Sunday, May 25, 2008

Fuckin' tabs

Wide or Deep? Is the question...

Everytime a product manager comes up with a product feature... it goes up as a tab on the home page. Mere mortals like us land on the page, scratch on our heads, bend over backwards and finally leave not knowing where we are supposed to go.

Tabs, to me, are the bane of product management. If you have a new feature for me, tell me when  i need it, don't stick it up on my face and expect me to make a decision. Give me one thing, suck me in, molest me and then show me around to other new cool stuff ya got. 

A naive little search box shows me the world wide web; A tiny cute bird keeps me connected to hundreds of friends feeding me breaking news by the second. And yet, the collective might of 40 tabs put together on a Y!, CNN, Nytimes or FirstPhera (yeah, we too - sigh!)  just turns me off. A book is linear, so is a movie or a track of music. Newspapers aren't, hence they suck and are dying.

Next time you put a tab, think! Who's problem are you solving?

Saturday, May 24, 2008

Call me antisocial but

I am getting really sick and tired of people (bloggers & consultants, especially) who talk about social media, social networking, social graph - basically, everything social.

Other words that make me puke - tagging, collaboration, monetization, revenue model, web 2.0, strategy, execution, viral, unique, branding, marketing (strategy)

Here's some words that we use internally, might be meaningless for you, but are quite refreshing for us...

participation instead of social

currency instead of monetization or revenue model

direction instead of strategy

implementation instead of execution

distribution instead of marketing

interesting instead of viral

useful instead of unique

What makes you puke?