BillMonk’s Facebook application hasn’t worked for months now (check out the complaints!) and adding things to your Library by searching Amazon now never returns any results. The developers are nowhere to be seen.

BillMonk is full-featured, yet simple to use and was (as far as I know) the original ’social money’ application. Back then the developers were great, responding to feedback and fixing bugs. What a shame it all seems to have downhill since they were bought out by Obopay!

So what’s plan B?

Can’t We Just Keep Using It?

I’ll try and continue to use BillMonk, but this is problematic because I really need both the Facebook and standalone website interfaces, as more friends communicate via Facebook only and not email.

Moreover, who knows how long it will be until one day we wake up to find BillMonk has just stopped working or disappeared? Luckily, you can export all your BillMonk data, so you won’t lose previous transactions even if BillMonk ceases to exist one day. (I suggest all users of BillMonk start doing this. Seriously, who knows if its days really are numbered?)

How About the Alternatives?

A lot of people seem to recommend two alternatives: the flawed Buxfer and the simple Scred. Unfortunately, neither are good enough. For a start, neither of them allow you to track things you lend/borrow from friends, as oppose to money.

I evaluated Buxfer a long time ago and dismissed it. Today, I looked at it again and came to the same conclusion. It is slow and very much focused on tracking your entire financial life (e.g. expenses, bank accounts, etc) — something I have no need or desire for. It is also very US-centric and you can’t export data out of it unless you pay for their premium service.

Scred appears to be nice and free from bloat, but it is too simple. Its sparse look and feel also doesn’t really appeal to me. (The fact that it has a multi-platform mobile application that even works offline sounds great though!)

So What Do We Need?

To be honest, what we really need is just a clone of BillMonk that works. Its ability to track non-money transactions and itemised bills is what nobody else offers.

The one thing I don’t like about BillMonk is its Debt Shuffling feature. Its mechanism is not naturally intuitive and some of my friends hate it. I’d prefer a pool system, which is basically like a simple central pot of money between a group of friends and each person owes money to or takes money from the pot. (Incidentally, Buxfer and Scred offer this.)

I’m desperate enough to seriously consider writing a simple replacement myself… and I’d have a lot to learn since I’m not an application developer! Are there really no alternatives?

HALP!

What?! But I only know of the English A-Z alphabet… how am I supposed to include multiple alphabets in my password?

Oh wait… did you mean letters of the alphabet?

Hilarity: 1
Thoughtful Design: 0

The observant among you will also note that the explanatory text originally on the form informs you that passwords must contain at least one digit, but makes no reference to any requirement for letters — poorly thought out indeed. Not to mention, since the password can only be 6-8 characters long, I don’t know how I’d fit 26+ characters even if I wanted to!

(Besides, all this thing protects is the ability to check how many fuel discount vouchers I have… why the need for such a strong password anyway?)

Listen, I understand that this is great news for FeedBurner and congratulations to them. But as a FeedBurner user, I’m somewhat worried. (The main blog and comments feeds here at Digital Kaleidoscope are run through FeedBurner.)

Will unwanted Google AdSense start appearing in feeds? What will change in the FeedBurner service as it gets Google-fied? What will happen to FeedBurner’s sense of humour? My feed is currently imported into my Facebook notes. Will that have to change depending on the situation with ads?

Speaking of Facebook, there’s always speculation about whether they will be acquired. Again, that’s another one I worry about. I currently trust a good amount of private information to Facebook and I’d hate to see them bought out by Google — I just don’t trust them with any of my data. Even Microsoft would be a better buyer, if Facebook was to sell at all. (Either way, I’d still worry about losing the crisp, clean interface that Facebook currently sports.)

Oh the things that keep me up at night… everything being swallowed up by Google. What has the world come to?

But you know what? Facebook is actually pretty cool… I thought it was a bit elitist for Facebook to have initially limited memberships to those who had an affiliation to a university and I’m glad that it’s now more open, but I’ve come to realise the easy way to identify other friends in your networks is really its key strength. It now also seems to be useful for those outside Australia. Oh, and it’s well implemented, with a UX that is on the whole pretty and functional.

For my Digital Media friends, I think you’re all missing out (as I don’t think any of you are on here)… it’s actually a great way of identifying any mutual friends you have with others that you had no idea about. It’s also a good way to catch friends from high school or earlier who you haven’t seen for a while!

