The official Google Support page describes the following subsidy tiers:

• Nexus One without service: $529
• Nexus One with new, 2-year T-Mobile US service plan for new customers: $179
• Nexus One with new, 2-year T-Mobile US service plan for qualifying existing T-Mobile customers who are adding data plans: $279
• Nexus One with new, 2-year T-Mobile US service plan for qualifying existing T-Mobile customers who are upgrading their data plans: $379

I’ve been a T-Mobile customer for a little over seven years now, and off-contract for pretty much that entire time. I’m thus now open to what T-Mobile calls their full subsidy. Except with the Google phone, where Google manages the subsidy, not T-Mobile. Since I had a $10/month sad, EDGE-based data plan with TMO, Google informed me after polling the TMO servers that I was eligible for the $150 subsidy, for a Nexus One price of $379. The next subsidy tier up is $100 cheaper for a price of $279.

The only distinction lies in whether you are “upgrading your data plan” or “adding a data plan.” This seemed like a simple enough problem to fix: I called T-Mobile support and asked them to cancel my data plan. They said it would be no problem, since I’m not under contract. I worried briefly that it wouldn’t be visible to the Google-based powers that be until the next billing cycle, but the TMO rep informed me that the change is instant. Since I knew I was buying a Nexus either way, I pulled the trigger.

Wouldn’t you know it, not five minutes later when I went to make the purchase again Google’s web store fetched my data and lo and behold, my Nexus price was now just $279. Easy-peasy, that.

The ironic part is that I’m moderately sure I could re-activate the data plan now without incurring any real additional fees in the day-and-a-half I may have to wait for the overnight shipping to get here, but I don’t use the slow EDGE service enough to warrant wrecking my cool here.

After all the dust settled, I realized how asinine Google had decided to make the checkout process by managing sales and subsidies of the device themselves. They limit you to just one rate plan during your purchase, which is more than a little infuriating as I received different answers from TMO reps over whether upping my minutes would cause Google to come after me for the subsidy. (It appears that you CAN upgrade your account to another Even More plan according to a recently-added note on this Google Support page.) The pricing rates are buried under a Support knowledge base article and not at all transparent. Google says $179 and then pulls an enormous J/K on you as they fetch your account information, seemingly pulling a figure out of thin air as it suits them. The T-Mobile reps can’t do anything about it since the purchase isn’t on their side of the pond at all. And Google is nowhere to be found.

Strange to me that a company so intent on delivering a device with their brand and full-throated support would instantly fawn off users to HTC and T-Mobile so that they don’t need to support their customers in any meaningful way. This isn’t the first time Google has proved shockingly absent with matters of support, but it feels very different when you’re purchasing a product subject to additional cancellation fees.

Further, it seems completely short-sighted to limit the subsidy as they have. Restricting the best price to new T-Mobile customers alone is frustrating, but they make it nearly impossible for anyone with a family plan to switch at the subsidized price. Worse, the subsidy at its lower rates really just amortizes the cost of the phone out over those two years, as the Even More plans cost $10/month more—that’s $240 over two years right there. Let’s be clear: At $379, you’re better off financially buying the unlocked phone and using the Even More Plus plan, which costs $10 less, for a total savings of $90 over the two year term. Even better since you’re not under any contract at the $529 rate.

Creating barriers to entry for new customers is always a bad idea, made all the worse when those barriers seem arbitrary and class-based. Google needs to stop with the silly tiers and subsidize the damn phone like they’re usually subsidized through carriers. They should allow purchases under family plans and not take the data plan into account. And they should allow you to select from any of T-Mobile’s Even More tiers, which would save me a phone call with T-Mobile’s (admittedly friendly and typically knowledgeable) support.

[1/18/2010 Edit: It was reported last week that Google is nixing the $379 rate entirely, so existing T-Mobile subscribers of all (out-of-contract) stripes will now qualify for the $279 offer. Early adopters who got hit with the $379 rate will have a refund check sent to them. Good on Google, but it'd be nice if it were $179 for all.]

WELCOME TO THE WORLD WIDE WEB, AN INTERACTIVE MEDIUM IN WHICH SCREEN RESOLUTION STATISTICS ARE TRIVIAL, BROWSER VIEWPORTS ARE VARIABLE, AND SCROLLING BEHAVIOUR IS A STANDARD. THERE IS NO PAGE FOLD. LOVE YOUR SCROLLBAR.

The buzz on Twitter from “designer” types appears to be a knee-jerk “ZOMG YES SO TRUE!!!111one” while responses on the site’s reddit thread have been more measured. I especially appreciate the following comment, by one fletcher_t:

Well of course it depends on the context of what the site is providing… but there is indeed a fold and if you’re ignorant of that, may god have mercy on your soul.

Let’s be perfectly clear: There IS a “fold”. For the uninitiated, the “fold” refers to the literal crease in a newspaper. Editors recognized the importance of catching their reader’s interest “above the fold”, because the likelihood a reader will bother to look under the fold is lower as a whole. Readers who might not typically read the sports section, for instance, will notice a story above the fold if it’s of interest to them. If they’re just flipping past as they always do, they’re far less likely to look beneath the fold.

