16 Things I learned from GDC Wednesday

I went to the Game Developers Conference yesterday.

1. Team voice chat is now a commodity, a feature you can buy/rent for your game from companies like GameSpy.
2. Players of team games don't like in-game voice chat.
   • They want to talk with teammates outside of the game before team play (planning, coordination, training) and after (after-action reports, peer feedback).
   • They want to keep their group together independent of a game service. They want the freedom to take their clan/tribe/friends to another world/network.
3. They like the ownership and control Ventrilo offers but don't want its inconvenience and cost.
4. Nobody in GDC's "audio track" is discussing voice chat. They care about designing a game's sounds and score and how to integrate them into the product and the gaming experience.
5. Facebook and asynchronous gameplay have everyone's attention. AAA games are too expensive and slow-to-market unless you are very well funded. "Social games" cost less and make it easier to diversify, experiment and learn from your customers.
6. Interoperability among games and player data portability are not interesting here. I wonder if activity streams might find some fans.
7. Open source? What's open source?
8. Creative commons? Oh, that could save on licensing art and music.
9. Scarce talent? Producers with game experience. Recruiters settle for product managers from non-game software companies and try to reshape them for the game culture. I can't believe CAA doesn't have a practice to represent senior and up-and-coming game talent. By the way, this is a relatively new problem; five years' ago the hunt was for technical and storytelling talent.
10. Auteurs seem to be the hub of studios and publishers collect them, steal them, and shore up their weaknesses.
11. Game studios assemble teams for each stage in a game's life cycle, staffing up and moving people out as needed. The kind of project culture you see in civil engineering and Hollywood. 
12. Like film schools, schools for game makers teach teamwork and collaboration, including when to stab a fellow student in the back and kick the "dead weight" off the team.
13. All the bigger live game companies are building deep pools of knowledge about player behavior, psychology, and how designs affect both. Deep and secret pools of knowledge.
14. Hallway talk is nearly always better than the presentations. Companies compete with secret technologies, designs, and features. This means they only share widely known history and practices. Insights are sparse.
15. Apple's iPad is droolworthy for game developers. Designers are imagining much richer mobile experiences than can fit on a phone's screen.
16. Publishers confront a difficult and costly tradeoff. How do you make each game for every kind of device and user location (iPhone, iPad, PC, Wii, PSP, Xbox, SMS, television, etc.) with a consistent feel and identity while somehow adapting the experience to the strengths and limits of each platform and adding incentives to play across multiple modes? Resources are finite.

tags: gdc, gdc10, gdc2010, games, skype, voip, chat

Call me at +1-510-316-9773, Skype me, follow @skypejournal and @Phil Wolff.
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photo: cc-by Official GDC

Icons for a data portability policy – a few thoughts

I sat down with the DataPortability Project's Elias Bizannes a few months ago to organize the elements of a model portability policy. Your site's portability policy will be part of your Terms of Service or End User License Agreement. Your portability policy should help your sites and services communicate the data portability parts of your relationship with the people who use them and your business partners.

I'm heading down to an all day privacy forum co-hosted by Lauren Gelman and Mozilla this morning to discuss what browsers might do with a "privacy" icon.

The Clusters

We clustered portability policy questions into five stacks: Start, Sync, Access, Share, and End. I sketched five icons:

I cleaned them up a bit, but they are still rough:

Between the five, you'll see questions about the lifecycle of your relationship with a site, from its start to its finish. You'll also see questions about the power to manage your portability through interoperability.

The questions

We mapped these questions for your portability policy to the icons.

The questions can be answered by choosing Yes/No or from a short multiple choice list. Policy explanations, links, and actionable information are optional.

These questions are the work of the DataPortability Projects ToS/EULA Working Group over 2008 and 2009.

Start.

How well do you welcome me, my history, my friends? 

Are your import and export APIs and formats documented?

• Yes
• No
• Suggested: If Yes,where are they documented?

Do people need to create a new identity for this site, or can they use an existing one?

• New Identity - The person is expected to create a fresh identity that is used on this site. This site does not trust a third party to authenticate identity.
• Existing Identity - The person can register an account that is accessed using an identity authenticated by some third party. This product assumes that, by selecting a third party to authenticate their identity, the person accepts that third party as trustworthy.
• Suggested: If Existing Identity, what identity services will you support?

Sync.

How do you keep my data fresh?

Must people import things into this product, or can the product refer to things stored someplace else? Can this product work with objects and information whose "authoritative home" is another product, or can this product only work with things that it hosts directly?

• Must Host - In order for this product to work with a thing, it must be hosted directly.
• Can Refer - This product has the ability to access and work with things that are hosted by third parties, assuming that the third party allows this.
• Suggested: If Can Refer, what items can be stored elsewhere and under what conditions?

Can this site accept updates that users make on other sites? In cases where the product tracks or manages things that the person has stored on some third party product, can this product watch the third party for updates?

