Earlier this month Google announced it would be shutting down Google Reader on July 1, 2013. It was explained in a bullet point on Google’s blog along with other product changes inside the Google Plex:

“We launched Google Reader in 2005 in an effort to make it easy for people to discover and keep tabs on their favorite websites. While the product has a loyal following, over the years usage has declined. So, on July 1, 2013, we will retire Google Reader.”

This was disappointing news for reporters, bloggers, content curators and avid readers like Om Malik and Matt Haughey (and myself) who have used Google Reader frequently since its inception. Several tech-focused blogs have already posted Google Reader alternatives.  And a two year old blog post from Chris Wetherell, a former Google engineer who helped create Google Reader, also resurfaced in the past week.

Google has created and retired dozens of products over the last decade, so this shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone.  However, none of those retired products seemed to have the sizable user base that Google Reader had.

Since Google is in the business of selling advertising, and secondarily, charging for services like Google Apps, it is puzzling they have not taken steps to generate any revenue with Google Reader.

I pay for several cloud-based services on an annual basis, like Flickr Pro, Remember the Milk, Netflix and would have happily paid for Google Reader as well.

Google certainly has more business data than I do, backing up its decision to retire the service.  Perhaps the overhead costs associated with maintaining and growing the product were too great to be realistically overcome with an advertising revenue model, or freemium revenue model, or a dozen other ideas for generating revenue with software platforms.  Perhaps they wanted to focus the staff on fewer products. I doubt we’ll ever know the real reasons beyond, the “decline in usage” that Google cited in it’s blog post.

One thing I know for certain is that I won’t be investing my time and energy into future Google products as quickly as I once did.  Being an early adopter of technology always comes with a risk that the product will be short-lived or purchased and merged with another product.  However, after nearly a decade of operation, I thought Google Reader was “safe.”

Let’s hope that some enterprising company recognizes the vacuum left by Reader and creates something great to fill the void.

Lately I’ve become fascinated with responsive web design, a technique that presents a more flexible website capable of conforming to the device you happen to be using at the time. A responsive website will be optimized for desktops, tablets and mobile devices. This is more complex than you might think at first, because many touch screen devices (like iPhones and iPads) have two different screen orientations: portrait and landscape.

There seems to be some debate in the web design community regarding exactly how this flexibility can be accomplished. However, there isn’t much debate about its usefulness. One platform served to many devices is the holy grail of publishing.

I won’t try to tackle that debate in this blog post, but I will show you some of the most useful tools and resources I’ve found in my own research. Here are some of the best resources I found for responsive web design:

1. Ethan Marcotte’s A List Apart article on responsive design kicked off the conversation about this technique. He discusses CSS media queries to determine screen size and enabling and disabling floats with that technique. This was the earliest resource I could find on the subject of responsive design. Ethan also wrote the first book on the subject, called “Responsive Web Design.” He also helped redesign the Boston Globe’s website to use responsive design principles (from my screenshots above). You should visit Bostonglobe.com and play around by resizing your browser to see it in action.

2. Jason Grigsby, VP at Cloud Four, a Portland company specializing in mobile & web solutions, wrote several great blog posts about responsive images and the challenges that surround them. You can find the series of articles broken into several parts (part 1, part 2, part 3). These articles cover some of the basics of responsive images, like delivering the mobile image first and upgrading to the desktop image when appropriate to conserve bandwidth for the user. He also links to several good articles on how to handle video embeds, data tables and third party widgets (ie. Twitter, etc) in a responsive way.

3. Think Vitamin’s “A Beginner’s Guide to Responsive Web Design” is a great place to start if you’re looking for a quick overview of the concept. The article covers fluid grids, media queries and some additional resources as well.

4. DesignMondo’s 50 examples of websites using responsive design – this blog post is a great place to see a nice sampling of websites using responsive design. The screenshots show details of how the sites change in desktop, tablet and mobile devices (in portrait orientation). DesignMondo also has another great post about tools and services that will help you create, test and implement a responsive design. One of my favorites is ScreenFly, a quick and easy way to test your design in multiple devices and orientations (portrait vs landscape). It’s free and useful for testing a lot of devices quickly.

5. Smashing Magazine’s “Responsive Web Design Techniques, Tools and Design Strategies.” As with most Smashing Magazine articles, this one is very thorough, but probably not a good starting point until you know a little more about all the components of responsive design. For instance, there is a very useful link to an article on how to debug CSS media queries. However, you would need to know what a media query is before you learn to debug it.

6. WordPress and responsive design. There is a great 30min video by Sara Cannon from Wordcamp San Francisco 2011. If you use WordPress (and I do) you’ll want to watch this short video to see how you can adapt your WordPress blog to use responsive design techniques.

