All Product Experiences are Personal

There's a well-worn saying in the world of politics: "All politics is local", spawned by former House Speaker Tip O'Neill, who explained that a politician succeeds by understanding the needs of the people who voted them into office. What directly impacts the individual's happiness and well-being will almost always trump a more philosophical issue - even if it is one of national interest.

Product development isn't all that different. The success of creating an engaging community with social software, or a popular application for mobile, or the latest hot website, derives from how the individual user feels when interacting with your product. No matter how much one group may enjoy your service, if an individual finds it to be complicated or questions its value, you're going to have a challenging time getting them to visit a second time or do more than quickly uninstall your app - as opinions are formed practically instantly.

Get this formula wrong, and you might end up with a site that may have a lot of registrations or an app with a high download number, but actual usage that lags far behind what is expected. This problem can lead to an almost unnatural amount of user churn, as the population of initial signed up users needs to replaced, not just with new ones to keep growth high, but to backfill those who've stopped using a product. Product success takes more than a good idea, but an entire package - from a clear message of what users get from your product, a fast and smart interface, and near-immediate benefits.

Users don't want to spend a lot of time setting up your application, filling out forms, or hunting for good content. They want to immediately see value, and later tailor it to their specific needs. So don't hassle them by obscuring the app's intent, and hiding the most important, informative or exciting elements behind a nest of menus or a maze of choices. If users are often confused, there's a good chance it's because you made a mistake.

Unsurprisingly, not every application is for everyone. Sites or applications tend to find audiences of similar groups - be it by age, geography, life stage, or any matter of personal preferences. It is a rare event when something crosses the chasm from audience to audience and becomes so mainstream that "everyone" is on it, or "everyone" is using it. That doesn't necessarily mean that by not reaching everyone, the product has failed, but that there is a ceiling on its potential. The company behind the tool then has to make a decision - whether to optimize the product to be an incredible experience for the limited audience, or to modify the product further, potentially at risk of alienating its original users, to attract a wider audience.

You can see this tug of war as initial users of a product (see: The Five Stages of Early Adopter Behavior) can be excited about the prospect of a service reaching the masses, only later to be annoyed at how a service has changed when the mainstream does arrive. It's all too common to see people migrate from community to community online or switch from app to app to keep one step ahead of the pack.

This makes every product decision critical, as well as the ability to listen to user feedback, take rapid action, and act on bugs that impact wide audiences. As I've experienced many times as an early user or as an employee at companies making user-facing software, it's very likely that bugs or quality gaps impacting one person also impact many other people who haven't spoken up yet. Tackling the most reported bugs, even if they are small ones, can be as critical as stopping a short-term outage, depending how forgiving your customers are.

And we as users need to understand that just because we love something doesn't mean everyone will. Other people have different needs, usage patterns and work environments. So while we can embrace the role of an evangelist, what fits us may not fit everyone. I often find, even at home, that my wife's preferences for software and hardware differs from mine. Cast the net wider, and you can see greater diversity in terms of preferred applications, news sources and more. Just because I love something doesn't mean you will, and just because as a developer, you expected me to use a product in a certain way doesn't mean that I will, nor will others. (See: Stop Telling Me How to Use Your Products)

The best product managers I've seen are exceptionally patient and compassionate. They don't bully users into following a strict instruction set, and don't mock you when you come to a different conclusion. They genuinely want to know where they can improve, and learn from you, to ease the onboarding process and make their product even more inviting to the rest of the world. Even if they may be focused on the big picture, every individual user counts, and that makes all difference between success and stagnation.

In-App Purchases: By Account or Device?

In a world where the Web is increasingly consumed on mobile devices, and applications on iOS, Android or other platforms continue to proliferate, developers are turning to in-app purchases to drive revenue, not just for premium applications, but for free applications that often get you in the door, but entice you to pay up for additional features. But what many developers aren't preparing for is a world where consumers have multiple devices, but carry the same apps - putting the customer's data at risk, tied to a single device, even when a centralized cloud solution seems like a reasonable and much more modern, alternative.

Traditionally, premium software vendors have asked customers to pay on a per-install basis. Want to run Adobe Photoshop on multiple computers? You have to pay a multi-user license. Want to run Microsoft Office for the whole family? Get a family pack. But on the mobile side, thanks in large part to Apple's leadership on the iTunes store, and other app stores, including the Android Market (tied to one's Google account), premium and free applications are synched on a per-user basis. Want to upgrade your iPod or iPhone? A sync with iTunes should get your apps back. Purchase the latest Android tablet or phone? Log into Google with your account, and the Android Market will start feeding you your apps.

That said, synchronization of content between devices is comparatively poor. For every cloud-based app like Gmail or Spotify that recognizes your ID and displays your information on every device, one finds applications that live on your phone or tablet, and don't communicate to any parallel installs you have. (See iTunes' guidance on this issue) This leads to the very common issue known by any Angry Birds addict, who finds themselves conquering the same levels from phone to phone to computer or even on Chrome, instead of starting where they left off. If you love killing pigs and burning time, that's wonderful, but I'd bet many people would find it valuable to log in with their account on any device, and continue where they left off. Some apps, like Barnes and Noble's NOOK app, do this very well, but many miss the target.

The situation becomes even more complicated with the advent of in-app purchases. Forget about the Mighty Eagle (just one dollar per level!) in Angry Birds. You can purchase weapons and tools galore for sports games and strategy games on your smartphone, but many application developers are making the purchase much like they did in the traditional sense - assigned by device, not tied to your Apple account or your Google account. That means that not only do your premium purchases not follow you from device to device, but even worse, if you have to reinstall your mobile OS for whatever reason, you've lost the in-app purchase data, and probably a bunch of the app's history as well.

