Previous Apple Mice

The previous model (the “Mighty Mouse”) was a complete disaster in my opinion and the only Apple product apart from the Tiger Xserve that I have never been able to defend (even as a devout fanboy). The main problem was that the scroll button (or ‘nipple’) would get clogged with dirt so easily that it would invariably stop working after a couple of weeks heavy usage. The official Apple solution to this (which has since been pulled from the KnowledgeBase) was to turn it upside down and bang it in your palm! Whilst it had a couple of benefits in terms of OS X integration (such as activating Exposé by squeezing) these features quite often generated more problems than they solved (such as activating Exposé by accidental squeezing). So how does the Magic Mouse differ?

Design

The Magic Mouse has no buttons, no squeezing, and no cable. Like the unibody MacBooks, it has gone for a simple look using the minimum number of parts; one piece of aluminium and one piece of glass. It is incredibly short (in terms of height) compared to other mice whilst being slightly longer than others. With no distinguishing buttons and a symmetrical shape, the only visual aid to placing it the right way round is the standard Apple logo displayed on the top. In my opinion, the design is beautiful yet simplistic (as you would expect from any recent Apple product) but would look at home in a museum of modern art. Not many people care about the aesthetics of a mouse (which is strange considering it’s prominent location in most homes) but now I’ve had this on my desk, I’d find it very difficult to go back to something uglier.

Before you’ve even got it to your desk you are struck by the beauty of the device. The packaging is incredibly similar to the new iPods (which makes a lot of sense) but it still amazed me to see just how little packaging was used.

It is difficult not to pick up the Magic Mouse in the Apple Store and not be impressed with the way it is packaged. This is how all packaging should be in the modern world – I’m not talking just about technology (although there is large scope for improvement) but in everything from food to clothing. Smaller packaging means not only that you can put more product in a store but also that you save fuel from transportation (as you can move more units in the same lorries / boats leading to less trips) and minimise wasteful plastic packaging. I was impressed when I found out that the mouse came with batteries (very rare these days) but even more impressed when I discovered they were already in the device which was simply turned off. This saves a huge amount of space and more plastic.

Functionality

As other commentators have noted, there is no “wow” moment with this mouse. By this, they mean that the majority of Apple products have that initial euphoria when you use it for the first time (e.g. when you first unlock the iPhone or when you lift the MacBook out of it’s stunning packaging) but this mouse doesn’t have that. You just use it. However, what it does have is a strange sensation roughly after an hours use when you try to go back to using a normal mouse. You find the scrolling isn’t as intuitive and that you’ve been using the multitouch features without even thinking about it. It is a very easy mouse to get used to and it is that which provides the “wow” as you realise you have been completely taken in.

In terms of setup, it’s a standard bluetooth mouse so a quick trip to the “mouse” page in Settings will have it set up in know time. As of the time of writing, you need to download an update via “Software Update” to take advantage of the multitouch gestures but when OS X 10.6.2 is released it will be built into the OS by default. The only negative here is that the update is 62MB which is a little excessive – this is most likely due to the videos that show you how to use the gestures in a similar way to the videos found on the MacBooks to show you how to use the trackpad. In any case, setup is quick and painless.

At present, there are very few actual uses of the multitouch. Clicking is performed by a physical click (not just tapping as per the trackpads) but there is only one button. The multitouch comes into play by detecting where your finger is on the surface and then linking that up to whether it is a primary or secondary click – this is very useful if you are left-handed or ambidextrous (as I am) as you can quickly switch the mouse to your other hand and it still feels comfortable thanks to the symmetrical design. The only other two uses are scrolling (a simple case of moving your finger around on the surface – you can go up, down, left, right, and diagonal which is useful for zooming in photos, etc) and the two finger swipe which lets you go backwards and forwards through browser history and photos. Apple also point out you can zoom into a page by holding the control button on the keyboard and swiping your finger up and down but this has always been possible by holding control and using a scroll wheel so I wouldn’t describe it as a unique function.

