To post complicated articles with a lot of notations and photos such as this one. For this usage, Posterous = Scribd + WordPress
To post professional photo albums, such as one from a professional event. Facebook won’t do since it resizes the images to 604px width. Plus, posting to a blog-like site like Posterous gives more feeling of going-with-the-event than uploading the photos to Picasa, Photobucket
To post materials for collaborative team projects. It’s easy enough for my non-savvy teams
Yahoo! is concentrating on their Open Strategy; the focus is good, if they don’t abandon the particles that form a platform.
My metaphor: the Hall of Valhalla and the billboards
Imagine you’re a college student. You’re going to the library. On your way, a billboard is hung just around the corner before you reach the library.You stop for a few seconds to skim around the messages. The billboard is typically normal as in every school and at first it looks somewhat messy; however it is messy in its own order and as you figure through, you’ll know what you need.
Basically there are 2 things:
It is convenient: on people’s way of achieving something (going to the library)
It has its own order
There are various billboards like that across the campus. All good ones have the 2 characteristics above.
Now, the authority decides to build a hall where all the billboard is going to reside. The hall is separated from other buildings (library, computer labs, class rooms, sport grounds, common rooms…) for it to be easily managed.
How often will you drop by the hall of billboards? To what extent will the hall add values to your benefits? To what extent will the hall add values to the posters?
The hall will desert. People will scarcely visit. The values will drop.
Now, let’s go back to Yahoo!’s case.
Yahoo!’s Hall of Valhalla Yahoolla
Users are billboard viewers. Developers are billboard posters.
Yahoo! 360 which will be closed was a billboard of contents. Yahoo! Mash which had been closed was a billboard of relationships. Yahoo!’s Open Platform in which Yahoo! Profile centers is the Hall!
Image from Neal Sample & Cody Simms’ presentation
Without particles, how can an open but blank platform attract users and developers? How will Y!OSP add values to users?
Now, extending the boundary a bit further to other services that Y!OSP supports: Twitter, Tumblr, slideshare, StumbleUpon…
Yahoo! is leveraging its greatest user base: Yahoo! Mail. The prospect is that Yahoo! Mail users can manage different services from their Inbox! Additionally, users have their Yahoo! Profiles.
However, how willing are users going to stay in one place to get updated of all these services? If they do, they miss out the most, name it interaction or content, from going directly to the other services.
The Hall that Yahoo! is building will be a grand, titanic, ordered silo. The biggest question is: what will users find in there?
Yahoo! Messenger, Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! 360 and Flickr are the four products that lead the market. While Yahoo!’s email market share has slowly been sucked up by Google, all four of them are still dominating. We also talk about Yahoo! 360 Plus and Yahoo! Profile here and there but these 2 shall be covered later.
What’s good about it? The good thing is that the majority of Vietnamese Internet users share the same type of knowledge offered by Yahoo! products.
…which I call Foundation Wisdom.
These might be very obvious and basic. However, I want to list them in a clear manner to reuse them as premise for further brainstorms and discussions.
Foundation Wisdom
1. Free
Just don’t underestimate this point. My director in his fifties was amazed by the fact that there are so many good software for free (he was mentioning Facebook) and my father hadn’t believed in a free thing before I explained how new advertising worked to him.
Now that the younger users (GenY) are used to having things for free.
2. Tolerance to ads
Wow a good thing. They don’t mind seeing ads on their Yahoo! 360 pages or Yahoo! Messenger, so won’t moan about advertisements flying on new sites.
3. Simplicity in achieving a goal
Product makers shouldn’t confuse simplicity in achieving a goal with simplicity in design. We are familiar with praising Google and Apple’s simplicity in design, but what I’m discussing is how simple it is for users to achieve a goal when using your service, especially for the first time.
What is the goal with Yahoo! 360? Write blog entries, read updates, comment, write quick comments. And that’s all. 360 makes it simple for them by offering simple features.
4. Customization
Users love design customization offered in Yahoo! 360 and wishes to see that in any other site.
5. Concepts
Guest book
Users are used to using guest book (or quick comment in 360) as the communication channel.
Confusion: blog and social network
I bet many users are confused between a blogging platform and a social network if they ever care.
Confusion: add friend, follow and subscribe
Many users wouldn’t bother distinguishing “add friend”, “follow” or “subscribe”. 360 offers “add friend” and “subscribe”. 360plus offers “follow” and “subscribe”.
Testimonials
Users are accustomed to writing testimonials for one another. While the initial intention of testimonial is to recommend good attributes of the recommended, many have used this feature to simply express their fondness toward one another.
But nevertheless, they’re familiar with this concept anyway.
Status
Status has always been offered by Yahoo! Messenger. But it takes off with Yahoo! 360 blast. Users don’t only update their status on the blast but utilize it for many short contents: quotes, life philosophy, messages…
It’s a good thing that creativity is encouraged.
Embed
Yahoo! 360 allows media embed and it is a great thing that this rather advanced feature has become known by users.
6. Language
Users are used to a set of languages in Yahoo! products.
i.e. “Quick comment”, not “Wall” or “Scrapbook”. “Testimonial”, not “Recommendation”.
7. Contents
Personal and emotional
Many Vietnamese users use 360 for personal purpose and chiefly write about their emotions and relationships.
Page view
Many write for page views and use page views as the only metric to measure success of contents.
Celebrity gossips
Some of the hottest blogs in Vietnamese attribute to hot news that center celebrity gossips, sex-related topics.
