Technology As Innovator

My first good impression of Facebook is its care for Privacy.

When user wants to add friend, Facebook prompts for the relationship with the recipient and the system verifies if the information matches. Correct me if I’m wrong, but many people who prefer this strictness in Privacy turn out to be diligent and thoughtful enough to savvy technology and social effects of the internet.

This solves a problem of many contemporary social networking sites such as MySpace: arbitrary networking leads to privacy abuse.

However, this in turn limits the ability to discover new sites and new people. Most of users’ Facebook networks likely come from already known sources. The chance to meet new people, or discover new sites is limited proportionally to the privacy limit.

My conclusion is that this variety of usability and website nature gives web-surfers more choices of services and more channels of connection.

The more choices the merrier.

What can we observe from a Bikini?

“A Bikini reveals 90% of a surface. It’s the 10% hidden that the audience want the most they are willing to pay for it.”

Can we do the same when selling?

Let customers see, or even use, the product one part at a time. If it solves their problems, address their needs and give them satisfaction, they will crave for more. Finally, for the most significant portion, charge them ten times the rate.

This approach works best for information and information systems, whose decomposition is relatively easier than other concrete goodies.

Dear my readers,

I believe that by the time you came to my Lab, you had already read many other blogs.

Have you noticed that some blogs only display excerpts of their entries on the index page, and require you to click on “Read more…” to read the full post?

Tai Tran’s Lab saves you the additional clicks to reach full articles. Here, full entries are displayed so you don’t have to do the heavy job of clicking around for navigation.

However, if you click on a post’s title to go to the single page of the article, you will be able to:

1. View and add comments to the article
2. Have more options to add the article to social bookmarks sites, whereas only the most common options are available on the index page
3. Save the post as PDF file
4. Email the post to your friends
5. Print the post

The reason these options are not available on index page is because they will make it heavier for the page to load.

What do you think?

Please let me know your opinion of these services and where I should put these options so I can improve my site to match your needs. Furthermore, do you recommend any functionalities that are currently not supported here?

Thank you for going all along with me,

August 26, 2007

Tai Tran