Netflix.com Review

Netflix.com

What can there be said about Netflix? It's practically the one thing that everyone in their 20s has in common. Everyone either has Netflix or they are stealing someone else's just to see what the fuss is all about. Nobody saw this giant becoming bigger than Blockbuster the de-facto King of multimedia. It still hogs most of the bandwidth of the internet, and other than it's one of the most popular ways guys try to lure girls and other guys on Tinder to do something for the evening.

The fascinating thing about Netflix is that no two experiences of Netflix used to be exactly identical as it is now. Gone are the days of prominent movies being offered for DVD rental. The age of mobile devices and set-top boxes have completely dominated the user interface of Netflix across every platform it's deployed on. The question is whether it is actually effective.

For the content consumption category:
    1. Is everything I need to get to what I want to consume there without scrolling? Is discovery relevant and available?
        Yes, by courtesy of the search bar. Generally if I'm watching a TV show or a multi-series, Netflix delivers me the content I want to find.
    2. Is it visually appealing?
        Yes. Netflix has the set-top box feel of an X-finity or a U-Verse user interface such that I feel like I'm actually watching TV even if I'm riding a train or wasting time on the couch.
    3. Am I left with the experience of being entertained?
        Yes. Throughout the end to end experience of finding something to watch all the way to watching it, ignoring responsibilities and then following it up with the next episode of what I'm watching, I don't feel like anything is out of place. Procrastinating with Netflix feels right.

Is it a good website?
On the ternary scale (0 being unreadable, 1 being unmemorable, and 2 being memorable), I give Netflix.com a big fat 2. In retrospect, I should have created a competition to evaluate which of the experiences the most are addicting based on a company that exists on the web. More than anything, Netflix also falls into the category of Apple and Amazon for the sole reason of the experience. It's like getting into a groove or familiar welcoming pattern to just binge Breaking Bad or a children's TV series that I missed growing up. It's no wonder that streaming sites have all copied it since then. Procrastinating just never felt so good.

Apple.com Review

Apple.com

Apple is a technological and business tycoon in today's market of devices and experiences. Apple is not special compared to other vendors like Toshiba, HP, Dell, or even Microsoft. They all sell devices, and they all can write documents and make movies and play games. But there is something unique about Apple that is impossible to identify from a purely business perspective. The point is that they view their product as an experience rather than a device or a service. From the perspective of Apple, Inc., buying an iPhone is buying Apple, and buying Mac is buying Apple: a uniform, relatable, and end-to-end experience.

To that end, the question becomes what is Apple's presence for the curious or the naysayers? Apple's success with selling devices back in 2008 with iPod is no accident--specifically which it wasn't the internet or their webpage selling those devices. It was the retail stores, word of mouth, and news hype that ultimately carried Apple into a truly golden age of commerce. It's entirely possible that Apple never needed a website back then and doesn't even need one now to keep the space grey, silver, and rose gold unibody train going.

For the purchasing category

    1. Is everything I need to get to or want to consume available without scrolling?

        Yes--with a twist. From a PC or newcomer’s perspective, it is not clear what Apple actually has to offer these days except for the one thing that they are particularly interested in driving sales or recently announced. Without knowing Mac is a computer, or Music is a subscription service, it's actually not immediately apparent what everything is.

    2. Is it visually appealing?

        Yes. The visual design is a universally recognizable Apple style. Sleek with silver, smooth scrolling, and vivid, bright colors against a white canvas.

    3. Am I left with the experience of wanting to come back?

        Yes. Oddly so, even though I have one of their products, I cannot help but waste a few minutes biweekly on their website to get lost in all of the silver.

       

Is it a good website?

On the ternary scale (0 being unreadable, 1 being unmemorable, and 2 being memorable), I give Apple.com a big fat 2. In a similar way to Amazon.com, their website is memorable for reasons that have nothing to do with the website itself, but rather the experience. Apple may have simply stumbled onto the design of their company language, the color scheme, and even the capabilities of their recent devices, but they captured something that cannot be forcibly replicated. This magic appears on the web too.

Amazon.com Review

Amazon.com

There is a lot to say about Amazon.com. It was (along with EBay) one of the most explosive websites to ever emerge from the dot-com bubble, soar to dizzying stock market heights, fall, then resurge as a reliable investment. Sociologically it has created a behemoth of a business and owns its own line of generic products and innovative products that impact the 21st century. It's quite possible that the shipping industry would not have been as a) profitable or b) as reliable had it not been for Amazon to revolutionize how the world shops.

