Just finished watching a recording of how people surf my blog. I must admit it’s been an amazing eye opener. I can actually see how people interact with my site, what parts they read, where exactly do they try to click and exactly how my message is communicated.

It makes me want to stop that person, and tell him: “Hey, stop using my site like this! Can’t you see that I meant you to click that Red Big Button on the top left, instead of reading that yada yada legal stuff on the bottom right???”.

The future of getting-your-message-through??

I can see (a really close future) when I’ll be able to edit a website (i.e. my Facebook page? My online-product-landing-page?) in real-time (using dream-weaver?) while I see how real people (from google-adwords?)  interact with it (using clicktale?). This can become a transformation of site-building and online-marketing – just like the first terminals transformed the way people started to program. Malcolm Gladwel explained in Outliers: using terminals dramatically shortened the feedback loop of programmers, who before that had to feed their programs into card-reading machines. This transformed programmers from being anal-code-verifiers into the powerful hackers they’ve become today. Using ClickTale can shorten an on-line marketer’s feedback loop – and help him focus his surfer’s attention on the core message. This can transform our online-marketers, design and usability people from being statistics-diggers into real-time-attention-hackers. Wouldn’t that be neat?

ClickTale walk their talk

The usability of the serivce is that of a “Next, Next, Next” wizard. I can feel how minimal is the attention that is required by my side, and how short is the learning curve to get things up and running. I can imagine how the ClickTale team streamlined their own product experience using their own tools, and this must have been very gratifying because I’m sure this have raised their bottom line figures with very short feedback loops.

I highly recommend every site owner to try out this service. Even my very short experience with this service has opened my eyes to some severe usability issues I wasn’t aware of.

Disclaimer: Me and Arik (ClickTale’s cofounder) became friends a coupe of years ago. He’s been urging me for 2 years to try out his service. The first beta versions were a bit shaky, but when I came back to it yesterday – it’s evident they did a terrific job. Way to go!

BTW: Smile, you might be recorded as we speak

Disclaimer 2: Although you are being recorded, I don’t gather any personal information about you – so I don’t have any idea who you are when I watch your recording… Unless you leave a comment on my blog… Hmmm… I wonder if there’s a way to exclude text from ClickTale’s recordings… I’m interested in not to know how anyone I know interacted with my site…

Having your BlueTooth turned on is like walking down the street yelling your Social Security Number

A year and a half ago I was playing around with my (then new) Nokia 6120 Bluetooth, 3G and python capabilities, when I figured out that I could create a pretty nifty spying machine, with some very little effort.

It began with a simple Bluetooth scan. Every 60 seconds my script wrote into a text file a simple line for each Bluetooth device it encountered around it – something along the lines of:

TIMESTAMP, BT-MAC-ADDRESS, PROFILE-NAME, …

It took me about 4 hours to find a proper Bluetooth programming library, and figure out how to python on S60. Then, scripting was simple. Happy about my new creation, I started the program and cheerfuly went home. When I arrived my home-computer and looked at the text file – I was in a bit of a shock. Apparently in a 10 minutes walk down Rothchild street in Tel-Aviv – I harvested more than 30 MAC addresses of people who had their Bluetooth on. Many of them had their full name now in my text file. Not bad. And this was 1.5 years ago.

Then the fun began.

For each line that I wanted, I added Tags.

When my script started, it now read all the lines – and for those with tags – it saved the MAC addresses in a lookup table. Now, whenever a new MAC was found – it was looked up in the lookup tabe, and if tags were there – the phone started to sound a special beep, and wrote on the screen the tags that I added to this MAC address.

So, all the people from the Rothchild strolling were tagged “Rothchild”. All the people from a Pub I went to that day – were tagged “Mish Mish”, and all the MACs from the supermarket were tagged “Suppermarket”.

Whenever I bumped into one of these people again (and the script was on) – I got a nifty alert: “There’s someone around you with the tags “Supermarket” and “Mish Mish”". I could also know when was the last time I tagged them.

But this is not the end of the story.

I later added some 3G capabilities. I tagged people at work with some special tags. Back then, I tried out Grubb.net as an online todo list. So, whenver I encountered one of the people from work that I wanted to do something with – my phone handed me the specific todo items – appropriate for the context I was in. Not bad.

I still don’t have a GPS on my phone, but I figured out that tagging could be really fun with a GPS. I can mark areas on Google Maps, and whenever people were encountered in one of the marked areas – their MAC addresses could be automatically tagged. So the people from the Amado building in my university could automatically get tagged as a high probability of being engineers of some sort. And whenever I encountered that girl from the psychology building, my phone could alert me with a proper pickup line – something like “Didn’t I see you 9 months ago in the such and such” building?

So far – everything is legal. Now, for some illegal ideas that I had in mind. (Not that I would ever implement any of them).

I could store the MAC addresses together with the tags, on a designated website. 3G internet traffic is pretty cheap, so it’s Very much possible to query the DB for each new MAC I encounter. This allows me to share tags with my friends. Now, without ever meeting somebody – I can get the tags that my friends has given to this guy. “This MAC with a profile name “David Nokia6120″ was tagged by Tal at Eran’s school 3 months ago”. I’d never do such a thing, but you have to know that this capability should take me about 8 hours to implement. And I’m not a proficient python programmer.

Next – matching up people’s MAC addresses with their Facebook profiles. Imagine you could browse their Facebook profile just because any of your friends had matched this MAC address with that specific Facebook ID.

