Mind360.com Beta was launched yesterday very quietly and I am very proud to present it here as its my brother in law brilliant startup :)

Our brain needs training to be in shape, just like our muscles, and this is why Mind360 was created, they offer a variety of games that allow you to practice and improve different cognitive aspects of your brain, and as a member you have a personal training program to improve your cognitive capabilities and strengthen your weaknesses, and do all this while playing and having fun (well not all fun, some is really hard work, but the challenges keep you going).

As described best in Mind360 home page: Brain training games aren’t just for seniors anymore. Now you can hang on to your wits by simply playing the leading scientifically based brain training games on the net. And what better way to strengthen your cognitive skills than by having a fundamentally good time as well. Today’s advanced brain training games help improve your memory, increase your ability to stay focused, plus make faster and better decisions.

As a Cognitive psychologist I am very familiar with Brain training, it was proven to work amazingly, for example on US Air Force pilots, and on US basketball players .

The best thing as I see it is the ability to get a professional automated analysis of your achievements and to see if your progress is sufficient and where to invest more time. This is truly not trivial, and part of the key to get a real improvement.

Here is an example of one of the games "Celebrity Spot" and what you can gain just by playing it.

• Cognitive exercise: Motoric Precision
• Cognitive skill trained: Eye-Hand Coordination
• Objectives: Synchronize mouse movement with click timing

Although it is just in beta and has a few bugs here and there and some of the advanced function are not up yet, it gives a great user experience. and i cant finish without saying one more thing about the design – it is just amazing, my compliments to the designer, clean, professional and beautiful design.

Keep up the good work.

I don't know about you, but when I was a kid there was a fun game we used to play. We took a sheet of paper, and wrote a story with the entire classroom, each kid, turn by turn without even knowing what the other kids wrote about. On the sheet of paper we wrote a beginning to a story, for example "Once upon a time". We passed the paper between the participants, and each one of them (in his turn) added the next sentence to the story. The next in turn would only be able to see the last word of the sentence the previous player wrote, and he had to write the next sentence based only on that, as the only hint to the real context. Eventually when there was no room left of the sheet of paper - we revealed what everyone wrote and that was the story.

The fun part of this game is that sometimes you get a really funny and surprising short stories.

So far with nostalgic thoughts... I am trying to replicate this same game in the Twitter community, so in order to do that I opened another twitter account dedicated to that called Shtory (Shared short story) - There our story will evolve.

Game flow example:

• First sentence: 5000 years ago man kind faced a dilemma.
  • I the twitter page I will only publish the word "dilemma", this word will be the only clue for the next person to add a sentence to the story.
• Second Sentence (by a random user): dilemma. We didn't know what to do, so we decided to go to sleep.later that day
  • The twitter page will now only display the word "Sleep." (the word dilemma will no longer appear only, sleep).
• Third sentence (by another random user...): Day. Day or night it doesn't matter I'm so tired I must go to sleep, but my wife keep on nagging about the garbage.
  • and so one, you get the point (forgive me for not being too creative or imaginative here...)

Guidelines and Rules:

• In the twitter account of Shtory , you will only see one word each time. This word you see is the last word of the sentence the previous person added to the story, and based on that word you need to continue the story with your own sentence.
• Only the first sentence will be fully published from the beginning in the twitter page, the rest of the sentence will only be represented by the last word of the sentence.
• The sentence you send me, must begin with @shtory and the last word of the previous sentence (the word published on the twitter account) for example "@shtory Dilemma. we didn't know what to do..."
• Only the first sentence that I'll get as a twit reply will be added to the story, I assume that I'll get duplicate sentences per word, and there can only be one sentence to continue the story based on that word.
• Once a new sentence was written and added, a new "last word" will be published for the next sentence, so follow the account to know what is the relevant word.
• Only one twit can be sent to continue the sentence (meaning no more than 140 characters).
• Do not include links into the sentences you send.
• You can send as many twits as you want, but you can not continue a sentence you already added to the story.
• After 100 twits I will publish the full shared story.

Let the fun begin

Twitter Personalities

Twitter, twitter, twitter , is there something that wasn't said about twitter? Maybe... I don't know if someone categorized the type of people using twitter, so I'm giving it a try...

People:

The Conformist:

He likes to think of himself as an early adopter... But not really, he uses twitter just because he heard so much about it from so many people, and he decided to signup. He doesn't really care for it, so he follows a few people and writes down a twit every few days at most, after a month he forgets about his account.

 

The Smart Opportunistic:

Joined twitter because he has an agenda. He wants to promote his blog, business, political agenda or whatever. He keeps on spreading information about his agenda (in a subtle way), he tries not to get caught as a spammer, so he keeps following other people too - but never read a word they say.

The Stupid opportunistic:

He is very similar to the opportunistic, but in a stupid way. He also delivers his agenda in a subtle way, but other people don't pay much interest to him because he is not smart enough to care about his followers-following ratio.

The Egocentric:

His only goal is to have as many followers as possible, even if he has no interest to follow a person he will follow him to get him to follow him as well. He doesn't wait more than a day to remove a person from his list if that person didn't follow him, in order to keep the followers-following ratio stable.

