Just got the news that I'll be speaking about the concepts covered in my up-and-coming book, "Designing the Obvious", at FlashForward 2006 in Austin, TX.

The session (and the book) is about the character traits of great Web-based software and how to achieve them. If you're headed to FlashForward in September, be sure to check it out, and feel free to stop me in the halls to chat!

For those of you that have been waiting for Dashboard HQ, it's time to finally get moving. I'm happy to announce we are in need of a few dedicated beta testers. We'll be starting very small, with just a few people, but in a few days, we'll put up an open invite on the homepage for more beta testers.

If you're interested in being one of the first people to use Dashboard HQ, contact us right now at:

beta - at - 33inc dot com

Please, only contact us if you're willing to spend some quality time setting up your Dashboard HQ page and giving us feedback on it. If we pick you - and this will be somewhat random, so don't be hurt if you don't get a reply - we'll reply with info about how to register.

Go here for details on Dashboard.

Thanks!

Why is it that Gmail, Google's webmail application, can handle spam so well when no one else can figure it out?

I get spam in my Gmail account (which I use for various discussion lists) every single day, but it almost never hits my inbox. 99.9% of the time it gets marked as spam and is neatly hidden away until I go check that list and delete everything. And email I am supposed to get has never once been marked as spam.

The Web would be a much better place if everyone could deal with spam as well as Gmail. Of course, the real problem is that sad, lonely losers out there produce spam to begin with, but that's a losing battle. We'll never stop the losers. but by learning from Gmail, we could do a much better job of preventing spam from showing up in our inboxes next to messages from people who actually matter to us.

Thanks, Google.