Greg Linden has a blog post entitled Marissa Mayer at Web 2.0 where he writes

Marissa started with a story about a user test they did. They asked a group of Google searchers how many search results they wanted to see. Users asked for more, more than the ten results Google normally shows. More is more, they said.

So, Marissa ran an experiment where Google increased the number of search results to thirty. Traffic and revenue from Google searchers in the experimental group dropped by 20%.

Ouch. Why? Why, when users had asked for this, did they seem to hate it?

After a bit of looking, Marissa explained that they found an uncontrolled variable. The page with 10 results took .4 seconds to generate. The page with 30 results took .9 seconds.

Half a second delay caused a 20% drop in traffic. Half a second delay killed user satisfaction.

This conclusion may be surprising -- people notice a half second delay? -- but we had a similar experience at Amazon.com. In A/B tests, we tried delaying the page in increments of 100 milliseconds and found that even very small delays would result in substantial and costly drops in revenue.

If you are a developing a consumer web site whose revenue depends on the number of page views you get, you need to print out that post and nail it to every bulletin board in your offices. One big problem with the AJAX craze that has hit the Web is how much slower websites have become now that using Flash and DHTML to add "richness" to Web applications is becoming more commonplace. My mind now boggles at the fact that I now see loading pages that last several seconds when visiting Web sites more and more these days.

Below is the graphic that shows up when you try to login to your Yahoo Mail beta inbox.

My girlfriend watched me waiting for my inbox to show up while the above animated graphic was displaying and joked that they should change the graphic to a tortoise crawling across the screen so you have a heads up about how long it's going to take. :)

Of course, Windows Live services have also been guilty of this as are most of the 'Web 2.0' websites out there. At the end of the day, it's better for me to get to my data as quickly as possible than it is for the experience to be 'rich'. Remember that.

 

I noticed today that the W3C has a draft spec named Widgets 1.0 that has the following abstract

This document describes widgets. It covers the packaging format, the manifest file config.xml, and scripting interfaces for working with widgets.

The type of widgets that are addressed by this document are usually small client-side applications for displaying and updating remote data, packaged in a way to allow a single download and installation on a client machine. The widget may execute outside of the typical web browser interface. Examples include clocks, stock tickers, news casters, games and weather forecasters. Some existing industry solutions go by the names "widgets", "gadgets" or "modules".

I read the spec and it's unclear to me after reading what problem it is actually trying to solve.  Is this supposed to make the lives of widget developers easier? Doesn't seem like it. Is it targetted at vendors that are building proprietary widget platforms like Yahoo!, Microsoft and Fox Interactive Media (MySpace's parent company)? Not really from what I read. At best, it seems this is trying to change the fact that the primary way of sharing widgets across sites is copying & pasting HTML code you find on places such as MySpace scripts and Video Code Zone by building a more complicated system which hopefully can then be integrated into Web browsers as native functionality to 'eventually' make things easier.

Yeah, right. Good luck with that.

 

A few days ago there was an article on the BBC News site entitled Zune problems for MSN customers which stated

But in a move that could alienate some customers, MSN-bought tracks will not be compatible with the new gadget. The move could also spell problems for the makers of MP3 players which are built to work with the MSN store.
...
The problem has arisen because tracks from the MSN Music site are compatible with the specifications of the Plays For Sure initiative. This was intended to re-assure consumers as it guaranteed that music bought from services backing it would work with players that supported it. MSN Music, Napster, AOL Music Now and Urge all backed Plays For Sure as did many players from hardware makers such as Archos, Creative, Dell and Iriver.

In a statement a Microsoft spokesperson said: "Since Zune is a separate offering that is not part of the Plays For Sure ecosystem, Zune content is not supported on Plays For Sure devices." The spokesperson continued: "We will not be performing compatibility testing for non-Zune devices, and we will not make changes to our software to ensure compatibility with non-Zune devices."
...
Microsoft said that its Windows Media Player will recognise Zune content which might make it possible to put the content on a Plays For Sure device. However, it said it would not provide customer support to anyone attempting this.

On a similar note there was an article entitled Trying Out the Zune: IPod It’s Not in the New York Times today which states

Microsoft went with its trusted Windows strategy: If you code it, the hardware makers will come (and pay licensing fees). And sure enough, companies like Dell, Samsung and Creative made the players; companies like Yahoo, Rhapsody, Napster and MTV built the music stores.

