Diverse users demand diverse products -- Nintendo of Japan

More women than men play Nintendo in Japan.

According to the Fall 2007 Nintendo Conference, more than half of Japanese Nintendo Wii and Nintendo DS players are female. Since Japan is to the video game industry what the Bay Area is to the web -- that is to say, it's the undisputed innovation center -- this is great news for those of us who care about video game diversity.

In 2008, I'm far less excited about playing my 50th menu-driven RPG than I am about finding another genre-shattering, barrier-breaking masterpiece like Katamari Damacy was and Spore hopes to be. And it seems that these unique games have much larger rapport with female audiences -- if only because they represent a new consumer base for games and as such are not entrenched in taxonomical comfort zones such as "Platformer", "Shooter", and "Beat Em Up".

Maybe this diversifying player base helps to explain why the last few years have included such paradigm shifting games as Brain Age, Cooking Mama, Trauma Center, and Elebits. It's not that unique games never existed before (a statement that would be logically fallacious anyway), but it seems to me that in my lifetime, unclassifiable games such as these have ever been nearly successful as they are at this moment. One can only hope it continues.



source
"13:56: For each household, the DS has 3.0 users, the Wii has 3.5 users. DS has a 53% female user base. Wii has a 51% female user base."

Facebook 'Booktracker' application; my first review (The Edison Gene)

Booktracker rocks. Go sign up for it! You can add a book by searching for the author, title, or ISBN.

Then, you can post books that you are reading, have read, or want to read. You can pick one of these categories to display automatically in your Facebook profile. In this screenshot of my profile, I've chosen to show by default the books I'm "currently reading":




The app is also nice because it keeps a record of when I read certain books. I hope the creator of Booktracker makes an archive of book additions eventually, because I'd love to one day have a historical record of when I started and finished reading any given book, from now on, plus my own reviews of each book.

To that end, I recently posted the following short review to my Books application on Facebook (full text below image):



Thom Hartmann's The Edison Gene is an important perspective on the gift of ADHD, the state of ADHD in psychology and education, and potential options for raising ADHD children. In the book, Hartmann consistently challenges the "disorder view" that ADHD is some sort of problem to be cured. In doing so, he appeals to history, modern science, and, above all, the evolutionary psychology theory of ADHD, which explains that this genetic trait for a tendency towards agitation and creativity was chosen for the world's most agitated, creative roles: inventors, explorers, hunters. Hartmann shows sound reasoning in demonstrating why the characteristics associated with ADHD would have been useful in the environment of early humans.

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I have a simple theory of ADHD based on evolutionary psychology.

In man's gradual conquest of the globe, it seems to me that natural selection must have always favored explorers. Explorers and expatriates are generally fueled by agitation, creativity, and nonconformism. A population that yielded a larger-than-normal number of people with these traits therefore had a larger-than-normal number of explorers. The traits, of course, occur today most frequently in people whom American society labels as "ADHD". People with these traits exported their population's genetic information across the globe, diversifying the geography of like strains, and thus avoiding forms of extinction by geographic anomaly (flood, drought, ice age, etc.).

Google's Blogger Play launches, begins to spiral out of control

Blogger Play is a great new site made by the Blogger team. It shows a pretty slideshow of images as they are uploaded by Blogger users.

This is a much more visual form of the scrolling display that can be found in most of the buildings here on Google campus. I predict that it will be equally addictive.

After hearing the product had been released, I spent about 30 seconds on Blogger Play before seeing this:


Uh oh. Does that mean that by posting to this Blogger Blog the above image, which now will appear in Blogger Play for other viewers, I am setting into motion an infinitely nested set of images?? IT WILL SPIRAL OUT OF CONTROL

Flex coolness: www.officialmancave.com

I was checking on a domain I wanted to buy, eless.com, and, much to my dismay it's owned by a domain farmer. For some reason, one of the ads these squatter-spammers had on the domain piqued my interest. Taking care not to click the ad, for this would reward the evil industry of squatter-spammers, I copied the domain and pasted it into my browser bar: http://www.officialmancave.com

It seems like this is an Alltel-funded advertisement experience. I see clear examples of Flex components such as the book component in use, and they feel really nice within The Man Cave experience. All hail Flex! Check it out!

Jobfox - the eHarmony of job sites?

I just spent 20 minutes on this site and feel like it knows me better than any prospective employer has ever known me.

Since I wasted that much time at work already, I'll forgo writing a full entry about this, and summarize what I would have written in the following analogy:

Jobfox : Monster/CareerBuilders/HotJobs :: eHarmony : Craigslist Personals

They get bonus points for the "boss over shoulder" link at the bottom. This is a welcome nod to the computer gaming industry of the 80's and early 90's.

