Planet Web 2.0

In a tragic and surprising turn of events, Brijit, one of the most interesting startups on the web, has announced that the company has run out of money and will cease operations until more funding is found. Brijit offered 100 word summaries of the best long-form content in print, on television and most recently on sites like Digg, Techmeme and YouTube. Review writers were paid $5 per approved review and the angel funded company planned to sell ads targeting high-end periodical readers.

I loved that site and am very sad to see it go. The service was a lot of fun to use. Given how recently the company has received substantial media attention and how loyal its small group of users was, this was a real surprise. Can high-end websites for thinking people ramp up and monetize quickly? This news makes you wonder.

Visitors to the site tonight were greeted with the following message:

You've reached this page because, at the moment, Brijit is out of money and can no longer afford to bring you the world in 100 words. We're working hard to find a way forward for our service and hope to relaunch in the not-too-distant future. Thanks to all our loyal readers and writers. And to our Brijit writers: payments in full for all abstracts published through May 15 will be made next week.

As you can see from the Compete graph below, traffic was trending up at Brijit after an initial media spike. The company has a really compelling system of "assignments" for review writers and the end result is a great crib-sheet for anyone headed to the periodicals section of a local bookstore on the weekend.

Brijit content is still available on the website here. You can read our previous coverage here. A great article about Brijit in the Washington Post is here. The Post reported in October that the company had raised $1 million in funding. Did it already burn through that, $5 at a time, or has something else happened?

I really hope that this isn't another signal that only lowest-common denominator content is able to monetize and scale online these days. It's hard not to think that Brijit's management must have drastically miscalculated somewhere. A million dollars aint what it used to be, though. Either way, the web will be a less wonderful place if Brijit goes belly up for good.

Web 2.0 has brought many wonderful innovations and ideas to the Internet. We can no longer imagine the web without a social dimension, and we can no longer imagine an online world that is read-only - it is now a read/write web full of user-generated content. But there is another fairly recent innovation, which might have just as profound implications. We're speaking of the contextual user interface.

Even five years ago we lived in the boxed world of Windows-dominated UIs. There were standard UI elements - menus, tabs, combo boxes, tables - and every single desktop application was full of these elements and nothing else. User interface was not the place to be innovative. It was considered unorthodox and even dangerous to present the interface in non-standard ways because everyone believed that users were, to be frank, stupid, and wouldn't want to deal with anything other than what they were used to.

Strikingly, the recent wave of UI innovation is proving exactly the opposite. Users are not stupid, and in fact, they were overwhelmed with choices presented in traditional UIs. The new interfaces are winning people over because they are based on usage patterns instead of choices. The key thing about new UIs is that they are contextual - presenting the user with minimal components and then changing in reaction to user gestures. Thanks to Apple, we have seen a liberating movement towards simplistic, contextual interfaces. But can these UIs become the norm? In this post we take a look at the rise of the contextual UI and ponder if they will cross the chasm.

Windows UI - The World Of Never-Ending Choices

Looking back at the years when Windows dominated our lives one can hardly believe what we put up with. These interfaces were massive and overwhelming. Each application was full of screens with huge numbers of options and settings.

Every imaginable choice was thrown at users at once and it was up to the poor user to figure out what to do. To cram more information onto the screen, the interfaces of that era used tabs. At some point Microsoft invented the ultimate UI element - a tab with a scroll button in the end which allowed the user to page through hidden tabs.

Another philosophy of the old UI approach was that the user wants to see all information all the time. Instead of building UIs that responded to the way that people actually interacted with the tool, the user interface opened up all possible choices at all times. Naturally, this is completely overwhelming and confusing to people.

The only way to cope with complexity was to introduce a standard set of widgets, such as tables, combo boxes, check boxes, etc., so that users at least had some familiarity with UIs from program to program. But on top of that, there was a myth spread that users were stupid and would not be able to understand a non-standard UI.

The myth was supported by the fact that a lot of people do not respond well to sophisticated visualizations, like graphs, heat maps, or treemaps. While this is true, it doesn't mean that people can not figure out new user interfaces. The proof comes from Apple, which continuously innovates with new UIs for its software products. Also, recent social web applications have made a strong case for simpler, contextual user interfaces.

