Ten Minutes With Jaiku April 26, 2007
Posted by Jeremy Wagstaff in cellphones, connectivity, contacts, photo sharing, presence, SMS, social networking, wireless.1 comment so far
What is it: Jaiku is a “rich presence” tool that allows users to create and share a “life stream” of updates about their location, their thoughts, their photos, the music they’re listening to, as well as links to their blogsand pretty much anything else they’re doing that can be accessed via an RSS feed.
What the company calls it: “Jaiku’s main goal is to bring people closer together by enabling them to share their presence. For us, presence is about everyday things as they happen – what you’re up to, how you’re feeling, where you’re going. We offer a way to connect with the people you care about by sharing presence updates with them on the Web and mobile.”
Executive Summary: It sounds like a waste of time, but it’s not. If you have people you’d like to stay in touch with, it’s a great way of keeping them updated, and following them. Especially if you have a Nokia phone. It’s also the future.
My ten minutes: Jaiku isn’t the easiest thing to get up to speed on. Sign up with a name, screen name, email address and password, and then you’ll see a box at the top of the screen where you can enter up to 140 characters. Those are your Jaikus.
So far, so Twitter. Jaiku is more about presence than chatter, though, so it make sense to add more feeds if you have them: they can be Flickr photos, Last.fm songs playing on your computer, or blogs you keep. These will end up in the same list as your Jaikus, meaning that if anyone is interested in you, they can also see at a glance what else you’re doing beyond Jaiku-ing. (You can add your Twitter feed as well, if you like.) Not that adding these feeds is terribly easy. Some are straightforward, some aren’t.
Once this is done, and you have a Nokia S60 type phone, this is where things get more useful. Download a small program and your cellphone’s contact list becomes alive, as anyone on your Jaiku contact list folds into the list and will have their Jaiku information updated in your phone. Similarly, you can update your Jaiku presence by simply opening a small window and typing in a short message. This is all done via data, not SMS.
Quibbles: Only working with Nokia phones severely limits the appeal of Jaiku outside the office. And finding other people on Jaiku is not easy. But it’s definitely a great way to ‘stalk’ your friends, and to allow other people to know what you’re up to. Good for families wanting to keep in touch without endless SMS messages along the lines of “where are you?”
Plus, there’s a certain snob appeal about Jaiku: it’s early days but there’s less riff-raff than on Twitter, and by focusing on ‘presence’ than on a sort of avian diarrhea of twittering, Jaiku saves itself from the occasional sensation Twitter gives off of mind numbing inanity.
I’m jeremy on Jaiku.
Verdict: Only for the truly inquisitive, for the stalker in you, or someone interested in what life is going to be like in the future.
Score: 7 out of 10
Ten Minutes with ShoZu April 24, 2007
Posted by Jeremy Wagstaff in blogging, cameraphones, cellphones, photo sharing, social networking, wireless.2 comments
What is it: ShoZu is a free service to ease uploading of video, photos and music from your cellphone to the Web. The company calls itself “a provider of mobile media exchange services” and describes its services (quite succinctly as) allowing “consumers to download and upload photos, videos, music, text and other digital content to and from the handset without the need to open a mobile browser, wait for pages to load, interrupt phone calls, start over in the event of a dropped connection, or sync to a PC.”
Exec summary: It does what it promises to do. Well.
My ten minutes: Sign up is easy and free of dodgy and misleading byways (“invite your friends! Oh, we already have!”) Once you’ve given the basics and have an account (free) you need to download the software. This is usually where things get painful, but I didn’t find them to be with ShoZu. Enter your phone number, get an SMS message with a link in it, and download it from there. The software works with most phones, although I noticed Palm OS is not supported (Windows Mobile Treos are.)
ShoZu doesn’t actually host the photos and stuff, so you need to have an account with another provider. In fact, this is a blessing: Who needs another account? It’s an impressive list of services that ShoZu works with, from Flickr to the BBC’s news photo submission service. You can configure settings with your accounts on any or all of these services, either on a computer or on your phone.
Once the software is installed on your phone, just take a photo or video and a menu pops up asking whether you want to post said multimedia work there. Say yes and off it goes in the background. The only sign that something is happening is, at least in a Nokia phone, a little arrow in the corner of the screen.
There are other parts of ShoZu worth a look. You can, for example, back up all your phone contacts securely to a website, if you like. You can add GPS tags to photos, if your phone supports it. There are things called ZuCasts which are like mini TV programs downloaded to your phone in the background.