But PlaysForSure bombed. All of them put together stole only market-share crumbs from Apple. The interaction among player, software and store was balky and complex — something of a drawback when the system is called PlaysForSure.“Yahoo might change the address of its D.R.M. server, and we can’t control that,” said Scott Erickson, a Zune product manager. (Never mind what a D.R.M. server is; the point is that Microsoft blames its partners for the technical glitches.) Is Microsoft admitting, then, that PlaysForSure was a dud? All Mr. Erickson will say is, “PlaysForSure works for some people, but it’s not as easy as the Zune.”

So now Microsoft is starting over. Never mind all the poor slobs who bought big PlaysForSure music collections. Never mind the PlaysForSure companies who now find themselves competing with their former leader. Their reward for buying into Microsoft’s original vision? A great big “So long, suckas!” It was bad enough when there were two incompatible copy-protection standards: iTunes and PlaysForSure. Now there will be three.

(Although Microsoft is shutting its own PlaysForSure music store next week, it insists that the PlaysForSure program itself will live on.)

Microsoft’s proprietary closed system abandons one potential audience: those who would have chosen an iPod competitor just to show their resentment for Apple’s proprietary closed system. To make matters worse, you can’t use Windows Media Player to load the Zune with music; you have to install a similar but less powerful Windows program just for the Zune. It’s a ridiculous duplication of effort by Microsoft, and a double learning curve for you.

So how is the Zune? It had better be pretty incredible to justify all of this hassle.

As it turns out, the player is excellent.

On days like this, I miss having Robert Scoble roaming the halls in the B0rg cube. It sucks when you let the press tell your story for you.

 

It looks like there has been an update to Windows Live Spaces with some obvious new features such as The What's New page and some not so obvious features such as fixing the fact that gadgets on Windows Live Spaces cannot save user preferences.

What does that mean for users of Windows Live Spaces? For one it means that my Embedded Video Gadget, Flickr gagdet and Photo Album browser gadget now all work in Windows Live Spaces. I'm going to be a gadget writing fool this weekend. Job #1 will be adding support for embedding SoapBox videos in my Embedded Video Gadget. The next will be porting some of the cool gadgets I saw at Widgets Live and getting them into Windows Live Gallery. 

By the way, you can see my gadgets in action at http://carnage4life.spaces.live.com. The video gadget should be playing the White & Nerdy video from YouTube and the Flickr gadget should be showing pictures from Mike Torres's public photo sets.

Update: The Windows Live Spaces team has blogged about the recent changes in their blog post entitled What’s new in Windows Live Spaces.
 

From the Microsoft press release entitled Microsoft Rallies Developers to Build Next-Generation Applications we learn

LAS VEGAS — Nov. 6, 2006 — Microsoft Corp. today unveiled new technologies that enable developers to build next-generation interactive applications for Windows Vista™, the 2007 Microsoft^® Office system and the Web. The new technologies are designed to help developers build Web services and connected, service-oriented applications that deliver the levels of security, reliability and differentiation that business and consumers expect.
...
The technologies announced today include the following:
•    The release to manufacturing of Microsoft .NET Framework 3.0, which provides advances for building rich, interactive client applications (Windows Presentation Foundation), communication and workflow (Windows Communication Foundation and Windows Workflow Foundation) and online identity management (Windows CardSpace).

So it looks like v1 of Avalon, Indigo and InfoCard are finally out. Congratulations to all the people who've been working on these technologies for the last couple of years. It'll be interesting to see what kind of changes to Windows GUI applications comes from the availability of WPF and also whether the developer community agrees that WCF supports building RESTful Web services as much as some folks have been telling me.

 

Torsten created a mockup of the Options tab for Attachments & Podcasts in the next version of RSS Bandit which is currently codenamed Jubilee and we've gotten into quite a debate about it. The Attachments/Podcasts tab of the Options dialog is shown below

So what are the points of contention?

1. Dare: We shouldn't have two download locations, one for podcasts and one for attachments
   Torsten: What about people who want to copy supported file formats to their hardware device (e.g. MP3s) but have everything else go to local folders?

2. Torsten: My MP3 player doesn't handle subfolders well so all podcasts need to be placed in the same folder.
   Dare: Most podcast clients create a folder structure where each podcast goes into a subfolder that is named after the feed. Perhaps we need an option for 'place podcasts in subfolders named after the feed'?