Living on the bleeding edge of early adopterdom as I do, I've learned to be flexible with the occasional bumps. I got hit with this in-app issue this summer when I had the chance to reinstall Honeycomb on my Android tablet from Samsung, only to lose the in-app purchases I'd made on the 9 Innings baseball game, along with dozens and dozens of games played and players acquired. While I didn't have to rebuy the app itself, which is great, I was starting on Opening Day all over again. That's nuts.

I can understand application developers wanting to ensure they receive appropriate payment for their apps being downloaded and enjoyed. I think the functionality of in-app purchases is a great expansion of mobile commerce. But in a Web-centric mobile world with centralized accounts, storing one's application data on the device, without backup in the cloud, seems short sighted. Many of us carry multiple devices, and may some day upgrade our phones and tablets. It'd make more sense for me that we can do so without fear of losing our progress and our premium buys.

Still Looking to Sync the World of Desktop, Mobile Devices

As an over-extended digital device collector, I have my unfair share of tablets, phones and laptops strewn about my office. My kids are practically tripping over them, each one having its own use or unique operating system. As I use each of these devices, I find myself seeing gaps in the way different applications share data - keeping user information local to the device and locking it away so I lose information when I switch. While the Web and the buzzword-heavy "cloud" are helping matters, we've still got a lot of room to grow.

As I move from device to device, I'm doing so making decisions based on what applications and data I will find when I get there. By using my laptop, I lose access to games and apps that run on my Android phone and tablets. By using my phones, I lose the desktop apps. While some are looking to Apple to lead the way by merging the OS X concept with iOS, less talk has been made of bringing these iOS apps to a touch-screen enabled desktop. Maybe the idea is not happening because it's a bad one, but some smart app developers have thrown caution to the wind and brought their content to practically every screen.

Take the ubiquitous Angry Birds franchise for starters. I can play Angry Birds on my Mac from the app on the Mac App Store. I can play it on Google Chrome on the Chromebook. I can play it on my Android phone and tablets. I can play it on the iPad and iPod Touch. It's everywhere. The downside, of course, is that I have to conquer all the same levels again on every device, with no central record.

A little better is how Barnes and Noble approaches its NOOK eBooks. Purchases I make on my NOOKColor may initiate there, but I can also read the same books from my NOOK app on the Galaxy Tab (7 inch or 10 inch) and there's even a Mac client. I just have to sign in to my account and my library is right there. Very cool. If I'm connected to the Web, it will even know which book I am reading and open to the right page. That's the kind of integration I am really looking for.

You can also see smart integration of user preferences in the way Safari on iOS has the same bookmarks as on your computer, or how Chrome bookmarks follow you from Google Account-enabled machine to machine.

But most of the time apps are not behaving this way. Android's default browser is still not Chrome (and this baffles many), so the integration isn't there. Meanwhile, if I play 9 Innings baseball on my Galaxy Tab 10 and get through 81 games, starting the same app on my Galaxy Tab 7 starts at game 1. Even if I buy in-app enhancements to the game (and others like Home Run Battle 3D), those enhancements are device-specific.

Now that we can have Web-centric user profiles and can back up our user content, history and preferences, the very least we can do is be sure that our activity is matched across similar mobile devices. I recognize that often coding for desktop and mobile can be very different, but as the devices blur between smartphones, tablets, laptops and desktops, a screen is a screen is a screen, and I want to get the same stuff everywhere.

Defaulting to a Web-centric operating system like ChromeOS is a start, of course, but it's early days for that, and not everything has yet made the trip. I'd love Spotify on my CR-48 the same way it's on my phones and tablets and Mac, but it's a major hole until it hits the Web.

One practically has to make a mental matrix to remember what content and services are available on which devices, and what one loses when they choose one screen over another. I'd like to see more developers thinking about eliminating these gaps and giving users what they want no matter what screen they choose.

The Android and iOS War Is Not Mac vs Windows Part 2

       
Over the last several months, I have seen scads of articles trying to equate the battle between Apple's iOS on one side and Google's Android on the other as a rerun of the famous Microsoft Windows versus Apple Macintosh battles that played out over the 1980s and early 1990s. In practically every case, Android is seen as Windows. After all, both operating systems have achieved market leadership (in most ways you could count leadership) through extensive partner relationships. In both cases, Apple fanatics look down on the alternative as being less polished. In both cases, the opposing non-Apple camp has the chance to revel in geekery, showing what's possible when you get to the system foundation, while looking down upon the more closed, possibly less flexible Apple option. But I would argue there's a different way to look at this conflict, and it comes down to apps - which flips the discussion on its head.

Microsoft Word 6 for Mac. The Pain Still Is Felt Everywhere.

As a longtime Mac OS user (and sufferer), I slogged my way through Apple's dark times in the mid to late 1990s, taunted by developers who would avoid Mac OS as a platform. Others, if they did choose to release for Mac OS, might do so well after comparable versions were issued for Windows. Often, the Mac version was a klutzy port of the Windows original, running slowly and awkwardly on Apple machines. While we had our own native apps that only ran on Mac, press and advertisers alike knew that Windows had the numbers - more users, more options and dramatically more software. Most of us Mac addicts were left to order out of catalogs instead of retail stores, quietly fixing our need like those with misunderstood fetishes, while Windows users gleefully got first-day shipments of PC titles with the latest games, office software, and multimedia. We begged for scraps, but our day eventually came.