The assertion made by the “no fold” site is that, because technology has provided us with infinite page lengths, we should design our pages accordingly. We can space things out more, we can use larger print and increase readability, and we shouldn’t be so concerned with what lies above the fold because users will scroll anyway! We were on a roll there up until that third point, weren’t we?

The reality is that the science of user attention is a tricky one, and more of an art than anything. Heat maps and eye-tracking studies frequently show huge dividends by presenting the initial page-load in a clear, concise manner, with well delineated courses of action visible to the user and readily accessible. Users will absolutely scroll, if you’ve given them a compelling reason to believe anything of interest lies beneath the fold. Users are fickle types, though, who scan quickly, look for large visual cues, and make an off-the-cuff and perhaps misinformed decision to bounce away from your site in an incredibly short amount of time, if you don’t captivate them instantly. To capture their interest, you simply must pay attention to the content that resides above the fold.

With Google’s release of Browser Size the other day, Tech Crunch mentioned that Google saw a 10% increase in the number of installs of Google Earth, simply by moving the download button up 100 pixels. By placing the call to action and primary focus of the page above the fold, users were far more likely to follow through. Naturally, this will vary from site to site. Amazon.com has a rather long page, which they use to show multiple categories of products they think you’ll be interested in. Their primary feature and what they hope will have the most success is always at the top, though—a compelling enticement to scroll further and see what else they got right.

Understand, this is by no means an argument for cramming everything of any importance above the fold. Not even a little bit. (And I understand that the no-fold site is likely directed at those types—but does anyone actually try to force entire sites above the fold anymore?) Whitespace should be well utilized, large print is totally acceptable, and designers shouldn’t force pages to fit into any idea of a “standard” vertical viewport. CXPartners even argues that including less information above the fold can encourage users to scroll more, arguably by reducing the utility of the site to the point where they’re forced to scroll.

It’s not my claim the no-fold site is implying you should ignore the above-fold design or disregard its design entirely, but the cheeky site title and its assertion that there is NO page fold degrades the importance of how you construct your pages for those first 700 or so pixels. Encourage your users to scroll, not by reducing utility but by increasing interest. Facilitate this behavior by keeping large, blocking horizontal lines and blocks at bay (advice from CXPartners’ piece) and providing clear paths downward. Ensure that users see that additional content exists further down. But don’t forget that your site’s first impression is above the fold.

With the exception of the penultimate “new Facebook”, they have had to rollback or significantly change tack from their initial position of “this is new and you’re going to like it,” forced  instead to listen to their users, post a mea culpa and attempt to save face with the global press and the blogosphere collectively rolling their eyes at each new foible. TechCrunch has an idiotic post about how when Facebook listens to their users, God kills a kitten for bowing to the masses and “designing by committee”. Robert Scoble backed this up with a misguided treatise about how Zuckerberg is on track to score billions from these changes and how they shouldn’t/wouldn’t start listening to their users. I call bullshit.

Scoble cites the fun designer quip: “if you asked a group of Porsche owners what they wanted they’d tell you things like “smoother ride, more trunk space, more leg room, etc.” He’d then say “well, they just designed a Volvo.””

This isn’t that. This is as if Facebook simply removed the steering wheel from the car and told you you’ll go farther now that you can’t steer.

What Facebook did here was not revolutionary. It was not bringing about hard change we needed. Instead, they stripped away piles of features their users had come to like and depend on. They replaced them with broken stand-ins, like the quiz/application-spammed “stream”, with no way to reasonably filter the nature of what was coming in. Sure, you’ve exposed me to “more” of the “social graph”, but at great cost to the signal/noise ratio that made Facebook so very useful to most people. When you make a product markedly and objectively worse to use and interact with on a daily basis, under the backwards-minded notion that the new way will help users connect “better”, you’re going to frustrate nearly EVERYone. And rightfully so.

This is not a question of design by committee. It’s interesting to note that, while excessive, there’s been a lot of chatter on how Google designs, if not by committee, then by cold, hard statistics. Douglas Bowman, Google’s former lead designer, recently left Google because of their engineering-centric approach to design: essentially to (arguably) overengineer the user experience and back every design decision with quantitative analysis, facts, and figures. He goes on to cite how Google tested 41 shades of blue in what must have been one hell of an A/B test—the point here is that the “committee” was essentially the aggregated experience of the user base, whether they knew it or not. This is fundamentally different than assigning 20 or 30 key “stakeholders” who can significantly alter the course and outcome of a project on their personal whims. Likewise, Facebook “listening” to their users is closer to the Google approach of implementing user feedback—saying it’s “design by committee” is a false dichotomy.

Further, telling me that Facebook is slimming things down and cutting features “for my own good” is like telling me that new keyboards will no longer come with an “E” key in order to simplify the user experience—I’ll just have to launch Character Map and manually copy and paste my vowel from now on, but look! Fewer keys! This is a perfect example of cutting off your nose to spite your face.