• One Time Import - This product only sees the remote thing at import time, and does not watch for changes.
• Watch For Updates - This product watches the third party for changes, and updates its own view of the remote thing to match.
• Suggested: If Yes, what types of items and under what conditions?

Access.

How well do you help me use and manage my information?

Can the person allow other sites to use the things they've created or updated here? Does this product provide a way for third parties to authenticate a person and read or write?

• No Access - The person must use this product to read or access whatever it manages.
• Third Parties Can Read - The person can provide the third party with authentication credentials, and can read data managed by this product.
• Third Parties Can Write - The person can provide the third party with authentication credentials, and can write data managed by this product.
• Suggested: If Yes, what technical protocols are supported and how can users manage the authority they give other sites?

Can the person download or remotely access a copy of everything they've provided to this service? As part of their standard use of most products, people import or create things. Does this product provide an open, DRM-free way for people to retrieve or access via third party all of the things they've created or provided?

• No Access - This product does not offer the person the ability to download the things they've provided.
• Remote Access - The product provides an open, DRM-free way for people to download all of the things they've provided to the product, or remotely access it using a third party product.
• Suggested: If Yes, how and in what forms?

Do you disclose where my data is being kept in the real world?

• Yes
• No
• Suggested: If Yes, where can I learn where my data is kept?

Can I control where my data is kept in the real world?

• Yes
• No
• Suggested: If Yes, how can I exercise those controls?

Share.

How well do you help me share well with others?

If person updates something here, is that change stored only by this product or can the person ask this product to store it elsewhere? Can this product accept some other site as being the authoritative home of a thing it knows about?

• Must Be Authoritative - This product assumes that it is the authoritative home of all things it manages, and does not update third parties.
• Can Update Remote - This product can work with a third party that is assumed to be authoritative. All updates made by the person using this product are also forwarded to the third party.
• Suggested: If Yes, how does it work in practice?

Can the person download or remotely access information that others have provided to the product? In cases where the product allows download or remote access, can the person export or access all of the data to which they have access, or only data which they have directly created?

• Provider Only - This person may only export or access data which they have directly provided.
• Full Access - The person may export or download any data to which they have access on this product, subject to reasonable usage and abuse rules.
• Suggested: If Yes, how and in what forms and with what other services or protocols?

End.

How well do you support a graceful exit from our relationship?

Will this site delete an account and all associated data upon a user's request? If the user creates a password or account for use with this product, does the product provide a way to cancel the account and erase all data associated with it?

• Immortal Accounts - Accounts or passwords, once created, are assumed to live for as long as the product is available. Desktop applications and other stand-alone products that do not have host services may have no way to remotely revoke accounts or passwords.
• Data Expires - If this product acts as a hub, the data it copies from other sites will expire in a set amount of time. This product must be linked to a place where it can refresh or synchronize data in order to stay current.
• Accounts Deleted Upon Request - This product has the ability to remove a person's account and all relevant data, and will do so when requested by the person or third party with appropriate legal standing.
• Suggested: If Yes, where can I find the procedure to request deletion.

Do you give notice before terminating the account?

• Yes
• No
• Suggested: If Yes, how much notice do you give and in what forms?

Can you recover a terminated account?

• Yes
• No
• Suggested: If Yes, how thoroughly, under what conditions, how quickly, and how is recovery triggered? 

Do you have a posted appeals process or dispute resolution procedure?

• Yes
• No
• Suggested: If Yes, where are the procedures posted?

Going Forward.

The questions and the clusters are works in progress. We're open to better questions, clusters, and definitely better labels and designs. These are just placeholders for better, official art.

I hope they serve a few common goals.

1. Make it easier to learn and understand the overall scope of a portability policy.
2. Make it easier to find the parts of a policy you care about.
3. Provide the visual part of semantic encoding that browsers and search engines can use to discover and understand where and what a site's policies are stored.

Things to do with the icons:

• Confirm the policy asks the right questions
• Prioritize and boil down for the Goldilocks Test: Not too much, not too little, just right
• Design an icon for the whole portability policy
• Design UI/UX behavior for what happens when you click on the portability policy icon
• Make the icons work better everywhere (cultures, visual impairments, sizes) and vet for semiotic conflict and mark infringement
• Semantic encoding (microformats, anyone?) that works across access methods
• Write the legal layer, creating plain language boilerplate that works for the business, for their lawyers, for site partners, and for users. Vary for world legal systems. Translate.

Join DataPortability.org's general mailing list to help or the low-volume announcements only mailing list for updates.

tags: dataportability, dataportabilityproject, dpp, icons, icon, portability, policy, portabilitypolicy

Call me at +1-510-316-9773, Skype me, follow @skypejournal and @Phil Wolff.
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Frontiers of Real Time Collaboration

When I think of my community, where I belong professionally, I find my peeps highly concentrated in two places: The Emerging Communications Conferences and last week's Supernova Conference, #sn09. Collaboration and realtime communication was the topic during a panel discussion on day three. Dr. Weinberger brought the conversation through qualitative changes due to speed, brevity, and engagement; and collaboration norms within vertical subcultures. Side note: Skype wasn't mentioned once. Here's the video, my play-by-play notes, and my observations.

