Actually I don’t want to write about that but seriously… Fifteen years ago I was an oddball because I had a computer and even odder because I had a modem. I remember when I went to Grad School in the fall of ‘96 I had a laptop I brought with me for notes and people looked at me like I was a space alien. Most people hadn’t heard of the internet, and those that had thought it was spelled AOL.

Anyway I digress. Shopping carts. They’ve been around that long, and it seems on some websites they haven’t improved at all since those early heady days. There seem to be three types of Shopping Carts on the internet. The good, the bad, and the lazy.

The lazy ones are the ones like they were coded 10-15 years ago. I came across one of these just a couple days ago, and it spurred this blog post. I was purchasing season tickets to the Pitt Panther’s this fall, and the form was just godawful. The shopping experience itself was poor, and the shopping cart. Well it was just lazy. One big long form with every piece of information on it. Oh it wasn’t the worst lazy one i’ve seen. I’m sure you’ve come across them. You purchase something and there IS no shopping cart it’s just straight into purchase, and then it’s one form, and you fill it out and hit submit and the purchase is made, and they barely confirm it to you and you worry for a week that you got ripped off before the item hopefully arrives. Those. Lazy.

I guess you could call them Bad too, but I consider them more Lazy. It’s just not taking any time to learn what improves a process. The goal is to increase usability, but the reason is to increase sales, improve customer retention, and lower cart abandonment. Those are the three goals of all this. If you don’t care about any of that stuff, why are you selling anything at all?

Second. The bad. People who have put way too much personal thought into their shopping cart process without talking to users at all. You’ve probably seen these as well. Usually there is a big registration process to get you ‘involved’ in some way, and then there might even be complicated drag and drop processes to make your shopping cart all funky and cool, and things moving and confusing, and you don’t even know what you’re doing anymore. Those are bad. They’re not simply just refusing to learn what makes a site good, they’re changing what was, to something THEY think is good, without even thinking about the users. That’s worse to me than just being lazy.

Again, the goal here is to increase sales, improve retention, lower abandonment. Not show how cool your website is.

Ok so what simple things can be done, and proven to work by usability studies, to improve those three aspects of your shopping cart.

1) Before you even get into the cart offer some basic functionality on your site. Product searching is a must. Users expect this now. If they want a Terry Bradshaw signed football, then they should be able to search for one. Secondly Related items. Every item on your site should have related items, hopefully hand picked by you. If they like the Terry Bradshaw signed football, they might like his signed jersey to go along with it.

2) Call to action buttons. They need to be clear and obvious. Add to cart. Add to wishlist. View shopping cart. Proceed to Checkout etc. If it’s not blatantly obvious to a user how to add an item to his shopping cart, or to start the process to give you money you’re failing. This is surprisingly common.

Ok once they’ve picked up their two items into the shopping cart and clicked the very obvious ‘proceed to checkout’ button  what do we do….

3) Let them buy without registering. Don’t make them log in or register for your site. Don’t force them to respond to an email, or give you any kind of information. They want to buy. you let them. You’ll get information from them in the future, but right now it’s more important you get their money now. Forcing registration is one big way you’re going to have customers abandon their shopping carts.

4) Stagger the registration process. Don’t have one big long page with everything on it. People will abandon a form half filled, but not a process half complete. What I mean is that if you take a registration page and break it up into 4 or 5 chunks, if someone has completed 1 or 2 stages, they’re more likely to finish the process if they get interrupted, whereas one big unfinished form is easy to let go of.

5) Simplfiy. You don’t need to ask them marketing questions or find out where they normally vacation. You need to sell them something. Don’t try and do market research with your sales. Customers HATE that. They’ll abandon the cart rather than answer the questions.

6) Through the whole process be communicative. Address questions, explain errors, highight required fields. Hold their hand, and try and make it as easy and quick and painless as possible to get through it all. You don’t need to add barriers to sales, you need to remove them.

***

Ok so how would a good sales process look? Ok let’s assume that the user has selected the Terry Bradshaw football and jersey. They click proceed to checkout.

Stage 1: Identify Them. You want to capture two things on this page. Email and password. This is an effective registration as well. You can identify them by their email and get them into your system. Also they won’t hopefully forget their email. Don’t do usernames. People forget usernames. They’re a waste of time. As far as the password goes have the password field, and a confirm password field, just to make sure since they can’t see their password when they enter it, becuase you’re hopefully using a password field there. Also preferably have the constant check of the level of security of the password. You know where it says low medium or high security, and suggests things like adding a number or a capital letter, etc.

Once you get through stage 1 you’ve got their email. Even if they don’t finish the process you can send them a reminder in the future if they abandon the cart “hey we noticed you never finished blah blah blah….”

