Ship’s Biscuit — Flipping the digital landscape to portrait.

I was excited to be invited to try out Google’s new Ad Planner (more of this later) application today. I’ve used it a couple of times now and have suggested improvements and features. But that’s not important right now…

What is important is Google’s lack of interest in their 404 page.

10 years ago that little “Did you mean: ” was truly inspired. There was a time when I though “Wow! Google thinks of everything”. And that’s what great design should make you think and feel. At first you get that little warm glow when it seems to understand you despite the fact that you did something stupid and then after that you forget about it because it just fits in with your life. It doesn’t stop you on your journey, slap you round the face and then ignore you for getting something wrong. That kind of thing isn’t fun.

So I was pretty surprised to see this when I missed an ‘n’ off the word ‘adplanner’ in the the URL ‘www.google.com/adplanner’. Check this out:

This is a 404 page which, I guess is one of the most well-known error codes, given that we’ve all seen a couple in our time. Developers and designers often ignore them because they mostly feel that people should either get that kind of thing right first time or it happens so infrequently that it doesn’t matter. I was pretty appalled by this particular page. Of course it isn’t a critical user journey for Google but, being Google I guess 20 billion people see this every 10 seconds.

First, I though this was just because the Ad Planner application is in Beta. Turns out all of the applications lead to the same unhelpful 404 message. Take a look.

Okay, of course it’s not Google’s fault that I think slower than I type but there is an opportunity for Google to make me think “Wow! Google are wonderful, they think of everything”. It’s about forgiveness. To me, their 404 looks like this:

When surely, me and millions of other fingerly challenged people should be seeing something like this:

I know this is picky as hell but, take the Fail Whale as an example. Fail Whale is a lovely little picture that you see when Twitter is working too hard to process what you requested. People love that little guy and his birdies, there’s even official merchandise and a fan blog.

Never mind who failed, either way, it’s kind of insulting when a system tells you that you did something wrong and it’s not very friendly to simply say ‘An ERROR HAS OCCURRED’ - why so aggressive? When a system brushes over your inadequacies and attempts to guess what you’re after, you simply can’t help but love it. Despite lots of people being mighty upset with Twitter’s downtime, I can’t help think that The Fail Whale is responsible for saving Twitter’s ass despite the competition.

So, in conclusion, let’s just stop being so negative and think about The Fail Whale next time we’re thinking what to do with users who get things wrong.

(En français)

There are exactly one hundred million billion new viral marketing campaigns seeded every 10 minutes - the vast majority are completely dire and destined to fail. So what separates success from failure? Well, the best appear to exhibit similar patterns and by using these patterns in your own campaigns you could be on your way to a free buffet and a drunken snog at next Summer’s Revolution Awards.

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Apparently, the key to getting enormous amounts of traffic to your YouTube video is to place suggestive imagery at just the right moment of your clip. Suggestive enough for people to think it’s porn. This public service announcement appears to have had over 72 million very disappointed views.

Last night Google launched their Application Engine. Nocturnal developer enthusiasts, get excited. It allows you to built applications that are hosted by Google’s robust infrastructure. This is fairly significant strategic change, not simply for the fact that it allows people to create ubiquitous web applications that never fall over and have unlimited space but because Google seem to have actually employed a trained designer to create a logo.

At the risk of sounding overly simplistic, it’s actually a bit like the way in which Facebook allows you to build applications. For most web developers the feature list will look positively erotic, however, one fairly massive drawback is that you need to know Python. Having said that, Python is one of the more simple syntaxes (there was talk of merging it with Ruby at one time). It will be a massive boon for the Python developer community. Hopefully they will ad new languages at some point, but I wouldn’t hold my breath.

The level of integration with Google’s own apps is yet to be seen. And I’m yet to discover if they have a service level agreement (SLA) - this was the biggest drawback of the Amazon cloud as this prohibits application developers from providing any level of service for their own customers.

The Times reports that CERN, the place responsible from bringing us Le Internet has gone and done it again. They’ve invented the Grid, which is a system that works much faster than the normal Internet.

The grid isn’t to be made for use by consumers initially but is intended to analyse billions of Mbs of data from from the Large Hadron Collider which is attempting to discover some particle that is proving ellusive (I have no idea what this is but the Register does). But what does really interest me is the fact that this technology could be exploited by telecoms providers to help increase broadband speeds.

Apparently, nobody will bother saving anything to their own computer and just save it to the grid instead. Sounds good to me, I kind of already do this with Google apps. It essentially means that we’re another step closer to ubiquitous computing, if you’re into that kind of thing.

CERN Accellerator Complex

Really interesting example of ASCII art in paid search, if only it was possible, I’m not convinced that it ever actually ran. This is a classic illustration of the potention for diffusion within advertising. Apparently Google doesn’t allow this on account of repetitive punctuation. Well, at least we don’t have to put up with doubel exclamation marks. BUY NOW!! L@@K

Found via Martin’s comments on Iain’s post about search. Search being an area I certainly need to ‘wonk off’ on.

Imagine my dissapointment when I realised that this style guide for Web 2.0 turned out not to be a joke.

So now you know.

The Telegraph reports that Virgin Media are trialling a policy in which they trace people who illegally download copyrighted material and then write letters to them telling them to stop. Virgin Media just happens to be the first ISP to come to an agreement with the BMI but more will follow once the government decides to legislate, which is supposed to be this month.

A couple of problems I can foresee are that there are millions of files shared that aren’t illegal to share. Surely the ability to track each of the rights of every file on the network is far beyond the capacity of a few bods at the BPI (it’s the BPI that will be doing the grunt work, after all)? Plus, the current favored method of file sharing is to use torrents, which are hashed for extra confusion, the ISP doesn’t see the file name. Without listening or watching every piece of copyrighted material there is no means of tracking the material without the correct file name. My knowledge of how ISPs work is sketchy at best but it all seems a little far fetched. How about public access networks? How about people who share WiFi connections using the Fon network? Sounds like scaremongering. That being said, people have been fined in the past from data obtained from ISPs, presumably this will simply spur people on to develop technology that shields the contents from the ISP altogether?

Any thoughts on this?

People seem to be loving muxtape.com right now, and quite right too. It’s a super-simple and elegant way of comping together music for a friend, family member or someone you hope desperately to spoon.

Plenty of people at JPMH have been excited about Adobe’s new AIR platform. AIR is something that you install on your desktop that allows you to run standalone applications that can be built using standard Flash ActionScript (the scripting language used to Flash apps), this is what’s known as a runtime environment and is exactly how Java works. It’s a bit like running web sites but on your desktop. There’s a couple of quite interesting possibilities with AIR. From a brand’s perspective, if you can make a download-able application that is useful, compelling or exciting enough for people to install then you have the equivalent of a door-to-door salesman’s dream of being invited into a consumer’s home for a nice chat on the sofa with a cuppa tea and a nice slice of cake. ActionScript is a relatively easy language to master when compared with languages such Java and C++; languages normally associated with desktop applications. This is mostly because you don’t have to worry about such tedious little things as memory management, that’s all taken care of for you. ActionScript then becomes much more interesting when you can actually save things to the user’s hard drive and have a database that  can live on the computer’s hard drive.

AIR has been in development for a while but it has only recently become stable enough to become exciting. Northcode has been doing something similar for years and has lots more functionality, however, Adobe are offering an imposing and compelling alternative by making it open-source, essentially allowing other developers to add to and refine the AIR runtime environment itself. This is partially because AIR itself uses a number of open-source technologes such as WebKit and SQLLite.

Here’s an interesting interview on Wired from Adobe’s tech premier Kevin Lynch