What’s stranger still to me is that the example Scoble cites is a complete non-sequitir: he basically suggests that Facebook is moving closer to copying FriendFeed than Twitter, and that we’ll be able to use it for recommendations and the “social” or “peer-based” marketing. Point of contention: the “old” Facebook design did absolutely nothing to stop exactly that. It was simply a different, more powerful interface that gave users more of what they wanted and better controls by which to express those preferences. Further, the *new* Facebook does nothing to better deliver that.

Even Mark Zuckerberg has trouble making a compelling case for the changes. Quoth Z:

We’re also going to make some changes to the home page. The new home page will let you see everything that’s shared by your friends and connections as it happens. [Previously possible with the Live Feed option on Old Facebook.] It will also provide you more control by letting you choose exactly who you see among the people and things you are connected to. [Previously possible with the Old Facebook sliders and "more" or "less" about this person option.] You can decide you no longer want to get updates from your old friend from high school who you rarely talk to, or you can filter the stream to only see updates about your family members. [Both previously possible.]

So what’s changed? They’ve consolidated four purpose-driven feeds into one amalgamated clusterfucky stream. They’ve *removed* the capability to specify the type of events you’d like to see the most, and thus, which things should remain visible for you the longest. The advantage to the old system was dynamic, intelligent exposure. Old Facebook would do its level best to show you what it thought was most important and make sure those things were persistent and visible. It used algorithms. It did NOT just spew an unadulterated, stream-of-consciousness of everyone around me with no means to filter it. Enter New Facebook. The world is better when you can’t turn down the volume, right?

Facebook has announced that they are, in fact, integrating some user feedback into the new design. Among these changes are things to mitigate application updates (something that Old Facebook already had, since you could mute a given application’s update), photo tags (sometnoshing that Old Facebook accomplished well enough with the Photos feed), more Highlights (something I’m not sure anyone really wants), and moving the Friend Request and Event Invites to the top right corner. You know, where they were on Old Facebook.

Subjective, design and interface-oriented changes that don’t significantly improve any user’s experience do not enable me to be better in touch with my “social graph”  or heart chakra, for that matter. Please, let’s not confuse good design with an overly simplistic, featureless future. And let’s not just full steam ahead, ignoring the pleas of millions, simply because Mark hath seen the glory of the coming of the Lord. Facebook’s future is still bright and buzzing with potential, but they haven’t gained any ground by seriously smudging the window to my social graph.

Responding to Your Feedback | Facebook Blog via TechCrunch
10 Things That Suck About the New Facebook | HTMList
Why Facebook has never listened and why it definitely won’t start now | Scobleizer

Facebook began rolling out their new design two days ago, and it’s frankly simply terrible. The first thing you’ll notice about the Facebook redesign is that it looks a lot like a basic Twitter page. Facebook talks a lot about how this new layout helps show a “live stream of your social graph” and a lot of other nonsense that would seem completely applicable if they were switching from the new design to the old.

The reality is that they are angering their customers by making things difficult to find, dramatically altering the aesthetic and interface of the site, and in many people’s opinion, taking a dramatic step backwards in usability. My exposure to this nightmare of an interface began just today, but I get a distinct impression that it won’t grow on me like the last changes.

What don’t I like? Let’s take a look:

1. Avatars: I’ve grown to love Twitter. I use it every day. Facebook has made a clear overture towards Twitter by displaying your friend’s avatars on every single feed item. This takes up space and annoys me a great deal: On Twitter, I may not know the individuals I follow. I may closely associate them with their avatars and use that as a visual reference. On Facebook, however, I know almost everyone I’m “friends” with, by name, and relatively personally. I know some users are exceptions to this and have tons of friends, but the avatar won’t help them any more than it will annoy me. It takes up space, looks off-balance, and feels out of place:
   
2. What’s on your mind? As it turns out, the same thing that’s on everyone’s mind: The new Facebook makes us stabby. They’ve changed the simple status update to a more poignant question: What’s on your mind? This has been merged into something called the Publisher, which essentially combines posted items, photos, and any app that is built to post news stories using the Publisher into one unwieldy and rather confusing component. While I think the Publisher has some potential, I think only showing the “Add” pane on focus is a mistake. The “building” interface is confusing–as you progress down the path of adding items like a link URL, more options become available to you, but because they’re not visible to start with, users may worry that they’ll end up just posting a straight link.
   
3. Multiple Notification Areas: Facebook has always walked the line with this a bit: New friend or application requests or other pressing needs always appeared in the upper right corner, at the top of the sidebar. This wouldn’t inform you of new inbox messages; for that you need to see if there’s a number next to Inbox. Facebook has does us one worse by putting friend requests near the Welcome banner, at the top of your stream, while other notifications like birthdays appear on the right side near the Highlights sidebar.
   
