Stale Top Comments

I've been watching Macklemore & Ryan Lewis Thriftshop video. If you can stand to hear a lot of cuss words, you should jump in because it's a funny and entertaining video.

This Youtube video has already cleared 20,000,000 views. The number of comments exceeds (as of today) 26,000. However, the "Top Comment," as shown above, has hit a paltry 37 thumbs up. How did 20,000,000 people/views get reduced to 37?

Without incentives, you're not going to get people to rank anything. Boardgamegeek.com has an interesting system in which users can earn "Geek Gold" which can then be spent on the site. However, incentives are not the purpose of this blog.

What I'm curious about is a perpetual cycle. The "Top Comments" (usually just two) get the most views because they require no further clicking to see. This kind of built-in advertising solidifies in many cases the Top Comment hegemony. Two suggestions here: 1) make it impossible to vote for the Top Comment or 2) program staleness into the thumbs up so that a top position degrades over time.

The general idea is that a viewer should see more than just two comments out of 26,000, and building in a kind of comment renewal is a strong way to encourage more user interaction. Sure, I could scour all of the comments and cast my vote every time, but I'm just not the voting type. However, I believe that the attention and votes of people today count more than they do six months, a year, or five years ago.

Rating comments is very democratic. Everyone gets a vote, if they want it. Integrating comment degradation would not be an attempt to undermine the inherent democracy of the comment world, but rather to introduce a new rule to spice things up.

Just a thought.

Standing Book Bids

I buy and sell books on Amazon.com. It's very very easy. As a buyer, you are just a few clicks and a few days away from getting exactly what you want at your doorstep. As a seller, it takes a little bit more work (you have to log the books, print out invoices, and mail them to get the max amount of money), but it is still surprisingly easy.

But the way the current system is in place, sellers definitely do more work than buyers. What if this were reversed? What if Amazon encouraged buyers to choose a price that they would 100% buy a book at (similar to a fixed stock buy) and it fell on the sellers to peruse these potential buyers to see if the price was what they were hoping to get for their product?

If a buyer isn't in a hurry to get something, he/she might put out a lowball bid, say 20% of the asking price. It might take anywhere from a few days to a few years to find a seller willing to sell at that price, but it would be an equally balanced equation like the system that is in place right now.

As a seller, I've got tons of books unsold right now. When I was logging them, I would have been more than happy to consider offers on them. As it stands right now, I've already put in the work for the current system. So I wait.

Google Maps Options

I want to talk about Google Maps, but I want to use this Yahoo! Sites listing as a starting point. First, just take a look. In just a few seconds, you get an idea of the possibilities on Yahoo! I don't use 95% of these sites, but I know they're there. When I started using Yahoo! back in the mid to late 90s, I navigated to their gaming page in a different way. When this quick tool bar popped up, the process (even though it may have only taken a few seconds less) was made easier.

Google Maps, to be clear, is awesome. I use it all the time. In fact, I just went through a little tutorial about all the options on the Google sidebar in the upper right (the place where you can toggle between Earth and Satellite views) and learned that there is a crazy PHOTO OPTION that, once checked, overlays local photos onto every place on the planet. Yeah, think about it. In just a few moments, I saw locally taken pictures everywhere from Boston, Massachusetts, USA all the way down to freakin' Antarctica and everywhere in between. Amazing.

However, awesome things can be made better. In fact, in this digital age, I would say that the definition of awesome is fluid in large part because awesome keeps on getting redefined every five seconds.

So how does one make Google maps better? For one, I'm getting annoyed that I get different results in Google search and Google Maps. I understand it's no fault of Google if a company doesn't have an online presence, that is, if they don't register their company in the online databases. But as a consumer looking for all my options, I'm a little put out that it falls to me to cut and paste the information that a computer program would do much more efficiently.

That's one thing. The other relates to these options. Once most of the businesses are logged into the database, then what happens next is the inclusion of another toolbar. I'm tired of punching in "Restaurant near Boston, MA," even if the stupid thing guesses what I want before I finish typing it. I want control. I want options on the side of the map that allow me to click, say, three options: Restaurants which appear in red, Game Stores which appear in green, and Grocery Stores which appear in yellow. With these options overlaid on the map of my choosing, I can easily see which places I need to go to first, second, third. Plus, I might find a place to go to that I hadn't considered, a grocery store that's usually off my radar, for example.

That's pretty much it. Oh, and I really think the Bike directions leave a lot to be desired. I absolutely hate all the green lines that pop up when I switch to bike view. Look at this madness (shown above). It's crazy!

HuffPo Needs a Better Algorithm

There's a lot of complex math going on behind the webpages we all visit.  If you receive an email with the words book or novel in it, you're instantly targeted with ads ranging from book publishing to Amazon.com's latest bestseller.  That's pretty insane when you think about it.  How in the world does Google's software pick "book" from an email in which the writer might have also included other important nouns like "mother," "homework," "baseball," or "car"?  I couldn't tell you.  The fact is that we've got a lot of really smart people writing really smart programs that essentially govern the media we're exposed to.