Apple's Revenge

Since Steve Jobs returned to Apple over 10 years ago, the company has been on a roll. The secret sauce behind Apple's success is a strong investment in software. In turn, this has meant a lot of innovation is user interfaces. Many years ago, when I myself was blinded by the standard Windows UI, my boss told me that user interfaces are cheap. He meant that building new UIs from scratch makes sense, because the UI is so essential and so important to get right that you shouldn't just reuse code and widgets.

Steve Jobs and his team know this all too well. Apple's UIs evolve constantly, taking on new forms and seeking simpler ways of delivering a superior user experience. What is remarkable is that you always know how to use Apple's products. I watched this over and over again. From my 4 year old daughter to my 83 year old grandfather, everyone I know could use an iPhone right away. iTunes has so few buttons that it is impossible not to know how to use it. And so does iPhoto and every other program developed by Apple.

In addition to simplicity, Apple has for years been using a contextual approach to user interfaces. Apple widgets react to user gestures by changing shapes and presenting more options only when it makes sense. And the latest web applications have got the contextual bug from Apple.

Contextual User Interfaces on the Web

It is ironic that it took web UIs so long to discover the elegance and simplicity of context. Since its dawn, HTML lacked the sophisticated widgets that are present on the desktop and web UIs were always considered more primitive and slow. Contextual, AJAX-based UIs actually seem faster because they do not reveal all possible choices to the user. Instead they focus on surfacing just the bits that are necessary and then surfacing more based on user gestures.

A good example of context-based UIs can be found in modern video players. The controls in these apps are hidden until the user moves the mouse over the player. Depicted below is the player from Vimeo.

Another typical element of contextual UI is modal DHTML dialogs. Regular modal dialogs are annoying to the user, but the modal DHTML ones work great because they bring the actions into the spotlight. For example, the dialog below comes up when the user clicks on Embed option in the screen above.

Note the contextual options in the screen above. The user can either preview the video or customize its look. Neither of these options are required so they appear as closed off toggles. If the user decides to explore the option, the toggle simply expands as shown below.

Another important breakthrough in the contextual UI approach is the realization that function is more important than design. The famous Apple mantra that design is the function is true, but not everyone can design like Apple. Lots of web sites in the nineties ended up with designs that were overwhelming and needlessly flashy. Those designs paid more attention to colors and forms than to the function. The new UIs are different, because a lot of them are purposely plain. They favor CSS over images, and focus on function and context instead of knock-out looks.

Lots of companies got the context bug. Flickr, Digg, and 37 Signals are just a few that use contextual interfaces. Our next example comes from the literary social network Shelfari, which developed a contextual UI for interacting with individual books. The remarkable thing about this UI is that it violates a lot of classic principles yet it succeeds in delivering the necessary functions in a contextual and compact way.

When the user mouses over a book, a contextual popup comes up containing information about the book and a set of associated actions. Part of the popup is a button/menu (sort of like a button and combo box) widget that allows the user to provide information about what he or she did with the book. The first thing to note is that combination of a button in a menu is not standard, yet it makes sense because it saves a click for the most important action. Secondly, the menu is effectively a popup within a popup, which is a big no-no in the classic world, but works well in this context. The elements of the menu are not buttons but check boxes, which allow multiple selection - another violation of classic user interface elements, but which works very well in this context. What is remarkable is how intuitive this gadget is - you are interacting with it in the context of a book and each choice is simple and clear.

Such clarity and simplicity was never present in the old interfaces. Clearly, this new approach to UIs is great, and early adopters are loving it. But will it cross over to the mainstream?

Can Contextual UIs Go Mainstream?

Crossing the chasm is a tricky thing and many cool technologies that are endorsed by early adopters fail to do it. Even though simple, contextual UIs make sense, the old UIs are still holding on strong. One of the early examples of a company that has adopted the new approach to user interfaces that we found is the Hertz car rental site. Hertz had one of the less user-friendly sites around, with a dull, "click-to-load next page" sort of UI. Their new web site features an intelligent contextual UI, which enhances and simplifies the process of reserving a car.

