One of my favorite parts of my NewBCamp talk last month was something I had never really talked about (either in person or on this blog) but wanted to take the chance to share: The idea of the URL as UI. So, what is URL as UI?
Computer users have gotten so used to the graphical user interface (GUI) that it is easy to forget that computers basically operate via a series of commands. The web has not only brought the command line back to the surface (with the web browser’s address bar), it has exposed the concept to an entire generation of users that has never seen a command line.
When you access a web site, you are generally typing in a URL (unless, of course, you are selecting a bookmark or following a link from an email, IM, other site, etc.). The URL is essentially a command to go fetch that content. We take components of the URL such as “http://”, “www”, and “.com” for granted now, these are rather arcane expressions that would be nonsensical to non-web user. But since most sites we access start with an “http” (perhaps an “https”) and end with a “.com” (or “.net”, “.org”, etc.), we get used to these conventions.
Many developers take the time to learn the command line instead of using the graphical user interface because it can be faster and more efficient. For example, if I wanted to add a graphic called “button.png” to code base for BatchBook (the web-based contact organizer I’m working on for BatchBlue), I’d have two options. I could:
- Open a Finder window.
- Open the folder “svn” in my home folder.
- Open the folder “batchbook”
- Open the folder “public”
- Open the folder “images”
- Find the file “button.png”
- Right click on “button.png” and choose “Add” from the contextual menu (I was using SCPlugin for Subversion)
Or, I could do it via the command line like this:
- Open the Terminal
- Type “svn add svn/batchbook/public/images/button.png”
Once I learned the conventions, it was an easy choice for me.
Similarly, navigating a web site simply by the URL can be much faster and more efficient than relying on the site’s information architecture and navigation menus.
Unusable URLs
If I visit Amazon.com and search for the album Rock Action by Mogwai, I am directed to a page with this URL (line break mine):
http://www.amazon.com/Rock-Action-Mogwai/dp/B00005AUBA/
ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=music&qid=1203311335&sr=8-1
My first question was “how much of this is needed to access the page and how much is session information Amazon is capturing?” Well, turns out that the URL really is:
http://amazon.com/Rock-Action-Mogwai/dp/B00005AUBA/
What’s good about this is that it has the artist and title of the album in the URL. What isn’t so nice is the extra stuff that means nothing to me, the user. I’m sure it means something to Amazon, but that doesn’t mean it needs to be exposed on the front end. If I want to look up a different CD or different artist, I need to rely on the search functions or Amazon’s site architecture, even though I already know exactly what I want.
Is this just Amazon? No. Here’s the URL that Barnes & Noble gives me (again, line break mine):
http://music.barnesandnoble.com/search/
product.asp?z=y&EAN=744861049029&itm=1
To me, this is far worse… there is no human readable component here at all.
URL as UI Done Right
So, what’s a good example of URL as UI? Last.fm, of course. Here is the URL for information about Rock Action:
http://last.fm/music/Mogwai/Rock+Action
Now, let’s compare the three showing human usable vs. machine usable data:
(click for larger version)
With Last.fm, if I want to look at the main Mogwai page, I can just delete the “/Rock+Action” part. If I want to look at a different artist page, I simply swap out the “Mogwai” with, say, “Orbit”. If I want to look at a particular Orbit album, I can just add it after the “/Orbit”, such as “/Orbit/Libido+Speedway”.
Notice that everywhere there would be a space, you use a “+”. Once you learn this simple convention, you can keep using it to speed up your interactions with the site.
Another example of a convention you need to learn is the individual track convention. It is possible for an artist to have the same song appear on many albums (such as the standard release, live album, greatest hits, etc.). Last.fm could track these separately but instead chooses to treat these all as one song. So, this is how you would access a single track’s page:
http://last.fm/music/Arcade+Fire/_/Intervention
Notice the “/_/” between the band name and the track name. The underscore in the directory where the album name would normally go signifies that we’re no longer looking at an album—we’re looking at individual tracks. If you were on the page for Arcade Fire’s “Intervention” and wanted to look at a different track by them, you’d have to hunt around the page and try to find a link to that track, or more likely go back to the main artist or album page and find it there. Using the URL, you can jump right to “/Ocean+Of+Noise”.
Of course, you can use this technique elsewhere on the site. For example, every artist has a wiki-based bio page, with a URL like http://www.last.fm/music/Mogwai/+wiki. If you wanted to read a few band bios, you’d have type the artist’s name into the search field, land on the artist’s page, and click the “Bio” tab to see each bio (and repeat the process for each artist). Why not just type the artist’s name and that’s it (via the URL)? Same thing goes with photo pages for each artist, video pages, etc.