Quibbles? Couldn’t see any easy way of adding more than one phone to an account, meaning you’d have to have more than one account. Who doesn’t have more than one phone these days? Also, I could never be quite sure on my phone what photos had actually been uploaded. I only discovered I’d backed up my contacts when I wandered around the website. Would be better to get some email notification of this, although one can subscribe to an RSS feed of everything one has uploaded.
Verdict: If you take photos on your phone and haven’t found an easy way to share them away from your computer, give it a shot.
Score: 7 out of 10
(Symbian screenshots kindly provided courtesy of software from Indonesia’s Antony Pranata.)
Ten Minutes With Egnyte April 16, 2007
Posted by Jeremy Wagstaff in backup, collaboration, editing, file sharing, productivity, web apps.1 comment so far
What is it: Egnyte describes itself as a “Web 2.0 content sharing solution that combines sharing, automatic organization and a powerful search capability. Using continuous synchronization, Egnyte seamlessly integrates the desktop with the web.” In English, that means a way to share, search and tag your documents with others online, keeping old versions and an audit of changes along the way. Its beta version was lauched April 15.
Executive summary: Promising quick and straightforward way of collaborating on documents if you don’t want to actually edit online. Not ready for primetime.
My ten minutes: Signing up is painless and requires no waiting around for an email confirmation. You’re then invited to upload files individually, or download an extra piece of software that will let you upload folders or bunches of files (obviously better if you’re planning on sharing a lot more files.)
It reminds me of Groove in the sharing idea, and the storing of version histories but it leverages Web 2.0 to add important extra features, including being able to search the content of files and tagging.
Uploading a single file was easy, following the instructions, although it is only possible to select one file at a time, and no folders. For that you need a widget, and that was when things started to go wrong for me. The widget loaded fine, and the process was self-explanatory, with the selected folder and subfolder but the folder and its subfolders acquiring a little orange ‘e’ to indicate they’d been “activated”, but that was as far as it went. Clicking the Done button merely took me back to the same page I’d been on, telling me I had to select folders. The system tray widget was no better: Clicking on “Upload now” merely brought up a message telling me an upload was in process:
replaced shortly thereafter by another telling me the upload was complete:
The folder in question never arrived alongside a file I had uploaded manually. Indeed, a second file I tried to upload manually suggested it was there, and yet upon closer inspection wasn’t. I still can’t see what I might have done wrong here, and if it was an important file I was sharing with my boss, I would be in a panic by now.
My verdict: The ten minutes rule doesn’t mean that if a product is broken it’s all over. Ten minutes, the theory goes, should be enough for a product’s qualities to reveal itself, not whether it works seamlessly. Egnyte, despite its frankly awful name, clearly has promise; the guys behind it have thought things through and it has the whiff of potential to it. But the problem is this: Online collaboration is fraught with peril, since you’re asking punters to entrust valuable documents to your servce. I’d say Egnyte needs another six months before it’s worth another ten minutes.
Score: 5 out of 10, but worth a second look.
Thanks to: StartupSquad (which has more details on features I wasn’t able to test.)
Ten Minutes Unsubscribing From Iambic April 13, 2007
Posted by Jeremy Wagstaff in unsubscribing.2 comments
What it is: No wonder people a) don’t like signing up for newsletters, and b) like the idea of RSS. Newsletters can be a b*tch to disentangle yourself from. Part of the reason is there’s no standard. So let’s start one.
Take iambic, for example, a purveyor of mobile software whose newsletters, for some reason, I am a subscriber to not once, but twice. I don’t mind one, but two is just frankly a waste of bits, so I decided to remove myself. The process was silly, timewasting, and misleading. So here are some guidelines for newsletter makers, based on the mistakes that iambic makes:
Rule 1: Be clear and visible on your email how someone can make sure they never get another one Iambic’s by contrast is obscure and doesn’t mention anything about removing, or unsubscribing. Instead it says, burried at the bottom:
If you can read that, you’ve got better eyesight than I. It says:
For prompt response to questions or comments, or to manage your iambic email subscriptions, please use the following links instead of replying.
Rule 2: Make the process of unsubscribing on your website a one– or two-step process. You have the technology; we haven’t got all day The link will take you to a “manage subscriptions” page where you’re asked to enter your email address (I always hate this bit, since I’m never sure whether I’m inviting more spam on my head. Good email lists will include a link which already contain your email address to make this step unnecessary.
Rule 3: People trying to unsubscribe don’t want to subscribe to more newsletters; nor do they want to give you any more information, at least not politely Another page tells me that:
To subscribe to any of the email types, please check the boxes.
To unsubscribe from one or all the email types, please uncheck the boxes or leave them blank.