Stage 2: Shipping Address. If you’re shipping something, you need the address. If it’s an online delivery format, discern it here. This stage is about how they’re getting what you’re giving them. If it’s an online login you can skip this step and give it to them after the confirmation. If you’re shipping something to them though this is the enter your shipping address and pick your shipping type stage. Be sure not to piss off people from other countries too. A form that adjusts the fields per country you ship too will be appreciated. IE if you want to sell to Candians as well as Americans be sure your form handles it. Don’t just have american states in the dropdowns, or a 5 digit postal code.

Stage 3: Billing Information. Here you’ll need to capture their billing address, be sure to have it default to the same as the shipping address, and let them change it if they want to. Then grab their payment information, credit card, etc.

Stage 4: Confirm order for the user before you process the purchase. Show what they’re buying, all the taxes, etc, list out out like an invoice, hopefully with pictures to remind them of what they’re getting. let them click a final button to confirm the purchase. Make it obvious to the user that ‘if you click this button you’re buying it…right here.” Show your security. SSL, trust symbols, Verisign, your own thing. Whatever. Let them know that their purchase is secure and they’re ok.

Stage 5: You confirm to the user the purchase was made, you show them what theyr’e getting, confirm their information, tell them what to do if there is a problem. Hopefully you’ve also sent an email to them, let them know that you’ve sent an email, make them a confirmation notice, with an order number that they can print out a hard copy of and reference.

Then if you want to start doing market research on them you can. You can ask some more questions if you want, but only after it’s obvious that they’re done. Most people will leave at that point, but tha’t sok. You’ve got them to make a purchase, and you’ve got their contact information.

***

Anyway is that so hard? Can’t everyone just do that? If you’re not doing that you’re leaving money on the table, guaranteed.

I started with the nominees, and just finished reading the winner (The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman).

Anathem by Neal Stephenson was up first. I really enjoyed his early books. I was introduced to him like many through Snow Crash, and then backtracked and read Zodiac, and I even dug up a copy of The Big U from a library before it was back in print. However as he went on, I got more and more disinterested in what he was writing. He was a great author, and the detail was remarkable, but it was like each book the editor got more and more slack. Cryptonomicon was long and meandering and I still don’t know what it was about really. It seemed way too long and lacking in a plot. The Baroque Cycle….It was like he went so far off the deep end that he couldn’t just write one long book anymore, it was so long and lacking in editing that they broke it up into three. Maybe that’s not how it was, but that’s how it felt to me. I couldn’t read them. Anathem is a return to form for Stephenson. Yes, it’s still long but it’s cropped down from his previous efforts, and yes the book takes a bit to get off the ground as it creates the world but it’s a completely different world from Earth so it takes a bit to set it up. It’s possibly his best book.  It’s an interesting and new world, it’s got interesting characters, and a plot. And it’s got his trademark asides, tangents and conversations, but they’re great, and they tie in to the story well. An amazing book that all lovers of sci-fi and smart fiction should read.

After reading Anathem I decided to check out the rest of the 2009 class to see what could possibly be nominated next to it, as well as BEAT a book so good.

Next up came Saturn’s Children by Charles Stross. This book is in some ways an homage to books like Friday by Robert Heinlein, down to the buxom female on the cover. The book is set in a future where humanity is all dead, and the intelligent robots we created to be our servants and workers are left behind, still soldiering on. The main character a former sex robot now with no humans to service making her way through the solar system. The book itself took awhile for me to get into. The writing style, while good, was not necessarily elementary. My brain had to switch into a higher gear. ONce there though, and once I started understanding the world and what was going on, I got into it. Unlike Anathem, Stross doesn’t spend 100 pages establishing the world. He jumps into the action on page 1 and you have to figure out what’s going on as you read. That’s all well and good, but it was such a different world it was hard at first to get with the program. By the end though I was really enjoying the book. The visuals were astonishing, the story gripping.

Anathem still on top, but Saturn’s Children very good. What’s next.

John Scalzi’s Zoe’s Tale. Ok I have to admit, John Scalzi is one of my favorite active writers. One of my favorite overall really. I’ve read everything he’s written now with reading Zoe’s Tale, and I can’t say that for many authors. I love his brand of sci-fi, his space adventure, his non-space adventure. I just really enjoy his writing style and topics and humor. They mesh very well with my own. Zoe’s Tale itself is sort of an alt-perspective novel to his previous one in the Old Man’s War universe ‘The Last Colony’. This one is seen from the perspective of Zoe, the daughter (adopted) of the colony leaders (and main characters in his other Old Man’s War stories). It was interesting to re-read the story but from a different view, which has to be a difficult thing to do without telling the same story twice. On the whole though he did a great job, and I thoroughly enjoyed the book. However, I couldn’t bump it above Anathem on my list. While I love Scalzi’s writing tremendously, Anathem was just a next level book.

