How I'd Improve Kindle

I love Kindle. I fell in love with it from the moment a Kindle slipped into my hands three years ago. And since the Kindle app appeared, I can read from any device I want: on my desktop, on iPhone, anywhere, really, which cuts out the need to cart more hardware around than I need to.

But there remain a few things I'd improve about the Kindle service in general. They'd make me a less reluctant user (because yes, sometimes my frustrations overcome my desire to go on investing time into it -- it's an ongoing balancing act between impulse buys and UI chagrin).

Here are ways I'd improve Kindle so that it becomes an indispensable item for any reader:

1. Shelfari integration. It's the perfect way to bring archives to life: literally instilling pride in the act of archiving them in the first place. Also, it'd be great if I could rate my book right there on Kindle instead of having to open Shelfari later on and do it! Speaking of...
2. A button to indicate I've finished the book.
3. A way to pass Kindle books to others. I'm not saying I want a way to digitally copy the book and send it all over the place; I'm saying I want to be able to take something I paid for and transfer it to another person to read. It wouldn't live on my account anymore, it'd move to theirs, and the natural act of sharing books we've cherished would go on as it does in the real world.
4. A clear and easy way to include non-Amazon ebooks into Kindle. One time I found a really confusing way to send a PDF to my Kindle: I sent it to my Amazon account, then found it on my Kindle, but the file was completely corrupted. Now I have to stare at it every goddamn day. It's like a hex on my life. Also, there are some authors that sell ebooks but won't put them on Amazon out of principle. I want to read these guys, but if I'm not using my actual Kindle device, how do I upload them to my app? The answer may be out there, but I've looked long and hard for it and frankly this is more work than it needs to be.
5. A way to file and organise books. On my desktop Kindle app, I have options to sort by Recent, Author and Title. But the truth is I don't want my advertising books touching my science books touching my literature books touching my books in French versus in English. I know this is just me, but that shit drives me mad. Amazon, these are data files. Let us bloody play with them.
6. A way to cancel purchases made by mistake. Amazon One-Click is super convenient, but I've had impulse binges where I've accidentally purchased a book title written by the wrong author. And now that book, like my corrupted PDF, is just chillin' there, mocking me. If I haven't opened the book or broached the 1% mark, I should be able to return it within a period of time (say, same-day).
7. Impulse buy integration. I'm serious. If I finished a book that has sequels, and I loved the living crap out of it and am totally in "I'm still in this author's universe" mode, I'd love to be able to see the sequel right there, then push the One Click button right in my app to start reading right away. Same for books by the same author, or the latest book the author's just written. Right after I read a book by an author I don't know, and now love, is really the prime moment to sell me everything they ever did.
8. Coherence between the apps and the Kindle device. Some things I can do directly with the Kindle device and not on the apps, like add and remove books, incorporate eBooks, etc. This is all really great, but to be honest my device is so old that it's not really practical for me to whip out  and plug into my computer for demands that small. Also, it isn't like doing things on the Kindle device is a piece of cake either: their interface design teaches you nothing, and you have to follow instructions pretty closely to do the things you want. Also, my WhisperNet doesn't work, which is an additional pain in the ass.

I think that covers it for now. I may add to this as frustrations arise, because I just downloaded Proust's entire body of work and now I'll obviously have to read it. 

But yeah. I don't think these are enormous demands (okay, the Shelfari integration thing is kind of a bitch); they are demands from a reader who's also an avid tech user, and who sees a divide between those two worlds on Kindle that doesn't need to exist. Please, Amazon, hear my plea.

Google+ Could Change PR and Influencer Marketing

It's been awhile since I've written in, mainly because Cannes eats all will to live. Since recovering I've been fooling around with Google+, trying to decide where it fits into my life.

The super-short first impression: Google+ goes right where Google Wave went wrong. This time around, it's hitting all the right buttons, especially where privacy and ease of use are concerned.

Early on, adding random people to "Circles" (the idiot-proof version of Facebook's wildly complex Privacy settings), I got the sense it would change my web experience. Enough time has passed since that implications for marketers remain speculative but generally agreed-upon:

• The +1 feature may change the face of SEO, tilting it further away from black-hat marketing tactics and more in favour of content usefulness.
• Its ease of use and potential to scale will make the data accrued on it increasingly important for social media monitoring.
• Content engagement is significant. It's easy enough to +1 something, but it's also re-enlivening comment culture. I made one comment today on a totally innocuous post and people from all over the sphere are leaping onto the stream, adding value to an article that would have gone unnoticed on Twitter, or that wouldn't have received much response on a blog.
• This is a new avenue for influencer marketing. And while influencers may remain roughly the same, its unity of multiple useful Google properties will change how we treat content being shared there. To wit:

In terms of feel, posting on Google+ is about as easy as on Twitter, with a final publishing result that more resembles Tumblr or Posterous. Images and videos are beautifully presented.

