Posted by harrisj
Thu, 07 Apr 2005 17:05:24 GMT
Jason Kottke nails one of the reasons why Google Maps has generated such excitement in the last few days with the addition of satellite data. Certainly it's not that the technology is especially new (Microsoft and other companies have had satellite data on the web, and some localities like
Washington, DC have provided maps that mix GIS information with aerial views). But the thing about Google Maps that inspires people and creates such a possibility for
serious play is the user interface. In
his post on Google's user experience, Kottke quotes an earlier post with a statement I like so much, I'm going to quote it here:
Advances on the internet and the web are typically heralded as technology-driven. Robert Morris from IBM argued last year at Etech 2002 that -- and I'm paraphrasing from memory here -- most significant advances in software are actually advances in user experience, not in technology. Mosaic was not an advancement in technology over TBL's original browser. Blogger is a highly-specialized FTP client. IM is IRC++ (or IRC for Dummies, depending on your POV). The advantages that these applications offered people were user experience-oriented, not technology-oriented.
Packaging and interface do matter. Indeed, I think the most successful online web applications ultimately will be those with the best interfaces, those that allow people to easily grasp what they can be used for and to dream up new ways to extend their functionality and uses in ways the designers haven't conceived of.
Posted in Web Services | no comments
Posted by harrisj
Thu, 07 Apr 2005 16:36:00 GMT
Yesterday, I was talking about Google maps and I mentioned using it for Virtual Tourism. Well, now someone has set up a blog for just that (Google Sightseeing). Check it out.
Posted in Search | Tags google | 1 comment
Posted by harrisj
Thu, 07 Apr 2005 14:00:00 GMT
Second day blogging and I am already late to the party in talking about the changes Google has made to the Maps program by incorporating the satellite imagery from Keyhole. The result is very cool, not just because it's neat to see things from space, but because the map functionality is overlaid right onto the satellite data as well (as John Park shows with his bike route). What I like about this is what I also like about people using the maps with Flickr's annotation capabilities to present memory maps or people doing "virtual tourism" of sorts to get a feel of geography from afar, in that there's a real sense of play and fun and hacking going on with Google Maps that I haven't seen with a web service for a while. I will talk more about this later, since I think it's the difference between a successful web service and a dud.
Posted in Web Services, Search | Tags flickr, google | no comments
Posted by harrisj
Thu, 07 Apr 2005 05:05:00 GMT
Here's a flash from the past, courtesy of Technology Review. It's a reprinting of an article about the growing pains of the Web back in 1995. And what's especially funny to me is the screenshot of Mit's Homepage back in 1995. If you squint really closely, you can see the address of MIT's official server back then was web.mit.edu, because the domain www.mit.edu was actually the location of an earlier server set up by the esteemed Student Information Processing Board (SIPB). Originally running on Plexus, a PERL web server implementation, it was one of the first 100 web servers in the world.
Why do I mention this history? Well, back then I was a student at MIT and a prospective member of SIPB, and someone suggested I might want to get involved in being a webmaster. And so this has brought on a bit of a wave of nostalgia for those heady really early days when HTML tags were strictly semantic, a URL on a billboard seemed an insane novelty, and we edited pages on the server by hand in ed. Good times.
For more information, check out original 1996-era homepage or the exciting history of the original MIT web server.
Posted in Net Culture | Tags mit, sipb | no comments
Posted by harrisj
Wed, 06 Apr 2005 17:56:00 GMT
This
New York Times Article
Online Shopping Makes New York a Cardboard Jungle has an interesting quote on why FreshDirect has succeeded in delivering online groceries in New York (where I live and am a customer), while so many other delivery services have failed (even in New York)
"New York is an ideal environment for online grocery shopping," said Patti Freeman Evans, a retail analyst for Jupiter Media, an Internet consulting firm. "A time-starved population that is geographically concentrated and Internet-saturated: that's just what you want."
This seems to nail the real reason why many online stores failed during the dot-com boom. If you can make shopping at your site cheaper, easier, and faster than shopping in a brick-and-mortar place (that was still a big if for a lot of places), you still could fail. I imagine a lot of seemingly good business on paper died due to high delivery costs (for nationwide grocery-delivery services; FreshDirect ramped up neighborhood by neighborhood) or because they assumed that too much of their target audience actually wanted to shop for their service on the Internet (or even knew what it was) in the first place.
Posted in Web Commerce | Tags freshdirect | no comments
Posted by harrisj
Wed, 06 Apr 2005 06:34:02 GMT
Welcome to the
Nimble Code Blog. This is my new home on the web for documenting the world of small, simple, but surprisingly powerful development methodologies, advanced web technologies, and other things that catch my eye. I have coined the phrease
Nimble Code as my catch-all term for my interests, and I hope to elaborate more on this in the next few days as I get set up here.
Posted in Meta | no comments