Next came the last non-winning nominee Little Brother by Cory Doctorow. It was in the young adults fiction section which troubled me, but after reading it I have to question why it was considered young adult fiction (a couple of the characters get naked in it and have sex. Not exactly pg material) Anyway it was a well written story, near future, about a kid and his group of friends who get arrested by homeland security in the wake of a terrorist attack, and then how he gets back at ‘the man’. Interesting book, good for teen rebellion. It was Sci-Fi in that there were a few techs in it that weren’t real, maybe 5-10 years in the future if that. I enjoyed it, it was a quality book, but I threw it in last place.

So last book up. I was dreading it. It was “the winner”. The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman. How  could it beat Anathem, or even Zoe’s Tale, I just couldn’t conceive. Not only was it a children’s book (It not only won the Hugo but it won the Newberry medal as well for best children’s book) but it was set in a graveyard with ghosts and ghouls and vampires and werewolves, etc. That subject matter just feels so trite these days with the Vampire Tween movies and True Blood, etc. Anyway, I got it out of the library and gave it a whirl.

I take back my dread. It was really an amazing book. It was like the anti-Harry Potter in a way. A story about an orphan boy, raised by mystical figures who teach him magic, to overcome the evil nemisis who killed his family (whom he escaped from as a baby) and win and become an adult. Same basic story, but so much better. Condensed into one book, rather than spread over 7, it keeps an internal logical consistency that the Harry Potter books never did, and the characters make sense, and behave in rational ways (or irrational if they’re meant to). It was really a perfect book in that mold, and I have to give it props. I think Anathem and Saturn’s Children were both written ‘above’ the level of this book and make you think in ways this one doesn’t, but this was really a perfect amalgam of this traditional plot, in a new circumstance, with colorfull characters. I visualized it the whole time reading it. I’m sure the movie, should they make one, will be fabulous. I cast the movie while reading the book (Ian McKellen as Silas…) More than anything though as I said, it just made me realize how bad the Harry Potter books really were. Oh they were enjoyable sure, but I don’t know abot you but when I was reading them many times I wanted to poke my eyes out. Harry not telling the adults tthings, the adults keeping things from Harry, him not trusting anyone, nobody trusting him. God the books were one big trust issue. It made me crazy. The Graveyard Book though doesn’t have that. The boy as a boy is trusting as he should be, too much so, and the adults trust him with some knowledge, but protect him, but don’t lie to him or cover things up.

So there it is. The five Hugo nominees, including the winner from 2009. I agree with The Graveyard Book winning, though I’d have been happy if Anathem had won as well. No reason to not have two winners no? The rest I all whole heartedly recommend for all sci-fi fans, though if you’re going to read Zoe’s Tale be sure to read the whole Old Man’s War series first so you can enjoy it more.

So looks like the biggest Porn house is going to stop using Flash tech as soon as IE8 starts supporting HTML5. (I won’t hold my breath, IE8 has really lagged behind the other browsers in supporting CSS3 and HTML5 but that’s nothing new. They’ve historically done things their own way…

The point though is that, whether people like it or not, Porn leads in technology. VHS Tapes? Porn. They got into VHS (and picked it over Betamax) before most people had a VHS machine in their house. They led that technology. Same with CD-ROM’s and DVD movies and High Def DVD’s. Blu Ray won partly because of Porn. 3 months before Toshiba gave up on the HDDVD format all the porn studios had stopped producing in it, and had moved strictly to BluRay.

The point is that where porn goes technology wise has been a pretty big indicator of where the rest of us soon will be, and one of the biggest houses in Porn just said “Flash, it’s been fun but…”

Throw on top of that the previous talk from Apple about how they’ll pretty much NEVER put Flash on their iPads and iPods and iPhones and iWhatevers….So companies interested in all those people and the growing alternate means of accessing the internet will be avoiding Flash more and more.

Honestly… I’m glad. I’ve disliked Flash for a decade. Oh I’ve done stuff in it, and I’m not going to get into every single reason I dislike the format, but I will say this. Adding Media to your site, adding content to your site…that’s a good thing… But locking it to a format that god knows how many of your customers won’t be able to see, is just dumb.

Like if you’re a restaurant. Why have a flash website? One of your customers might be trying to check out your website from their iPhone before lunch to see whether they should go there. Not only should you not have any Flash on your website, you should probably have been smart enough to pay additional money for a mobile version of the site.

