Joyful Complexity

A thorough review of Google's new Ad Planner by David Smith over at MediaPost.

Once your customers get used to a service it is nearly impossible to take away that service without the customers feeling at least a bit 'gibbed,' or downgraded. Ryan Singer over at Signal vs. Noise points out how features are a one-way street:
 

A while back Netflix added a "Profiles" feature to their service. A couple weeks ago, they decided to pull the feature because it was too confusing and it wasn't adding value. But it was too late. People were pissed. The blog post received 1286 comments. In the face of this reaction, Netflix had to turn 180 and keep the feature.

What does this mean for your business? Do you consider this possibility every time you release a service into the wild? Think of all the negative publicity Netflix has received AND they had to go back to the status quo of supporting a complicated feature.
You have to think about not only the 'majority' of your users but also the most 'vocal' ones. The Profiles feature on Netflix is probably used by a miniscule minority. But this minority was able to make enough noise to get the feature back. Who are your most vocal customers?

If you are like me and make a few trades here and there, TradeKing is the perfect online brokerage for you.I have been using TradeKing for about a year now and I can attest that it truly rocks. For the record I have tried ETrade (stay clear!) and Zecco trading before finally switching to TradeKing. TradeKing offer a very competitive rate of $4.95/trade and $0.65/option contract. They have been rated #1 by Smart Money and Barron's. Their site is top notch and support is amazing - online and on the phone. But what most impressed me about TradeKing is that 'it just works.' There are no hidden fees, no minimums, no hassling of any kind. TradeKing respects their customers. Unlike the other online brokerages out there, TradeKing is not looking to make a quick buck by fooling you. They are trying to build a long lasting business through a great service. I have personally recommended the service to numerous friends (and TradeKing has rewarded me handsomely with referrals ; ).
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If you are a small-time trader who's not making hundreds of trades/month, you owe it to yourself to check out TradeKing.

I have always believed the best internet ideas are the ones that exploit the greatest resource on the planet - 6 billion humans. Ideas like eBay (auction), Wikipedia (user generated content), Prosper (people-to-people lending), etc. Researchers at Carnegie Mellon have come up with yet another. They are using humans to help digitize books, by translating words/phrases that stymie advanced OCR (optical character recognition) software. Nick Gonzalez explains:

Captchas are well known for keeping automated spammers out and letting humans in. However, ReCaptcha is a rather clever service using them to help digitize books scanned into the Internet Archive as well. It's a project from the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon.

Much like a Mechanical Turk application, ReCaptcha uses humans to translate images of scanned words that a computer couldn't understand. Notably, Mechanical Turk has been used in the searches for Jim Gray and Steve Fossett.

The scanned words are placed alongside a normal captcha widget so users decode both words at the same time. The word can be run by multiple people to cut down on errors. Catchas also offer the opportunity to convert a lot of words. ReCaptcha's founders, Luis von Ahn and Ben Maurer estimate that about 60 million CAPTCHAs are solved every day. Assuming that each CAPTCHA takes 10 seconds to solve, it' this is over 160,000 human hours per day (that's about 19 years).

 

 

Daniel Coffeen on Joyful Complexity:

The beautiful is not frivolous. It is complex, surprising, educational, affirmative of itself and experience. It eludes simple reduction: while perhaps transient, it is not disposable. The beautiful slips away from the familiar, speaking a language which seduces the reader into unknown territory. It is uncanny: simultaneously familiar and strange. Unrecognizable because thoroughly itself, the beautiful is glorious, indifferent, self-assured. And discrete: it is bound, enjoying limits. Yet these limits are infinite.

A Calder mobile, for instance: it is never really finished. It shifts this way and that as the surrounding winds nudge and beckon, arranging it just so, and then just so again. These winds do not disrupt the integrity of the mobile. On the contrary, the mobile incorporates the winds into its own production: it is a little machine, endlessly productive of itself. And yet this "itself" is never finally complete; with each gesture, it forges new spaces and possibilities.

Calder's mobiles--or Borges' odd writings, the Beatles' colorful songs, Deleuze's exquisite philosophy, the Coen Brothers' wily filmic wit--are complex machines which are beyond good and evil. They are indifferent to principles, morality, to the familiar run of things. And it is precisely within this amorality that this complexity educates, seduces, and folrics, affording pleasure and pedagogy in its relentless forging of a happy, happy new: a joyful complexity.

 

 Your setting is not only the stage, but an integral part of your performance. And I think it goes beyond subliminal. Our environment affects our behaviour greatly.

Just read about Posterous at TechCrunch. Michael Arrington calls it "the simplest blogging platform to date." Let's find out...