The post goes into the thought process behind the logo, the stages it went through, and hints at ways to brainstorm brand identities, particularly for web applications. Make sure you don’t miss the post. Click here to read it.

Now I can actually see what my friends are saying (or creating) about design, userexperience or development – these are just examples, obviously. And I can do site-specific searches (something I also asked for) which is down right amazing. And (I just tried), I can get RSS feeds for these searches. Friendfeed people, you got me. I’m a full-on user from this moment on. You win – actually, I do, because my information overload is soon to be gone.

Note: I’m re-reading my post and it sounds like sales. Trust me when I say it’s not – I’m just pretty happy about this. Maybe as happy as I was when I joined Twitter back in 05, or maybe when I joined GMail. Wow moments are hard to get, allow me to ride me for a few minutes.

I’ve been using Friendfeed a bit myself and while I find it cute and somewhat useful – as you probably do, I like to know what my friends have been doing or working on -, it just isn’t helping. It’s became just another content stream where I am fed unfiltered information from people. Twitter was “hard” enough to keep track of on a busy day, but Friendfeed not only includes twitter updates, it also packs info collected from around 23 other services. Cute? Definitely. Helping? Heck no.

A couple of ideas

Filtering: Friendfeed needs filtering. If I already have Twitteriffic on, It makes sense to be able to filter out all Twitter bits from my friendfeed. If I’m in the mood for checking out photos from friends, I may want to see only photos on my friendfeed. If I’m looking for what my friends have been listening to on Last.fm, I might want to see only that.

Search, domain clustering: Why can’t I search for words in my friend feed? A term extraction algorithm + search could become a pretty good tool to know what the people I care about have been saying about, that’s say, “design”, “user experience” or “development” related. Now that would be useful.

The truth

Here’s the cold hard fact: I’m going to pay little attention to a service that only delivers more stuff. A few years ago, in order to get updates on people you cared about, you’d call, visit or email. Now you hear about them all day every day. Now that’s obviously not a bad thing, don’t get me wrong – it’s just that sometimes, it’s a little too much information.

We need these tools (Twitter, Friendfeed) – and tell me where to sign up if you’re building a product like this – to help us make sense of the data coming in by mining it, filtering it and giving it to us in a way we can consume it. I still want the ability to see and hear everything should I be inclined to, but I need (we need!), to control this flood of information we’re living with every day.

Update: Well (wow, rather!), that didn’t take long. About 24 hours after I posted this, Friendfeed announced search. The difference a simple feature like this makes is astounding.

Not everything can be generic, and a brand is one of the most important things to nail down when launching a product or service. If you’re still thinking of removing vowels from words to make up a 2.0-ey name, stop because you’re clearly doing it wrong. Here’s an example of how naming is a zoo these days. Here’s a couple of paragraphs from a post by Om Malik:

Earlier this year we wrote about Gaboogie, a web-based conference call service started by Erik Lagerway. The service didn’t quite work out, and the company reconfigured its business focus to offering instant group calls from mobiles, and is now called Lypp.

Another web-based conferencing service, Foonz might be going down that route. Randy Corke, CEO of Foonz’s parent company, RPM Communications was in town last week to bring me up to speed on their new offering, Utterz, which is sort of like blogging-via-voice-calls from your cellphone.

Gaboogie is now called Lypp, and Foonz is launching Utterz. Are these people having a laugh? If I asked you to name the company with the golden arches, you’d probably say McDonalds; If I talked about the drink with the great bottle and the red brand, you’d likely say Coca-Cola; If I asked you about a web-based conferencing system, you would probably never remember Gaboogie, Lypp, Foonz or Utterz.

In contrast, I haven’t forgotten Joost’s pre-launch name “The Venice Project” (witty and smart) or “Jackson Fish Market” (weird and unexpected), a startup doing virtual gifts. Some will argue that once you hit critical mass how good a name is isn’t important, but it’s easy to make the argument that the name may have a huge impact on the growth itself – so please, do think about leaving those vowels in and give naming your new company more than 5 minutes of your time.

