Ping, which launched a few weeks ago, is a social network for music built on top of iTunes. So far it’s been a bit of a damp squib. Immediately after launch some were extremely enthusiastic about it:

The future of social commerce… It can tell me who my friends think are cool… Some of my friends are famous deejays. Others just have eclectic musical tastes.
Om Malik, GigaOM, 1st September 2010

Others, however, were more guarded:

The interface is still buggy and slower than molasses in January at the North Pole during a legitimate Ice Age. And that slowness is a big turnoff and an inherent factor of working within iTunes. We don’t love Ping yet, but we don’t hate it, either.
Jolie O’Dell, Mashable, 1st September 2010

In the last few weeks discussions about Ping have become increasingly negative. Analysis of online chatter published by Buzzstudy on September 15th showed that:

With the exception of a huge spike on the day of its release, Ping chatter has been surprisingly low… [sentiment analysis revealed that] iTunes Ping was clearly the most negatively talked about service.
Buzzstudy, September 15th 2010

Some recent coverage of Ping has the tone of a post-mortem, an instructional case study of historic business failure, with inside sources dishing the dirt on what went wrong:

…Apple launched Ping without insight from a major part of the industry: the A&Rs and digital marketing teams, the people whose job it is to connect artists with fans. Perhaps this accounts for why Ping is so, well, boring.
Austin Carr, Fast Company, September 22nd 2010

The prevailing wisdom seems to be that the breakdown of talks with Facebook has been to blame, and indeed Facebook is being portrayed as a bit of a villain:

“Working with Facebook as a large company is challenging at this stage, very similar to mid-late-90s Microsoft,” says one Silicon Valley veteran.

Dan Frommer, Business Insider, September 21st 2010

A lot of the problems with Ping are pretty glaring. You’re only allowed to like three pre-defined genres of music, artists are added to the system manually, and you can only use it within the iTunes application. When you think about it, it seems like it was conceived as the antithesis to everything we’ve learnt about successful social networks in the last five years.

But there’s another big problem that I associate with Ping. It’s not a flaw in Ping itself – it’s something that Ping has brought into focus, something more general about the relationship between music and social interaction. In a nutshell, the problem is this: do people really want to know what music everyone else is listening to?

Don’t get me wrong – music plays a huge part in my social life. Most of my closest friends are people I got to know through shared musical tastes and activities. Social discovery and enjoyment of music is important to me, and I don’t think people should be separated into isolated bubbles of mutual musical ignorance.

But at the same time I don’t think that social discovery & enjoyment of music works well in the larger social networks, which is what Ping aspires to be. Broadcasting one’s musical taste to the world at large doesn’t feel right. I wouldn’t put my Last.fm listening history on my LinkedIn profile, for example, and I don’t think I’d gain much from seeing that information on other people’s profiles.

Music is one sphere of life where there is still a strong case for communities of interest, rather than communities of acquaintance. It provides a great example of how most of us partition our lives, similar to the famous “work/life balance”. Religion and politics are other examples. Some relationships, especially professional ones, can work better when these subjects don’t take centre stage.

For me at least, music networks are better if they are decoupled from the larger social spaces and allow me to control how much of my musical taste leaks through into them. And this is a basic problem with Ping as I see it. A Facebook-sized, music-based network that uses real names and forces people into a set of pre-defined genre boxes doesn’t really fit with how a lot of people engage with music. Music is a social experience, yes – but it’s a private one too.

Evernote is a free service that allows you store text, images, audio files and (if you’re a premium subscriber like me) any other type of document on the web.

OK, so that sounds useful, but hardly unique. There are lots of tools that do the the same sort of thing: SugarSync and DropBox are two that come to mind. The difference with Evernote is that it’s optimised for a particular purpose, online note-taking. And when I say optimised, I mean optimised.

For note-taking to work it has to be as immediate and accessible as a notebook and pen in your pocket. And for the online aspect to work, it has to take advantage of the medium. Evernote succeeds on both these points, and here’s how.

Accessibility

Evernote have produced desktop applications for Windows and Mac OS X. There’s a fully featured web client. Mobile apps exist for iPhone, iPad, Android, Blackberry, Palm’s Web OS and even ,Windows Mobile. You can add notes via the automated Twitter account, @myEN. There are various browser extensions and third party apps. So there’s no shortage of ways to get hold of, and add to, your notes.

