Archive for January, 2011
Why Skype does not Detect the Microphone Automatically?
Skype is a great product and I use it almost every day for my video calls and phone calls out of the country.
Once you set it up, assuming that you do not purchase any new hardware and that Windows does not decide to randomly find some new hardware in your computer, it will generally work. That said, if you install it for the first time, switch webcam or attach a microphone to the PC, trouble will most likely start to appear: either you will not hear the other end, or they will not hear you.
Why? Because the right microphone was not selected in the preferences, perhaps, it is trying to use the jack instead of the one in the webcam, or the one with Bluetooth, etc…
There is a simple solution: check on which microphone you get signal, perhaps asking the user to speak, and select automatically that device for input.
It is a “while loop”, no more than 10 extra lines of code, but that will greatly simplify the life of the users. Skype, why don’t you do that in the next version?
Google/Bing, it’s Time to Use Classification to Improve Results Pages
I have been saying “users don’t think, they google” for a long time now, and every day I find new examples that confirm my theory.
Since users are this way, I wonder why Google and Bing aren’t showing many steps towards this. Sure, they inject news and images into the results here and there, but you can do it much better and in a smarter way.
I was discussing of this with my friend and ex-colleague Francesco over Christmas, but the idea goes back 2~4 years with my discussions at Ask.com with Apostolos Gerasoulis and Antonio Gulli.
If you have tons of traffic, and some sort of content type and category classification, then learn from the clicks of the users how to organize the page. For example, if 70% of the people looking for “apache” still click on some links about the Indians, then 7 out of 10 links should be picked from the same category, and we should stop showing 9 links about the webserver (come on, afterall every tech guy will click on the one of apache.org anyway). How to do this? Categorize the query based on what people click on, and then boost results from the same category.
Same applies for content type. bet everyone who looks for “Justin Bieber pictures” on Google would love to be brought to the image search page directly instead of the normal one plus some pictures injected. If almost everyone who search for the title of a song then click on the YouTube video on the top, don’t you think you can offer a better experience? Perhaps expand that at the top automatically, so I can just hit play.
One could go in more deep personalization (e.g., I may be in “work mood” or at home), allow different profiles for each computer (e.g., me, my wife, my kid, …), learn what I like from my choices, etc, but already offering a standard set based on the average (i.e., 99%) user could go a long way.
Sure, some purists will be annoyed by that. For them you put a link somewhere which sets a cookie and avoids to do this. But for the rest of them, which is probably 99% of the Internet users of today, this would be great.
People don’t think, they Google. So, make it easier for them.
Redesign Instant Messaging Platforms to be Used on Multiple Devices
Most of the people who care about it have a smartphone and a data plan. They get their emails on the phone, browse the web and often also use instant messaging.
Software like Google Talk, Yahoo!Messenger, or Skype now exists for almost all devices and operating system: Windows, OS X, iPads, iPhones, Blackberry, Android, …
But what happens when you use it on multiple devices at the same time? Maybe you are on your PC, then get pulled in a meeting and bring your ipad, and then go out for a coffee and have your cellphone with you. Sounds familiar?
Today, either the platform sends the messages to all the devices or just to the last one from which you logged in. Annoying in both cases. It’s time to change.
The IM software should be written so that it knows what you are using. For example, as long as you type or use the mouse one can assume you are using the PC. If you start touching the ipad and not the PC, then switch to that. If the phone detect movements (GPS?) and there is no activity on the other devices, switch to that.
In addition, the chat logs should be kept on the sever, so that whatever device you use you always have them with you.
Privacy problems you say? Not really. You just need to encrypt the messages that you send and receive and use the same key on your devices, so that they can encode/decode them locally and on the server there is just and indecipherable series of characters. The Off-The-Record plugin, available for Audium and Pidgin, does just that.
It is not that hard. Who will get there first? A new startup or the IM companies?
Twitter “Similar To” allows you to Discover People with Matching Interests
I just realized that Twitter now has a “Similar To” panel in the profiles pages of the users. I am not sure how they compute those but it is a pretty cool feature, which allows you to expand the people you “follow” beyond the most popular ones.
If I had to build that service (or a competing one), I would probably use as similarity factors:
- a signature of the most discriminant terms that each person uses in their tweets
- the links they posts (or at least the category)
- the social network (who they follow).
I wonder if that is how they did it.
Use Skype-To-Go to Forward Google Voice Calls to an International Number
I like Google Voice a lot, especially when I am outside of the US. With any data-plan, I can see text messages and listen to voicemail left for me to my US number. Since the international call fares offered are reasonable, I would love to transfer the calls to the international number I am using in that moment. Unfortunately, that is not possible at the moment.
But here is a simple work-around. Log into your Skype account and get a Skype To Go number, then register your international number as one of your favorites.
Once you have registered the Google Voice number with Skype, you will receive a direct number to call for each of your favorites.
Save that as forwarding line in Google Voice and forwards all the calls to it.
Done!
In case Skype does not really let you register the phone with them, just install the Google Voice application on your phone and/or call the Skype-To-Go number from your gMail. It will say that it does not recognize the number and make you go through a 2-steps verification process. It is relatively simple and in a few seconds you will be finally registered.