4. Birthday Handling Is Curiously Stupid: This one is hard to verify, because it’s not presenting right now, but when I first loaded the new design, it showed me my friend’s birthday was today. Below that, it offered me a link to view more upcoming events. As it turns out, another friend has a birthday within 3 days. Nice that I need to click a call to action to display that information. Old Facebook just showed me birthdays of friends three days out. Worrying: My friend’s birthday has passed, but my other friend’s forthcoming day of jubilee is no longer showing up anywhere on the page, at all.
5. Event Handling Is Curiously Stupid: Or broken, I can’t tell which. I have a forthcoming event—one I created, am attending, and would like additional details on—but all I see near the Highlights sidebar area is a stupid sponsored event for a forthcoming movie I have no intent on seeing. This is wildly inconvenient as a reminder to NOT see a film I couldn’t care less about is markedly less useful for me than a friendly, ever-present reminder of an event I’m, you know, RUNNING. I’m hoping this is just a simple bug, because not having a consistent space for forthcoming events that you’re attending will near-completely irradicate any usefulness that feature once had.
6. “Highlights”: Not Anyone’s Definition of Highlights: Seriously, I understand the concept, as Facebook describes it:
   “This section will feature photos, notes and other content you probably don’t want to miss: events lots of your friends are attending, links many people have commented on, public profiles your friends connect to and so on.” But they really missed the boat on this one. Maybe it’s my particular group of friends, but showing me a few people’s tagged photos doesn’t really rank as “breaking” for me. It’s stranger still that it seems to give weight to the first two items, even though their presence at the top of the list is arbitrary.

   Finally, I can’t “clear” items from this list. I like to remove persistent items after I’ve decided to read or disregard them. But because I can’t nix them, I’m stuck looking at the same stupid rotation of menial items until it decides to rotate them out. (A good example of the functionality I’d like to see is the “People You May Know” widget that appears on the home page—click the X and it’s replaced with a new potential person you may know, until there are none left.)

7. Fully Integrated Ads: I understand Facebook needs to generate revenue. Integrating ads directly into the Highlights sidebar with absolutely NO visual cue that it’s an ad is a quick way to ruin the entire Highlights experience for me and annoy the fuck out of me in the process. I read and responded to Facebook ads before, when they were disparate and set apart and clearly ads. Now, I’m skipping the entire Highlights bar because a few items look like ads to me.
8. No Sorting by Content Type: Facebook let us select the News Feed, which was the generic home page view, or drill down to just Status Updates, which was actually very useful when you just wanted to keep tabs on your friends’ statuses. These filters aren’t available anymore, though I hope that’s just for now. (You could also filter by Top Stories, Photos, Posted Items or the Live Feed, or any of your friend groups—all very useful in their own ways.)
9. Changing the Interface So Dramatically Frustrates Users: Sure most people will stick around and “get the hang” of things. And Facebook will continue to evolve the design so that it’s perhaps someday half as useful as its predecessor. But every time you make a sweeping change to the entire way the site functions, you alienate all of your users who took the time to learn their way around your software. It’s not really practical to allow users to select their theme, since branching design concepts could become a maintenance nightmare, but it’s also not fair to ask your entire user base to relearn their way around. Least of all when it offers such little additional utility and frustrates so many.
10. It’s A Full Step Backward: As argued throughout, the new design is actually less functional than its predecessor. When you remove very useful features that people know and love from your application, you’re looking for trouble. When you do so for what appears to many to be no particular reason, change for the sake of change, all you’re going to do is stir the ire of the masses.

Facebook has a very, very bad habit of firing off sweeping changes to the site without properly introducing them or soliciting real feedback. They did it with the news and mini feeds, they did it with the Facebook Beacon, and they’ve done it again. The last sweeping change to Facebook, they approached much more civily. They had a long transition period where you could elect to try the new Facebook, submit your feedback, get the hang of it, and see where they were going with the changes. Even still, when they formally launched the new version, it wasn’t tightened down and finished properly—that came later.

This iteration around, Facebook provided significantly less time and warning, and instead of soliciting honest feedback, their attitude seemed to be much more to the effect of: “This is what we’re doing. And you’re going to like it. Whether you like it or not.” It feels half-baked, especially when features like content-based filters are missing entirely. And it doesn’t feel as if it’s aiming to assist with any of the goals they espouse when talking about the social graph and tracking the actions of those around you.

It’s clear they see what Twitter’s doing and they think they can leverage their platform to do roughly the same thing. But they are two different properties. Facebook is where I go to track people I know and love. It’s where I share my photos, write long treatises, chat directly with friends, monitor birthdays, and challenge friends to games. Twitter is where I go to meet new people, strike up random conversations, and take in a peripheral awareness of my friends, but also the happenings of individuals I don’t know but am otherwise interested in. Because of the limited nature of the information Twitter provides, individuals like celebrities can allow people to follow them, when they would typically not add every fan as a “friend” on Facebook.

Facebook seems to be a bit of David chasing Goliath, even though they don’t necessarily operate in the same footprint at all. I wish they’d stop and consider what they do to their customer base when they make these changes. If the feedback on the blog post is any indication, they’re going to need to decide if they want to weather this storm, capitulate, or compromise. They’ve done all three in the past. It’d be nice if they would take a break from massive, crowd-angering, sweeping changes, perhaps for just a few months.