Part 1. (1 hour)

Part 2. (6 minutes)

• Moderator: David Weinberger (Berkman)
• Anna-Christina Douglas (Product Marketing Manager for Google Wave)
• Laura Fitton (Pistachio Consulting and founder of 140.com, co-author of Twitter For Dummies)
• Paul Lippe (Legal OnRamp)
• Deborah Schultz (Innovation Design Practice, Altimeter Group)
• Jason Shellen (CEO of Thing Labs, founding product manager of Google Reader, Blogger.com)

Notes: [paraphrased unless quoted]

David: What's different about today's tools?

Laura: Speed of interaction.

Deb: Ubiquity. Filtering leads to activation of groups of people, like people who are in the same place.

Jason: Engagement and iteration.

David: What is good about the 140 character limit?

Laura: Meets the need of two-way, social grooming.

Jason: It's short, like a one line joke.

Deb: Constraints breed invention.

Deb: SAP tried 5000 character tweets in an in-house pilot and it didn't go far.

David: Lowers the transaction costs compared to blogging.

Deb: Twitter is more like communication.

Sanford Dickert: Twitter solved the privacy and noise problems. "Hmmm - I actually like the 140 character limit - it makes people more efficient with their thoughts - just like how limited memory and HD space made programmers in the 60s and 70s very efficient programmers."

My Observations:

Collaboration is a lot more than editing a document or a thread together.

It's casting (bringing the right people together).

It's the metawork of common language development, modeling the deliverables in a way everyone understands, goal setting, planning, coordinating, controls, communication.

It's the social activity of bonding around common purpose (sometimes around a paycheck but often around a shared interest or value).

It's trying small things before big things to climb a learning curve of how to work with each other, building trust, knowing who can do what well, of learning who leads, who works, who has insight, who has connections.

It's creating a common vision of the work to be done and how to do it.

It's learning how to resolve differences within the group and resolve stressors from outside the group.

It's creating rituals and rites of passage, of establishing behavioral norms.

It's about finding best practices that help you become productive, efficient, and effective together.

Tools like Skype, twitter, blogs, and wikis let people talk with each other but few tools help with any of the other parts (let alone the actual work).

You're still on your own. 

- Phil Wolff

Laura: Public waves weren't planned but became popular, and are now part of the central design.

Deb: The fact that we're not collaborating more with all these tools out there is what's really interesting.

Jason: One barrier to tool interop is the profit motive.

David: These tools give us new kinds of publics. Paul's software creates gated communities with defined publics.

Paul: A great deal of work is uncovering extant knowledge and creating new knowledge. Lots of knowledge is in verticals. Legal OnRamp's software respects structures for attorney-client privilege, so there's a public ramp and company-specific things. Solving collaboration as a horizontal problem is much more difficult than solving collaboration vertically.

Laura: The fact that twitter is so messy and random and torrential creates an interesting collaborative context. Problems find their way to the right people.

Paul: The social structure of law departments and their ecosystem are much more defined.

Jason: Knowledge management (document management) systems died, replaced by internal blogs and wikis and search.

David: KM systems became records management. When companies bring social media inside the firewall, how do the media change?

Jason: Talking in a human voice doesn't change. It's still about engagement and virality.

Deb: The writing depends on an org's people, culture, products. Contrast legal vs. media companies, for example. Media tools are making roles more porous. Inside the firewall, businesses have goals, focused energy.

David: Is there an anti-hierarchical cultural statement made by wave?

Laura: Waves are very democratic today. Enterprises may adapt wave to add back controls.

After...

Adrian Chan (via Google Wave): "Sorry to have missed it -- it just bugs me to no end that in the midst of the conversational turn in web and web tools, so many of us miss the fundamental differences introduced by talk... talk is the mode of production, talk is the means of distribution. that's social media. it's not "information" -- though it contains information of course -- it's more and much of what more it is still escapes us -- escapes our ability to capture, measure, relate, quantify, filter, sort, and so on...

tags: skype, #sn09, supernova2009, collaboration, conference

Call me at +1-510-316-9773, Skype me, follow @skypejournal and @Phil Wolff.
Visit our Skype Journal private technologist roundtable, one of the longest running public Skype chats.

In-Skype advertising

A few more ads for the English language North American market within the Skype for Windows 4 client. Some are tips, like this new one for The Phone Booth Experiment.

 

Turn on Skype-provided tips, help messages, promotions and public service announcements through the "Alerts & messages" controls under the Tools > Options menu command. Or turn them off.

Use the #inskypeads tag for alerts you see inside Skype. You can always tweet them to @skypejournal email them to tips@skypejournal.com and we'll share them. Thanks!

tags: skype, advertising, design, ue, ui, ux, inskypeads

Call me at +1-510-316-9773, Skype me, follow @skypejournal and @Phil Wolff.
Visit our Skype Journal private technologist roundtable, one of the longest running public Skype chats.