If you want to be really wowed, go here and click on some objects in the experience map:

User Abuse: iPhone lacks IM capabilities; Apple and AT&T choose quick cash over human factors

Yesterday, I stopped by the Apple Store in the Stonestown mall in southwest San Francisco, near the West Portal house we recently rented. The mission: check out the iPhone!

Michelle and I have alternated interest in the iPhone since its announcement back in January. However, when Apple made it clear that there would be no third-party software on the device, I was more than a little annoyed. This robbed the machine of any serious capabilities as a hiptop, in my opinion primarily to protect iTunes' ownership of the iPhone's full-screen interface.

As mentioned in my previous post, I suspect that their reasoning is as follows: If iTunes owns the right to play music on the device in full-screen mode, it can't as easily be turned into a personalized, on-demand jukebox -- and unless/until they enable Flash, it can't be done at all. This means that Apple cannot be edged out music, that critical piece of the experience. As much as I love Apple in general, I see it as a grave wrong that they have robbed users of choice of software. (Personally, I had planned on making a Flex/Apollo mp3 jukebox to access and stream music from my archive at home via the internet -- a sort of non-corporate version of Orb -- and releasing it for free.)

Then, with the recent devastating leak that the iPhone would lack a native instant messaging (IM) client, the last straw broke my interest in the device. My analysis became not that of a prospective buyer, but that of an outspoken critic. Even without third-party software, iChat would have given the iPhone the potential to start a massive leap forward in person-to-person communication, like the iPod did for digital music. Like the iPod, it wouldn't have been the first device of its kind -- there were tons of MP3 players before Apple entered the market, and today plenty of smartphones have IM capabilities; I personally have been connected to IM nearly uninterrupted for about 2 years. But also like the iPod, it would have been the first device of its kind that was targeted at the masses. If they had iChat, iPhone users would form a massive, constantly-connected chunk of mobile communicators. In the words of Tenacious D, it would make nonstop rocking possible.

But sadly, it is not so. There is no native instant messaging capability on the iPhone at all. A quick glance at the AT&T iPhone pricing plans explains why:


The important thing to note on this chart is that, despite all plans having Unlimited Data, there is still a very low limit (200/month) on SMS text messages. For an extra $10/month, you can bump that up to 1500, and for $20 the cap is removed altogether. Through the internet and unlimited data packages, SMS is quickly being made obsolete. They must have realized that iChat on the iPhone would have been the nail in the coffin for this aging, laggy technology. I'm sure the MBA quant jocks also realized that it would have been the end of the $10/month, $20/month, and overages that AT&T is set to reap from Apple's decision to restrict users to SMS.

In the world of product and service design, this type of behavior is viewed as typical money-grubbing, short-sighted user sabotage. These kinds of design decisions deliberately force users to spend more-than-necessary money for poorer-than-necessary experiences. It's not surprising news that a big corporation is doing evil things to exploit its userbase. What makes it worth blogging about is that, this time, a former white knight like Apple is doing AT&T's dirty work.

iPhone crashes and needs to be rebooted at demonstration

When I was checking out the iPhone at the southwestern San Francisco Apple Store on Sunday, the employee demonstrating the device had to shut it down and power it back on. As a hardened owner of the Palm Treo (aka "THE REBOOTERIZER"), I immediately noticed this and asked him, worriedly, "Hey, did you just have to reboot that thing?"

The employee told me that sometimes his phone (and apparently the display model as well) acts up in iPod or photos mode, and when it does so, he just reboots it. I deduced that this employee had only owned his iPhone for a maximum of three days. This means that, in three days, he had adjusted to a lifestyle of rebooting his hiptop device whenever it "acts up". We have an intransitive verb for this kind of behavior: "crash".

This reboot scare cancels the #1 reason I had been considering replacing my Treo 650 with the iPhone.

Zurfer-like Picasa mobile shows off a Google Maps mash-up; adds location to your photos

Yesterday evening, Google announced the launch of the very descriptively-named Picasa Web Albums for mobile devices, which is another big step in the quiet photo sharing revolution.

With Map My Photos, Picasa joins Zurfer, which was launched two weeks ago by the Yahoo! Research Berkeley lab, in allowing us to mark photographs with location metadata, or "geotag" them, and then experience spatially-organized albums. Make sure to check out the Picasa team's test gallery for a demonstration of the mash-up at work.