Welcome to Your New Home Page | Improving Your Ability to Share and Connect

In trying to link my new account from the store with an online account, it prompts for a security question. I select “mother’s middle name” since things like “what’s your favorite restaurant?” are ridiculously inane as I’ll almost *certainly* forget what I entered, which will promptly be followed by feelings of wanting to stab someone. And then I enter ma’s middle name: marie. Nevermind that the security answer is CaSe SeNsItIvE, (because, clearly, I should also be forced to remember if I proper-cased my answer) it goes ahead and tells me:

Great. Now Barnes & Noble is calling me a liar AND insulting my mother. Swimming performance there, kids. [Really, the error message reads as follows: Your Security Answer is not formatted properly. A Security Answer must be 6–15 characters long, spaces allowed. Remember that Security Answers are case sensitive (i.e., "Dickens" is not the same as "dickens").]

The moral of the story? Don’t enforce ridiculous limitations on a security question if the user’s correct answer might violate those limitations. And don’t insult your customer’s mothers. (CrunchGear blogged about this too, some two weeks ago.)

Our beloved web analytics tool Clicky blogged about a pretty crucial SEO & analytics issue today: Google is rolling people over to a new AJAX-powered search, that pushes query strings AFTER a hash mark. So: http://www.google.com/search?q=what’s+my+referrer becomes: http://www.google.com/#q=what’s+my+referrer

The problem with this is that browsers don’t send anything after the hash mark (this thing: #) in their referrer string, since they’re used for named anchors. Since analytic tools use the referrer string to parse search keywords, this breaks that functionality for anyone on the “new” Google. Nightmare. It’s as if they’re effectively “commenting out” the rest of the query string from the referrer string–dark pool, that. Learn more about the ramifications here after the jump.

What’s interesting to me is the split opinions on the Clicky blog post. A lot of people seem to be taking a “they can do whatever they want” attitude towards things, with some noting that if it were instead Microsoft making this change, the ranting wouldn’t stop. While I agree that a company has the right to change the way they operate and to change the way their application functions, I think they’re doing everyone a vast disservice by essentially breaking such a useful component. Many, many tracking tools and logging systems will cease to process search keywords properly.

What’s stranger still is that this appears to break even Google Analytics’ own implementation of keyword tracking, based on its use of the referrer string and some preliminary testing by this guy. This leads me to wonder if this was a test concept that got pushed to production inadvertently, and if we’ll be seeing a rollback sometime in the near future when the engineering team realizes what unholy hellfire they’ve released on the analytics community. Worse still, this isn’t a simple tracking-system fix. The browsers themselves govern the data sent in the referrer string. They parse out anything after a hash mark, because it was traditionally used to refer to a section within a page, pointing to a named anchor somewhere on a given page. (Whereas a regular query string is typically calling dynamic content, and thus fundamentally different even if the root file were the same.) No reason to consider index.php#top and index.php as separate pages; in fact, this would further muck up analytics tools.

It will be very interesting to see what develops here. Losing the ability to track incoming keywords for no appreciable reason and with no word from Google seems a bit obtuse, but there’s a fair chance we’ll be hearing something or seeing some changes very soon.

Meanwhile, if you want to test this yourself, visit Google directly, search for “What’s my referrer” and click the first result. Then try it from a Google Toolbar search; these searches still use the old query string method, as its the toolbar itself formatting the search request and not the site. Search for the same and note that the referrer now contains your search string.

Facebook needs to publish a public post-mortem on this, as soon as humanly possible. When any data disappears from the cloud, no matter how innocuous, it calls into consideration serious questions of trust and competence. I’ve trusted Facebook for a long time. The engineers who have built it have done an amazing job at making sure things scale brilliantly, at cobbling together various pieces of technology and contributing their own back to the community to make the site highly available and without many of the horrible growing pains MySpace experienced, when Tom would send a message telling everyone bulletins will be down and to please not email him.

But as any developer knows, data doesn’t just disappear. Something happened. A commit was made, a query was executed, redundancies weren’t properly established, or deltas weren’t present—a series of wrongs likely had to occur for Facebook to lose this data forever. Now, Facebook is free. I don’t pay them for their services, and they don’t owe me an SLA. That issue becomes irrelevant the more Facebook asks me to share with them, and the more they attempt to assure me my privacy is intact and of the utmost importance to them. If my notification settings can be completely lost and reset, what’s to say it couldn’t have been my privacy options? Further, do privacy settings regress safely, to the most secure levels? Or do they regress, in the absence of all other data, as one may expect, to an open season on my profile, my pictures, my notes and everything else Facebook has asked me to share with them, with the knowledge that I could wall some of that data off?

And conventional wisdom is simple enough: Don’t post to Facebook that which you wouldn’t feel comfortable sharing with just about anyone. But Facebook is asking for us to trust them more than that. And in doing so, they’re making the application considerably more valuable to me. I can enjoy the site and share certain things with my friends on Facebook that I might not want readily apparent when a client Googles me. This isn’t to say that it’s not a risk, or that I don’t still temper myself to a point. But when I’m given the functionality to wall things off, I expect them to work. And if those settings are maintained just one table over, so to speak, from my notification settings… well then, we dodged a bullet this time, didn’t we? In fact, of all the data stored on Facebook, this was probably the most innocuous and least impactful data that could be lost.