In time, our once pitiful position, a mere blip in software sales next to the incumbent behemoth, changed. Under Steve Jobs' leadership the new Apple and Mac began to stand for something else - not just in quality, but in numbers. The popular titles that once were shipping Windows only started to ship for both Mac and Windows simultaneously. Large companies that once abandoned the Mac came back, or set up separate business units thad did a fantastic job creating quality software. The gap once felt in software has practically disappeared, and I can't remember the last time I felt longingly for a piece of software that ran exclusively on Windows, or found a hardware device that had forgotten to find a way to work well with Mac out of the box. I have an HP Laptop running Windows 7 (and IE) at home, but I've only had to use it to get into proprietary online meeting rooms that demand Windows. Otherwise, the notebook stays closed.

Does this mean that the Mac ever caught up in terms of the vast number of software titles? No. But no Mac user today feels the same way that we Mac users did eight or twelve years ago, because everything we can do on a PC, we can do on a Mac, and there are many different things possible on this platform that can't be done on Windows.

Top App Developers Are Coding for Android and iOS

This brings me back to Android. Apple's iOS has more applications than Android. It has a smart, well-organized, high quality store design that presents new and high quality apps to users for iPhone, iPod and iPad. The Android Market is close, but not perfect. iOS has a good number of applications that are iOS-only, which do not exist for Android, namely favorites like Instagram, Path, Flipboard and more - many more.

But, as I've predicted over the last nine or so months, since changing my mobile OS preferences, this is changing, just like the Mac issues of the past. The gap in software is closing in terms of the number of applications. The polish of Android is improving relative to that of iOS, as Google improves with each iterative release. The amount of software available is increasing to fill needs that were previously unserved. Soon Android users, if we have not gotten there already, will feel like the Mac users of today, where every need is served, and there is no lingering desire for anything on the other side of the mobile software divide.

You can see the dominoes begin to fall as iOS-only applications, like Path, publicly promise Android versions soon, while promising to wait and deliver an amazing experience. You see applications like Ninua start as Android only, and games developers deploy for Android while ignoring iOS. (See: Bionic Panda Games) I believe only the most ardent of iOS fanatics will stay single sourced in the long run, just like BBEdit has never strayed from its Mac-only approach (and boy do we love them for it).

For when it comes to the mobile applications piece of this skirmish, Apple is not Apple of the 1990s. It is playing a role more similar to that of Microsoft, who had more titles, more developers, and a seeming guise of invincibility. This is not a replay of that battle, but a new one where the challenger is now the dominant one, and behaving much like a dominant player would. What I like more about this specific discussion is that this time, in my opinion, both sides are great. I would take a market battle between Apple and Google any day over the frustrations and issues that took place with a dominant Windows of yesteryear. I still love my Mac and the iPad has transformed mobile computing. But let's not be so naive about the world of Android software. Developers, users and the entire Android ecosystem are going to be benefitting from continued progress and growth - in quality and quantity.

Wanted: The World's Software Library, by Subscription

Retail software prices are often eyebrow-raisingly high, and for the most part, inflexible. Every couple years, it's not uncommon for our family to shell out $150 to $500 for the latest Microsoft Office Suite. The full Adobe Creative Suite will set you back almost $2,000, and upgrades are $600. The home edition of Mathematica is about $300. Apple Final Cut Studio will cost you $1,000 and Logic Studio another $500. These prices are no doubt in line with professionals who require the software to live, but for more casual users, who might interact with the software infrequently, paying full retail price seems exorbitant. This sets up a market imbalance, similar to that of the world of music pre-Napster, where the consumer at times can seem justified for obtaining the software freely using another method.

I've previously stated that the vast majority of consumers are solid law-abiding citizens who are happy to pay for quality, assuming price is in line with the assumed value of the goods. When inequality enters the system, be it for full music albums, individual movie theater tickets, software, or even pay per view TV events, technology often comes into play to circumvent the traditional restraints.

Adobe CS Sticker Shock

The disruption of the music industry by Napster's steal what you can model, followed by iTunes' efforts to reign things back again at an affordable price point, has recently evolved further with the subscription-based all you can eat method, one not pioneered by Spotify, but popularized by it, despite years of Rhapsody and Napster (part two), and newer competitors like Rdio offering similar structures. Software, running in parallel, can similarly be downloaded for free on peer to peer networks, and can even be downloaded directly with options like the Mac App Store and Google's Chrome Web Store, but missing is the solution for the casual buyer who just wants to rent the software, occasionally accessing it, without needing to shell out for the boxed retail option, dedicating gigabytes of hard drive space for the privilege, being sure to keep one's serial numbers stored under lock and key.

A new business model, following the Music as a Subscription service, emerges with Software as a Subscription, more commonly referred to as SAAS (Software as a Service). SAAS applications can be enterprise-focused like Salesforce.com, or consumer focused, like Google Docs and Gmail, most of whom see all the activity taking place on the Web via a Web service. But what about the more traditional software titles from Adobe, Microsoft and others? What about an iTunes-like, Spotify-like service where the consumer could pay about $25 to $50 a month and tap into all the popular software titles in the world, reading and writing remotely, but saving locally?

One assumes the major reason this generic software subscription model has not emerged is because the traditional retail software giants can still get buyers at the hundreds of dollars apiece, and they would be less interested in spreading a customer's $500 to $600 across 12 months with other providers. So long as they are raking in the revenue, disrupting their own business isn't appealing.

For consumers with high-speed Web access and relatively powerful CPUs and GPUs, the infrastructure for creating such a software subscription service is there. Toss a few thousand titles on Amazon or iTunes and you can see that with smart cataloging, the ability to use any title in the world would be at your fingertips. Then too would come the next stage of the rollout - including video games and premium offerings with tiered pricings and tiered privileges.

