very interesting move. They have more or less decided that both IE and Firefox browsers do a nice job rendering web pages and decided not to compete or recreate the wheel. Instead, they decided to differentiate on enhancing the user’s internet browsing experience – which they have done to an extent through the introduction of some nice features.

From a web design and development point of view, allowing the user to select either the IE or Firefox rendering engine is the equivalent of a karate chop to the jugular. This brilliant idea has left us scratching the back our heads – how do we write code that is optimized for a browser that could be running one of two different rendering engines? The problem is augmented when you think about the version of the each rendering engine – so we not only have to keep an eye on the browser, but the rendering engine AND the version of the rendering engine AND the overarching settings Netscape uses to govern the rest of the software!

Admittedly, we have not done enough research to fully understand how deep the problem is and if there is a solution – so I might be freaking out in vain; and at the end of the day, it is our problem to figure out.

I don’t think the browser is going to gain much traction, because it behaves somewhat unpredictably, and its main claim to fame (switching rendering engines) might cause the brain of the “regular user” to hiccup and stall. “I just downloaded Netscape and now it is asking me if I want to use Firefox or IE to browse the internet? Huh?”

According to this article by Jorge Arango, IAs are not just creating content categories where information gets tossed into – he observes (argues?) that IAs are factors of change. Yes. He is right. But sometimes we have a hard time shaking off the “what do you know, you are just a web designer” stigma. IAs, by nature are multidisciplinary folk that are allowed to thread in and out of different (and often isolated) organizational silos. It is often the case that in just a couple of months, IAs can surface deep organizational concerns that have nothing to do with “web design.”

NTT Communications in Japan is experimenting with a service to send smells over the Internet. Lest you think this is a totally new idea, a company called DigiScents tried this back in 1999. Of course, if you really want to go back to the beginning on all of this stuff, you need to thank John Waters for coming up with the original Scratch-n-Sniff movie concept back in 1981.

Oh, and if you're looking to get your own scratch-n-sniff cards printed, check out The Print Box, Inc., a company that custom-prints scractch-n-sniff cards! They have a fairly comprehensive list of available scents, but they also claim that ANY custom scent is available. Oh the possibilities!

ComputerWorld has reported that Bill Gates is putting "IE at the core of Microsoft's next-generation Web plan." Apparently Gates feels that Microsoft missed the boat on the Web 2.0 thing and now he wants to catch up by using new features in Internet Explorer as a wedge into the world of Web services.

It's gotta make me wonder, though: how many "normal users" out there have had the joy of experiencing the New Web the pundits are so fond of touting? Most folks still appear to be using IE 6, with the second place spot being taken up by Firefox. With IE7 coming down the pike, a lot of the stuff that works with IE6 (and IE5, for that matter) may not work with IE7. The inevitable result of all of this will be a lot of confusion, a lot of redundant testing, and a lot of headaches for the non-techie users out there.

While those of us in the biz pretty much know how to deal with strange browser errors and work-arounds, I'd imagine that the majority of people out there have no idea how to configure their browsers, how to upgrade, and how to fix problems that arise. And even if they do on their own personal machines, chances are that their conservative IT departments are going to lock down their machines until all the security issues are solved and the next dot version comes out.

Overall it comes down to this (totally unverifiable) gut feeling: there's a user gap. The user gap is difficult to identify and difficult to address, but it's there. It's the gap between the early adopters and the folks who can't be bothered, who just want their computers to work and not spend their lives on the bleeding edge. These folks see computers as means to an end, not ends in themselves and don't want to have to think about them anymore than they think about their furnaces, tires, or toaster ovens. The pundits and playahs might keep pushing the edge, but the majority of the world is probably far behind.

I am sick of the brouhaha about goodmail.
Sure, it will cost. Sure it will be used at some point to do evil to someone, and sure that sucks. But the alternative is far suckier to the spam-o-philic max, and we are living with it now.

