<![CDATA[Over at ZD Net today, October 18, 2006:
Ms. Dewey: Taking cute too far
If you haven’t seen Ms. Dewey, you will probably be hearing about her. She’s tkill the memory of Jeevesof Jeeves, who you formerly asked. She’s also a disaster as far as UI goes.
Built in Flash, Ms. Dewey is an antropomorphized search page that features an actress who apparently spent about 20 minutes in front of a green screen making chit-chat that loops as you contemplate your search and the results. She gets impatient, calls “Type something here,” taps the screen and asks if anyone is out there, pouts (she’s hot, so she can get away with it like Jeeves never could, a conceit that is sexist on innumerable levels), but mostly proves, as Google Blogoscoped put it, that she—the search interface—is “inhumanly dumb.”
(It’s a Microsoft gimmick: Get it, MS Dewey? Aren’t they a riot in Redmond?) Continue reading Ms. Dewey.
Is Yahoo’s glut Google’s opportunity?
The dismal is on Yahoo after it announced a 20 percent increase in revenue compared to the previous year’s quarter. Google, expected to grab as much as 25 percent of the online ad market in the quarter is succeeding by doing one thing that Yahoo hasn’t on its “on-network” properties: Treating individual ad placements differently through its auction-based ad inventory system.
Yahoo’s business is increasingly like that of a television network. It invests in content and community offerings that can be sold to advertisers on the basis of what still looks a lot like a newspaper or network rate card. This means advertisers are constantly comparing their costs at Yahoo properties to other placements, and with a growing tide of social networks where people are spending vast amounts of time and viewing hundreds of pages and messages a day Yahoo’s properties look expensive… continue reading Yahoo’s Glut.
Technorati Tags: Microsoft, design, torture
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