Despite the music industry and other's concerns, Spotify's success is not in the ability for some folks to gain free access with ads, but in the popular and accelerating option for paid accounts, eager to shell out real cash for access to an immense music library. I may scoff at the idea of upgrading my Adobe Creative Suite again for a few hundred bucks, only using it sporadically, but I'd pay a good amount per month, like I do for cable TV, electricity and other plumbing, to gain access to the world's software library. Web-based SAAS for single instance applications is not enough. It's early days. A company that can get all the copyright holders to work together and find a solution to customers would be extremely compelling.

Apple, Google Agree Web is Future of Software Delivery

Apple's announcement this morning of a Mac App Store, part of OS X 10.7 Lion starting next year, and for 10.6 users as soon as 90 days from now, spells another nail in the coffin for the retail box model of software discovery, purchase and installation. Just as iTunes, Napster and the many other Web-based entertainment delivery models dramatically impacted the retail experience of physically purchasing (or renting) CDs and DVDs, so too will the software industry be impacted by an increased emphasis on Web delivery of applications. Apple has woken up to this trajectory with today's announcement, after years of focusing their app store on mobile devices, while at the same time, Google continues to march down its path of a Chrome Web store for the company's planned OS.

The concept of an iTunes-like software delivery method for purchasing is hardly groundbreaking. Back in 2007, more than three years ago, I was begging for it in a piece I had posted to The Apple Blog (Solving Software Purchases the iTunes Way). At the time, I talked about the benefits of reviews, demos and one-click purchasing for all types of software, and those benefits are a big part of the promised Mac App Store. Interestingly, at the time of my post, Apple had only focused on media with iTunes. The iTunes App Store came out a full year later, and it has taken two more years to bring this delivery method to standard software.

In the last three years, a few major developments have taken place to make this promise more of a reality - including increased access to high speed broadband, required for large downloads, much like with movie rentals and purchases, once deemed nearly impossible, and the gradual doing away with optical drives, which Apple seems to be allergic to in the same way they ditched floppy disks back in 1998 with the first generation iMac.

On my MacBook Air, if I can avoid hooking up the USB SuperDrive, I will do it. I downloaded my Adobe Photoshop suite from the Web, and want all my data to flow through the air. If I ever were to consider Google's Chrome OS, the process would no doubt be the same - only with the browser being the center of the universe, not an iTunes like product.

Interestingly, much of Apple's event this morning was taken up talking about the latest edition of iLife, the consumer products focused on rich media, from photos to video and music creation. First, those apps and their data take up a lot of space, possibly forcing folks to consider backup outside their smaller SSD drives, and second, highlighting how unlikely it is that I will be purchasing iLife from an Apple Retail store in a boxed version. If Apple hasn't yet said that all software installs are going to come from the Mac App store, there will definitely be a push that direction. I already don't want to upgrade from my current version of iLife to iLife '09, simply because there's no way to update over the Web.

Many of us have faster pipes. Many of us are using our DVD and CD drives less and less - if at all. The Web is replacing all these things, and Apple is making a centralized place for us to have fast access, and for them to no doubt make lots more money than they already do - grabbing 30 percent of the pie. It's an aggressive move for them on the balance sheet, one more piece of their "integrated" approach, but the right one and the obvious one. Google's Chrome Web store too is obvious, and exciting for its own right, giving the option for Web services providers to charge for apps that might otherwise be free. As a consumer, I am ready to pay real money for good programs. Just don't make me buy them at retail on a spinning disk.

Could A Real Apple Fan Completely "Go Google"?

As a Mac fan in the 1990s, it was a lot easier to understand who the good guys were and who the bad guys were. Apple was very good. Intel was bad. Adobe was usually good. Microsoft was bad. Very bad. Evil. But over time as we have morphed into the latter part of this decade, Intel switched teams and became good. Meanwhile, Adobe looked less like a close friend and more like a despised ex, as Microsoft went from hated bully and thief to playing the role of crazy uncle who nobody really likes but puts up with because he's not going to disappear. The hardest to label? Google, a younger cousin who everybody really likes, but just might be too smooth to be trusted, even as it gets too popular. Now the stage is set for an awkward family reunion - as Google and Apple are so overlapped, tech fans have the option to choose between the two for practically their entire digital life, and the loyalty once sent Cupertino's way, exclusively, is getting some serious competition.

Over the last few years, if one can look beyond the striking hardware and arguable operating system differentiation between Mac OS X and Windows PCs, Apple has unquestionably led the way in terms of seamless integration between applications and devices. The company's iLife package ensures that media is treated in a similar way across multiple applications, and its user interface guidelines protect the users from odd menu behaviors that change between each program. Meanwhile, the company's iTunes/iPod/iPhone juggernaut has made managing media easier than ever before, especially when one considers the addition of the fast-growing App Store and the good, even if not given much respect, Apple TV, which brings the core of the store to the core of the home.

But while we Mac fans may have been resting comfortably as the Mac vs. PC commercials made us giggle with egotistical self-pride, and the company's balance sheet has grown ever stronger with quarter after very profitable quarter, Google has been changing its spots - morphing from search engine and advertising powerhouse to a Web services monolith that can go head to head with almost every single Apple product out there. As the company integrates its many different products, they too may offer the integration we have always come to expect from Apple, but in an open, Web-focused way. And with every single new announcement, Apple fans have to start thinking if their future is one that is Google as much as it ever was Mac - and if "Going Google" would be that bad anyway.

If Mac OS X is the platform on which all Apple software starts, so too will be Google's Chrome OS. We know it's coming, and some sharp engineers are slaving away in Mountain View to capture the flexibility of the Web and make the cloud the equivalent of your hard disk.

