I landed tonight on eBay’s new home page (they are testing new versions and making it more personalized) and was a bit surprised/lost in the first minute.
Although the direction eBay took is right and the page is better organized and much cleaner and with less clutter compared to the old one (clutter is one of eBay’s home page trademarks 
) I think that too many elements were moved from their original location making it somewhat difficult for existing/loyal users to find their way.
Some of the elements that were moved are now in non-standard locations compared to other high traffic web sites, making the orientation of average Internet users difficult. For example: The welcome and register buttons in center-low right area (vs. upper right corner in many cases), the “What’s Hot” was buried below the fold close to the bottom of the page (power feature that should be better highlighted). In addition, the page is longer and require the user to scroll down more if he/she wants to see all the elements on the page.
One thing that I do like and think is a smart move in order to increase the number of searches/products being browsed is the horizontal layout of the categories at the upper area in a hotspot.
Bottom line, I think eBay should continue to test and optimize. Their new home page still does not fully work for me.
BTW, one page eBay should redesign & improve is “My eBay” and the preference page. I was trying to setup IM Alerts earlier today and had to look really hard for this option. Defining the “Send alert X minutes prior to end of auction” alert would be a nice feature as well.
Old page New Page
Earlier today Apple released their Q2 ’07 numbers and announced that 270,000 iPhones were sold in the first 30 hours (!). As we approach the one month since the iPhone debut, I thought it would be a good time to post my own personal feedback based on the extensive usage I have had with this great device.
Overall, I am very pleased with my new 8GB iPhone. I find it to be a true next generation mobile multimedia device. The user interface is gorgeous and the operation is brilliant yet extremely intuitive (you should see how my 3.5 years old son zooms in/out or slips between photos).
BTW, the presence of the iPhone in my hands made me think of some the fascinating work I did together with a small group of Israeli geeks on the Galleo mobile-multimedia-communicator in the years 2000-2001 (back then there was no such thing as Blackberry or Trio). Similar to the iPhone, the Galleo was a Unix/Linux operated device with a wide variety of applications including a fully functional web browser (Opera), MP3 player, Camera, Email, Instant Messenger (Jabber) and more. The zooming application though was not as slick as the iPhone’s…anyway, enough with the nostalgia and back to the review.
As I use the iPhone I try to take notes (using the built in Notes application of course) of any missing/broken/limited feature I come across. Here?s the current state of that list. Hopefully someone at Apple will read this post and add the items below to their product roadmap:
- Phone
- Voice-activated dialing (even my old Nokia 6102i supports this)
- Ring tones & Video tones – turn the first 5-30 seconds of an MP3 file to a ring tone, turn recorded video clip (see Video below) to a video tone
- Call log
- Delete selected numbers from call logs (missed, made, received). The current functionality lets me delete all the records at once. This is too aggressive
- Improve call time resolution. Currently calls made/received/missed get a week day resolution if they happened prior to today (Yesterday, Sunday, Friday, Thursday?). Only today?s calls show the exact time. So for example, if someone calls me at 10pm I will see ?Yesterday? if I look at the call look after midnight
- Missed calls are colored in Red but there is no visual indicator to differentiate between calls made and received
- Contacts ? Add keyword search (with RAT – Refine As you Type)
- Camera ? Digital zoom, night mode, size & quality options
- Video- Capture video clips, make video conference calls if/when on a fast connection (Wi-Fi)
- Keyboard ? Improve the predictive text application (Apple should take a look at T9)
- Spell checker? Add to applications like SMS, email & notes
- Clipboard ? Add Copy, Cut and Paste capabilities (at least for text)
- MS Exchange support
- Contacts and Calendar sync
- Inbox sync – It?s a real waist of time to delete emails twice ? first on the iPhone and then on Outlook. Unfortunately, I have been doing that a lot lately
- Push mail – Currently I have my iPhone set to auto-check every 15 minutes and this wastes the battery. Pushing mail only when there is a new message will help preserve the battery
- Photos
- Create photo albums
- Select multiple photos and email then together
- Games – Imagine playing Snake using your fingers
- Maps
- Voice recognition & Text to speech – Both are key features to improve safety while driving. This functionality is pretty standard in GPS systems built into cars. I should be able to instruct the iPhone for new destinations. I should also be able to hear the directions instead of pressing on the little arrows that appear at the top of the Maps application and trying to read the little text
- Add Highways/Avoid Highways modes
- Add GPS – use Multilateration to estimate phone location based on signals received from cell towers
- Instant messaging? Web based IM applications such as eBuddy or Beejive developed special versions for the iPhone form factor and I would rate their experience as less than OK. However, it is essential to have a native Jabber/Trillian type of application fully integrated with other applications like Contacts, ring tones, camera and more. This way I could be constantly online even when my iPhone is in standby mode
- Hebrew support? This is one of the most critical problem for me. I read a lot of websites in Hebrew, I receive emails written in Hebrew and have a large library of songs with Hebrew ID3 tags. iPhone’s lack of Hebrew support prevents me from reading those websites and emails and forces me to go back to my PC to do that. Also, I can not imaging editing ID3 tags for my entire Hebrew iTunes library just to get them onto my iPhone (for my iPod I solved this using iPodHeb but they do not support iPhones). This is a real pain!
And the last one,
- Configuration via PC ? The activation process Apple & AT&T came up with is a true revolution from my perspective. It completely changes the way people buy and activate cell phones. When I bought my pervious Cingular phone over 3 years ago, I spent over an hour at the store filling paperwork, waiting for the sales rep to call the support center to activate my number and more. Getting the iPhone to work took me less than 10 minutes (3 minutes buying the device at the Apple store and another 5 minutes in front of my PC going through the simple activation wizard). Now, if iTunes is the place to setup, activate & synchronize the iPhone, why not make it also the place to configure it? After all, it would be much easier to configure email accounts or type Wi-Fi networks password using a regular keyboard…
That’s all for now, I will keep taking notes as I use the iPhone.