Skype-modded Hulger phone

The Hulger P*PHONE is a gorgeous retro USB phone. It's technically simple, just a microphone, a speaker and a cable.

Canadian artist and designer Mike Pelletier "added a lever switch connected to a phidgets interface kit [seen below] so a max patch can detect when you pick up and hang up the phone and automatically tell skype to answer or end a call. I made sure that the wires match the phone."

tags: skullbee, hulger, mod, skype, hacks, voip, phone, telephone, handset, switch

Call me at +1-510-316-9773, Skype me, follow @skypejournal and @Phil Wolff.
Visit our Skype Journal private roundtable, one of the longest running public Skype chats.

Skype Concept Art: "Free to Roam" Tee Shirt

Ashley Hutchinson created this art for a YCN 09 design competition. Her theme: "Free to Roam... It's about more than just free calls." Ash's flickr set, used with permission.

tags: skype, art, ashhutch, ahutchabove, conceptart, ashleyhutchinson, graphicdesign, huddersfield, illustration, typography, animation, ycn

Call me at +1-510-316-9773, Skype me, follow @skypejournal and @Phil Wolff.
Visit our Skype Journal private roundtable, one of the longest running public Skype chats.

Skype Concept Art: "Free to Roam" iPhone wallpaper

Ashley Hutchinson created this art for a YCN 09 design competition. Her theme: "Free to Roam... It's about more than just free calls." Ash's flickr set, used with permission.

tags: skype, art, ashhutch, ahutchabove, conceptart, ashleyhutchinson, graphicdesign, huddersfield, illustration, typography, animation, ycn

Call me at +1-510-316-9773, Skype me, follow @skypejournal and @Phil Wolff.
Visit our Skype Journal private roundtable, one of the longest running public Skype chats.

Research Topics in Collaboration

I wanted to follow up on my Monday post about the importance of collaboration products to Skype's business strategy. The great thing about collaboration is that it is very hard. Collaboration is less a discipline than a catchall term. It's peopleware more than technology, anecdotes more than evidence. Universities have no Collaboration Studies department in schools of business, humanities, engineering, or medicine. Industry and governments study collaboration but produce narrow benefits, poorly shared.

Frankly, there's no Collaboration Science to inform the design of the next generation of tools like Skype.

Society needs it. The web needs it. I want to do it.

So what questions about collaborative behavior and collective productivity could investigations answer? Which avenues could radically improve the ability of live and time-shifted talk to become work effort? What collaboration patterns and social software designs can break down barriers and bridge teams and connect project stakeholders?

I made a list and called it Skype Journal - Research Topics in Collaboration (not attempting any creativity there). The research areas showed four themes:

• Talk is a component within larger relationships
• Talk systems are part of a larger interconnected network of information systems
• Work adds constraints that help focus conversation
• Collaboration as collective productivity

and the topics fell in three clusters:

• Getting Started (Ridiculously Easy Group Formation; Group Goal Forming; To Do Lists, Calendars, Personal Time Management, and Getting Things Done Together; Fame and Reputation)
• Being Better Together (Augmenting Inline Conversation; From Discovery to Action; Decision Making and Decision Support; Collaboration Afoot; Situational Awareness; How Collaborators Use Search and Personal/Collective memory; Gestures of Tomorrow)
• Crossing Boundaries (Intergroup Collaboration; Earning Trust and Using Whuffie; Collective Presence and Project Presence/ActivityStreams; Transparency and Collaboration; Backchannels; Scaling Collaboration from Tasks to Projects to Programmes)

It's a quick read, needs pictures and I consider this a rough, incomplete draft. The questions are a sample to get a feel for the space to be studied. 

How can we answer the questions? Research. Each topic is amenable to a different blend of usability testing, instrumented communication tools, prototyping, field ethnography of high function collaborative teams, and analysis of data from virtual teams.

I'd like to assemble a body of knowledge that turns our digital tin-cans-with-strings into engines of effectiveness.

Help me kick start this. (Yes, this is a bit self-referential.) What topics are missing? Prior art? Can this research occur in an open space or must it happen inside a corporate firewall? Of all the research topics, which ones are low-hanging fruit and which are harder to reach but outstanding value? Here's the pdf.

Skype Journal - Research Topics in Collaboration - 2009q4

 

 

 

tags: skype, microsoft, google, ge, collaboration, research, science

Call me at +1-510-316-9773, Skype me, follow @skypejournal and @Phil Wolff.
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Skype Concept Art: "Free to Roam" laptop skin

Ashley Hutchinson created this art for a YCN 09 design competition. Her theme: "Free to Roam... It's about more than just free calls." Ash's flickr set, used with permission.

tags: skype, art, ashhutch, ahutchabove, conceptart, ashleyhutchinson, graphicdesign, huddersfield, illustration, typography, animation, ycn

Call me at +1-510-316-9773, Skype me, follow @skypejournal and @Phil Wolff.
Visit our Skype Journal private roundtable, one of the longest running public Skype chats.

