Amazon AdMash: Will It Catch On?

While I was looking for the next batch of books to read on Amazon, I started looking at Kindle 3G. It was right on the landing site selling one for $114 (Wi-Fi version). That sounded really cheap. It wasn't too long ago Kindle was selling for $150 or so, I thought.

It turns out I was about right. The third generation Wi-Fi Kindle was selling for $139 until early April. Amazon is marketing that Kindle is now on sale for $114 to make the e-reader even more affordable.

What's interesting is how Amazon is moving from premium to ad-based discounted model. Yes, Amazon is lowering the price of Kindle by displaying ads when Kindle is turned off or showing its home page. Usually we see many freemium to premium movement especially from small start ups looking to grow user base quickly. But it's interesting to see that Amazon is now lowering the price by introducing sponsored advertisements.

Why Facebook Gets Bad Reputation For User Data Privacy

If you are a long time Facebook user, you'll remember Facebook's humble beginning as college student network. Facebook used to operate around the networks that you belong to. Facebook user could choose school network, work network, even regional network to share private information.

To most of you all these network-centric sharing would be distant memory. And so it was with me. I have long forgotten this network-centric sharing past of Facebook, and even the fact that I entered my network as FaceTime Communications (Actiance used to be known as FaceTime Communications).

Don't Make Me Think: Recycle, It's Good For The Environment; It's Good For Users

Recently I enjoyed reading Steve Krug's Don't Make Me Think, The Second Edition. For those of you who are Web design practitioners, I strongly recommend that you pick up a copy and go through it.

After reading through it, one of the lessons that stuck with me was the benefits of leveraging established user interface design: Fancy word for recycling what's known to work.

In some sense this flies in the face of innovation. Innovation is good, as long as it is done in a way that minimizes the user's mental exercise to learn and get accustomed to it. If the learning curve is too steep, or even worse the interface is not guiding users where to begin, it will fail. In other words, the center of innovation should be human, the users.

Safe Facebook = Clean Coal?

There have been lot of discussions around energy recently in the aftermath of Fukushima nuclear disaster. Especially there have been increasing talks about clean burning coal technology and its hopes and reality.

I don't know about you, but when I hear clean coal, I know I have to pay extra attention to actual scientific claim to differentiate marketing and political spins from scientific facts. I get the similar reaction to late night TV ads like no exercise weight loss drug. Something smells funny.

Don't Give Up On Google And Social Network Privacy

As social network users, we have all gotten used to accepting less privacy is a necessary evil for social networking sites. When you sign up for new social network service, checking off that terms of use agreement checkbox means that 'yes, I trust you to do the right thing when it comes to sharing my information.' And social networking sites usually take this to mean whatever it makes sense for them. Especially when they are introducing new feature, they would like to interpret it to mean, 'surely you must want to use our new service since you haven't deleted your account'.

Language Matters: Name Your Feature Carefully

Chances Are That We May Never See
'Add As Foe' Button, But It Underscores
Nature of Complex Human Relationship

Just the other day I saw my colleague posted his unofficial feature request to Facebook: Add as foe. In binary world of Facebook where everyone is either a friend or not, either likes what you wrote or not, having this additional dimension to express your complex love-hate relationship seems to be a natural next step. Who knows? This maybe be the next big idea for new wave of social networking sites.

I don't know how realistic it will be to expect love-hate social dimension to be implemented in Facebook. But what is clear to me is the power of semantic. When we talk about a new social networking feature, it is very important to name it right to give the right meaning.

Google Social Search: A Man Is Known By The Company He Follows

To all Google fans out there, Google Social Search is now available to all Googlers in US. I didn't realize this until I saw my name popping up on upper right hand corner a few weeks ago. Then last week while I was searching for Amazon EC2 references, I saw the social search in action.

Google Now Makes Full Use Of
My Social Network When Searching; Well Done!

This is a small but significant step for Google. Since I wrote about the lack of social search feature on Google last October, Google has been working hard at improving search experience to include social discovery. If you connect your Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Flickr, Quora and Yelp account, Google will now search the posts made by friends that you have on the social networks and display the search results.

Since I only connected my Twitter account, I saw results from people that I follow. I'm assuming it works the same way with Facebook and LinkedIn (I've just added about half an hour ago, and I haven't seen any results from Facebook and LinkedIn yet).

I'm little excited about this feature and here's why: