Fred Sampson's Radio Weblog

	Saturday, January 15, 2005

Inside Google

I had to miss this week's BayCHI meeting due to family obligations, but there's plenty of linkage to summaries of Marissa Mayer's talk. I've seen and heard her before, and met her at DUX2003, so I don't feel entirely left out.

An Evening with Google's Marissa Mayer. Notes on a BayCHI/PARC talk given by Google's Marissa Mayer are posted here. Thanks, Rick!.... [John Battelle's Searchblog]

User Experience: the Google Way. Tuesdayís BAYCHI event featured Marissa Mayer discussing The User Experience at Google. After a walk through of Googleís UI principles (complete with examples and anecdotes) and extensive Q&A, Mayer revealed a lot of what makes Googleís UE tick.

Marissa began by questioning whether a particular user experience could be a sustainable advantage as it can essentially be copied. In practice, however, Google has found that competing sites have a hard time maintaining the level of feature restraint that Google adheres to. Mayer pointed out that it is quite difficult to remove something once you have added it. This is especially true in large organizations with pronounced vertical structures and vertically based incentive systems. . . Article Continues [Functioning Form: Interface Design]

An evening with Google's Marissa Mayer. Google-watchers who like to peek behind the curtain at the Mountain View search company might enjoy the tidbits of information that product manager Marissa Mayer offered the other night during a lecture at PARC. Much of it we've heard before, such as how the uncommonly spartan Google home page stumped early product testers. But there are other interesting morsels, such as Google's claim to have the largest network of translators in the world.... [SiliconBeat]

1:12:02 PM

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Mega-linking

I was already using LinkedIn, primarily because of a few invitations, before the PeopleSofties discovered it. The influx over the last month or so has been phenomenal:

PeopleSoft employees flock to LinkedIn. Social networking sites have been derided as a fad without a business model. But professional networking sites may be another matter. Users clearly see a value in networking sites focused on cultivating professional contacts. Consider that thousands of PeopleSoft employees, facing the prospect of layoffs because of the Oracle acquisition, have apparently flocked to LinkedIn, the Mountain View online networking tool, according to a PeopleSoft employee and some sleuthing by Joi Ito. Said Ito: If you search for PeopleSoft employees who have joined in the last 30 days, you get over 3,700 results. There are 5,500 or so employees listed in total which is around half of their employees. Via Ross Mayfield... [SiliconBeat]

12:46:50 PM

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Do "Blink"

Malcolm Gladwell's going to be at Capitola Book Cafe on Tuesday, January 18. How they snagged him for an appearance merely a week after his new book was released I don't know, but I will try to be there (and I'll buy the book there, too):

'Blink': Hunch Power. "Decisions made very quickly," Malcolm Gladwell says in his book about first impressions, "can be every bit as good as decisions made cautiously and deliberately." By By DAVID BROOKS. [NYT > Books]

12:05:29 PM

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Resurfacing

No, that doesn't mean I'm paving my driveway. It means I'm back to blogging, albeit somewhat reduced in volume.

What happened? First, my computer crashed. Apparently, both the motherboard (including RAM and CPU) and the C: drive were fried by a power spike during December's nasty weather. Fried, despite having everything plugged into APC UPS units. So two weeks later I got the box back, rebuilt by my friendly local computer tech, Rand Rueter. And yes, I'm filing a claim with APC under their protection policy. This shouldn't have happened.

And naturally I had plenty of files backed up, but by no means everything, so I lost a week of email, some inconsequential data files, all my browser bookmarks, and some licensed software. So I'm rebuilding what I can, and doing without what I have to.

Additionally, I started the new job at IBM this week, which has left me with little free time to attend to much of anything, including the blog.

11:43:52 AM

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