Why it would be easy to switch away from Google search

onStartups has a few points on why it would be potentially easy for users to switch away from Google Search. The main points he makes are:

1. Low Training Investment
2. Low Customization Investment
3. Easy Experimentation
4. Better Results

These are precisely the reasons most users moved to Google in the first place. In any case, general search on the net is a commodity that can no longer be leveraged on its own. The future trend will be towards integration of search into other interactions on the desktop, the enterprise and the net. And do these points hold good in those scenarios as well?

User proofing AJAX

Nice article on A List Apart about handling errors in AJAX applications. From the article:

Ajax is handy because it avoids needless browser behavior such as page reloads, but it can also be dangerous because it avoids useful browser behavior like error handling. Gone are the “Server not found” error messages and that familiar escape hatch, the Back button. When Ajax circumvents useful behavior, we have to make sure we replace it as well as we can.

Microsoft vs Adobe

JD is keeping a tab of what the blogosphere has to say about Microsoft's Expression Suite launch.

I played around a bit with the Community Technology Preview of the expression suite which I'd downloaded a few months ago and used it to create a few designs. The Graphic Designer module was interesting while the Web Designer module seemed very similar to Dreamweaver and quite good. But the interactive designer/blend/sparkle was the odd boy of the lot. It borrowed a lot from Flash, but you had to do things differently to get it working. And although I have been using Flash for over 10 years, using MS Blend/Sparkle/ID was not quite straight forward as Mano would make you believe in his presentations. As a result I never got around the learning curve, and since my job as an interaction designer is not tied to the tool, I don't think I would really invest much time in it. At least, not now.

If there is a following in the future, it would possibly go up the same curve that Flash did in its early days, but maybe a bit slower as there is not that much of a 'disruptiveness' associated with the product.

Interestingly of the three, Blend is the only product that was designed and developed in-house, the other two were acquired. One more observation I had about the Expression Suite (at least the CTP) was that it did not gel together as one suite of applications, but more like a hotch-potch.

I'm sure things will improve in the future, and it is always good to have more than one option when it comes to tools to work with...

More about digital identities

I'd just recently posted about information overload resulting from too many passwords, when I ran into the 'Digital Identities' icon in my Control Panel. A small search revealed this post on Andy Harjanto's blog. Guess I'm a bit late on this, but thought this was worth blogmarking...

AskCity

AskCity was in the news today, however when I had some time on hand, and decided to try out the interface, it threw up a login screen saying the service was still available only to limited users. Guess the news came in early Eastern time, and AskCity was slated for a Pacific time launch? BTW, I was still on Indian time so much ahead of both. In any case I tried playing with it again, but only after reading Scoble's post on the same, and that has tainted my view on it a bit. The site does not live up to the press it has got, at least...

Too many passwords...

According to this BBC report:

Growing use of the web is stripping people of their personal privacy. The number of passwords and logins web users need makes it inevitable they will re-use phrases, and Re-using these identifiers puts people at serious risk of falling victim to identity theft.

Biometric Authorization still has a long way to go, but it may be a necessity in the future...

Don't play around with simple, says Jeremy...

"I'm tired of AJAX being used as a replacement for quality design." This seems to be the message that is coming out of the disastrous re-design exercise of Yahoo!TV. New Yahoo! designs seems to be forsaking usability for the sake of visual design and AJAX coolness. Somehow I feel we are going to see more such user outbreaks in the coming months...

OLPC: What can we learn from it?

I think one of the biggest innovations on this project has to be the display technology developed by Mary Lou Jepsen. It is a a dual-mode display—both a full-color, transmissive DVD mode, and a second display option that is black and white reflective and sunlight-readable at 3× the resolution. And to top it all it uses only 2 w of power and costs only $40 to manufacture. That apart from the sheer audacity that the team displayed in its vision, has to be applauded.

Five countries have so far pledged its support for this project, though it's a pity that the Indian government decided not to (because of a fair amount of lobbying by the Wintel camp, I heard.) Even if the project fails to have much of an impact on third world education, as most of its detractors have voiced, once the technology gets into the commercial realm, it will have a large impact laptop prices overall. Unfortunately, I believe, this laptop itself cannot be made commercial...

Here's a link to a talk by Michail Bletsas, the Chief Connectivity Officer for the project.

Google to answer no more...

Google is bidding a quiet adieu to Google Answers.

No explanations have been provided to the reason behind this move, but wonder if Yahoo! will follows suit or is this a shot in their arm? Interestingly Rashmi Sinha had posted an entry on her blog about Yahoo! looking for a lead designer for their Answers team, and one of the comments was about potential experience issues with the concept itself. Might be something worth pondering about...

The history of Human Computer Interaction

I need to bookmark this paper for later reference...

Microsoft to license the 2007 Microsoft Office User Interface

This is a new one, and about as close as M$ has ever come to open-source I think. In a new move, Microsoft has announced that it will be licensing the user interface for MS Office 2007. This means as a developer (developing an non-competing product) you could use the MS ribbon idiom in you application as long as you comply with some style restrictions imposed by the license. This is interesting as many of the MS UI paradigms were aped by a number of applications, thus giving the UI more eyeballs and making M$ applications seemingly intuitive. With a big shift in paradigm from M$'s end they do feel that users will find it difficult to adapt to the new UI, so this is probably a way to evangelize the new UI. That's my reading of this announcement.

I personally have not used the ribbon interface yet, so I can't comment on the merits and demerits yet, but maybe some of you can...

Get a refund on windows XP

Interesting incident about an 'open-sourcer' getting a refund for a copy of Windows XP which he never intended to use...