May 2008 - Posts
It’s been a pretty long time since the first generation of Zune came out. Microsoft wants to attract us as potential users to join the social – they made pretty good media sharing and community features so that to distinct from similar products made by other companies.
However, Zune has a very serious usability problem that even though a huge amount of users have been complaining all the time, it’s never been solved. It is the lack of support for most of the global languages.
It’s true that Zune has not yet been available globally. However, the assumption of people in North America only listen to English, French, and Spanish songs just does not make sense. There’re people originally from almost anywhere in the world reside in North America temporarily or permanently. They speak different languages and they have their entertainment needs as well. They listen to English songs, but they also listen to songs on their own languages.
You will be able to see the demand of global languages support by just doing a simple search on the Internet. You will see a huge number of complains from the date the first generation of Zune came out all the way up to the present time.
The users do not even need Microsoft to have Zune menus displayed in their languages. They just need Zune to have the ability to show their song information correctly on the device. Technically, this is really a simple task for Microsoft to do. So it’s become a do-or-not-do decision for Microsoft. But provided the fact that until the newly released version 2.5, Zune still doesn’t support most global languages, I guess Microsoft made the not-do decision. But I still hope in the upcoming third generation, they can do it.
If you now think that Microsoft has done nothing about this issue, you are wrong. In order for the users to solve this design or usability problem, Microsoft published a Knowledge Base article (http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx/kb/928210/en-us?sd=zune). It simply asks the user to change all the song information in other languages to their equivalent English representation. Well, does anybody like to find some spare time to translate and change the name, album, and artist information of 10,000 songs in the media library? Or do you, as a user, want to just simply buy an ipod, iriver, or Creative zen? Microsoft tried to ask the customers to solve their own design issues. This will not work out in this user centric era!
As the result, people have songs in foreign languages are in a frustrating situation. They may like their Zunes; they may like the social; but they don’t want to see the boxes showing in the device instead of the correct characters or languages anymore! Finally, they decide to switch, they either buy a much cheaper music player but supports 20 languages including their own, or go to use an ipod.
Microsoft should really do something to solve this – provided it’s really just a matter of whether or not putting some font files in the system partition with just a little extra work.
Social networking web sites like MySpace are more and more popular in young people’s everyday life in recent years. People have the desire to make new friends on the Internet for various reasons, such as dating, for a relationship, for friendship, or for business networking; people also like to re-connect with old friend through such web sites.
However, identity issues have never been completely solved for years. Years ago, everybody on the Internet can claim himself or herself to be anyone (without any technical restrictions). One person can steal pictures from another person’s web site and claim to be that person. Even in the present time, there’re a lot of profiles on web sites like MySpaces are fake ones. They claim (appear) to be pretty girls or handsome boys, and attract large amounts of people to add them into their friend lists.
I’ve never done any research on this, but personally I think they may have the following goals in mind when stealing those identities and making those fake profiles.
1. Collect relatively a large number of users’ information for various illegal business purposes (i.e. but not limited to send Junk messages or any form of advertisements). They attract a lot of users in their desired genders to be in their friend lists, so that they can more or less get some personal information from them. There are, and actually quite a few young people provide real information in this kind of web sites.
2. To get their psychological satisfactions. Some people with psychological issues have the desire to be a completely different person online and get a lot of followers. They enjoy doing so and get the satisfactions they desire to have by doing so.
3. Just for fun. Yes. Many people make a fake profiles just for fun.
I believe there are many other reasons that I yet to know. But this is truly a problem. How can you ensure you are chatting with your potential date but not her dog on the Internet?
Some new social network systems like Facebook provide ways to verify users identity. For example, if you want to register as a college student, you may have to use your college email address; if you want to register as a company employee, you may have to use your work email address; etc. But even so, you can still find several Bill Gates, several Steve Ballmer’s and etc in the system. People can still register for a profile freely and use a fake identity.
As the result, this kind of identity issue is really a human issue, but not a technological issue. Indeed, my answer to the previous question I posed is “ to be careful.” Know your goal when you are using these web sites and don’t abuse. Try to verify whom you are really talking to before disclosing too much information. Learn to protect yourself. Young people like teenagers usually don’t protect themselves enough when trying to get to know new people. They should take more care. And parents should provide more education to their children about protecting themselves online.
In fact, even in an ideal environment that everyone uses their own identity (can be real or imaginary but need to be their own, not stolen), there are still issues. For example, boyfriend may know girlfriend’s password so when you are talking to someone online, it’s possible that you’re really talking to her boyfriend; in the same sense, wife may know husband’s password, too.
As the result, these issues are not likely to be technically solved, at least in a short time. Think about what information you want the others to know before disclosing; and think about if there’s any unexpected person who may potentially know this information as well before disclosing. Do some verification to make sure the one you’re talking to is the one you want to talk to. If you do all these carefully, I’m positive that you won’t email me and tell me that you’re in a relationship with a dog any more.
Xiaonei, which is called “the Facebook of China,” has a very similar user interface as Facebook. It provides similar but simplified functionalities. While western media often compare the two and discuss about the potential competitions they may have, I don’t think in recent time there will be any big competition between them.
In many senses Xiaonei and Facebook do the same thing. They are both social network systems and are both platforms designed mainly for people who already know each other to get connected or reconnected. However, there’s really a long way to go for both of them to have a real competition with each other.
Xiaonei has absolute advantage in China. They started in as early as 2005 and accumulated a huge number of Chinese users. According to the recent news reports, they also raised a lot of money. But Facebook, on the other hand, has not even officially entered China (or just started to do so). As the result, even with the assumption Facebook gets started to enter the big Chinese market, they still need a lot of efforts to get the users to them. And many Xiaonei users may even think that Facebook copies Xiaonei, since they’ve never known Facebook before.
However, Facebook currently has absolute advantage in technology. Although Xiaonei looks really like Facebook, they don’t get the same underlying technology, even for basic features. Every single software system has problems and bugs, but Xiaonei still has enough technical problems (bugs) to give users a bad experience. They need a long way to go to be technically comparable to Facebook. As a user, I hope Xiaonei will invest more to the development team and create software with better quality. In addition to the quality issue, Facebook makes itself an open platform. They provide Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) to third party. Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) can develop their own applications or plug-ins for Facebook. By doing so, the contents of Facebook have been dramatically enriched. This also help creates a better user experience.
Now you may realize why I make the point that Xiaonei and Facebook will not even in competition in a short time. They both have advantages that the other can’t catch up in a short time. Xiaonei will get more and more users and eventually succeed within China, while Facebook will continue their success in other parts of the world. I, as a user of both systems, just hope both of them can get better and provide us a great user experience. I hope Xiaonei can continually improve their technology; and Facebook can continue their efforts on globalization.
It will be fun to see what the situation is again in 5 years.