Briefly, how to take advantage of this
1. User education doesn’t have to start from scratch
Make use of their current knowledge. Build your education on that.
You can even set an ego gift for your customers. Make them feel like after using your service, their level of technological insights has been improved. This, firstly, makes them feel good about themselves. Next, imagine your users proudly educate others about a new service and become a guru in their friends’ eyes. This further boosts their satisfaction.
2. Make it simple for users to achieve their goal
Good, no need to throw advanced features to users in the first launch. What needs done is the core feature(s) that bring(s) most values to users.
Rule of thumb: users’ patience toward complexity proportionates to the value of the goal to them.
3. Colorful design and profile layout customization
Colorful design is a must. And being colorful is not mutual exclusive to simplicity.
While customization is not relevant to some types of services such as social news, it’s recommended to provide the ability to customize one’s profile.
4. Language
Exploit the set of language from legacy Yahoo! products.
5. Concepts
Exploit the set of concepts from legacy Yahoo! products. If you have to introduce new concepts, find way to introduce it with the language users are familiar with.
6. Make it personal and emotional
7. Don’t (have to) host contents, but be a platform to spread contents
Good is embed exists. Better is users are familiar with it.
What it means here is that you don’t have to host original contents, but need to build platforms that media can be embedded in and focus on how to allow such contents to be spread on by your service.
Private-owned high school Ngoi Sao (translated as Star) was probably the first non-international school in Ho Chi Minh City to provide edu email to their students. Read the story here
First, since the capacity is 7Gb, I have reason to believe that the school’s IT utilizes Gmail service.
Second, providing students with the school email address makes it more professional for communication than a personal mailbox on a free service. The students can use their school email to apply for part-time or free-lance job.
Third, I wonder if there is any difference between email addresses of students and email addresses of the school’s staff?
Last but not least, maybe these students can use their edu email as credentials to join a network on Facebook, instead of the current introduction mechanism.
How to join a network on Facebook
1. Location-based network has no restriction
2. For organization-based network, members must have an email address belonging to their company / organization where they find the verification link from Facebook
3. High schools also have their networks, but since many high school don’t provide school email, joining process is done on introduction basis. Person A requests network N to which s/he belongs. When person B who is a member of that network in real life want to join N, B has to add A as a friend and asks A to confirm that B is actually in N before Facebook adds B to N. Then C shall have to add either A or B and ask for confirmation. This process goes on for subsequent members…
The blog craze started in 2004, MySpace came out in 2002. From then till now, Web 2.0 has penetrated deeply into our lives.
You may have heard the buzz: it’s all about communications, exchange information and expressing the ego.
Have you thought of utilizing all those things for learning?
Recently I’ve been very aggressive on the net to see how we can use the applications for learning, and here I am with my key findings:
The requirements
Let’s imagine a very familiar study scenario: you’re assigned into a group to do a research on topic X.
Traditionally, the group would rely on emails, phone calls and IM to communicate and collaborate. Have you found these media difficult to classify your information?
This is how I would use Web 2.0 for learning
1. Search for information with Search EngineS
Obviously, information searching starts with search engines.
I have some hints for this:
Don’t just use Google. Try Yahoo! search, Live search, Ask search and other engines. They give different results and thus, relevant information might be found from ones other than Google
Try Google on different region settings. google.com/ncr (international version) yields different results from google.com.vn
Try different keywords and keyword combination. Also, exploit the operators
Also search for images. At least Google, Yahoo! and Live support this. Images are useful for illustrating your ideas and, in some cases, give you additional information.
Addendum: academic requirements. Some institutions forbid the use of wiki-like sites and dot-com sites.
5. Blog your group’s findings on group-blog powered platform
WordPress supports multiple-author. I would want our group members to blog our research everyday on our blog. This is not superficial. It helps us
Collect information, thoughts, findings, analysis and intermediate conclusions
Track each member’s progress
Present to the lecturer our growth
5b. Share micro details
This is optional though. Some information might be very detailed and we want quick sharing methods. I would connect my mobile phone to Twitter and quickly update my thoughts on the way.
Publish your research as presentations on slideshare or documents on scribd to share your knowledge engage in discussion on the topic.
12. Consolidate them all into one page
There are just so much!
How’re you gonna navigate around them all?
Well, one solution is to use a homepage service like netvibes to put all these services together.
Why all these?
Too complicated? Well here are the reasons why I would do it this way
Better organization of information. No email confusion
Exhaustive analysis. You write on the way so no information is missed
Better collaboration
Man, isn’t it fun?
I know it would be much easier for you just to email. But how much time have you spent searching for information later on? I’d rather spend the time to get things organized first, then make it easier later to focus more on creating contents.
And I’m pretty sure of one thing: just next year, this entry will be outdated because many new services will come out. Semantic web, mobile apps are just a few to predict.
It’s not a fashionable fad or a time-killer, it’s a shift in the way we can be more effective. Do you want to miss the train trend?
Digital Divide
But you know, all these will never happen if digital divide hasn’t been closed.
Technology proficiency and more importantly, community habit is a big gap. I want my team to do so, but other teams may not, so some of my team members may argue “why do we have to!”
With the internet connection speed in Vietnam, using Google Docs et al is insane.
Today, a world that is flat is till a romantic dream for me.
Resources
I’ve already tried out these services. Kindly see mine as example of how things may end up evolve: taitran.com/blog/resources
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