Tretakoff Musings

Apple's iOS has routinely been beat up for the user interface in the stock apps that come with the iPhone/iPad. Lately, the criticism has been on the use of "skeumorphic" design (i.e. design elements meant to resemble a real-world analog, like the use of simulated wood and green felt on Game Center or the simulated  brass casing on the compass), but lost in the noise is the real challenge: making the apps much more useful. Today, let's look at the iOS Calendar app and some of the alternative versions that may make you rethink using it. First, the standard app. Like most calendar apps, derives it's look from the classic paper DayTimer from the analog age. Decent information delivery, with the option to switch between List, Day, Week and Month views. Good separation and use of the screen real estate to display all day events vs. timed ones. A separate drawer to manage received calendar invitations. Prominent controls to go to Today, vs. whatever day you are on. ...

Facebook's big introduction today of Graph Search set off all sorts of seismic waves across multiple companies. Investors reacted with gloom and doom in a variety of companies as big, bad, Facebook announced their intention to introduce a "third pillar" of their business by allowing users to search relevant Facebook friends' recommendations and relationships. The question is: why? Before I get to that, a note about today's announcement: a very smart move by Facebook to take advantage of that wealth of data they know about you in a way that doesn't make you scream and run for the hills, and is actually engaging. Also, impressive move to put it in equal importance to their existing News Feed and Timeline products, the two most identifiable aspects of Facebook. No wimpy "beta" labels here; they are making their intentions quite clear. The problem I forsee is that search is, in essence, a mechanism to "pull" information: you have to ask...

Great article today on the rise of Pinterest , that now seemingly viral service that has exploded onto the scene. The article focuses on a few aspects that I have marveled at: Unlike Facebook Like and Twitter, this time online marketers, specifically those with e-commerce capabilities, have embraced and integrated Pinterest into their offerings in absolute record time. While it took months/years for many etailers to figure out how to drop Facebook Like buttons onto product pages, Pinterest buttons popped up in mere weeks. There seems to be as much emphasis on mobile with Pinterest as web; that's a huge differentiator. In fact, as today's article points out, it's forcing changes to site designs to accommodate the mobile visitor automatically. Who's have predicted the catalyst to make sites ubiquitously mobile friendly would be a rehashed social bookmark service? Unlike other services, e-marketers are embracing Pinterest across the enterprise, not just in the ...

The world is a'buzzing this morning with the big news: Facebook purchased Instagram for $1 billion . HUGE move: one of those seminal business moments that will mark a seismic shift. Hearkens back to the moment AOL bought Time Warner, or Netscape's IPO, or Google crossing the $400/share mark: all moments the landscape changed. In this case, the ramifications are many, but I want to highlight two. The first is the title of this post: this is truly the triumph of the echo over the voice. I've recently been wrestling with the perception dilemma of a feature vs. a product/company; there is a very good argument to be made that Instagram is nothing but a feature of Facebook: just a slightly better photo sharing. $1 billion is a lot to pay for a supposed feature, right? Here's where it gets interesting: there is a steady succession of companies who you could argue have taken a feature of other companies and turned it into a full product. For example, Twitter is, for all int...

Many people didn't like Plaxo ; I'm an exception. I loved that it pulled everything together: contacts, social, even staying in sync. But, as I wrote before , they were permanently stung with the "bac'n" problem: they spammed your friends on behalf of you, to try to build the network: once that happened, there was little to recover. Luckily, Comcast purchased them for address book migration, so they soldiered on. Actually, they did far more: they built a FriendFeed like service, added premium options, and continued to innovate. Many people, myself included, wondered what the Comcast purchase would do to contribute to that innovation. When word leaked at TechCrunch's Disrupt conference that the team would be debuting a new service, TunerFish, it sounded like a perfect marriage: Comcast's TV and Plaxo's social media. The details were vague, but they promised "one click social sharing of what you were watching." I eagerly signed up, as it...

I recently stayed at the New Yorker Hotel in (yes, you guessed it) New York City. It was a spectacular surprise; I had thought I had a room at the W, but fumbled my bookings. So there I am, in NYC, needing a hotel for the night. I fired up my Hotels.com HotelsNearMe app on the iPhone while I grabbed a bite to eat, and it showed me The New Yorker Hotel. Location good, price great, reviews good. OK, I'm in. I arrived very late, having been out with clients all night. The lobby was great: very deco and modern, all at the same time. Evokes classic NYC without feeling old in any way. The desk clerk was very nice, and checked me in. We chatted a bit, and he smiled, then said, "Sir, I'm going to upgrade your room to one with a balcony." I thanked him, a bit bemused why a balcony made all the difference; after all, most hotels I stay at have the sliver of a cement slab they call a balcony. But I was tired, and appreciated his enthusiasm. I took my key, and headed up to the...

