Waxing Philosophic » Web2.0

The much-anticipated, full and unadulterated review of the iPhone – three months in

jguttman — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 23:48:20 +0000

It’s been nearly three months since I began my second iPhone journey and if it’s any indidcation, the gist of this post has changed several times before I’ve managed to write it. The iPhone is a device that commands both loved and hated sentiments (but rarely anything in between), as Om blogged about last week. The first month of my second iPhone journey was pure bliss, and I’ll elaborate more on what made it so enjoyable. The more recent two months have been a mix of love, hate, disgust, frustration, joy, serenity and finally, disbelief during the many instances where the battery has died, rendering the device useless.

Starting on the upside (since I’m a positive person), there is a lot to love about the iPhone when it’s working:

Having one device that houses your phone, pda, music, videos is phenomenal.
Easy integration with iTunes makes for seamless podcast downloads and updates – I’m loving my NPR podcast subscriptions.
The way the music fades in and out when calls are received/placed is elegant and never ceases to feel good.
While not exclusive to the iPhone, a good stereo headset (mine is Shure) changes the phone experience and makes good audio possible.
The GUI of the device, Apple’s trademark, is as polished and refined as I can imagine. Simply opening/closing apps is fun every time…though considerably more fun when it happens quickly without delay.
What perhaps separates the iPhone most from other PDAs is the browsing experience, which is truly a pioneering achievement. The way web pages open, are stored and saved (up to 6 at a time simultaneously) is so cool. The way hyperlinks are executed and logins are magnified is extremely well designed.
Visual Voicemail – why didn’t anyone else think of that?
Building the iPhone as a platform, and opening it up to app developers, was pure genius and makes the power of the device nearly infinite, but how many of these apps do I use regularly?
1. The answer is not that many. My most used/favorite apps, aside from those native to the device, are: Facebook, KickMap (Interactive NYC Subway Map), Flixster, Yelp,
2. My second tier apps that I occasionally use are: StreetEasy (NYC Real Estate), Mint, iEasy Camera, Flex PhotoLab, Shazam and Airport Status.
3. Apps that I hardly ever use, but are cool: Paper Football, Labyrinth, PacMan, Urban Spoon, French.
4. The summary here is that apps are fun and cool, but not all that important or essential to my life.
Finally, the camera on the iPhone is strong. Photos are crisper than they were with my Blackberry Curve, and doing things with the photos I take (emailing, twitpic-ing, not MMSing), couldn’t be easier.

At this point in my iPhone journey (let’s call it January 15, 2009), I felt compelled to issue a public apology to Tony Conrad for my incessant provoking and making fun of his iPhone hardships. It seems that every time we’ve been together for the past two years, he’s needed to charge his ailing iPhone, whether we’re in a meeting, in Austin for SXSW or at a bar having a few beers. Proudly carrying my Blackberry, which lasted days on end without a charge, I found it fair to poke fun, unable to understand how the benefits could possibly outweigh the hassle. After some time using the device though, I better understand Tony’s decision. Truth be told, the benefits listed above are fantastic and for a while, clearly outweighed the hassle of the short battery life, so here it is. Tony, I apologize.

Now for the fun part. The first time I owned an iPhone, I lasted two weeks before growing frustrated with the touchscreen keyboard. With V1.0, there were no apps and the UI was less mature, so it didn’t take me long to call it quits. I sold it on eBay to someone in Sweden for 20% over what I paid. This time around, I’ve lasted a lot longer and continue to use the device, though recently more and more begrudgingly.

So what’s wrong with it? Where to begin….:

While Apple claims to have push email, it’s not really true. The iPhone shows if you have new messages, but requires a sync to pull them down from the server. When sending, it usually happens relatively quickly, but nothing compared to the blackberry, where messages are gone practically before clicking send. This delay introduces more opportunity for hiccups, as was the case today, when I had to get a quick email out to someone I was meeting for lunch. The message got stuck on my device. Luckily, I found my lunch companion.
Some of the shortcomings of the iPhone are just silly. For instance, searching for a contact takes approximately three times as long as on a blackberry. After you open your contacts, you need to scroll to the very top to access the search box, at which point you can start typing the name. This is always frustrating and takes too long. For reference, on a blackberry, you start typing a name the minute your contacts open.
No copy and paste? Are you serious Apple? I suppose this is a short-coming of a touch-screen display…no, I take that back because the Storm managed to do it. This is a huge and frustrating short-coming of the device. I look for copy and paste 3-4 times every week.
No MMS? Again, are you serious Apple? For a device billed as the ultimate multimedia pda experience, leaving out MMS capability seems odd, particuarly when blackberry has been MMS-compatible for years. Granted, the messaging format hasn’t exactly caught fire, but I’d like to read the messages that my two friends who have adopted the medium send me.
The battery life is dreadful. I touched on this earlier, but it’s probably the single biggest flaw of this device. Every committed iPhone user must invest in multiple chargers and use them frequently. My phone routinely dies on me (it’s on 20% right now and it’s only 6:20pm) and this is unacceptable. My Blackberry Curve rarely died on me.
The touchscreen keyboard is so-so, but significantly less efficient than Blackberry’s full qwerty keyboard. I think it takes roughly 50-100% longer to type than on the Blackberry.
The iPhone seems to have an issue with dropped calls. Talking to my dad last night, I was disconnected three times. Om referenced the same frustrations in his post last week. Not sure whether it’s AT&T’s network or the phone itself, but I suspect it’s the phone based on the behavior – the triple-beep and “lost call” messages I get.
The iPhone requires two hands to operate, which compared to a Blackberry, is a significant shortcoming.
The iPhone is fragile, somewhat moreso than other phones, leading Apple/AT&T to only warranty the device for 30 days (the same length of time that returns are accepted….hmm).

