So funny. So funny.

There’s been some hubbub going around about how Flash won’t be included on the iPad, mainly because Steve Jobs considers it a memory hog and unneeded once there are other ways to play online video.

While he did claim that Flash would drain the battery of an iPad from 10 hours to 1.5 hours with Flash on, here’s an interesting stat:

Battery life on newer MacBook Pros has been as shrinking by over an hour with Flash active, although the faster processors and added memory help absorb some of the performance concerns.

Outside of playing video, run of the mill HTML with Javascript libraries is more than enough for most websites, and if you have a technology that’s draining systems that much, is it really worth supporting?

Flash is buggy and a memory hog and consequently, a poor user experience

This seems to be the biggest complaint. Microsoft tries to make Flash play well with Windows, even though they have their own product Silverlight. Most online video requires a Flash player, so they have to support it. The bottom line: operating system developers are maintaining changes for a plug in because the developer isn’t doing their job.

Or, someone else other than the author is supporting technology needs.

It’s a hard job making it work with all of the browsers and platforms, but in all honesty, Adobe decided to pick that battle when they bought Macromedia. I’ve experienced browser freezes on Mac OS X, Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows 7 across Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari and Chrome. For it to not work and crash on so many systems (and mind you, I have a MacBook Pro and a Sony loaded with tons of RAM), that’s just sloppy development and an embarrassment to Adobe.

I recently tried to do some remote usability testing using DimDim, a free service. They have a Flash-based conferencing product that allows you to do screen sharing. Not a trivial task from a programming point of view, but Adobe supports it.

After 30 minutes, we could not get it to work, so now I’m using GoToMeeting.

Honestly, it was a buggy issue. Every time the browser tried to launch, it crashed.

That said, the number one rule of User Experience should be: “If it crashes, the user has a poor experience.” Adobe, with their wonderful graphics applications, should understand it. I have no idea how many quality assurance people are on Flash, but they need more.

Flash confuses users

During the DimDim installation, there’s this security dialog that is run of the mill for us internet types, but most users, they freak out and want to go home. (The person I was testing kept cancelling at that point). Just recently, I was talking to a video publisher, and he was saying that at that point, 50 percent of the users that attempt to share video cancel the action at the security dialog.

Recently, I’ve been seeing confusing error messages on several sites (Mashable being one of them) about “security issues” regarding Flash. I selected the Settings button on the dialog, and was redirected to the Adobe site.

This is what I got. I consider myself a Web Expert, and I found this dialog confusing.

Can you imagine most of the Web trying to figure this out?

Outside of online video and some Flex apps, Flash isn’t needed

It is very easy to encode video with Flash. But outside of online video and a few Flex apps like TweetDeck, I personally have no use for Flash. HTML with jQuery achieves most if not all of the user interface needs I need to do elegant UX work.

The Virgin America decision to not use Flash on their site is a great example. They have a clean, easy to use site and a user base that is highly connected to mobile, and more importantly, the iPhone. To book a flight, does someone really need a full video with spinning cursors and animating tabs to pick the best time to fly from LAX to JFK?

No.

It becomes a simple business decision for a company like Virgin America.

There are 70 million iPhone users. They represent over 60 percent of the mobile web traffic. Apple won’t support Flash — guess what?

No Flash for Virgin America.

If I were a Product Manager on a site that had a highly mobile component and I made a decision to ignore those 70 million or so iPhone users (most of whom, seriously, make good money and like to spend it on toys like the iPhone), I should be fired if I ignored them.

The upside — Flash is on the way out

HTML 5 apparently has support for video without Flash (YouTube is running a beta now if you use Chrome, Firefox and the Chrome plug-in on Internet Explorer). If you take away some of the ads, and do most of the normal animations using jQuery, what do you really need Flash for?

From comScore:

The study found that 30.8 percent of smartphone users accessed social networking sites via their mobile browser in January 2010, up 8.3 points from 22.5 percent one year ago. Access to Facebook via mobile browser grew 112 percent in the past year, while Twitter experienced a 347-percent jump.