3. Dare: When creating playlists in iTunes or WMP, should we create one über-playlist with all podcasts or one playlist per feed? Perhaps we need an option for this as well?

4. Torsten: With all these additional options perhaps we need an 'Attachments' tab and a 'Podcasts' tab?
   Dare: Wouldn't that be weird given that most of the settings from the 'Attachments' tab would apply to podcasts as well?

Let us know what you think about the various points of contention and feel free to let us know if there are other points of contention that you have with the above dialog and the discussion around it.
 

From the press release entitled Microsoft Adds 3-D City Models to Live Search we learn

REDMOND, Wash. — Nov. 6, 2006 — Microsoft Corp. today announced U.S. availability of Virtual Earth™ 3D, a new online mapping interface that is part of the Live Search offering, providing consumers with a three-dimensional experience to search, browse and explore the real world online.

When people visit Live Search (http://live.com), type a query into the search box and click the “Maps” tab, they get their search results in a map context that offers the option to explore the area using two-dimensional views (aerial and bird’s-eye) or three dimensional models with Virtual Earth 3D. This new technology compiles photographic images of cities and terrain to generate textured, photorealistic 3-D models with engineering level accuracy.

Again the VE team proves why they are my favorite team at Windows Live. The team has also blogged about the changes in their blog post entitled Spaceland is Live! which includes a screenshots. This is hot. I'm off to a launch party in a few hours here in SF and I can't wait to high five some of the folks behind this feat of technological sweetness. 

 

These are my notes from the session on Success Story: PhotoBucket.

PhotoBucket is a video and image hosting site that sees 7 million photos and 30,000 videos uploaded daily. They serve over 3 billion pieces of media a day. The site has 15 million unique users in the U.S. (20 million worldwide) and has 80,000 new accounts created daily. There is now a staff of 55 people whose job it is to moderate content submissions to ensure they meet their guidelines.

The top sites their images used to be linked from used to be eBay and LiveJournal but now the key drivers of traffic are now social networking sites such as MySpace and Xanga. There is 30% - 40% overlap between their user base and social network website users

There was some general advise about widgets such as being careful about hosting costs which may pile up quick if your widgets become popular and also about trying to monetize users via your widgets because some sites frown upon that behavior such as eBay. However well designed and compelling widgets can drive a lot of traffic back to your site, the best example of this to date being YouTube.

The speaker then gave a timeline of notable occurences in the MySpace widgets world such as MySpace blocking Revver & YouTube to the recent explosion of new widgets in the past few months from MeeboMe to a number photo slideshow widgets from the major image hosting services.

Pete Cashmore over at Mashable.com has compiled some statistics on the most popular widgets on MySpace which shows the relative popularity of PhotoBucket's widgets in comparison to other services.

So what's in a name? They've renamed the feature from BucketFeatures to Widgets and now to 'Slide Shows' because none of their non-Silicon Valley users knew what widgets were. After the rename from 'Widgets' to 'Slide Shows', the usage of the feature almost doubled within a month.

They've also designed a JWidget which allows people to log-in to their PhotoBucket account to access their videos and images. Users can upload images and videos . This way people can outsource both image upload and content moderation to PhotoBucket. Now have 16,000,000 logins a month via JWidget from about 500 partner sites. It is amed JWidget because the developer's name begins with 'J'. :)

During the Q&A someone asked if they support you have tagging & open APIs. The response wa sthat they don't do tagging and their user base has never asked for tagging. With 2500 support tickets a day, none of them have ever been about tagging. Also, since it is just image hosting service, tagging is probably more appropriate for the blog post or profile the image is appearing in than on the hosted image. They don't have an No API primarily due to resource constraints, there are only 40 people at the company working on it.

 

These are my notes from the session on Success Story: MeeboMe.

Meebo started as a way for the founders to stay in touch with each other when they were at places where they couldn't install their IM client of choice. They realized that Instant Messaging hadn't really met the potential of Web and decided to create a startup to bring IM to the Web. Today they have grown to a site with 1 million logins daily, 4 million unique users a month and 64 million messages sent a day.