Several months ago, Amazon’s distributed file storage system, S3, suffered a severe outage that lasted for hours. Now, the situation is a bit different: Entire businesses rely on Amazon S3 to be functioning for their livelihoods. Outages mean lost income and lost trust. So Amazon did what Facebook absolutely must do: they issued a full post-mortem that explained their engineers’ findings and failings, their root-cause analysis, what caused the problem to cascade across their network, and most importantly, the measures they’ve taken to ensure that, to the best of their ability, this would never happen again.

This is the only way to get users back on the road to trusting you, and Facebook needs to deliver more information to us than just “we apologize for the inconvenience.” They need to let me know exactly what was the cause of the problem, what failed, and what they’ve done to make sure that, say, next time, all of my messages won’t be converted to open-wall posts on my account. Because this time, it was notification settings.

They dodged a bullet. Most users won’t really think twice. But those of us who know what it takes for a system like this to fail in such a manner… we’re worried. Facebook’s not perfect, the cloud grows more ethereal, and we’re left to hope beyond hope that what data we’ve chosen to share stays within the walled gardens we’ve established for it. Help build back some of that trust, Facebook, and let us know what went wrong.

There are so many web 2.0 applications out there that building a following and reaching a point where it makes any financial sense at all to keep the site open and available and to keep actively developing the site is a difficult challenge. It’s not helped at all by the fact that a site can grow beyond a regular simple hosting account to requiring an entire dedicated server, or even two or more in a load-balanced configuration. This problem is compounded when sometimes that growth milestone can be hit without the dollars backing it up. And yet, this decision wasn’t a financial one.

When a user initially signs up to use an application, they’re in an exploratory phase. They’ve been enticed enough to consider the app, and they want to play around with it a little. They’ll soon make a decision to become an active, engaged user, or to forget about the site. But when a user becomes active and engaged, and when they find themselves using an application to help them manage their lives, they are putting a great deal of trust in the application.

Nothing is permanent. There are a great deal of sites that we all use day to day that could easily not be here tomorrow or in five years. But when something is useful and someone has sold you on their concept and you actively support them by coming back every day, it can feel like a simple act of betrayal when it’s announced that the site is closing. With I Want Sandy, people are feeling burned more because they were never given a chance to pay for the service or contribute. Rael will be working for Twitter, and the intellectual property for IWS has been transferred to Twitter.

This, to me, is not a classy move. I don’t know Rael personally and I’m not privy to the inner musings that went on with his deal with Twitter. But if I were in a similar position, I would want to make clear, first and foremost, that I would need for my site to remain active, available, and open to the users that have come to love it and use it every day. Even if the intellectual property is being transferred, or if Twitter is purchasing the concept and has bigger ideas for the IP, I would want them to keep the site active until it was assimilated into the purchasing company’s portfolio—shuttering the site entirely only serves to vastly erode the value of the IP Twitter picked up when they acquired Rael. And while clearly they want him as an employee to work on Twitter and that is their primary focus, I don’t see what good reason they’d have for pissing off a few thousand people by essentially removing this “distraction” from Rael. As the founder of the site, I’d feel I would owe it to my users to keep things going.

This further goes to erode people’s trust in web 2.0 applications in general. This poisons the well. While people understand there is some risk in putting their eggs into free web 2.0 baskets, all it takes are a few terrible shutdowns like this one to get people gun shy and reluctant to use other applications. And that’s not in anyone’s best interest, but least of all when the site is (probably) cheap enough to just keep things going at the very least, or to have Twitter sponsor the hosting, or just to work something out instead of completely shutting down in two weeks. With personal produtivity tools and applications that become part of your routine or workflow, a shutdown feels even more disruptive and like an even more callous act of betrayal.

The comments in the Get Satisfaction thread are interesting. People are bitter. And they’re coming to distrust the cloud. It’s an ethereal thing and their data isn’t their own and the application isn’t their own and they can’t take it with them and they have no insurance that it will be there tomorrow. This is a significant issue for those who see value in web-based applications, who see potential in releasing something that can do something clever, for free, with a unique business model, if only there were the users and daily traffic. Says one commenter: “You’re really leaving a lot of people high and dry. If you treat your users like this now why should we trust you not to do the same again in the future?”

And even worse, people are feeling betrayed for having extolled the virtues of Sandy to others. It’s out of your control, sure, but it’s a credibility hit and you feel a bit the fool for suggesting a service that just completely went quiet. This is an interesting situation because it wasn’t at all a matter of dollars and cents—Rael took an offer with Twitter and explained that maintaining Sandy would have taken too much time. But this just comes off as feeling selfish and shortsighted. Twitter and Rael should have come up with a solution to keep this going for his community. The issue wasn’t at all helped by the fact that Rael didn’t see fit to have an export option until after he made the initial announcement, which has left other users high and dry as well.

How could Rael have handled this differently?

1) Work with Twitter to continue operating and hosting IWS. Spend a little time focusing on making it stable and automating a lot more of the time-consuming maintenance components. This would be difficult, but it’s responsible and it prevents Twitter from catching the flak that we’re seeing in the GS post. A responsible acquiring company works hard to not completely screw a set of people over, even in a situation as unique as this one.

