uTag’s Ten Minutes October 21, 2008
Posted by Jeremy Wagstaff in advertising, browsing.1 comment so far
Here’s another idea that sounds good, but isn’t: It’s sneaky, and, for me most important, will further bewilder and turn off ordinary users.
Utag works like this. Insert a link to a website in your blog but preface it with a utag link. Clicking on the link will take the user to the site linked to, but will add a banner frame at the bottom of the browser window (it used to be at the top but uTag listened to the complaints at put it at the bottom):
This sucks on lots of different levels. For one thing, the URL in the browser window is the uTag URL, not the actual website. Among other things, this means the title of the page itself won’t appear in the browser bar:
(This is what it should say:
Not only is this going to anger websites, but it’s also, presumably, going to be heaven for scammers.
This banner frame, by the way, will continue to sit there until you type something fresh in the address bar; clicking on links in the page above the bar will not remove the bar. That can only be done by clicking on the x to the right:
which will take you back to the first page you visited within the nasty uTag banner frame link thingy.
The people behind uTag say all this is designed to monetise your links and encourage people to link outwards. It’s true that this is a problem—one thing I hate is the misleading links that appear to go the website or page mentioned in the link, but which in fact direct inwards to another page on the website itself.
But guys, this is not the answer. And here’s why:
- it’s confusing to ordinary users. Big players like About.com might be able to get away with it—tho they shouldn’t—but if this sort of thing happens throughout the web ordinary folk are not going to know which part of a website belongs where.
- it’s theft. You’re doing the very 1990s thing of trying to put your advertising on other people’s pages. This didn’t wash then and it won’t wash now.
- It breaks pages. As outlined above, it undermines the usability of other people’s websites and pages.
- It’s almost certainly a security risk. I don’t know how but I can imagine bad guys loving this kind of thing.
- I’m sure there are other reasons this won’t work. This guy has a few, including the point that if you replace all your outgoing links with uTags, then if the service dies, so will your site in the Google rankings.
ShifD’s Ten Minutes February 25, 2008
Posted by Jeremy Wagstaff in browsing, cellphones, information, mobile apps, web apps.3 comments
What is it?
ShifD calls itself “a mobile application that provides users the capability to seamlessly shift content back and forth between their desktop computers and mobile devices.” In English, it’s a way to store snippets, links and maps on either your desktop/laptop or your mobile and access them from any of them. Useful if you’re reading a paper at lunch and want to remind yourself to check something out, or on your way to an appointment and need a map on your cellphone to guide you.
My ten minutes’ worth:
Signing up is painless and doesn’t require lots of personal information.
You can add stuff via the web page (above), via a toolbar plugin (actually a bookmarklet; no need to add extra information, so it’s pretty quick) or via a standalone application, built within Adobe’s AIR platform:
Add text or drag it (or a link) into the box at the top, select one of the three buckets (Notes, Places or Links) and automatically one of the three sections below will be updated, depending on what you’ve dragged there.
This creates an archive of interesting stuff, easily accessible by web or widget. Then there’s your mobile.
The mobile side is where this might be most useful, and in a sense the point of the whole thing, but right now it’s not really got much to say for itself. At some point you should be able to send an SMS to yourself of something you like, which would be simple.
For now, however, there are a couple of things you can do. You can view the notes you’ve sent to yourself. And you can, or should be able to, view the map links you send to youself as maps in your mobile phone browser. This, I have to say, would be very useful, but it’s not working for me yet. Then there’s using your cellphone to input stuff–I often find myself wanting to make notes which can then appear somewhere, and most times I use email for that. ShifD in theory offers a better way of doing this, but I hate doing stuff in a mobile browser: Adding a note here requires you to sign in, and navigate to the page to add a note:
Adding the note is straightforward enough:
Which will then turn up on your page of notes you can view in any browser (although you’ll need to refresh the page to make that happen; it won’t update automatically, apparently): 
I also couldn’t get links or notes I added via the desktop application to show up in my mobile browser, for some reason.
Verdict:
It’s nicely designed, and really aims to try to file a hole in the way we collect and access loose data. Once the mobile side works, and the numerous bugs are ironed out, I think it could be quite a useful tool. There’s always a problem with these kinds of things, tho. How sticky are they? It’s got to be a compellingly simple and powerful tool for anyone other than real geeks to get involved in, and I’m not sure the ShifD folks quite have it.
Footnote:
Perhaps the most interesting thing about ShifD is that it’s developed by two guys from within The New York Times’ R&D Lab, so you can’t help wondering where something like this might fit into the world of newspapers.
I’d love to see, for example, a five-digit code at the end of each news story in my newspaper/magazine that I could key into my phone and which would then store a copy of that story on my desktop. Would save me carryinga magic marker around and then forgetting to clip it when I got home. Forget reading the NYT on my handheld: That ain’t going to happen to an old fogey like me; but I’d love a way to store what I liked somewhere useful so that I wouldn’t forget it.
Thanks to:
New York Times Launching Its Mobile-To-PC Content Sharing Service
BlueOrganizer’s Ten Minutes May 27, 2007
Posted by Jeremy Wagstaff in bookmarks, browsing, organizers.add a comment
Intro: BlueOrganizer is a browser-based tool for intelligently adding information to what you’re looking at in your web-page. Instead of this information being added “bottom up” by other users via services like del.icio.us, it’s added top down, via BlueOrganizer’s parsers, services and algorithms. The result: contextual links on the fly.
How the company sees it: “BlueOrganizer is the new smart-browsing technology for Firefox. It automatically recognizes things like books, wine, travel destinations and offers contextual shortcuts between your favorite sites.”
Exec Sum: Useful but confusing tool for adding contextual information to your browsing. Only for geeks and people who buy a lot of stuff online.
My tenminut.es: Installation was pretty straightforward, but after that things were less clear. BlueOrganizer is at its most basic a button on your browser toolbar that changes color when you visit a website it has information on. Even if it doesn’t you can still access further links by either right-clicking on the page or the pull-down menu next to your address bar:
Visit a web page like Amazon, or anything that sells stuff like wine, music, books, videos etc, and you should find links to relevant sites, along with pre-prepared searches on del.icio.us, Google etc. Select a word, right click on it and the BlueOrganizer contextual menu will offer up a smorgasbord of relevant searches. (There are other features that BlueOrganizer offers but that would have taken me way beyond the ten minutes to figure out.)
Gripes: It felt slow and sluggish on my computer. Thumbnails of websites were slow to generate (they’re still generating.) And the way BlueOrganizer adds itself at the top of my pop-up menu meant I found myself having to wait until its submenu had loaded before I could do anything:
More importantly, I found myself not really getting it. I had to go some way beyond my ten minutes to figure out what it was about; I was surprised it was less intuitive and, frankly, mind-blowing, than I expected, given I’m an admirer of Alex Iskold’s ideas. The help pages weren’t particularly helpful either: I quickly found myself on a “page not found.” Even the example given in the tutorial, the Amazon page on the Nintendo Wii, didn’t always do as advertised, instead throwing up an empty submenu.
Verdict: Nice idea, and popular among the Web 2.0 crowd for bringing the Semantic Web a step closer. Needs a bit of work both on the usability and on the range of stuff it has information on and, ironically, more contextual help to bring it out of the techie ghetto. BlueOrganizer, for all the vision of its creator and its promise, needs to find a way of conveying its usefulnes to ordinary Joes in less time.
Score: 5 out of 10
