Paper Bits

• 2012-03-15

  Each Generation is Doomed to Reinvent the CueCat

  Here’s the thing about the CueCat: it wasn’t that the hardware sucked, it’s that people aren’t going to scan things to go to a web page.

  And yet now we have QR codes, which we’re laughing at, and which will disappear like an American Idol contestant.

  QR codes, the CueCat, and other printed hyperlinks are just that. Links. They’re like the <a> tag¹. But they’re not useful enough yet in their own right to bear the weight of their use in advertisements.

  Advertisements are parasites on useful and desirable tools we already understand. Like the <a> tag.

  The web runs on <a> tags. We love them. They fuel everything. And oh, yeah, some of them are ads. That’s an acceptable cost to many of us, though, because the others are so damn useful.

  Would the <a> tag have caught on if the only place you saw it was on an advertisement or flyer? Would you “click here for more information” if you knew it was going to be a come-on?

  Pretty sure I wouldn’t. In fact, I’d probably learn to avoid anything that looked like a clickable link.

  Just like I’ve learned to ignore the big square 2D barcodes cropping up in stores and ads.

  QR codes are a limited but powerful tool for some innovative applications. It’s a damn shame that they’ve come to mean, “some asshole wants me to wave my phone at a big square on the subway so I can watch a commercial about how awesome he is”.

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  1. And right now they’re inconvenient, slow, ugly <a> tags that require you to dredge out a piece of specialized hardware or software to use them. That’s not going to help either. ↩

• 2010-11-11

  

  RFID is a useful way to identify objects —to “name” them— so that they can be tracked in space and time.

  In order for something to be trackable, you have to be able to query it. The most obvious way to do that would be a smartphone, like an iPhone or Android device.

  None of these smartphones speak RFID.

  QRCodes can be read by phones, which is why there’s so much interest in them right now.

  But they suck.

  And it’s hard to tell whether they suck because all of the reader applications suck (they do).

  Or, do they suck because the purposes people are putting QRCodes to are lame (they are)?

  Do they suck because you have to convince people to download an app onto their phone before they ever use one? (A horrible first-time experience, even if your app is free.)

  The key question, I guess, is: if there was a perfectly flexible and usable QRCode reader that everyone already had on their phones, what would you use it for?

  And don’t say “advertising.”

  Source: Flickr / jazzmasterson

• 2010-10-27

  

  Making the Physical from the Digital « Random Hacks

  Source: benosteen.wordpress.com