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  • Blue Chip Products – 2006 Report Card

    Joel Spolsky attempts to deconstruct the winning characteristics of of what he terms Blue Chip products (iPods, Julia Roberts etc.). Spolsky hypothesises a ‘Formula’ for good products and services – making people happy, creating an emotional connection and obsessing over aesthetics

    • Reddit.com – the cartoon mascots and karma points creates an emotional bond with the user.
    • Motorola’s PEBL – this phone’s surface is highly ‘fondle-able’, like a real pebble 🙂

    Spolsky cheekily highlights three trends in web design over 2005 – ugly ugly and ugly! Berating designers for seeking to emulate Google with the pastel Arial aesthetics – essentially copying the wrong part of Google’s design. Google’s design only makes sense as an aesthetic statement when contrasted with older cluttered portal layouts. He’s not impressed 🙂

  • First You Google, But Then What?

    Ask and you shall receive (something)…Plum’s Hans Peter Brondmo outlined his views on collecting almost anything, sharing it and then connecting it to others in order to discover. Brondmo sees this as a solution to search results that can overwhelm the user with choice.

    Plum appears to be a web-based clipboard, where clips can extend to data and people – ostensibly this doesn’t appear to do anything that del.icio.us, Scuttle or our very own Plasma and Klippr do not already do.

    Plum does include some interesting features such as

    • integration with iTunes. Skype
    • Views – collections can be rendered as blogs and other layout formats.
    • Storing actual fragments of pages, rather than just URLs or thumbnails.

    Brondmo went on to announce the launch of a developer API (written in the last three days!)  and invited the audience to embrace the APIs and extend Plum into new application areas.

  • When Do We Get The Events We Want

    Brian Dear of the Events And Venues Database (EVDB) is on a mission to maximise event discovery. Announcing an event is in essence a flyer or an attempt to focus and gain attention.

    Initally EVDB was considering either building a portal or platform. Eventually, EVDB decided to build both:

    • Eventful.com – let users share information about known events and scanning the future for events that matter to you. Features include search, calendars, tags, RSS & iCal feeds, groups, friends/family/contacts, auto-submission, an iTunes import, an AIM EventfulBot and ‘performers’ data
    • The platform – centered around a RESTful API, EVDB is eminently mashable, the most notable example being PodBop.

    Interestingly, EVDB is looking to demand aggregation – tools for users to express desire for events they wish would happen. Eventful demand is more than a simple wishlist, but includes the promise of fulfilment. The company doesn’t seek to sell intention data to record labels or promoters (for example) but create a marketplace between fans and performers.

    Incidentally, Dear claims that Eventful.com is the largest utilisation of microformats in a live service…this is borne out somewhat by the fact that Ray Ozzie used Eventful.com as a source site in his demonstration of LiveClipboard yesterday morning. Finally, Dear demonstrated some of the viral event campaign tools – creating stickers for use on blogs and other third-party sites.

  • Rich Internet Applications & The Service-Oriented Client

    Adobe/Macromedia’s Kevin Lynch began with a recap of the AJAX rich internet application paradigm and some of its limitations (sockets, cookie storage, vector graphics etc.) before leading into the announcement of a Flash+AJAX web application model – only recently adopted by the AFLAX and Dojo.storage frameworks.

    Interestingly, Flash is the most widely distributed client in the world, more so than even browsers, and is constantly refreshed and updated to ensure each client is running the latest code. Flash, Flex and the Flex+AJAX bridge are now the core of Adobe’s RIA strategy.

    Lynch demonstrated an application that utilised a Ruby-based AJAX form to populate a Flash-based carousel of Flickr images. Notably, embedded Flash movies now include a View Source command to support remixing and reuse of Flash applets.

    Lynch notes that though server-side development has shifted to an SOA and ESB-based models, but client development remains fragmented; a Service Oriented Client could be a solution to this problem and actually make client code more portable and consistent in use of local computing resources.

  • Shut Up! No, *You* Shut Up!

    Clay Shirky introduced a pattern language for moderation strategies, using Slashdot as a case study:

    • Freedom’s just another word – with increased freedom to publish, the level of annoyingness increases and mechenisms are required to mitigate increased noise.
    • Slashdot’s defenses – members defend readers from writers by ranking comments on individual posts…around 20% of comments are therefore hidden (those below a certain threshold).
    • Tragedy of the Commons – Move comments to a separate page, treat readers & writers differently, let users rate posts and include defensive defaults.
    • Who Will Guard The Guardians – Treat users and members differently, measure good behaviours, enlist comitted members – judges can’t post.

