Bradley Howard's Blog

Understanding Pinterest

Feb 16, 2012 at 10:24am

So the latest social network, in fact the best social network since Facebook, is now Pinterest. Barely a day goes by without a top headline story from the likes of LinkedIn and Mashable promoting the increasing take up of Pinterest.

I’ve been using Pinterest for a few weeks now. Since then it’s been interesting to see more people joining and following my ‘boards’. It’s principally the same group of early adopters who keep signing up to the latest new social websites in search of the next big Facebook.

Pinterest is a super-simple concept. If you see something interesting on the web, you ‘Pin’ that content to Pinterest, which inserts a good looking graphic from the interesting page on to a virtual cork board.

In the past, this type of site was called a bookmarking site and would have competed with Digg, Delicious and a thousand other startups which have been acquired by the big .coms (and then spun out again).

Pinterest seems to make bookmarking interesting again through a few simple new concepts:

Grouping ‘Pins’ together as interest groups
Keeping it simply to Pin items to Pinterest
Adopting the ‘following’ principle of social networks

It’s the user interface that’s the knock out factor. There are some key aspects of the site that sets Pinterest apart from other sites, and we’ll start seeing the usability features on other sites.

One of these features is how the site horizontally scales so well. At home I have a large widescreen monitor. I can easily fit a browser window next to a Word window, and Skype or Yammer around those. Looking at Facebook when a browser window is maximised looks ridiculous – a thin sliver of content among a wide, white page. However Pinterest constantly fills the entire screen, adding more content as the browser window expands vertically and horizontally.

There’s no doubting that Pinterest has been growing very, very quickly. The site is still very fast at loading and rendering, despite most of it’s content being graphics.

I don’t think Pinterest is the killer app for bookmarks.

I still use Delicious, mainly because I’ve been using it for several years and have hundreds of bookmarks, but also because most of my links are stored because the content was interesting, not just a graphic on a page.

And I still use Flickr for all my images because BT gave me a Pro account with my broadband package and it stores the graphics in such high resolution.

If I see an interesting graphic on a page, such as an infographic, I typically put it on Twitter and if I need to find it again, I’ll search my tweets.

As for Pinterest, I’m not that sure where it fits in. Most of the boards seem to centre around fashion and food. So maybe Pinterest will end up as a niche site for these industries. Until the next big social network comes along.

tags:

Facebook, design, innovation, social media, trends, usability,

1 Comment

Innovation is an ingredient

Jan 20, 2012 at 10:25am

Two large companies with completely different views on innovation, Saab and Kodak, have filed for liquidation and protection in the last two months.

It’s wrong to compare these two companies against modern day technology companies who are so good at innovation, because technology companies are so young by comparison, and companies change rapidly once several ‘generations’ of employees leave the company.

Saab haven’t released a brand new model for several years, so whilst I feel sorry for the thousands of employees worldwide, its a case of lack of innovation leads to staleness. Even the most loyal customers eventually grow bored, such as my next door neighbour who bought a new Saab (in the same colour) every three years for the last few years, bought a beautiful Jaguar XF last October.

In 2010, Saab’s revenue was £2.3bn and Jaguar Land Rover’s was £6.5bn. Jaguar has since released several completely new models and gone from strength to strength. In Q2 2011, it’s revenue was £2.9bn - and that’s during a recession.

It’s easy to look at Kodak as an innovative company though. They invented the first hand held camera, the Brownie, in 1900, and they invented the first digital camera way back in 1975. Unfortunately these landmark inventions weren’t enough.

Companies needs to keep on innovating again and again, literally ad infinitum.

And innovation isn’t enough by itself. It's merely an ingredient amongst good timing and marketing.

Photo courtesy of liftarn on Flickr

tags:

economy, innovation,

0 Comments

How I would Yahoo!

Oct 26, 2011 at 8:43am

So, apparently Yahoo! is up for sale, and even better, Google are willing to help fund it's resurgence. This sounds so familiar – in 1997, Apple were having serious problems and Microsoft, their once main competitor, invested $150 million in the company, and now Apple is worth more than Microsoft!

Back to Yahoo!, it’s amazing how many people are so dismissive of Yahoo!’s (that’s a lot of punctuation) value.

Here are the high level stats:

Yahoo has over 500 million unique visitors each month, around the World, in over 30 languages.

In the UK alone, adults spend over 3 hours a month just on Yahoo! Mail.

To build that audience of 500 million would cost a HUGE amount of money (and time), so in my opinion there's never been a better time to Yahoo! Stock is set at a very reasonable price, and Google are willing to invest a significant amount of money.

Here’s what I would do if I took over Yahoo! tomorrow:

Focus

An Internet content portal above all else. In terms of competition, Google provide mail to compete with Yahoo! Mail however there is no one with similar a traffic size which provides the level of content as Yahoo!
Generate a cost/revenue model for services such as Yahoo! Mail and Flickr to see if it’s worth selling these on or keeping them and reinvesting.
Create a cloud development service model to compete with the likes of Amazon and Microsoft - turning a cost centre into a profit centre

Analytics

Work out where my users are coming from – is it mainly from PC manufacturer-set-browser-homepages which haven’t been updated for 5 years? In fact, I’d probably do most of my initial work on the analysis of who uses the individual Yahoo! services to ascertain the users’ value, or even try to derive an ARPU (Average Revenue Per User).