I will end with a good news and a bad one. The bad news ? there is no software update yet. The good news ? all of the above (and more) can be fixed via a software update. I look forward to it.
Forget everything you know about digital photography because here comes Microsoft Photosynth.
Jason sent me this video and it blew me away. It was presented earlier this year at the TED conference and it’s one of the most impressive visualization technologies that I have seen for a long time.
One of the features I liked most is the ability to see where pictures where taken and seamlessly change the point of view to be as you were standing where the photographer was. Then seamlessly tilt, zoom in or out or continue to change point of views. The speed this is done is extraordinary considering it can run on a browser installed on a standard PC.
It’s a great example of how social data from people’s collective visual memory (photos) can be linked together to make something that is greater than the sum of its part.
I think that after you will play with it you will find it even more impressive than the video.
You might have noticed that some of the links on my blog that previously displayed a PreviewShot (image of the linked web site) now display RSS information from the linked site. This new capability is called RSS Shot and it’s the latest improvement & enhancement that we added to the Snap Shots product.
This is how it works in plain words:
- An Expanded View would show if the link is to a specific article or to a blog post permalink
- An Excerpts View would show if the link is to a site that has an RSS feed accosiated with it. Typically you will see 2-4 headlines depends on the size of the bubble
A more detailed & technical description is avlaiable on the Snap blog.
The more I use it I find it more and more useful. In many cases it is faster for me to visit hover over the links on my site’s blogroll and see thier latest headlines than to launch an RSS reader (Netvibes has become really slow for me lately, not sure why). What do you think?
“Are you ready to spend a whole day, today (Tuesday), without using Google?” asks Richard MacManus of Read/Write Web. I am. I hope you are too.
So when you look for an alternative search engine to spend your day with, try Snap, the visual search engine.
We recently added a Classic mode to ease users into the “search with previews” experience. The Classic mode displays a traditional “10 blue links” SERP with Snap Shots, so you get to see what’s behind the link.
When you feel ready for the real thing switch to the Enhanced mode to enjoy large & rich previews, keyboard shortcuts (use up & down arrows to quickly surf thru the list of results) & Keyword suggestions and more.
And if you really like the experience, try Snap Image Search and install a Snap toolbar.
Happy searching:
I spent some time on the redesigned apple.com website.
I love the new top scrollbar that provides an easy navigation using previews.
I also love the upgraded site search functionality and the new search box with suggestions & previews.
There are some really innovative visualization mashups including Digg Charts, Digg City, Wheel of Upcomingand others. I actually find the ones built using Adobe Appollo (make sure you have it installed) to be less impressive than the pure Flash ones. This is kind of a surprise for me.
I already wrote about Digg Exposé, the mashup between Digg and Snap Shots. It looks like it has many fans but it needs more votes.
I received today an invitation to join Jaiku from Jason. Considering Twitter’s latest outages I though I’d give a try despite the pain in setting up a new online-mobile friends’ network. So, I began the sign up process & immediately liked it:
- First, Jaiku comes out of Finland, a pioneer in mobile technologies and services and the homeland of Nokia, my favorite handset manufacture
- The UI of the signup process is very clean and minimalist
- Super simple account setup process built as a 3 step wizard
But then I received the txt message with the activation code and was surprised to see that it came from the number 011467374940501. I then realized that Jaiku currently offers a short code that works only in Finland (17273). Users from all other countries would have to use an international SMS number (cost would be about $0.20 per message). To me this is a major adoption barrier. True, Jaiku offers a J2ME version for Nokia Series 60 phones that uses data plans and not SMS, but how many users have these types of phones?
Beyond the signup process, the Jaiku web site has a few neat features and overall I find the Jaiku product offering much more complete than Twitter. Two things that I like most:
- The ability to add different feeds (RSS feed of your blog, flickr page, video, bookmarks and more) under you account. Once you do that your contacts will automatically receive notification whenever a new item is being posted to any of those feeds, meaning that activity level on the site compared to Twitter is much higher. This feature could get improved if Jaiku would integrate with TinyURL to automatically convert long URLS of any of these feeds to TinyURL ones and send those out. When they will do that this would turn from a good feature to a killer one.
- The power of Previews – being able to preview the latest message sent by people just by rolling over their thumbnail. Did someone say Snap Shots!
Bottom line - A good looking product with some strong features but a pricey way to broadcast status from mobile & no built-in ability to use an IM client to broadcast status (to do that I would have to use a 3rd party product like Anothr or IMified).
Until Jaiku would offer a US short code I do not see this becoming my main status notification service (and probably this would prevent them from becoming a serious competitor to Twitter in the north-american market), which means I would still have to keep seeing the cat making thingz better.
Or maybe I should use both and monitor them together using Twitku.
Last week Hart Woolery a lead developer at YourMinis created a new mashup using Snap Shots & Digg’s new API and submitted it to Digg API Visualization Contest.
Jason who works with me at Snap posted the story on the Snap blog and in a few days his story reached Digg’s home page.
This a very cool mashup and great product recognition for the Snap Shots product.
Great post on Mashable:
“From navigating the Web in entirely new ways to seeing where in the world twitters are coming from, data visualization tools are changing the way we view content. We found the following 16 apps both visually stunning and delightfully useful”
Too bad Snap was not included under the search category where we should be. We at Snap believe visualization is the way to find information faster on the web whether you are searching or surfing the web looking for a cool video clip.