Also, Last.fm is not the only site doing this right. Another example is Flickr. To see my photos, you go to this URL:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/darowskidotcom/
If you want to go switch to another user’s photos, as long as you know their username you can replace mine with theirs. It works well for tags, too. If you want to see all my photos I have tagged as “redsox”, you can go to:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/darowskidotcom/tags/redsox/
If you want to see someone else’s photos tagged “redsox”, simply swap in that user’s username. If you’d rather see everyone’s photos tagged “redsox”, just take out the username altogether.
If people use your site enough, they’ll want an even faster way to reach the content they want. They’re not browsing anymore. They are power users. They know what they want. Give them a nicely hackable URL to do this.
- August 29th, 2007
- Filed Under: Community, Social Media, Flickr, MySpace, Delicious, Brian Oberkirch, Last.fm, PatientsLikeMe, Joshua Porter, Twitter, Identity, Social Networking, Facebook, Sermo
- 4 Comments
Okay, I have absolutely no statistics to back up that title.
Joshua Porter posted a great article yesterday on Bokardo called “Sermo a sign of a larger trend toward specialized social networks“. In the post, Joshua says:
Sermo is a sign of a larger trend: the move to smaller, more specialized social networks that have custom tools to support a unique activity and may cater to a private or exclusive set of users. In this case it is sharing medical information among verified doctors.
I’ve blogged about Sermo in the past. I love what they are doing—creating an exclusive social network for physicians so that they can discuss medical issues long before they hit the journals (and are likely more candid than journals). Of course, they are raising a little hell as the pharmaceutical companies can no longer control their messages delivered to each physician. They are (gasp) talking to each other.
If it is possible to have a crush on a company, you know I’m in love with PatientsLikeMe. I left a comment about them on Josh’s blog, so I’ll just repeat myself:
On the other side of the medical spectrum, I’ve spoken with a few folks from Boston-based PatientsLikeMe, another example of a specialized social network. They are a network for the patients. I love that instead of Amazon’s “customers who bought this also bought this…” intelligence, they have “patients at the exact same stage of ALS as you who are experiencing these symptoms that you are have taken these medications and felt these side effects.”
Ridiculously amazing.
The market of “just because” social networks is now bloated. In order to take off you’re going to need one of these specialized networks that offers something nobody else can. One key to that can be taking detailed profile data and using it to help foster your users’ social interactions (like PatientsLikeMe, and others such as last.fm).
Damn, reading that back, it sounds good. You can tell I love this idea. I recently joined Facebook. I yawned about it here. All I’ve done with it is insert widgets into my profile of specialized networks I have elsewhere (last.fm, Flickr, Twitter) and add friends that I have elsewhere. I find Facebook doesn’t really do anything more than my personal blog already does—act as an aggregator for all this information.
So, these specialized networks—last.fm (for tracking my music listening habits), del.icio.us (for storing my bookmarks), Flickr (for storing my photos), Twitter (for microblogging, public IM, whatever the hell you wanna call it), etc.—offer a hell of a lot more value than the “aggregator” social networks. You can easily hop to another aggregator (or create your own) and add the specialized content to that new profile. You still need the specialized services, but the Facebooks and MySpaces become expendable.
Then there’s OpenID and portable social networks (via Oberkirch). Once these reach their enormous potential, what really is the purpose of Facebook or MySpace?
- August 16th, 2007
- Filed Under: Social Media, Flickr, YouTube, Delicious, Last.fm, Twitter, LinkedIn, Social Networking, Pownce, Facebook
- 5 Comments
For a techie who’s totally into social web design, I have relatively few accounts on “social networking” sites. The main reason I have hesitated is covered by what Joshua Porter calls the Del.icio.us Lesson. In Josh’s words, the lesson is:
personal value precedes network value
I guess that’s why to this day I still haven’t signed up for a MySpace account. I simply have no idea what I would get out of it. I have accounts with a few social networking sites and I’ve noticed that how much I use them more or less directly correlates to what personal value they have to me.
Here are eight social networking sites I have accounts with. Six of them I use enough to have posted links to my profile in my blog footer.
Twitter is probably the application on this list I use most for “social” purposes. For those that don’t know, Twitter is an application that is compatible with all sorts of interfaces (web, email, IM, SMS, RSS, etc.) that essentially lets you get status updates from your contacts. It has been described as “microblogging”, “public IM”, or “public away messages”.
