The subscribers shall keep things free, to a limit

If you remember a few weeks back I was fretting about the fact that almost everything on the Internet is free. This is what comes from a lifetime of being told that if a deal seems too good to be true (sub-prime mortgages, 99 cent laser vision surgery), it almost certainly is. I talked about how it seemed unrealistic to think that ad sales alone could support everything useful or entertaining that could be provided to us through a website.

I feel better about the prospects of enduring free-dom, if you will, after listening to Chris Anderson, editor in chief of Wired magazine, last week on National Public Radio’s Talk of the Nation. I already sent around the link to the program, but here it is again.

Anderson explained that we can get so many things online for free because it’s so cheap to do business in cyberspace. And it’s getting cheaper all the time as the prices fall on inputs like bandwidth and storage.

OK, cheap is one thing, but can you really give people something of quality online for nothing? Not exactly but close. Anderson described an online business model called “freemium,” which is shorthand for “free to most, premium for a few.”He gave the example of Flickr, the photo storage and sharing site.

Almost everyone who uses Flickr opts for the free basic membership. But the site offers additional features -- designed to appeal to serious or professional photographers -- for a subscription. Those subscribers, though a minuscule share of all Flickr users, pay the freight for all of us freeloaders and, presumably, supply a profit to Flickr’s owners and investors, too.

Anderson said this is the opposite of the old-fashion free-sample strategy – you know, where a bakery gives away 1 percent of its muffins in the form of free samples, or a department store lets women spritz themselves with 1 percent of the perfume, in the hopes that this will help move the other 99 percent in inventory.

Freemium, on the other hand, is giving away 99 percent of the product in hopes of selling 1 percent. This is possible only because it’s so cheap to provide many services online compared with, say, the cost of baking muffins or concocting, bottling and shipping perfume. As Anderson put it, “Offering a Web service to an individual, the sort of casual user, is so close to zero that you that can really round down.”

The problem with freemium thinking is it works only when your operating costs are puny. Moving digital bits is cheap and easy, at least for now. Moving atoms, in such forms as carpet or cars or milk, is expensive and complicated. Moreover, sites like Flickr, MySpace and Digg, whose founder, Kevin Rose, was a guest on the same Talk if the Nation as Chris Anderson, all get their content for free from their users and from the acquiescence of other sites in permitting reposts. Bakeries, department stores and other business that deal in goods don’t get their content for free.

Neither do service-oriented businesses like news organizations, universities or doctor’s offices. Money has to come from somewhere to pay the salaries of people with professional expertise. It’s hard to imagine any of those industries developing a premium service so desirable that it could be priced so high that if only 1 percent of customers bought it, the other 99 percent of us would be able to get our service for free.

Microsoft, why must you task me so?

See this line?

I hate this line. I want to annihilate this line, but I can’t.

This line represents a bad user experience to me.

After listening to Janice Rohn from YellowPages.com talk to class the week before spring break, I started thinking about bad user experiences I’d had online. Honestly, I couldn’t think of many, outside of my feckless attempts to enter virtual worlds earlier in the semester. But in those cases the villains were out-of-date hardware or drivers, not inhospitable websites. Or at least not entirely inhospitable websites.

The line above didn’t come from any website or virtual world, though. It came from Microsoft Word 2007, the program in which I composed this and past posts.

I was taking notes in class on my laptop some weeks back, running Word 2007, when I wanted to divide one section of the notes from another. I held down the hyphen key until it made a dotted line halfway across the page. When I lifted my finger off the key and hit enter, the dotted line turned into a solid line extending from one margin to the other, just like the one above.

I wasn’t exactly shocked. Word is always acting like it’s smarter than I. Anyone who has used the program is familiar with its habit of turning successive single lines of type into bulleted items, whether you want them bulleted or not. I’ve talked with many PC users over the years who feel as I do, that Word should mind its own business.

I can usually outsmart the impertinent bulleting, but when I tried to move text from below my intrusive line to above it or to get rid of the line altogether, I couldn’t. I tried all combinations of backspace deleting, forward deleting, cutting-and-pasting copy, pasting it into a new file – no dice. I even tried changing the color of the line to white. It stayed black.

