Category: Imported

This morning one of my PCs had a little pop-up balloon asking for permission to download an update.  This is the computer that my wife normally uses and I rarely use it except to check it for updates. The program that wanted to update was Sun’s Java runtime.  I figured this was probably a good idea so I told it to go ahead.

Where’s the evil?  The update wizard tried to sneak in an installation of the Google Toolbar.  If you accept the default options, and just click “Next” through the wizard, you get the Google toolbar installed along with the Java runtime update.  The Google toolbar has absolutely nothing to do with keeping my Java runtime up to date, but for some reason, they try to sneak it in.  I dislike bundling in general, but I really dislike it when the default behavior of programs is to bundle.  I didn’t like it when the MSN Messenger defaulted to change my homepage and search settings, and I especially don’t like it when software “updates” are used to sneak software onto my machine.

Thankfully (I guess…) my wife never updates her machine.  She’s totally immune to Windows Update pop-ups, or even the Onecare beta’s yellow or even red icons.  I say thankfully because if she had run the update, I’m almost certain that she would’ve next-clicked her way through the defaults, and then she would have been complaining that her IE window was getting cluttered by the toolbar.

Companies need to remember that for most folks, Sneaky == Evil.  Every time you gain a user through sneaky bundling, you lose some consumer trust.  Google is in a tight spot because a great deal of their business value, their market value even, is based on users trusting them with personal information.  Without a high level of consumer trust, Google is just another advertising platform serving up irrelevant ads.

How could this be better?  If you must bundle unrelated software, require explicit and obvious consent.  A pre-checked box in the middle of an update wizard is not explicit and obvious.  Better yet, toss out the bundling, and win customers based on the merits of your product. 

Kathy Sierra and the rest of the crew over at Creating Passionate Users consistently impress me with their witty, sometimes irreverent style of blogging about business decision making and marketing.  Sometimes I laugh, sometimes I just sit back and think, but without fail, it’s interesting.  Some of my favorite posts include:

Death by Risk Aversion

Real Motivational Posters

Physics of Passion: The Koolaid Point

Most Classroom Learning Sucks

And there’s a whole history of interesting posts.  If you ever need to give your brain a workout, just browse through some of the older posts.

(This has been a positive post brought to you by the positive post project)

Search Champs was a great experience, and I wanted to capture a few thoughts:

1. The Microsoft employees that we interacted with are very passionate about making great services, and part of that is listening to criticism.  They invited folks who were very likely to provide hard critical feedback, and they received plenty of very vocal feedback.


2. If you put a bunch of geeks in a bar, the conversations can be pretty interesting.  The evening after we all arrived, they took us all out to a bar in Seattle for a reception.  It was weird to be shouting over the music, discussing technical details of this or that service.  The next evening, it was the same story at the restaurant.


3. Search Engine Optimizers (SEO’s) and Search Engine Marketers (SEM’s) are people too.


4. Robert Scoble is NOT an edge case.  Just ask him 😉  ( I was two seats over when this audio was taken ).  As a corollary, Robert Scoble is a good sport.


5. When they say to meet your driver at 7:00am, don’t wait until 7:02am to be in front of the hotel.  I ended up taking a cab to the airport.

My brain is still full from the experience.  I’ve got some thoughts on Live Labs, Expo, and MSN’s stance on privacy.  Hopefully I’ll find some time to get those written out soon.

What is conversational blogging?  MSN has a few relevent pages, Google does too, but the answer doesn’t seem very clear.  I’m going to propose a definition.  Feel free to track-back or comment to add your 2 cents…

Conversational blogging is the act of publishing or reading blog entries in a way that groups related posts into a coherent dialogue.

There are several mechanisms that people use to build conversations in the blogosphere. 

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  Comments are the simplist, and often the easiest method.  It keeps all the relevent info in one place, and anyone who visits the post page can easily find the dialogue.  Comment spam, and all the things that fight comment spam (CAPTCHA, Moderation, etc.) detract from the usefulness of comments for dialogue.
  
  
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  Referrers are dead in my opinion.  Publishing referrers is just spam-bait.
  
  
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  Trackbacks may be the best we have for current technology.  Spam is still a problem, but automated checking and blacklists seem to be holding back the tide.
  
  
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  Tags.  Tags can be used to follow almost anything, and if they are specific enough, they can limit their results to a single conversation.
  
  
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  Search.  The various blog searches have ways to subscribe to “who links to this or that” feeds, or you can follow conversations by tailoring your searches properly.

How could it be better?  From a user perspective, when I’m reading feeds and find an interesting entry that might have an good conversation surrounding it, I’d love to be able to click something and set a “follow this conversation” flag.  My feed reader should then give me some good way to visualize a threaded representation of all the chunks of information that relate to that specific entry.  Comments, links, trackbacks, whatever, I’d want it all to be available in an organized manner.  Let me un-follow the conversation later if I lose interest, but otherwise, bring me the new bits as they appear on the web, and provide some context for how they fit in to the dialogue.

This is a feed reader problem, but it’s gonna need a great search back-end, and a well thought-out UI on the front.

Tris Hussey links to a post by Amy Gahran pointing out that Blogging really isn’t mainstream enough yet.  Amy says that email discussion lists and forums are easier for new or non-technical users to pick up and start using.  Is it possible to make conversational blogging easy enough for these users, or are we forever doomed to a world where blogging is dominated by the technically savy?