Tom Morris

On my mobile phone (Motorola V3, 'Razr'), every time a text message comes in, it pops up a little movie telling me that a message has arrived. This monopolises the screen, and changes the options that I am currently looking at to "Read" and "Exit".

This is perhaps the worst usability design I've ever seen. If I am entering a number, the message pops up and gets in the way so that:

0207 123 1234

becomes:

0013--224*

or something equally useless. And I can't find a way of turning off the text alert. I know there are unread texts because there's a little 'mail' icon in the top.

Here's the thing. I go in to "Messages", then push the 'dash' button, and up comes "Message Centre Setup". Okay, this is separate from the 'Settings' page. But presumably there might be a way of turning off this annoyance. Perhaps inside "Message Setup" it might tell me. Ah, "SMS Alert"? No, that doesn't do it.

Let's get this straight. Setting Messages/Message Centre Setup/Message Setup/SMS Alert to 'off' doesn't actually turn off SMS alerts. Perhaps I'm the stupid one here, but I strongly suspect it's the phone.

Please, LazyWeb, help me! I don't want little animations popping up when I get a text. I get so many, it's impractical and makes my phone almost unusable for Twitter. Why didn't someone at Motorola test this?

Tags: twitter, sms, motorola, razr, v3, usability, design

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Tom Coates is suspiciously less cynical than I am (although I do plumb the depths of cynicism more and more by the day) has this to say about 'technology addiction': "Are people addicted to the alphabet? The plough? Paper-making? Light bulbs? Technology addiction is such a lazy and reactionary phrase".

There's a great out-of-context quote which can be had from the source article: "You're more prone to have a car accident if you drive". Who'd ever thunk it, eh?

Strangely enough, for an article of this sort, there's no mention at all of the elephant in the room - attention!

My newsreader has the option to put things which you click through to higher up in your reading order. If my email client prioritised emails from family, then business, then friends over random commercial mass mail, that'd solve a lot of the attention problem.

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Wow - it's crazy what a little announcement from a certain Tim O'Reilly can do for the discussion of the Semantic Web, specifically focussing on a startup called Freebase.

Dave is quite cynical about it, and so is Nick Carr, although more about the media coverage than the product itself.

Tim O'Reilly makes a big blunder:

But hopefully, this narrative will give you a sense of what Metaweb is reaching for: a wikipedia like system for building the semantic web. But unlike the W3C approach to the semantic web, which starts with controlled ontologies, Metaweb adopts a folksonomy approach, in which people can add new categories (much like tags), in a messy sprawl of potentially overlapping assertions.

Let's quash that one straight away. The W3C approach is not top-down at all. It's folksonomic to the extreme - you can use any URL you damn well please! I'm deadly serious. It may not be the simplest of things to do to create your own ontology - but it need not be difficult at all. The terms you use to relate resources in RDF can be as 'folksonomic' as you like, or as controlled as you like - whatever suits the purpose of the ontology.

Richard Ziade at Basement.org has a post about Freebase and the SemWeb. Danny has some really on-topic things to say (as always). And Nova Spivack is also commenting on the topic.

I hate to throw cold water on innovation, but I don't think that the Semantic Web is going to be built by startups like Metaweb's Freebase. It's more likely that it's going to be built by hobbyists in their garages - it's going to be built by the PHP users of the world building modular plugins for existing web applications. Why's that? Because I'm not sure if there is money to be made in SemWeb technology, nor am I sure that many businesses will like the result. If the SemWeb is successful, then a lot of companies which currently exist may just disappear in a puff of smoke.

Tags: semweb, getsemantic, rdf, freebase, semantic web, w3c, oreilly

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Techmeme is also discussing another Markoff story - this time about Palm and the hiring of Paul Mercer.

You know what Palm could do to improve their lot? Firstly, they need to dramatically improve their offering for developers. Make it easy for people to build applications for the Palm Pilot. Put a free and open-source scripting envrionment on all Palm Pilots - Python or Ruby. Make the software side as good as you can.

Next, bring back all the offspring. Palm has been split up in to so many companies. It's no wonder nothing is happening with the platform - there's no actual coherent vision laid out for the future of Palm. Bring back all the spinoff kids one-by-one and start rebuilding the business.

The Palm market will grow through good software as well as good industrial design.

Reach out to the community more. Palm really could become the platform of open source software if Palm worked on making it so. The software isn't going anywhere quickly, and is competing with more and more players - not just Apple but the huge market that is Windows Mobile and Symbian.

I love my Palm Pilot - especially with the external keyboard - but Palm really needs to sit down and figure out what the hell they are going to do to remain relevant. Hiring an ex-Apple guy needs to be the start of the story at Palm, not the finish.

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