Skype Concept Art: "Free to Roam" poster

Ashley Hutchinson created this art for a YCN 09 design competition. Her theme: "Free to Roam... It's about more than just free calls." Ash's flickr set, used with permission.

tags: skype, art, ashhutch, ahutchabove, conceptart, ashleyhutchinson, graphicdesign, huddersfield, illustration, typography, animation, ycn

Call me at +1-510-316-9773, Skype me, follow @skypejournal and @Phil Wolff.
Visit our Skype Journal private roundtable, one of the longest running public Skype chats.

Should Skype put Wave inside? Skype inside of Wave?

Skype could be a better Skype with Wave inside.

Should Skype clients be Wave containers? Perhaps. When will Wave become truly free of Google control? That depends on how many other software companies and enterprises start building and host Wave servers.

Would you like to see Wave inside Skype? Skype inside Waves? Federation of Skype names with Wave namespaces? Sharing of presence between the networks?

See also: Google Wave: Loosely coupling IM to everything and video: Ribbit Conference Gadget for Google Wave.

tags: skype, wave, google, googlewave

Call me at +1-510-316-9773, Skype me, follow @skypejournal and @Phil Wolff.
Visit our Skype Journal private roundtable, one of the longest running public Skype chats.

How will Skype target internal ads?

Skype's been showing ads inside Skype 4.x.

The orange backgrounds are commercial. They show promotional offers ("get 15% off") and explain value propositions ("Save money on..."). 

Some ads show tips and tricks to get more from your Skype experience or avoid problems.

Now we're seeing the first public service announcements. "Peace One Day: What will you do to make peace on 21st September? Visit www.peaceday.org." Instead of Skype art it features the Peace One Day logo.

UPDATE: You can control whether you see these messages at all. Skype menu, Tools > Options > Notifications > Alerts & Messages. 

Peace One Day is a third-party message. It's served in English so Skype's ad server apparently filters or ads are served in all Skype languages, the flavor selected by each user's language preference. What else can Skype use to target ad placement? They can serve locality (profile, IP address, mobile GPS). They can mine your shallow Skype profile for gender (women often omit this or lie) or keywords.

Would it bother you if Skype mined your chat text to automatically place commercial ads? Google does this. Is the Skype experience different than webmail?

How would you feel if Skype analyzed your buddy list and contact history? "Five of your friends dialed this ad." Relevance in advertising is good for users, right?

Perhaps there's a future in shared ads, ads seen by all the parties in a chat at the same time. "Manchester United is playing a friendly next week. Tune in." Fodder for conversation. Trigger a shared conference call to a service: talk amongst yourselves while listening to a tune or an interview with a celebrity.

Skype's been careful in their in-client advertising. They don't want to harm user experience or the Skype brand.

Email screenshots of your in-Skype ads to tips@skypejournal.com.

tags: skype, ad, ads, advertising, psa, promotion, adserver, advert, banner

Call me at +1-510-316-9773, Skype me, follow @skypejournal and @Phil Wolff.
Visit our Skype Journal private roundtable, one of the longest running public Skype chats.

Why do you uninstall Skype?

What might we learn from a Skype survey?

Which of the following are reasons why you are uninstalling Skype? Please check all that apply:

• Skype doesn’t work with my webcam
• I couldn’t hear the other caller or the other caller couldn’t hear me
• Buying Skype Credit is too complicated
• My antivirus or firewall software wasn’t allowing Skype to launch
• I used Skype in my company, but it is not allowed anymore.
• I received unwanted calls
• I was unable to use Skype because I had lost my password
• It wasn’t easy to get setup and started on Skype
• I didn’t realize you have to pay for calls to landlines and mobiles.
• I didn’t have a headset or speakers.
• I had technical problems or other restrictions not related to Skype (e.g. internet access).
• I have read that Skype is not secure.
• I find that using Skype didn’t save me any/much money.
• I am uninstalling Skype to upgrade to the latest version of Skype
• Money on my Skype account is/was missing.
• None of my friends used Skype even after I tried to get them to start using Skype
• It is not convenient to use because I don’t want to turn my computer on to make personal calls.
• The call quality was not what I expected.
• I had technical problems (other than bad call quality) or received error messages from Skype.
• Couldn’t use my credit card to make a purchase
• Skype is too complicated to use
• I was being spammed (e.g received unwanted calls/ chats or requests to authorise contacts from people I don't know)
• I couldn’t find any of my friends to contact who were already using Skype
• Skype takes up too much space on my computer
• Other

This version of the survey is from January 2009.

The causes fall into four broad buckets:

• Problematic perceptions of Skype's product and web experience,
• social behavior (too few people you want) and antisocial behavior (too many people you don't want),
• gear missing, limited, or just not working
• third-party interference (employer, networks, ISPs)

Have you dropped Skype? Given up? What was your reason?