“I want a flash splash screen that the user has to play a game on to get into the site, like nothing hard, but it’d be cool if they have to drag like say pieces of a puzzle together in order to enter the site.”

That’s a paraphrase, but it’s pretty close to something I once heard. Is the customer always right?

Lord no.

Flash crashes browsers. Flash is STILL not well read content and SEO wise by the search engines (it’s made forward strides in it, but it’s NOT as good as HTML) not to mention throwing in usability issues…You don’t want to make accessing your site and information on your site difficult.

I’m sure people will abuse HTML 5 to make poorly usable wesbites. It’s probably inevitable. Usability is important, and it’s tricky, but it looks more and more like the technology that will be used to implement usable solutions in the future won’t be flash, and I’m glad.

It’s been great. I love soccer/football. Played it when I was younger, played it when I was older, coached a club soccer team during grad school…Of course that’s when I was a player/coach and i had my ‘last’ knee injury which really prevented me from playing ever again…. but still.

Anyway this World Cup has had a ton of controversy over calls. Some people are for the use of technology to solve some of the problems, such as video instant replay like in American Football or a chip in the ball to tell when it went over the line. FIFA, the world governing body of football is against it, and has been for years.

One thing they claim is that it’s technology that wouldn’t be available at all levels of the sport, so it shouldn’t be in unless it could be.

Because my daughter’s soccer team this fall (her first…she’s old enough this year) REALLY needs video instant replay. I’m sure.

Other people say it adds to the drama and water cooler talk. Seriously? There’s plenty of drama without making some out of having unfair calls change the course of a match.

As you can probably tell, i’m for the use of technology, at least at the highest level. I think if there is a tool available to you to use, that can improve something, it should be used. If you can use a backhoe, why would you use a shovel? If you can carry a cellphone and be contacted in the field while you’re working, why would you not have one, and rely on checking in every day by payphone (if you can find one these days). The argument against the use of technology for technologies sake just irritates me.

Now don’t get me wrong, I don’t think we should use technology for everything. It’s gotta solve a problem. Technology for technologies sake is also an issue. It’s a balance with Luddites on one end, and the Borg on the other. It’s important to live life, to be human, and to enjoy the world as the people we are and not let technology dictate our lives…. but at the same time not reject technology for technologies sake, or any other BS reason.

If it solves a problem it should be used. If it creates new avenues to experieince life, it should be considered. If it’s just tech for tech sake…. It should be looked at warily.

I think in the case of the World Cup, goal line technology should be used. A chip in the ball, that works 100% of the time to determine if a ball is over the line…. It would remove the HUGE issue of goals going in that aren’t recognized. It doesn’t happen a ton, but when it happens at the World Cup it’s a big big problem. It wouldn’t affect or change the players, it would just help the Ref make a call.

Instant Replay… It starts affecting the game. How would it be handled? It would be for things like offsides. If Offsides is called it stops play, so you couldn’t award a free kick if it was a bad call. What if the offisdes is in the penalty box? I just think it would cause more problems and change than it’s worth, not to mention that it would stop the game for long stretches and it’s just not good for a game that so depends on the flow of the match. It should definitely not be like American Football when the red flag can get thrown at so many points to get a replay on so many things.

However it should maybe be more like Hockey. There should be a replay booth of officials watching on TV. When certain things happen, like say someone is obviously offisdes and scores a goal, the booth might see it before play resumes, contact the Ref and say “we’re overturning that”, and they restart from the center with no goal scored. Have it all up in the booth, and able to overturn the obviously bad calls that video replay can see. Why not?

Sorry. Rant off.

Oh you silly social networkers. Never say something is made out of people. That’s just gross. Don’t use synonyms either. The internet isn’t made out of people, nor does it consist of people.

Not only are those statements flagrantly wrong, but they make it sound like our world is based on some sort of 1970’s B Movie dystopia, and I just can’t get behind that.

I know what they were trying to say. They’re trying to say that the most important websites, and parts of websites, on  the internet now consist of communities. It’s been ‘the thing’ for a few years now. Community building. The internet isn’t made of people though, nor communities. The internet is a fickle thing and will change again soon enough.

But the point is sound. if you’re not developing your communities for your services, products, organizations, whatever… you’re doing yourself a disservice.

For nearly every business with recurring customers a “sticky” website with a community is a huge thing. People need to understand that a website isn’t just brochureware anymore. It’s gotta go “next level”.