Shopgoodwill.com: buy weird crap from the kinds of people that will NEVER use the internet

Tonight, I realized that I now buy nearly everything online. In fact, I really only have IRL shopping experiences at thrift stores, Asian/Mexican bazaars here in the Mission District, or Walgreens (the place that bleeds me dry when I purchase something I need urgently enough not to buy it online). It's impossible to replace the ambience of the bazaars with a website, and Walgreens is necessary for stated reasons, so I decided to look for online thrift stores.

After a quick Google search, I stumbled upon this site, Shopgoodwill.com, and I thought to myself "uh oh... this could be a pretty important find." I made a mental note to blog about it if it were, indeed, a pretty important find. And here we are.

It didn't take me long to find the Men's Clothing section, and I wasn't disappointed to find this:

Mens XL Disco Shirt DESCRIPTION: This shirt needs cleaning.

Then, in the Women's Clothing section, this:
Fake Fur Vest

However, the clothing selection here suffers from the same thing as Goodwill's brick and mortar incarnations: the inverse bell curve. See the following graphs:




As you can see, at Goodwill, more people fit into the 'WTF' size range or the ~0 size than anything else (the second graph). Because of this polarized populace, there are remarkably low numbers of size 'M' people at Goodwill, considering that this is the size most represented in the population as a whole (the first graph). And, I assume as a result of this, the number of size 'M' garments is also dangerously low. This inverse bell curve, I found, applies to both the selection and the people at Shopgoodwill.com.

I left the clothing section behind, happy with what I found there.

At first, the weirdness of the crap I was digging through felt like an adventuresome treasure hunt and yielded hilarious results, like any reasonably good day at the real thrift store. This is a ringing endorsement -- I had found a new hobby! However, as my search went on, the item selection deviated increasingly from the norm:

Newspaper Clip in frame from 1936
Two Old Hand Saws
Oil Painting of a Girl on a Beach
Case of 500 - 3"x2"x2" Boxes

This is brilliant! I'm finding more and more bizarre crap -- the kind that is definitely not available for purchase on other websites, because the people selling this crap aren't the kinds of people that use the internet in the first place. These products are provided by people dumping their junk off at several federated Goodwill locations nationwide -- and many of these people aren't advanced enough as netizens to become sellers on sites like eBay and Craigslist. But Shopgoodwill.com lowers the barrier to entry for the internet economy, if only in this weird little niche. Some Goodwill dumpers are people moving house (or, hopefully, moving trailer) with a need to offload a ton of junk quickly. Others are donating the contents of the storage shed of a recently deceased uncle -- perhaps one with oil paintings? Most are probably thrift store community members who have no idea that there's even an online component of the system that sells their bizarre crap.

This bizarre crap is mixed with another kind of crap -- the kind that, while it may be available on eBay from time-to-time, I would never find because it's not like I perform constant searches for items like these -- these are the kinds of products that I don't know I want til I see them.

And for that kind of impulsive and weird consumer, vintage and thrift stores have long been a haven. Shopgoodwill.com is a kickass extension to that.

If you find weird junk at the site, post it in the comments!

Ninjawords -- because 18 DEX > *

Phil Crosby said that online dictionaries made him feel like shouting, in his words, "get out of my face and show me a definition!” We've all experienced this problem first-hand many times over the years, especially as dictionary.com, Merriam-Webster Online, and even Wiktionary bloated their pages more and more (though, in their defense, Wiktionary's "bloated" pages consist mostly of value-added content as opposed to graphics, ads, and inefficient layout coding). That's why he created Ninjawords.

In line with his original goal, Phil's solution is fast -- for me, on a mediocre broadband connection, a single lookup takes less than half a second from the time I press enter to the time I start reading the definition(s). Additionally, it is primarily populated with definitions from Wiktionary, which I'm all for. But to top it all off, Ninjawords has additional features that set it far ahead of the pack. For instance, you can enter multiple search terms by separating them with commas, and the results are all returned instantly on the same page. Also, when you have a typo, Ninjawords not only offers guesses as to what you meant to type -- it also automatically returns the definition of the most relevant suggestion.

The minimalist interface takes a queue from Google, and is welcome respite from the terrors of Merriam-Webster:


Check out the site for yourself!

Wiktionary: Replacing them all

Only an evolving medium can describe an evolving entity like the English language, especially if the entity evolves as quickly as the English language. Today, Wiktionary is four years old, and it makes the competition look incredibly slow -- slow to keep up with the language, and slow to load in my web browser.