7. The HTML Boilerplate – This is a free template using HTML5 and some responsive design techniques. If you want to play with HTML5 responsive design, you can download the code from their Git repository.

There are many other resources available for responsive design. However, I found these to be the most useful. If I’ve missed any that you think should be on the list, please feel free to post them in the comments below.

Thanks

Like most mornings, I opened iTunes today and noticed I had a few apps that needed updating – 8 to be exact. I immediately noticed that all 8 of the app icons were a shade of blue.

All 8 of them.

I’ve mused about this before with some designer friends, wondering if there were a psychological reason app developers use blue in the icon so frequently.  Nobody had a good explanation for this oddity.

I have a total of 168 apps in iTunes and 57 of them (34%) are blue.  (Note: I did not count apps that simply contained blue like the Flickr app with its blue and red dots.  The app needed to be mostly blue in order to be counted…like the ones in the screenshot above).

I can only imagine that, like the color of cars, the color of an app icon probably has something to do with what the personality of the app…or a feeling the app developer wants to convey to the user.

If you know of any research (psychological or otherwise) I’d be interested in reading it.

What percentage of your apps are blue?

If you’re sorta thinking, “huh? You mean like, blind and deaf people Accessibility?” then you’re not alone, because I’ve come to understand that there are lots and LOTS of people just like you: people for whom this idea does not have the right Accessibility, so it hasn’t been able to get through to you yet. It’s not your fault for not understanding, any more than it would be your fault for being blind or deaf or motion-restricted or living with any other disability. When software — or idea-ware for that matter — fails to be accessible to anyone for any reason, it is the fault of the software or of the messaging of the idea. It is an Accessibility failure.

You can read the entire post here.  I’d love to see some of the changes he suggests implemented at Google.  I hope he is put in a position to help make these changes.

1. Do nothing.
2. Build a separate mobile site.
3. Build native mobile apps (iPhone, Android, etc)
4. Convert your standard website to use responsive design

1. Do nothing. A lot of small to medium sized publishers present their standard desktop website to mobile browsers with no display changes whatsoever.  Usually this is because they don’t have the time, resources or knowledge to deal with it. However, that isn’t always a bad thing.  If their website is mostly text-based, it won’t look too bad in a modern mobile browser.  Most mobile browsers (I’m talking about Android, iOS, Blackberry, etc) will handle text-based sites pretty easily.

David Eggers‘ popular McSweeney’s website is a good example of this “do nothing” strategy.  They present their standard website to mobile browsers and then prompt you to download their iPhone/iPad app. This is mostly likely a sales/marketing decision for McSweeney’s – as pinching and zooming in a mobile browser isn’t much fun. However, I could purchase their weekly articles inside their iPhone/iPad app for a much better user experience.  I suspect this “do nothing” strategy for their desktop content prompts many of their fans to do just that.

2. Build a separate mobile site.  Many large publishers (as well as smaller tech-savvy publishers) fall into this category.  In most cases, when a reader visits the publisher’s standard website with a mobile browser, she is automatically forwarded to the mobile-friendly site.  This option isn’t as easy as the “do nothing” approach, but it’s not much more difficult.  Finding the right mobile vendor or the right mobile publishing plugin to make this happen isn’t as difficult as it sounds.  Many newspapers and magazines relying on advertising as their main source of revenue decide to go this route for mobile devices.

Many blogging platforms like WordPress and Blogger have easy-to-install plugins that do all the heavy lifting in this case. There are also services like MoFuse that will take a simple RSS feeds and create a mobile sites on the fly.

3. Build native mobile apps. More and more publishers are opting to build specific iOS and Android apps for their content.  If done well, this can be a great experience for the reader to engage the content in ways that a browser wouldn’t previously support.  It can also be another source of revenue if they decide charge for the app (or content within the app) as the New York Times has done with their mobile subscription service.  This is a difficult option for smaller publishers because mobile application development is very expensive right now. Publishers that can afford to drop tens of thousands of dollars on a app will also need to update the app on a frequent basis when Apple and Android periodically release new versions of their operating systems.

The cost of building and maintaining native mobile apps put them out of reach of many small publishers.  (Although, that is changing as more and more mobile app developers are charging a smaller monthly fees or even revenue sharing for mobile apps as the market becomes flooded with mobile developers.)

Native mobile apps also reach a smaller percentage of the public (those who use smart phones), than the mobile web. Because of this, I think this option is best paired with a mobile-friendly website to reach the widest audience.