For instance say you need a website for your local Chamber of Commerce. Twenty years ago it might not have had a website at all. Fifteen it may have had some basic thing. A page or two. Ten years ago it would have been a fancy looking multi page brochure you go to for information. Today it needs to be a hub for your members. It needs to have forums, and blogs written by members. You need to be able to sell tickets to events online, and have profiles of businesses that are easily searchable. You need to make it so that the members of that chamber actually USE the site and particpate in YOUR community. The last thing you want to do if you’re looking for a new website is to make one that looks like it’s 10 years old and does absolutely nothing for you.

Our oClubhouse product makes websites for associations and chambers with this in mind. It lets you build your little brochure site, but we focus on improving the organization through effectively leveraging your own website. Having features your members will use, and ones that you can get a return on your investment for.

Your new association website. It’s made of people.

Ew.

Well we’re almost there, but every time I think we’re in the future we’re back in the present. Of course then all that stuff is in the past…

The image above, if you’re hopelessly clueless, is from the movie 2001. The main character, who would be much better captured by the great Roy Scheider in the sequel 2010, has just taken a Pan Am space shuttle up to an orbiting space station where he’s going to get a connecting flight to the Moon.

Ok already it’s like….Damn…We’re really slackers when it comes to getting out into space…

Anyway he gets up to the space station, talks to some Russians and then goes to call his wife and daughter before he heads off for the Moon. You know….Like he’s in Denver or something. Anyway the phone booth is comfy and spacious, and the phone is a video phone.  Now, this is something that actually is all throughout the 2001, and 2010 universes. While they have regular phones, most phones have transitioned to video phones. Wall phones. Etc.

The thing is we’ve had video calls for awhile now. Video conferencing, etc. it’s not anything new, but for some reason it’s just not become big or caught on. People have made all sorts of explanations as to why like people don’t want to be seen, but I just don’t think that’s it. Yeah people like their privacy, and maybe sometimes they’ll want to keep their camera off, but look at all the webcaming. Look at the youtube and vblogs and whatever. People want to be seen. Especially people in the most targeted demos.

So why no video calling on a mass scale?

It’s been free for awhile now. most computers come with a webcam, or if not they’re super cheap, and then the software to webcam is free. But that involves knowing it exists, installing it, arranging someone else to log on at the same time and maybe tney don’t etc. It’s got alot of usability barriers. The technology is there though. And I think the desire for it is there.

Enter today, possibly, the iPhone 4. Word on the street is that it has a front facing camera. For video calls. This could be it.

Or it could not. It’s all about how it’s implemented.

If it’s something wher eyou have to use ichat and call someone else with iChat it’s not going to be huge. Oh they’ll TALK it up, and some people will love it, but if it means that you have to log onto ichat and someone else needs to log onto ichat and then connect up that way over wifi….well that’s a problem.

Still it’s gonna be neat.

But we need a video phone that you can call ANYONE. If I want to call my relatives in England who just have a regular phone it has to be the same app. If they don’t have video, then fine. No video. If I call someone who HAS video though over an iphone or something, then the video should be there (with a suitable warning so that I am not picking my nose).

However if it’s like Skyping with my parents now to show them their grandkids, and I have to call them to arrange it first, then really that’s just too annoying and not good usability.

As soon as there is a video phone though, which now means on a mobile device because that’s what phones are, and it has good usability it’s going to become the standard overnight and within 5 years everyone’s phones will be video phone capable.

That’s my 2 cents. It’s all about usability. Make the thing usable and people will use it. People WANT to use it. People are going out of their way to find work arounds. Keep it simple stupid, and you’ll make millions.

Humans have a really hard time judging scale. They can’t really picture size. When you do try and represent things to them that have immense scale their minds shut down. For instance there was a great blog post over at

yougottobekidding.wordpress.com/2009/12/02/what-does-one-trillion-dollars-look-like/

About what one trillion dollars looks like. It starts with a hundred dollar bill and goes up in increments till they reach one trillion. Here’s their representation of one million dollars.

It’s a little pile of 100 dollar bills.

Something you can visually grasp. Of course even that little pile you can’t probably really understand the scale of the number, you can at least stuff it in your duffel bag and run out of the bank as fast as possible.

Not that you should rob a bank. Unless your dog tells you to do it while listening to Beatles albums. Then really, who could argue with that?

Ok here’s one trillion dollars…

Boom baby.

And the US Budget is what… three times that? Wrap your head around that scale. Next time someone says ‘Let’s cut this or that from the budget and save a million dollars’ you know to laugh. They spend more on toilet paper in some departments of the government.

Anyway my point is scale. It’s something that at a certain point you just can’t really comprehend it anymore but just hits you in the gut.

We’re closer to the rabbits in Watership Down. I forget how high it was, but they could only count to like four or something. They couldn’t comprehend high numbers. We’re the same way, but we can go past four.

