My iPhone

Hi world,

For you to get to know me a bit better, I've decided to introduce a good friend of mine in this blog: my iPhone (AKA by my wife "the enemy").

I got it a few months ago and we're inseparable ever since. It's applications changed quite a few aspects of my day to day life:

• I have never been so aware of the weather before
• It opened me to the stock market, and have since lost some money there (but fully aware of when and how much)
• I am completely addicted to "who's got the biggest brain"
• I had a night with 2 hours of sleep playing backgammon
• I had a week outside of society when I installed all the initial software and firmware
• I'm suspicious of anyone who goes near my desk at work when it's not in my pocket

All in all I can say it has changed life for the better.

But seriously, if some love the iPhone and some hate it, I belong to the former group. It's big, it's heavy, it has a crappy speaker, its phone application has much much room for improvement, and the most annoying thing - you can't really hang up the phone on your own terms, but I still love it. I can't put my finger on why exactly (which is even more frustration as a human factors grad student), but i don't see myself go back to a "normal" cell phone.

Still, as a HF student, it's my obligation to at least try to understand what makes me feel like I do towards my iPhone. As I think about it, I think "feel" is the key word here. Using my iPhone makes me feel. For me, it's the best definition of the term "user experience". The elegance and aesthetics of the user interaction with this mobile device is something I didn't experience with any product before.
The multi-touch interface, although sometimes problematic, somehow forces a more "intimate" relationship with it. Together with the simple and seemless interactions the iPhone quickly became literally (almost) a part of me.

Now before I'm accused of sexually harassing my iPhone, i must also admit there is a downside, which bring's me towhy my wife calls it "the enemy". Very simply put, it robbs me of my spare time. If not carefully used, it can enslave me. As I recall, when first reading through Apple's reader's manual, there was a warning saying something like over-use may cause health problems, a warning I dismissed with contempt thinking "what kind of person would use his phone so much it as to hurt himsel...?". I did not yet reach the point of seeking medical attention directly linked to using my iPhone, but I can easily say the time I spend using it is bigger by a factor of 10 at least compared to my last cell phone. I have to admit that I need to actively monitor my iPhone usage, so i don't go over the line.

In conclusion, I would say that on one hand my iPhone usage consumes a lot of valuable time; on the other hand, very few products force me to this situation - this is a great product.

Topsy - a tweet based real time search engine

Today I'd *like* to talk about a new web 2.0 technology website, it just feels like the right time to do it (plus this is an assignment for my KM course due Monday).

go2web20.net is the place 2go2 for all the recent cool web 2.0 sites. This is where i found Topsy.
Topsy is a search engine that's entirely based on citations of hyperlinks embedded within twitter messages by using the Twitter search API. Big words; let's try to break it down a bit.

Google's search results are ranked mainly according to the number of links pointing to a page, meaning how many other pages have links to this page. The most linked pages that correspond to a search term are the top results. Google sees the web as a network of documents. It's web crawlers index the WWW, which is expensive. That's why it might take Google a while to show rather recent content on it's search results (this is also why it took about a week after creating this blog for it to be found in Google searching for the term "simplenotsimplistic". Still not bitter.)

So it can sometimes be problematic to find recent blog posts on Google (although the more popular blogs are indexed quite frequently). Recently, with the explosion of Twitter, the amount of real time information being published has been increased significantly and it seems this is too much to handle by Google, Yahoo! search, Bing and the other big link based ranking search engines. This is where Topsy comes in.

Topsy sees the web as a stream of conversations. As Michael Arrington describes it, Topsy makes use of the 30+ million twitter users as "an army of little content-finding machines". When searching for a term in Topsy, the sorting of the results are based on the links that were most discussed in Twitter, on who posted the tweets (some authors are more influential than others) and by the other content in the tweet (other than the hyperlink).

Search results can be sorted by their age (similar to the you tube search) by using the bar on the left refining the search to results from "all time" (September 2008 being the oldest results), month, week, day and even hour.
The more influential Twitter authors for the search terms are listed on the bar at the right.

As an example, I searched for the term "Sacha Baron Cohen" on Google and on Topsy. The results from Google (see image) are clearly not real-time. The first result is the Wikipedia page, followed by Cohen's imdb page and a rolling-stone article from 2006.
The Topsy results are different (see image above): the two first results is the trailer of Cohen's new movie (Bruno), followed by Bruno's Facebook page and a news article from June 3rd 2009.

Topsy is a great source of up-to-date information and knowledge. Another Michael Arrington quote sums it up: "For me, someone who’s obsessed with news and stuff that’s happening right now, Twitter search is about 25% of my total Internet searches. The ratio keeps going up over time."
Topsy has a clear advantage over the "traditional (?)" search engines when you need to know what's going on NOW.

Seeya,
Ben

The more I see the less I know

OK world, I decided I gave you the silent treatment long enough; I hope you learned your lesson...

Today I decided to finally try to live up to the expectation my blog's name has raised in the blogosphere, I hear some bloggers actually went on a hunger strike until I do. To those, I recommend Schulz catering.

The the's "slow emotion replay" begins with this posts' title; this quote is also ascribed to John Lennon and appears in Red Hot Chili Pepper's song Snow (hey oh).

At first this seems reverse to common sense - the more I see I would expect that I also know more. This reasonning can be explained as follows: since the more I see, the more likley I am to witness contradicting facts (or things I cannot understand), my certain knowledge ("what I know for sure" as appears in John Lennon's original quote), lessens.

In Human Factors, we couldn't hope for a better slogan. Ideally, users (of any system) would like to be presented with only the information they need and exactly when they need it.
Less information than needed will result in an inability to react; but the more common case is too much presented information, or information clutter.

Information clutter is a common usability issue that stems from the tendency of system designers to prefer presenting information even when it's relevance is doubtful. The result is overloaded systems where the user has a hard time distinguishing the important information relevant for her goal from irrelevant information. In that sense, the redundant information obscures the information the user needs. The more she sees, the less she know for sure.

While different users (e.g. novices vs. experts) in different situations need different levels of information, it is the system designer's job to be able to identify these users and these situation so that only the right amount of information is shown.

While this identification requires quite complex mechanisms, to the users the system is simple to use.

Seeya!
Ben