The Chatter:

He is not interested in reading or spreading links to the coolest things, or the hottest news. He just wants to chat with his buddies on everyday things. He feels that twitter is his new replacement for emails or IM.

 

 

The Autobiographer:

What he does all day is tell the world approximately every 10 minutes what he is doing. He has no interest in other people, he has only the need to share his everyday accomplishments. (Such as riding a bus, eating pizza and etc...).

The spammer:

He doesn't care at all about what is going on, he just keep on following people like there is no tomorrow. He has the worst followers-following ratio. Since he opened his account he created approximately 1-3 twits and no more, to make the appearance of a real user... He gets you all excited for a new follower until you understand he is just another spammer.

The Early Adopters:

They have been here from the beginning, telling themselves this is the next big thing. They keep a happy count of how many times twitter is down, in the last few weeks they are unhappy because twitter is up most of the time.

The Stalker:

He is searching twitter to find real celebrities. He likes to collect them and tries (but fails) to bask in their reflected glory.

The one twit people:

Opened an account after reading an article in Techcrunch , really loved the concept of twitter and even filled a short bio and posted a twit. Never came back...

The Re-Twitter:

He is a person of ethics. When he finds something he likes in his feed (Submitted by a person he follows), he wont pass it on as his own as he is a person of high ethics, he will always give the honor to that person by mentioning him in the form of a Re-Twit.

The heavy blogger:

He thinks he is a king walking among his many loyal subjects. He greets them in his special way when he wakes up or go to sleep. He always chooses who to reply or who to ignore. He has 10-50 times more followers than people he is following. Beside spreading links to his new blog post he likes to share his occasional words of wisdom.

The Casual twitter:

For him twitter is just another platform, he doesn't really pay attention to twitter articles or to his followers-following ratio, but it is always a reasonable ratio. He has a few buddies here, a few Celebs and a few opinion leaders. He is probably the only twitter user who reads his entire feed.

Companies:

The "Opportunity to get Cheap advertisement" Company:

Probably a company that heard about the "New age" of viral advertisement and web2.0, and would like to exploit twitter to gain free advertisement, and to be able to say to its investors that they are into web2.0.

The web2.0 Company:

A web2.0 company is all about what is Now. so there is no way they didn't open a twitter account. Most of the times the twitter account looks like their chances for an exit...

The Hip CEO:

Probably a company that its CEO still didn't pass the age of 35 (sometimes even 25), and uses twitter in a good way to be in touch with its customers. Their account is more similar to a chatter account than to the opportunistic account, they sometime have the tendency to forget to talk about their own company.

The Company's "Cover" account:

They don't use the company name, instead they pretend like it is a real user spreading links from their web site (and never other links) and they use the account as any of the opportunistic characters. Most of the time they are so obvious it hurts...

News and Feed Bots:

Rarely helpful, and commonly suffocate your feed with an overdose of very not interesting links.

I hope you can find yourself there, but I guess all of us are a mixture of some of these types. If you have any additions, corrections , suggestions, or a twitter account that fits one of these types feel free to leave a comment.

Oh yes almost forget..., follow me on twitter :)

In the last few months I witness an impressive advancement in the auto-complete function of browsers, web sites and application. So I decided to summarize the evolution of it, in terms of User Experience.

          
            In the beginning there was (and still) 
          
          
            
              Internet
explorer
            
          
        

In Internet explorer 7 , the auto-complete only complete if the browsing history string starts with the exact string the user wrote. for example, if you write the string "A", only web sites that start with "A" will appear.

And Google said, let there be Google Suggest

Google suggest, is literally suggesting the users search terms according to the the strings the users entered into the search box. and in the same principal of the Internet explorer, it mostly suggest the matches from the beginning of the search terms.

There is only one small user experience problem as I see it, sometimes the string I enter will be more relevant in the middle of the sentence, but due to the fact that Google has so many suggestion to give that match the beginning of the phrase, you almost never see suggestion that include your string in the middle of the suggested search term. (I had to write "hesaurus" to receive the suggestion that doesn't start with "H" and got "Thesaurus"...). I wonder if the Google algorithm take it into consideration.

And Mozilla saw the light, and created FireFox 3

The big improvement in FF, is that the auto complete searches the string you enter in the address box, not just in the beginning of the phrase but in the middle of it and/or in the site description, all according to how relevant it is according to the user browsing history.

Today a short and easy domain name is not something so common, and many domains today are created from half words or a couple of words, and this is not so easy remember. The FF auto complete was a huge improvement in terms of user experience, as users no longer need to be so accurate, and remember exactly the domain name, they only needed to remember part of it or how it is described.

And Google said, let there be Google Chrome

In Google Chrome the address box and the search box are combined to one. If the phrase you enter exists in your browsing history it will suggest a web site, if it doesn't it will suggest that you will search for this phrase.

So simple and so smart, why hassle the user to click between two boxes that are so relevant to each other, when he can do it in one.

