So if you’re on Techmeme or follow a few people on Twitter you probably know that Scoble’s account was deleted from Facebook for using an automated contact information script by Plaxo. Mike says that Plaxo’s wrong here by violating Facebook’s TOS and scraping data into their own system. Robert says (after being naively caught red-handed) that data should be free (he arrives late in the data portability game, but better late than never). Both of them have good points:

1) Plaxo was wrong in building a script that clearly goes against Facebook’s TOS. Despite the “good intentions” they might have by allowing their users to import data into Outlook from other systems, it’s still a clear violation.

2) Data should be free whenever possible and legal. If I’ve created content on a service and added value to it by doing so (posting photos on flickr, updating my status on twitter, videos on youtube or building my social graph on facebook), I should be able to get my data out. Not necessarily wipe it from the service itself (although that’s something I should be allowed) but at the very least export it in some meaningful format.

3) Facebook is wrong too for not allowing people to copy or move data out. It also feels a little odd that I can import GMail contacts into Facebook but can’t move anything out. People aren’t allowed to delete their facebook accounts either, so it does seem like once you’re in, you and your data are locked. Sometimes I wonder what facebook would be without mass.

John Furrier says 2008 will be the year of trust, and I’ve written about it a couple of weeks ago too. A lot of these problems need to be solved, and hopefully we’ll continue moving towards open systems and open data. But now, now we just need Facebook to change their data and privacy policy. First Beacon, now this.

It’s now been a while since Tim O’Reilly coined the term Web 2.0. Thousands of applications and services emerged since - however chances are you can only remember and name about 10. Truth is branding has been ignored by many of the entrepreneurs looking to launch their ideas - and many are paying for the mistake with slow adoption or failure.

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.

Evan Williams has a very good post on evaluating product ideas based on his previous experience (launching Blogger, Odeo - pretty much forgotten in that article - and Twitter). I’ve been thinking about a couple of products as well (have been for a while, actually), so the whole article sort of fell into place with my own criteria. Here are Ev’s:

• 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.

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.