This is not as easy as it sounds. First off, three boxes have already been checked, assuming I’m signing up for more newsletters, not trying to get rid of the ones I have. Not only that, I’m forced to fill in three more fields — First Name, Last Name, and select from a pull-down list of Professions — or an error message will appear and my unsubscription won’t go through. Not only that, the refreshed page with the error message will have rechecked any boxes I have unchecked, leading the unwary (or downright furious) to get more subscriptions should they click “submit” again. Whatever happened to “leaving them blank”?
By now, of course, I’m going to put anything in there to get out, and hopefully mess up whatever little survey they’ve got going. (‘Insurance’ was the worst profession I could find, as ‘Street walker’ and ‘Hobo’ weren’t available.
Verdict: A sad and unnecessary waste of my ten minutes. Still, it’s good to see how not to do these things, and perhaps iambic will respond to this and improve their procedures. It’s a simple thing really: if you want folk to subscribe to your newsletters, they need not only be as easy as RSS to subscribe to, but as easy to unsubscribe from.
Score: 0 out of 10
Ten Seconds With Homestead April 12, 2007
Posted by Jeremy Wagstaff in unsubscribing, website design, website hosting.5 comments
What is it: It’s supposed to be a review of Homestead, a U.S.-based website hosting service that offers a free first month, and then $5 a month thereafter.
My verdict: Don’t bother unless you’re willing to hand over your credit card for a ‘free’ trial.
My ten minutes: I test a lot of services and I hate wasting my time. For example, I hate not being told up front that ‘free’ does not mean ‘free as in the sense of not having to pay anything’, but free as in ‘we won’t tell you until you’ve committed to the signup process and entered some personal details that free actually means giving us your credit card details so we can charge you when you forget to cancel at the end of the trial period.’
I can understand why companies would request some personal details, and I can actually understand it if web site hosting, as in this case, requires credit card details to prevent fraud. But what I can’t stand is their not being upfront about it. In this case there is nothing on the homepage that suggests I’m going to have to hand over my credit card. In fact the big yellow button sounds like it’s free:
Or maybe I misread that. Maybe I miread the next page too, which offered no indication I was about to be asked for a credit card either (although I guess the ‘no obligation’ should throw up a flag):
It’s only after filling in all that stuff that I’m taken to another page and the switch is made: I need to hand over my credit card deails.
Now the thing is, I don’t really mind handing over my credit card. I don’t like it, and if I can avoid it I will. But if I’m given a good reason I might do it. If the reason was “we get a lot of short-term spam sites that abuse the 30–day trial so we need to know you’re serious” I would probably say yes. But Homestead don’t say that, or anything like it. They fudge it:
To me that’s not a reason. At any time during that month Homestead could ask for the credit card details to ensure the website would continue running without interruption. (They were very quick to ping me when I didn’t complete the sign-up procedure, so their automated email service is working OK.)
Based on experiences with sites like Napster (check out this litany of abuse here) I’m always very skeptical of companies that claim they won’t charge before the trial period is over. More pertinently, I’m very skeptical that companies will conscientiously remind customers they’re about to be charged for something they may well have forgotten about, or, heaven forbid, actually seek permission for the card to be charged when the month is up. Somehow I’ve not heard of companies doing this. Perhaps there are. But if they do I’d like to see it in writing: We won’t charge your credit card until the trial period is completely up — not a day before — and we will give you plenty of warning and the clear option to cancel before the charge is made.
And if websites argue they’re just avoiding scammers setting up dodgy websites, it’s a fair argument. Except, of course, good scammers have plenty of fake credit cards at hand, so I’m guessing that unless homestead actually confirm the card’s authenticity this is not much of a deterrent.
Anyway, I don’t mean to be too hard on Homestead. They’re not the only ones doing this. But as a point of principle, I’m guaranteeing readers of tenminut.es here and now I’m not going to be reviewing sites or online services that don’t let me assess them without handing over credit card details. And no ‘we’ll give you a special account’ stuff either. What I see is what you’d see if you tried it. Promise.
Score: 0 out of 10
Ten Minutes With Mindomo April 9, 2007
Posted by Jeremy Wagstaff in collaboration, Flash, mindmapping, productivity.3 comments
What is it: Mindomo is “a versatile Web-based mind mapping tool, delivering the capabilities of desktop mind mapping software in a Web browser – with no complex software to install or maintain.” Anyone familiar with mindmapping, and MindManager, will recognise the terrain. The company behind it is Romania-based Expert Software Applications.
Executive Summary: If you mind map, another useful option. If you don’t, a good place to start.