For the transition to happen the new approach needs to be embraced by more mainstream web sites. Will they go for it? The answer depends on whether they will think that the new UI approach, with contextual choices, is more complicated. Certainly there will be people who will say that consumers are not smart enough to figure out where to click. The concerns might be amplified by the fact that each contextual UI is unique and so won't be familiar across the board for users the way the old UIs were. Still, it seems, based on our experiences over the past few years and on the impressive track record of Apple products, that simple, contextual UI have a chance to finally win out over their complicated Windows rivals.

What do you think - can contextual UIs become the new standard for creating user interfaces? What are your favorite contextual UI elements?

Adobe announced today the release of the Flash Player 10 beta, previously code named "Astro," on the Adobe Labs site. The beta is available for download immediately at the Astro web page and adds a number of compelling features to the Flash player. Adobe, which claims that the Flash player is on 98% of Internet connected PCs, says it has seen an acceleration in the penetration rate for new versions of the player which each new release. It took just 3 months to reach 62% of Flash users for the last version of the player (verion 9), according to the company.

Last October at the Adobe Max event in Chicago, Adobe showed off early demos of "Hydra," a new image processing programming language. At the time, Hydra was being used to power many of the special effects and filters in After Effects CS3 -- a market leading motion graphics software package for film and video -- but Adobe planned to integrate it into future products, including Astro.

Hydra is now known as Pixel Blender and it is indeed in Flash Player 10. Pixel Blender can be used by developers to create small functions that can be applied to vector images, video, and bitmaps in real time -- think things like morphing transformations or transitions. One thing that struck me about Hydra when I saw the demos at Max was its speed, and the same can be said of Pixel Blender, in part because Flash Player 10 is taking more advantage of the GPU.

Adobe has set up a Pixel Blender Exchange where developers can swap Pixel Blender effects the way Photoshop users swap plugins and filters.

Also new in Flash 10 is a new text rendering engine that will allow developers to create their own text controls. The new engine "provides interactive designers and developers creative control over device font attributes, such as anti-alias, rotation, and style as well as support for ligatures," according to an Adobe press release, as well as "more text layout options, such as vertical, bi-directional and right-to-left." The latter is important because it will make supporting non-Latin alphabets, such as Japanese, more easy.

One of the most immediately accessible and compelling new features in Flash Player 10 is the native support for 3D. Developers will now have the option of performing 3D effects on 2D objects with just a few lines of code. The screenshot below, for example, is made up of 2D images of cell phones that were laid out in a circle, then tilted up into 3D space and told to rotate.

Adobe expects to ship a final version of Flash Player 10 later this year, and also plans for the new features to find their way into AIR in a future release.

At the end of April, we covered the launch of YackTrack, a new tool that helps fight the conversation fragmentation issues. The service provides a method for tracking the conversations taking place around your content. You just enter a URL and it searches sites like Digg, Disqus, FriendFeed, Mixx, StumbleUpon, Technorati, and WordPress to find who is saying what.

Features Added After Launch

In addition to the service itself provided by the web site, YackTrack's creator, Rob Diana of Regular Geek quickly responded to user feedback and added a YackTrack bookmarklet, a suggestion that our very own Marshall Kirkpatrick proposed in the comments of the post.

Another feature that was quickly added was a YackTrack link that bloggers could include on each of their blog posts. This idea came from Colin Walker.

What's New

YackTrack has now received another update. Besides scouring the web for comments on service like Digg, Disqus, FriendFeed, Mixx, StumbleUpon, Technorati, and WordPress, YackTrack's URL search now includes Blogger/Blogspot searches as well as Google Blog Search. Also, FriendFeed search results now include what service generated the result.

However, the big news in this update is yhe new feature on YackTrack called "Chatter," which now has its own tab on the site. This feature is a bit different than the standard YackTrack URL search. Instead, Chatter allows you to perform keyword searches on the social web. On Chatter, you can search Mixx, Technorati, Google Blog Search, FriendFeed, and Twitter (currently powered by Summize, but that will change in the future).

YackTrack Chatter

Finally, the YackTrack UI got a little refresh too, giving the site a cleaner, more professional look and feel.

Communications giant Comcast has acquired social web application Plaxo for an estimated $150m or more. Techcrunch confirmed the deal first but offers an understated critique of the alliance. Many web users familiar with the operations of both companies are much more upset about the deal.