“Social networking remains one of the most popular and fastest-growing behaviors on both the PC-based Internet and the mobile Web,” said Mark Donovan, comScore senior vice president of mobile. “Social media is a natural sweet spot for mobile since mobile devices are at the center of how people communicate with their circle of friends, whether by phone, text, email, or, increasingly, accessing social networking sites via a mobile browser.”

All channels, all devices, baby.

• 30% of smartphone users accessed social networks via mobile browsers — this was up from 22.5% in 2009.
• Total social networking access via mobile browsers on all mobile phones rose to 11.1% — this was up from 6.5% in 2009. Most of this growth was in the uptick in smartphone usage.

How does MySpace survive if their mobile-centric audience uses their mobile site less?

This became an inside joke I at the Online Marketing Summit, one of my clients. I was doing the drinking thang (networking, talking with attendees), and I always have one gimmick that I go with at an event as an icebreaker.

The joke was, “so how do you increase conversion?”

“Red Buttons.”

I’m sure Red Buttons the comedian didn’t know he was going to be the punchline for a user experience jokes. “I’m here on Tuesdays, tip your waitress, next up They Might Be Giants…”

But…

That’s not always the case, as stated in this great tool that’s been around for a year, Which Test Won.

Which Test Won is a great little site that does what we all want: publish the results of A/B tests for ideas of better site conversion.

In the red button/grey button test, Verizon tried two versions of a home page, one with red buttons everywhere, and one with a single red button. The main call to action was a gray button.

Can you guess which one won? Go to the site to see.

All of the opinions below are mine, and only mine.

On top of everything else happening in the social space (Google Buzz, everyone leaving MySpace, Facebook changes), this happens: Facebook Patents The Newsfeed. You can read the full copy of the patent here.

Now before we all have a “What the hell moment,” here’s a few things to remember:

Some patents are virtually unenforceable

Various companies have patented the shopping cart, the GIF image, the one-click purchase, and the affiliate program. The one-click purchase made Jeff Bezos look like a fool for a while, especially after they went after Barnes and Noble.

If you’ve noticed, none are really enforced, except for the GIF image patent, which there’s “sometimes” a $5,000 licensing fee. Unisys at one point threatened to go after every website that had a GIF image somewhere on the site.

That was popular.

A few patents, like the one-click purchase and the affiliate program, have given rise to protests and eventual defeat of a lot of the claims Amazon had over the business process. Most of those patents are violated every second of the day because they are ubiquitous and so mainstream there’s no way to enforce them.

Some patents are more for defense against large competitors

While it doesn’t make sense for Facebook to sue everyone, I’m sure they’re thinking about what they can bring up against Google, MySpace and a few other large properties with a newsfeed.

Other places are probably thinking about how to rearchitect their solutions now to avoid any patent infringement.

That said, if you’re running a site that isn’t one of the top 1,000, I don’t think Facebook is going to be sending a lawyer your way anytime soon.

Some patents are for getting money out of people and for increasing market value

One of the few points people forget about Google is that the concept of AdWords wasn’t invented by them — it was patented by GoTo.com. I’ll admit that Google does it much better than GoTo/Overture ever did, but it was enough of a threat that Google eventually settled with Yahoo!, who had purchased Overture.

The lawsuit against Google related to its AdWords service. In February 2002, Google introduced a service called AdWords Select that allowed marketers to bid for higher placement in marked sections – a tactic that had some similarities to Overture’s search-listing auctions.

Following Yahoo!’s acquisition of Overture, the lawsuit was settled with Google agreeing to issue 2.7 million shares of common stock to Yahoo! in exchange for a perpetual license.

That patent was probably one of the reasons why Yahoo purchased Overture.

There are holding companies whose purpose is to hold patents. However, they are selective about who they sue because lawyers are expensive. It’s an ROI equation, and there’s no point going after someone without money, right?