If you were to look up the word podcast on Merriam-Webster Online, you would be greeted with the following:

As you can see, it's not in there, but I doubt that Merriam-Webster questions the legitimacy of the word: they use the word quite often. As I write this, the root word podcast appears on Merriam-Webster’s main page four times -- once as a common noun ("this free podcast delivers a daily dose of word power and fun"). Their podcast section is even listed as a free daily feature:

Isn’t it ironic? A dictionary website, whose main draw is ostensibly to find definitions of words, uses a word that’s missing from their own dictionary multiple times on the main page! A further irony is the fact that podcasts are a free service of Merriam-Webster, yet to find out what the word means, you’d be forced to search for it at another site.

While it’s possible that the word’s definition would be available from Merriam-WebsterUnabridged.com, the by-subscription site whose link is visible in the above screenshot, this gives rise to a whole new set of questions. Google has demonstrated that low-fi content (such as dictionary data) can be offered for free in a profitable business model based on targeted advertising, even when the backend is as comparatively complex as that of Google Search or Gmail. So in the case of Merriam-Webster, this seems like a no-brainer: If you really do have good dictionary content stored somewhere, make it free! While you’re at it, cut down on the bloatiness of your site.

I know that the word podcast does indeed appear in Webster’s New Millennium Dictionary of English, as can be found through a dictionary.com query, which searches through the "Preview Edition" of that text. But why doesn’t it appear on Merriam Webster’s main page? Years ago, I relied on their site for definitions. (They won me over because they had a clever little JavaScript prompt that allowed me, even back in my Internet Explorer days of 2000, to search their site for a definition without first loading the main page.*) They lost my business soon thereafter when I started to notice that even quite pedestrian words were occasionally missing from their data. I shudder at the thought of paying a subscription fee to access word definitions, so around five years ago I stopped using Merriam-Webster’s site altogether.

What’s more, I noticed that the New Millennium Dictionary, which does contain the word podcast, is missing from the list of versions that are included in the Merriam-WebsterUnabridged.com package. This suggests that Merriam-Webster is withholding content even from paying users. But it’s not just Merriam-Webster with problems…

The above screenshot is from the subscriber-view (it would appear that my university is a paying customer) of Oxford English Dictionary (OED). As you can see, the word podcast is absent from this site as well, despite the fact that the related New Oxford American Dictionary (NOAD) named podcast their word of the year for 2006. Meanwhile, on AskOxford, they proudly announce the addition of two seemingly useless words, even while "podcast":

I applaud Oxford for leveraging the publishing power of the web to update their online version of OED four times per year, which is a bit more often than a print version could feasibly be updated. But the first question I have to ask is, “why only four?” It’s not like web publishing is all that difficult — I even manage to update my silly blog more often than four times per year, and when I do, there are quite a few more words. Further, I can’t for the life of me think of a single technical, financial, or user-oriented reason that OUP stands to benefit from the practice of buffering their updates until a predetermined day each quarter.

The OED bills itself out as “The definitive record of the English language”, yet it fails to define words like podcast and laptop, each of which has over 100 million Google hits (whereas liposculpture has abount 300 thousand) and is in daily use all over the developed world. Omissions like these are rampant in MSN Encarta Dictionary, American Heritage Dictionary (which even lacks “blog” as a term), and every other print-and-web dictionary I could find. Clearly, these companies are behind the times.

Now, I’m not the kind of tech-head that demands webization or “web 2.0″-ization of all things, but nearly everyone I know already relies on the web for definitions. And right now, they are users that are up for grabs, searching for a product that doesn’t suck; a free product that won’t intentionally omit words to solicit paying subscriptions; a product that loads quickly; a product that is up-to-date.

The product they’re looking for is Wiktionary. Wiki technology is exactly what a dictionary needs. It is a platform that thrives on changes, change-averse language pundits (see my previous entry). Because language changes far faster than the publication cycle of top-down dictionaries, a by-the-users and highly iterative approach is needed. Wiktionary uses that approach. I encourage all of you to compare your current web-based dictionary of choice with Wiktionary and see how you like it. In instances where you find it failing, you can just edit the entry and justify your changes on its accompanying discussion page. I believe that the more active users a wiki has, the more accurate and useful it becomes — especially if Wikipedia is any evidence. Because a definition can be quickly added, edited, or deleted by any reader, Wiktionary has the potential to be everyone’s go-to resource for word definitions — I know it’s mine.

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*Note: Nowadays, this is possible for most of the sites I use — it’s a built-in feature in Firefox to create similar shortcuts. For instance, if I type “wp ninja” in my browser’s address bar, I get Wikipedia’s search results for the query “ninja”. I have set up similar shortcuts for about 20 sites, including Facebook search, Urban Dictionary, my university’s online student directory, and a registrar WHOIS search.