What could Skype do to get you to try again? Which of Skype's competitors could earn your business?

tags: skype, surveys, customersatisfaction, research, market research, marketing, stats, uninstall, uninstalled, uninstalling

Call me at +1-510-316-9773, Skype me, follow @skypejournal and @Phil Wolff.
Visit our Skype Journal private roundtable, one of the longest running public Skype chats.

Add Directory: A Thing I Really Want from Skype for Business

Intranet and Extranet Directory Service.

I love that Skype lets me import my Google and Outlook contacts (at least those with phone numbers). That's not enough.

In the world of work I need to see my company's phone book. Not a snapshot, imported months ago, but the latest version.

• Add directory. Let me add my company directory to my contacts by reference. So I'm always looking at the latest version. This also relieves me from adding all three million people who work for my organization one at a time. Or keeping up with all the adds, moves, and changes.
• Add another directory. Frankly, I really want to be able to add "white page" and "yellow page" directories from partner, supplier, and customer organizations. At the same time.
• Find people. Let me search my company directory using the same search I use for the Skype network. It would be nice if I could restrict searches to specific directories.
• Departments as "contact categories." Many of us live in a world of hierarchy, orgcharts, and cost centers (centres). How about treating department names as tags? So it's easier to find co-workers and their colleagues?
• Autopopulate profiles. Company directory services are rich with descriptive information. Show it.

This is useful stuff.

So much easier to set up multichats and conference calls without leaving Skype to find all the details.

You can easily see staffing companies like Monster offer private directories of job applicants to a specific job. Or project management software sharing a directory of people assigned to a project.

You'll have to work out de-duplication, lifecycle events, authenticating against LDAP, facebook API, and other directory service protocols. But it's doable. This could convince workers to keep Skype up and connected all day.

 

See also:

• Aliases
• Alias Transfer 
• Provisioning
• Share Aliases

 

Skype is a productivity and collaboration tool, well suited for the workplace. Millions of people use Skype at work. Skype for Business is a Skype team and product family serving small and large organizations.

tags: skype

Call me at +1-510-455-4384, follow @skypejournal and @Phil Wolff. Ask for an invitation to the Skype Journal private roundtable.

Should Skype clients be Wave containers?

Last week Google announced Wave, a pre-alpha browser application project. The experience is like instant messaging but with the extensibility and variety you might find in facebook or OpenSocial applications. Wave can be highly decentralized, like email, with Wave servers hosted by any person or company that cares to. Wave clients run in browsers. (Good to know: Skype desktop clients have tiny browsers inside.)

Extensibility makes a container useful in more ways. Like adding new tools to your Swiss Army knife or multitool. Apps could change what goes on inside the chat. We will be able to combine them in interesting ways. To surround chat with useful information about people. To enrich ways we discover people to talk with, to initiate conversations, to conduct those conversations using the right tools for that conversation, and to use the history of those conversations meaningfully.

Wave solves several Skype problems:

1. One size doesn't fit all. People are diverse. So are the ways we want to talk. Skype is mastering the middle ground, ignoring the long tail of experience demand.
2. Skype is closed. Promoting the Skype namespace so non-Skype users can chat with Skypers should increase demand for access to Skype services. New blood to boost the number of people in the Skype network. 
3. Skype isn't developer-bait. Skype might siphon off Wave talent. Opening up Skype to developers gives them immediate access to a world market, a great opportunity to bring them in to the Skype developer program. Done well, you might do without giving up control of Skype's added value.
4. Skype doesn't run in browsers. Waving the Skype desktop client could lead to a browser-based rich Internet application, a Skype that runs in a browser without a 20MB download.

The flip side is opportunity:

1. Skype meets more needs (lock-in in more markets).
2. Skype attracts new customers (faster word of mouth).
3. Skype attracts developers (lighter platform, bigger market).
4. Skype runs everywhere (not just in Skype clients).

What would you like to see Skype become?

tags: skype, google, wave, ebay, design, im, chat, voip, voim

Call me at +1-510-455-4384, Skype me, follow @skypejournal and @Phil Wolff.
Visit our Skype Journal private roundtable, one of the longest running public Skype chats.

Why a Skype platform can lead to happiness

Here's a 2004 TED talk by Malcolm Gladwell about the importance of variability in product design.

He concludes with four points.

There's a disconnect between what people say they want when you ask them (in focus groups, for example) and what they really want and do. We all say we like dark, rich, roasted coffee but many of us like weak, creamy coffee.

Horizontal segmentation can reveal that there are many variations of a product, each with their own appeal to the many variations among people. I like chunky tomato sauce, you like spicy. Until you reveal and test the clusters across a zillion dimensions, you'll never know how you should extend your product family.

While chefs have an idea that there is one right way to make a particular dish, they are wrong. The Platonic Ideal of a product misses that everyone in that restaurant has a different experience, different tastes, and that the chef's perfection of poached halibut will only produce an "average" happiness.

By searching for human variability and embracing human diversity, we'll find a truer path to true happiness.