4. Convert your standard website to use responsive design techniques. Responsive design is a fairly new concept in web design.  It works by determining what kind of device you are using to access the website and delivering content best suited to that device.  If you are using a desktop browser, the site will deliver a content-rich site with photos, video etc.  If you are using a smart phone, the site will scale that content to fit your screen and bandwidth limitations.

There are pros and cons to this strategy. Unfortunately, the concept is so new we don’t have a lot of data to measure the success yet.  On the pro-side, a publisher only has one site to manage and one content management system on which to train their staff.  There isn’t a separate mobile site or separate apps to worry about marketing, etc. On the con-side, building a website with responsive design techniques seems more difficult than building a standard desktop website. Ethan Marcotte recently redesigned the Boston Globe to use responsive design principals. This is one of the first major publishers to experiment with responsive design and I am eager to see how they fair in the coming months.

I hesitate to say that responsive design is the best option available, but it certainly seems like the most efficient way to deliver optimized content to any device, regardless of screen size or bandwidth connection.

I think it will eventually become a very popular option for publishers and will keep my eyes on the Boston Globe to see how they fare.

I purchased a book tonight for my Kindle with Amazon’s One-Click delivery, a service that makes buying a book literally a one-click operation.  However, the credit card that was associated with my account was expired.

Amazon delivered the book to my Kindle anyhow.

After I received the book on my Kindle I received a separate note (and an email) explaining there was a problem processing my credit card.  Amazon asked me to log into my account within the next 5 days to pay for the book…that they already delivered to my Kindle.

“Though your order may have already been delivered to you, it is important that you visit the following page within 5 days to update the payment information for this order.”

This is a pretty amazing customer service policy.  Frankly, I’m still a little shocked. Amazon actually delivered a product to a customer even though there was a problem with payment.

I happily paid for the book and would love to thank the Amazon employee who came up with this service policy.

Has anyone else experienced this with other companies selling digital products online?

UPDATE: The Oatmeal has explained this in a comic better than I could in a blog post. You can read the comic here (thanks to Leonardo for the heads up.)

Netflix announced plans today to spin off their DVD rentals into a new company called “Qwickster” that will include video game rentals to compete with companies like Gamefly, GameStop, etc.

Last week Netflix announced subscriber losses that caused some investors to sell their NFLX stock. Dan Frommer made a good observation that most of the subscription losses they announced came from the DVD rentals and not the streaming service.

I think it’s safe to say the future of the entertainment industry is in streaming content online, not mailing DVDs. We’ve reached the tipping point where high speed internet access has penetrated enough households to make streaming a more viable distribution channel than mailing physical DVDs through a financially troubled US Postal Service.

According to an email sent to all subscribers (and posted on the Netflix Blog) by Reed Hastings, Co-Founder and CEO, of Netflix:

So we realized that streaming and DVD by mail are really becoming two different businesses, with very different cost structures, that need to be marketed differently, and we need to let each grow and operate independently.

A few thoughts on this statement:

• Marketing one company is much easier and cheaper than marketing two companies. Seems like a weird choice to use “marketing” as one of the reasons to make this change.
• “Qwickster” sounds like the name of a cheesy 2001 internet startup selling chocolate milk online, not a profitable, well-established, 14 year old company. As Gruber suggested, why not Mailflix? It keeps the branding consistent and sounds far more professional.
• Creating a separate company for their DVD business (and naming it something COMPLETELY different) makes it a lot easier to sell off that part of the business if they ever wanted to.
• Forcing their customers to go to two different websites to search for a single movie is not a user-friendly experience. When I search Netflix for a movie, my first preference is to stream the movie. If the movie is not available for streaming, I’ll put it in my DVD queue and get it mailed to my home. Right now, this can all be done from single webpage. In the future, it appears that I will have to visit two different websites to search for a movie (one for streaming and one for the DVD).

John Wilker made a funny (because it’s true) statement on Twitter this morning about the changes:

For the record, I still think Netflix is a great service for the cost.  Basically for the price of a couple lattes, I can stream an unlimited number of movies to my home in a month and alternatively have DVDs mailed if I choose. That’s a pretty good deal.

However, by making things a little more difficult for the customer, I may drop the DVD service altogether. I haven’t decided yet.

And maybe that’s what Netflix wants in the long run anyhow.  There is more profit in streaming movies digitally than mailing physcial DVDs anyhow.

If you are a current Netflix DVD subscriber, will you keep the service after they make these changes or will you go streaming-only?

As a side note, newspapers are dealing with similar issues in transitioning from an old distribution channel (print) to a new one (digital).  Gigaom has an interesting comparison between the challenges Netflix faces and the ones newspapers are facing now too.