As a last resort I turned to the Help files. Or rather I would have turned to them, except Help was nowhere to be found.

In previous versions of Word, Help was a pull-down menu on the far right of a row of pull-downs that started with File and Edit. But in Word 2007 – in fact, in all the Office 2007 programs – there are no pull-downs, just bunches of buttons grouped under tabs. And there’s no tab for Help.

It was only after talking with a Microsoft Office expert in my office that I found out where Microsoft had hid the Help files in Word 2007. Hid is right. They’re accessed through a small circle with a question mark positioned at the far upper right of the screen, directly below the X that closes the file or exits the program. The question-mark circle is blue and it’s set against a background of lighter blue.

What were they thinking? This redesign could only have come from the same geniuses who replaced the “Bookmarks” or “Favorites” pull-downs in Internet Explorer with a star and the add-bookmark function with star and a + sign.

I think I know what’s going on here. When Microsoft, or any software maker, comes out with a new version of a program, they intentionally make it look different. The thinking seems to be, who would pay to upgrade to a new version of a program if it looked exactly like the old version?

I’ll tell you who would, I would.

I like new features, but I hate having to relearn how to navigate a program. Most industries understand this. On cars they don’t yank the turn-signal activator off the steering column and move it next to the heater controls just to differentiate this year’s Malibu from last year’s.

Websites understand the value of convention, putting things where people are used to finding them. They want to make it as easy as possible for visitors to get what they want. They know that if they frustrate users, users are likely to jump ship to a user-friendlier alternative.

Having built a virtual monopoly in office software for PCs, Microsoft doesn’t have to worry much about a competing word processor with more easily removed lines stealing its customers. We’re pretty much captive at this point.

So what's the lesson from all this? Nothing profound. User experience may always matter, but it matters a whole lot less in the absence of competition.

What I've Learned So Far

I’m sure I’m not the only person whose eyelids did that cash-register ch-ching thing in class last week when David Pollock told us that companies will pay big money for people like us. People who know how to drive eyeballs to a website, that is.

I was mentally depositing my first obscenely large paycheck when I started to think about what our friend the venture capitalist assumed we knew or would know by program’s end. Has anything I’ve learned so far made me more of an expert on eyeball attracting? Maybe.

What you see below is a partial list of what one APOC student, me, has learned at roughly the midway point of his first semester. For the handful of you who are taking all three courses this semester along with me, almost all of these should sound familiar. The rest of you will be baffled occasionally or continually.

Add items to the list by posting them as comments.

What I’ve Learned So Far

If a tree falls in a forest and the tree isn’t in the top three search results, it didn’t fall.

A book with an ape’s head and the word “nutshell” on the cover can be surprisingly devoid of mirth.

You are not likely to create the next Yahoo or eBay, but there are a number of three-legged voles out there who are dying to network. If you don’t monetize them someone else will.

So what if there are already five social networking sites devoted to crippled voles. None of them allows users to upload photos and none is in Hindi. Seize that niche!

You can maintain order in a community through Gemeinschaft or Gesellschaft, but either way some people are going to feel they've been schafted.

People who lead Second Lives for 40-60 hours a week … must not be enrolled in a full-time graduate program. Paradoxically, they may be teaching in one.

If you plan to launch an SNS, an MMOG or even a simple MOO or MUD, you’re going to want a developer who can express it in UML first and who can compose a thorough PRD (XP is for hippies). That way when the OOP is done you can be reasonably sure that the XML will work with the MySQL and connect to any APIs. IMHO.

If you don’t like something you see on a website, send the site host or ISP a notice-and-takedown letter stating that the material is infringing on your copyright (even if it isn’t). You can be sure the material will be down in a jiffy.

Ruby on Rails is not slang for a drug addiction.

The Tragedy of the Commons is a social model, not that Carl’s Jr. in the back.