So that’s my take. As an entertainment device, the iPhone is fun, cool and well, entertaining. As a business device though, it comes up short of the Blackberry, adding time as well as frustration to one’s life. Is it worth the extra trouble? The answer is sometimes yes and sometimes no. Though after a hard days work, rocking out to my tunes on the subway before using the Yelp app to find an appropriate dinner spot can be rewarding. As for the public apology, I considered retracting it as my iPhone experience has evolved, but since Tony is my boss, I’ll leave it out there…at least until I retire the device.

Why Facebook has crossed the canyon, changed the way we communicate…and should buy Twitter

jguttman — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 15:49:33 +0000

Facebook has crossed the canyon. If the “chasm” is the leap from early adopters to mainstream, then the “canyon” is the leap from mainstream to mass commercial appeal. Facebook has taken that leap. In the past few months, my dad, uncle, aunt and the mother of a high school friend have all joined Facebook. Facebook has become, as I explained to a hold-out friend of mine last week, the most fun and efficient way to keep in touch with the people in your life. As recently as five years ago, I reserved most Sunday nights for catching up with people by telephone. That was the way I maintained friendships, particularly with people living in other cities, who I didn’t see face-to-face on a regular basis. I’d call them after dinner, speak for 20-30 mins, get an update on the past few weeks (or months in some cases) and then say goodbye, until the next time we called each other. Today, telephone conversations of this sort are passe. Why waste time on the telephone, a communication medium limited to audio, when we can peruse each others’ photo streams, see what events our friends have been attending, and most of all, from a single page, get a snapshot of their status’. The feature with which Facebook offers the summary view of our friends’ updates is called the News Feed. If we really care, we can review their historical status updates to get a more complete picture of how they’re doing. When’s the last time you received as complete of an answer to the question “How ya doin?” . Most industry wonks agree, the status update is Facebook’s single greatest achievement. It allows people to keep in touch with the absolute minimal amount of effort possible. It’s possible that Facebook makes it too easy, contributing to the loose ties effect that sociologists have been preaching, where our networks become less centered around a few close relationships and more around many looser ones. More than any other tool in my universe though, Facebook is having a significant impact on that shift in the social landscape. Their crowning achievement, the status update, is such a good invention that several companies have been formed around it, the most notable of which is Twitter.

Not surprisingly, Twitter’s growth trajectory has been similar to Facebook’s. Twitter virtually launched two years ago at SXSW in Austin, when it caught fire among a captive audience. Since then, it’s consumed the early adopter market and steadily made it’s way toward mainstream. In the past few months, several celebrities and consumer-focused orgs have caught on and grabbed ahold of Twitter accounts to communicate with their constituents. According to Compete.com, Twitter traffic measured by unique visitors is up 640% in the past year – though this figure doesn’t fully account for Twitter’s influence since a big chunk of their traffic flows through one of several messaging apps that feeds the platform. Like Facebook, Twitter is having it’s own effect on social behavior. I’ve recently noticed conversations taking place between groups and individuals that might be unlikely to converse otherwise. One example is GazaNews who has, not surprsingly, attracted a bunch of followers recently and engaged in some compelling back and forth. This is a good thing. Open dialogue and discourse between people that are geographically and/or ideologically far apart can only be healthy, and for a company as nascent as Twitter to be enabling this is a huge accomplishment. Twitter has essentially peeled off and borrowed a piece of Facebook by identifying and unleashing the full potential of this feature…not that there was anything Facebook could have done about it – it’s unlikely the status update could have been patented. Still, Facebook should buy Twitter to reclaim ownership of the feature and own the social media landscape that they’ve helped transform. It would re-establish them as owners of all things status update-related and give them another outlet for their ad sales activities. Better integration with Facebook would also expand Twitter’s influence exponentially, making it a far more powerful tool than it already is. The reality of Twitter is that it’s a feature that caught fire, but can probably only survive so long by itself. Facebook could likely acquire them for a reasonable price right now and quickly justify it by the further growth they can help fuel on the platform. It would also be a strong defensive move for them. If one of their competitors – in social networking, blogging or sharing – acquired Twitter, they’d essentially be stealing a piece of Facebook and I think that may come back to haunt them down the road.

