Middle-Aged Users' Declining Web Performance

Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox for March 31 is now online at:
  > http://www.useit.com/alertbox/middle-aged-users.html
			
Summary:
Between the ages of 25 and 60, people's ability to use websites declines
by 0.8% per year - mostly because they spend more time per page, but also
because of navigation difficulties.
				
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Usability Week 2008 conference

  > New York, April 7-12
  > London, May 19-24
  > San Francisco, June 16-21
  > Melbourne, July 21-26

In-depth training:
  > 3-day Intensive Camp: Usability in Practice
  > 3-day Immersion: Tog on Interaction Design

Specialized full-day tutorials:

  > Fundamental Guidelines for Web Usability
  > Application Usability (2 days)
  > Intranet Usability (2 days)
  > Websites That Sell
  > E-Mail Newsletter Usability
  > Writing for the Web
  > B2B

Full program:
  > http://www.nngroup.com/events

DEADLINE to save $200 on New York registration: THIS FRIDAY, April 4

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FACEBOOK AND METCALFE'S LAW

We are getting close to the bursting of Bubble 2.0, so it's a good idea to
review some of the precursors of Bubble 1.0.

In 1999, I wrote an article "Metcalfe's Law in Reverse" about the problems
of so-called walled gardens, where a service cuts itself off from the
Internet and tries to add value by being closed.

  > http://www.useit.com/alertbox/990725.html

Facebook and the current generation of social networks are trying to
replicate the walled garden strategy that failed ten years ago. It'll fail
again.

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DEATH OF NEWSPAPERS

In other old news, 10 years ago I predicted the death of newspapers "in
ten years" (i.e., now) in my column "The End of Legacy Media":

  > http://www.useit.com/alertbox/980823.html

The New Yorker has an update on this topic, subtitled "The death and life
of the American newspaper":

  > http://newyorker.com/reporting/2008/03/31/080331fa_fact_alterman
	
As it's often the case, I was too aggressive in my prediction. Newspapers
aren't dead yet, though they are sadly dying by the month. According to
the New Yorker piece, American newspapers have lost 42% of their market
value over the last 3 years alone.

The problem is that classified ads are one of the few forms of advertising
that work better online than in print, and they used to be a huge part of
newspaper revenues (33% of all newspaper ad revenues in 1985, the year
the Web took off). Display ads work much better in print (since they
hardly work at all on the Web due to banner blindness), but display ads
plus subscriptions are insufficient to fund a newspaper.

Furthermore, there's a tendency for people to get more of their
information online than from print, and since the value of a website
reader is vastly less than the value of a print reader, this compounds the
problem.

I hate to say this, since I am a big fan of newspapers, but I think that
my prediction from 1998 is in the process of coming true, even though it's
going to take more years than I originally said. Never confuse a clear
view with a short distance, as the saying goes.