My ten minutes: Mindomo opens in a separate browser window and is, unsurprisingly, a Flash app. The interface is simple, and borrows more than a little from Microsoft Office’s ribbon idea (or maybe it’s a licensee?) This works well although as with Peepel, it tends to reduce space on the screen.
If you’re used to mindmaps, and in particular MindManager, Mindomo will be very straightforward, right down to the keyboard shortcuts for adding subbranches and branches. In fact in some ways it feels smoother than MindManager, although I don’t know why. There is a generous array of features available, from being able to change the shape of branches to adding a rudimentary image here and there to brighten things up.
I did hit some snags. Flash prevented me from selecting everything on the page when I wanted to change fonts or layout, and my effort to register (necessary if you want to save your mindmap) failed. Neither was I able to export to PDF (one of the supported formats): the process seemed to work but the file could not be found. I also found that I wasn’t able to import a MindManager map.
For collaboration, it seems to be possible to save a map as either a public or private one, and, if public, to be able to set whether others can read, copy, modify or delete those maps. As far as I can see it’s not possible to set whether a map is accessible only by certain other users. I’m guessing that is in the works.
Verdict: Great promise as a quick brainstorming app if you don’t have Mindmanager, or Freemind, or just want something quick and dirty. But it needs some work.
Score: 7 out of 10
Ten Minutes With Peepel April 6, 2007
Posted by Jeremy Wagstaff in office suites, productivity, web apps.add a comment
What is it Peepel is an online office suite comprising a word processor, calculator and spreadsheet, operating within its own desktop environment inside the browser.
Executive Summary: Early days, but a promising idea. Needs design tweaks, offline capability (in the works) and collaboration features to compete.
My ten minutes: A webpage starts you off, accessible in Office 2007 style with a drop down menu from the top left corner giving you access to the programs. The word processor, or WebWriter, and the spreadsheet, or WebSheet, are also pretty straightforward, opening in their own windows within the desktop. Office 207–like bars or ribbons appear at the top of the window giving access to the usual functions — a nice touch, although they take up too much space unless you’re lucky enough to have a huge screen at your disposal (typical problem where software is designed by dudes with massive displays.)
Everything is pretty intuitive and familiar, especially to anyone who has played around with Office 2007. A nice extra is a column of icons on the left side of the screen allowing you to move easily through the documents and programs you have open within the Peepel desktop. Once again, though, this reduces the amount of space you have left to actually do stuff.
I couldn’t find any way to import spreadsheets or documents (dragging and dropping, however, works well with documents) but exporting stuff is straightforward enough. A workspace manager allows you to save all the open windows and files in a particular way, another nice touch. The icons, though intuitive, all felt a bit uninspiring and well, childish. Maybe that’s intentional. I couldn’t find any way to collaborate on documents.
Verdict: This would be good for taking short notes or building small spreadsheets you want to work on when you’re on the move, or if you can’t affort an office suite. Not ready for more than that right now.
Score: 6 out of 10
Ten Minutes Getting Out of Zorpia April 2, 2007
Posted by Jeremy Wagstaff in unsubscribing.27 comments
Sometimes a service or product reveals its quality, or lack of it, when you try to leave it. Here’s the first in an occasional series on how to get out of a service, rather than how to get in it.
A few weeks ago I wrote about Zorpia the networking site. Some readers have written in complaining about the difficulties of deleting their account there, so I thought I would give it a try. The experience is indicative of the site’s real intentions, namely to bulk up membership numbers rather than to provide a real social space for users.
The best place to start when trying to remove yourself is the FAQ or help page. Amusingly “How do I delete my account” is at the bottom of the page in the ‘Common problems’ section.
From there you’ll be directed to your account page, where, if you look really, really carefully, and after a lot of white space, you’ll find a link to Terminate Account:
Click on that and you’re taken to the Account Termination page. Fill in the fields (don’t skip the reason; it’s a required field) and success! You’ve deleted your account:
No, wait a minute, there’s an error:
Try that a few times; you’ll get the same result. (I suspect that this may be a feature, not a bug. And don’t bother looking for a reference to the Error number: it changes each time: 1005797, 1005802, 1005807, 1005810 etc… Try it. It’s fun.)
Now try emailing support. I haven’t heard back yet, and neither have several folk who wrote into me. I’ll keep you posted.
Conclusion: Zorpia account deletion process is not up to standard, and may tell us more than we need to know about the service’s real intentions.
Postscript, two days later: Advised by email from Zorpia support to try again, I did, successfully:
Bye bye Zorpia.