I love machines.

I’m not talking about electronic gadgets like laptops, mobile phones and vacuuming robots (although, I like those things too.)  I’m talking about machines constructed with gears, cogs, springs and fly wheels.  There is a certain beauty in machines that are constructed in this way.  Mechanical watches are fascinating collections of cogs, gears and springs that run for days on the energy of a single spring and tell you what phase the moon happens to be in at any given moment.

My love of all things mechanical translates to the digital world in a similar way.

I get excited when I see web-based tools that allow me to build single purpose apps that are simple on the surface and complex under the hood.  On the web, I never need to see the cogs.  The website If This, Then That does this in a very clever and simple way.

If This Then That allows you to connect many of the social sites you use on a regular basis with the web tools you use on a regular basis. It is built around the concept of choosing a “trigger” and then executing an “action” when the triggering event occurs (hence, the name of the site “if this, then that”).

For example, when someone tags a photo of you on Facebook (trigger), save that photo to your Dropbox account (action).  Or when APPL stock drops below $300 (trigger) send a text message to my phone (action).  If it’s supposed to rain tomorrow (trigger) send me an email reminder to pack an umbrella (action). You get the idea…

If This Then That has a collection of pre-made “recipes” that people have already created to get you started.  There are also some nice write-ups of the service on Webmonkey and Scott Hanselman’s blog.

Now, go make something fun.

Flickr photo from Sergei Golyshev

“I’m a friend of Sarah Connor. I was told she was here. Could I see her please?” – Cyberdyne Systems Series 600 Terminator

The uncanny valley is a concept coined by robotics professor, Masahiro Mori, in 1970 to describe the reaction humans have to robots with human appearance.  The graph can be interpreted by saying the more human a robot looks, the more familiar and comfortable we are with it. (Translation of Mori’s article.)

As a species, we’re comfortable being around other humans.  So, the more human something looks, the more comfortable we are around it.  Motion affects this response by amplifying our familiarity with the object. Humans move.  Therefore, it’s easier to recognize a moving human than a stationary one.

This overall positive feeling we have toward human-like robots holds true until the robot reaches a point at which it looks nearly identical to a human…but not entirely human.

Then we get freaked out.

“‘More human than human’ is our motto.” – Dr. Eldon Tyrell

So, what does a psychological response to robots have to do with corporate communications?

Regardless of what politicians say, most people view large corporations as companies full of people working toward a common corporate goal.  Although, corporations have been afforded some rights of individuals over the last 100 years or so, that’s not how most people view them (and those rights are legal and political in nature, not humanizing).

You probably wouldn’t invite United Airlines over for dinner or turn to Ford Motor Company to chat about relationship problems with your girlfriend.  Because those personal relationships are reserved for actual people, not companies.

Yet I see a recent trend where corporations engage their customers (or potential customers) in exactly that way.

I find this creepy and inappropriate when companies attempt to manufacture an emotional bond with their customers.  I suspect their corporate communications department or outside social media consultant is purposefully trying to “humanize” the company.  In many cases, this is laughable.

Pepsi Corporation likes bicycling into the sunset. (Really?  A multi-billion dollar beverage corporation enjoys romantic sunset bike rides along the beach?)

McDonalds Corporation wants to know if I have any EXCITING plans for the weekend! (C’mon, seriously? What McDonalds Corporation really wants to know is…will I swing by McDonalds this weekend to eat a Big Mac?)

Pizza Hut Inc cares about my mom! (I can tell they really do care.)

Tweets like this run the gamut between weird and creepy for me.   Mostly because they come from corporate communication departments trying desperately to sound human.  Although, if any one of those tweets would have come from a friend of mine, I wouldn’t have given it a second thought.

Friends telling me out a fun bike ride and beautiful sunset feels completely normal.  Multi-billion dollar beverage companies waxing poetic about sunsets feels creepy.

I’m sure social media consultants will tell me that those tweets are indeed coming from real people.  For instance, Pepsi’s corporate Twitter account bio says:

“Your direct line to party time! It’s summer! You have Joanna, George, Grace and Shiv here in the Pepsiverse! Follow us for a good time.”

I’m sure Joanna, George, Grace and Shiv are really nice people and charming in person.  However, they being paid by Pepsi Corporation to promote Pepsi as a brand.  If you actually believe those 4 people care about your child’s pool party last weekend (because you mentioned “Pepsi” in a tweet about it), I have some beachfront real estate to sell you in Nebraska.

Call me old fashioned, but I think the relationship between large corporations and customers should be a professional one. Not a cute chummy one.