When you pay for something, you have a chance to control it. Spam is a market phenomena, NOT a technological phenomena. Paying for clean email makes sense to me because it lets me manage my inbox.

http://www.goodmailsystems.com/certifiedmail/getthefacts.php

Yeah, there's been a lot of hype about all this "Web 2.0" malarkey. Yeah, most of us are sick of it. But when stuff like Fold shows up, it makes me sit back and say "Hey, self...there may actually be something to all of this." See for yourself at this very slick attempt at creating a Web based "desktop" that might actually be useful.

ps. If you're looking for the ultimate list of Web2.0 stuff, check out Sacred Cow Dung's All Things Web 2.0 list.

In case you've been itching to create nifty stuff using Google Maps (such as this cheap gas hack or this IP traceroute hack), you should check out this very nice Google Maps API Basic Tutorial. It walks you through all the basics of bending Google Maps to your twisted will through a series of 12 exercises covering both conventional and object-oriented programming. If you're getting really ambitious, you might also want to check out myGmaps, a site that lets you create and host your own custom Google Maps datasets.

idfive university meets today at 5 pm, we will be going over usability 101.

even if you are useless, you are invited.

-sean

Yes, you gotta be a real geek to appreciate this, but this guy has figured out how to do true vertical centering using CSS without having to resort to tables. Nifty!

If you really want to be public in your telling-offs (or you're just really sick of the whole social networking thing), check out Snubster. Sign up, set up your profile, and submit your list of people you want to snub:

These lists can contain items or people. If you choose people, supply an email address to identify the person. The email address will remain private, but we'll send them an email letting them know that they're either on notice or that they are now dead to you.

There are just soooo many reasons why this is such a good idea!

America Online just launched In2TV, the first "broadband television network." Unfortunately it just works in Windows Media Player 10 and Windows XP (much like Nickelodeon's TurboNick) and appears to be tricked out with some tough (and st00pid) DRM crap. On the other hand it IS yet another sign that the old ways of thinking about media are doomed.

In case anyone reading this has some actual time on their hands (yeah, I know...but it is possible!), here are a few nifty sites to check out:

Free iTunes Downloads
You may not know it, but the Apple iTunes store regularly offers free singles. The problem is finding them. This intrepid blogger keeps track of the free stuff and even posts reviews to help you figure out whether or not it's worth it to bother making the effort to download it.

The Whitest Kids U'Know
Obnoxious, hilarious, offensive, and a little rough around the edges, this sketch comedy troupe from New York will definitely make you laugh. Not for the easily offended or humorless.

Gabbly
If you're the type who has something to say about everything, you'll want to check out this site. Just pop a simple URL in front of the address of any site you want to chat about and you'll be jumped into the Gabbly chat room for that particular site. But don't think it's totally useless: it also makes a cool QA tool or client demo tool if you want to show off one of your own sites.

Pandora
If you're looking for new music, are sick of commercial radio, or just want something to listen to while you work, check out Pandora. Simply put in the name of a song or a band that you like and Pandora will automatically generate a personal "radio station" that plays music like the band or song you entered. Great for discovering new stuff!

I like to avoid thinking by quoting others, so here are some thoughts I haven't had:

At idfive we deal quite a bit with financial types, and we always try to engange them with talks about money, asking what they think and why and how and so forth. But they always seem reluctant, and come back at us with questions about what we do, which we dismiss as mere politeness. Oscar Wilde has a different take on it:

"When bankers get together for dinner, they discuss art. When artists get together for dinner, they discuss money." - Oscar Wilde

And here are some thoughts I ahvne't had from Seymore Cray, grandfather of supercomputing:

"If you were plowing a field, which would you rather use? Two strong oxen or 1024 chickens?" - Seymour Cray (1925-1996)

"#3 pencils and quadrille pads." - Seymoure Cray (1925-1996) when asked what CAD tools he
used to design the Cray I supercomputer; he also recommended using the back side of the pages so that the lines were not so dominant.

"I just bought a Mac to help me design the next Cray." - Seymoure Cray (1925-1996) when he was informed that Apple Inc. had recently bought a Cray supercomputer to help them
design the next Mac.