Famous for a day….

jguttman — Wed, 14 May 2008 19:14:00 +0000

This chart graphs the traffic on Sphere’s blog in April. As you can see, traffic chugs along fairly consistently at 150-300 visits per day, then spikes to more than 3,000 the day of our acquisition, which was covered by various high profile blogs and mainstream publishers. What’s funny is that the influx of traffic only lasts two days before returning to previous levels. In fact, over the past week, traffic has dipped down in the 100-150 range, which is lower than normal. Perhaps, our ruby slippers are wearing thin:) It just goes to show that fame is often fickle and short-lived….

User generated photos picking up steam on Bergen Carroll

jguttman — Wed, 14 May 2008 01:54:53 +0000

When I put together Bergen Carroll a year or so ago, I setup a feature whereby readers could showcase their photos in a "featured photo" section by tagging them Bergen Carroll on Flickr. For the better part of 12 months, nobody noticed and the only photos rotating through the system were ones I uploaded myself. Then, something happened and people figured it out, possibly prompted by a few Flickr messages sent to neighborhood residents. Over the past two months, 80 neighborhood photos have been tagged Bergen Carroll on Flickr by 3-4 different photographers. I love that this feature has been noticed and is being used as intended. It shows that adoption can sometimes take time (and can require patience) before usage grows. Though having that patience is often a necessity if you believe a product has real growth potential. Another six months without adoption and I may have taken the feature down…..

in da AOL Sphere

jguttman — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 19:13:00 +0000

Yesterday was the big day, we announced our acquisition by AOL:
TechCrunch Coverage
Sphere blog Coverage
NYT/The Deal Coverage
All Things D Coverage

This is a thrill and very exciting, but also a tad bittersweet. Exciting because any time a small fledgling startup that you’re a part of building is acquired by one of the large Internet superstars, it signals that we’ve made it; that we’ve created something of value that others recognize and appreciate. Based on our traction in the market and accelerating demand for partnership, we knew this internally, but an acquisition by a brand like AOL announces it through a bullhorn to the rest of the world. It’s also exciting because AOL is giving us the opportunity to remain independent, which we love because the team has really gelled and is hitting on all cylinders right now. It’s fantastic that we get to continue working together and building out what we started with the resources of AOL. Of course, this is also where the bittersweetness comes in. I’ve been involved with Sphere for 14 months. For eight of those, we were engaged in a courtship ritual dance of sorts, that eventually resulted in me joining the team. For the past six, we’ve been sprinting towards the finish line and fending off other competitors trying to take a piece of our pie. Our pipeline is full with some of the biggest and most exciting brands and publishers. Our business should continue to grow and naturally, there’s a part of me that would have loved to ride this one out a tad longer, especially since six months was just enough time to really get in a groove. Though I imagine this is a sentiment that one feels whenever a sale of a business takes place, whether after six years or six months. Now, time to focus on the great opportunities this brings and to finish what we started. Onwards and upwards we go….

Ranching it up with Sphere at our “on-site”

jguttman — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 03:59:01 +0000

Spent the past week with the Sphere team at the COD ranch outside Tucson, AZ. It was a great opportunity to get to know all the members of a team that’s been working closely together over the past 6+ months. When you’re a virtual company, personalities don’t play as strong of a role in the functioning of the organization. It’s more about the task at hand and raw performance. I think this is one of the reasons we’ve been so successful at Sphere. It’s all about personal accountability and this puts pressure on each of us to perform. I’ll always be curious to know how our performance would have been affected if we shared the same office space. I’m guessing we’re better off in our virtual structure, and our friendships are probably better off for it as well:)

Anyway, last week was a great few days on the ranch, getting to know the team better, and drinking a few beers around the campfire. We coded a few new features and even pushed a new product or two out the door. Our founder/CEO, Tony Conrad, turned me onto some new bands, a nice surprise and thereby fulfilling his status as all-around groover.