• Tractability: How difficult will it be to launch a worthwhile version 1.0?
• Obviousness: Is it clear why people should use it?
• Deepness: How much value can you ultimately deliver?
• Wideness: How many people may ultimately use it?
• Discoverability: How will people learn about your product?
• Monetizability: How hard will it be to extract the money?
• Personally compelling: Do you really want it to exist in the world?

To these I would add two other characteristics that I believe have a great impact on a product’s success: cleverness and trustworthiness. You know when a product is clever because you get the feeling of empowerment and delight. And trustworthiness (although perhaps difficult to assess initially) defines how people look at your product or service – if users can trust it, it is more likely that they’ll become engaged and use it often. People are often skeptical about things that dip into their personal affairs (think Facebook’s Beacon and why it sucks), but will feel at ease to engage and discover new things about a product if they trust it.

Ultimately, it isn’t easy to determine the likeliness of a product being successful by putting it to the test against a series of attributes – but it may help. I’m still a big fan of entrepreneurs following their gut and seeing where it takes them, but depending on the person, that might not be a good plan to stick to.

I definitely recommend you give Ev’s article a read if you’re an entrepreneur – you’re still here so chances are you’ll be interested. Unfortunately Evan still doesn’t allow comments on his blog, because I would imagine the discussion on such an article would be interesting.

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.

Some of the developers building applications with Amazon S3 have been asking us about an SLA, or Service Level Agreement. An SLA defines the minimum acceptable level of performance from a service along with some sort of penalty for not meeting expectations. A typical SLA actually defines a performance or reliability boundary which is somewhat lower than what the system is actually designed, built, and expected to deliver.

We know that many of our customers, including a multitude of teams within Amazon, are using S3 in mission-critical ways and need a formal commitment from us in order to make commitments to their own users and customers.

And the agreement looks good, too. Amazon will give you 10% service credit if uptime goes below 99.9% and 25% credit if it goes below 99% in a given month. Which tells you a lot about how reliable they believe their platform really is.

The agreement is in effect since October 1st, which means those of you who’ve wondered (for so long now) whether it would be a safe bet to host something on S3 can finally exhale. Now, and although I do trust Amazon’s reliability – I mean, it’s Amazon -, it’d be great to have an SLA for EC2 as well, but I assume that’ll be up when it officially launches.

The iPhone gives you the best experience browsing the web on a mobile phone although contrarily to what some people seem to believe, that’s because it doesn’t need iPhone-specific pages to feel right. Apple did a terrific job at crafting a device that gives you the web (as it is today) in your hands. And that takes me to my main point: which is that designing pages exclusively for the iPhone is a dumb idea.

Dumb? But it’s the iPhone!

Here’s a hypothesis: Google launches their own mobile device, say, tomorrow – and it’s so beautiful you need to have it. In fact, it’s so amazing you’ll be throwing that iPhone out the window. Suddenly you get it, all those iPhone-crafted pages are suddenly useless, because they are built specifically with one device in mind.

The mobile web never really took up because designers tend to design for what’s closest to their hearts – and right now that’s the glassy phone with the Apple logo. As most people will tell you, being “closed” is a lousy way to get wide adoption – and this is just about as closed as you can get. Think about it, you’re designing pages specifically for a $599 device and expect huge visits? Oh, come on.

Design for the experience, not the device

A better idea is to design for an experience, not a specific device like the iPhone. Just like you design for desktop browsers by assessing constraints (like window size) and building an experience based on those constraints, why not do it for mobile devices in general? Truth is carefully crafted pages can actually display perfectly both on the desktop and the mobile web (iPhone or not).

The iPhone actually goes a very long way in making sure pages today work great. Instead of building a page specifically for the phone, why not one that gracefully scales to fit the device’s screen? It guarantees you’re not spending resources building for a specific device and effectively means you can focus on building one experience that’s maintained across all platforms. Give it a try.

PS: Have you also noticed how most of these iPhone-specific pages are trying hard to mimic Apple’s design too? Sacrificing resources and a brand just to make something blend in on one device is a lot worse than spending those resources on maintaining quality across the board.

Lets recap what ethnography means and what it allows first – and then look at examples of how it is being used by large organizations like Nokia, Intel and IBM.