Before you ask a venture capitalist for a million dollars, shave. Especially if you plan on showing a little leg.

You can generate good “buzz” for your product if when combined with another product it makes a geyser.

If Britney Spears kills herself tomorrow, don’t get on an airplane for a few weeks.

If you can use the word “granular” in a sentence without mentioning sugar, people will think you are tech savvy.

If you are notified that five people have been searching for you online and you are willing to pay $60 to find out who they are, there may be hope for subscription-based Web services.

The more difficult it is to join an online community (entry costs) and the more ritual there is involved with being in the community, the tighter-knit that community is likely to be. Sort of like Judaism.

A programmer is likely to be pleasantly surprised to learn that you have an STD.

Television and air conditioning destroyed civic engagement in this country. The Internet is just here to dance on the grave and maybe set up a webcam.

The Cone of Uncertainty illustrates how it is difficult to make accurate estimates about software development when you first start out but that it gets easier after a couple of iterations. The Cohen of Uncertainty is me at the entrance to any virtual world.

Anonymity is for Wusses

You’ve probably seen that cartoon of the dog at the keyboard with the caption, “On the Internet nobody knows you’re a dog.” If not, here it is.

I’m here this week to give all those dogs online who refuse to identify themselves a rap on their collective snout.

No, I’m not talking about less-than-beautiful people (example at left) who post personals with, shall we say, imaginative self-descriptions. I’m talking about Internet anonymity and accountability.

Earlier in the week I went online looking for information on a dermatologist I’d seen back in Reno. I needed the address and phone and fax numbers for his office so could get my medical records transferred to the health center here at USC.

I found the doctor all right, on a page of Citysearch, which is like Yelp or Yahoo Local, a directory of local businesses with user comments. But here’s something else I found: a user comment that began, “This is the worst customer service you could ever get.”

The entry went on to complain about the phone manners of the receptionists and the tone of voice, manners and attitude of the doctor. An “extremely unpleasant experience” is how the user summarized the visit. It was signed “anyasmdp,” whoever that is.

And that’s my point.

If you’re going to criticize someone by name, you should have the guts to give your name. But that’s not the convention on the Internet. Search the comments on blogs, news groups, reader forums, you’ll see almost nothing but aliases. Why?

I’m can see why you might want a handle like Krang the Karnivorous when you’re marauding around some virtual fighting world. Or if you’re engaging in some form of virtual infidelity, the motivation for adopting an alias is obvious. But what about everywhere else?

Back on the Citysearch site, just above the rant from “anyasmdp,” the doctor posted a response. Technically it was a second review (five stars). I know it was the doctor because she used her real name as her user name. Incidentally, this wasn’t my doctor but his wife, who shares the practice. Also, I clicked on “anyasmdp,” and the profile page it linked to didn’t provide any further identification.

The dermatologist wrote that she remembered the anonymous poster’s visit. She flatly denied the allegations and mentioned that the patient in question refused to pay to be seen.

Obviously I can’t tell who is right in this dispute. But the flame made me think of our friend Greg Markel, the search-engine-optimization expert, and his illustration of brand-reputation management on the Internet. If you recall, he described how important it was not only to have one’s name show up high in search engine results but that you don’t want negative comments to be the first thing the reader sees.

I wondered how much damage that anonymous Citysearch comment would do to the dermatologists’ practice. Probably not much. In the high desert of northern Nevada there’s enough skin cancer for an army of dermatologists, and Nevada has a severe shortage of physicians. But I also thought about how much it would cost to hire a Greg Markel to do his spider-charming if the situation were different.

Uh, yes, you in the back, waving your arm furiously...

“But what if the complaint is legitimate? Then the more hits the comment gets the better informed the public is about a bad doctor.”

I say the same comment could have been left but with integrity by signing it (warming: self-righteous statement coming down in 3, 2 . . .), which is why I always use my real name when I leave comments online.

It may not matter if you’re a dog online, but in most contexts it’s the responsible thing to wear your dog tag -- that is, identify yourself. That goes double if you plan on doing you-know-what on someone.