Does it work?

There’s no shortage of articles (ReadWriteWeb, Search Engine Land) on the features of DuckDuckGo like enhanced privacy, !bang syntax for searching directly on other sites, infinite scroll, and zero-click info sources.

All I care about is whether it makes my life easier. So, does it work? Yeah. It does. Mostly. In what I feel is a recurring theme of the blog, DuckDuckGo more or less does everything I need, except when it does something that I can’t stand — like when the zero-click box pops in late causing me to click something I had no intention of clicking. Despite the roughness of the first few days, the last week has been unremarkable. That’s a good thing. Search should facilitate the task at hand not be the task at hand. I feel confident saying that in the overwhelming majority of my queries, DuckDuckGo gets me to the information I need quickly.

I don’t want to gloss over the fact that DuckDuckGo is still maturing. I wouldn’t recommend it to your technophobic friend despite its occasional win. I frequently fall back to Google for certain precise queries, to verify that I haven’t missed a critical link, or simply because DuckDuckGo doesn’t seem to be providing useful information. Of course, over time I expect not only that the DuckDuckGo algorithms will improve but that learning the system shortcuts will increase my efficiency as well.

For what it’s worth, I plan to keep using it as my primary search engine despite the (hopefully temporary) flaws. If nothing else, DuckDuckGo may play the role of independent presidential candidate, forcing the incumbent to scoop up the best features and stick to the straight and narrow.

1. Gabriel has a useful post today on making DuckDuckGo your default search engine in each of the major browsers.

What I saw (and used) was a multimedia-rich book running on an iPhone 4. There is no UI chrome. No status bar at the top or tab bar at the bottom. It’s just like you see in the still image on their teaser site. The entire screen is filled by content, not user interface elements. The screen is the book, the book is the screen.

…

Kindle and iBooks seem to have the goal of reproducing what is possible in paper books. Yes, iBooks supports embedded video and audio content, but it does so in a way that feels as though Apple pondered what it would be like if you could play video on a piece of paper. Push Pop’s concept strikes me as far more ambitious: What can we do with the idea of a “book” if we eliminate the limitations of ink and paper, rather than mimic them? E-books that aren’t merely rendered by software, but rather e-books that are software.

Eleven months ago, Andy Clarke announced the forthcoming iPadification of Hardboiled Web Design. That hasn’t happened yet, but I stand by my comments at that time:

If Andy does succeed in publishing his new book as an iPad app with demos and video tutorials, that will truly herald the future of books. Physical, typeset books have their place, but if you’re publishing something electronically, there ought to be a big, flashing sign demanding you use every advantage the medium affords. To do otherwise is no different than playing a radio broadcast on television or scanning a newspaper and calling it a website.

Congratulations to Mike Matas and company for realizing that vision so emphatically.

If building a better comment system was the goal, iterating on the progress made by dedicated comment sites like Hacker News, Slashdot, Digg, Reddit, et al seems a much savvier plan than blowing it up and starting over. While we stop short of praising comment threading, voting, and flagging as panaceas, it does seem undeniable that Twitter solves none of those issues, introducing instead a host of its own.

By replacing comments with tweets, Happy Cog twice undermines its audience, first by contributing to the general Internet noise pollution (as well as the specific article comment thread noise) and second by trivializing the resulting discussion. Artificial brevity is a flaw not a feature. It makes substantive conversation if not impossible at least heavily discouraged. Ex-communicating the indefinite length, local comment as the fundamental unit of a larger intellectual discussion is inimical to Internet culture and, most importantly, learning — which we presume is a core value of any blog post.

But perhaps we’re unfair. We tremble at the thought of standing in the way of progress and stick-in-the-mud traditionalism is hardly our philosophy. Maybe the goal was to simply make it easier for people to leave feedback on the article. In that case, Cognition has succeeded wildly. It is a bold move (though perhaps a bit shy of “brilliant” as many commenters tweeters gush)  worthy of applause. If upsetting the rotting apple cart of blog commenting is one outcome, it won’t all have been for naught.