Criticism

There appear to be two main criticisms of this device if you read the forums or the reviews pages on the Apple Store; size and functionality.

A lot of people have found the size uncomfortable as it’s so much shorter than previous mice. However, I note that most of these reviews were from people going to their local Apple Store and trying it rather than at home. I had read these reviews and so when I got to the store I made a point of squatting down to try it as the benches in the store are very low (meaning you’re not holding the mouse as you normally would). This made a huge difference to how it sat in my hand and so I think a lot of these reviews just stem from this problem. I would never buy a mouse that cost this much money without trying it out first but it is important that you try and recreate how you would use it as much as possible.

The second problem of functionality is much more valid in my mind. For a multitouch device, this mouse uses a woeful amount of multitouch features. When it was first announced I was expecting all the features of my trackpad such as pinch, rotating, zooming, 3-4 fingered swiping, and maybe a few extras as well. Without this option (and the customisation that goes with it) there are just too few buttons for a lot of consumers. The squeeze buttons on the Mighty Mouse may have been annoying to some but at least it gave you a way to control Exposé from your mouse – something that can save a lot of time over the course of a day. Likewise with no middle button control you can’t get to your dashboard or spaces easily (or use it like a PC mouse for opening new tabs in browsers).

My theory on this lack of functionality is that Apple know they are going to get negative reviews that focus intently on this issue. They will therefore release an update in a month or so which fixes it and adds full multitouch support which will then write off all of the negative reviews. In this way, they are able to choose the negative issue that people will focus on safe in the knowledge they can resolve it later on and make it seem that everybody loves the device. People who had an issue with the device can’t then say “x is bad about it” as their original review will have focused on the multitouch issue as the only negative. From what I’ve seen of Apple’s marketing machine (one of the best in the world to my mind) and my studies of politics, this is exactly the kind of controlled negativity that I would expect. I guess we’ll see if I’m right in a month or so!

Conclusion

So is the mouse worth £55 (or $69 – strange currency conversion there…) – at the moment I would say no simply due to the lack of features supported by the multitouch. If these are corrected in a future update (and I’m confident they will be) then this will be one of the finest mice on the market, but at the moment it feels as if it’s full potential is being restricted. There is no question that this is a beautiful device, but the functionality needs to match the aesthetics before I can fully endorse it.

Update – 11th Nov 2009: I was recommended BetterTouchTool by @ricklecoat which is a free app that enables some extra features of the mouse. For instance, my Magic Mouse now reveals my desktop when I slide two fingers up / down and does Exposé when I tap (yes tap, not click) with three fingers. Has improved my productivity no end!

Gallery

I’ve put together a few shots of the unpacking of the Magic Mouse as well as comparing it with a few of my older mice.

Initial Thoughts

My first thought was that the iPhone 3GS somehow felt nicer than the previous models of the iPhone. I remember upgrading from the original to the 3G and thinking that the new plastic back made it feel more comfy and it seems that again something has been done to the texture to make it seem more solid and comfortable. Although it looks exactly the same as the 3G, there are a few minor aesthetic details such as the lettering on the back now being the same colour as the Apple logo which makes it stand out a bit more.

The “oleophobic screen coating” (that’s oil resistant to you and me) really does work incredibly well. With previous iPhones, greasy finger marks on the screen wouldn’t go away even if you rubbed them with your t-shirt or trouser leg; they just smeared. With the new screen coating, one wipe with a t-shirt makes the screen look just like new. This is a very useful addition to my mind!

One other detail I noticed straight away is that the screen is a lot brighter. I had thought it was slightly better (in the same way that Snow Leopard is much clearer than Leopard although this is to do with a switch to the 2.2 gamma standard) but wasn’t aware of how much better until I placed it next to my old iPhone 3G – you can see the difference in the photo above. The key thing here is that both phones were set to the same brightness level so there really is an improvement in the hardware somewhere.

