Thoughtful Preparations: Media Spin Blog

Perhaps Microsoft should buy Yahoo! They have something in common: they both try to do many things, and too many of them are second rate.

It’s the Quality vs. Quantity problem. Apple learned its lessons long ago when it came out with too many products either not ready for the market, or the market not ready for them, such as the Lisa (right) or the early PDA, the Newton. These items suffered from being ahead of their times. Yahoo!’s problems stem from scattering their energies in too many directions. Apple’s and Google’s successes stem from excelling with the one market they are competing in.

A few examples of Yahoo! missteps and bad design:

1. Online Advertising: I’ve tried Yahoo!’s online ad program, Overture or Yahoo! Publisher Network, which they bought to compete with Google’s AdSense. The user interface for designing ads was not as thorough as Google’s, the diversity of the contextual ads presented on web pages was poor and often irrelevant to the context of the page, and the payout rate was not as good as Google’s. Eventually I deleted all my Yahoo! ads, using Google’s AdSense entirely. What does it tell you when one of Yahoo’s own writers, TechieDiva’s personal site uses Google and other’s ad programs, and not theirs?
2. Account Profiles: I’ve tried many times in the past few months to update my various public profiles. A few years ago they worked, and I had images and info linked to each profile. Out of the blue, Yahoo! switched to a trendy Anime-like design of Ken and Barbie Flash based cut-out characters as choices, and threw out my old image links. Now when I attempt to update or change the images, the system hangs and times out, or gives me a message that they are not ready to accept profile images at this time. Come on Yahoo! dudes! This is basic social networking 101, or website 2.0, I should say.
3. Hanging Links: My most frequent use of Yahoo is Yahoo!Finance. During the tech bubble, Yahoo’s mix of financial charts, stock information and message boards made for an exciting mix. In the past year, Yahoo!Finance has changed their message boards. For a long time, when you navigated to a board, you lost the navigation menu of the stock and experienced difficulty returning to it. The same for their new beta charts. I wrote toYahoo! about it, and I see navigation is now back to normal on the message boards. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it!
4. Yahoo!Mail: I can give credit to Yahoo that its e-mail works, but it is an ugly mess, full of advertising sidebars, spam from Yahoo!Messenger, and an extremely slow response time for scrolling and loading messages. I recently gave up and deleted all my Yahoo inbox messages just to try and make it more usable.
5. Clutter: The result of trying to be all things for all people is a massive clutter of cramped, competing stuff on main portal entries My Yahoo! page and Yahoo! Home page. Remember the original Yahoo! before all the sneaky slide on ads, when it was just a directory of many categorized web sites, and you could submit yours or others? Very Web 2.0, simple text hyperlinks, and the formula that Yahoo! grew from. Google’s search is still a clean, plain page, mostly text, with some occasional decoration, and it gives the user a focused, reliable experience. Who willingly navigates to a desktop traffic jam?

So here’s my own $0.02 plus, and I have suggestions and solutions for these and other usability problems. I can help Yahoo! clean house, simply for a few left over Semel dollars.

The Internet and its millions of searching eyeballs is full of surprises. Today I received an e-mail from a publisher requesting permission to use an image Social Networking developed for this blog in a previous article, Hobnobbery 3.0.

My image will appear in their book, The Emergence of the Relationship Economy. The image (left) shows up on Google “social networking” image searches, and it’s an indicator of a visual theme enjoying some success. They also pitched the idea of using a still from one of my recent eyeball animations to illustrate the not so new concept of “owning eyeballs”, as in media marketing. Get their attention, grab their eyeballs, and then subject them to advertisements, be it television or computers.

So, who knows? Many of my opportunities spring out of the Internet, whether it is responding to an ad on craigslist.org, posting a resume online, or someone finding me and my work on my web site. Last April I received an inquiry about my animation of the five senses of the human body. This led to a six month production of a new and improved set of narrated animated 3D sequences, “The 3D World of the Five Senses”, to be published by Roadkill Science, a division of Teachers Discovery. Depending upon the success of this first venture with Roadkill, there may be more titles to come.

Meanwhile, despite all the social networking via the Internet, there’s nothing better than real, live parties. This is the end of the year holiday party season, so get out there and meet people and make new friends eyeball to eyeball.

VentureBeat‘s article points out that Slide is contributing to the addition of one million new Flash widgets daily across all non-Facebook social networks, such as Myspace. Facebook is listed on the Slide web site, so I’m not sure what the distinction is that VentureBeat is making.

So what’s the big deal? Slide has created templates of clever skins and image processing tricks to enable non-Flash programmers to build slide shows and customized animations using their own digital images. You can take a Flickr photo or a YouTube video and jazz it up your way. Personalization is a big deal in the world of social hobnobbery.