On to Skype.

Talk is a fundamental human activity and it's tough to create access to the Skype network from everywhere people talk (or would talk if they could).

So Skype gives us one Skype. It's squeezed into different shapes to adapt to different devices and operating systems, but it's the same Skype.

This is not enough. Skype knows it.

Skype is resource constrained. Everything they have is going into creating access to Skype dialtone. There is no way they can create 20 variations of Skype for Windows to serve different market segments. Let alone the thousands of variations by which people meet, engage, interact, play, learn, discover, fight, love, and experience each other.

So Skype needs a multiplier.

A multiplier that lets thousands of teams of developers fashion a Skype that meets their way of talking and being social.

We call that platforming. Giving a solid foundation, a platform, on which others can build.

Skype has several weak programming platforms now, all of them under review. The review is good.

Because for as big as Skype's market is now, it can be orders of magnitude larger. And Skype doesn't have the time or people or money to make Skypes for all those contexts.

Skype for WoW.

Skype for First Responders.

Skype for Shoppers.

Skype for Stock Brokers.

Skype for Grandparents.

Skype for the Hypersocial.

Skype for Twitterers.

Skype for Getting Things Done.

Skype for Lovers.

Skype for Musicians. (I met a company that has this as a business plan)

Skype for Projects.

Skype for Poken.

Skype for Sales.

Skype for Lawyers.

Skype for eBay Power Sellers.

Skype for Product Managers.

Skype for Hello Kitty.

Skype for IMDB and other movie lovers.

Skype for Manchester United.

And a thousand more.

Each with their own social and communication patterns, their own feature priorities, different measures of success, integration with different other systems, and support requirements.

What would they have in common? An underlying brand ("Skype inside"), one login, backup, in-network connection to other Skype users, encryption, contact lists, history.

And an ecosystem eager to pour a liquid Skype into the forms that make each community, each niche, each segment, each person very very happy. 

tags: skype, platforming, design, technology, malcolmgladwell, spaghetti, tedtalks, happiness

Call me at +1-510-455-4384, Skype me, follow @skypejournal and @Phil Wolff.
Visit our Skype Journal private roundtable, one of the longest running public Skype chats.

Download Gladwell's talk

• Audio to desktop (MP3)
• Audio to iTunes (MP3)
• Video to desktop (Zipped MP4)
• Video to iTunes (MP4)
• Watch this talk as high-res video (MP4)

Open Arms: a data portability approach

Caveat Lector: this is a rough draft of my thinking on what a Portability EULA /TOS should say/do/include. Please comment. - Phil

We've discussed Graceful Exit, the ability for people to control their departure from a site or service.

Open Arms starts at the beginning of your relationship with a service. Let's summarize it, break it apart, and explain why this is a powerful way to do business.

Open Arms is a combination of policy and technology.

The policy says:

When you come to our site,
bring all of yourself.
We'll help you put it to use
in our context.
We'll make it easy to come.
We'll keep it safe.
We'll respect ownership as you see it.

What you add while you are here
will join your collection
and be portable in turn.

The elements.

All of yourself.

Bring your identity, your contacts, your history with your contacts, your photos and videos, your playlists, everything digital.

We'll ignore what we cannot use.

Put it to use in our context.

Every site has a context.

• Things it does
• Purposes people share
• Community standards of behavior.

For example:

• Monster brings work and workers together.
• Flickr helps people manage what comes out of their cameras.
• YouTube is a community of video.
• QuickBooks helps you manage your business.
• Chemistry helps you find true love.
• Amazon and eBay bring buyers and sellers together.

We need your data. These sites could help you do more and do it smarter with more and fresher and truer information from you. Monster could create team job search features if it knew your social graph. Chemistry could be more accurate if it had your music and video playlists.

Our sites are verbs. We do things. The more data you bring, the richer the data, the fresher and more standardized the data, the more we can do, the more creative we can be.

Most people don't try new sites because it's hard to recreate data. Especially for every site you visit.

Easy.

So for Open Arms to work,  bringing your onlife to each site you join must be fast, simple, easy, and obvious. And correct.

Safe.

We will protect everything you share. We will protect it from damage, theft, natural disaster, financial ruin, legal physical threats, from legal threats, from Martian invasion. As best we can. And we'll explain the threats we perceive and how we're protecting you and your onlife from them. 

Ownership as you see it.

"Ownership" is a tricky word: it means one thing to lawyers, something else to most people. Our online and mobile social experiences are a little ahead of the law. So all we can do is try to the right thing for you and for all of our guests.

We'll respect that your stuff is only "mostly" yours and that you may not have permission to share them with strangers. You may not have permission from the subject of a photo, or their parents. You may have clipped a blog post to share under fair use, but not for general distribution. You may have a confidential email that could endanger lives if leaked.

We will assume everything you bring is private to you and that you will tell us what can be shared, with whom, and under what conditions.

We'll make it easy for you to re-use your choices, so you don't have to explain yourself everywhere you go.