New Features

Compass – the new digital compass (or magnetometer if you prefer?) was one of the big talking points of the iPhone 3GS as it allows for far more accurate turn-by-turn navigation. It also added a sexy new app appropriately named “compass”. The compass app itself is fairly basic and I felt that the actual readings were quite slow to adjust. Additionally, making a very small change to the orientation of the phone doesn’t always reflect in the compass which is a little frustrating when you are trying to get it to point exactly North. Having said that, it’s good enough to get a basic idea of which way is which. The real area the compass shines in is in the updated Maps application where pressing the location button re-orientates the map to the direction you are facing. This is absolutely invaluable when navigating and is a feature I will be using heavily.

Voice Control – When it was announced at the WWDC Keynote, I felt that Phil Schiller sounded a bit stupid going on about how this great phone was now able to do voice commands seeing as it was something my Nokia could do 8 years ago. However, I now realise why he was quite as smug as he was. It really does work exactly as they demoed it. After I synced my contacts and music, I tried a few of the commands such as “phone Ben Dodson” (to which it replied “work, home, or mobile?”), “play panic at the disco”, “play more songs like this”, and “what song is this”. Every name and command I tried worked flawlessly so I was incredibly impressed. The real power is that with other phones you’d need to add a voice tag for each contact whereas with the iPhone, it just reads the text and interprets your voice accordingly so there is no need for you to record a voice command prior to using it. The app looks awesome as well!

Camera – The new camera app is fantastic. I can’t believe that it’s only a 3MP camera as the quality of the images is as good as some phones I’ve seen with 5 or even 7MP. The video app is simple to use (as you’d expect) and again the quality is very very good. It’s a shame it doesn’t film 720p but the colour balancing and overall quality make up for the relatively small resolution. The only negative I can find is that video at nighttime is fairly grainy (whereas in daylight it’s beautifully smooth) and the camera would really have benefited from having a flash. I was really hoping the rumours that the Apple logo would act as a flash light were true but it appears that it’s not the case… for this model at least!

I’ve got the need, the need for speed!

My main reason for buying the iPhone 3GS is that I wanted faster app loading times and generally quicker responses within the apps. Playing Sonic the Hedgehog on my 3G nearly bought me to tears as it was actually unplayable (I’m sure they only tested it on a 2nd generation iPod Touch…) and I’d always get frustrated playing Tap Tap Revenge 2 when the app would skip a little due to memory running out. So, speed was a big thing I was interested in.

I did not imagine it would be as good as it actually is.

The speed increases I’ve noticed so far have been nothing short of phenomenal for something that got a 50% speed boost and a doubling of RAM. Quite often, load times have been reduced by up to 4x and overall app reliability is nothing short of flawless. Here are a few stats based on some of my most commonly used and intensive apps:

Bejeweled 2 – app launch to menu screen
3G = 12.1s
3GS = 3.7s

iDracula – selecting “grave park – survival” on menu to actual gameplay
3G = 21.6s
3GS = 6.5s

Peggle – app launch to “touch to play” message
3G = 25.4s
3GS = 10.2s

Sonic the Hedgehog – app launch to “SEEEGGAAAAA” message
3G = 5.9s
3GS = 2.7s

Tap Tap Revenge 2 – app launch to main menu
3G = 6.4s
3GS = 3.3s

Tap Tap Revenge 2 – selecting “The Sound of Settling” on “Hard” to start of track
3G = 8.9s
3GS = 3.5s

All apps were tested on the 3.0 OS after an iPhone restart. They were timed using a stopwatch and each test was run 3 times and then averaged in order to minimise discrepancies.