Scale is important. Even with us once you get past 10 it starts entering ‘gut’ range. What does 100 people look like? 1,000? 10,000? Try and do it outside of a context, like on a white background. Most people you say “hey picture 100 people”, think of a picture of something, like a picture of all their wedding guests. If you say 50,000 they picture a crowd at a baseball stadium. But they’re not really picturing those people. They’re not picturing 50,000 people. They’re picturing ONE baseball park full of people.  You know it’s a huge number though. When you see massive crowds on the Washington Mall, etc, your gut is what tells you about the size and importance of something. You don’t, and can’t, count all the heads. It’s impossible. You just gutcheck it after a certain size.

What made me think of this was the map of the current BP Oil Spill…

www.ifitwasmyhome.com/

That’s a pretty cool little map website. Takes the oil spill in context, and then puts it in a context of size you have a better time understanding. The size is still pretty incomprehensible, but putting it in a more familiar place on the map you can say “holy shit it covers my entire state”. Seriously, click on it. It’s pretty crazy. Seeing it in the Gulf of Mexico doesn’t really let you put scale to it, but putting it centered on your home really drives it home how big the damn spill is.

Ok so where the hell am I going with this?

Websites. Scale. Gut checking.

It’s been established that pretty much everyone under the age of 30 (96%+) use the internet as their primary tool for finding products and services. Bye bye yellow pages, hello yellow pages.com. (they fucked that one up a decade ago, don’t get me started). When they look for services that they’re unfamiliar with, or that they’ve recieved a referral for via their social network (another major way they find things….) they’re going to look your business or organization up online.

It goes like this.

Friend Referral via Social Network (optional) -> Google Search -> Your Website

Pretty simple. That’s the majority of ways that people under 30 (and really the majority under 40, but it’s pretty much EVERYONE under 30). Do you care about people aged 18-40? Are they in your market? Then you should be using social networking, worrying about your SEO and search engine rankings, as well as having a good website.

Here’s where I get to my point and do my TL:DNR.

Your website needs to be concerned about scale. Not the number of pages you have, that’s not what I’m talking about. Amount of content is a separate issue. I’m talking about that gut check. That thing in the person’s gut that they use to comprehend scale whether it’s a trillion dollars, or the size of an oil spill, or your company.

They want a bunch of things from a company that we can talk about…but what I’m getting to here is the gutcheck part of the equation. Is this company legit.

The trick to this is to look to someone’s gutcheck like one size larger than you are. Size does matter. I’m not saying to actually CLAIM you’re bigger than you are. Just look it to a gut check.

If you’re a one man operation working out of your attic, do you want your website to look like a one man operation working out of your attic? Is that a pretty obvious question and answer? No. I don’t care if you’re a lawyer or a gardener….you don’t want to look like you’re one guy working in an attic. You want your website to NOT reflect that. You want to look bigger than you are. Maybe like you might even be a few people in your firm, with professional offices somewhere. That’s what you want to look like.

If you’ve got a few employees and an office you want to look like you’re even bigger. 1o0 employees. A big office.

Etc.

Using restaurants as an example if you’re a corner pizza shop (honestly you probably don’t need a website) but you should look from the person’s gutcheck like a citywide chain. If you’re a citywide chain, you need to gutcheck as regional. If you’re regional, you need to gutcheck as national. If you’re national you need to gutcheck global. If you’re global, then congratulations you’re on top of the heap, make sure your site looks bigger than everyone elses.

Again I’m not saying “bigger” or “size” by actually claiming to have multiple locations. Just how it looks to someone. It’s quality. It’s targeting. It’s a good high quality design.

A lawyer’s website that has “Frank Litigator, J.D.” and a phone number as black text on a white page isn’t going to inspire any confidence in you by that guy who doesn’t know you coming to your site. Whereas if it’s a site with a high quality web design that looks like a classy lawyer’s website, with high quality information, photos, services, etc. It’s going to make them think “ok this guy looks like a professional”.

That’s what I’m getting at.

If you’re a guy with a phone number, you need to be a guy with a kickass website.

Size does matter. How people perceive your size does matter. More and more every year that means having a website that isn’t just some generic template with 4 pages of information and a phone number.

It’s what my company is doing for multiple industries and we see the results in our clients. Daycares using oDaycare fill up and have waiting lists and open up multiple locations. Athletic Clubs using oFitnessclub give our more free trials that turn into new members a week than they used to in a month. Clubs using oClubhouse get more participation in their events than before. Lawyers using oLawoffice get more contacts from people looking for legal advice, that turn into clients.

It’s not rocket surgery. We’ve worked hard to make products that help your websites LOOK bigger, because it’s important to look one level of scale than what you are.