Our metaphorical fingers are crossed that Happy Cog instituted this system not as part of a grand PR scheme but in the sincere belief that it offered at least the chance of a better model by holding commenters accountable and elevating responding blogs to first-class comment citizens. If that is the case, we humbly suggest supplementing Twitter and blogs with good, old-fashioned comments à la Disqus because, on some level, a well-considered comment system is irreducibly complex. It requires a spectrum of in situ response lengths to adequately simulate real conversation.¹ By striving for “simple” we fear Happy Cog has strayed into “simplistic.” Unless changes are made, commenting on a Cognition post is an exercise in futility, home only to well-meaning pats-on-the-back and vapid gestures.

Let us be clear: we have no objection to decentralizing, extending, or otherwise improving the conversation. We do, however, oppose its infantilization.

In Zeldman we trust.

1. And, if beggars were choosers, things like voting, threading, burying, author highlighting, comment email or RSS subscriptions, etc. There is much room for improvement.

Mobile and tablet computing are immature and unstable. Major revolutions still occur frequently. We still haven’t figured out how this stuff all works or what we can do with it. Mobile computing just started. Mobile computing is, today, where portable computing was in 1983.

— Marco Arment, “New MacBook Pr—OH LOOK, AN IPAD!”

I am, without exaggeration, as excited about the iPad’s potential to change how we interact with computers as I was about the Wii’s potential to change how we interact with video games.

There’s a real value me, and by extension most other people, in my phone / computer / myriad Internet accounts knowing where I am right now and where I am planning to be. It should go without saying that where there’s value, there’s money to be made. Perhaps the simplest way is targeted advertising. I suspect, though, that there’s room for services that charge money as well.

But don’t take my word for it. Robert Scoble has two visionary posts up this week, “Malleable social graphs and mini-mobs: why Facebook could destroy Foursquare and Gowalla with one check in” and “Are location geeks at Where 2.0 off the path to real money?”

Just remember, the Scobleizer lives pretty far out on the bleeding edge, so while his ideas are valuable, we aren’t there yet.

1. I hope you understand I’m exaggerating for dramatic effect here.

But you know what? There’s a lot of really valuable data locked in there. OAuth to the rescue:

You may or may not be excited by the acronyms OAuth and IMAP/SMTP, but the combination of them all together is very exciting news. Google Code Labs announced this afternoon that it has just enabled 3rd party developers to securely access the contents of your email without ever asking you for your password. If you’re logged in to Gmail, you can give those apps permission with as little as one click.

Prediction: all major email providers will eventually support OAuth and serious Gmail competitors will have it within the year.

Adam Lisagor, the homeless man’s Stanley Kubrick, comes up with another promotional YouTube gem (co-starring fellow Twitter-lebrity Jason Permenter), this time for iPhone credit card service Square. Nate and I have differing opinions of Square’s usefulness:

Nate:

square is interesting. apparently there are already things that do this, but it looks easy.

Nate:

i won’t be buying a dongle any time soon for personal transactions, and i doubt anyone else will either.

Jay:

if you were at all social, the “paying people back” angle is useful.

Nate:

if you were a real socialist, you wouldn’t need people to pay you back.

Jay:

you win.

141 years ago, Henry J. Heinz founded the H. J. Heinz Company in our fair city of Pittsburgh, PA. For the first time in the last 42 of those years, Heinz is changing its iconic ketchup packet design to a new “Dip & Squeeze” container. Tear the front off, and it works just like the current packet. Tear the lid off, and it’s a container for dipping. It also holds three times the ketchup of the original. I’d love to learn that the material used in the new packet is 100% biodegradable or made from recycled water bottles, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. Maybe Heinz is figuring that consumers will generate less waste by simply using fewer containers, instead of the 37 packets we’re all currently using to drown our fries. C’est la vie.

As Malcolm Gladwell reminds us all, Heinz didn’t become a global ketchup monolith by accident. They did it by innovating.

UPDATE: This, from an anonymous source close to the Dip & Squeeze’s development:

In food, innovation takes baby steps, because food consumers don’t like the totally unfamiliar. So it’s great that you appreciate this product for how innovative it really is, in that context. It might not be an iPhone, but it’s an incremental innovation, solving real problems consumers have (not enough ketchup per packet, gotta open each packet with my teeth, can’t trust my kids with the packets in the car). So glad you got it.