Conclusions

The speed boost was definitely the biggest thing for me and I have to say that it has exceeded my expectations. The small range of stats above don’t accurately display how snappy everything has become. Previously, navigating the menus of Tap Tap Revenge 2 always a pause of around a second between each screen whereas now it’s instant. Also, actually playing the game could be incredibly frustrating as I knew I was in time but a memory glitch along the way would cause the tappers to move erratically causing you to miss them even though you hit the area at the right time. This was verified to me when playing on the 3GS as I got a 100% streak straight away without really trying too hard. Another game that suffered horribly on the 3G was Sonic the Hedgehog which really shouldn’t have been allowed to go on the App Store. It was probably ok on the 2nd Gen iPod Touch as that had a slightly faster CPU, but on the 3G it was just dismal with stuttering sound, obvious slow down and speed up, and a whole host of other glitches such as unresponsive controls. On the 3GS, it plays exactly as it always should have done – exactly the same as it did on the Mega Drive.

I haven’t even touched upon areas such as the speed increases in Safari rendering (pages are near instant – truly amazing mobile web browsing), the noticeably smoother animations between apps, or any of the other minor tweaks that make sure that the 3GS not only outperforms the 3G, but actually completely exceeds the speeds that were previously attainable.

However, there are one or two problems in all of this. For me, the biggest question mark hangs over how the App Store is going to be managed. The iPhone 3GS has much better hardware and allows for much better graphics which means that theoretically we should get into a situation where apps are available only for 3GS. However, it looks as if Apple is going to resist this route and that the 3GS upgrade is purely for across the board speed increases rather than in making more powerful apps. I can’t predict what is going to happen but I fear that there will be a lot of apps made that will only work on the 3GS but they won’t be labelled as such in the App Store (in the same way that Sonic the Hedgehog should have been labelled 2nd Gen iPod Touch only). This leads to a lot of frustration when you are paying £5.99 or so for a game which then won’t work on the existing hardware.

So, do I think the 3GS is worth the upgrade?

Yes. Yes I do.

Now, most people I’ve mentioned the book to have scoffed and said something along the lines of “I already know how to use phpMyAdmin”. Like them, I thought I knew what phpMyAdmin was and what it could do but it turns out there are huge amounts of functionality I never knew existed in MySQL let alone in phpMyAdmin!

For the Beginner

The book starts off with a very gradual introduction to phpMyAdmin covering everything from basic installation and setup to a detailed explanation of the overall interface. I was particularly pleased to see an in-depth chapter on security configuration at the beginning of the book which would help any newcomer make sure that their setup is completely secure – usually such chapters are found at the back in the appendices! The first six chapters follow in a similar vein with very basic information about how to run SQL queries, edit data, change structures, and so on but chapters seven and eight deal with exporting and importing data which is one of the many areas that I have seen developers struggle with in the past. There is a good explanation of the different methods for importing / exporting including the benefits of certain types over others. Crucially, there is a section on CSV using LOAD DATA which is something that has always seemed to lack proper explanation to me in the past.

There then follows a few more chapters which more advanced users can probably skip such as searching, an overview of relational databases, and table / database operations.

Advanced Topics

I would say that the real meat of the book for experienced PHP developers begins at chapter thirteen with each further chapter adding useful knowledge. I’ve listed the key highlights of these chapters below:

* The Multi-Table Query Generator – A powerful tool which enables you to fine tune complex queries via a series of forms thus allowing you to specify multiple criteria. It contains features such as automatic joins which allow you to very easily build up complex queries.

* Bookmarks – A feature I was completely unaware of that allows you to save queries for future use. This is particularly useful if you happen to be a database administrator that administers purely on a table by table basis within phpMyAdmin and has a number of queries to run. I always used to have popular queries I’d use stored in a notepad on my OS X Dashboard but no need anymore!

* System Documentation – I recently had a need to produce some MySQL documentation so was very happy to read this chapter and find out about the excellent documentation tools available within phpMyAdmin. This includes not only a basic print view, but also a data dictionary and a relational schema which are all exported as PDFs.

* MIME-Based Transformations – If you’re the kind of developer that likes to store images, etc, as BLOB fields. With transformations, you can make images appear as images within the phpMyAdmin results rather than as indecipherable encoded text. Very useful!