GigaOM says:

Friendster, which was recently bought by a Malaysian company, made much of the fact that had obtained five U.S. social networking patents, at times using the patents to scare off the competition, at least in the press.

Scary.

Some patents are declared invalid

The U.S. Patent Office grants a lot of patents — it doesn’t necessarily mean they will stand up in court. Gibson Guitars has been on a tear, suing anyone that produces music simulation software like Guitar Hero. Read more here.

They have yet to win.

What would happen if Facebook went after MySpace in court, and the patent was declared invalid?

What if a single social network invented before Facebook had the same implementation, and Facebook were in violation of the intellectual property of that website? Would that company win $500 million like when Microsoft was sued over the browser plug-in?

GigaOM points out:

The patent is particularly valuable because news-feed style communication has become pervasive since it was launched on Facebook. However, it’s not clear that there aren’t precedents for the technology; for instance, the social network Multiply.com had a similar interface for keeping track of friends’ actions before Facebook launched its own.

Mutliply.com suing Facebook? That would be fun.

What next?

As big as a deal as this may seem, it isn’t until they do something with it. For now, it’s just another asset they have in the universe of Social Media.

I would have never thought of this.

Google guesses who your friends are, including your mistress that your wife doesn’t know about (and then shows everyone this).

This is such an inexact science, because anyone can figure out your email address. We receive so much spam and other garbage through email account (is a shopping site really my friend?) and there are conversations you want private. Those connections are now public by default, as Gizmodo points out:

• A girl you slept with in college sends you a message on Gchat, to tell you she has five beautiful children now, and that she doesn’t ever think about you, ever. Ok!
• You exchange some messages and a couple emails to be polite. You defuse the situation. You don’t mention it to your current girlfriend, because that would be weird.
• Coincidentally, you enable Google Buzz, which adds both your current girlfriend and this lady who you politely deflected.
• Your girlfriend checks out your Google profile, sees your friends list, and asks you who that lady is.
• You clumsily try to explain, “Oh, it just adds people you talk to automatically,” which only makes things worse.
• Fight!
• You break up, which was probably a good thing anyway, because your relationship sounded really unhealthy. But you get the point, right?

The situation is so bad, some sites (like Lifehacker) are showing ways to turn off the contact list. Think about it — do you want every telemarketer to be your friend? Facebook has one important filter: you can deny friend requests.

It’s never, ever a good idea to create a social graph the way Google did. That’s why most of the IM clients do the double opt-in approach (and the follower model is killing Twutter).

Google Buzz reinforces the power law online, which means you’ll get to see 100 photos of Jason Calacanis’ dog, or promoting how he pays more than some services, but less than About.com for content

The people you want to talk to automatically become long tail, yet the people who are endlessly self promoting always bubble to the top because they have 11,000 followers, and someone’s always going to make a comment.

Social Customer points out buzz does two things that will simply make it unusable.

1. It shows threaded conversations and strongly highlights the initiator of those conversations, and makes the comments subservient to the initial post.
2. It takes posts that have “new” comments and immediately bumps those posts to the topmost position of the viewing window.

This interface will greatly reinforce the existing power law relationships online, and have the effect of greatly reducing the serendipity and interestingness in things like the current Twitter and Facebook interfaces.

Not that many people use Gmail, and most who do are the digirati.

From twittercism:

This is also the first time I’ve noticed how few of my friends actually use Gmail. I loveGmail, and recommend it to everybody, but people are often quite set in their ways, and prefer to stay with Hotmail or Yahoo, irrespective of the lack of features. Looking at my address book, I’m guessing probably less than 20% of my friends have a Gmail address, or even a Google account, for that matter.

Yeah, it’s mad, but it also means Buzz is already limiting my network.

Social networking is an all or nothing game, and if you only have 20 percent of your friends, do you really think the other 50 percent or so are going to create a Gmail account to see Google Buzz?

I think not.

What’s the take away? Not ready for primetime.