Plaxo has probably the most clouded reputation of any of the major participants in the current data portability discussion, except perhaps for Microsoft. Comcast is no angel either. Together the two companies will be ill prepared to serve end users well.

Users Want ISPs Out of the Way

The plan for Plaxo at Comcast appears to be for the acquired company to power media publishing, sharing, lifestream aggregation and presumably contact management. The problem is that there's a whole market of alternatives for those services and many users just want their ISPs to deliver the damn internet so they can use it however they see fit.

Comcast has done a poor job of this lately. By engaging in a practice called "traffic shaping," whereby the company throttles down the bandwidth available for activities like media downloading, Comcast has made itself the poster child proving that network neutrality is a valid concern. How much further would things need to go before Comcast slows the user experience to a crawl when users seek to visit sites that compete with Comcast properties? The kind of lifestream aggregation that Plaxo offers is an emerging bandwidth hog - perhaps Comcast customers ought not be allowed to use lifestreaming apps other than Plaxo.

Likewise, you'd expect your address book to mind its own business - but that's not what Plaxo has been about traditionally. Email inboxes around the world used to be filled up with spammy requests for contact info from Plaxo. ("hi, this is Joe, could you update the contact info I have for you in Plaxo?") While the company's earliest reputation as one of the biggest scum-bags of the mainstream social web has been greatly softened lately by a very charming (and now wealthy) young exec named Joseph Smarr, the old tarnish is hardly gone from many peoples' minds. Some users complain that Plaxo is still spammy and some people in data portability circles, where nouveau hip geeks like Plaxo (and yours truly) hang out, say that Plaxo is still clearly doing what's best for Plaxo above all else.

Maybe big money on the table means never having to do more than say you're sorry, but the Plaxo deal with Comcast is liable to hit more bumps in the road than just an unpopular history.

Mismatched Visions, If Everyone's Telling the Truth

One-stop social web shopping at your ISP isn't an unusual vision at all. Plaxo's data portability talk seems at risk of going out the window for the relatively cheap price of $150m, though. Comcast is far more likely to want Plaxo to power a new line of Comcast branded social web services than they are to want their customers running links off-site to Yahoo and Google properties through their Comcast experience.

Given the histories of both companies, something devious is liable to happen. Perhaps though Comcast just wanted to acquire some human resources, including people who figured out how to spam the whole web for contact information and just a few short years later end up hated less than a telco. That is impressive, even if not enough to warrant trust from users.

Last week, the fight to manage your social data kicked off in earnest as three major players in the social networking space each announced independent competing approaches to making profile and friend information data portable. MySpace Data Availability was followed by Facebook Connect and then Google Friend Connect after that. With all these competing APIs, how this will play out is anyone's guess. We've created an interactive app from Impact Games that will let you model how each of the major players will impact the data portability movement and share your opinions about what they should do.

Prior to any of the announcements last week, Chris Saad, co-founder of DataPortability.org, appeared on our podcast show ReadWriteTalk and told us that this was one of the use cases the Data Portability Project was focused on. Missing from the scrum so far is Microsoft, who Saad told us is the most data portability friendly company. What Microsoft will do is unclear at this point.

In the game below you can choose to play the role of any of 5 different players: Google, MySpace, Microsoft, the Data Portability Project, or Facebook. You can then predict what will happen, or voice your opinion about what should happen. Or both.

Example of game play: Let's say you chose to play as the Data Portability Project. You can predict that Data Portability will "criticize the vendors and encourage a vendor neutral approach." If you voice an opinion, you are guided by several "advisors" - in this case we have ReadWriteWeb, CNET and Forrester Research. The difference between predicting and voicing an opinion is that you may not necessarily agree with what you predict Data Portability or any of the different roles will do, so you can also cast your opinion about what you think they should do!

This is the second in a series of games that we'll run over the next few months on ReadWriteWeb; the first dealt with Google App Engine. In about a week, we'll be sharing the results of both what you think the different players will and should do in the future. Please share any additional thoughts on this issue in the comments below.

Disclosure: One of our writers, Sean Ammirati, is on the Impact Games advisory board.