Size does matter. Luckily we can use photoshop to help you.

Seriously, get your mind out of the gutter.

Anyway I digress. The whole schtick about the drink is that you get that 2:30 feeling. The post lunch falling asleep at your desk feeling. Groggy. Unable to work. Unable to focus. Most people have felt this at one point or another. They claim “hey drink this and you’ll feel right as rain for 5 hours to get you through the day”

I’m sure it works on some people. Not me of course.

The drink itself is essentially a b12 shot combined with a couple other things and espresso levels of caffeine. They have a super duper one that has double the cafeine. Personally I didn’t like the taste of it. It was very sacchariney or whatever they use for artificial sweetener, but it wasn’t bad enough you couldn’t drink it and basically it’s a shot. You pound it and are done.

The problem with me is that I already drink like a pot of coffee a day so a cup of coffee at 2:30 plus a b12 shot just isn’t enough to perk me up if I”m falling apart.

But WHY am I falling apart at 2:30? Why do so many people apparently fall apart at 2:30?

Well I’m not doctor, but I’ve noticed something. If I go exercise, even just a 20 minute walk, and then that night get somewhere between 7-9 hours sleep…I don’t get tired at 3pm.

Shocking right?

If you just have very moderate physical activity, and get a good nights sleep you’ll not need to do shots of espresso and b-12 in order to stay away at 3pm.

Maybe THAT wouldn’t work for everyone, but it sure works for me (when I do it).

Today though I stayed up last night till like 2am, and haven’t excercised in days and now it’s 11:30 and I just want to go back to bed.

Seriously though…exercise regularly, eat healthily, and get a good nights sleep. If you’re doing that and falling apart at 3pm then you need to go see a doctor, imho, not drink an energy drink.

Now for me to finish up olawoffice.com and we’ll have all our product sites up. oclubhouse.com got finished first, then odaycare.com and then ofitnessclub.com. I have to update all of them more, and add internal graphics and whatnot, but they’re all getting to be in pretty good shape.

I read a blog post earlier with the same title as this one. “Dear Mark Zuckerberg” which inspired me to write this blog post.

scobleizer.com/2010/05/13/dear-mark-zuckerberg/

He makes some interesting points. To split Facebook into private and public components, to make the private piece easier to set up, to have a third party verify your security, to do a better job evangelizing facebook’s abilties, and to use video more. All valid and thoughtful points.

I’m going to have just one point that I want to sell to you here though.

Take the money.

No not the users money, or corporate money who want to buy people’s information. Not partner companies, or stuff from Mobwars style games. not ad revenue.

You know those investors who wanted to buy Facebook for like thirty gagillion dollars? Call them up today. Fly them out. Have them write a number on a piece of paper. Take the money.

You can haggle a little bit if you like, play more than one off each other to get even more. I’m fine with that.

But you need to have check in hand within 3 months. The sooner the better.

Take your billions you stand to make, and buy an island and an absurdly big yacht that comes with it’s own James Bond supervillain helicopter and undersea base.

I mean some people already think of you as a James Bond supervillain so it’s not like it’s gonna be a stretch right? Am I right?

Seriously, dude. Take the money.

I say this because Facebook is gonna be Napsterized. You came on strong, but as fast as you rose, you’re gonna fall hard. I’m not sure exactly when, but it’s gonna happen, and I’m pretty sure that even if you double the users you currently have in the next year, you’re near peak. You’re probably not at peak yet, but that’s a great time to sell. You can still say “Look how much we’re growing! Look at our projections!” and turn that into an extra volcano lair for yourself.

What you don’t want to do is to start LOSING users. Have new users flatline, have old users stop coming to the site. Have your traffic start leveling off, then slowly declining…then dropping like a rock. That’s not the time to sell.

The time to sell is now.

This summer four kids who seem a hell of a lot less comically evil than you are gonna take a stab at your heart.

www.joindiaspora.com/

Oh I’m sure you already know about the Diaspora project, but let me tell the people who don’t know what it is, what it’s about. It’s an open source social network. It’s one where YOUR information is owned and kept by YOU. Not facebook. Most people don’t realize that whatever they post on facebook basically is out of their control forever. The user has no real control over what is shared, and what isn’t. It’s all in Facebook’s hands. Right now something might be private, but tommorow Facebook can change their mind, and poof. It’s public. Once it’s public it’s out there. Forever.

Diaspora aims to change that. They want to make it so that your social network is run more like….say torrents are now. You have your social information, your status, your pictures, etc, all in your own control, on your computer, or on a server somewhere that’s shared, but YOU control the information for it. It’s yours. No company has control over it, like Facebook presently.