Another idea was a service called “Celeb Me”. Imagine that anytime you walked down the counter of any Starbucks – they’d know the type of coffee you always drink and how much sugar you drink in it. Wouldn’t that be neat?

Some drawbacks of this script:

• I don’t know exactly who is it around me who has got that BT MAC address I’m looking at. Using RSSI data is somewhat problematic.
• This script uses the BT, 3G, and could also use a GPS. All of these capabilities drain the battery really fast.

The technicalities:

• The script is run using Python S60 version 1.4
• I used a library called lightblue. The latest release didn’t work back then, I had to use the one before that.
• I connected to the Python using the Bluetooth console and hyperterminal.
• Copying the files in and out of the phone took me quite an effort back then… Nokia decided to make life not easy for people who aren’t paying them for their libraries.
• As you can see, the script is quite short… Could be even more efficient and better written if I wasn’t such a novice in Python
• The link to my crude-but-working script:

And some final thoughts:

1. People who walk around with their BT open – should know that they are actually YELLING a unique ID. This means that they can easily get followed by any Joe Shmoe with very little effort.
2. This thing totally rocks! It is so much fun, especially showing it off in geek parties
3. I have some funny little stories from playing around with this script, but I’ll leave them for another post.

 

 

A disposable napkin*

I wish napkins had this slogan written on them, with the following text on the other side:

“This napkin was once a tree, growing up in Brazil. Then it got cut down, got mixed with some toxic materials, so that it will look shiny and sell better. Then we printed on it (the text that you are reading in this very moment) – using some more toxic materials. Then it got shipped half way around the world, using some fuel. After you’ll use it, this napkin will get shipped to the nearest dumping location (using some more fuel, and polluting the air a bit more). There – it will deteriorate in the course of the next 5 years, putting all that toxic waste back into the ground. And all of this is done so that for 3 seconds you will look a bit more civilized when you eat your fettucini.”

“Please consider putting this napkin back in the stand, so that the next person sitting here will also get educated”.

Now,

I’m sure that producers of disposable dishes think that these napkins would be a bad business idea. Maybe they are right. But, these napkins can benefit us in a couple of ways:

• They educate about “environmental footprint”.
• Less napkins that the restaurant has to buy and manage.
• Less toxic waste that the restaurant will produce.

I call these “guilt napkins”. Maybe another text can be used to create “educational napkins” or “good karma napkins”. Maybe these napkins shouldn’t get produced at all, and an empty “educational napkins-holder” is enough.

Just a thought.

Please consider sending this blog post to someone that needs it

* In the process of writing this post, no napkins were actually disposed. This photo was downloaded from istockphoto…

RentPA - The fastest way to rent in Tel-Aviv

I’m quite sure it’s possible to find my next place for rent with an investment of about 6 hours, and a month’s worth of rent. The plan is this:

• 40 minutes interview over Skype with MyRentPA ™.
• Scan through videos of appropriate appartments – ~5mins x 8 videos.
• A deeper look into the top 3 appartments: 10 mins x 2.
• ~3 meetings x 1.5 hours.

The only problem is that MyRentPA doesn’t really exist. Yet. I wish they opened a branch in Tel-Aviv already.

Do you think it’s possible for a Real Estate agent to video tape his candidate appartments, make a bit of a story out of each one, have a short interview with the owners, some easy editing, and put it all on a plain and effective website?

I think it could save everybody’s time, both the owners and the people who rent the place… It sure doesn’t sound like a big effort… Maybe it could be a nice income for a starting comedian…

I bet that if the system is tuned up properly, it’s possible to make a month’s worth of rent out of each video… Am I missing something .

Thanks, Tal, for the inspiration…

Control the access to your own data...

Some incidents that happened lately led us to think quite much about the control of our data:

• In the past couple of months, Facebook had decided to disable the accounts of a couple of friends of ours.
• In 1999, some very important files of mine were hosted on a “Free 50MB storage” service. A year later I found out that my files were taken hostage, and in order to bail them out of that company I had to pay $10.
• Censorship is another concern. I’ve given YouTube and Flickr the liberty to censor my movies and photos. Sometime in the future, they might decide to shutdown their service, clean up their servers, go bankrupt, become a racist totalitarian, or who knows what.
• Some very important accounts of mine are authenticated against my GMail. If someone somehow breaks into it – I can lose control over some Very important accounts of mine.

These are a couple scenarios that happen when we give the control over our own data, to some 3rd parties who might someday betray our trust.

Very annoying.

Very disturbing, when I came to think of it.

Giving the control over my data to some company, suddenly sounds insane. Why should I trust Facebook, Yahoo!, Amazon, Microsoft and Google – with access to my personal data? Why are we forced to trust these companies, when another, very elegant solution is now possible?

Tal Muskal has urged me to think about cloud computing in the past couple of months now. Amazon, Microsoft and Google – all started to offer some cloud storage and computing solutions. These resources are quite cheap, and always available. Together with some open-source development, these solutions can be turned into something very neat.

Imagine that you pay for some storage and CPU time in the cloud. You have full control over the data, and the APIs needed to access this data. All the code is open-source, and the data is encrypted so that you are the only one who controls who gets to see what.

With this scheme, I can control exactly who is permitted to access my pictures. I can allow my Facebook-friends access to my future events, without allowing Facebook-the company access to my list of favorite songs. I can store some audio-clips, and pay $0.17/GB/Month, without the concern that a service will sometime decide to take it down.

This approach is much healthier than the current state we’re in. It removes the need to trust 3^rd parties with some very important data. I believe that the ability to have full control over his own data is something that every heavy Internet user should strive for…