There’s a moment in just about every project when you have to do something ridiculous to appease someone: a design direction to try that you know is going to be totally unworkable, an extra presentation for a big boss, some model or power point slide to explain the obvious, or a really unnecessary meeting. Luckily I’ve heard a great new phrase for this sort of silliness, to be used when it arises: “Dance for Grandma!” It’s usually accompanied by rhythmic hand-clapping. Brilliant.

Want to start a Web 2.0 company? Here’s the keywords you need to sprinkle through your presentations:

• social
• tagging
• network
• collaboration
• user-generated content
• RSS
• API
• platform

I’ve heard or spoken to at least three different companies lately who do “social networking software” and all three meant something totally different by that term.

As I mentioned in an earlier post on Service vs. Product Design, services are easier to replicate and improve upon than products. Similarly, I think services, especially web services, are easier to create and improve upon than content. My new law, Saffer’s Law, is this:

It’s easier to create a content aggregator than it is to create content.

Hundreds of aggregators can grab content from the New York Times, but it’s much harder to create the content of the New York Times. It probably wouldn’t be hard (at least on the front-end) to make a better auction service than Ebay: the trick would be to move their millions of users (and their content) over to it. Just ask Amazon Auctions.

Now certainly creating (and constantly maintaining and upgrading) a great service is no easy task. But at the center of most web services is a kernel of content (this can be user-supplied) and that has to be good or the service is junk. You wouldn’t trade from an online brokerage if their stock quotes were bad. You wouldn’t go to Google if their search results sucked.

Similarly, at the center of most offline services is a product, and if the product sucks, no great service is going to save it for too long. If Starbuck’s coffee tasted like Maxwell House, you wouldn’t buy very much of it.

In the cavalcade of hype around Web 2.0, we shouldn’t forget that a focus on services at the expense of the content that helps fuel them, could leave us with some very shallow services.

While I like marketing-readiness of the term Web 2.0, a part of the metaphor doesn’t ring true to me, namely this: in software, version 2.0 is a replacement for version 1.0; you usually don’t keep version 1.0 around. With Web 2.0, however, Web 1.0 (and 1.1, 1.2, etc.) are still around and likely will be for a long time. Web 2.0 isn’t replacing what we have, only supplementing and augmenting it. And living alongside it.

All this AJAX stuff is pretty cool, but we shouldn’t forget that one click away is still certs.com…

Robert Reimann, one of the people who literally wrote the book on personas, once mentioned that one of the most important elements of a persona is the photo of the person. My personal experience confirms this: I long remember the names and pictures of old personas long after I’ve forgotten other (probably more important) details about them.

A persona’s picture gives a face–literally–to the data, and choosing the right one is a combination of science and art. The science first.

I’m probably giving away my greatest secret here: Yahoo Personals are the best place online to find pictures for your personas. Why? Because there is an extensive amount of criteria they have that you can search by, for one thing. Looking for a 40-year-old lesbian Native American woman near Cheyenne? No problem, here’s about 20 of them, in a photo gallery for you to peruse. Another thing: people look their best in their photo personal ad, even if that best isn’t all that great. There’s a wide range of humanity to choose from.

The main difficulty in using Yahoo Personals is that you’re never sure of the size of the photo that people have uploaded. It might look fine onscreen, but be too tiny for print use. I’ve spent a lot of time frustrated after having found the perfect photo for my persona only to find out it’s too small or of too poor quality to use in print.

Also be sure to pick photos with a fairly neutral background and with no one else in the picture. In most cases, you want the focus of the photo to be mostly on the person’s face.

The art of choosing a persona resides in how two things relate to the data: what s/he is wearing, and what his/her expression is. Clothes tell a lot about a person (or, more accurately, what perceivers assume about the person): what they value, their socio-economic status, career, and a host of other things. Expression conveys attitude. How does the person approach the world? Cautiously, joyfully, angrily (yes, there are some angry photos in the personals!), hopefully? With expression, you can capture how your persona is going to approach your product, and that expression may say more than everything else you’ve written on the page.

It helps if you believe it too. The picture has to look like someone you could have talked to (or did talk to, if you interviewed people remotely). If it doesn’t seem like one of them, throw it out. There’s plenty more where that came from.

One final note about persona pictures: don’t get cute with them. The fastest way to have people dismiss your personas is to put in ridiculously beautiful/handsome people, people holding puppies, celebrities, you, your teammates, etc. It might be funny or clever for a moment, but that’ll fade and your personas will have lost all their power to remind us that it’s not about us, it’s about them.

I’m finding myself having trouble keeping up with all the RSS feeds I have (109). Which isn’t a huge number, but considering some of them are news feeds, del.icio.us popular, and group blogs like Boing Boing, it’s ending up being about 300 entries a day to read. Even at only a minute an entry (and some take much longer to mull over), that’s five hours of reading. Every day.

I don’t know about you, but I don’t have five hours a day to read and process 300 chunks of information. There needs to be a better way to manage and control RSS feeds. As Herb Simon told us back in the 1960s, there’s no lack of information, just the human limitation to process it all.

Here’s some things I’d like to see in an RSS reader:

• the ability to widely vary the amount that a feed is accessed, anywhere from several times a day to once a month
• the ability to designate something as a temporary feed with a limited shelf life, so that after a designated period of time, it vanishes from my list of feeds
• the ability to determine which feeds will display as an “unread” feed in my dock (I wish I had this for email as well)

If anyone knows of a Mac feedreader that can do even some of these things, let me know.