It also has an advantage over such platforms in the sense that you don't have to work so hard at outset to build your community -- nearly everybody uses Gmail and is hankering for an in. (In Early Adopter-land, anyway.) Days after joining, over 100 people added me to their streams -- well before I'd posted anything, and most were people I knew and had already engaged with previously. That's a good figure.

As previously mentioned, Google properties like Picasa and YouTube are automatically integrated -- so if you're not already a user of these services, they are instantly more accessible. I generally favour Flickr and Vimeo but have already tested the photo-upload feature, which is ridiculously simple. Presentation is great and privacy settings are intuitive. This has basically made me a Picasa user overnight, and I'll probably use this for quicker video uploading and sharing, too (which will likely resuscitate my dead YouTube account).

I said in the title of this post that this could also change PR. When you write about ads and technology, you're heavily reliant on imagery and videos -- tools that help illustrate the merits of a product, service or campaign. Email is the traditional darling for getting PR messages across, but it isn't great for scrolling through imagery or videos in an intuitive way -- you usually have to leave your email client. And then there is the question of organising PR notices that you mean to cover, but never do, because it gets lost in your email.

These problems don't exist with Google+. (Not yet, anyway.) PR folks can write a quick piece, add imagery and videos in a snap, and publish only to a circle of journalist contacts (or the wider public). The publishing style feels like Facebook but is less ephemeral -- it is easy for people to skim, copy/paste from and return to later, making it more like Tumblr but in a closed ecosystem with great scale.

Then there is the "Hangout" feature, which enables you to video chat with up to about 10 people. Nice option for briefings, meetings ... or hell, just hanging out.

The main reason I think Google+ is interesting is because the barrier to entry is low, potential to scale is high and usability is fantastic. I can see people compulsively using this the same way they compulsively use Facebook, except they don't necessarily have to leave universes that are important, like Gmail or Google Docs. This is a bit like what Rockmelt tried to do except you had to download a new browser -- a small but irritating obstacle to use, which Google has the luxury of being able to skip.

It's also directly linked to the identities of most people via their email, connecting their social activity to their existing Google profiles and producing a broad picture of who you are and what you're doing on the Web. This also minimises spam inside the platform.

One critique thus far. My impression is that you can upload to your Google+ via mobile, but only from Android. That's not necessarily bad news, given that Android adoption is exploding, but it does cut out tech-savvy compulsive socialites who are anchored to iPhone or other smartphone platforms. Google's attitude is historically more open than its peers, so I hope this changes once confidence in the viability of Google+ grows.

A Rockmelt Review Update, to Be Just.

After 48 hours or so of hardcore use, today I decided that I hate Rockmelt.

Used as your primary browser it gets insanely slow and data-heavy and the lag is insufferable.

And because you can't organically update Twitter/Facebook from the right-hand pane, having them ever on the periphery doesn't actually stop you from having to go to those pages. All it really does is make you a compulsive newsfeed update-checker, which is something you thankfully forget about doing from time to time when you're not constantly gazing at those icons.

Back on Chrome again. Will I return to Rockmelt someday, to visit? Probably, but that I'm saying "probably" probably means no. I'll keep it on the dock awhile though, just in case.

This concludes my review.

UPDATE, 13 Nov: A few commenters actually pointed out to me how I can update my Facebook and Twitter statuses from Rockmelt.

It's on the left!

There's also some kind of "smart" RSS suggestions feature that passes you fresh sites based on your interests (StumbleUpon-esque?). I haven't yet figured out how that works though.

Thanks, guys. Maybe I'll give this another go (but that laggage, man... find a way to work it out!).

A Short, Rather Incomplete Rockmelt Review

...per Len Kendall's request. :P

Let's kick off with what Rockmelt is: a Chromium-based web browser developed by Tim Howes and Eric Vishria, although you'll likely hear less about them than about its hefty backer: Netscape founder Marc Andreessen. It launched two days ago and is currently still in invite-only beta.

This demo does a good job of illustrating the experience:

How Rockmelt is Shared

This is one of the first things I noticed: primary dissemination of Rockmelt is happening via Facebook. My first couple of invites came through Facebook messages, and I was like, "....the hell is this?"

There is good reason for that: it's intimately integrated with Facebook, in the sense that you can log into Rockmelt via Facebook Connect (which has the advantage of automatically populating available friends on your left-hand pane), share with great efficacy, and - this is crucial - disseminate Rockmelt invites through it as well.

Here's a feature I thought was interesting:


Post-download, you're allotted three Rockmelt invitations to offer to others. They are replenished every time somebody uses one. When you want to pass Rockmelt along, you're given a list of Facebook friends that you can share it with - but priority space is given to friends that have already requested Rockmelt access (with the most recent at the top). This ensures you're not passing an invite to someone who already has the browser, or to somebody who doesn't care.

