The real deal?

Spending some time musing about brand-building and it occurs to me that good brands almost always have some kind of "very similar imitators."

The question is, is an "imitator" necessarily of inferior quality?



Me, I'd stick with Cheezels.

What would happen if I pulled the plug?

I just snapped this picture last night of my brothers - three brothers, three PCs, all online at the same time.

Of course, this is worth some sort of social discourse about the changing habits of people and how screens (your TV, computer and mobile device) and the internet are impacting the way we communicate and view the world around us.

What would happen if someone pulled the plug? Or in this case, if I did it?

I'll leave that as a hypothesis, and for you to make your own conclusions. But for now (to borrow a too-often used cliche), I thought the picture itself is worth a thousand words.

Impressions on the new Windows Live Messenger Beta

I think I've unravelled the analogy between Churros and Microsoft - it's their design language for their new products! Moist and chewy, if the new beta for Windows Live Messenger is anything to go by.

Go download and install it here and you'll immediately notice the difference. Everything gets bigger!

Literally. In fact, the fonts have become so big you can't even see my full name on my bar. The new Messenger beta has also become kind of "more social." You can choose a select few of your chat-buddies to become "favourites" (wow, what a ground-breaking feature) or add them to groups (kind of like how your phone's contact list allows groups).

Then there's that ticker at the bottom that collects all the subtitles from your friends' names and displays them like like a news feed. It also collects changes in your friends profile like "Mr A just changed his profile picture..." and feeds it to you a la RSS. This feature I like. It shows Microsoft's really been paying attention to how consumers are using their features. When Heath Ledger passed away, more than half my contact list turned up with "RIP Heath" messages.

One thing I didn't like was the fact the large fonts and layout made for a very short list of friends and a lot of scrolling. So much so I've started making use of the search function now.

The best function has got to be this though - the fact you can map emoticons to profile pictures and change them according to your "mood". For example, if you use the smile smiley, your profile changes to a picture of you smiling. Of course, you have to setup the pictures first, and I don't get why they couldn't just let you upload various pictures for this instead of forcing you to use that "Wizard" that requires a webcam. Not so smart eh?

In case you thought I went missing

Sorry folks, I've been seriously ill - near bed-ridden - for the past few days. Thus, naturally, as much as I would have loved to, my fingers just didn't agree that I should be spending the little energy I had on chronicling the possiblities of the million-joint-aches on my blog.

The good news is, that's now past. Expect service to resume as normal.

Pushy 1.0, Polite 2.0

One of the things that struck me when installing Chrome was how it actually asked me: "Would you like to keep Yahoo! as your default search engine?" (I'll grab a screenie when I can)

If this was Microsoft, there would have been no question at all - just Live Search as default - and that annoying pop-up everytime that asks you - "Would you like to make Internet Explorer your default internet browser?" No such thing from Chrome, it just sits quietly as my non-default browser.

Which brings me to my point on the evolution of technology in the social dimension. The old Web 1.0 method was when the technology vendor would sneakily and pushily switch all your defaults and settings to favour its own applications and programmes. But that's not working anymore today. So much so that PC vendors like Sony are giving vendors the choice to not have "pre-installed, value-added applications and tools" on their brand-spanking-new machines.

For this reason, I think Google's nailed it. In the new Web / technosphere, the audience is increasingly resistent to the "push." We'd much rather be treated as intelligent people who know what we want and where to get it.

"You don't have to keep asking me if I want Internet Explorer as my default browser, I'll set it as such if I want it."

There's a keen lesson for companies to learn here - not just for technology outfits. In communications, its no longer safe to assume the public is ignorant and that the company knows best. Instead of just thinking of what the company says (message), what's more important is going to be thinking about how the company behaves.

After all, no one likes a pushy door to door salesman that takes every opportunity to push his product onto your face. Even if its a good product.