Posted by Seth on March 17th, 2008
I recently tweeted:
sethyates linkedin UI sucks on a mobile - both mobile ui and web ui 03:09 PM March 15, 2008 from web
Steve Ganz (from LinkedIn) promptly replied:
steveganz @sethyates, what can we do to make it better? 09:10 PM March 14, 2008 from im in reply to sethyates
BTW - looks like the timestamps in Twitter are local to the sending user (I’m in Australia, he’s in California), hence why he replied to me before I tweeted 
Well, a proper response wouldn’t fit into a 140 character tweet, so here goes in a blog post:
First, I use LinkedIn quite often and would love to use it on my BlackBerry Pearl when on the road/away from the laptop, but the UI when rendered on a mobile (either using www.linkedin.com or m.linkedin.com) just doesn’t do it for me. These improvements would help me and fit my use case, maybe they wouldn’t fit the majority cases. Disclaimer over, here’s my list:
mobile UI (m.linkedin.com)
- The home page (after logging in) is simply a Search box. Now, the time I spend searching in LinkedIn is rather limited so this isn’t really an appropriate home screen. Here’s what I want to see here: let me set my status (”What are you working on?”, contacts’ status updates and inbox/action items (Invitations, Accepted Invitations, Recommendation requests, In Mail, etc). It’d also be nice to know some of the connection stats from the www home page (# connections, network size, new people in network since X date, # views of profile, etc).
- I manage a group that gets several new member requests a day. There’s no way to manage the group using this UI.
- The contacts page only has next/previous, and starts on A-C surnames. If I want to get the contact details of a Contact with a surname starting with M-O, I’m many clicks away. Add a quicker way for me to get to another page. Move the Search box from the home page here.
- Once I’ve found a contact, you don’t display their contact details like you do on the www UI. Sometimes I just want to grab their email address (yes I know you have “Send a Message”, but often I want to contact them from my email account directly).
- On the contact’s profile, perhaps start out showing an abbreviated experience listing (e.g., don’t show details - I often don’t need to see that and am happy to click again if I want to see the experience details).
Web UI on the mobile (www.linkedin.com)
- Only one comment really: its just a jumble. This is a result of the BB not rendering the stylesheet. To see what it looks like in your browser, run up Firefox with the Web Developer toolbar and disable CSS. Luckily there’s “Skip to content” near the top, because the top several pages is just the menu in list format.
With these tweaks in place, I reckon the LinkedIn Mobile UI would be the ducks nuts.
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Posted by Seth on June 23rd, 2006
I’ve been using Virtual PC 2004 with Windows Server 2003 running in it for my development environment for a while now and overall its been a great experience.� However, the Virtual PC sound emulation is a dodgy SoundBlaster 16 device which Windows Server 2003 doesn’t support out of the box.� I finally got annoyed enough to fix this and found the following link which gave the information needed: http://www.agileprogrammer.com/dotnetguy/archive/2003/12/13/4633.aspx.
Basically, you need to grab a Windows XP installation CD and use some of the files from it.� Note that the ctlsb16.sys file is in the DRIVER.CAB.
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Posted by Seth on November 30th, 2005
CNET reports that Microsoft is “developing a free online service that will allow people to list items for sale, events and other classifieds type of information that can be shared either with select groups of friends or anyone over the Internet”.
Okay, so now everybody wants to play. Google recently launched Google Base, which is its version of classifieds advertising system. Craigslist has been running all over the US drying up the local newspaper’s “rivers of gold” from classifieds advertising, although their foray into Australia has been very weak. Fairfax’s cracker.com.au has seemed to be more successful, with over a half million unique visitors per month and hundreds of thousands of postings in the main metro areas.
The classifieds market (jobs, cars, houses) is finally tipping (in Australia). With such a transformational shift happening, plenty of players are rushing in to try and cut out a bit of the market for themselves.
The next 5-10 years are going to be interesting indeed.
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Posted by Seth on November 30th, 2005
As reported in Business Week, Amazon are testing several new features in beta form now:
1. tagging
2. wikis
3. community discussions
Really interested to see how they fare with this, as these are some really cool features that I would like to see in use in more sites. Amazon have always been sort of a quiet innovator in many ways, with their recommendation engine (other people who bought this book/dvd/cd/garden hoe also boought this book/dvd/cd/shovel), RESTful web services, and their huge collection of reviews (now that is a truly powerful barrier to entry).
Although I am often a skeptic of the latest technology being used in search of a problem, I think tagging, wikis and community discussions can be really powerful tools in the right applications (and I think Amazon clearly is the right application for many of these). Hopefully Amazon will be able to make the wikis last longer than The Los Angeles Times were able to.
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Posted by Seth on November 30th, 2005
This is important:
“Developers of four of the most widely used Internet browsers (ed. Microsoft Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera and Konqueror) have agreed to make a number of changes to their products to make Web browsing a more secure and trustworthy experience.”
“The basic plan would be for all browsers to tint the address bar green when users visit major-brand sites with a “highly-assured” digital certificate. Suspicious sites that might be sources of phishing scams would be indicated by a red address bar. A padlock icon would be also be set in the address bar, where it’s more visible, when users are at an SSL-secured page.”
“Additionally, the plan would put an address bar in every browser window, even those popped up or under as forms, to defeat fraudsters’ camouflaging tricks.”
“Some browsers already include elements of the plan. Firefox and the open-source Konqueror, for example, put the padlock icon in the address bar, while the under-development Internet Explorer 7 uses the green/red combination in its integrated anti-phishing filter.”
Covered here on Yahoo! and here on InfoWorld.
I hope these guys can pull this off, but it is highly dependent on the parties being able to push forward these ideas consistently and on the certificate signing authorities coming up with a yet-unspecified rigorously checked “high assurance certificate”. It will also mean we’re given yet more power to the big CA’s like VeriSign.
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Posted by Seth on November 22nd, 2005
Roedy Green has a great page on how to write unmaintainable code.
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Posted by Seth on November 21st, 2005
We released Restful.NET 1.0 library today. This library is a light-weight, open-source (GNU LPGL-licensed) framework for building and consuming REST web services from .NET.
The Restful.NET REST Web Service framewok can be downloaded from here..
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