* MySQL 5.0 and 5.1 – a quick look at the enhancements that MySQL 5 added with things such as views, routines, stored procedures, and very interestingly, triggers (a way to run other MySQL commands when a certain thing happens – e.g. when a table gets updated). You’d probably want a separate book to cover MySQL 5 if you were planning on doing any development with it, but this chapter gives you a good overview of some of the things you can expect.

* MySQL Server Administration – The final chapter deals with some of the more fundamental maintenance tasks related to the actual server and improvements that can be made with caching etc as well as a good comparison of the different types of storage engine you can choose.

Summary

All in all, I would highly recommend this book to any PHP developer or anybody that is using phpMyAdmin on a regular basis. It could really have been broken into two books – a beginners and an advanced – but it works well by acting as a reference for those developers that have grown up using phpMyAdmin. The main thing though is that it taught me a great deal about phpMyAdmin that I didn’t realise was even there – just goes to show that even a basic sounding book can have a great deal to offer.

Mastering phpMyAdmin 3.1 is available online from Packt Publishing

On the whole, I found the book to be very good although it was rather simple and basically consisted of a similar message to the excellent book “Don’t Make Me Think by Steve Krug – that is to say, “use some common sense”!

The book is broken down into 8 chapters with each one becoming slightly shorter and slightly more off topic.

1. The Rise of the Social Web

This opening chapter really sets the scene by explaining what is meant by the term “social web” and investigating the move from one-way communication to two-way and then many-way communication. Joshua also looks at something he calls “The Amazon Effect”; the behavioural trait that people will quite often use Amazon for product research even if they have no intention of purchasing there. He also investigates something that I come across more and more these days; “The Paradox of Choice”. This is a term given to the problem of having so much choice in front of us that in the end we actually do nothing as we spend all of our time comparing. Whilst not offering any solutions to this problem, it is worth noting that it is present in order to stop the more content happy of us trying to offer every single solution to a user when oftentimes it’s better just to give them one or two – this again enforces the idea of keeping things simple.

The chapter goes on to look at how “social software is accelerating” and how at some point the entire internet will be taken over by the social movement. I have a few issues with the figures bandied about at this point (and indeed in many other similar books). The most frequently used statistic is from Technorati in that there are “120,000 blogs being added every day” thus somehow showing that the very face of the internet is changing. To my mind, this is nonsense as for every new blog being added to the blogosphere, there are probably a good few that are just fading into non-existent as their owners fail to update them or their accounts get closed down. Whilst I do appreciate that the take up of social media is indeed growing, it is nowhere near the levels that people would have us believe.

2. A Framework for Social Web Design

This is another excellent chapter that focuses on the bane of all agency-bound developers; feature creep. This is one of the key problems in current web application development as people think that more features means more users and thus a better application. This is of course completely wrong and many would do well to remember the old maxim “quality not quantity”. Joshua looks at a wide range of social network sites such as YouTube, Digg, Delicious, Twitter, etc, in order to point out what their key function is and therefore highlight that the most successful social apps are those that stick to what they know.

There is, however, a rather peculiar section regarding giving social objects a URL. Apparently, Flickr was initially a flash application and it wasn’t until people had their own page to show off their photos that Flickr really began to grow. The issue here is that a lot of emphasis is placed on having a URL and that this is the main reason that Flickr grew whereas in actual fact it was just the idea that somebody could have their own profile page and their core model went away from flash application to a real web application that probably increased their user base. I’m not contending that social objects should have their own URL but rather that this is fairly obvious and that it probably wasn’t the defining feature that turned Flickr around.