Stuff I Like About Rockmelt

I've been using the browser less than 24 hours, so this is a drive-by review at best. As things stand, I dig the following:

• Available Facebook friends on the left-hand pane. You can toggle this to see only friends you've favourited - meaning, huzzah, I ONLY SEE THOSE OF YOU I LIKE. (This doesn't mean I am hidden from those I don't want to see, it only means I see less of what - er, who - I don't care about at any given time.)


• The speed. It is easily Chrome-caliber fast. The developers explain why in this TechCrunch vid.
• Dedicated window for Facebook chat. It feels/sounds a lot like iChat. Above your discussion, you also see the livestream of the friend you're currently chatting with. Unexpectedly handy way of keeping things in context, especially when dude goes, "So have you looked at my vacation pictures yet?" Uh ...... yes.

• Worth noting: when friends try to chat me, Facebook tells them I'm using a remote service. To send the message along, they must confirm a change in their settings (that they are willing to be visible to remote services that access Facebook chat). It isn't yet clear if that means that, in this case, the friend would just be visible to me or to all remote chat users. Settings can be changed back in Facebook's immense archives of privacy rigmarole. (Thanks Atif for walking through this with me yesterday.)
• Being able to browse social networks, favourite blogs, profiles, Tweets, and even search without leaving my current tab. (Anything you wish to open while toggling thepane options will automatically open in a separate tab, so you never lose your place.)
  
  
  
  
  
  


• Clean interface that does more or less what you expect. With so much material coming at you, it'd be easy to suffer from data overload. Thankfully, diversions and other tools are off to the side, which isn't distracting. And when I do decide to play with them, I don't lose track of where I am.
• Easy delete. If I hate something I've saved, I just drag it out of the pane and - poof! - gone forever. Just like with the Mac dock.
• Intuitive sharing feature. Easy to post links of what you're looking at on Facebook or Twitter; the Share button feels totally natural beside the URL address line.
• 

Stuff I Do Not Like About Rockmelt

• Can't toggle searches. It's like going back to the Yahoo days. If you run a search from the hyper-convenient right-hand pane, you get one basic stream of results, with no ability to see just images, or just news, or just blogs or videos. It seems crazy that you can't automatically expand this page to fill a tab (bringing you directly to Google) or that toggle options can't just be added to the top of search results.
  
• I can't Tweet? There must be something I'm missing here. I can share, reply and retweet from inside the browser pane, but I can't self-produce a Tweet?!
  
• Come to think of it, I can't update my Facebook status from here either. Small potatoes but irritating. Why go to the trouble of saving us from having to leave our pages to peruse our socnets if we can't update them from those same tools? Boooo.
• Adding separate Twitter accounts isn't super intuitive. In fact, it doesn't work at all when I hit the "Add new Twitter account" button. And at the same time, I don't know if I necessarily want to fill my entire right pane up with Twitter accounts and sites I frequent. And I don't think it scrolls. There has to be an easier way to manage this, but for now it doesn't look like I'll be divorcing Tweetdeck anytime soon.

But this is all basic stuff that I'm sure will get sorted over the course of the test-drive. It also merits saying that I don't know if I care enough about all these features to leave Chrome. I'm giving it a full 48-hour test run; and if I can't go back to the way things were, I guess then I'll know for sure.

(There haven't been any rendering problems so far, and easy imports from other browsers mean I can fool around with Rockmelt without the irritation of having lost all my history and details. Naaaahce.)

Mass Adoption?

In his original Tweet to me, Len hit it right on the head when he said experience teaches that browser gadgets don't score mass adoption. This is true, and there are still others who are simply not into the idea of downloading one more extra goddamn thing, especially when our current browser options do the job fine.

If Rockmelt sorts out the issues I mentioned above, and fast enough, it's got a fair shot at adding one more wedge to the handful of browsers we actively use. It has funding, serious coverage, and its clever way of disseminating invites builds desire while psychologically prepping the user for a social browser experience.

If it is true that the vast majority of Facebook users log in over 7 times a day, and if compulsive Tweeters are hitting their socmedia-smack just as much, then it's fair to say it'd be cool if we didn't have to keep a tab open for Facebook, and some extra desktop client open for Twitter, all the time. If we can keep that stuff ever-present on the periphery of our overall internet experience, it'd make life a lot easier. And that sharing feature? Seriously. Priceless.

I'd say keep an eye on it, especially once your non-tech or media friends start talking about it. I doubt it'll take a long time; a social browser provides sufficiently non-geeky, addiction-enabling incentives that there are plenty of reasons for Rockmelt to go mainstream.

That's all for now. Hope it helps (...Len). If you have any thoughts to add, by all means, LEAVE A COMMENT, MAN!

There's an update to this review. Take a looky-loo.