Apple's Safari browser, the built-in Web browser for Mac and for iPhones, is equally matched by the Chrome browser on all major operating systems and on Android as well.

The iPhone and its 80,000 to 100,000 applications in the iTunes Store are being challenged by Android's new fleet of phones, led by the Droid from Motorola, and its rumored 10,000+ apps.

Apple's Mail? Easily matched by GMail. iCal? See Google Calendar. iChat? Google Chat. iMovie and iDVD? Well, it's not the same thing, but you would be hard-pressed to say YouTube doesn't win that battle. iWeb? Really? See Blogger.

On the professional side, Apple's iWork sports Keynote, Pages and Numbers. One has to wonder why they even released these apps, as they're not exactly keeping Microsoft at bay, and I don't know anybody who uses the last two. I use Pages once a year to do our Holiday letters home, and that's it! You better believe that Google's online office suite of Google Docs, Spreadsheets and Presentations is the real deal. Beyond that, do you expect Apple's iDisk to trump GDrive? Will Mac OS X Server beat out the Google File System (GFS) or can you expect XServes to replace Google's commodity rack servers in their datacenters around the globe? Not likely.

This isn't a rant stating that Apple is doomed. Far from it. After all, Google doesn't "yet" make excellent laptops. But I've tried the Motorola Droid with Android 2.0 and it's good enough that if iPhone were not an option, it would be an easy second choice. I find that I am using my Apple OS and my Apple Web browser to go Google, not just for the search engine, but all the downstream Google services. (10 of which I highlighted last month)

Google spokesperson and king of anti-spam Matt Cutts said his October goal was to avoid Microsoft software, a task made easier than ever now with Google providing an alternative just about everywhere. But I wonder if it's possible to do something very different - use ONLY Google software for a month. That would mean using the company's Web browser exclusively, and their office suite exclusively, and their mobile phone OS exclusively. That would mean using GMail and Google Talk and Google Wave and Google Calendar and Google Reader instead of Outlook or Mac Mail. I bet we're very close to this happening.

On Wednesday, Google also announced some of their first forays into Music search. This is an area where Apple still has the clear advantage - with iTunes. But Google offers Pandora on the Android platform, so iTunes isn't needed. Maybe I could push them to buy Spotify, and set up a killer alternative to iTunes with the Google logo? That would be something indeed.

I am a Mac guy. Maybe I'm less of a Mac guy than I once was, but I still trust Cupertino. That said, Google is growing on me in a big way, and they are the real alternative - something Microsoft never really was. Maybe soon I'll also be going Google in a way I never expected.

Prowl Pushes Growl Notifications to Your iPhone for Instant Alerts

For desktop applications, Growl serves to alert you when important events occur, unintrusively notifying you with a quick message on your screen. Now, with Apple's iPhone 3.0 software supporting application's ability to push updates to you in real-time, a new application called Prowl has bridged the two, bringing Growl updates, which you set on your desktop, to your iPhone, wherever you are.

There is an extensive list of applications that support Growl on the Growl team Web site, ranging from Web Browsers and E-mail to Games, Twitter Clients and Yahoo! Widgets. And if they can push Growl notifications to your Mac or PC, they can push the same notifications to your iPhone, using Prowl.


Setting Up Prowl to Alert Me On the iPhone
To get started, you need to download the Prowl application from the iTunes App Store for $2.99, and set up an account. Then after you add the Prowl plug-in to your computer, you can set up each individual Growl-enabled application to use Prowl, as you prefer. For example, you can set up Tweetie to send a note to your iPhone if you get mentioned on Twitter, or you can set up Reader Notifier to send you an update if you have new unread RSS items.


Many Applications on My Mac Support Growl

I Can Configure Prowl from My Desktop

Setting Up One Application to Alert Me Using Prowl

Notifications from Prowl on the iPhone can be as transparent or as invasive as you prefer, including sounds, alerts or badges, grabbing your attention as news comes to the foreground. Meanwhile, Prowl keeps a record of each notification in the application's history, showing you how often it was activated.


One Prowl Alert, and a History of Updates
Drew Olanoff, who highlighted Prowl on Tuesday, alerting me to the product says "the possibilities are endless". Whether or not that's true remains to be seen, but I found it very cool to get an instant update on my Google Reader share items even when I was in the car or otherwise separated from my laptop today. For all the buzz around what applications were going to leverage Push on the iPhone, Prowl just made an amazing shortcut for all the developers who already had made their applications Growl-compatible.

Dinosaur Adobe Manually Reviews Download Purchases

After years of working on outdated desktop software, I was all set to bite the bullet tonight, and upgrade to the latest Creative Suite family from Adobe. Not interested in cluttering our already-cluttered home with boxes of software and CDs, I was pleased to see I could order a download version of the suite, and potentially have it tonight, installed and running while the twins slept. But for some bizarre reason, probably having to due with an overwrought insecure obsession with piracy, Adobe says it will review the order manually, in the next business day, and then, assuming I pass, I'll get permission to download what I bought.

Crazy. Dumb. Antiquated.


Seriously, Adobe? You're Reviewing a Download?
It's one thing to order a physical item from Amazon.com, the Apple Store, or Zappos, and expect it to ship in a few business days. But downloads? Instant or not at all. This is part of why iTunes has been so successful. Click to purchase, and you are downloading immediately. Same goes for Netflix's "Watch Instantly", and practically every other legitimate software download service.

What if I absolutely needed Adobe's software tonight? What if I were in a creative agency on deadline working the weekend? Could I tell a client that no, I would be unable to open their project in the latest version of InDesign or PhotoShop because Adobe was going to review my order the next day? It's almost enough to make me check out BitTorrent.