2) If still committed to shutting down the project, provide at least 30 days for users to get their data out and make sure that they have the ability to do so on day 1. Further, communicate clearly and efficiently across the site and through the service itself that the site would be closing, providing instructions of exporting data and alternatives in the email.

3) Remember that betraying the trust of a userbase hurts everyone in this market. “It’s annoying to maintain” isn’t a particularly good excuse to kick an entire userbase in the nuts. Especially when a considerably larger, more glamorous startup just bought you out and doesn’t benefit from appearing on the t-shirt of the nut-kicker, so to speak.

Take a look at the forum posts and you’ll see why this is frustrating so many users. And while I don’t know what agreement Rael has made with Twitter, I’m still of the belief that something could be done and they could act to keep it up and running still. But I doubt we’ll see that happen—IWS has little to do with Twitter’s competencies and Twitter isn’t looking for distractions. It’s too bad, really.

[Updated 11/26/08 @ 5:07a to add bold, for readability's sake.]

The issue? Mint is really just a re-skinned version of Yodlee. Yodlee is a bank account aggregation tool that makes itself available to banks who want to offer their customers the same sort of “one look” aggregation services in a white-label manner. They’re good at what they do, and they offer a free personal edition called MoneyCenter. Mint simply slapped a bunch of pretty gradients on top of it (they actually use Yodlee as their backend) and some transaction matching algorithms that generally miscategorize items or retitle them if it thinks it knows what they were. (It’s wrong, in my experience, a staggering amount of the time.)

They also use your information to peddle credit card and savings account deals to you, because they can give customized estimates and let you see what you could save by going elsewhere. Their entire business model is reskinning another company’s product offering and earning referral commissions with their bit of logic.

Now I’m not saying Mint isn’t pretty. I’m not saying it’s not a better option than straight up Yodlee, though their transaction-matching will make you want to commit murder. But what I *am* saying is that reskinning another site is nowhere near innovative, clever and cool enough to have set them apart from the 39 other great companies at TechCrunch last year.

Well guess what? Fail strikes again. TechCrunch announced this year’s winner: Yammer. Michael refers to it as “Twitter with a business model” and that should be enough right there. It’s basically a corporate-network-limited Twitter. You have to register with a corporate email address, and your “tweets” are kept private only to others within that network. That’s it. It’s otherwise identical to Twitter. Yammer makes a quick buck by allowing HR departments at these organizations to “take ownership” of their own domain’s on Yammer by paying $1/user for the privilege.

Oh, and they ask “what are you working on?” instead of “what are you doing?” Call me crazy, but any company that has essentially refactored another, popular site’s concept into a small, microcosm, tightly focused business model is in for a MAJOR ass-kicking when papa bear decides to build their own iteration of this functionality. Why the hell shouldn’t Twitter tomorrow announce Twitter Corporate or Twitter Networks. Allow you to select which networks you belong to, continue to restrict access by company domain emails and hide certain tweets or allow them to be targeted: HOLY SHIT YOU JUST DESTROYED THE ENTIRETY THAT IS YAMMER.

My point is this: With absolutely nothing else to differentiate here, there is nearly NO innovation and definitely NO justification for them to have won this year’s TechCrunch50: 10,000 new members and 2,000 organizations is nothing; Twitter can do it better and if anyone bright over there actually has a say, something like this would be simple (relatively) to implement and MUCH more convenient for existing users of Twitter.

(Disclosure: One of our internal projects was one of the 100 TechCrunch40 finalists in last year’s competition. We were nowhere near far enough along with it, however. Point remains that plenty of the other companies at both events had more merit for the prize by FAR.)

The home page is Google-simplistic: Logo. Input box. Search button. Over-inflated index count. About link. Privacy link. On black. (Which is, I hear, the new black.) Start typing and a helpful suggest engine ala Google Suggest pops up. Cheers.

Try to search. One of several things will happen. Since we’re out of the “our servers are cooked” phase of things, chances are, you’ll get a results page. But if you were lucky to give it a shot early on, you’d just be flat presented with a “no results found” page. I searched “web application development” and “web development” and both came up with a 0-results page. This is apparently because the caching system isn’t able to retrieve results on the first request so instead places them in a queue. Except that Cuil doesn’t bother telling you that they’re still getting their shit together and that you’ll need to check back when they’ve actually pulled and cached those results. Not that you’d want to. Here’s why, after the jump.

An Index Bigger Than Google!

First and foremost, Cuil claims to be able to index pages faster and cheaper than Google. But the size of the index doesn’t drive relevance, except on the very edge of the very long tail. (Incredibly obscure search queries have a better chance of finding results if the index is incredibly large.) The question comes down to what the engines do with their indexed results. It’s not enough to simply cache and store a copy of every single unique page on the internet. You need to provide me the results that are most relevant. Google does this with PageRank and a giant swath of algorithmic goodness that looks at things like the weighted popularity of the sites linking in to you, Google Toolbar results, URL content, page titles and the like, with a lot of secret sauce thrown in. Presumably, Cuil uses some of the same metrics, since they just make sense. But a cursory glance at Cuil’s results set is frustrating to say the least and rarely what I’m looking for.

The Interface

The Cuil search results page is frustrating at first glance:

Three columns of results if your resolution will support it, with a handful of pictures thrown in and the occasional breakout box suggesting alternate categories or like searches.