MeeboMe is an embeddable IM windows you can drop on any webpage. People can see your online status. Even cooler is that it allows the Meebo user to see people who is viewing that page and then they can send an IM to the page in real time while they are viewing the page. That is fucking cool. I'm so blown away that I've decided to figure out a way to get MeeboMe on Windows Live Spaces and will start looking into how to get that to happen when I get back to work..

There are three main reasons they built the MeeboMe widget; It meets their core mission of bringing IM to the Web, it drives use of Meebo.com and their users asked for it. :)

Their design principles have been quite straightforward. They have used Flash and protocols like Jabber/XMPP that already exist and that they are familiar with to ease development. They try to keep features to a minimum and focus on making Meebo.com act like the traditional IM experience. They have had t deal with performance issues around sending/receiving messages and showing changes to a user's online presence without significant lag. They are also very driven by user feedback and the Meebo blog is embedded in the Meebo web experience when users sign in. User feedback is how they determined that being able to show emoticons in instant messages was more important to users than being able to add IM buddies from Meebo.

MeeboMe is used in a lot of places such as education by high school teachers and college professors as way to give students a way to contact them. Librarians have also used it as a way to have patrons contact the librarian about questions by placing the MeeboMe widget on the front page of the library's website. There is a radio DJ takes requests from the MeeboMe widget on his site. There are also retail sites that use MeeboMe for customer support. One trend they didn't expect is that people place different MeeboMe widgets on different pages on their site si they can have a different buddy list entry for each page.

During the Q&A someone asked if MeeboMe drove account creation on Meebo.com and the answer was "Yes". They had their largest number of new accounts up to that date when they launched the widget.

 

These are my notes from the session on Fox Interactive Media by Dan Strauss.

Fox Interactive Media (FIM) is the parent company of MySpace. Also owns MySpace, IGN, Fox.com, FoxSports.com, AskMen.com, Rotten Tomatoes and Gamespy. They have 120 million visitors across all the sites.

They are buying small dev teams like Sidereus and Newroo as well as big companies like MySpace & IGN. They created FIM Labs so that some of the small dev teams can coninue to be innovative. FIM Labs focuses on incubation of new technologies, product development and technology evangelization to FIM properties. The folks from Sidereus worked on the Spring Widgets platform. Announcing a new platform named Spring Widgets.

Why widgets? They have a goal of to cross-pollinating users across the various FIM properties and also create a platform that can tie their businesses together. Widgets have been gaining traction and seemed like the right vehicle for furthering their goals.

Sidereus had a desktop background and researched Konfabulator, Dashboard and Vista gadgets.They also looked at Web widgets specifically AJAX and Flash widgets being used by MySpace users. They want users to be able to add widgets for FIM websites to their MySpace profiles and their desktop. From the Sping platform site a user can find a widget then add it to my MySpace. No more cutting and pasting code, the experience is similar to Windows Live Gallery for MySpace. Users can also drag and drop widgets from the Web onto the desktop. Only the Windows desktop widgets are supported for now but Mac support is on the way.

The Spring Widgets platform is 100% flash. Adding a desktop widget requires installing the Spring widgets runtime in addition to having Flash installed. This runtime is less than 2MB. There is an SDK so widget developers get APIs that can tell if the user is onlne or offline, store some persistent state, tell certain UI conditions such as the widgets window size and more. There is also a Web simulation tool developers can test their widgets without having to upload them to a Website.

The talk was followed by a demo showing how easy it is to build a Spring widget using WYSIWYG Flash development tools. They also announced a partnership with FeedBurner.

There were several questions during the Q&A that resulted in an answer of "we're still figuring things out". It was clear that although the technology may be ready there are a number of policy questions that are still left to be answered such as whether there will be integration of the Spring Widgets site into the MySpace UI (similar to how Windows Live gallery is integrated into Windows Live Spaces or what the certification process will be for getting 3rd party widgets hosted on the Spring Widgets site?

Despite the open questions this is definitely a very bold move on the part of Fox Interactive Media. It does the question though that if every widget platform has its own certified widgets gallery that use their own platforms (e.g. Flash in the case of Spring Widgets, DHTML and XML in the case of Windows Live Gallery and proprietary markup in the case of Yahoo! Widgets Engine there is either going to have to be some standardization or else there may be a winner takes all where widget developers target one or two major widget platforms because they don't have the resources to support every homebrow Flash or AJAX platform out there.