There's a reason Web services are replacing the old dinosaur software companies. They are more agile and more forward thinking. Maybe I'll get approved and get the software I paid for by tomorrow. But this is completely ridiculous. The world is moving to a real-time Web, and this is anything but.

Stop Telling Me How to Use Your Products

In recent weeks, there have been a number of incidents where high profile online services have gotten into something of a battle with their users. Be it the on again off again user interface debate between Facebook and its user base, or Twitter's deciding just what is the right way or the wrong way to use their service, both products have ended up telling their own customers that they know best, and you should just suck it up. During these debates, some have said the best way to drive a product forward was to never compromise and listen to your users, while others celebrated the users getting a voice at the table.

But we're missing a major issue that I want to address. I'm fine with companies making changes to their interface, or adding features, or even deciding to prioritize some issues over others. That's business. But don't tell me how to use your products. Don't tell me what is the right way or the wrong way to use a product, when you've given us tools.

Take for example the hubris from Biz Stone at Twitter in his note to individual customers who were relying on their providing autofollow capabilities. Most specifically, he said:

"We’re going to discontinue autofollow because this behavior sends the wrong message. Namely, it is unlikely that anyone can actually read tweets from thousands of accounts which makes this activity disingenuous."

Oh really? What a bunch of junk this is. What's next? Google Reader telling us that there should be a limit to the number of RSS feeds we subscribe to, or that Yahoo!, Hotmail and GMail will limit the number of new e-mails we can receive in a day? After all, couldn't they write that "nobody can actually read e-mails from thousands of people which makes this activity disingenuous"?

Here's the reality - people are going to use products the way they want to, especially if you build a product that is flexible. And they will often use them in ways you never expected, or had even considered when you were first designing. And as you continue to build your service out, the solution is not to tell users there is "one right way", but instead to consider how you can make your product even better to an increasing number of people.

What I have seen from companies like Twitter and Facebook is a belief that you should only be connected to people you know in real life, and that you should only have a small number of people to be connected with. Yes, Facebook's dismissing the 5,000 limit, and yes, they're opening up to companies and fan pages, but they still require you to enter your true first and last name, and demand a synchronous follow.

Twitter's limits are even worse. What's so bizarre about this most recent volley about users being "disingenuous" by using auto-follow is how it impacts their most popular users. Where's the outrage that Barack Obama clearly uses auto-following software? Do you think Twitter is going to tell Obama that he can't actually follow 586,000 users? Do you think they are going to tell Robert Scoble that it is "disingenuous" to follow 85,000 people?

I also use a third party auto-following service from SocialToo (where I'm also an advisor). I use it because Twitter, thanks to other limitations in their product, will let me send direct messages only to those who follow me, and I want to let them contact me directly.

What Twitter and Facebook are doing by trying to tell their users that they know the right way to use their products is putting themselves above the users, and acting in an authoritative, but naive, manner. I think Biz' comment that it was "disingenuous" to follow thousands of accounts is covering the fact that Twitter's infrastructure wasn't meant to support such activity.

At risk of echoing Thomas Hawk's comment that I'm "Mr. FriendFeed", it's worth noting again that FriendFeed doesn't tell me how to or how not to use their products, and they aren't setting limits. They put out a service, and let the users have at it. That's impressive, and a major reason of why I'm bullish on what they do. For the rest of you developers who keep setting limits and claiming it's not your fault, but your users, you're wrong.

Seesmic Launches First Dedicated Client for Facebook Updates

One of the introductions displayed during Facebook's Dave Morin's panel at the South by Southwest conference today was that of a new desktop client for Facebook status updates, delivered by Seesmic's Loic LeMeur. The new app, available for both PC and Macintosh, running on the Adobe AIR platform, lets users view updates from friends and post new status updates to the popular social network, much like the myriad of applications built for Twitter, from TweetDeck and Posty to LeMeur's own, Twhirl.

During the debut of the application, Loic was keen to try and help redefine Seesmic. He said simply, "Seesmic is more than video now, it is about sharing with friends."


Connecting to Facebook With the Seesmic Desktop Tool
I currently update my Facebook status with my updates I send to Twitter, so for those people who use Twitter and synchronize the two, there may be little need for the new tool, but there are many others who have made Facebook their home for social networking with friends and family. With some now 50,000 applications running on the Facebook platform, as Morin mentioned today, the new Seesmic application both has the option to be seen by very many users, but also the chance it could be overlooked, unless Facebook also chooses to push its visibility.


Updates from My Friends and Updating Myself
There is some curiosity as to why Twhirl was not made the conduit for these updates. The product, primarily focused on Twitter, also enables updates to FriendFeed and, of course, Seesmic. It could be that Facebook wanted a native app dedicated to their site, or it could be that Loic wanted to gain the market visibility by building a new category of desktop utilities. (Of course, you could see CenterNetworks' video to learn more)

You can find the new Seesmic Facebook updater at http://www.seesmic.com/facebook. From there, you'll be taken to the Facebook site, upon getting connected, and you can download the AIR application. Loic officially announced it on his blog here.

Apple iPhoto to Integrate Facebook Connect

During Dave Morin's presentation on a search for a more social Web at the SXSW conference today, the senior platforms manager for Facebook mentioned the company would be integrating Facebook Connect with Apple's iPhoto consumer program, in what could be a big step for Cupertino away from their forced vertical integration with Mobile Me, and more toward an adoption of the broader social networking community.

