In the current implementation, favorites are interesting but terribly annoying to set when using the Zune client for playback. (It’s at least 5 clicks & two waits from a song in Zune client… (1) right-click song, (2) click More About This Album, …wait…, (3) click More At Zune.net …wait for the browser to start & load the page (may have to log into Live ID)… find the song in the list again… (4) click the song in the album (may have to scroll), (5) click Fav. (6) close the browser window or tab if you didn’t want it.)

I don’t recall if it’s even possible to favorite on the Zune device… please let me know if it’s easier than that.

So, my guess is in the current implementation favorites are likely things users want to show to others on thier card, badly enough that they will go through the effort I described to do so, but that favorites are abandoned after some time by N% of users. (When they realize there is no benefit, and that effort is high, and they churn.) And I bet some users only have 1 or 2 favorites from accidental clicks in the Zune card.

The upside is that perhaps if setting favorites has a “cost”, they really are more meaningful than actual plays, for those users who go through the effort to set them regularly & lovingly. So then, perhaps they have value in matching like-users up. Limiting the # of favorites (as is already being done) has this effect too, although it kind of pissed me off when I discovered I’d clicked so many times, all except 5 (clicks) x 8 (favorites max) for naught. Now I’m likely to not be a customer of the Favorites feature anymore, and if you add a match-up feature, it won’t do me much good. See churn.

In summary, please just make it usable ((1) right-click the song, (2) click Make Favorite), tell your customers up-front what benefits, and downsides, it has

It’s just for fun… show your friends what your 8 favorite songs are! Maybe we’ll add a match-up feature later!

and see what happens.

Cordially (like the Cherry),

Wade

Unfortunately there a couple usability problems with the Atom feeds:

1. According to feedvalidator.org, the Atom namespace qualifier used on the <feed> element will cause interoperability problems. It’s perfectly valid XML and Atom 1.0 but some consumption code, including some I saw written at work the other day, is looking for <feed>, not <a:feed>. I suspect this is what throws off FriendFeed’s blog importer, as well as the importers for Yahoo Pipes and Microsoft Popfly.
2. <entry><link> has an empty href attribute. Hey Zune team, remember that social I mentioned earlier? If you don’t link to it, customers ain’t joinin’ it.
3. <entry><updated> is the feed-generated date/time, not the date/time the track was added to the playlist. Time is an important dimension! (*waded favorites a curmudgeonly song at 3:54PM.)

So I thought, hey, let me try a little Yahoo Pipe grease:

1. Fix the interoperability problems by sourcing the Atom feed in Pipes as raw XML, then spitting certain elements back out as RSS.
2. Use the Zune Social XML namespace track information to make a useful <item><link> to get users to http://social.zune.net album info.
3. Nothing much to be done about the date problem that I could see… that’s for the Zune folks to fix.

The result is at http://pipes.yahoo.com/waded/zunefavorites. The RSS rendering, with parameters in bold, is at  http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.run?_id=4va_WrpV3RG7AfwEiXrL0A&_render=rss&mid=98772405-3286-4e64-b78b-f7512f3804fe&playlist=BuiltIn-FavoriteTracks

“My spoon’s too big… my spoon’s TOO BIG!”

Wouldn’t it be nice if the room we call the “lounge” wasn’t dominated by a computer desk and a rolling office chair? Here’s an idea:

Get rid of the computer desk & chair.

Put a nice colorful rug down.

On top of that, a small table & L-shaped couch, with an option to sit almost upright with back support on one leg of the L, and the option to lie down on the other leg

The tabletop should rotate to serve either leg of the couch.

Put the Apple LCD & keyboard & mouse on the tabletop; the monitor will lean back on its legs to serve all form factors of users.

Hide the computer box somewhere, perhaps behind the couch.

#1: Added an Atom <link>. RSS is dead. (Well maybe that’s a bit extreme, but providing only an RSS <link> is lame.)

#2: Removed any RSS badging/links. The fine art of “wasting time looking for a syndication badge when there’s plenty of other stuff on the WWW to look at” is dying. It’s not as usable or quick as letting a computer figure it out.

#3: Removed the search box, and related WordPress search cruft. Search on low-traffic personal blogs is definitely dead.

#4: Now displaying a bit more older content on the homepage.

#5: Fixed validation bugs (a <div> in a place it can’t be, a missing alt attribute on an <img>, and a Flickr URL with unencoded ampersands.)

#6: Changed styles and text a bit.

New research suggests that heavy coffee drinkers are less likely to die of heart disease, such as heart attacks, strokes, and arrhythmia. Edidemiologists from the Autonomous University of Madrid analyzed data from more than 120,000 men and women. According to their study, women who drank four or five cups of brew a day were 34 percent less likely to die form heart disease. Men who drank more than five cups a day were 44 percent less likely to succumb to heart disease…

(I cut it BoingBoing off here just for fun.)

That’s cool. So I’ll just keep on doing what I’m doing.

Now, I heard the same this morning on the radio, although the radio folks said decaf coffee has the same effect. Lies.

If we keep playing the telephone game long enough, we’ll be drinking coffee from the Annals of Monkey. Oh wait, some people actually do that one.

In summary, coffee is great, reblogging is annoying, and people on the radio just talk about whatever in the morning and I wish they would shut their yappers and play some music.

I ran out of olive oil, and I need eggs. 5 seconds and they are on the list. Need something new? Add it to your list once, and next time, it’s one tap away.

groceryZen is an iPhone recipe and shopping application made by developers & designers I know. If I had an iPhone, I’d be saying "I’ve got to get me some of that."

But I currently have the Verizon HTC Tricorder.

And I mean Original Series Tricorder, with the shoulder strap, knobs and 3" CRT.

But in 5 days I got 3 Capital One mailings, including one bulked up with bubble wrap, and decided “enough is enough.” (Actually I didn’t decide those specific words, but you get the idea.)

I called Capital One and managed to get on the suppression list (I think) using the phone number 1-888-817-2970. They ask for your credit card # initially, tell them you do not have a credit card and want to “opt out of marketing solicitations” as capitalone.com says can be done. They will take your address and phone number.

Then I found these free opt-out systems:

• https://www.optoutprescreen.com/ (the front end to Equifax, Experian, Innovis, and TransUnion… related to credit-based mailings. Note fields like SSN and phone # are not required… just name and address.)
• http://www.coxtarget.com/mailsuppression/s/StoreMailSuppression (Valpack coupon booklets… just provide name and address.)
• https://www.dmachoice.org/MPS/proto1_reg.php (The Direct Marketing Agency’s mail preference service. This seems to be the way out of specific catalogs. You can also use credit card authentication to get out of all mailing; I decided not to do that.)

Still wondering how I might escape the Dell catalog.

One thing to think about: will this really reduce the number of junk mail sent by mailers? I don’t think so. Every penny mailers save not sending junk to me will be reinvested in sending more junk to other people, or identifying new people to send it to.

I will let you know if it actually slows down the flow.

No. 2 was fine for a year, now its ROL is RROD’ing fairly often. (ROTFLCOPTER BTW.) That’s supported under the 3-year warranty extension.

Support has done well by me so far. Let’s see what No. 3 is like.

http://www.boisenopantsday.com/