So it begs the question: if these people are so freaking smart, how is it possible to stumble upon something as blatantly STUPID as the above shot, taken from today's Huffington Post website.  The Huffington Post, or HuffPo as it's sometimes referred to, is an internet-only news source.  It's liberal, so if you've been plugged into FoxNews your whole life, you might not have heard of it.

So back to the shot.  Take a really close look.  The title of it reads "HuffPost's Big News Pages."  That's a good start.  It gets you wondering what is going on in the world.  There are some obvious ones, of course -- "Energy," "Election 2012," "September 11 Anniversary," "Hurrican Isaac 2012," "Libya," and "Taxes."  But wedged in there are some real losers: "fish" and "Bacon."  If you've got a puzzled look on your face, that makes you a normal human being.

What the hell is bacon doing up there with September 11 and Taxes?  Seriously.  This is evidence of an algorithm, some fancy piece of mathematical software, gone very very wrong.  Obviously, the HuffPo's software has grabbed all the websites that have gotten the most hits.  That's fine.  But they can't forget that there are actual HUMANS reading their website.  It's more than a little offensive to see BACON up there with a NATIONAL and WORLD TRAGEDY.

In chess software, you can't just tell the computer that the King is the most important piece on the board.  You have to assign it a value.  From what I've been told, you give the King such a high value (like a million versus the Queen's value of 9 or the Pawn's value of 1) that the chess program understands as a byproduct that the King is to be guarded at all costs.

It seems to me that if it's that easy to do that in chess software, it should be equally easy to do that with this.  Just assign Bacon a negative value in relation to Big News.  It's that easy.  Take it off the list.  People who are into bacon won't be offended, just like people who like comic strips aren't offended that they aren't on the front page of the newspaper.  Seriously, this one is a no-brainer.

Comment Consolidation and Nazis

My friend mentioned Godwin's Law to me one day during a chat, and I confessed I'd never heard of it.  Godwin's Law states that the longer an online discussion goes the closer the discussion comes to the mention of Hitler, Nazis, and the Third Reich.  It's meant to be serious but also to poke fun at the way we interact with one another on the digital platform.

This got me to thinking about how much people like to leave commentary.  I do it every so often, just throwing out my two cents for the sake of getting it off my chest, but I never get into a sparring match, as there doesn't seem to be any point.

However, for some reason, I love reading what people say almost as much as what an article says.  If you want to know what America thinks, go to a controversial article and skip straight to the comments.  You'll find the bloody beating heart of America right there.  Without the inhibitions of a face-to-face encounter, people put it all out there.  It can get nasty quick, and comparisons to Hitler are the least of your worries.

Every site has their own system.  That is, generally, if you want to leave commentary, you have to have an account with that particular site.  If you love leaving commentary and you love reading ten different sites, this usually means having an account with every single one of them.  In short: this blows.

I would like to see a consolidation of commentary.  What Huffington Post does within their own web content is excellent by the way: they reward people who post a lot by highlighting their names, allow others to follow them (digitally, of course), and keep track of them overall.  I would venture to say that their system is the best one out there right now that I've seen.

It's this system that I would like to see used across the internet, a stand-alone company whose sole job is to provide commentary support for all internet content.  I want to know what people are saying across the spectrum.  I want a history of their writings across all sites; in short, I want whatever users write to create a history.  Like a credit card, it's their choice to create a good history or bad history.

Compartmentalization of comments, which is what we have now, allows for people to say whatever they want.  The goal of commentary should be to achieve a level of mutual respect that exists in the physical realm.  Obviously, not all interactions are positive in the physical arena, but those people who act out do so with the full knowledge that they alone support their words.  Comment accountability does not really exist in the digital realm, but it can and should.

A few days after my friend told me about Godwin's Law, he said that he had gotten into a heated online discussion.  After a few back-and-forths, the person he was debating used a reference to Hitler!  Godwin's Law was illustrated to full effect!  My friend was both pleased and disappointed.  The comparison (I don't recall which two things were being compared) effectively terminated the conversation because to play Devil's Advocate at that point would mean to side with Hitler.

It's this kind of stuff that one would hope to avoid while creating a history.  A user might even see patterns in his own way of debating things and make improvements upon himself.  But really, it should give a commentator a moment's pause before posting: this is going down in my record forever.

Multiple Windows

I open multiple windows on my laptop all the time, everyday.  Sure, I'm a fan of tabs.  Who isn't?  But sometimes I like a movie to be playing, a game of backgammon to be going, and a word document that I'm supposed to be editing open, and I want them all on the same screen.  Is this too much to ask?