Immediacy

The various Evernote apps are all designed to help you get information into Evernote quickly, including images and audio as well as text notes. On mobiles, you can use Evernote to launch the camera and take a photo – that photo, once tagged, will be added to your notes, and will then be accessible from anywhere. Here’s the Android app’s start screen:

On the desktop apps, there’s an option to have Evernote take control of the Print Screen key. Pressing it will bring up some crosshairs, which you then use to select an area of the screen to send straight to Evernote. Right-clicking a file gives you a “send to Evernote” option. And anything you add can be tagged, making it easy to retrieve in future.

Sharing

It’s one thing to be able to add lots of notes and have them available on almost any network-enabled device you own. But one advantage of having those notes online is the ability to share them.

Evernote allows you to create additional notebooks, which can then be shared with the world or with specified individuals. If you want someone else to see a note, just move it to one of your shared notebooks, and others can see it.

There’s a WordPress extension called Everpress that will automatically post items from a shared notebook to your blog, but I haven’t tried that yet.

Searching

This is the best bit, and the feature that really got my attention when I first found it.

One day, when I was still quite new to Evernote, I was testing its search feature. I searched for a word that I knew wasn’t stored in plain text (I didn’t have many notes then). Evernote said “1 result returned”, so I thought the search system must have a bug. Then I looked at the result, and it was a photo I’d taken of a whiteboard. The word I’d searched for was written on the board, and Evernote had highlighted it in yellow.

Searching for the word 'confirm' - the highlighting is from Evernote

Up until then I didn’t know Evernote had that feature, and it was a bit of an “encountering the future” moment. Whenever I tell people about this they have an “encountering the future” moment too.

I’ve since found out that Evernote scans any images you upload and uses OCR to extract text from them. That text then becomes searchable, which is extremely useful, and is becoming more so over time.

So yeah, I think you should try Evernote. If, like me, you collect & create a lot of information which you then need to get hold of further down the line, you might come to find it indispensable.

I don’t discuss work on this blog very often. My company’s clients are very secretive and don’t like their projects being mentioned in public. But this post isn’t about clients – it’s about my own role and a difficult choice I’ve recently had to make.

For the last four and a half years I’ve been working at interactive agency Tobias & Tobias. In the time I’ve been there a lot’s changed: the company has grown, we’ve taken on many new clients, and I’ve had a number of different roles, most recently as head of the combined strategy & user experience teams.

Screenshot of Tobias & Tobias website

I’ve really enjoyed working at T&T. I’d never stayed in the same company for more than three years until this job, which is a testament to the people and the culture.

But all good things must come to an end, and it’s with great reluctance that I’ve decided to move on to another role, as an associate creative director at SapientNitro.

In terms of size, the two companies are poles apart. SapientNitro is part of a group that employs 7,000 people in 30 offices worldwide, while Tobias & Tobias has 30 people in one office. But in other ways I think the companies are quite similar.

Specifically, I think that both companies have a similar approach to quality in the user experience and information architecture work that they do. I feel qualified to say this because I’ve interviewed a lot of UX practitioners, and most of the best portfolios I’ve seen have been presented by people with long stints at SapientNitro. This is a big part of the reason why I chose to join SapientNitro. The last thing I’d want to do is move to a company that didn’t take user experience seriously.

Obviously it’s going to be a big change for me – I’ve worked in large organisations before, but it’s been a while since I was in an office so big it was a challenge to remember everyone’s name. But I’m looking forward to having the resources of a large company to draw upon, and a large pool of new colleagues & clients to work with, learn from, and – hopefully – help out in some way.

The current plan is that I’ll start at SapientNitro from November 1st and will be working at their office in Spitalfields, a much more convenient location than Kensington Olympia! But while I won’t miss the extended Overground journeys and the constant roadworks outside our office, I will miss working at Tobias & Tobias, and plan to stay in touch (which means that, yes, I will be gatecrashing the Christmas party!)…

It’s exactly two years since the collapse of Lehman Brothers triggered the most intensive phase of the global economic crisis. That’s enough time for us to start taking a historical perspective when we look back on it, and indeed some new research indicates that the recession caused by the credit crunch was (well, is) a very odd one indeed.

