Monthly Archives: October 2011

Google’s management doesn’t use Google+ ?

This site is just great; we wish we had found it earlier: theunderstatement.com

There aren’t many bloggers that take a data analytics approach to popular hype: the kind of stuff that Rich Barton called the “Y Combinator, TechCrunch, Benchmark, Sequoia spin cycle” Here’s another beauty of a pie chart:

The extent to which Google's senior management use Google+The extent to which Google's senior management use Google+
The extent to which Google's senior management use Google+

And the money quote: “In total, of the 18 most senior people charged with overseeing Google, 11 have either not joined or have never made a single public post, and 5 have barely used it at all.”

 

If Google is innovating like crazy, why aren’t Android users benefiting?

There’s a remarkable graphic over at the theunderstatement.com that shows how infrequently updates to Androids have made it into the hands of end-users. Here’s the graphic and the money quote:

Android and iPhone update history
Android and iPhone update history from theunderstatement.com

Other than the original G1 and MyTouch, virtually all of the millions of phones represented by this chart are still under contract today. If you thought that entitled you to some support, think again:

  • 7 of the 18 Android phones never ran a current version of the OS.
  • 12 of 18 only ran a current version of the OS for a matter of weeks or less.
  • 10 of 18 were at least two major versions behind well within their two year contract period.
  • 11 of 18 stopped getting any support updates less than a year after release.
  • 13 of 18 stopped getting any support updates before they even stopped selling the device or very shortly thereafter.
  • 15 of 18 don’t run Gingerbread, which shipped in December 2010.
  • In a few weeks, when Ice Cream Sandwich comes out, every device on here will be another major version behind.
  • At least 16 of 18 will almost certainly never get Ice Cream Sandwich.

Also worth noting that each bar in the chart starts from the first day of release – so it only gets worse for people who bought their phone late in its sales period.

It’s well worth reading the entire blog post, which is one of the most detailed analyses we have seen in a while. While Google has done a great job of rapidly innovating on the Android platform, they have completely neglected the job of getting these innovations into the hands of end-users.

A new pricing structure, reflecting a mature product

Now that we are well and truly out of beta, we have updated our pricing structure to reflect the maturity and unique features of the Kerika software.

We still have the same great freebies as before:

  • Everyone starts with a free Standard Account, which lets them create an unlimited number of projects, and have an unlimited number of visitors to these projects, so long as they keep the overall Account Team size limited to the Account Owner and two other Team Members.
  • People working in academia, which includes schools, colleges, universities and research institutions get free Accounts, which can include up to 20 Team Members.
  • People involved in open-source or advocacy projects also get free Accounts, which can include up to 20 Team Members.

For people working in commercial settings, the new pricing is as follows:

  • Once your Account Team size gets past 3 (i.e. you Account includes more than just you and two of your colleagues or friends), you need to upgrade to the Professional Account, which give you an Account Team of 20 people. This now costs $66.67 per month, which works out to just $3.33 per user per month.
  • If your team grows even larger, you can upgrade to the Premium Account which gives you an Account Team of 200 people. This now costs $333.33 per month, which works out to just $1.67 per user per month.

If you are an enterprise customer, give us a call.

Why it took so long to get the Back Button working

We finally got the browser Back button working (along with the keyboard backspace key) to help you navigate back and forwards through your Kerika pages and other websites that you may be browsing at the same time.

You might be wondering why it took so long; after all, the Back button has existed in browser since the very beginning, and “breaking the Back button” is one of Jakob Nielsen‘s cardinal sins of Web usability.

The story is somewhat complicated, and it helps to understand two critical features of Kerika:

  • Kerika lets you have multiple projects open at any time, each within its own tab. In other words, Kerika lets you create tabs within a browser tab. Since all of these Kerika tabs are within a single browser tab, in some sense they all share the same URL as far as the browser is concerned. This makes things tricky for us, since each Kerika page actually has its own unique URL. So, how can we map several URLs, for several Kerika pages, to a single browser tab? Hmm…
  • Kerika offers super-fast updates when somebody on your project team makes a change to a project page that you are viewing: we aim for sub-second responsiveness in terms of letting you know that something has changed in your project. You don’t get that kind of speed using AJAX, which is what most people think means “real-time Web”. (That’s just so Web 2.0…) Instead, we use a newer technology called Comet, which is based upon the concept of “long polling”.