As Facebook grows in visibility, it's no surprise that companies big and small are looking to tap into the service's reported 175 million accounts. As Morin said during his presentation, "The desktop is getting more important in terms of integration with the Web." And the move for iPhoto users to upload their photos to Facebook, add tags and other social data further blurs the line between what is a desktop app or a Web app.

Apple has long considered it one of the leaders of the Web - despite having zero presence in search, portals or social networking in general. The company's long in the tooth iTools to .Mac to MobileMe transition has never really gained traction with the masses, even though the company's iPhone/iTunes and iLife families have been tremendously successful. That they are moving to work with Facebook and support the integration of the service indicates they're trying to dismiss the "not invented here" mentality.

Morin did not indicate which version of iPhoto would include the Facebook Connect option, or a timeframe, but given the presentations by multiple iPhone app developers having integrated the same technology and APIs, it likely won't be too long.

FriendFeed Launches Desktop Notifier AIR Application

In time for the South by Southwest (SXSW) Interactive event, the popular information sharing and aggregation service, FriendFeed, has introduced a desktop application based on Adobe's AIR platform, letting you see updates on any of your friend lists directly on your desktop - essentially bringing the service's real-time feature out of the Web and ever closer to your core.

The notifier is fairly lightweight upon introduction, letting you select to receive updates from any list you choose, choose how long they will display, and where on your desktop they will show. And that's it! So it's not exactly trying to take away your attention from more robust AIR applications, like TweetDeck for Twitter.


If you don't mind the constant notification updates from FriendFeed, you can choose any of the lists you have preset, and individual notifications will pop up. Click on the notification, and you can be taken to the item, or click comment to start commenting on it.



A Pair of Notifications from the New FriendFeed App
The utility is likely best positioned for highly-targeted lists, say of close friends, family, or work. Otherwise, you've got yet another way to drink from a firehose. You can find the notifier here: http://friendfeed.com/settings/notifier. The company's official post is here: Get FriendFeed notifications on your desktop.

What's Growing Faster? Software Bloat or PC Capabilities?

There is an old adage in the storage business. No matter how large you make the hard disk, users will find a way to fill it. The same seems true in the bandwidth and networking business - build a bigger pipe, and customers will find applications that use it up. The same concept extends to me as a consumer, for my traditional software experience. While my laptop is tremendously more capable than its predecessors of 2, 5 or 10 years ago, it sure doesn't seem like the software loads any more quickly, and I still find myself closing applications or forcing them to quit when the whole thing grinds to a halt.

Back in late 1998 after I got a first-generation iMac, complete with a then-acceptable 32 megabytes of RAM and a 4 gigabyte hard disk, I marveled at the gargantuan install needed for the latest version of Microsoft Office. I remember specifically telling a friend to just wait... as the next one would take more than a gigabyte of space. Sure enough, that's practically accepted, and now, it's not too uncommon to see downloads, and even software updates, that are in the hundreds of megabytes.

But the issue is less about capacity and more about the perception of speed. Yes, my laptop can do more than its forefathers. It can do new things with the Web and with video that were never before possible. But booting Microsoft Office, Adobe PhotoShop, FireFox and other products still manages to slow down my system to a crawl. It's gotten to the point that I've even eliminated possible reasons for the slowdown. I hardly ever boot into VMware Fusion any more, to run Microsoft Outlook. I stopped using an external monitor at work, and try to recharge my iPhone only when I don't need full use of my MacBook Pro. And that doesn't even extend to other RAM and processor hungry apps, like one of my personal favorites, TweetDeck.

For whatever reason, it seems that software developers have, for the most part, chosen to add features, and not optimize for speed. I don't think it took more time to boot Microsoft Word 5.1 on my old Performa than it takes to boot Microsoft Word 2008 on my MacBook Pro, even if the Megahertz speed on the processor has increased from 33 MHz to 2.2 GHz, and the RAM from 24 Megabytes to 2 Gigabytes. And lest you think I'm picking on Microsoft, Apple's iPhoto has also been a slow to load memory hog in its own right.

If somebody told me ten years ago that I could increase my processor speed by 1,000 percent, and my RAM by about the same amount, I would have expected to be able to hit "Select All" on my Applications folder and then "Open" to run them all at once. But there's no way. At this point, even with my current machine, I probably can run Mail, iTunes, a Web browser and one more application without slowness. Add one or two more apps to the mix, and we're in spinning wheel city.

In one my recent tirades against how often my machine was slowing down, I heard the all too common reply: "Time for a new one?" but the answer should be no. It's time the pace of the treadmill whereby hardware needs to speed up to handle the new software should slow. Get it to work, and get it to work fast. Please.

TweetDeck to Add Translations, Tweets by E-mail, StockTwits

TweetDeck has rapidly climbed the charts of popular Twitter clients since its debut last July, and with new capital backing, developer Iain Dodsworth continues to add more features to make the product practically indispensable. In the latest update, to debut tomorrow, Dodsworth adds new features that will help you communicate with a global audience, in multiple languages, monitor stock data, and even send your tweets by e-mail. And just think, this is one of Iain's minor point releases, not a major update - which is also in the works.

TweetDeck, as you recall, is a popular AIR application, easily recognizable by its tight multi-column format, which lets you follow all your Twitter data, be it updates from friends, replies, direct messages, search terms and groups. In fact, the success of TweetDeck has spawned different software products to emulate its interface, including FriendDeck, a tool for following FriendFeed, and most recently, Alert Thingy.

Tomorrow's iteration includes the ability to translate tweets you have both received or written into any of nearly 3 dozen languages. If you want to tweet outside of your native language, simply write your tweet in TweetDeck, click the dual-bubbled conversation bubble on the right, and select a language. A few example translations of my "I am not a Twitter addict, but I can see how that would happen." are below.