The issue with this is that people like to view search results-type data in list form. They like to click through multiple results, clicking a result and clicking back and trying the next result. When you have 15 results in a very roughly aligned grid on the page, the user has to define a strategy to select a result first. While the excerpts will typically drive my decision between the first and fourth Google result for a given search, I still put a good deal of trust in Google’s ability to rank their relevance and to present them in that order.

With Cuil, I’m not sure what ranks second. I’d guess that the top left result is first, but second is a mystery: Straight down and continuing down is confusing, since the fourth result is almost off the screen, while the fifth result is adjacent to the first. Ordering the results from 1-3, left to right on the top row doesn’t make sense either (though I think that’s how it’s supposed to read), since for some search results, the ninth result actually appears “higher” than the sixth result. This may be an effort by Cuil to lower the emphasis on “relevance rankings” at this level of granularity but search lives and dies by relevance and making that information confusing or scattershotting your results to a user and letting them pick is a risky game. Users are using your engine for guidance, not untethered choice.

The Suite

Cuil is a startup. But they’re a startup in one of the most difficult markets to break. Google isn’t just web search. It also looks up businesses in my area, maps the results for me, translates words, shows me the current weather, gives me the time in any city, converts my currency, shows me what my stocks are trading at and does basic math. These are mostly features that someone like Cuil can integrate in with a bit of time and some relatively simple programming. But mapping and directions are critical to me and Google does them very well. What’s more, they can integrate their map product in their basic web searches when they think you’re looking for something local. That kind of integration is incredibly useful and something Cuil won’t have for a good long time. We won’t even get into the fact that the remaining suite of Google products makes for an attractive consistency in look and feel across many different applications I use, from email to search to driving directions. Why would I choose another site for just search, even if the search is, say, marginally better? (It’s not.)

The Challenge

No one at Cuil is naive enough, I’d hope, to think that this is an easy challenge. Search is arguably the hardest market to break and one of the most critical: people rely on search in a way they rely on few other products to enable them to use the internet day in and day out. Microsoft has been tossing money, brains and more money at the problem for years now and their market share isn’t budging. And frankly, their search still isn’t that great compared to Google. They even have the benefit of something resembling a unified suite of products, including mapping. And they haven’t been able to win a battle, let alone the war. Cuil has $33M in funding. But just because it costs them less to build their index doesn’t mean theirs will be relevant enough.

And here’s the scary part: Cuil could build a genuinely amazing product. They could build the killer application for search, that would deliver better, more relevant results than Google and does so with a smile on its face. And that would be the least of their worries. Because Google users love Google. And everyone’s a Google user. Google doesn’t just work “well enough.” It works exceedingly well. Search is still their primary business and they’re not just standing still while others around them work to evolve.

If the fact that they are constantly working to better their mousetrap weren’t enough, the terrifying truth is that breaking people of their Google habit represents the single largest problem facing any search competitor. Google is a verb now. It’s the first place I go to search for something and it’s probably your first destination as well. The Google habit isn’t one people want to be broken of and giving them enough reasons to even consider your option, let alone how to spell it, is an immense challenge that will likely be met with failure.

There’s Room, Perhaps…

I’m not saying that someone can’t come along and bring something new to the way search is handled. Google did it to Yahoo, after all. It’s definitely a large internet and playing to a niche is a possibility that can drive you some market share. You don’t even need to play at Google’s level to be successful or to at least break even; far from it. But Cuil is looking to take Google head on. They’re looking to best them and deliver a superior product. And they may have bitten off more than they can chew.

It’s frustrating and telling to me that, despite the size or age of their index, the results that come back for my queries just seem… wrong. A search on Cuil for the lyrical phrase, in quotes, “by now you would think that I would be up” brings me the song as only the “third” result. The other 8 results on the screen focus on the word “that”, of all things. Meanwhile, Google delivers to me eight different sites with the song’s full lyrics, its name in the title of each of them. This is how I expect a search engine to behave.

Michael Arrington kept issuing the caveat that “they’re only an hour old” when he published his initial piece on Cuil. I’m not sure that’s an excuse. If their index is “larger than Google’s,” then what do they need more time for? If their search engine itself isn’t able to deliver relevant results to me with that large an index behind it, then it looks to me like the technology just wasn’t baked all the way through and that they needed to focus more on that before bringing exposing it to the light of day. His other claim that their breakout widget of alternate queries or search categories is useful is true. But it’s not a Google killer. If the component you’ve built to set yourself apart from Google could be executed by Google in less than a month, then I’ve got a bridge to sell you if you think you’re going to beat them at this game.

The worst thing you can do when trying to break into this market is to demonstrate your lack of ability to compete at this level early on. Anyone who might’ve given you a shot is going to summarily write you off and add you to the filter of also-rans that don’t warrant a second look. Get it amazingly right the first time and you might have a chance at really getting some of your launch momentum to work for you and build an attach rate. This isn’t going to happen with Cuil and frankly, it’s because it sucks.

Cuil: Search That Sucks (And for the love of all that is holy, don’t misspell it!)