Innovation

Yahoo! strikes me as a company which is struggling to innovate. How many new services of note have their launched recently? I would look at why this has happened – have they all left to go to competitors? Internet companies need to have innovation at the centre of their philosophy, vision and corporate structure in order to keep users returning. I would reignite this passion for innovation immediately.

And finally, I think I’d rebrand Yahoo! to drop the exclamation mark! (Pun intended).

tags:

Microsoft, cloud, content, email, google, innovation, web traffic,

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Eat your own dog food

Feb 3, 2011 at 12:37pm

During the launch of Microsoft Vista, we implemented a number of projects with Microsoft. There were a few things I learned from Microsoft at the time, however one of them - the concept of 'eating their own dog food' - was something that sticks out.

The concept is simple. Get your own captive audience to try your products before the public. Understand how they use it. Be ready for the public reaction, because you've already been using it for a few months.

You don't need to create your own products to have this approach.

I strongly believe and encourage the staff at Endava to use the latest social networks, tools, applications, so that we can have a view and opinion on them for our clients. What works better than Microsoft Project? Is Twitter useful? What's the difference between Yammer and Skype? What's the best task tracking system, or should we be using TFS? Is an iPhone better than an Android?

One specific client always follows up these types of questions with "And have you used it?"

The only way to answer these questions is to have experienced them personally before providing the opinion to clients.

Photo courtesy of nancybeetoo on Flickr

tags:

Endava, Skype, brands, business, iPhone, innovation, twitter, website production,

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Politics on the web

Jan 24, 2011 at 8:51pm

It's interesting how politics is starting to the use the web in different countries.

The press spend all their time discussing cyber-terrorism, flash mobs for riots, etc., and little time promoting the use of the web as a great way to interact with your local council or government.

In the States, Open Government has been relaunched which helps track bills, votes, and members of the CA Senate and Assembly as well as following specific issues and contacting politicians.

Here in the UK we have DirectGov and the Parliament website, which I've used a few times for different issues (on a professional note, the information architects had their work cut out for them on those sites!).

My local council is Barnet, and whilst most of their services are available through their very standard, functional website, they have an interesting new twist to generate new ideas.

For instance, here's a video showing how Barnet council spend their (our) money:

And there's also a website where residents can recommend new ideas to the council. How very Googley.

The ideas on the website allow others to then comment on them.

Whilst I'm remain sceptical about the use of User Generated Content to run my local council in this current time, I do believe this is the way of the future. For instance I've never understood people who moan about their local MP but don't write to them considering their email addresses are publicly available.

And if they continue moaning about their MP, they can always try being a virtual one for a week!

tags:

IA , innovation, politics, website production,

0 Comments

The startup surgery

Nov 23, 2010 at 9:00pm

On of the things that Endava is really good at is keeping the door open for new businesses to come to us for advice.

I would estimate that each fortnight a start up comes in and spends an hour talking to us about their new idea, and how they're implementing it. Usually they are a contact of one of the sales or senior management teams and we're doing them a small favour.

However some of these meetings have paid off and we've ended up being given some work as a result of these meetings. We've also introduced some of these startups to existing customers to see if they can work together.

Recently, some of the ideas have been really interesting. I can't give any particular examples because they are at such an embryonic stage.

The ideas have been interesting, however the execution has been completely wide of the mark. These entrepreneurs seem to be stuck in pre-Internet models, scared off with another .com boom style business model.

However there are compromises, where a new Internet business can take the best from both Worlds and successfully (at least potentially) make a lot of money.

One example I've recently come across is a new type of network of sites. Networks were very popular at the beginning of the Internet (sports, fashion, IT, estate agents, recruitment companies, and so on), and some of them still exist and make a lot of money (Perform, in football for example, or Prime Location for estate agents). The idea is to create a large number of websites, get a large audience, and then sell advertising, mobile apps, etc. to the large audience.

Back to the new network - I thought I'd seen all the networks that could be brought online, already online, but a friend of a friend had thought of a new one, and it was very compelling. The problem was that he was trying to sell each site and make money on a site by site basis and he wasn't doing particularly well at selling the first few sites.

This is nearly impossible on the Internet - what he should be doing is creating the first few sites, perhaps at a loss, then learning from those and selling the success of those to the next few instances. The absolute key is to make the sites an almost turnkey solution - at very low cost to himself. He'll then be able to build the network at low cost, bringing a bigger audience into the network.

"Build the audience, then monetise", as we were often taught at IMG (aka a Broom mantra).

After going through the new, simple model, the guy 'got it' and has gone back to step 1 on his business model. I wish him the very best of luck.

Image courtesy of SeanFraga

tags:

Endava, business, innovation,

0 Comments

Tags

Understanding Pinterest

Innovation is an ingredient

How I would Yahoo!

Eat your own dog food

Politics on the web

The startup surgery

Bradley Howard

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