Video of Interview with Marissa Mayer, VP at Google

The video of my interview with Marissa Mayer, Google's Vice President of Search Products and User Experience at the WebGuild Web 2.0 conference is now available. A lot of great tidbits and insight from an expert in this area. Watch the video!

Have a safe and happy Thanksgiving everyone!

Google Reader

I have been using Google Reader and am quite enjoying having all my feeds and content from multiple sources aggregated in one place. It does make for easier reading as touted. And having it integrated into my uber Google account which includes Gmail, calendaring, docs, and spreadsheets is convenient. The interface is characteristically Google-y...simple and text based. The one thing that I found to be not-so-obvious in the interface is in the preview pane. When a user clicks on a news item to expand out the story to read it, it is not clear that the user can click again on the news item title to contract the pane. This would be one of my first and most commonly taken actions in this app....i.e. to expand and contract the news stories. There are no explicit pane controls for this action. On the other hand, I like the color coding of read versus unread items.

Very cool stuff! Check it out at http://www.google.com/reader/.

User Versus Usage Growth

Recently at the WebGuild Annual Conference 2006: Web 2.0 — The New Web, Keynote Speaker, Ram Shriram, Founding Member of Google, noted that of the approximately 2 billion users worldwide on the web, upwards of 60% have broadband access in the developed markets (i.e. Japan, Western Europe, US, and Canada) and 30% have broadband access in the emerging markets (i.e. Brazil, India, China, Russia, etc.). He went on to state that user growth has been established in multiple geographies but that usage growth comes with maturity. Developed markets are experiencing more usage growth as user growth is already high, and within emerging markets such as China and Brazil followed by Russia, and India, usage growth is occuring more so than in other emerging market countries. Usage growth is happening in email, search, and comsumption of information, versus using, to transact on the internet.

Watch the video of the interview!