Sure, I can fiddle with the windows.  Make them bigger, make them smaller, make them thin or fat or wide.  What I want the brainstinks at Microsoft to come up with is an automatic program that gives me the option of auto-sizing my stupid windows.  Call me lazy, whatever.  When I open a new window and this option of auto-sizing is already turned ON, I want the two windows to fill my screen perfectly.  No fiddling required.

Seriously, am I the only person who wants this?  I couldn't be.  There's got to be someone else as scatterbrained as I am who seriously wants half a dozen windows open at the same time.

So here's my vision.  Let's say you have three windows open at the same time.  The auto-size option has them fill the screen.  Let's say one window is the dominant window and fills up half the screen; the other two are smaller and lay on top of one another.  Perfect.  But when I manipulate one screen - that is, make it wider or taller - I want the other screens to auto-size accordingly.  I mean, come on!  This isn't rocket science here.  Figure it out and get back to me.

I *love* how I can swap tabs in certain internet browsers.  I want this swapping feature in conjunction with the auto-size option.  I want to be able to drag one window on top of another to swap them, to make a quick change up.  For someone working on multiple projects at the same time, this would be very very handy.

So do it!  Get someone on it.  Figure out this little itty bitty option.  It would make a lot of us really really happy.

Promo Emails

I *just* unsubscribed to my daily Groupon alert.  (For those of you who love Groupon, this may seem like blasphemy; for those of you not in the know, count your blessings.)  It was surprisingly easy to do, which I very much appreciated.  The "unsubscribe" button was at the top of the email, and though it was in small font, it was still a cinch to spot, click, and be done with.

THEN I was prompted to give feedback.  Again, the wizards at Groupon have made this ridiculously easy.  Three buttons appeared which said "Too much email," "Not relevant to me," and some other option that escapes me for the moment.  I wanted to click on BOTH the first two options, but I decided that the greater of the two evils was "Too much email," so I went with that one.

THEN I was thanked, but what kills me was the new button at the bottom of the thank-you: RESUBSCRIBE.  You have got to be kidding me.  Why in the world would I resubscribe to something I just dumped?  The audacity!

I get so many promo emails - stuff that I actually signed up for - that I have come to look at them as SPAM or unwanted clutter.  They make me *not* want to buy anything from those particular retail outlets for a long long time.  Google did a remarkable job of sorting true SPAM out of my inbox, but dumbass that I am, I have spoiled their work by signing up for various deals, bargains, and for shopping online.  And for signing up for Facebook.

I could go on and on.  I hate this stuff.  So let's skip to the idea.

I don't want to entirely get rid of these stupid promo emails because once in a blue moon I might want that 30% off from Amazon or an update from Marmot (Marmot by the way sends far fewer email updates than any other business, and to this, I say "Thank you.").  ONCE in a while, those emails come in handy, and I love a good deal, so I don't want to eliminate a lifeline.

Instead, may I suggest the consolidated email.

In Google, I have many many options, but the main one is to flag an email as being a junk email.  Why couldn't I flag it for consolidation?  I don't want to reroute these emails into a separate folder because I'd likely never visit the folder (that's just the way I roll).  What I would prefer is that these promo emails get collected and delivered to me as one single freakin' email once a week/month/whatever.

So let's say I've flagged nine to fifteen promo emails.  I don't want to see these individually ever again.  However, every two weeks (I'm thinking that twice a month is PLENTY for me), I'd get a single email that I could click on and be presented with a collection of these promo emails.  I could glance at the list and determine in ONE MOMENT if I'd like to investigate something new.

I can see retailers hating this, but if email service providers had that option, there's certainly nothing they could do about it.  Over time, however, I could see companies redirecting their efforts to making sure that when they get that fraction of a second from a consolidated email what they write will actually be worth reading.

iPhone Finger Swiping Art Project

As I was fiddling with my iPhone the other day, I had the notion that I was doing an awful lot of finger swipes.  I swipe to open the phone, swipe to change pages, punch icons to open apps, swipe to scroll up and down.  It got me to thinking.  What do all my collective finger swipes look like?

If I were in an application like DrawSomething, all of my finger swiping would be recorded as me making art.  But what about all the OTHER finger swipes?  To run the iPhone and check the weather or play games or read an internet article - no matter what you do you have to swipe on the touchscreen.

My idea is to record this data for a fixed period of time (say, five minutes).  Then the user could start the application and see a condensed version of their finger swiping as a visual piece of art.  It could be a still frame of the entire time, or it could be an animation, with different colors every few seconds, possibly set to music.

A friend raised the objection that this would be similar to tracking users' keyboard input - that is, a record of every button pressed.  But it's not the same, not by a long shot.  What's great about this idea is that because everyone's Smart Phone is configured differently (the placement of our apps is very different) and how users use their phone varies widely as well, the visual imagery generated by a person's finger swipes would only be meaningful to that person.  ("Hey, that's when I was playing Angry Birds!  And that's when I was reading The New York Times!")

We are all of us artists in one way or another.  This app would just be evidence supporting the point.