When I first asked Joel Eisenberg about posting a few of his Grateful Dead concert photos on a few back pages, Rockpix, at this here Media Spin web site, I added that it might take awhile for folks to find us. Well, in less than two years, two of his images have risen to positions #1 and #2 on the Google image search engine when entering “Grateful Dead Concert“. Of course this is an ever-changing statistic, but for now, as Walter Cronkite would say, that’s the way it is.

A Google search for simply “Grateful Dead” yields us the #8 and #9 spots. The image appearing in both searches has ghostly lettering “Grateful Dead” which I added using Photoshop techniques.

I’ve seen a number of these images linked at large sites such as Myspace, and music forums all over the world, so I suppose that is how these receive such high rankings. Other than running Google ads, Joel and I are curious about how to monetize the images. We’ve taken a few requests for photo prints on an individual basis, but merchant sites such as CafePress.com do not allow the marketing of celebrity images.

As exciting as this is, it reminds me that I must soon build a new web site for my own professional design work. Mediaspin.com has organically sprawled into my own little multi-purpose fun site, since Media Spin Interactive, Inc. closed its doors in 2003. I’m planning to use a new domainname for my professional design website, and maintain Media Spin as the random fun web site. That way professional business contacts will not be confused by the diversity and commercial nature of the current Media Spin site. What a long, strange trip it’s been!

See the video! Joel and I do a show and tell on Tubular TV about his concert photos.

Of course, a leading 3-D virtual world is Second Life, a rich 3-D experience which you enter after downloading Linden Lab’s browser portal.

A friend was telling me about an acquaintance whose son had fallen in love with a woman he met within his many hours of Second Life absorption. The innocent young man planned to travel to Texas to meet his virtual girlfriend in her primary world flesh form. His concerned parents ran a background check on her. It should come as no surprise, the siren turned out to be in her mid 40’s with a criminal record.

Second Life was presaged in part by Neil Stephenson’s insightful work of modern science fiction, Snow Crash. The detailed mind of imaginative writers through the ages, such as Ray Bradbury in The Martian Chronicles,recognize that as many planets we may colonize, how ever many virtual worlds we create, we always manage to fuck it up! Corrupted by greed, power, prejudice and fear there will always be the insecure knigget, the weakest link, probably a Republican, who will introduce a tear in the fabric of the psychic community trust.  The rest is history.

If Monty Python’s Flying Circus had a virtual universe, this would be it. Check out a strange and beautiful land, an interactive 2 1/2 D world, Red Universe.

It’s interesting to observe that as we struggle with the real world, the virtual worlds can be more enabling for design and play. There is so much in the real world we cannot control. Virtual worlds and online communities provide us with experiences that permit more control, opportunities for fresh starts and re-invention.

Wha? This is no outer space language, it’s VUZE the new name for the Azureus website distributing long-form, high quality video. Many of the videos available on Vuze are HD resolution 1280 720p widescreen formats.

Azureus engineering has been busy at work on this major upgrade since early 2007.  The site has many new Channels of content to browse, and the Azureus client application has undergone a major upgrade as well.

The company has recently announced content partnerships with Showtime Networks, BBC Worldwide, Bennett Media Worldwide, G4, A&E Networks (including A&E, History, and Biography channels), National Geographic, and Starz Media.

Azureus Inc. is the provider of the most popular P2P application for the transfer of large media files. With more than three years of technology innovation, proven robustness, and more than 140 million downloads of its application, Azureus users connect with one another from more than 100 countries and 40 languages.

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Last summer a Senator from Alaska, Ted Stevens, fumbled through his description of the Internet as a “series of tubes.” His simplification was a clumsy adaptation to what telecom folks colorfully refer as “pipes”, network bandwidth such as fiber optical cables providing faster transmission speeds and therefore a “fat pipe.” In 3 to 5 years IBM promises we will have much, much fatter pipes. (Link to full story.)

“We have worked out a way to ship almost inconceivable quantities of data at extremely low power,” said Bernie Meyerson, chief technologist for International Business Machines Corp.

Imagine 160 Gigabytes of data or an entire HD movie being downloaded to your computer or DVR box in one second! The implications of this new chip are staggering. Codecs, audio and video compression technologies, such as MPEG used in mp3, DivX and all the rest will no longer be necessary. Larger hard drives and bigger memory storage devices to collection your new tidal wave of data will be necessary. Online video web sites will contain larger, higher resolution clips which will certainly compete with traditional television broadcasting stations to a larger extent than they do now. Peer-to-peer networking schemes will be more important for sharing vast storage resources than bandwidth itself. Networked games will become higher resolution and more interactive. I can imagine two remotely located Nintendo Wii users playing a lifesized game of tennis through the network. My mind is on fire with ideas, get me a VC quick!