I've been dipping a toe with trepidation into the world of location-aware social networking. I say "with trepidation" because I have had many primal concerns about broadcasting my location to the world...and I am questioning that trepidation. The immediate fear is about a loss of privacy, yet I am a staunch proponent that privacy is an illusion: with the advance of Google, the growth of social networking, and the ubiquitous presence of smartphones, the reality is that privacy has long been gone. Think those text messages you send are private? Wrong . How about those pictures and videos you publish to Flickr and YouTube? Please. Watching cable or renting a Netflix disc? Yup, those companies know just what you like and can be compelled to share that info. Your GPS and cell phone can't be tracked, surely? Are you kidding me? Every single device we use to make our lives easier with increased communication has a dark side: those same communication paths can be followed bac...

Look, I don't ask much (well, that's not actually true, but work with me here...). The very least is, when offering a social network, and giving me the option to connect with another person on the network...let me connect? Case in point: LinkedIn . Great resource, excellent product. Xobni alerts me that there is someone I get e-mail from whom I can connect with on LinkedIn. I click through, get the LinkedIn page for the person, define how I know her, and click Connect. What do I get? A page refresh, and an error that says" We're sorry, but you cannot send this invitation." No explanation. No reason, just that. It would be one thing if I only got it once, but this must happen at least once a week. In the parlance of the day, Fail . Anyone else experiencing this?

Social Media Marketing is all the rage: companies try to dive in, and proclaim how cool and hip they are with fan pages on Facebook and Twittering specials. What they fail to realize is that social media is not e-mail 2.0; it requires participation and feedback, and, most of all, responsiveness. When they fair to recognize this, the damage they do to their brand is far worse than if they simply had not waded in, uninformed, to begin with. Case in point: Quizno's. They established a Twitter account for their commercial mascot, the Quizno's Toaster Oven. They send me an e-mail, ostensibly from the Toaster, offering me a deal: a free Torpedo sub when I buy the combo. That's a $4 savings. Ok, good, entices me to come in to my local shop, and walk past the 6 (I kid you not) other lunch sandwich options between my office and it. I bring the coupon, get to the shop...and the shop refuses to honor it, instead offering me $1 off. Ok, with franchised businesses, I get that these thin...

One of the interesting side effects of brands using social networking to communicate with their customers are the humanization of the formerly faceless brands. As NASA found by using Twitter to let the Mars Rover communicate with interested parties, people form an emotional attachment to what were formerly cold and lifeless objects. But what happens when those are brands, come to life? The results are fascinating. Take a look at the "tweets" today, left. That's a conversation between, ostensibly, Southwest Airlines and JetBlue . Both are active on Twitter, letting folks know of new routes, delays, and new features. Both are typical of Twitter, representing themselves as the brand, not as individuals of that brand. Thus, to the follower, while you "know" there's a human behind it, the brand is the voice. For that reason, the voice tends to be reflective of the brand: SouthwestAir is fun loving, chipper, and relentlessly upbeat; JetBlue is suave, slightly amu...

I've always been a huge fan of Doug Flutie. I grew up right down the street from the very stadium he played his college ball (and made his legend). I followed him through both the CFL and the NFL. In fact, I even flew hundreds of miles, just for the chance to see him play. No matter how successful as a pro he was, everyone always remembers Doug Flutie for the play that put him on the national stage: the Hail Mary pass that won the Bowl. Years later, while he was setting record after record in Canada, his team even brought the recipient of that pass, Gerard Phelan, to the team. Was Phelan that great? Not at all. Did Flutie need a great receiver? Absolutely not. But the team wanted the public to recapture their sense of awe and wonder at this display that changed the world by evoking the connection of that Hail Mary. This week, another former champion, known for taking the world by storm, took the stage again for one last Hail Mary pass: Palm . Similarly, it was a desperate situation...

An article in today's Boston Globe caught my eye: Barnes & Noble announced they would launch a site for customers to track their interests and favorite authors, and "share information with Facebook and other social networks." The headline of said article? " Barnes & Noble goes social networking ." Intrigued, as the article was picked up by a few retail-centric newsletters I read, I signed up. The results were disappointing, to say the least: it's not much more than a "build my library" feature. The "social networking?" It consists of a "Share" button that allows you to post an article to Digg or Facebook. You're kidding, right? That's not social networking; that's ShareThis , the same type of widget I put on the end of my posts to allow you to share my thoughts with others. To be fair, I don't put the blame on this embarrassment on B&N; I put this squarely at the feet of the AP reporter, who's le...

Nice move by Virgin America to append the ways to reach them on common social media platforms on the base of their emails. I've seen this on the web, with the "Add This" functions (see this end of this post, for instance), but great move to include this type of alternative communication to e-mail. I'd love to see this trend expand, much like RSS with web pages, to allow automatic detection and aggregation of social network presences from an e-mail sender. Maybe an Outlook plugin? That's today's million dollar idea.

