Visit TheStandard.com and scroll down to "Homage" to read about my friend mike who makes usable cookies Then visit biggerhand.com to see what other mischief he gets into.

It's the consumer experience, stupid. (with apologies to Mark Hurst).

a. Go their site. It's easy to download Napster. No painful registration screens (they get that information later, after you've committed). No hiding of the links users want the most (it's right at the top: download Napster, tour Napster). Last time I was on Adobe's site I had a hard time just finding where to download products, much less finding the product I wanted most: acrobat reader.

b. Install Napster (go ahead, I dare ya!) This is the best installation of a software program I have experienced in a long time. My favorite part is during configuration. One of the choices on connection speed is "I don't know" and they let you skip the geek talk in a way that suggests not knowing how Napster works will not impede enjoyment of it. And why should you have to know about proxy-servers to listen to music?

c. As part of configuration Napster asks you if you'd like to share music with the Napster community, then searches and shares the files for you. This is what keeps Napster valuable. Each song a user shares makes it a little more likely that a song another user is searching for will be found. If you used Napster to search for Metallica songs and never found any, you'd stop using Napster.

A problem with Gnutella-- the other popular P2P file swapping software-- is that Gnutella users tend to be borrowers rather than sharers (see an article on the study). I suspect this is because how Gnutella is designed: I still haven't figured out how to share a song via Gnutella. Open source software is notoriously hard to use, probably because software engineers are rarely interface designers and open source is a pure engineering play. Without people sharing songs as well as downloading them, the service isn't valuable. And if people can't figure out *how* to share songs... .

Everyone is talking how Napster has revolutionized the internet via P2P, or by galvanizing the music industry to finally use the internet as a music delivery channel, but I have yet to see anyone point out the revolution wouldn't have come if Napster was as hard to use as Gnutella. Napster had to be easy to use to gain wide use to gain value.
(what use would a telephone be if you were the only one in the world who owned one?).

And then the revolution could begin.

From: gleanings
To: experiensors
Subject: Gleanings: mark and dack

OPENING THANG

dack.com is good. Not only the source of the lovely best practices shopping cart article I mentioned in an earlier glean http://www.dack.com/web/shopping_cart.html , and the now-famous Amazon tab-cancer http://www.dack.com/web/amazon.html , he offers

flash is evil
http://www.dack.com/web/flash_evil.html

the new economy bullshit generator (scary how many of the terms it generates I used to hear bandied about at my former company)
http://www.dack.com/web/bullshit.html

the excellent intranet cost generator, for cost justifying making your intranet halfway decent
http://www.dack.com/web/cost_analyzer.html

go. http://www.dack.com/web/

IA MATTERS

New paper from Good Experience: The Wireless Customer Experience: Download the white paper here for free:
http://www.creativegood.com/wireless

and a few other Mark Hurst tidbits
"New York Times: A special e-commerce section, including a story by
Ben Stein about why it's hard to produce humor online, and another
story about "geek fashion," which includes a quote from little ol'
me.

E-commerce section:
http://www.nytimes.com/library/tech/00/09/biztech/technology/index.html

Ben Stein:
http://www.nytimes.com/library/tech/00/09/biztech/technology/20stein.html

Geek fashion:
http://www.nytimes.com/library/tech/00/09/biztech/technology/20laferla.html "

and also another mocking of mark hurst (relax Mark, this means you're famous!)
http://www.lfw.org/jminc/customer%20experience/http://www.goodexperience.com/

NEWS

ZDNN: Palm, Motorola pack cell phones.
Under an agreement to be formally announced Monday, the two companies plan to
develop a phone by early 2002 that combines Palm's operating system with
Motorola's wireless technology. The new device will feature a color-display
screen that is larger than most cell-phone displays...
http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/news/0,4586,2631800,00.html