Attention & Sex

I am signed up to a Scott Berkun’s newsletter which is rarely too exilherating. It focuses mainly on project management and other not so exciting things. His latest essay however is something I think we can all understand and relate back to our lives (I know I have).

This article explains about how we divide our attention and what we focus it on. It makes you stop and think how you really should be spending your minutes of the day.

“Whenever someone is lost in waves of e-mail and information, they’re often oblivious to the deepest tragedy of their time. It’s not the stress of dealing with so many requests and obligations (as real and challenging as that stress might be). It’s that somewhere in the wash of interactions and split attentions is the missed possibility they’re looking for: Meaning. Depth of experience. Connection. To quote Pirsig, “The truth knocks on the door and we say, “Go away. I’m looking for the truthâ€?. In the race to clean out inboxes and scratch items off the to-do list, we miss chances to find the thing we’ve created the inbox and to-do list for. Like an American tourist in Europe racing from site to site with barely a moment to take a picture or talk to someone not on their tour bus, we’re trapped in a quantity mentality, despite our quality based desires.”

Read Attention and Sex

The New Flash

I was just reading up on Alexoid’s blog, courtesy of one of his posts on UXmag (great read) and came across news that the new Flash will be called Blaze. Naturally I found this interesting as my first name is actually Blaze and I am a web designer and I do a lot of flash (increasingly so recently).

Nonetheless it’s always intersting to see what they will bring out with the new Flash. I think theyre just building up still and by version 10 we really will have a complete web platform. It currently is a platform but I just think it will be a lot easier.

We can’t comment on the timeframe for the release of BLAZE but it will be a full cycle so don’t expect anything to be coming any time soon. That said, you’ve probably already heard about the upcoming release of Flash Player 8.5 with an alpha available in a few weeks and a ship date next spring. Flash Player 8.5 will add a new virtual machine, AVM2, and a new programming language, ActionScript 3.0. This player release will coincide with the release of FlexBuilder 2, the new Eclipse-based developer tool for creating rich Flash-based applications.

Your Beta Better Be Brilliant

This is a letter to all companies creating new and innovative software and releasing it to the public. I just have to make this clear.

I happen to be very interested in new and innovative technology and in particular, software. Although I think the whole “Web2.0″ bandwagon is a lot of hot air, it is still pushing a lot of people to create better applications for users in more ways than we knew possible. This in turn creates a greater user experience for users and the web a better place for people to be.

The Web2.0 Bubble has only really started but look at the competition

It is just getting ridiculous the amount of Web2.0 companies out there and even worse is the fact that 99% of them are in “Beta” phase or even less. Now fair enough if being in Beta is one of the traits of Web2.0 due to the fact you can change your application at any time and adapt and move and evolve.

This however, can be your downfall if you don’t play it right.

So what are all of these companies doing wrong?

To put it simply; it’s one thing to gather input from users and model your application based on their feedback, it’s another thing to do this at the users expense by exposing them to something that’s just not quite right.

That dont impressa me much.

The real reason why I am writing this is because – on numerous occasions recently – I have come back to re-download or re-signup to a service that I have used before in Beta stage. The reason I came back is because I know I have used it and I know it can get the job done the quickest way possible. Upon first use of these products they really didnt impress me much. But wait! All of a sudden I am using them again and I rediscover how great they are plus they are stable and are just generally impressive.

I’ll let you in on a little secret. People don’t want to do what they have to do or use what they have to use… they want to be amazed by something, they want to be engaged by something. For those who disagree with me, you just don’t know it yet.

Developers, you need to ask yourself…

By letting people in on our beta is there a chance of destroying initial interest in our product?

Is it better to do demos and screencasts etc until the date when we can release something substatial and impressive.?

What can we do (marketing wise) to innovate and keep people interested instead of exposing some buggy software.

The Bottom Line

If someone sees something impressive, they will use it, they will continue using it and they will rave about it. People are getting smarter on the internet and if you disappoint them with your initial offerings, it is definately a bad marketing move on your part. Even in such a fast paced world you still need to sit back and work out the best way to do these things.

New Digg Commenting System

Would you believe how complicated the new digg commenting system is. I have never been a fan of digg, but it seems this is just going to complicate things even further. I can’t even work out what is going on or what conversation is happening within the comments.

Maybe they did this to appease the tech users (which admittedly, would be most of their userbase) but this doesnt get me any more excited to sign up at all.

I think, at the end of the day, It all comes back to K.I.S.S.

File Hosting… Advanced

I had a look around today for a place to host my files and ended up coming back to a place I had seen before, box.net. So what’s the big deal here? Well let me tell you:

• These guys have really competitive plans for hosting files.
• They also have a free account one you can sign up for right now with 1gb of space.
• They have a load of more nifty features.

The features:

• Public Sharing:
  For example click here and see a bunch of files I quickly uploaded.
• RSS Integration:
  When you share things it provides RSS feeds for everything. Imaging integrating that into a website etc, it would be so simple, just a matter of uploading the files.
• Photo Slideshows:
  Not the strongest feature but you can quickly get a photo slideshow going with minimal fuss.
• And a whole bunch of other stuff like:

• Desktop Sync
• Private Sharing
• Work Groups
• Remote Access
• Mobile Access
• etc etc etc

Go Sign up for the free one today and tell me it’s not good, please I dare you. I’m going to be using this service a lot more now.