What a difference a small change makes. Gmail launched what has probably been my #1 wanted feature since I’ve started using it: colored labels. Labels were useful already if you wanted to archive content meaningfully, but without a visual cue their impact on the inbox wasn’t really significant.

Colored labels however, make a huge difference. If you’re smart about the way you use labels, you can create a system for your email to prioritize conversations, organize a task list, or go all out and build a proper GTD system out of it - all with the visual cues of colored labels, because they allow you to at a glance understand what email belongs where without reading the subject or even the label text.

What to take away from this

Minor differences like these visual cues are some of the things that define application experiences, and frequently (and unfortunately) are forgotten by developers and people building products. Products that are meant to help people manage assets in their daily life in particular deserve this special caring eye on them.

People building web applications need to ask themselves “How can I provide meaningful cues to help my users?”. These things (like the need for cues) are not found by chance - people do express the need for cues and helping paths all the time, we just need to care enough to listen and make changes.

It’s kept us awake the last couple of days until ungodly hours, but it’s now live. The Crunchies is an awards ceremony co-hosted by GigaOm, Read/WriteWeb, VentureBeat and TechCrunch, meant to celebrate internet technology and innovation. You can nominate companies for awards in 20 categories, and out of those nominations, 5 candidates are picked for voting on each category. Then in January 2008, a ceremony in the San Francisco Herbst Theatre will award the best of the best.

In the last few days our team built the infrastructure for the crunchies, designed the brand for ceremony and sites and built the web applications to allow voting and nominating companies. Now we definitely need a couple of hours of rest. All in all, it’s been a good time working with the people at Techcrunch again.

Note: Want to participate by nominating a company? Visit the Crunchies weblog and the nomination page and vote away! You can catch more posts about the crunchies at the participating blogs: Read/WriteWeb, VentureBeat, GigaOm and Techcrunch.

How things have changed. A year ago, just about every device was closed and locked behind closed doors and proprietary information. Now we’re seeing Android, the Chumby, and now Bug Labs. It’s exciting that people are waking up to the power of allowing people to hack - and to have a device as platform. Bug Labs in particular is getting me very excited.

Fred Wilson has been blogging a bit about these guys (they’re a part of the Union Square Ventures portfolio) for a while, but this morning he’s posted a video by Robert Scoble that got me begging for one of these:

I’m not even going to ramble about how this project is going to create a whole bunch of new hardware hackers (which is fantastic) and getting people to try out new ideas and prototypes for future devices - because that’s all obvious if you watch Robert’s video (or read his post). I just want our team here to get one of these and hack away at some ideas we have.

Bug Labs guys - please don’t pull a Chumby on me. I was on the initial list for the Chumby prototypes but because I moved back to Europe, I never got one. Not one of the first limited few (which they kept emailing me about), not one now that they’ve launched. I can’t order the damn thing. Be smart about this, please?

This one is going to be quick - your blog ads piss me off. I know we all read feeds every day, but every once in a while (like everyone on Techmeme, I’ll assume), we end up reading blogs in our browsers (you know, like in the old days) - and you know when that happens, because your head explodes. Why does it explode, I hear you ask? Because you are spoon-fed ads all the time. Let’s look at a couple of examples of what I call “blog as chrismas tree” (I’m so ticked by this, I’m actually coining terms).

Engadget: In green, white space or elements that although can’t be necessarily called content, are okay (or useful) to have. In orange, pieces of layout that are mildly distracting. In red, elements that are just there to cause retinal pain or to make the user go away and never come back. Engadget, above, isn’t so bad - it actually comes out with about 50% content over the fold. Let’s look at someone else:

Born Rich: Don’t be fooled by the green, ladies and gents, you’re looking at 9% content, 91% advertising or white space. I don’t know if these people were actually “born rich” as the blog name implies, but they’re sure trying with all those ads. Seriously, if 10% of useful screen real estate above the fold is all I’m going to get, I’m getting the hell out.

The blog as christmas tree plague

Monetize, monetize, monetize. We all want it, we all need it. But people, we’re getting ridiculous here. We’re shoving ads in front of our users, when all they care about is the stuff we actually write about. If you really want to get people to visit your site, do think about how much of your page is useful.

Eh, I’m just having a bad monday here. Don’t mind the grumpiness.. And I usually don’t do this, but I’d appreciate the eyeballs on this matter, so if you’re keen, digg this.