That's not to say that Amazon as a company is without its critics--some of them levying serious humanitarian and ethical concerns. Article after article in News circles seem to indicate that Amazon is really a hungry beast, riding its employees until they either quit, or feel the need to speak out about feeling caged. Nevertheless, the giant is here to stay, and its welcome page is a bazar unto itself of wares.

For the purchasing category

    1. Is everything I need to get to or want to consume available without scrolling?

        No. Amazon is everything like a Mall was designed to be, but not by design. Unless I know exactly what I want and search for it, Amazon doesn't automatically deliver my needs to my front page. Otherwise, the search function is all I need.

    2. Is it visually appealing?

        No. There is very little architectural language or quality control when it comes to product hosting. Some vendors are genuinely concerned with maintaining product pages with high quality images and accurate, helpful descriptions. However this is the vast minority compared to the sum of all offerings on Amazon.

    3. Am I left with the experience of wanting to come back?

        Yes. Just like it is addicting to walk through a mall to window shop, I, like many others, find myself just browsing for fun to avoid doing work or just to get some idea of what I could possibly want next.

       

Is it a good website?

On the ternary scale (0 being unreadable, 1 being unmemorable, and 2 being memorable), I give Amazon.com a big fat 2. It is unfortunate that Amazon is as memorable as it is--considering that it doesn't do anything over the top to impress. It is a bare bones (stylized), warehouse of miscellaneous goods for sale with some organization for browsing and a fantastic indexing system that works when the goods are popular. The memorability of Amazon is not the website, but rather the customer experience and dependability of 2-day free shipping with a subscription. This could be an indication that a website must suit its experience, rather than reinvent the wheel.

Wikipedia.org Review

Wikipedia.org

There's a game that people can play on Wikipedia called the Six Degrees of Separation. The theory goes that one can actually navigate to any topic or any person within only six clicks and therefore viewing six pages--only by using links contained on the first page one visits.

Wikipedia is simply a marvel of crowd-sourced information. Academics bring it up the first assignment of College Writing classes, students pretend like it's the truth, and it's growing every day by the grace of millions of contributors who have authored portions of each page.

The layout is a throwback to the 2000s during the age of a top navigation bar, side navigation bar, and nothing but articles in the middle. There are millions of articles to sift through and only twenty-four hours in the day. Its text is bare, peppered by the occasional image, and every once in a while annotated with a note that declares a citation is needed.

For the informational category:

    1. Is everything available at 1280*800 resolution without scrolling?

        Yes--with a twist. The only thing I could want out of an encyclopedia is a table of contents or a search function. That's the only useful thing that Wikipedia offers without scrolling. Everything else is clearly not consumer friendly and actually is intended for contributors.

    2. Is it visually appealing?

        No. It is a bare-bones, no frills website that delivers content in Times New Roman and .jpg with moderate to high resolution.

    3. Do I feel the experience of learning and understanding something after I'm done?

        Yes. No matter what the topic is, there is a Wikipedia article and a fan base that is rabidly supporting it and updating it.

Is it a good website?

On the ternary scale (0 being unreadable, 1 being unmemorable, and 2 being memorable), I give Wikipedia.org a big fat 2. Wikipedia is the go-to resource for topic research, period. As a STEM student, it's actually incredible to observe how faithful all of the STEM pages are treated with reverence to theory and definitions. As a fan of many TV Shows and comics and other entertainment media, Wikipedia is thorough and contains articles per character that go further in depth than the distributing websites.

Starwars.com Review

Starwars.com

Star Wars.com is a website that is built by Star Wars nerds for Star Wars nerds with the understanding that not everyone may be immediately familiar with what midichlorians are--but at least they've heard that Darth Vader is Luke's father.

The layout is a fairly standard modern fare, consisting of a header navigation bar, nice color choices for the Galaxy far, far away... but something seems a bit off about it. It's actually a glorified blog--a Pinterest of Star Wars content that the different branches within the Disney-owned franchise now operates. For me, as a fan of Star Wars, this layout indicates to me a very aggressive social media approach to the franchise--sharable content, videos, easy articles, and stuff that fans will probably already know by heart.

Does it pass the litmus test?