First up is a study cited by Fast Company which found that, counter to existing wisdom, crime rates actually fell in the US during the recession:

…violent crimes declined in 2009 for the third year running, a period roughly coinciding with the recession. And property crimes declined for the seventh straight year. Aggravated assault rates dropped over 4 percent; murder rates dropped over 7 percent; and motor vehicle thefts dropped a whopping 17 percent, to select just a few of the FBI’s more remarkable findings…

Meanwhile, on this side of the pond, the BBC’s Mark Easton is asking why people in the UK are apparently feeling happier now than they did at the height of the economic boom. Happiness levels grew in 2008 and have remained fairly high ever since.

I’d already been wondering what the hell was going on with this recession. The world’s economy has suffered massive structural damage, and the scale of the numerous crises has been enough to make your head spin. But things have been surprisingly mild if you look at measures like unemployment, interest rates, inflation, oil prices, crime and so on.

Why is this recession so bizarre and anomaly-ridden? Two possible explanations suggest themselves.

1. That the modern, globalised economy has developed an ability to manage crises rapidly and effectively with minimal economic fallout – in other words, the planet’s got smarter
2. That the mildness so far has been a result of stimulus packages, and with the effects of those measures wearing off, worse times lie ahead. Basically, what we’ve experienced so far is just the first phase of what will be a prolonged and severe global depression.

It’s pretty obvious which one I’d like to believe in, but optimism doesn’t come easily at times like this…

Last Saturday I started setting up my new Macbook Pro. Nothing spectacular about that, I guess, except that this is my first foray into the world of Mac OS X. Here are some thoughts on why I decided to buy one of these machines.

In the last few years there have been more than a few occasions when clients, friends or colleagues have been surprised to see me running Windows or even Ubuntu, saying things like “I always had you down as a Mac person”. It reminds me a bit of when I used to smoke and colleagues would say “I didn’t have you down as a smoker” – it feels flattering, but you still wonder about the signals you’re sending out.

I’d never become a Mac user because I never really saw a compelling reason to. I enjoy learning new things and I’m interested in computer systems (let’s face it – I’m a nerd) but could never justify the time and expense that switching would have involved a few years ago.

You see, back then everything was different. Macs ran on proprietary hardware. The application ecosystem for OS X was still developing. Most of my personal data was stored on the hard disks of Windows machines, and just moving to a new PC was arduous enough.

But these things have changed. You can install Windows or Linux on modern Macs, making them far more multi-purpose than they used to be. The application ecosystem seems far richer now (this list of indie graphics editors for Mac OS X is a case in point).

And most importantly, my personal data doesn’t bind me to a specific machine in the way it used to. Like many people, my online self is becoming increasingly nebulous, drifting away from the lone device to reside in the external world or the “cloud”. Email, contacts, files, personal notes – all of these can be reached from any machine with an internet connection, and with every couple of months the setup time becomes shorter and shorter.

It’s this last point in particular that encouraged me to give Mac OS X a try, and which I expect is encouraging OS-agnosticism among many other people too.

There might even be a bit of a paradox at work here: the less we depend on a physical device to act as our information store, the more free we become to focus on its physical properties – ergonomics, build quality, the tactile sensation it offers, as opposed to, say, its hard drive capacity or its RAM.

As the computer becomes a physical device first and an informational device second, a company like Apple (which has been focusing on physicality for a long time) can only stand to benefit.

Google is testing a new feature on its main search page, and I seem to have become an unwitting guinea pig.

The feature is called “streaming” (edit: it was actually Google Instant, which went live a few days later) and the idea is that the search results page is dynamically generated as you type into the search box. You don’t have to click “Search” for the results to appear. You could think of it as the “suggested results” box on steroids.

Initially, the results page is completely blank waiting for your input:

Then, as soon as you type something, Google starts to run a search. I had to move quickly to get this screenshot:

A few milliseconds later Google has come up with some results, which then appear on the search results page:

At this point I’ve yet to click “search”, but doing so will only clear the auto-suggest box – the results are there already. And the whole thing happens so quickly you don’t really notice it, as your focus is on the search box you’re typing into.

Does it improve Google? It’s difficult to say. Fast Company were sceptical about it when it was announced back in August. It certainly doesn’t mar the experience, once the initial surprise has worn off, but it doesn’t really enhance it either. In fact it’s mildly frustrating to see your desired result on the screen, but to have it obscured by the auto-suggest menu until you click return.

Maybe the main benefit is the slightly extended life your keyboard will enjoy if this feature becomes official, as you’ll be hitting the return key far less frequently.