I've bitched about how I don't really like Facebook here before, as well as embracing Twitter and Plaxo. The latter is really great to me, as I can see a consolidated view of my friends' updates, sparing me from having to log into separate sites. Although Plaxo has an iPhone-enabled web version, it has not been quite as easy to catch up on the road, though. Yahoo, of all people, has actually taken a pretty good first step, with Yahoo oneConnect for the iPhone . Simple, actually: download the app from iTunes, and it scans your iPhone's address book. Then, enter your credentials on sites like Flickr, Twitter and Facebook, and it pulls all of the updates from those sites into a single consolidated view. Nice. My only complaint? The consolidated view is called "Pulse." Um...this is clearly the trademark that Plaxo has claimed, so we are headed for some legal wrangling. Worse, this naming puts Yahoo in an adversarial position with Plaxo, so I won't see Plaxo Pu...

I'm cautiously optimistic about the approach that businesses are taking with harnessing social media to extend their brands and connect with their customers. Unlike the ham handed ways they have used before (uh...pavilions in Second Life?), They seem to be showing a surprisingly open and organic approach to this new medium. Peter Kim has put together a fairly comprehensive list of what many companies are doing, and the various forms that has already, for me, yielded great results. For instance, here are some of the highlights for me: - Comcast . Frank from Comcast is a one-man good PR campaign for this much maligned company. Got a problem with an installer? Twitter Frank . Bitching about your reception on Twitter? He's there to direct message you. Want proof? At my company, we recently received scattered reports that Comcast customers were unable to see the sites we host. I pinged Frank, and within minutes, he responded that he was unable to duplicate the problem, but offered ...

Just installed Tapulous' Twinkle , which is an amazing location-aware Twitter client, on my iPhone. Of course, as expected, Twitter was having access issues. If you have ever encountered these issues on Twitter itself, they usually put up a cartoony picture of a whale , which has inevitably lead to the name "fail whale." So imagine my amusement at seeing this clever icon in Twinkle: Yep, the fail whale is now a slick looking icon. Bravo, Tapulous. Bravo. Thanks to Pete for pointing out the new way to take an iPhone screenshot!

All right, I'll admit it: I'm confused. In this last week, I have watch the "new media" bubble uncontrollably about two things: - Sites that can monitor you and your friends' activities on all of the "cool" sites, like Flickr, Twitter, etc., and publish them in a feed. - Google Calendar sync with Outlook. In all of the mentions, barely a word was spoken about Plaxo . Why? Plaxo has been doing both of these things for quite some time, and has an important advantage over Netvibes , Spokeo , etc.: it already integrates with your address book, and gives users ancillary benefits of keeping their address books up to date. Maybe it's the desperate air of "for sale" that was the reason; maybe it's Plaxo's old "bac'n" problem, but whatever it is, it's unreal. Why would you want to set up all of these additional sites, then convince your contacts to join them, then convince them to sync their online social life, when you ca...

I've written many a time about how I hate Outlook. Today, I struggled for hours to get Outlook even to start. I vented my frustration on Twitter, and, much to my surprise and delight, a Twitter person decided to point me to a great set of tips: Arrow Tips . Now THAT is the power of the Web to deliver solutions! Now, excuse me, I'm back to figuring out how to reduce a 4GB Outlook Archive file...

Plaxo's Pulse continues to get better and better. Today, they became the first to use Google's Social Graph API. The result? A public "pulse" page, that you can control the content of, available to anyone, not just Plaxo users. Mine is up. Another perk? Pulse status updates now link with your Twitter account and vice versa: update one, the other is automatically updated. The article I link to above actually does the best job yet of stating why Pulse is not a Facebook "me-too:" "Plaxo's Pulse platform, mistakenly thought of by some as just another social network, is actually an attempt at an open version of the social web where sites inter-operate with each other. Currently Pulse supports integration with flickr, YouTube, digg, LiveJournal, Windows Live, del.icio.us, yelp, MySpace, webshots, last.fm, Pownce, xanga, tumblr, jaiku, twitter, smugmug, Yahoo 360, Picasa, and Amazon." Gotta say, I hope Plaxo continues their trend, missteps and all,...

As you may have noticed, I've been become more and more fascinated with the evolution of Web 2.0 to harness the "cloud" of the Web to make the online world more relevant. In other words, using the web to enhance the social nature of interactions. This hearkens back to my early days as a BBS sysop, and actually has the potential to make the web ubiquitous. I've been quite congratulatory towards Plaxo for recognizing one of the key tenets of this, the ability to automatically discover interactions, and display and classify them, in the form of Plaxo's Pulse , which gives you a "news feed" of what your connections are doing, all over the web. I've also mentioned that Plaxo sometimes, rightly or wrongly, gets a bad rap as being a Facebook imitator or worse, but I have to tell you, the Pulse is addictive: like all good "push" applications, it keeps you up to date on everything. But what if you could have Pulse, without Plaxo? Enter Spokeo , whic...