And when something makes your life so much easier, people find out many ways use it.

Good friends of mine, created the startup Predictad , They give advertisers a new place to advertise in - in the suggest box. The ads that appear. are relevant to the user search phrase. This gives the publishers and the advertisers a new way to earn money or exposure.

I wrote this post because I saw today a nice post in the weblog of 37signals - Signal vs. Noise , a nice enhancement Highrise made to their auto complete tool.

Something in particular caught my eye, Their auto complete tool, also know how to complete strings that not exactly match (For example if the user wrote "danrimon" (my name), the auto complete will also know to search for "dan rimon"). This is pretty cool, although exists in other places, including Google Chrome , but for some reason I only noticed it when i saw Highrise video.

This made me think, What's next?

The purpose of the auto complete is to help users, then why not take it to the next level:

• One obvious improvement - correct spelling mistakes.
• The other thing is more interesting in user experience terms, and this is Auto-Complete with filtering. what do I mean? If I want to search the word "Water" for example, I can write instead "trewa" (Why is that?), because this string includes all the letters of the word "water", but mixed. What the auto complete algorithm should do in my mind is suggest all the strings that include these latter in the relevant possible combination (and filter the words that do not include these letters or part of them). This simple change will solve a lot of most common mistakes we do when we write in the Internet. mix the letters because we write to fast and do not pay attention very closely.

If you have any more interesting auto complete tools or just more insights - feel free to share.

Most of the day I sketch and design the future web sites of my company and sketch the improvements of the current ones. An important aspect of my work is to plan the correct flow of things. This is why Product Planner caught my eye.

The company describe this product - "Product Planner was born out of the need to help people understand and create user flows for their web products. The idea is that by looking at examples of other successful web products, you can get a better idea of how to create your own".

The site is in its early stage and doesn't really have yet enough examples, but I really love their vision, and I can see how much it can do to the User Experience of web sites who will follow it.

In general Product Planner is a simple tool to create and share flows, but the great thing about it is that the flows are not created just from headlines but they are created from functional designs screens or from the actual site screen shots.  The full detailed design in the flow makes all the difference in understanding and building good user experience.

For example - an "Invitation to Twitter " flow:

Each box in the flow represent and actual page as a part of the flow, and by pressing on a box you can see it magnified:

Few pointers:

• Not enough flexibility in flow types - It decreases the chance that experts will use this tool BUT this limitation can also do good, by keeping the small and generic flows, the site becomes more useful, and it is better than having very long unique flows that won't serve many.
• As a site builder how will I know which flow to use, which is the better? I can see which ones are the favorite ones, but which ones are truly good for my goals? As a User Experience expert, when I plan a flow I have in my mind the objective of the flow. For example if I want to create a signup flow - the objective of it can be:
  • Joining as fast as possible (Low barrier of registration)
  • Gaining as much information as possible (When I want to profile my users before they get access)
  • Complex registration (High barrier registration - when I don't want each users to become a member of my site without some sort of a commitment by him
  • Users can add comments to a flow, but it won't do the trick, maybe add the option to tag a flow by a set of characteristics: "for professional users", "for novice users", and etc...
• What I miss the most if to be able to explain the interaction between each segments of the flow, and to be able to add to the flow exceptional cases - for example error message in case the user does something wrong in the flow (Enter the wrong password, Email already exists).

To conclude:

I hope this site will fulfill its vision and be a tool for product managers, usability experts, developers and etc... and make our web a friendlier place. I'm sure I'll be happy if people will share with me interesting flows from the site.

Beware - Part of this post is way too optimistic

My economic analysis suggests that the economic crises might even help web2.0 startups.

how come? In general investors have many investment opportunities in different risk levels - stocks, bonds, real estate, startups, art and etc...  

The investor invests his money according to a risk analysis, % goes here, % goes there and etc... so that he wont risk too much and will still have the opportunity to earn money without risking it too much.

Now that the crises made the stocks, bonds and real estate and riskier investment, the investors can spread their money differently in order to keep the same risk value. so in simple words, startups are now relatively less riskier and more bearable as a long term investment.

And in a more realistic view - The crises probably reduced the pie size, so even if the risk is more bearable, there might not be all that money to invest or to purchase companies...

But all this doesn't matter... as web2.0 sites are not something the economy crises can stop altogether. web2.0 sites were not created because somebody invested money in them, these sites were created because there was a true evolutionary need for them.

Human beings are social and can not survive in a non social environment, the web as we knew it in the era of web1.0 was a non social environment. people used to spend a lot of time with their computer (same as today) but there was no social element to satisfy their primal social needs. this is the reason why web2.0 sites started to evolve, to satisfy these needs.

Web2.0 is "The People", and this is why that even without money web2.0 sites will still exist, there might not be as many sites created every day as today, but they will be created. If the crises will be as horrible as  some predict, this  will be the opportunity for the students to once again set the tone in the world of web2.0 sites, bringing back the work to the garage, and creating the new big things, just because they  had a dream. 

This is why web2.0 will never die, well only maybe if we will go back outside socializing like the good old days...