BJ Fogg's Weblog

Women are wired to communicate

The new Pew report on how people use the Internet provides a great snapshot of Internet history.

I've only scanned the report. Soon I'll put on my Ph.D. hat and read the document carefully. Like many studies, this one relies on self report, which doesn't always give reliable data. The differences in how men and women report Internet behavior may be more dramatic than their true behavior. But that's a whole different can of worms.

In this report I was most interested in the finding that women use the Internet to communicate more than men. Not a big surprise, given what I found in my research that led to YackPack.

(Oh, one more thing . . . Hooray for Deborah Fallows and her Pew team! I've done similar research, and few people appreciate how much work it requires.)

Email = slow torture

I predict that just five years from now, we'll look back at our current email systems and say, "What were we thinking?"

Many of us spend most of our waking moments doing email. It's a miserable user experience that fills our days -- and lives. Personally, I'd like to give up email, but I can't.

In trying to get my work done today, I used five email clients: Outlook, Apple's Mail, Entourage, Thunderbird, and Stanford's webmail. None satisfies. I use different clients for different purposes. (I hope to settle on two apps in the coming weeks -- just to keep my sanity. But that's not why I'm writing this post.)

My point is this . . .

Email sucks. I'm not the first to say so.  I believe our unhappiness with email will continue to fester. In response, we'll eventually adopt new forms of messaging and collaboration. Until then, email is the dinosaur we live with to get our work done.

Does YackPack qualify as Web 2.0?

The YackPack team has been a bit too busy to debate if our service is Web 2.0 or not. Perhaps folks outside of YackPack--people with a wider view of the landscape--are in a better position to judge. Their verdict so far: Yes.

Here are a few posts I found lately:

• Web2Linux lists YackPack as a Web 2.0 chat application (um, we're not really chat, but that's okay because we don't fit neatly in any category).
• In one alerti.com posting, Olivier Ruffin and Patrick Chassany list YackPack as a Web 2.0 collaboration tool.
  
• Anthony Timberlake posts about YackPack as Web 2.0 at Negative Horizon.

Now here's my favorite . . .

• MrMorpheus lists YackPack as #3 in their "Web 2.0 Tools Top 10" (cool -- thanks!)

So, yes, YackPack seems to part of the Web 2.0 revolution. I suppose that's a good thing.

Yacking in public -- at a computer kiosk

Last week I walked up to a public computer at Stanford and logged into YackPack. I saw that my mom had sent me a message, so I clicked to listen to her voice message. It played just fine.

I then hit reply to see if this computer kiosk would record a message back. I started talking and to my delight the YackPack recording worked beautifully. I didn't expect this public computer to have a working microphone. But it did.

I logged off YackPack and stepped back from the computer kiosk. I just stood there. After a few seconds, Professor Byron Reeves walked by and sort of chuckled at me. I must have looked silly staring at the computer, liked I'd never seen such a device before. He probably didn't realize that for me, this was a big moment.

Beta bugs give perspective

Over the holidays I was helping my dad get set up on Flickr. We ran into problems with the Flickr photo uploader. After about 30 minutes of frustration and no solution in sight, my dad said to me, "I'll bet it gives you a lift when other Internet companies have buggy code."

I must admit he had a point. If nothing else, seeing other people's bugs gives me perspective.

Women yackers catch up with men

During the first couple weeks of YackPack's public life, our metrics showed twice as many men as women registered for YackPack. This was a bit surprising, but then again not really . . . Men are more likely to test out new technologies.

But as of yesterday, the women have caught up. It's 50/50 now.

I say "hooray!"

Making YackPack Simpler

We've made YackPack even simpler with our new release.

In previous versions our interface had three tabs: recording, listening, and information. But we found that experienced YackPackers never use these tabs, while novices would click on them and get confused. So we got rid of these tabs and improved the initial user experience by about 40%.

It's a long story why the tabs stayed in our interface after they were no longer needed. One silly reason: We worked hard designing and testing the art, so we got attached.

My plan for removing the vestigial tabs made a few people nervous. Even after we learned that experienced users never click on the tabs, some folks wanted to keep them. It seems people take comfort in a familiar-yet-flawed user interface. The bigger insight: Because we humans are cognitive misers, we naturally resist change.

"If you're not embarrassed . . . you launched too late"

When deciding to launch YackPack six weeks ago,  I found advice from LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman reassuring. When meeting with Reid a while back, he said this to me:

"If you're not embarrassed by your first release, then you launched too late."

Well, it seems we launched YackPack on time, because our initial version had some pretty ugly warts. Six weeks later, most warts have been removed, thanks to our team cranking out weekly updates. In fact, this week's release is good enough to share without apology.

Whew (my credibility was at stake)

Webmasters can put YackPack on their sites (easy & free)

Last week we invited a few webmasters to embed YackPack on their own sites. We assigned them a partner ID and sent them some code snippets that access our service. We found that speedy webmasters can get YackPack running on their own pages in about 15 minutes. Mere mortals require 30 minutes to set things up.

The webmasters all said it was simple to get our YackPack service piped into their pages. They've invested about 30 minutes, and now we do all the work: keep the YackPack servers humming, backup the data, and support customers with questions.

For me it was gratifying to share YackPack like this. Every so often I go back to these new pages just for fun . . . a tennis club website with YackPack . . . an online high school with YackPack . . . a family website with YackPack. In each case, YackPack looks like it belongs on those pages.

We're not quite ready to roll out the YackPack partner program in a big way. But we're getting there. If you want YackPack on your website, email me. You'll be among the first to know (perhaps we'll invite a few more webmasters to be early adopters).

A bit more info here --  http://yackpack.com/partner_home.html

"Wow, that was too easy."

We invited a beta user to install YackPack on his own website for a tennis club. We sent him instructions. He got it done and sent us a note:

"Wow, that was too easy. I'm always amazed when this stuff works as planned."

So now this webmaster can offer YackPack to people on his site. We at YackPack do all the heavy lifting (servers, storage, support, etc.). He gets all the credit.