Elliott C. Back: Internet & Technology

If you hurry over to new.facebook.com you can see a Beta version of their new design (Pulse says they took it down, but they haven’t for me). It’s interesting, because while it’s definitely going in the right direction, it’s nowhere near complete or solid. It is unusual for a company to publicly “try out” their design work, but Facebook is the first of a new breed. Anyway, here’s my take on things, starting with the new “home page”, your wall:

The new wall page, the first page you see when logging in

• The new “All Posts / Wall Posts / Posts by Me” filters are nice.
• Only three posted items in the right bar? It should have at least 10.
• Posted items have a thumbnail and text; without the text, they are mostly blank space.
• There is a ton of blank space between the footer and chat bar!

The new info profile page, tells you about you

• The edit information button renders wrong.
• The “fan pages” have too much blank space with the vertical layout!

The photos page has the best layout

• The photos page is perfect, the spacing is great. There’s little wasted space here!

Note also that on a wide monitor, there is just a huge amount of blank space to the sides of each page. Also, Mashable has their own “New Facebook” review; they conclude stuff isn’t “working as I’d expect.”

The more I look at visual search engine SearchMe, the more I like it. In a way that text-based search engine Google has never done, SearchMe brings thumbnails to search results without losing any of the textual indicators we need to process relevance. SearchMe is also innovating in clustering search results into categories or topics, something Google has experimented with their sets demo but never implemented into the larger search engine. Perhaps the best way to show you how much more relevant SearchMe can be is through a short example, searching for “Obama.”

The first thing I get, as I type “Obama,” is a list of categories that SearchMe finds relevant. I click on “Politicians” and it takes me to the next screen, the main area for exploring search results:

There are a few features you should note that set the SearchMe results apart from their competition. First, they keep the list of categories you’re interested in just one click away from instant filtering at the top of the results. Second, all of the available space of the page is filled with a gigantic preview of the search results. The title of the website is shown at the bottom, along with the site URL when you mouseover the results. Essentially, their search results are a better version of Apple’s coverflow, applied to websites. Clicking on a preview will take you directly to the page of interest, in the same tab, just like most search engines do today.

Their dynamic snippets code is nice, as well, highlighting the search terms you used in multiple colours. It appears to have been implemented directly in the coverflow-like flash engine, or behind the scenes is coming back as a new layer of image, as it loads only after the high resolution preview has loaded. An unfortunate side-effect of their highlighting algorithm is that when searching for multiple words, like “Calderon de la Barca,” the words will be highlighted separately, even if found next to each other.

Not all their results work well; for example, searching for “China” leads me into irrelevance, regardless of the category I choose, and also brings up this half-rendered view of NBA China, that my own browser renders properly. Other search terms also return odd categories and funny previews, but I imagine that this is something that will improve over time. The big problems for a search engine, responsiveness and interface, are already solved as SearchMe is both lightning fast and beautiful.

If you’re interested, you can go check out their blog or signup to the private beta. Apparently, the venture is Sequoia backed, according to Techcrunch, which probably means it’s serious about being a big web search contender in the future. According to Louis Grey, the searchme spider is aggressively hitting his blog, too. It will be interesting to come back and a year and see how SearchMe has evolved. The most likely outcome for this is being acquired by one of the big four–Facebook, Google, Yahoo, or Microsoft–since it’s hard to imagine unseating any of them in the popular mindset.

Flow|state, a user interface design blog, recently ragged on the Windows Vista file copy dialog for obscuring important information about the files it’s copying. Specifically, Vista warns about files with the same name, and asks you what you want to do with them:

Can you see the disaster in progress? Most users can’t either.

This dialog has buried the lede. It focuses the user’s attention on the fact that there is another file with the same name in the destination folder. It fails to point out a much, much more interesting condition: The user is about to overwrite a newer file with an older file.

So he suggests the dialog read “There is a newer file with the same name in this location,” increasing the number of recognizable file attributes from one, the file name, to two. What other kind of file attributes are there? I can list a few:

• Path (implied)
• Name (explicit)
• Date created / modified / accessed (suggested)
• Size
• Type
• State
• Permissions
• Ownership
• File System
• Mount

I think these are all equally important attributes. By flow|state’s logic, the dialog should really read “There is a newer, substantially larger file with the same name in this location. The current file is a video, but your new file is music owned by a different user, your mom.” This is obviously ridiculous.

The best way to do this is what linux does–just move the file. If you want to get clever, use a command pattern to make it reversible.