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New TEDTalks iPad app is good – here's how to make it great

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I was thrilled to discover the new TEDTalks app for my iPad this morning, and quickly installed and liked much of the experience.  There they are, over 700 amazing Talks to listen to.  This is particularly sweet for me as I watch a TEDTalk on my iPad virtually every morning whilst on the bus to the office, currently obtained through the suboptimal process of subscribing to the podcast in iTunes, and syncing to the iPad.  And if I may slide for a moment here, I can’t believe in 2010 there’s still anything that has to “sync” via a wire.  But I digress, back to TED.

In just a few minutes of use I quickly realized the app was content-rich, but not feature-rich.  While the “Inspire Me” feature is extremely well done (it’s all about length of video – this is a key realization most entertainment/content people need to clue in on), I felt it was otherwise a little flat. In fact, it’s not going to be very useful for my personal needs, and I’m concerned that’ll be true for others as well.  So in my support of TED, and by the way – I genuinely believe that if all people watched TED Talks the world would actually be a better place – I thought I’d quickly jot out the notes to make it better for users such as myself.

  1. Add search
    The browse works great, but there’s no search.  So when I see a tweet from a friend about a given TED Talk, I can’t find it without browsing for it.  And, to boot, I need to know the category/tag that applies to the talk to find it.  While we’re at it, make search by keyword and author too.
  2. Add alphabetical browsing
    Per above, at present you need to know how the Talk is categorized to find it.  Personally, I’d like to find something just by browsing a list of titles.
  3. Add sharing features
    At the end of virtually every TEDTalk, I want to share it with someone, whether a peer, my team, a friend or family member, or the entire world on Twitter.  Add simple “tweet this” and “like this” and “email a link to this” TEDTalk to every clip.  Also, the link should probably share the YouTube or TED.com version of the clip.
  4. Add a history/watched list
    Once I’ve watched a few dozen videos, I find it hard to remember if I’ve seen one, or hard to remember the exact title of one if I want to reshare it.  A simple history feature is essential.  And in the would-be-nice category?  Show me “You Watched this on MMDDYY” on the video preview page if I come back to it.  Also, add a “mark viewed” feature along the way, in case I’ve watched the Talk on another platform.
  5. Incorporate social features
    Since everyone’s busy “liking” everything else via Facebook these days, would be great to see in a video profile page that friends of mine have liked something.
  6. Add download controls
    Once I begin a download, there appears no way to delete the download, queue for later, or otherwise manage whats going on.
  7. Add more “cool views”
    Timelines. Maps. Duration.  etc.
  8. Integrate with other platforms
    There’s the TED site, YouTube, the iPad app, a forthcoming iPhone app, a Boxee app, the iTunes podcast, and I’m sure more to come.  Assume I am using more than one method to consume the content, then allow me to integrate from one to the other.  In other words, let me favorite something on your site, then see that on my iPad app.

I think the “1.0” version of the app is probably pretty decent for most people.  If you have even a few free minutes and an Internet connection and want to get inspired, this app will certainly do the trick.  Hopefully these ideas can help inspire team TED to take it just a bit further!

Thoughts on… Dell Buying Palm, Facebook Vanity URLs, Building43, Project Natal, Content Consumption

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Kinda enjoying the “wrapup” post concept.  I feel less pressure to blog, and take a bit more time to collect my thoughts (instead of jumping on board any given meme as it happens).  Would definitely like to know from my reader(s?) if this is harder content to consume than more frequent, shorter posts.

Dell Buying Palm

This rumor’s been floating for a while. At the Building43/TechCrunch party I was told it was a certainty, though the NY Times thinks it’ll never happen.  At this stage in the mobile game, I think Palm does need an acquisition if it wants to survive as a big player, either that or needs a drastic overhaul/downsizing until they think like a startup again (which really is the position they are in). Dell’s a decent suitor, though I’d doubt they’d really escalate the brand to the level it needs.  I’d rather see a merger with Motorola’s mobile group, as they have the true infrastructure needed to compete at the high stakes table, and could really use an injection of creativity and new technology (no more RAZRs guys).

Facebook URLs

This whole week Facebook did a replay of Oklahama in the late 1800s (including allowing “key journalists” in sooner than us lame users). The stats last night were impressive, though I’m still sitting here scratching my head on the whole thing a little.  I’m assuming FB plans to do some serious SEO work, enabling those who grabbed useful terms like “carpenter” (no, I don’t know that guy) to generate a little business out of them. That said, some useful terms like “sanfranciscosushi” are still up for grabs, so enterprising folks should put their creative hats on and get going.  I didn’t take my name yet (having a unique name makes that kinda easy) because I just don’t get the value to me personally.  Googling Jeremy Toeman always gets me, as does the first page or two for just Toeman.  Not to say I didn’t try a few names to see how they’d feel…

gefiltefish

nah… not quite right.

Building43

My friend Robert Scoble started working at Rackspace (the place where we host Legacy Locker, btw) a few months back, and he’s been dropping hints about this “Building43” thing for a while now.  This week he formally unveiled it during the TechCrunch 4th birthday party down in Palo Alto.  First and foremost, thanks Robert and Mike for some amazingly good BBQ food – oh, and your contributions to the tech industry blah blah blah ;). So Building43 is designed as a resource for entrepreneurs and big companies alike to participate and gain feedback and insight from the tech community at large.  It’s an ambitious goal, and I wish them a lot of luck.  My biggest advice to them is to really focus on the user experience, as right now I found the site a little confusing to navigate (despite my personal familiarity with all the technologies they are using, like FriendFeed).  If it’s tough for me to find things, I can’t imagine what it’s like for those new to it.