Interview with Jason Falls on Social Media Explorer

jguttman — Sun, 30 Mar 2008 02:54:05 +0000

Jason Falls just posted the video interview we did together down in Austin a few weeks ago during SXSW. It’s posted with an article on his Social Media Explorer or you can watch the YouTube version here:

Connecting The Conversation – NYC Fete

jguttman — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 23:08:22 +0000

Last night Sphere co-hosted a cocktail party with The New York Times, Automattic (WordPress), Giga Omni Media (GigaOM), Hearst Corporation and True Ventures. The event celebrated the evolution afoot in the media industry, bringing together large publishers and bloggers. Quite an evening. Thank you to everyone who joined us and a special shout out to True Ventures and Hearst for making the event possible. Here are a couple of photos from the event which took place at the top of the new Hearst Tower overlooking Central Park.

SXSW – Recap from Austin

jguttman — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 04:40:14 +0000

Woah! Seven days in Austin for South by Southwest were all I could handle (in fact, more than I could handle as I escaped for one night to Dallas). I signed up for SXSW without knowing much about it, but with the general impression that it was a fun event and unique in the professional world. Both these assumptions proved spot on. By the second day, I was referring to SXSW as Burning Man for Business. In fact, there is significant overlap in attendance and I found myself discussing Burning Man several times over the week. The format of SXSW is very similar to Burning Man, with sessions and panels organized throughout the four days of the conference (and many people skipping the sessions altogether). While some of the sessions were entertaining and educational, the real meat of the conference happened outside the convention center at the parties, in the bars and throughout downtown Austin. In the evenings, tech stalwarts like Google, Apple, Adobe and a few upstarts in a Super Bowl ad-like move, throw parties at local bars where booze flows freely (as in gratis) into the wee hours. This scenario creates an extremely social ethos, not to mention makes for late nights and late mornings, all making SXSW a giant party for the industry. If you weren’t there, this might sound like a giant boondoggle, but interestingly, I found that more valuable networking and business actually happened that at your average conference. In an industry that is relatively young, where founders and execs in their early 40s represent the high end of the range, we’d all rather do business in fun, social environments than staid office-like conference halls. This proved out over the course of the week as I networked and connected with many dozen industry professionals from around the country. I also found these relationships more authentic and more likely to lead to friendship since the formality and forced interaction are lifted. I did manage to attend a few valuable sessions, my favorite of which was given by Jason Fried on Lessons Learned at 37 Signals. His message was overwhelmingly simple and the lessons he conveyed were mostly common sense. Sean Ammirati has a nice review of the session on ReadWriteWeb. Another session that scored high marks was The Worst Website Ever delivered by Merlin Mann which you can watch here on Viddler. Overall, SXSW was nothing short of awesome, and I’ll definitely be back in future years.

Sphere vs. The Competition

jguttman — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 21:13:21 +0000

People often ask us how Sphere’s products and technology fare versus our competition. While we believe that the results (namely our footprint) speak for themselves, it’s worth discussing some of the key differentiators between Sphere and other similar services out there:

Behavioral vs Contextual - Several well-funded companies are competing for a piece of our market’s mind-share by offering related content powered by behavioral analysis. In other words, people who read this article also read this one, so we believe there is a relationship between them and you might also want to read it. This technology is very cool and we love it when it comes to e-commerce and the like. When I buy a digital camera, it’s helpful to see the memory cards that other consumers most often purchased. When it comes to content, however, we think it’s much more difficult to establish reliable relationships between, often, very disparate articles. We also understand that click-through rates generated by these services on content are typically significantly lower than those generated by contextually related content, and we think this confirms our hypothesis. Sphere contextual matching will generate higher quality results on content more consistently than behavioral analysis.

Dynamic Results Guarantee Freshness - Sphere’s related content results are generated dynamically in Java-Script every time the page loads. This guarantees that we’ll provide the reader with the absolute freshest content. If I’m reading an article and a blogger and/or journalist published a contextually relevant piece within the past hour, this is something that I’d like to see and thankfully, Sphere will provide. Getting back to the point above, behavioral relationships typically takes time to establish, which prevents me from seeing the freshest results, from the source I’m on or elsewhere.

Breadth of Related Content - Our technology is super-flexible and this means we can generate related content results from a multitude of different formats and sources – including articles, videos, photos and podcasts. When you integrate Sphere with your site, we can generate related content from your own articles or videos, as well as from external sources including blogs, videos and podcasts. Since we maintain one of the largest indices of the blogosphere, segmented by topics, and already work with many large video providers, this all happens very quickly.

Simplicity of Integration - Speaking of speed and quickness, this is the icing on the cake. Several of our competitors require significant excavation and retooling of publishers’ CMS and website. Instead of offloading the work on our partners, we do all the heavy lifting at Sphere, including the indexing and configuration. When it’s all complete, we deliver some slick code wrapped in a red bow with instructions for implementation. That’s it – signed, sealed and delivered. Our typical implementation from start to finish happens in just a few days!!

If you’re a site owner or publisher and any of this gets you excited, send us an email by clicking the "contact us" link at the top right of our site.