These constraints made it tricky for us to get the Back button working: we had to be able to “load” the browser’s Back button with a new URL every time you switch between Kerika tabs, and we had to do this fast enough to not compromise our exacting standards for delivering real-time performance.

We were finally able to do this because modern browsers are now offering Web applications easier ways to load the Back button stack in each browser tab. This is relatively new, and now supported across enough modern browsers for us to be able to offer this (seemingly routine) feature!

A major new release: snapshots of pages within pages!

The latest version of Kerika, hot off the presses, contains our biggest innovation yet: if you have pages contained within pages, these will now show up as small snapshots.

Here’s an example of a set of projects, as viewed from the My Projects page of an Account:

A thumbnail view of a project page
A thumbnail view of a project page

Projects can now be viewed as little thumbnails: this lets you see, at a glance, what’s inside a particular project!

This feature extends all the way inside a project that consists of a series of nested pages. Take, for example, the Product Management page shown above: if you open it up, you will see that it contains some sub-projects within it, and these sub-projects – which have their own pages – can also be viewed as thumbnails:

A subproject also shows up as a thumbnail
A subproject also shows up as a thumbnail

This feature is probably the coolest innovation ever! It took a really long time for us to build, since we were working on this while doing all the other usability improvements, bug fixes and new features we have delivered over the past few months, and we think it will improve the overall usability of Kerika in a very big way.

There are all sorts of side-benefits to this feature:

  • Now, you can upload a snapshot of the project to LinkedIn and Facebook along with your comments; the picture will contain a live link to your project.
  • We have made it possible for you to embed a snapshot of a Kerika page in your own website or blog, using the Share! button that’s now more powerful than ever.

These snapshots of pages are automatically updated whenever a member of your project team makes a change to the project: we wait a couple of minutes after the last change has been made before producing a new snapshot to avoids sending you a flurry of new images.

There are also two new ways for you to embed either a Kerika page, which you can use as a regular website page, or the entire Kerika application, in your own website or blog. (This is a big enough topic to deserve it’s own blog post.)

And there’s more to our latest version!

  • You can see the page URL of any project at any time (unless you are using Internet Explorer which continues to lag in its support for the HTML5 standard.)
  • When you upload documents to a project page, they are now stored in your own Google Docs account, not the Google Docs account of the Project Leader. This is a big change, but one that was necessary to allow the use of the same document in multiple projects. Previously, we passed ownership of the document to the Project Leader, but this meant that ownership could pass through several people’s hands if the same document was used in multiple projects.
  • The browser’s Back button (and the keyboard backspace key) work now! Yeah, it took us a while to get this working, but there were some serious hurdles that we had to overcome first, relating to the way different browsers support HTML5. More on this in a subsequent blog post.
  • We have added a new diamond shape to help you draw flowcharts. We are not keen to add a lot of shapes; we want to keep the Kerika user interface clean and uncluttered, but we felt that a diamond shape could really help with flowcharts so we have added our first new shape in six months!
  • Pages now automatically refresh if the application detects that there was a problem connecting to the server. The old dialog box that used to pop-up asking you to refresh your browser – which we found as annoying as you did – has gone away.
  • You can now add a Twitter feed to a page by just providing “@name” as the URL. Adding Twitter feeds to Kerika pages is becoming more popular with our users, so we made the process of using the Magic Plus button simpler: just enter “@kerika”, for example, when you use the Magic Plus button to add content from the Internet and you will get our Twitter feed added to your Kerika page.
  • Speaking of which, the Magic Plus button got even more magicky: now you can add content from dozens of third-party sources to a Kerika page. (You can see a handful of them listed on our website, but don’t be shy: just add any kind of URL and see if Kerika can’t automagically figure out how best to show it on your project pages.)