Project Natal

Microsoft introduced “Project Natal” at E3, and there’s a rumor circulating that instead of thinking of it as a new component to the Xbox 360, it might be its own console. I love the idea of using motion capture as a video game controller (or remote control or any other kind of interface), but I think that’s where my love ends. As an idea.  Here’s the issue – it’s not good enough if it’s 99% accurate. Why?  Because the 1 time in 100 that you shoot instead of duck, or block instead of jump, or whatever mistake it makes is going the about the last time you play seriously.  Fundamental to every good user interface is absolutely perfectly reliable controls, with proper feedback mechanisms to the user.  With a motion controller, the moment the game doesn’t do what you wanted it to do, it’s all over.  Trust is lost, and the “magic moment” is replaced by dislike, then eventually anger. I saw a tweet that I think encapsulated the issue perfectly: “Project Natal is headed to the uncanny valley.”

Content Consumption

I recently realized I don’t read any blogs anymore.  I do a lot of searching.  I follow some folks on Twitter and/or FriendFeed.  But I almost never just go to sites like Engadget or TechCrunch nor friends of mine like Dave Zatz or Michael Gartenberg and just read.  And based on looking at the analytics for many of my clients’ web sites, I’m thinking I’m very much not alone.  There’s too much content, and just not enough ways to organize it.  If I were an enterprising lad, I’d be spending a lot of time figuring out how to help people deal with content overload in a very useful manner.  The right tool needs to combine all the potential sources a user wants, and give lots of ways to customize and filter it.  Google Reader isn’t enough, nor is FriendFeed, nor is Facebook.  I’ve got a hunch there’s a lot of opportunity for an excellent “get signal out of my noise” service, and it’s probably something people would pay for.

Have a great weekend everyone, I’m heading back to toil in the garden where I can be really productive.

FriendFeed's Real Opportunity: Reassembling the Internet

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I’m a fan of FriendFeed, the Internet service aggregator self-described as:

FriendFeed enables you to keep up-to-date on the web pages, photos, videos and music that your friends and family are sharing. It offers a unique way to discover and discuss information among friends.

For an example of it in action, you can see my profile here.  Basically the site pulls from a variety of sources, such as Digg, YouTube, Flickr, my blog, etc, and presents all the content in one view.  As you can see to the right of this screen, I use a widget to show my latest content from FriendFeed here on the blog.

While FriendFeed (FF) is a neat way to follow someone, it gets much more interesting when you use it as a new type of discussion forum.  If you click here, you’ll see everything I’ve commented on.  Again, from a “watcher’s” perspective, it’s still only moderately interesting (at best), and if you don’t see the point right now, I totally understand.  Personally, I like the ability to rapidly share content and interact with others in fun (or serious) debate and discussion.  I still believe it’s a niche play right now, but I think they have an interesting opportunity to get much much bigger.

At present, if you comment on one of my blog posts, that comment is stuck, it’s isolated to my blog (though it is retrievable over RSS, for those who really want it).  I could use a service such as Disqus or CoComment, which allow my comments to get aggregated with other blogs’ comments, but I don’t really see how that benefits either me, my reader, or those who leave comments here.  That said, those services are also integrated back into FF, which means a Disqus user’s comment on a blog post ALSO appears as a new content entry in FF.  This is only the beginning of the mess, which compounds as users can comment on a Disqus comment INSIDE FF, but that comment doesn’t make it OUTSIDE back to Disqus.

If I’ve lost you, don’t be alarmed – this doesn’t impact more than a few thousand people (at best) so far.  But when you look across many of the social networking sites (like Facebook, etc) and content sharing sites (like YouTube, Flickr, etc), the common abilities are to comment, favorite, and re-share content you find.  FriendFeed does a great job pulling in all that content, but I think the ability to push the content OUT is where the real opportunity to succeed exists.

I believe the Internet today is highly fragmented and disassembled.  I have my LinkedIN contacts and my Facebook friends, and some overlap.  I have my photos on Flickr, my lengthy videos on YouTube, and my short videos on 12seconds.tv.  I have people who read my Tweets and follow me on FriendFeed, but don’t subscribe to my blog.  In every single site I just mentioned, users can comment and share content, but what they cannot do is have their experience contributed back to the source material universally.  In other words, if someone comments on my blog here, my FriendFeed followers do not see it, and my blog readers here are unaware of FriendFeed users’ comments.

My belief is there is a big opportunity to fix this problem of content fragmentation.  FriendFeed (or virtually anyone else, but they’ve built a good chunk of it already) can take their platform, and create an API that allows for bidirectional content delivery.  At present, they are great at pulling in content, just don’t share it out well (and RSS isn’t good enough), and as we all know, anyone can take reservations, you gotta hold the reservation!  If FriendFeed could build the de facto content aggregation and distribution platform that integrated across all content sharing and social networking services, it would become an instant acquisition target.

Sooner or later the “Internet’s middleman” must emerge.  As people continue to sign up for more new services, our content and experiences become harder to share and find.  The silos of content and, more importantly, content discussion, are frustrating and annoying to all but the earliest of tech adopters and “a-listers” (who seem quite willing to put up with anything just to try new stuff).  For the majority of people out there, a certain degree of “registration fatigue” is setting in, and whether it’s FriendFeed or Facebook, or someone else entirely, there’s a big opportunity sitting out there, waiting for someone to jump in.