So much like the uncanny valley in robotics, I experience the same weird uneasy feeling when corporations are attempting to become a little too human for the sake of sales and marketing.

What do you think?

(By the way, I think the rules are different for small businesses…because they have a face. I’ll expand on that in a later post.)

I just realized that I haven’t posted much of anything to this blog for nearly 6 months.  Wow.  To end my dry spell I thought I’d talk a little about paywalls currently being considered by several large news organizations.

Let me start by saying that I don’t want newspapers to JUST survive.  I want them to prosper and grow.  I love newspapers. However, in order to prosper, they will have to make radical changes to their current business and operational models.

It’s no secret that newspapers are in an unpleasant predicament right now.  Business models that should have gradually evolved over the last decade to adapt to the current climate have instead stagnated in the last decade.  The only real changes newspapers made to their business models over the last dozen years was to raise their advertising and subscription rates.  Paywalls are certainly a radical change from that stagnation, but perhaps not the best solution available.  Putting the genie back in the bottle is a lot harder than letting him out.

Here are a few thoughts surrounding newspaper paywalls:

1. Exclusive and utterly fantastic content.

All parents think their children are unique, brilliant and precious.  However, without sounding mean, the vast majority of those children are probably pretty average.  (I know, that sounded mean, but hear me out.)

Newspapers think the same thing about their own content.  Each section of the newspaper is a precious child with perfect teeth and above average grades.

But what I think they don’t understand is that it’s nearly impossible to charge for content that can be found elsewhere on the internet for free.  If the content isn’t unique, then it has to be the best example of that content available.

Are you covering your technology section better than Tech Crunch?

Are your photo galleries more interesting than Flicker?

Are you covering your local dining section better than the dozen passionate food bloggers in your city?

Are your podcasts and videos more compelling than YouTube?

This is your competition…and they’re all free.

If a newspaper can’t answer “yes” to these types of questions, then perhaps that content isn’t a good candidate for subscription services.

2. Enterprising local bloggers

Several outcomes are inevitable when a local newspaper begins charging for specific categories of content.  For example, if the Boston Globe began charging for access to their Red Sox content, you would probably see 3 outcomes.

1. People would pay for access because they love the Red Sox so deeply, not even a paywall would stop them.  Web traffic would drop to that particular section, but the true fans would remain.
2. People would stop reading Red Sox content at the Boston Globe, but seek it out via bloggers, or other reliable news agencies.
3. Seeing a ripe opportunity, people would begin to blog about the Red Sox themselves and become competition for the Boston Globe in that category.

How many enterprising bloggers would cover niche news categories if your local newspaper decided to charge for content?  Are they any good?  Should you recruit them instead of compete against them?

This will not be a big deal in smaller communities, simply because smaller populations foster fewer bloggers.  However, larger metropolitan areas will be filled with bloggers writing in the exact same niche the newspaper covers.  And sometimes, covering it better than the paper (remember those unique and precious children?).

3. Run the numbers, it may (or may not) help

The New York Times launched their “TimesSelect” subscription service in September 2005 and filled it with unique and exclusive content that could only be read with a TimesSelect subscription.  Two years after its launch, the Times determined they could make more money by removing the subscription paywall and running advertising on the site.

By some accounts, TimesSelect didn’t fail (it was projected to make $10mil in revenue).  It just didn’t live up to its financial goals using that particular business model.  TimesSelect was conceived before the explosion of traffic that search engines like Google and Yahoo began delivering to news sites.  It was impossible to capitalize on that increased search engine traffic through a closed system that requires a subscription to participate.  The New York Times wasn’t able to foresee that explosive search engine growth.

Under normal circumstances, a newspaper will need to dig deep into the traffic and financial metrics and try to forecast how many loyal visitors they have available for subscriptions?  How many of these visitors will pay to return?  Is it enough to compensate for the drop in traffic?

Implementing simple registration walls caused about a 20% immediate drop in traffic when registration was all the rage a few years ago.  I can imagine the drop in traffic for requiring payment would be even greater.

The New York Times is currently building a paywall in which visitors “will be allowed to view a certain number of articles free each month; to read more, the reader must pay a flat fee for unlimited access.” This system will be in place by January 2011.

It will be interesting to see how this works for the Times in 2011.

In closing, I will leave you with this quote from Stewart Brand on the cost of information.  Hopefully newspapers can find a happy medium…

On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it’s so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other. – Stewart Brand

(Also…my disclosure, I work for a company owned, in part, by Media News Group and they’re not responsible for any craziness I may spew on this blog. Nor am I representing them in any way.  Yadda yadda yadda…)

(Images from viZZZual via Flickr, ThinkGeek, Robot in Disguise)