For the informational category:

    1. Is everything available at 1280*800 resolution without scrolling?

        Yes. Everything that I could want to get to or find is available with a Search bar in the upper left hand corner. The letdown is that it's not immediately apparent if they even have biographies for their own characters.

    2. Is it visually appealing?

        Yes. As a casual consumer it practically looks like YouTube on an Apple TV, designed to be scrolled through lazily without actually intending to consume anything. It's a window shopper's dream.

    3. Do I feel the experience of learning and understanding something after I'm done?

        No. As a fan, the information contained on the official Star Wars page pales in comparison to other websites like Wikipedia and fan forums. Coming from the eyes of a newcomer who just wants to find out what Star Wars is, it doesn't make sense that there's no obvious ingress point to learn about the franchise.

       

Is it a good website?

On the ternary scale (0 being unreadable, 1 being unmemorable, and 2 being memorable), I give Star Wars.com a big fat 1. Its only purpose is to provide Star Wars social media promoters to be able to promote something while fans eagerly await the next movie. For me, I have other sources for the Star Wars information I need, and the official website just doesn't cut it.

COP 3813 Fall 2015 - Assignment 1

All,

This will be the first blog post in a significant amount of time. I believe the last time I even touched this website was when the iPhone was just taking off, Facebook was filled with Farmville requests, and college was still kind of a foreign concept. Now I have attended two institutions, worked for over five different employers, and am now laden with dreams, purpose, and excitement.

This blog will be revisited for now to fulfill on an assignment for COP 3813 – Intro to Internet Computing at FAU. The purpose of this assignment is to drum up five websites to critique for poor or outstanding reasons and to identify what about them makes them stand out.

First I’ll be grouping the following websites into categories. This list is just a preliminary list for this assignment and may be further expanded should design of websites be something I investigate further. The four categories are websites for the purpose of information—purchase—content consumption—and content creation. I initially intended to review eight websites. The assignment only requires five, I will be covering two informative websites, two purchasing websites, and one content consumption website.

Per category, each website will be judged subjectively based on the following litmus tests:

For the informational category, the checklist goes as follows:

    1. Is everything available at 1280*800 resolution without scrolling?

    2. Is it visually appealing?

    3. Do I feel the experience of learning and understanding something after I'm done?

   

For the purchasing category

    1. Is everything I need to get to or want to consume available without scrolling?

    2. Is it visually appealing?

    3. Am I left with the experience of wanting to come back?

   

For the content consumption category:

    1. Is everything I need to get to what I want to consume there without scrolling? Is discovery relevant and available?

    2. Is it cluttered/visually appealing?

    3. Am I left with the experience of being entertained?

   

For content creation category:

    1. Are all the tools I need to create content there without scrolling.

    2. Is it visually appealing?

    3. Am I left with the experience of having gotten work done?

Finally, I will give conclude with an overall rating based on the ternary scale (0 being non-functional, 1 being forgettable, and 2 being memorable).

I hope you enjoy the following blog posts and I encourage you to visit again in the future!

Best,

Chris Carl

http://christophercarl.blogspot.com/2015/08/starwarscom-review.html
http://christophercarl.blogspot.com/2015/08/wikipediaorg-review.html
http://christophercarl.blogspot.com/2015/08/applecom-review.html
http://christophercarl.blogspot.com/2015/08/applecom-review_26.html
http://christophercarl.blogspot.com/2015/08/netflixcom-review.html

Constitutuional Law Notes: 07/30/10

JSA Georgetown Summer Session II, 2010
Congressional Law, Dr. Marty Sheffer

I. Judicial Liberalism
a. The first term was synonymous with Judicial Restraint.
b. However, you can’t do your job if you’re not doing anything activist. No decision is going to be non-activist.
II. Selective Incorporation
a. The Framers of incorporation believed that the first Amendment was particularly more important than any of the others.
i. All of this is a game of balancing whether rights in a particular case more important to an ordered free society than the free hand the government has to use.
III. Sherbert v. Warner
a. Even though there are rules and stuff for working hours and wages and all, no matter what the intent was, the fact is that the 1st amendment free practice is more important than any policing of any corporation.
IV. Caroine Products Co. Case (1938)
a. Footnote 4 – the possibility that when the first Amendment is at stake in the litigation, you actually reverse the presumption of constitutionality. An act of legislature that directly infringes will be presumed unconstitutional, and the full burden of proof will be placed on the government. This footnote becomes the “Preferred Freedom Test”. Freedom will always be preferred.