That’s the reason I’ve finally signed up. I realised many of my friends used it, and I figured anything that truly helps me keep in touch with them is a good thing, right? (I actually think many of my non-Digital Media friends are much more into this stuff. Weird? Or maybe the geeks are just too cool for this.)

P.S. No, this does not mean I will soon have a MySpace.

What’s that sound? I just read on Whirlpool that Telstra will finally be phasing out the annoying Heartbeat system for BigPond Cable customers, a move that’s a mere 45 000 years overdue.

The Heartbeat required devices connected to the cable modem — whether that’s an individual computer running the BigPond Cable login client or, more commonly, a router — to regularly respond to a kind of ping from BigPond in order to remain connected to the service.

This created a ridiculous number of problems for people setting up and using routers that didn’t always cope with the Heartbeat. Not to mention, in recent years even those with only one computer have occasionally wanted to connect to their cable Xboxes and the like — except none of these know how to deal with the Heartbeat.

Goodbye Heartbeat, you won’t be missed.

It’s interesting that they don’t seem to have publicised the changes that well. There is a Flash introduction to what’s new that my friend Fiona pointed out to me, but I don’t see this linked from anywhere on the site. All I could find was a blog entry about the redesign.

Good Improvements…

The new look is crisper and cleaner. The use of shadows and shading around containers helps in visually differentiating content sections. While news sites seem to enjoy cramming as much content into as small a space as possible, the new SMH site luckily retains enough whitespacing to avoid looking cluttered. Best of all, articles are now displayed in a larger font with greater leading (linespacing) — much easier on the eyes.

Personally, I like the drop-down navigation bar at the top as it saves space, though it can’t be a replacement for all other navigation. As long as the right column contains relevant links to surrounding sections and related articles I’ll be happy.

Unfortunately pop-up ads are still used, although Firefox’s popup blocker seems to catch them all now. The placement of ads appears to be improved compared to the old site (from memory). The ads don’t seem to be as intrusive — I think they are better integrated into the layout than they used to be?

…But Not All Smooth Sailing

However, a serious usability issue plagues the new design. Articles are now spread out over a multiple pages and you need to follow links and wait for new pages to load to continue reading. Thankfully, the team at SMH seem to have gotten enough complaints that they’re going to capitulate and reverse this. I wonder why they decided to do it in the first place? Was it to increase ad impressions in search of greater revenues?

Also, on some articles (it seems most of the ones accessed from the home page), you have no idea where you are. There is no breadcrumb trail. I don’t think it’s a deal-breaker as I generally tend to read an article then use ‘Back’ to return to the index page, but this is still bad!

Even more annoyingly, their RSS feeds are still ridiculously meagre offerings, providing only headlines. What is so wrong about providing at least a paragraph of intro copy with each headline in the RSS feed? Hint to the SMH team: if I had some idea what content is actually on your site, I might actually visit it more often!

Most disappointing of all though is that the new website fails to validate (the homepage fails with over 250 errors) despite the developers bothering to declare an XHTML 1.0 Transitional doctype. It’s a shame, because a lot of the errors appear to be simple issues with characters not being encoded properly or care not being taken to use the correct markup syntax. It’s good to see the site otherwise uses standards-based markup for layout and pages linearise well (displays in a semantically logical way even without stylesheets).

My Verdict

I worked at rival News Interactive during the last redesign of NEWS.com.au in Dec 2004/Jan 2005. While I could never bring myself to read the tabloid trash that News publishes, I really think our website at the time was better than SMH’s previous offering and made better use of the medium than SMH’s lowest-denominator presentation.

Of course, NEWS.com.au is now a lot more cluttered than when I left, lacking polish and taking forever to load (thanks to an overload of ads and gimmicks). They also seem to be happy leaving the site breaking in Firefox. Not to mention, they removed my favourite feature! OK, so it was one that I wrote, but hey… (It made text flow nicely around island ads in articles regardless of font size.)

Overall, the SMH redesign is a welcome change. At a time when underlining links has been shunned for years, when subtle, glassy 3D shading is in and Ajax isn’t even a new craze anymore, their previous design from 2004 had begun to feel a bit dated.

I’m glad to finally have a news site to call home that both looks good and contains respectable content! I just wish we could have a major news site that validated for once and provided decent RSS feeds. Thumbs up.