Greener Tech

>optical channelколи под наеммебелиally want to like MobileMe. The Apple revolution is supposed to be about slick, easy-to-use software that helps you spend less time troubleshooting and more time creating. MobileMe was to extend this concept to the not-so-new generation of web-based services. While it’s a nice facelift from their older .Mac service, it still has a long way to go.

Take their Gallery service. While it integrates easily with Apple’s iPhoto software, the web-based galleries are a mess. There’s too much interface and not enough… wait, what are we here for?

Pictures. Visitors to your gallery get fancy resize sliders, color pickers, and animated layouts to play with, which is great fun for the first few minutes. These fancy gadgets, however, soon get in the way of what we’re really trying to do - view pictures. When you click a thumbnail, it never just pops up. It always slides, zooms, or fades in. There’s no way to search within an album or sort pictures into a particular order.

But the most serious affront to my photographer sensibilities? The pictures don’t even display properly. Clicking a thumbnail should bring up a large version of the image. In MobileMe Gallery, it first brings up a fuzzy low-resolution version of the image at full size. A second or two later, the full-resolution version pops in. This is an odd behavior, and one I’ve never seen on any other website.

The net effect is that a visitor’s first impression of your pictures are that you’re a talentless hack that doesn’t know how to focus a camera. When you spend hours trying to get that perfect shot, you don’t want anyone’s first thought when viewing it to be, “Whoa, that’s blurry. Oh, there it goes. Yeah, that’s a pretty good shot.”

Next up to bat: Flickr.

I recently returned to Wesabe, a nifty money management site with a social community wrapped around it. Wesabe lets you visualize and track your spending across multiple accounts, and features discussion groups where users can talk about how to achieve goals (saving for a house, paying down debt).

When I joined Wesabe about 18 months ago, the defining feature seemed to be the “Tips” section. As you tagged your transactions into categories, the Tips page would show you tips written by members that were related to your transactions’ tags. So if you attached a “coffee” tag to a Starbucks transaction, for example, you’d get tips on how to save money at Starbucks, as well as some cheaper alternatives. If you’d found a printable coupon, you could post it for others to see. Great idea.

I stopped using Wesabe for a while, partly out of laziness, but mainly because of a lack of time and motivation to tag all of my transactions. I recently realized that I needed to get a handle on my spending, so I came back. I was pretty disappointed in what I found.

Some things have improved. Uploading bank data is now more streamlined, including an option to have Wesabe save your bank credentials and automatically update your accounts. This is much easier than running update software on your computer or manual uploads that were previously required (though still available if you’re concerned about security).

What really disappointed me was the changes in the Tips section. The tab now only shows results from their new “Value Engine,” which compares two merchants (one you frequent, one you don’t) based on other members’ spending habits and approval ratings. It’s a nice idea. Since I shop at Starbucks, it should show me a comparison with Dunkin Donuts. Users, on average, spend about a dollar less at Dunks and actually give them a higher approval rating.

But it doesn’t. It shows me a comparison between Starbucks and an independent cafe in another state. It also suggests I try Pizza Hut as an alternative to Subway. A useless comparison, but a forgivable mistake for a computer to make.

In introducing this new (and still a bit beta) feature, Wesabe has hidden their own killer app. If I want to see the user generated tips, I now have to click on Accounts -> Checking Account -> Merchant Name -> Tips for Merchant. That’s 4 clicks! And that just gives me tips on a specific merchant and its related tags. If I’m viewing Dunkin Donuts tips and I want to see auto tips, I have to back up or search for something new.

It’s just too much work. I want to see a page with the latest and highest rated tips for ALL my merchants and tags, all on one page. It should have the ability to sort by popularity or submission date, and a sidebar with a list of all of my tags and merchants so I can drill down from there. Let the hive mind work for me; I shouldn’t have to dig for this information. Put the Value Engine on another tab. Call it “Compare Merchants” or something like that. If it starts working, I’ll use it.

It seems like the number of user-contributed tips has waned since my first experience with Wesabe, and I wonder if that’s partly due to the lack of an easy way to get at the useful tips. The site also doesn’t coax me into contributing tips. If I saw a list of all of my merchants/tags and the number of tips for each, I might be inclined to write a few tips for the ones that don’t have any.

The idea that got me excited about Wesabe in the first place was that I could consolidate my financial data from multiple banks into one spot, see how I’m spending, and see user-generated tips - tailored to my spending habits - on how to save money and gain value from merchants. This last part, harnessing the collective knowledge of the users, is what sets Wesabe apart from Quicken, Mint, and all the others. That feature is now so crippled that it’s pretty much useless.