French: Je ne suis pas un accro à Twitter, mais je peux voir comment cela allait se passer.
German: Ich bin kein Twitter Süchtigen, aber ich kann sehen, wie das passieren würde.
Italian: Io non sono un tossicodipendente Twitter, ma posso vedere in che modo che accada.
Polish: Nie jestem uzależniony Twitter, ale widzę, że jak by się stało.
Vietnamese: Tôi không phải là một Twitter addict, nhưng tôi có thể nhìn thấy như thế nào mà có thể xảy ra.

Also, as not everyone is yet a Twitter addict, you might find yourself wanting to share items from Twitter to friends by e-mail. Now, using TweetDeck, you can mouse over any individual tweet, click "Other Actions", and select e-mail, which will pop open your default e-mail program, and set up an e-mail that says "Tweet forwarded by @yourusername", and includes the Twitter user, the tweet itself, and a little note: "Sent via TweetDeck (www.tweetdeck.com). You can see Iain demonstrate the e-mail from TweetDeck function below on video:


Click to see a demo from Iain Dodsworth
(Opens in a New Window)
You can also translate or untranslate individual tweets from this "Other Actions" menu.

Another interesting function to debut tomorrow is the ability to turn your TweetDeck into a full-fledged StockTwits terminal, showing your Friends, Portfolio, Recommended, Commentary and Everyone columns. If you are a StockTwits user, and have added stocks to your portfolio, you can see what the entire StockTwits community is saying, be it on AAPL, YHOO, GOOG or MSFT. See the screenshot below for what mine looks like (sans friends) following just Apple, Google and Sirius Radio.


The updated point release will hit TweetDeck.com tomorrow. If you're someone who skips point releases and wants a full update, you'll need to keep waiting, but I've been told it's not all that far away. Expect Iain to tackle major issues such as memory, multiple accounts and more then.

Suffering from BeOS Nostalgia? The Haiku Project Can Help.

In 1996, Apple was in freefall and the Macintosh was in trouble. As many Mac fans clung to their Performas and PowerBooks in vain, we prayed for a savior to swoop in and save the Cupertino company from what at the time seemed like certain doom. And before Steve Jobs and Next came in to provide Apple with its next generation operating system, there was a different white knight we expected to keep up the fight against Microsoft and Windows. The white knight was the Be operating system, and its founder, Jean-Louis Gasée. As history now shows, Apple's not choosing Be pretty much killed the OS and the company - as it faded into operating system history, alongside Amiga and others whose time has come and gone. But for its time, it had some intriguing features, which live on in the Haiku Project, which you can try out today.


Inspired by the BeOS, Haiku looks almost exactly like the older operating system, featuring the trademark yellow tabs atop floating windows, featuring a Linux-like terminal, and true multi-threading to take advantage of multiple processors.


And the Haiku project is more than a series of intriguing screenshots. You can actually run the project today, by downloading a virtual image from their Web site, popping into VMware, with or without a full set of applications, from Mail to Firefox to a PDF viewer and a Paint application.


I downloaded the VMware image with the latest nightly build, and sure enough... 1996 all over again. But it wasn't an OS running on a Zip Drive on a 603 or 604 processor. It was a virtual machine running on my MacBook Pro. Quick. Fast. Elegant. Not very useful, of course, but an interesting science project. It works.

So if you want to toy around with an elegant OS and you want to kick the tires or just scratch that nostalgia itch, check out Haiku. See also: OS News: BeOS Lives: Haiku Impresses.

Why In the World Can't I Customize Apple's Time Machine?

In March of 2007, when writing for The Apple Blog, now part of the GigaOM network, I openly speculated that Apple would debut a wireless network storage device, combining their expertise in Airport wireless devices with an external hard drive and give users a simple way to back up all their files. Sure enough, Cupertino rolled out the combination of Time Machine software and the Time Capsule backup device to do just that. And while I'm one of those Apple customers backing up my data through the air, you have to color me unimpressed with the flexibility of Time Machine - as its options are so limited, it's practically assumed I'm too stupid to make any decisions on my own. This leads to the application slowing down my computer when I don't want it to and regular bandwidth congestion for me and others sharing the network (notably, my wife).


As with many of Apple's products, Time Machine assumes it is made for consumers who benefit from a limited number of options. The product, in an attempt to backup all your data regularly, comes preset to make:

• Hourly backups for the last 24 hours
• Daily backups for the past month
• Weekly backups until the backup disk is full

And... that's it.

When I am at the office, away from my Time Capsule, I'm not backing up. But when I get home, every hour, for about 10 to 15 minutes, my laptop starts to slow as Apple's Time Machine whirs into action, backing up my MacBook Pro's 200 Gigabyte hard drive to the 500 Gigabyte time capsule. While I've told Time Machine to not back up some folders, to reduce the time and storage space, I can't set up Time Machine to back up with any other granularity. I can't tell it to back up every two hours, three hours or four hours. I can't tell it to only back up after 10 p.m., or in a window from 6 p.m. to midnight, if I wanted to. I can't tell it to exclude certain types of files (like MP3 or PowerPoint, if I wanted to). It's either on, or it's off. And it's on the way that Apple set it up. Not the way I did.


So If I have my Time Machine stuck in the "On" position, I'm doomed to have my computer slow down once an hour and stuff the network full of flowing bits once an hour. I've even switched over to my neighbor's open wireless once or twice just to make sure the backup failed and I could get my bandwidth back. While we've gotten further along than my August post where I couldn't even get Time Capsule to work right, I'm still quite annoyed that Time Machine seems to be designed so simply that I simply can't be happy with it. It's time to get more options.