manage to experience

Where the hell is Matt?

Yes, where?

Where the Hell is Matt? (2008) from Matthew Harding on Vimeo.

Your ever-narrowing universe

An interesting take on the increasing reliance on personal information filters, and how the filters/people begin to define those who rely on them.

It's most obvious in the political sphere, where you can find a safe cocoon among the like-minded, but the influence of filters is everywhere.

Back from vacation

Five days at the beach and I barely paid attention to the Internet. Skimming the feeds this morning, here's what caught my eye:

• Cuil is live (then dead, then live again). A real competitor to Google? That would be a good thing, but Danny Sullivan offers a good analysis and reasons to be skeptical.
• A data point in the destination versus distribution discussion, and one that continues to suggest that distribution is winning. Can't say I'm particularly fond of the term "brandstreaming."
• Speaking of new terminology, there's a new animal in the PR world, the social media press release. A thoughtful, coordinated approach to applying PR to social media should be a good thing, right? Then why am I afraid that the most common application of the SMPR will be tone deaf spam? I hope I'm wrong.

37 Signals on revealing hidden assumptions

Q:  “[I]ts only Y, how hard can it be?”

A:  "Imaginary work is always easier to do than real work. It is much more attractive (being more quickly done) and once you see the imaginary work, it can be very difficult to identify the real work it masks. People estimating imaginary work often assume they have all the facts in hand when making their estimates, which assumption leads them to believe that there is no 'big technical hurdle' preventing its implementation."

Family Meals

Is the experience you wish to share with your customers something that starts with and extends to the people who deliver that experience?

Lessons from "family meals":

That’s the idea behind the best family meals. Make them simple, well rounded, diverse, and delicious, and you’ll keep your staff happy. It’s a sentiment shared by all eight of the restaurants I visited, though it’s probably no coincidence that the three restaurants known for both stellar food and remarkable service offered the most noteworthy staff meals.

Ads and environment

Do ads exist in a vacuum? This case points out two YouTube videos that are an effective counterpoint to millions spent on an otherwise effective advertising campaign.

It's not just the ads that matter. It's the environment they're released into.

Dissecting the long tail

The long tail is getting longer, but not any fatter. And those who venture down the long tail are the heaviest consumers, and not the most satisfied by the experience.

According to an article by Harvard Business School Professor Anita Eberse, businesses that rely on the long tail are placing themselves at a competitive disadvantage to businesses that pursue a blockbuster strategy.

The importance of the long tail has grown to be a matter of faith among many businesses. Eberse's research suggests that this isn't a case of "the Web changing everything;" rather, the long tail is simply an idea that resonates with an audience that is predisposed to accept it.

Social forces continue to be the strongest influence on sales. We aren't a society of iconoclasts who seek out obscure gems that speak to our condition. Rather, Eberse holds that consumption is shaped by others, and we're generally satisfied with the media we consume. The more we consume, the more we wander down the long tail, and the less satisfied we are by what we find.

Netflix to customers: Profiles not going away.

Netflix recently announced that the profiles feature which allows customers to maintain multiple queues within a single account was going to be retired.

Now they've changed their minds.

It would be easy to frame this as a simple matter of a company listening to its customers and reacting in an appropriate way. Every Netflix customer I know was unhappy with the plan to eliminate profiles. But Netflix's real mistake seemed to be how and what they announced about their plan.

To paraphrase Netflix, the change was for customers' benefit. Beyond that, they didn't explain how this would benefit customers. And that, I suspect, is what set off a strong reaction, particularly when customers discovered that email isn't part of the Netflix customer service experience (try finding a simple way to email the company).

Lesson: When announcing a service change that's likely to be controversial, offer a detailed explanation for the change, don't focus on vague future benefits, and don't assume that "trust us" is enough.

Google crawls Flash content

Yes, this could lead to more abuse of Flash, and who needs that? But on the whole I take Google's announcement that they are crawling Flash content as a positive.