From the June article: Ethnography – a method to look at user needs through observing people in their naturally setting rather than through research or, like we usually see in this space, guessing work. Ethnography allows you to design (in the broad sense of the word) products that are more in touch with your audience – to solve real problems, and not those you think people have.

Ethnography at Nokia

Business Week has the inside view on how Nokia uses ethnography to deliver richer products that solve real needs. Here’s what Nokia’s Design Director Antti Kujala has to say about their method:

Our process starts with a team of anthropologists and psychologists working in our design group. They spend time with specific types of people around the world to understand how they behave and communicate. This helps us to understand better and to spot early signals of new patterns of behavior that could be harnessed into mobile communication. Our designers often go out into the field to understand the world they are designing for. All of these observations are brought into the design process to inspire and inform our ideas.

We have an advanced design team that is looking 5 to 15 years out, working on spotting and predicting megatrends in society and coming up with thought-provoking ideas on what mobile design could do to influence and react to these.

Ethnography at Intel and IBM

Hemispheres Magazine (from United Airlines) has also a very good article on how corporations like Intel and IBM use ethnography to look ahead and enter (or create) markets ahead of competition. Make sure you read this article as well.

In addition to helping with the development of products, ethnography also can be used to direct corporate strategy, says Ken Anderson of the people and practices research group at Intel Corporation. Anderson oversees the innovation team within the digital health group at Intel. “It’s not about developing a particular product, but opening a space that had been untapped,” he says.

Inspired? Act on it.

Ethnography isn’t just for huge market cap corporations – it can and should be used in any product-oriented or service-oriented business. Chances are if you are reading this blog, you are either an entrepreneur or someone who’s passionate about the web and design. You should be acting upon these examples.

How can observation help you launch a successful product or service? What would do you differently if you looked at your target audience more deeply? Quite a lot, most likely. Here’s how you get started if you don’t have the budget or a product: carry a notebook, note down problems you have in your daily life, or problems you see other people have. You’ll likely come across solutions to these problems, and you know what that means.

Like our project management product (Goplan) came out of our necessities and problems dealing with the people we do consulting for – and by looking at how people manage their projects poorly -, you’ll likely succeed in solving real problems if you just sit down, observe and listen.

Do one thing right

Flickr is the number one service for photo sharing on the web, and does it exceptionally well. It is simple to navigate, very clutter free, very photo-centric. People love that – I love that. Heck, Flickr may very well be my #1 favorite service out there.

Now, look at Youtube – despite the fact that I believe their layout has a few flaws -, they excel at video sharing. It’s what they’re good at, and numbers (for both memberships and uploaded videos) seem to agree. No need to go anywhere else for video.

These are two examples of doing one thing right – how well do you think Yahoo would do by adding video to Flickr? Not too well, it’s definitely not the Flickr mindset. Consider the reverse scenario: Youtube adding photos. Preposterous idea, I hear you say – exactly. Just like Flickr dwelling into the world of online video – a crazy idea, and apparently quite out of touch with the majority of the Flickr audience.

A few alternative routes

Now obviously Yahoo doesn’t want to miss the video bandwagon – makes total sense to them from a business perspective. But you shouldn’t mess with a product that clearly does well in a different market just for the me-too feeling – the implications of messing with something as big as Flickr are huge. And Yahoo does have alternatives:

Jumpcut, hello? Jumpcut is Yahoo’s video solution. And if you’ve never heard of it before (which wouldn’t surprise me at all), that’s only because Y! has been doing a really poor job at promoting and enhancing that service. It’s a youtube competitor, but it lacks positioning and attitude. It’s Yahoo!, they definitely can spruce it up a bit.

Integrate, don’t build: If Y! does want to have videos in the Flickr interface, why not integrate Jumpcut instead of hacking video into Flickr itself? Am I the only one for which this approach makes more sense? They’re both Y! properties, and by integrating, each would maintain its own identity. People who wanted videos with their Flickr profile would pull those in from Jumpcut, and that’s it.

Concluding thoughts

I must confess I’m a little skeptical about these changes to Flickr. It worries me that they’ll mess up a service that so many people use effectively in their daily lives just to go with the flow. Do you have any thoughts and opinions? Please leave them in the comments – thanks, and have a great weekend!