I agree with twittercism:

My gut feeling? Unless they make some major changes and improvements to Buzz, and soon, and that includes addressing those privacy issues, it’s never going to be a threat to Twitter or Facebook. It’s just another aggregator. And a bad one, at that.

Everyone sees Facebook as the center of their social graph. They also see Google as the place that wants your information, which is why people won’t trust them with their social graph.

What do you think?

Stephanie Bergman is a Social Media and Product Management consultant friend of mine. She’s very sharp, a good compass of where to go. Here’s her opinion of the iPad, and you can find her blog here. And yes, I’ll have my own opinion.

Earlier today, Apple announced the tablet computer the world has been waiting for. And it isn’t quite a tablet or a computer. It’s more of an entertainment device – a “third category” as Steve Jobs put it – and one I don’t really think the world needs.

I’ve never been really excited about the idea of a tablet, so I was biased from the start. A keyboard is pretty essential to me for anything, I type very fast and have no patience for anything that slows me down. That said, I was still curious to see what Apple was going to do beyond making a really big iPod Touch. I mean, this is Steve Jobs, I expect to see a paradigm shift, a massive step forward, a change in the way we do things. That’s where I’m disappointed.

The iPad is a big, expensive ($499 for the cheapest version without 3G), iPod touch.

The positive – there are going to be people who will love this thing (other than the usual Apple fan boys/girls). It’s gorgeous, and if beautiful design is your thing, you’re going to love using this. It’s a nice entertainment device, a decent size to watch television on, iPod, and a good ebook reader. If someone doesn’t have access to a television or other computer, this could fill that gap. Maybe someone with roommates or college students. Business folks will also love whipping this out in a meeting to do a presentation. Assuming, of course, that they don’t mind presenting in Keynote. It’s also going to open up an entirely new world of computer gaming as people innovate with the touch screen interface. Someone who travels a lot would like this as well (battery life is reportedly around 10 hours) – so long as they don’t mind using the screen to type, or carrying another laptop/netbook.

There definitely IS a use for this. I simply don’t think that now is the time for it. It won’t replace a computer – you can’t run Word or PowerPoint on it, you can’t even do something as simple as keep AIM open while surfing the web – and it isn’t a phone either. No camera, no GPS, no keyboard, no Flash. How many programs are you running on the machine you’re reading this post on? You couldn’t do that, it’s clearly not intended for work. This would have to be complimentary, an entertainment-focused device in addition to a computer and phone and a television…and that’s where it loses me. The costs don’t work out.

I’m not the average user, I know that. I have an iPhone, iPod, Netbook, Kindle, and Macbook Pro, and they all have different uses for me. I rarely watch videos online, that’s what the Roku and TiVo are for, and I like being able to curl up in bed with a kindle without having to worry about touching the screen or it rotating. I have absolutely no use for the iPad, it doesn’t offer me anything at all beyond what I already have.

Then there’s a name. Immediately after the presentation was over, the word iTampon was trending on Twitter. The name iPad was not. The jokes are never going to end (in fact, they started years ago), and it gives me crazy giggles to think that there’s an iPeriod app for the iPad.

The bottom line is – there is nothing revolutionary about this. It’s pretty, it’s cool, I’ll absolutely drool over it when I see it, but that’s about it. If any other company had announced this, I would have shrugged. But it’s Apple – I expect innovation, and there’s very little.

Oh well. But hey, it’s first gen. I’ll wait until next year for the brain implant.

Congrats, this is the 500th post on Usability Counts.

I’ve met Dana Oshiro, and she’s a great writer. I’m glad to see she’s written something about UX, especially in an area we give so little attention to.

Over the weekend we had a chance to highlight Graphic.ly – a company that opted to release early (and imperfectly) in exchange for valuable user feedback. As companies look to their peers and audiences to help define product features, there’s a greater need for scalable testing platforms. Here’s a summary of 8 useful services that will help put you on the path to product greatness.

Read on…

Sometimes we forget about this, but white space is a very important component in design and user experience. Inspired Magazine has a great post about the usage of white space in design, even if it is print.