3. Authentic Conversations

This is the point in the book that I began to notice that it was slipping away from it’s titled purpose of “design” and instead looking at very general good business practice. The entire contents of this chapter can be summarised by “respect your customers and talk to them”. There is quite a large section about the “Dell Hell” situation from 2005 and how Dell had basically received complaints and not responded to them. To make it worse, a blogger created a website to publicise this and they still came back and said nothing giving them a very bad image. Joshua’s dichotomy of this is to show an incident in which the technical editor of the book posted a message on her blog about a problem she had experienced with Plaxo and that they had then commented on her blog to try and help resolve her problem. In it’s way, it is a good example as it shows a company commenting on an issue on somebody elses blog in order to correct them. What isn’t pointed out is that the original poster should have just contacted their help desk (or in fact read the instructions in the first place) rather than writing a rant on her blog which the company had to find and then correct her. However, this is probably very realistic of most online conversations as there is always a group of people (especially prevelant on YouTube comments) who will just shout loudly when anything changes. This is exemplified later in Chapter 5 with Facebook. In my opinion, the response from Plaxo wasn’t particularly good either as it was far too formal a response (felt a bit auto-generated) and they had performed some rudimentary anti-spam protection on their email address (listing it as “privacy @t plaxo.com” rather than just putting “privacy@plaxo.com”). If the person complaining couldn’t read the simple instructions on the task she was performing or search for the technical support when she had a problem, it is probably fairly likely that she’ll just copy and paste what is there and then write a follow up article entitled “They never reply to my emails – they just send bounces!”.

The chapter does move into a few interesting articles of PR situations that have gone very wrong such as Dreamhost calling an overcharge to their customers of $7.5million a “teensy eensy weensy little billing error” and a good section on how to apologise correctly. However, this isn’t dealing with design and isn’t what I expected to find inside this book. It’s welcome advise but I would consider it to fall under “common sense” or some sort of management category rather than the encompassing role of “design” as the title suggests.

4. Design for Sign-up

Now we get back to intended idea of the book (”design”) and approach how to get people over the all important hurdle of signing up to your website. I particularly like this section as it reinforces one of the first eye-opening pieces of knowledge I received about writing copy for the web; keep it very short and very simple. This method was taught to me many years ago as such:

Most people will write copy for the web as if they were writing for a broadsheet newspaper such as The Times or The Telegraph whereas it should be written as if for a tabloid such as The Sun or The Daily Mirror. Notice how tabloids tend to highlight key phrases and keep sentences short. The first thing you should do with any copy you write for the internet is delete 50% of it. Then, once you think it’s the right size, remove another 50%.

This obviously doesn’t apply to articles or blog posts but is a key tactic for writing easily digestible content for homepages or sign up forms. This chapter espouses this view by forcing people to state very clearly who, what, where, when, why, and how. With these key questions in mind, you can make your inviting text all the more succinct and likely to generate conversions.

The other half of this chapter details how to “reduce sign-up friction” which basically boils down to making your registration form as small as possible. One thing that is missing here which should definitely have been mentioned is the removal of captcha forms and human readable tests. There is no reason at all why companies should still be using these ridiculously outdated methods of spam prevention. They are inaccessible (I have trouble reading a large number of them) and time consuming yet more to the point they are completely useless as a spam bot can be fooled easily by simply having a hidden field named something enticing like “email” and then have your script check to see if it’s full. If it is, you’ll know it was a spam bot as there is no way for a human to fill it in. To prevent humans submitting applications over and over, use an automated system such as Akismet (which I use for spam prevention on this blog) or just impose an IP limit so you can’t have more than one registration from the same address every 15 minutes. This will slow down spammers enough that they won’t bother but won’t interfere too much with those on shared networks, etc.

5. Design for Ongoing Participation

This is another good chapter as it focuses a lot on the psychology of users and essentially on the mass insecurity they have and the need for them to be able to create their own little home on your site. Any social network these days has to have a profile page and again I find it strange that this needs reiterating as this is surely a given.

There are one or two good points made about encouraging efficacy (a way of giving active users a boost in reputation) and in giving people solid control over privacy options (something that Facebook neglected initially to the general outcry of the public) but these things really are fairly obvious to anybody intent on creating a social network. I think this chapter could have offered a bit more constructive advice and maybe a few more case studies of sites doing the right and wrong things in order to make it as good as some of the previous chapters.

