To celebrate the holiday, we’ve partnered with an awesome charity, goods for good, to help vulnerable children and orphans across the world. It’s exciting to have them as our partner, and it’s a fantastic charity, so visit Reqoop now, download the app, and take some pics. Each pic you take will donate $1 to goods for good!

HBO GO was recently launched on Roku, and when my team and I at Huge approached designing for the Roku platform, we had one simple goal – make it the best looking app on Roku, period. This proved to be a harder challenge than we thought it would be, given the tight limitations of the templates available to us, and the speed at which we wanted to launch the product to the market. Of course, the main reference we had was Netflix, and there were a few things that we just had to change if we could stand using GO on Roku.

The first was the dreaded “talk bubble” info box. Actually a more complicated task than you’d think given the fixed nature of these templates, but with some assistance from Roku, we ended up with something that’s both more elegant and refined, and “feels” like HBO.

Design wasn’t the only problem – we also had to figure out the best way to replicate the way we were organizing the content on HBO GO into something that made sense on Roku. This meant many tests of different IAs, each optimized for a different way to navigate through the content stack. In the end, we decided on one approach that mixed both flat and hierarchical ways to browse content, which I think makes the best of HBO’s content library as well as the way people navigate on Roku.

So I hope all of you HBO GO users out there enjoy using it as much as we enjoyed making it.

We’ve been hearing a lot of about TV this past year. Whether it’s “cutting the cord“, or “over-the-top services“, or a zillion other buzz phrases, you can’t read tech press without speculation about the future of connected-TVs. For all the buzz, so far there’s been little advancement.

If you’ve been following such developments as CableLabs OpenCable or Tru2Way, or GoogleTV, or AppleTV, or Boxee, or a zillion other products that I could mention, then you’re probably just as confused as everyone else about where the world is going to go.

The problem? The MSO/MVPDs. The simple reality is that for at least the foreseeable future, the cable companies will continue to control the bulk of the content that you actually care about. And while this is clearly a problem for innovation because of their tight control over the technical ecosystem and limitations of their platforms, we’re at least starting to see the MSOs themselves start to play far more aggressively with tech – case in point such developments as Xfinity’s well-designed iPad app, or U-verse integration with XBOX.

But the unfortunate reality is that there is no content interoperability yet. CableCards and Tru2Way were supposed to solve the problem – opening up the cable system to allow consumer electronic companies to create cool products that had direct access to the cable stream. But, saving for TiVo, very few products ever hit the market. Instead, we’re seeing a rash of so-called “over-the-top” products that interact with the internet but cannot provide the most necessary function to be a killer app – the ability to interact with the content that I actually want to watch!

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A war is on to control your personal data. Cookies all over the net are learning as much about you as possible – for better and for worse -  but an even bigger war is looming as companies like Facebook place strict limitations on your ability to control what you do with your own personal data. Facebook claims that this is for your protection; however, is this claim disingenuous, merely allowing them to continue to have sole proprietorship on your personal data?

So it’s not surprise that Google and Facebook are taking this war public in a major way.

When I was at Viacom, one of the major sticking points in negotiating a deal with Facebook was over this very issue. A major problem for any business is (or at least should be) how effective they can be with CRM. And whether you’re looking to improve recommendations, incorporate behavioral targeting, or simply learn more about your visitors to make your site better and more relevant, once a user decides that they want to be a part of your community, they are making an explicit statement of interest. At that point, there should be no reason why the site, with the permission of the user, shouldn’t be able to develop and store their own user profile without forcing the user to re-input all their data, especially in a case when a third-party system is working in concert with a first-party system, as is the case with most implementations of Facebook Connect. It’s as simple as asking the user, “do you give us permission to import your data from Facebook?”

Facebook objects to this, while at the same time declaring that they’re on the side of the user. But, if the user owns their own data, should it be their choice to determine whether or not they can export data from Facebook into any site of their choosing? Google made this mistake when they shut down Orkut and have now down a total about-face on the subject.

I’m a believer in data portability. I think we, as businesses, will have plenty of opportunities and ways to convince consumers to provide us with personal data so we can improve their experience, make offers more relevant, and generally remove the clutter. The burden is on us to keep giving them great reasons to come back. I’m convinced that as long as we – as content owners, creators, programmers, product developers, and business owners – continue creating great experiences, users will continue to share their personal info with us, and no single company should have the ability to take ownership of your identity without your choice.

I hope someday we’ll see that “export your data” function in Facebook.

It was reported today that according to a study by the USC Center for the Digital Future that zero – yes zero – people would pay to use Twitter.  Jeffrey Cole, the director of the Center for the Digital Future, says, “Such an extreme finding that produced a zero response underscores the difficulty of getting Internet users to pay for anything that they already receive for free.”

This is a refrain I’ve certainly heard before. After spending a decade working in the music industry, prior to the last handful of years in broadcast media, the constant topic of conversation was how to get people to pay for something we’d previously given them for free. For the music industry, the answer was fairly simple in principle (and much harder in practice). The answer was to focus on service and quality, and basically get the entire industry to completely re-think everything they previously thought a record label was. Though it’s taken a long time, some progress has been made. Most notably the changing relationship between labels and artists so that it is simultaneously more equitable while giving the record labels better incentives to focus their energy on an artist. For most artists, and I was once of them, too, the problem is always one of mindshare. The label will only push a handful of acts, and how do you become one of those handful? It used to be mostly luck and who you knew (as if it wasn’t hard enough just to get a record contract, you also had to make sure you had the political alignment in the company in your favor). The new approach is to provide more equitable financial relationship between artists and labels, which would be a fantastic approach if labels could be trusted. But that’s another conversation for another time…

For Twitter, the solution is far less clear. The problem with Twitter is not that it’s free or that it’s programmed user behavior. In actuality, people already DO pay for the things Twitter give you for free. It’s called text messaging and you pay your mobile carrier for it every month. The problem is that Twitter as a service is not what I like to call a “purpose driven” service. It’s been driven by marketers and leveraged to excellent effect by celebrities, but for the average user, there is very little purpose or need for them to use Twitter. What would happen if suddenly they couldn’t “follow” Britney’s exploits on Twitter? Well, they’d simply get them from their favorite gossip blog who’ll happily repost, or a zillion other sources. And you already have a great way to send short messages to your friends…those aforementioned carrier provided text messages.

So will any social networks be able to charge customers? Probably not, unless they’re purpose driven. LinkedIn can charge users who have the goal of using LinkedIn to either find candidates for open positions, or those who are job hunting and want to leverage LinkedIn’s tools. And let’s not forget that dating sites are really not quite different from social networks, especially with the functionality that’s evolved to match sites like Facebook. So the problem comes when you build products that have no clear underlying “purpose” other than that of communicating with your friends. Good luck getting end users to pay. Pandora has certainly learning this lesson, with some counts putting their paid subscriber base at less than 1% of their users.