Seeds of change -- what's next?

I remember "ripping" a CD track to AIFF format back in 1996.  The file was enormous, not to mention basically useless.  But it was the first time I remember listing to full-length digital audio.  Broadband was several years away at that point, and I remember thinking that digital audio was interesting but impractical.

Now it's over 12 years later.  Broadband is ubiquitous.  Digital audio is the default way that most people buy music, and I can't imaging a situation where I'd run out to a store to buy a CD. The point here is that the seed was available back in '96, but it took a decade (and Steve Jobs) for it to become completely mainstream.

So what other seeds are out there? It's a fascinating thing to ponder for many reasons, not the least of which is that if you were to bet on the right product you could make a lot of money.  (See AAPL stock chart.)

Digital video is clearly in its infancy, but I think we're starting to see how it's all going to shake out.  Short video will have a hard time finding a monetization model (who is going to watch a 15-second ad for a 30-second video?), but long-form video like 'Lost' seems to do pretty well with advertising.  Pay-per-view will be a factor.  Everything will be IP-based.

But what else?  Here's my list of potential contenders:

-- Passive recommendations for products through social networks/services will change the way that goods and services are marketed.

-- Mobile applications with geographic information will probably change the way we purchase goods locally in the next 10 years.

-- In-car entertainment will change totally.  AM/FM/Satellite will fall prey to 2-way IP-based services either built into the car or added aftermarket.

-- Inevitable taxation of online purchases will take away a lot of the incentive to buy big ticket items online.  As a result, local commerce will need some kind of search engine.  Local merchants will compete on price like never before.

-- Face and location recognition services will be able to scan any photo/video for recognizable features, but photos will need to be run through one or more very complex services (e.g. YouTube / Flickr / other) for this to work. Photo and video search will get really interesting.

-- The news business will be completely transformed, if not decimated.  There has to be a way to win here, but it's going to require a much lower cost structure.  Look for the next CNN to pop up in the next few years, and it won't be Drudge/HuffPo/CNN/Fox/MSNBC. 

Other ideas?  I'd love to hear them.

 

Lost in Translation - Asian vs. Western UI and Visual Design

Over the last few weeks I've spent some time checking out the most popular Asian web sites to see how they differ from their Western counterparts like YouTube, Flickr, Facebook, eBay, Amazon, Gaia, Craigslist, etc.  

Take a site like Todou for example, which is a video sharing site in China.  A few things stand out when compared to YouTube — Todou has a colorful template, a lot of animated Flash elements, and much more content on the signed-out versions of the home page than what's shown on YouTube.  Where YouTube lists featured videos horizontally, Todou fills a grid.

Now take a look at CyWorld, a South Korean social networking site that's expanding internationally. Again, there's a lot more going on here even in the signed-out version, and again it's in a grid.  (Log out of your Facebook account and you'll see that the default home page is pretty sterile.)  

Now, hold your breath and go to Sohu, a Chinese web portal.  My Chinese is... uh... a little rusty, so I ran it through Google Translate to see this. As you can see, there's a lot going on here. It's very crowded, with more content than anyone could hope to take in visually in a single session.

Back in 2006, I sat in on a usability session in Beijing while at eBay.  We showed participants several web sites (eBay China and others) and had them tell us what they thought. Again and again participants told us through a translator that the eBay China site was "boring" and "untrustworthy."  Boring I could understand, but untrustworthy?  I asked the translator about this, and she told me that white space on a page made the participants uneasy... which led to feelings of untrustworthiness.

So it's pretty clear that visual design needs to be quite different in Asia, but what about the user interface?  

Interestingly, it's not that dissimilar.  Forms seem to be formatted more or less the same as you'd see on a Western site.  Tabs seem to work the same way.  Drop-down menus and buttons are just buttons.   Everything around the interface elements is different (colors, grids, animation), but the interface itself is about as familiar-looking as it gets.  It's a bit like finding a Starbucks on a busy Chinese street, but UI isn't really Western -- it seems to be universal.

Multi-national Internet companies face these issues every day, and I'd curious to hear from designers who have worked on Asian sites to find out more about their experience.  

What works, and what doesn't?  

Is it even fair to lump web sites into "Asian" and "Western" buckets? 

Have popular Asian web sites evolved over time into today's frenetic visual design, or did they start out this way because... duh... it's obviously the right way for them to look?

Is Craigslist rotting on the vine?

For a site that gets so much of the credit/blame for killing the newspaper industry, Craigslist is a mess of a product. More specifically, Craigslist's search features are a mess.

Maybe Craig and Jim like it this way. Or maybe the staff has convinced itself that messing with the secret sauce will break the spell. Or perhaps users just don't care.

My gut tells me that users actually do care a lot, and that Craigslist is rotting on the vine. I know people who now dread using Craigslist — a relatively new occurance, I think. A quick look at Compete.com shows that traffic is basically flat during an economic period when you might expect classifieds to do fairly well.

The site has three major problems:

• The site's category structure is very limited.
• The site's search engine is even more limited.
• The rigid geographic boundaries are completely arbitrary.
  

The system works well enough in cities where the number of listings is still relatively small, but here in the Bay Area it's anything but easy to use. One example: the Computers & Tech category isn't divided into sub-categories (Mac, PC, whatever.), so it's impossible to browse. 

Searching for "Mac" produces a different number of results than searching for "Macintosh" -- meaning that there is no synonym dictionary to help users find what they need. 

Geographically, it's impossible to search the South Bay and the Peninsula at the same time without also pulling in the North Bay and Santa Cruz.

Craigslist is entrenched, but the product has now fallen so far behind what's possible that serious competition is inevitable. 

I like Craigslist. I want them to succeed. But they need to get their head out of their sand and fix the product before it's too late. 

Retro is only cute for so long.  At what point does a product go from simple to broken?

Media Sherpas

Does anybody know why a TV station — I’m talking to you, KGO — would run a crawl line alerting viewers about the impending switch to digital TV on their digital channel?

As worked up TV stations and Congress are over the upcoming switch , they’re mostly ignoring the real switch that is already underway for some extra-early adopters like the types of people who would read a post like this one.

If you haven’t tried Boxee, try it. Especially if you’re a marketer. Boxee is an open Alpha test with all the expected bugs and UI issues that brings, but it’s a brilliant vision of a file-based entertainment future. Boxee runs on your Mac, PC, or AppleTV with some minor hacking. It can play video and audio content from your home network and from some Internet sources including Hulu, Comedy Central, and CNN. More interestingly, it lets you share what you’re watching with friends in your Boxee network, and it lets you see what others are watching too. (Subject to some privacy controls.) In other words, it’s a social media network.

Most of the TV shows available from the Internet via Boxee include ads that cannot be fast forwarded. This type of ad placement is still very experimental, and the ads are often annoyingly repetitive. (The same McDonalds spot appeared four times during a single South Park episode from Comedy Central.) This will change with time. Ads will become more relevant and less repetitive. Netflix’s new Watch Instantly streaming service is another example of this file-based trend. For the moment the service is free with a Netflix account, and sign-up is extremely easy. There are no ads to deal with, and watching movies from a vast online library is a revelation. It works on a computer and through media devices including Tivo boxes and Blu-ray players.

I’ve noticed two changes in my own behavior while using Boxee. First, I’m tearing through episodes of shows that I never got around to watching. Second, I’m fascinated by what other people are watching and it’s influencing my own viewing behavior to an unexpected degree. The social network part of Boxee is still a work-in-progress, but it’s fascinating and I think it’s going to create a new type of marketing based on passive sharing, not dissimilar to Facebook’s much-maligned Beacon initiative. With a few key exceptions — for me, my shameful Paula Deen addiction — I think we secretly want our friends to know what we’re watching as long as the sharing process is easy. For Boxee, it’s passive. Doesn’t get easier than that.

Boxee will have some challenges building a ratings system for content — partners won’t like it — but it needs to do it now. (Netflix has a great ratings system, but it’s sidelined by its status as a closed system limited to subscribers.) If Boxee executes, it could become a sherpa for this new world of decentralized media, a great position to be in if there ever was one.

Internet providers, especially cable companies, could deliver a buzz kill to this new world in the form of higher fees and data download restrictions. It’s certainly not in their best interests to become a dumb pipe and they’ll fight it just as hard as cell phone providers have in the US, but that seems to be their inevitable fate.

For me, Boxee and Netflix’s streaming service have been “ah ha” experiences akin to what I felt when I first used an iPhone in person. The future is file-based, on demand content over the Internet, delivered to any platform I have. Most content will be ad-supported, but some will be pay-per-view. I have no idea if the entertainment industry’s business models can manage this transition, but I think it’s unlikely they’ll have the stomach for it. New content providers will emerge with lower fixed costs and fewer revenue lines to protect, but this too will take time.

This is going to take a long time to shake out, but a very long time isn’t as long as it used to be. File-based entertainment is too good of a user experience to ignore. Ignore that crawl line across the top of your TV, and turn on Boxee. The switch already happened.