6. Design for the Collective Intelligence

Collective Intelligence is a term used to describe how social applications can be shaped by the users of the system in order to make it work as they would like it and promote content that they would like to use. This is highlighted by the real world example of Digg which obviously works based on the idea of collaboration and in voting on particular pieces of content to move them up and down the social chain.

There is an excellent section on “leverage points” which goes into detail on how your social application will have many points at which the users can control something and how this can be managed correctly e.g. how a homepage of content voted on by users is displayed, what happens when somebody votes, etc. but I would contend that this is all fairly obvious to anybody who has used a social application before.

7. Design for Sharing

Sharing on the internet has supposedly boomed with the invent of networks such as StumbleUpon, Delicious, and Digg yet I am a firm believer that social network badges and sharing forms don’t actually get used by the majority of users. This is also true of RSS feeds as I’ve mentioned in a previous blog posting as these are still mainly the domain of geekier users of the net. It is true that most websites around at the moment have these social badges or sharing forms but I don’t think it is true of most social applications that people are going to be building. If you look at the title of the book, you are almost expecting to be taught how to make the next Delicious, not on how to integrate it. There are few social networks that have badges for other social networks on them as they are all very precious about their own traffic (although this has changed to a certain degree with Facebook Connect). This chapter is focusing on entirely the wrong angle as most social apps don’t make sharing easy – blogs certainly do, but apps don’t.

The one part that interested me was the criticism of too many social network badges which has become a phenomenon of the growth of social networks. As there are so many to choose from, how do you keep all your bases covered? More and more blogs are moving over to systems such as AddThis which do show all of the badges in a hidden button overlay but again this is still rather clunky and doesn’t generate much conversion as people are overwhelmed by choice (as discussed in Chapter One). Having said that, I have written a jQuery plugin called jTardis which allows you to show only social networks that the user subscribes to thanks to some javascript trickery but I’ll be blogging on this in more detail in the future!

One of the things that frustrated me about this chapter was the fact that the sharing forms that Joshua had designed and used as good examples were in fact really bad! All of the examples look like they had fallen out of the pre-dot com era of web design and didn’t really show the basic simplicity of sending a page to someone else. He does note that most people tend to copy and paste the URL and just email. However, writing a form or widget to do this is not difficult yet he seems to have not done it particularly well – I’m sure there are better examples he could have used.

8. The Funnel Analysis

The final chapter is one that to my mind is far too short and doesn’t really have a place in this book at all. It is a chapter designed to show how you can monitor the statistics of your social network via funnel analysis – a basic way of monitoring where people drop off from your site (e.g. are they falling at registration signup or at registration confirmation?). This is all very well and good but the chapter is far too short when you consider there are books of many hundreds of pages that still only scratch the surface of site analytics. There are also numbers used to show what small percentages of people actually sign up to certain sites but these are totally irrelevant as the apps involved aren’t mentioned and every app is different so your figures could be differ greatly. They may as well have been made up!

I also found this chapter to be a little strange as I read the final sentence about how funnel analysis helps to illustrate that people do drop off as they progress through the site, and then turned the page to immediately drop off… into the index. The book was over with no summary, no recapping of the key points (remember the “writing for a tabloid” I highlighted earlier?). There was just a feeling of “oh, it’s finished”.

Conclusion

Overall the book is fairly good and does highlight a few interesting ideas. However it strays far too much from it’s key focus of “designing for the social web” and thus fails to meet one of the key things it espouses; keeping your application simple by basing it around a single piece of functionality. The book was supposed to be about design and specifically on how to build great social web apps, yet too often the conversation moved to general business ideas such as “talk to your customers” or looking at how to analyse your web stats when it should instead have focused on the key components in a social app and how they work. To an extent this does happen (particularly in chapter 4) yet I don’t feel it happened enough.

If you haven’t used a great many social applications and are interested in a broad overview rather than a detailed analysis of the social web, then this book might be worth the £28.99 list price. However, if you are looking to build the next great web app and are already an avid user of the social web, then this is probably one you can afford to miss as it will just be covering well-trodden ground.