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Marketeers’ relentness efforts for your attention

Notification spam

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One of my pet peeves is notification spam. Yesterday, I got one from Apple TV reminding me to watch a baseball game. I don’t watch baseball and never watched a game on TV in my life. I’ve no idea what prompted Apple to send me that, but I immediately disabled notifications from the TV app. It’s so annoying.

I forgot to make a screenshot because I was traveling and it actually interrupted something I was doing, but I’ve been collecting them for a while. Here are some examples of useless notifications.

Nowadays by default no app will get notification privileges. I never expected spam from Apple so it got through.

Growing your startup

Ownership

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Yesterday I had a good discussion about how to manage teams and people inside fast-growing organizations. One effective way I favor is making sure every team and person has clear ownership in their own domain.

Assuming people are onboard and aware of the mission and vision of the company, ownership gives everyone – person, team and manager – clear starting ground to discuss goals and budget. It also gives people the freedom to make the best decisions to further those goals. Of course, people will make mistakes too. Tweaking the size of the domain of ownership to the person combined with good management will minimize that risk, but tolerance to mistakes is important. You can learn valuable lessons from mistakes too.

Ownership also helps teams and people work together and foster an environment of clear communication and decision making processes which always a challenge in a fast-growing company.

The biggest challenge though is how to adapt while growing. The best way is to constantly re-evaluate. If you need a reorganization, you’re really too late. This was how that discussion started last night. Though the most painful sometimes is dividing ownership over time. People dislike giving away responsibilities. They see it as a personal failure. This is another reason to move quickly. It is inevitable though any growing organization.

UX comes in small packages

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When I stay in Las Vegas, I usually book the same hotel. I like this hotel. It’s just off the strip and has no casino. It’s more quiet and I like it that way.

The elevator button panel though drives me nuts though. It takes too many brain cycles to select the right button. Here’s a photo of it:

If they would’ve added 1/2″ of spacing between the button and the number, it would make it a lot easier to select the right button. Now I’m standing in front of it and have to make a mental leap to look at the left to remind myself it’s the floor number first and then the button. If you’re on floor 10, that’s just annoying.

Often UX improvements aren’t big changes, but little convenience choices to reduce the mental load of making the correct choice or perform a certain task. The new password manager integration of IOS 12 is a great example of that.

Hotel Wifi

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It’s interesting how hotel wifi used to be a major thing in my life when traveling and today it isn’t. Yesterday, I traveled to Vegas for a conference. I would not be able to tell you if the wifi in my hotel is free or any good. This used to be such a big deal.

In the not-so-distant past, whenever I booked a hotel the quality of the wifi was a huge decision factor. I would troll the hotel reviews for clues of its quality. In general, paid wifi was better than free. Free wifi meant no internet between 6pm and midnight. Paid wifi was often such a bore because you had to pay per device and you had to decide which devices you wanted to bring online.

Today, I don’t care. I use my phone and T-Mobile – my provider – is pretty reliable in urban areas. My other devices just connect to my hotspot. I don’t even bother with hotel wifi anymore.

It’s interesting how fast that changed.

Tech wars

When Titans Fight

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Apple, Google and Amazon are the most valuable companies in the world and they’re fighting to each other. Unfortunately it’s the consumer who loses in this fight.

A few examples:

  • Apple’s products are not officially available on Amazon
  • Same applies to many of Google’s products
  • The Nest skill on Amazon Alexa is a joke
  • You can’t buy or rent Amazon Video products on their IOS or tvOS app
  • Spotify is nowhere to be found on Apple TV
  • YouTube doesn’t want their videos to be on the Alexa Show

The list goes on.

Remember that Google Maps app on IOS back in 2012 just had 60% of the features of the same app had on Android? It made it necessary for Apple to launch Apple Maps. It wasn’t great, but at least it had navigation. Google caught up quickly, but Apple to this day spends significant resources to keep Apple Maps alive. They have to.

All of these companies are very successful in their own domains and the anti-competitive behavior is not hurting their bottom line by much, but it’s the consumer who loses and gets inferior propositions. I also wonder how often this happens to small but successful companies who are not in a position to fight back. We certainly can do better than this.

Honey, I broke the internet!

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I’ve been an adblocker since early 2000s. I did it for three reasons:

– Reduce cognitive load of the web – ads are meant to grab your attention but distract you from the actual content

– Speed up browsing – ads slows down page loading significantly.

– Privacy and tracking prevention

Early on adblocking didn’t happen in the browser, but was an add-on for a proxy server. I always run my own somewhere on the internet or at home. Life is much simpler now with browser extensions doing the work.

