Scott Blomquist

Selection paralysis

I got to thinking lately about how I wish I had a wiki on my personal web site, because I want to do some quick’n’dirty semi-structured and richly linked writing to share with others so I can get feedback and input. I spent some time catching up on what wiki systems are best at what, and discovered I was completely daunted by how many different choices there were.

I eventually whittled the list of candidates down to just short of 10 different packages, and then got stuck again. What happens if I pick one today and invest considerable time in it only to discover that a different one fits better with what I’m using it for? Is there any way to migrate the data to a different wiki package at or near full-fidelity?

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I get bitten all the time with minimum username length requirements. The most common number that I bump up against is 6 characters, probably because my usual username is 5 characters so I wouldn’t hear about requirements of 4 or 5, and it’s obvious to everyone that requiring 7 or 8 characters is silly. But why have a minimum length in the first place?

Help me out here—I want to believe that when Zoho tells me that I need to use 6 characters, it’s for some reason other than “the developer who wrote that validation code picked 6 arbitrarily”. But I can’t for the life of me imagine what the other, better reason might be.

Even worse than Zoho is Google’s Picasa. Before successfully choosing a username there, I managed to uncover 3 different error messages, two of which are completely useless:

1. Please enter a username between 6 and 30 characters.
2. Please enter a username without invalid charcters.
3. The username ‘xxxxx_’ is not available.

Okay, for message number 1, I can understand what to do in response to the message, but it frustrates me nonetheless. As far as I can tell, the only “charcter” (their misspelling, not mine) that triggers message 2 is ‘@’. Any other character that’s not a letter or a number results in message 3 (which was caused by the _ in this case).

I know that neither the Zoho developers nor the Picasa develoeprs are likely to read my meager blog rant. But for those of you out there who do web development today or in the future, please keep in mind that there are some of us with well-established usernames that are only 5 characters (or 4 or 3 or shorter, for that matter) that would love to not be subjected to capricious and silly rules when using your site. If there are technical reasons for arbitrary-seeming restrictions, then fine, but in most cases there shouldn’t be.

Read about the new movie recommendation engine Jinni on Techcrunch earlier today. I’ve done a few queries, and love the particularly rich axes along which they slice and dice the catalog of movies. They call their taxonomy the Movie Genome Project, and admit that it aims to do for movies what the Music Genome Project (most famously in use at Pandora) has adeptly done for music.

While they’ve done a great job of building a really nice movie recommendation service so far, and I can’t wait to see where they go next, one particularly significant missing piece today is integration with the Netflix API. As with most of the profile data that I scatter around on the web, I don’t want to have to enter movie ratings on every single web site that could use them to improve my experience. The good news is that Netflix has cracked open most parts of their user database and will allow me to grant access to third party sites using OAuth to read the ratings that I’ve already entered, as well as add ratings for additional movies. They will also allow sites to add movies to my queue or even stream the movie via Watch Instantly.

If Jinni were better integrated with Netflix, it might become the only site that I use to manage my movie-rental experience. Which is great for Jinni, and just fine for Netflix. If Netflix spends only enough money on web application R&D to provide a basic experience, they can focus more resources on doing what they uniquely do best—getting movies in front of my eyes either via mail or via streaming over the Internet. That is, by enabling sites like Jinni to supplant some of the work that Netflix has historically had to be good at, Netflix ends up with a more satisfied and loyal customer.

Update: Minor edit to fix up an unclear pronoun in the last paragraph.

Microsoft released Beta 1 of Internet Explorer 8 during MIX08. They’ve done some exceptional work during the 15+ months since IE7 shipped (passes ACID2 out of the box, implements some neat new JavaScript features, has moved the IE Dev Toolbar developer tools into the browser, and too many other things to list here).

My personal favorite feature is a thing that Microsoft calls “Activities“.

IE8′s web site describes Activities as:

contextual services that provide quick access to external services from any webpage. Activities typically involve one of two types of actions:

• “Look up” information related to data in the current webpage
• “Send” content from the current webpage to another application

They can be discovered and installed from anywhere on the web much like the search providers that plug into the search box in the upper right corner of any modern web browser.

To understand why this is my favorite IE8 feature, and further why I believe that every major browser will end up adopting this idea, let’s take a look at one of the scourges of the modern social internet–the social bookmarking icon collection:

This incomprehensible clutter is found below many news and blog articles and is supposed to help you bookmark the article for future review or to share it with your friends.

Unfortunately, if you didn’t already know that, there’s very little way for you to figure it out for yourself. And even worse, unless you’re so familiar with at least one of the sites that you know its icon by sight, you’ll never be able to pick which of the 26 little buggers to click on.

If you’re an avid social bookmarking user, you can probably find your favorite site’s icon somewhere in that mess. But if you’re an avid social bookmarking user, you probably already have a browser plug-in or bookmarklet that can do the same task–even on sites with fewer (or no) social bookmarking icons.

So it’s a polychromatic eyesore, and it isn’t helpful whether you know what you’re doing or not.

Before we get back to talking about Activities in IE8, I’ll point out that there has been some progress lately on consolidating the hideous collections into a single button and letting a central site worry about making sure everyone’s favorite bookmarking sites are supported. http://www.addthis.com is the first such site that I remember hearing about, and http://www.sharethis.com is doing some interesting work in the consolidation arena, having created an icon that they encourage all social bookmark cosolidators to use. The icon is apparently gaining some traction, judging by Google’s use of it on Google Shared Stuff.

Activities fit into this whole thing by giving each user the ability to tweak their browser’s context menu to include all of the icons for activities that they consider useful while not cluttering it up with dozens of icons for sites that they don’t care about. As you can see from the samples on the list in the picture above, there is a variety of things that activities can do beyond simply sharing a bookmark. The IE8 Service Gallery groups them into activites that Blog, Define, Find, Lookup, Map, Send, Share, and Translate, but the developer documentation leaves room for making up your own activity types.

It’s also incredibly easy to create new activities. You simply create an XML file that describes which URL to use depending on whether the user has chosen a page, selected some text, or right-clicked a link. You simply tell the Activity what extra info to send along to the URL, and off you go.

Far easier than getting all the news and blog sites or even just sharethis.com to include icons for all your favorite sites, and more in your control.