We also spent some time improving our text blocks, after seeing just how popular this feature was becoming with our users:

  • We have better icons for the buttons; the old ones weren’t as intuitive as they could have been.
  • We have added a new background fill color so that you can have even fancier text blocks.
The text block feature has better buttons and a new background fill color capability
The text block feature has better buttons and a new background fill color capability

We have done a ton of usability improvements and bug fixes, as usual, and we will continue to do so in the future…

  • One usability improvement was to “undo” a previous improvement: we had made a change in our last version that we thought was a good idea, but it turned out that everyone liked it, even us, so we have taken that out. Now, when you resize an item on your page using the grab handles, the item resizes in just one direction rather than in all directions.
  • We made it easier to add large (high-resolution) pictures to your Kerika pages. Previously, high-res pictures would appear initially with full resolution and crowd out everything on the canvas. Now, pictures appear with a maximum initial size of 640×480 pixels, and you can, of course, resize it to be larger if you like.

Finally, we have revamped our website completely and would love to get your feedback. We are featuring sample projects on our home page, and the Example pages.

We want to feature your work on our site! Create projects that are open to the public, that show your skills and share your knowledge, that related to open-source, advocacy, political action, interests in hobbies and sports… It’s all good.

Science project: does spam attract spam?

We get a ton of spam on this blog, all from robots so they appear in waves: dozens of similar sounding comments that are attached randomly to various blog posts.

A little while ago we decided to run a little science experiment: we took one of the funnier spam comments (they are all inadvertently funny, since they are composed by people who have a shaky command of the English language), and decided to reuse it as blog posting.

The science experiment was to see if a spam blog posting would attract the same amount of spam as a real blog posting: in other words, to test whether the spam engines made any attempt to read the content of blogs before providing their inane commentary.

The results are in: spam blog postings attract as much spam as real blog postings.

Goodbye, Internet, it was nice knowing you…

(And, our thanks in advance to all the spam engines that will respond to this blog posting: keep up the unintended humor; it makes us feel superior.)

The “S” stands for Siri, for speech.

Apple just announced a new platform and nobody noticed.

Far too much of the commentary from Wall Street about the launch of the iPhone 4S has been superficial, focusing on the fact that it is a “4S” and not a “5”. Why, oh why, wail the analysts, couldn’t Apple just have called it the iPhone 5 and made everyone happy?

This misses a rather big point about the iPhone 4S: the “S” may ostensibly stand for “speed”, since the new phones have a faster processor, but in our opinion the “S” really stands for Siri, as in “speech”.

OK, so we don’t have our hands on a real iPhone either, which means we are guessing, too, and using the very limited collection of videos and demos that are publicly available for our guesswork/analysis, the most extensive of which is Apple’s own promotional video.

This promo video, however, does provide a very good indicator of the vast potential of the new speech platform that Apple has just launched. Yes, there’s a whole new platform for personal computing out there now, thanks to Siri, and it’s not just limited to iPhones.

Siri is more than speech processing: it is an impressive attempt to bring interactive voice response (IVR) to the masses in a way that does not immediately induce rage against the machine. There are two major innovations with Siri, only one of which has gotten any real attention:

  • There is the AI needed to understand the user’s speech and translate the nouns, verbs and indirect references (like “this weekend”) into API calls, and here Siri promises to be a considerable leap forward from the kind of hugely annoying systems we all accustomed to dealing with when we call our bank or insurance company.
    There is also the AI needed to generate voice output from the system, and here Siri looks like it could do with some work, particularly if it is to sound less synthetic.
  • The far more impressive work is the Siri’s integration with the calendar, email, Google Maps and iTunes programs, as well as external web services like weather.com. This is the new platform that just got launched: the integration of a speech interface to all personal computing devices: not just phones, but also tablets, laptops and TVs.

The iPhone 4S will debut with Siri working seamlessly with mail, calendar, Google Maps, SMS, weather, and basic Web searches. But this is just the start: what Siri does today is similar to what the iPhone 1 did on the day it launched, when it came with a handful of standard applications for email, calendar, SMS, weather and basic Web searches. (Hmm… sound familiar?)

If the iPhone 1 was impressive right out the box, before hundreds of thousands of applications had been written for it, imagine what the Siri platform will be like when there are hundreds of thousands of existing applications and software packages that support a speech interface.

Apple has launched what they hope with be the speech platform for personal computing. Sooner than we developers would like, we will have to start supporting a speech interface to our personal computing applications, and it will have to be a much smarter interface than anything that came before.

If Apple succeeds in making the Siri interface a de facto standard, they will own a fundamental platform technology that would make Bill Gates envious.