Sunday, December 19, 2004
The Only Reason Blogs are popular
Usability! Remember that usability is relative to the user’s frame of reference and the application at hand (i.e., task). Command-line interfaces are very usable to many UNIX "power" users. Using a GUI would slow them down and require them to learn a new way of interaction. Dvorak keyboards are more efficient, produce higher speeds of typing and reduce the chances of acquiring carpal tunnel syndrome. The current QWERTY keyboard was a "good" design -- it was designed to slow your typing speed so that the keys on typewriters would net get stuck together.
Publishing a web site is relatively easy, right? Well, sort of. All you have to do is set up a web server, write html, ftp files to your web server and overcome several other minor technical hurdles. And of course, you can host somewhere else and use their tools to accomplish things like sending out newsletters or providing a shopping cart. This is why we have millions of web sites, right. These tasks are really simple for technical people, fairly simple for the technically inclined but what about the other 85% of us? Even if a techie set up your system and all you have to do is edit your web pages, you need to know how to logon, navigate a Unix file system, download, edit/write html, ftp your files back to the file system, etc. For most this is a technical barrier impossible to penetrate. Even if you can do manage these tasks, the inconvenience and tedium makes publishing a chore at best.
Then came blogs. It's the pet rock of web publishing. Use a simple web-based publishing system, make it really easy for even a technology laggard to use and now you have millions of people publishing web sites. There is simply no other answer to its popularity. Some would argue that they're timely and easy to update. Well, yes when technology is dirt simple people will use it more often. Some would argue that Napster had very low usability but since it had such incredible usefulness millions of people would use it to download music. I would argue differently. Napster was incredibly useful and it was very novel (so buzz had a lot to do with it popularity). But who really used it? Not my grandmother or my Aunt Jo. Early adopters, gadget freaks, technical adventures. . . we know who we are. The point is that to get millions of users is a whole lot different than getting the other 100 millions users to use your application. As hard as it is to build something that attracts millions of users, it’s infinitely more difficult to attract the mainstream.
Blogs are on the cusp of the mainstream. As it turns out Grandmother and Aunt Jo can use this stuff. To paraphrase Allan Kay at the 1995 3rd annual WWW conference in Darmstadt, Germany, "We'll know we've made it when one of our cuff links can communicate with the other via satellite. The question is, 'Will we have something to say"? It turns out that the answer is yes.
Publishing a web site is relatively easy, right? Well, sort of. All you have to do is set up a web server, write html, ftp files to your web server and overcome several other minor technical hurdles. And of course, you can host somewhere else and use their tools to accomplish things like sending out newsletters or providing a shopping cart. This is why we have millions of web sites, right. These tasks are really simple for technical people, fairly simple for the technically inclined but what about the other 85% of us? Even if a techie set up your system and all you have to do is edit your web pages, you need to know how to logon, navigate a Unix file system, download, edit/write html, ftp your files back to the file system, etc. For most this is a technical barrier impossible to penetrate. Even if you can do manage these tasks, the inconvenience and tedium makes publishing a chore at best.
Then came blogs. It's the pet rock of web publishing. Use a simple web-based publishing system, make it really easy for even a technology laggard to use and now you have millions of people publishing web sites. There is simply no other answer to its popularity. Some would argue that they're timely and easy to update. Well, yes when technology is dirt simple people will use it more often. Some would argue that Napster had very low usability but since it had such incredible usefulness millions of people would use it to download music. I would argue differently. Napster was incredibly useful and it was very novel (so buzz had a lot to do with it popularity). But who really used it? Not my grandmother or my Aunt Jo. Early adopters, gadget freaks, technical adventures. . . we know who we are. The point is that to get millions of users is a whole lot different than getting the other 100 millions users to use your application. As hard as it is to build something that attracts millions of users, it’s infinitely more difficult to attract the mainstream.
Blogs are on the cusp of the mainstream. As it turns out Grandmother and Aunt Jo can use this stuff. To paraphrase Allan Kay at the 1995 3rd annual WWW conference in Darmstadt, Germany, "We'll know we've made it when one of our cuff links can communicate with the other via satellite. The question is, 'Will we have something to say"? It turns out that the answer is yes.