Then you exchange your keys for your network with other people. List yourself on listing sites. I don’t know how they’re going to do it, but in the end it’s gonna be just like Facebook just minus the ads. Minus the crap. Minus the privacy questions. You’ll have full control over your information, and they won’t have to worry about the crap anymore.

Plus it’ll be open source, so there will be lots of different fun things people can do. They’ll add to it. There will be applications and websites to use it. You’ll not be limited to ONE company being the social hub of the world.

Because really what sounds more likely to be the de facto social experieince in 10 years? Or even 5? Or even 1? One where everyone in the goddamned world puts their information into your hands, Mark, or one where everyone controls their own information and chooses to use it however they want?

It happened with file sharing. Napster was the big dog, there were a few others but Napster was it. They got hit by the legal bomb, which I don’t think you will, but that didn’t stop file sharing. It went open source. It went to torrents. Now it’s easier and people have thousands of options. They don’t have to use one company who wants to leverage what is really not even their information.

That’s what Facebook has done. They’re taking all this stuff people are sharing and putting it in one place and claiming ownership of it. That’s what your’e doing when YOU decide what is public or not. You think you have a say, not just on your own site, but I think you think it in a more metaphorical sense.

Well you don’t, and either these kids at Diaspora are going to eliminate you or they’re the seed of the future that will. In 5 years I bet Facebook is still around but it’s a sad place that has adopted the new public standard and is trying to eek out an existance, and your market share will have been cut by an order of magnatude or more.

So…Yeah, do what you want Mark, but If you know what’s best for you, I think it’s time to take the money and run.

I hear that there is a monastery on top of a mountain in the alps that would makea a great location for a “laser” that can wipe out the moon.

“I’ll never remember them”

“I have too many passwords I need to remember already”

“You mean ‘password’ isn’t a good password? That’s what came with my router though.”

I’ve looked at a few “how to make your password secure” sites and they never really focus on the main objection people have. They just cover the HOW of making something more obscure, not the “How the fuck am I going to remember all this stuff, I don’t even know my wife’s phone number I just press her name into the cellphone and it dials her.”

I’m going to try and help with that….First the nitty gritty.. of the first how.

1) Make it long. If they allow 16 character passwords, use it. At the very least have them be 10 characters long.

2) If they allow upper and lower case letters use a combination of both.

3) If they allow special characters use at least one. These characters include…

! ” # $ % & ‘ ( ) * + , – . / :
; < = > ? @ [ \ ] ^ _ ` { | } ~

4) Mix and bake 3 hours at 325 degrees.

Ok most places will tell you that, and tell you to make them memorable and there they kind of leave it to die. People look at the special characters, hear “make it memorable” and just glaze like a Krispy Kreme.

Here’s where I come in. Now I’m going to make up an example here, but you’re going to have to semi-personalize it. Don’t over personalize it, you don’t want to use kids names or pets names etc. Also I’m going to show an example cypher here, but you’re going to want to make up your own.

1) Pick something you enjoy that has a sequence of a number of things in it. A book series. Nora Roberts novels. Baseball teams. James Bond movies. Something with more than 10 things in it, and preferably those 10 things all consist of words of more than 10 characters. This is the big key to remembering a bunch of passwords. If they’re all random gobbledygook with alternate characters, these days you need to be a mental magician to not only remember them all, but know where they’re used.

For this example lets go with baseball teams.

2) Now you need to create a cypher. Let’s look at those alternate characters. Now a good hacker will see through an attempt to swap out ‘leetspeak’ terms. So don’t change E’s with 3’s or i’s with 1. But you need some characters to replace vowels. So for instance…

Anytime you use an A use an & instead. Do this for all the vowels, and some consonants as well.

A = &

E = #

I = /

You can even use multiple characters to represent one…

O = ()    <-those are paranthesis

U = >

C = {

T = ~

N = |\|

You’ll have the hardest time remember the cypher at first, but use it a bit and it’ll become second nature very soon.

3) Make your first password. Ok so we’re going to use baseball teams.

Boston Red Sox

now apply the cypher

B()s~()|\|R#dS()x

eh voila. a secure password. If you memorized your cypher which you will very quickly just by using the password regularly, you’ll be able to then make more

Pittsburgh Pirates

P/~~sb>rghP/r&~#s

Then just have all your passwords be baseball teams. If it helps to remember which ones, you can do them alphabetically, but since you already KNOW the sequence of teams you’re most likely to actually remmeber the sequence of teams you use. Then knowing your cypher you now have 30 passwords of strong quality you can use and you’ll be able to easily remember them.

Of course whether ~&mp&B&yR&ys or &~l&|\|~&Br&v#s opens your bank account really still is up to you to remember.