Portable in turn

Reciprocity works. So we're going to share with other sites the part of your onlife you spend with us, as you see fit. So you never feel we're holding your data hostage.

What's next?

So, we've "Open Arms" at the start of our relationship and "Graceful Exit" at the end. Next up "Ever Fresh" in between.

tags: dpp, dataportability, openarms, everfresh, gracefulexit

Call me at +1-510-455-4384, Skype me, follow @skypejournal and @Phil Wolff.
Visit our Skype Journal private roundtable, one of the longest running public Skype chats.

Optimizing Skype.com for growth and sales

UPDATE: A Skype executive asked Omniture to ask Skype Journal to take down this post, said Kristi Knight, Omniture senior director of corporate communications. "It was information that wasn't meant to be made available to the general public" said Brian Watkins, Omniture's public relations manager. Omniture removed the Skype part of the webinar from the site after an employee accidentally sent a link to it to prospective customers in an email prospectus. Skype gave permission to use their story at The Omniture Summit in Salt Lake City this past February, a closed pre-sales pitch and customer education event. Someone at Skype was apparently very upset that this high level case showed up on our blog; enough to persuade Omniture to take a PR hit.

Before I explain what I'm going to do, let me explain why this information is blogworthy, maybe even newsworthy.

Skype Journal helps its readers understand the Skype universe. Skype's product features, business model, financials, performance, product strategy, technology, user stories, design philosophies, and everything that explains this rapidly changing, growing, influential company. This ongoing Skype story affects hundreds of millions of people worldwide.

Today's story shows Skype uses state of the art practices to get more out of each customer visit. This is not rocket science (social science, actually) and we'd expect to learn a little about the active management of one of the most visited sites on Earth.

While the information was released by accident, it was released nevertheless. As a courtesy, I'm removing the slide screenshots. 

The post:

Omniture helps web sites get visitors to act by testing variations on a web page's design. (Omniture has a pretty great home page.) Skype.com was featured in a workshop that showed tests comparing different home page and returning page layouts and content. The slides are from a pre-sales briefing but they offer some insight into Skype's day-to-day operations.

The overall goals: improve downloads and sales by adding or subtracting "branding" intensity.

Test one was for the Skype.com home page:

Three versions of the page are offered randomly to users, their behavior is logged and compared. In this case, A was heavily branded (more screen space devoted to art, people, and slogans.

1A was the existing design, "Heavily Branded," used as a control. About half of the page was a large horizontal block with a lifestyle photo showing a young couple on a swing, a screenshot of Skype for Mac contacts list, and a "Download Skype" button.

1B was simpler, with a lighter branding touch. Everything "below the fold" was cleared off, the screenshot removed, and the lifestyle photo down to half its previous size. The number of words on the page was cut in half. 

1C was very light, no photography or screenshots, word count cut in half again, focused on the transaction ("Get Skype Now").

Test 1 showed less is more with newbies. Recipe B improved click throughs by 1.4%. Recipe C increased downloads 4.6%. If all you want to do is drive new visitors to download, then simple, elegant, and focused could work.

This adds up. By constantly optimizing site design, Skype's visits to download.Skype.com rose 235.76 % year/year, twice as fast as visits to www.Skype.com, which rose 93.59 % in the same time according to Compete.com. More than 3 million people visit Skype.com monthly, and most of them land on the home page.

So Skype is now doing a better job of converting prospects into users of free Skype services.

What's the best way to convert users of free into paying customers? Skype uses a landing page for returning users. 

For test 2, can design alternatives improve the sale of minutes and gear? Again, three flavors of the same page. 

2A is the control again, minutes in a big, dark Skype Pro block on the left, a Phillip cordless phone package ad on the right. Below the fold was a row with "download Skype" and "Skype SMS" ads, and a row with three columns beneath that with seven different offers for gear and services.

2B is all about the minutes. The dark "Skype Pro" block is lightened and expanded to two-thirds width of the page. To the block's right are Skype Credit and SkypeIn links. Gear ads below the fold were cut to three bigger ones with photos. 

2C also de-cluttered like 2B. The right hand credit and SkypeIn ads swapped places with below-the-fold gear ads.

Unlike the home page test, the results were mixed and had no confidence score. 

So they dug deeper by seeing how different segments behaved. 

It turned out that weekday users liked 2C a lot, improving click-throughs by nearly 14%. However weekend users disliked 2B and 2C so much they offset weekday users.

Segments behave differently, even when you compare something as mundane as day-of-week. So the big lesson is to test how customer segments react to design ideas. 

I haven't really thought of Skype.com as a product, but it's clearly part of the Skype experience and contributes directly to Skype's growth, customer retention, and sales.

tags: skype, design, testing, omniture, home page, landing page, statistics, trends, growth

Call me at +1-510-455-4384, Skype me, follow @skypejournal and @Phil Wolff.
Visit our Skype Journal private roundtable, one of the longest running public Skype chats.

see also: flickr photo set