Better Experiences is a Stamford-based software engineering
and usability consultancy specializing in helping people and companies create better
user experiences for their products and services.
Tawheed Kader is the principal of Better Experiences.
Through his technical expertise, creativity and business acumen,
he strives to create successful products with delightful experiences.
services include interaction design, wireframing, rapid prototyping, and full scale development.
Do you need help creating a better experience for your customers? Read more about my services.
It’s crazy how many Recommnd-like ideas are cropping up all over the web. I’m still working away to launch this thing (that I’ve been working on for over a year), but I figured it was time I actually released a screenshot.
The whole idea of crowd sourcing ideas for a product or question that you have was [...]
Continue reading →In light of the recent disaster in Bangladesh, I’ve put together a site to help raise funds. It takes a bit of a non-traditional approach to raising funds, so go check it out and let me know what you think.
Remember when you discovered kayak.com and thought it was the coolest thing ever? Well, it’s old news now.
Honestly, when I first started using Kayak, I asked to myself, what else could you possible need (short of complete transparency into when prices will fall)? But I pretty much left it at that since I knew that was next to impossible.
Well, Farecast not only scoures the web to find you all the deals on flights, it also tries to predict where prices are going to go. And as if that wasn’t enough, you can sign up for Farecast alerts that notify you on when is the perfect weekend to take that trip to Buffalo, NY.
On a sidenote, yes, I know this blog is horribly out of date and I haven’t posted in over a month, don’t worry, yet another re-design is in progress.
If you happen to subscribe to my blog and saw a rather odd entry show up in my RSS feed, my sincere apologies. Earlier today, I was demo-ing the power of Textmate blogging to Garret and Chris. To show off all the features, I put together a jibberish entry and posted to to my Blog.
The post was literally up for 20 seconds (stop and count 20 seconds). As I loaded up my Wordpress blog, and logged in to delete the entry, Garret said “Wouldn’t it be funny if Pulse picked up on that entry and aggregated it already?”
We laughed.
Just a few minutes ago, Garret sent over a screenshot of Google Reader, showing the jibberish entry that I had up for those very 20 seconds. Damn Google, you’re good, maybe a little too good…
Sometimes, it’s easy to forget exactly how much more connected the Internet is today. Probably five years ago, you could post some random ramblings to your dinky little blog and no one would ever notice. But today, with the power of crawlers, feeds, and all this openness, 20 seconds is all it takes for the information you create to spread everywhere.
After attending the F8 Platform Launch, back in the beginning of the summer, I got inspired to write my own little Facebook app. Being so busy with my day job, I wanted to write the simplest quickest thing possible.
At the same time, I was also starting to plan out my crazy summer activities, and was dying for some way to show it off to my friends.
So, one random night, I decided to just go for it. I planned out a quick little app that would let me list my Summer Plans so that I can show it off on my Facebook profile.
After about 6 hours of coding (most of which went toward learning the Facebook platform and finding the documentation for the multiple friend selector) I had my very own Facebook Application called Summer Plans.
I could not have made it any simpler, for each summer plan, you say what you are doing, when you are doing it, and you can list out up to 10 of your friends that you are planning the event with.
The end result is a listing of your summer plans, your friend’s pictures and a simple countdown to each plan.
In fact, I kept it so damn simple (and lazy), I didn’t even include an “Edit” feature.
Aside from my self serving goal of showing off my Summer Plans, the one other thing I really wanted to find out was whether the “Social Graph” really is as powerful as it claims to be in spreading a simple web application.
To figure this out, I purposefully left out any and all viral features. This means that your summer plans did not show up in the mini-feed. It didn’t notify your friends if you included them in your plans, hell it didn’t even send a single email out to anyone.
So, essentially, this was a simple standalone app. And don’t worry, I didn’t cheat. I didn’t blog about it, I didn’t send out massive emails. The only thing I did was tell 5 of my friends to kindly install the app, so that Summer Plans officially got listed in the Facebook applications directory.
The outcome was, well, satisfactory. Without any of the viral features, and even with the lack of an “Edit” function, Summer Plans amassed a whopping 449 users that installed the application and added a Summer Plan. As of this moment, there are 302 active users.
Not bad for an app with ZERO viral features.
I’ve also heard some horror stories about small Facebook apps getting released and then spiraling out of control, while racking up bandwidth costs and bringing the whole service down to a halt.
Needless to say, at only 303 users, I had no such problems. But, it was pretty interesting to check out how my server stats were affected by the app being deployed.
I have no idea why the Bandwidth usage actually went DOWN. I think it may be the effect of setting up Akismet on my Wordpress install (Note that these stats include hits to this blog, which gets little to no traffic).
One thing is for sure, there is a clear need for an analytics package that will help measure the performance of a Facebook app. Being able to figure out realtime statistics on which user installed the app, didn’t install it, and what went wrong where can be the critical thing missing for building successful Facebook apps.
Although, one could argue that the Graffiti app (which, to me, seems to be the most popular Facebook app) will never need such analytics.
As soon as things settle down, I think I want to give Summer Plans another rev (ofcourse, I’ll have to rename it to Weekend Plans, so that it fits with the season). I’ll start adding some of the notifications, emails and other such viral aspects that can perhaps drive Summer Plans to rock star levels. And oh yeah, maybe I’ll add that ‘edit’ feature.