I do remember that using an adbocker often broke the internet. It was certainly not for the faint of heart. It took perseverance to keep using them and live with the “broken” internet. The filters at the time weren’t as sophisticated as we have today. Also browser extension have much better context of the content where as the proxy server had no such context – it just analyzed network requests.

You can imagine that not always went down that well at home. It certainly didn’t support the “wife factor” well.

Even though adblocking no longer breaks my internet, VPNs break it today. I use a VPN to get into the internet regardless of my location. ISPs routinely sell your browsing behavior or mess with your DNS to inject their own search results. It’s like the phone company routinely selling the numbers you’re calling or texting with. I don’t want that.

Yesterday, I ran into two of those issues I common encounter when using a VPN. First, Google thought I was in the “United Kingdom” even though my VPN endpoint is located in the US. Second – and I get these a lot – is that some service thinks I’m a bot because my VPN endpoint is not an ISP-owned IP-address. Google’s version of the bot protection makes solve silly puzzles to improve their automatic driving object recognition software.

Here’s an  example:

I got that again when I was changing my credit card on FreshDirect. Unfortunately I don’t think anyone ever tested that at FreshDirect because I was unable to complete the form after the finishing puzzling for Google. I ended up using the app to fix it.

Another issue is the streaming services like Netflix, Prime Video, Hulu, etc. To avoid people spoofing their location, they don’t allow VPN-based streaming of their content. The whole thing is just silly. I wish they were more like Apple who just uses the payment method to determine someone’s location, but I digress.

I do value my privacy more than a perfect working internet – I do hope this gets solved. Meanwhile I’ll keep helping Google/Waymo by solving their puzzles.

Browser Fingerprinting

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Yesterday, I was reading an excellent review by Ars Technica on Mojave. One of the new features which stood out to me is the new fingerprinting protection in Safari 12. In the article a few sites are mentioned to test your browser and I tried them all out:

The end result? It’s easy to fingerprint my browser and ultimately track me. I encourage you to try it for yourself.

I recommend everyone not on Safari to disable third-party cookies in their browser. Even though they still might be able to fingerprint you, it’s harder for them to track you over time and across different devices. Apple has the good sense to do this by default. Firefox and Chrome (and its derivatives) should get on-board to. It’s the right thing to do.

Privacy is important. I’ll write about that another day.

HD Earth Viewing System (HDEV) at Home

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On April 30th, 2014 the HD Earth Viewing System was installed on the ISS. It consists of four cameras pointed at the earth. The goal of the experiment is to test the longevity of off-the-shelf commercial video cameras in space. The views are absolutely breathtaking.

When I came across it back, I was absolutely mesmerized and wanted to have the live stream at home. The video stream was available through ustream and I had a spare iPad to run it on. Unfortunately the ustream app on IOS was never reliable enough to keep the stream playing for more than half a day or so. Eventually I gave up on it.

Earlier this year, the stream became also available on YouTube (see above). YouTube is a lot better at keeping the stream going. It can run for weeks without me having to restart it. Clearly YouTube’s engineers have done a great job on this.

I could finally build a setup to see the live stream all the time. I bought a 1st gen iPad Pro 13″ on eBay – they’re surprisingly affordable – and a AmazonBasics tablet stand.

It’s a daily reminder that we live on this beautiful planet and there’s a whole universe still out there to explore. It’s both inspirational and humbling to see the earth slowly pass by.

Sunday Morning Ritual

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My favorite cherished Sunday morning ritual is reading PostSecret with a coffee. Wherever I am, it’s a small moment of peace and contemplation. I can hide from “the world” for a few minutes.

What I like about PostSecret, is that it puts me in touch with my own feelings. They’re little jolts of empathy and emotions which remind me that I should listen to my own – I sometimes I forget they’re there.

Rituals are important and I’ve many little rituals. It keeps me balanced and grounded.

Do not disturb

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I came across this article dumber phone and it expresses well about how I feel about my computing devices today.

Smartphones are useful, but they are also incredibly addictive, and that addiction is at the epicenter of Silicon Valley’s effort to grab an ever increasing percentage of our minds. In that a substance or behavior controls us, it becomes our master, and that just won’t do.

Amen. There’s a lot of good advise in this post.  I’ve been battling this very thing for a long time. Not only on my phone, but on all my devices. I carefully curate notifications. By default notification are not allowed and most applications do not get notification privileges. Notifications are off for all apps on my laptop and iPad. My laptop is for working and my iPad is a distraction-free consumption device. I only enabled calling, text and email notifications on my phone.  

Even websites want to send notifications nowadays. I can’t even phantom why you would want that.

Apparently Nir Eyal wrote a whole book about it and then some which is ironic since he’s well-known for his other book; Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products. Perhaps it takes one to know one.