I started using it at SXSW, mostly because Evan & Co. were the darlings of the event. But I quickly started to appreciate the value. Not only can you subscribe to friends, you can also subscribe to industry professionals you enjoy learning from. Their Twitter feeds often contain interesting nuggets of information they don’t publish on their blog. That’s the beauty of it. It’s short (140 characters or less) and quick. You can publish and consume quick thoughts without needing to sift through large blog posts.
The basic personal value I get from Twitter is the ability to post short thoughts of my own without having to dedicate an entire blog post. Beyond that, it lets me keep track of folks who are doing the same.
Flickr is an easy one. The personal value is public sharing of photos. The networking effects allow me to always have the newest photos of my contacts delivered to my RSS feed. It is a simple, beautiful thing.
I’ve written about Last.fm in the past. Last.fm tracks my iTunes music listening habits and creates charts from them. For many people, this would not be enough personal value to make it worthwhile. But for me, it totally is. I love this. I eagerly await my charts every week. It’s like fantasy football for audiophiles.
I’ve actually dipped into the networking side of things, as I documented my befriending of my #1 Last.fm “neighbour” (person in the system with listening habits most similar to yourself). I swear, Last.fm must think I’m a Scot.
Honestly, I’m almost surprised I use LinkedIn. I signed up when a friend wanted to link to me and then I actually started using it when Steve Ganz deployed all those hResumes. Now that Mario Sundar is with them, I’m intrigued.
It requires minimal effort to add contacts, and there are some personal benefits. It is nice to see what old colleagues are up to. In particular, I found out through LinkedIn’s home page that Kate Brigham had joined PatientsLikeMe. That alone was worth the minimal investment. Combing through others’ contacts to find old contacts is also a worthwhile task.
It seems that the possibilities for LinkedIn aren’t even being touched. I mean, right now it is essentially a hyperlinked address book. Things like the new Questions feature are promising. You would think it would have been more prominent in my job search a few months ago. Every once in a while, I see some UX positions listed from my “network”, but everything’s pretty much on the West coast.
That said, I get the feeling that LinkedIn is in it’s infancy and it is going to keep adding more useful functionality.
Ah, the site the Del.icio.us Lesson was named for. Tons of personal value here. I use a lot of different browsers and a couple computers. Saving links to Del.icio.us ensures I’ll have them on whatever machine or browser I happen to be on.
I rarely use the network value, but sometimes it can be interesting. For example, it allows you to see who saves your own posts so you can get a better idea about other sites that they find helpful.
YouTube can have a HUGE personal benefit if you share a lot of your own videos. I’ve only posted a few, so I don’t utilize it quite that much. But I do also use my account to save excellent live performances (like this) that I want to make sure I can easily find later.
And now, here are the two sites not yet in my blog footer—meaning… I simply haven’t found a specific use for them.
It’s all the rage. It seems to be all some people (Kawasaki, for example) can talk about right now. I’ve even signed up. Like, less than a month ago. And let me tell you what—I pretty much have no idea why I should use it. It really is just a collection of the same activities that I do elsewhere. I mean, as a blogger, do I need Facebook?
What is the only thing I’ve really done with Facebook? I’ve added a few apps to my profile. I’ve added the Twitter app, last.fm app, Flickr app (though I can’t get the damn thing to work right)… but I link to all of those profiles from my blog footer, too.
Facebook wants me to update my status. I already do that with Twitter. Worst part is that Facebook wants me to go to the site to update everything… and read everything. Sorry, no RSS. Sorry, but I really don’t go to websites anymore. (Also wish LinkedIn provided updates to your contacts via RSS, for the record.)
Facebook also feels anti-open, anti-standard, etc. For example, I have no idea how I would even link you to my profile. Could it really be “http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=544839151″? They can’t do any better than that? How about Facebook.com/adarowski? No? Why not?
As you can see, I’m underwhelmed. About all it is good for is the groups features (which I don’t even use because there is no RSS… so maybe it’s not all that good) and the last.fm widget rocks if I’m on a machine that doesn’t have my music or the last.fm app installed. As of now, I can only envision using it if it somehow crushes LinkedIn and becomes the #1 site for business networking.
Pownce is a really cool technology that some compare to Twitter. As Brian points out, they should not. I simply haven’t been able to use it for anything because it seems that where it differs from Twitter is that it is great for small working groups. For example, if we didn’t use Skype at work, Pownce would be a great option. But we don’t, so I don’t use it.
I’m not saying it is bad. In fact, it is quite attractive and well done. I just don’t have a use for it yet. If it had beat Twitter to the streets, we’d all be using Pownce. But it didn’t, so it needs that extra use for people to adopt it.
So there you have it.
Those are the social networking apps I use. As you can see, I’m not much for the networking part, go figure. Gimme value immediately and you’ll suck me in.