    Shirky went on to describe Bronze Beta, where there aren’t ‘features’ as such, comments are central to the content base of the site and logging in is an optional interaction, removing a barrier for user contributions. Shirky’s ITP students at NYU have made available a wiki and mailing list to foster collaboration and discourse on patterns for moderation.

  • Attention Focussing Strategies

    Jon Udell‘s session on Attention Focussing Strategies was framed around four key concepts:

    • Heads, decks and leads – drawn from print publishing metaphors, giving people the abilty to scan information at multiple levels of detail.
    • Active context – resources that are self-updating and queryable, rather than a static list of information (wishlists, feeds, linklists, blogrolls, podcasts).
    • Canonical names – URLs, ISBN and other namespaces are a powerful source for focussing attention.
    • Multimedia storytelling – examples like locative mashups, the iPod-by-Microsoft YouTube clip and others illustrate the potential for attention grabbing content, being created at the grassroots.

  • Rich Local & Social Experiences

    Jointly presented by Meetro and PlaceSite, this session explored various locative media developments. The central question posed, ‘Who are you NOT meeting right now?’, is particularly appropriate to the conference environment.

    Location as a principal factor is deconstructed as one of the driving factors in community. Regarless of the mediated nature of networked communities, physical presence and location largely shape our participation in the places we work, live and play. Interestingly, realtime social networks with a community dimension were seen as a critical carrier of locative media in the future.

    Interestingly, IBM’s experience of collaborative media in the enterprise has been very successful, but organising locative meetings, even in the same city, required ad-hoc organisational mechanisms that didn’t exist – Meetro addressed this need for IBM.

    Meetro has become a ‘neighbourly’ tool, enabling people within proximity to share resource – can i borrow your vacuum?

    Amongst the lessons learned by PlaceSite and Meetro in launching their services:

    • User’s options to represent themselves through photos or avatars.
    • Proximity drives meetups, particularly serendepitous, spontaneous meetings within a few blocks.
    • Absolute location shouldn’t be revealed; abstracting to a radial ‘aura’ around an actual location is more desirable.

    Where Meetro is tied to the person, Placesite is largely linked to actual locations – this is a useful distinction in models pursued by various locative media.

    Placesite’s location-centric approach enables existing social boundaries to be extended into locative media and ensures an intrinsic community is related to an actual location. Placesite also offers router code which can PlaceSite-enable a WiFi hotspot; partnerships are in place with wireless providers Sputnik and Wavestorm.

    Longer term plans for PlaceSite include plans to address housing developments, conferences, muniwireless zones, an open API and the general transformation into a platform and network provider.

    As we consider FON-enabled Wanadoo Liveboxes to create a public wireless network for Wanadoo broadband subscibers, a Livebox+FON+PlaceSite combination offers a more compelling user proposition. Each Livebox could be transformed into a hub for local users, advertising, organisations, media and companies.

    A Wanadoo Placebox could illuminate neighborhoods with connectivity and information – a digital lamppost!

  • The New Community

    Communities occur when people have the ability to use their voice in a public and immediate way, forming intimate relationships over time.

    Web 1.0 communities were the era of company towns. You can use you voice, but only within the format and rules of the bossman…The Well, Salon Table Talk, Builder Buzz. The new generation of communities are increasingly self-powered and independent…Dooce, Kottke, BoingBoing. The differentiator is no-one can turn the new generation of communities off.

    There is a connective tissue that is powering distributed communities – blogs, comments, trackbacks, tags, APIs, blogrolls, referrers and links. Third party aggregators such as Technorati, Bloggies, Photoblogs.org and ORblogs also have significance in the connectivity between communities. Indeed, this tissue forces better behaviour of all particpants in an extended community.

    Memes are increasingly the fabric of communities online – where user contributions might lie buried within a forum post, connective tissue is enabling memes to spread further and wider, outside the constituencies where they would previously have remained…SelfPortraitday.com, Whiskerino, BlogThis quizzes.

    However, with no centralised authority, moderation, community scale that exceeds the personal and complex tools, the new generation of communities are creating their own problems.

    Flickr, YouTube, MySpace, Friendster, LiveJournal, Typepad and Last.FM are the reference examples of the new generation of communities, with a mixture of 1.0 models which have evolved and pure models fashioned from current thinking.

    The session closed with some guides to community building…

    • Treat your community well, don’t prevent them from leaving.
    • Go to where your community is – create a group in Flickr rather than a new photo service.
    • Decentralised community mirrors real community more closely.
    • Move towards a community afiliation cycle, grow up in your parents house then move out on your own and buy a house.
    • Blogs have forced older closed models to interact with the rest of the world.

  • Playsh, the playful shell

    Playsh is a ‘narrative-driven "object navigation" client, operating primarily on the semantic level, casting your hacking environment as a high-level, shell-based, social prototyping laboratory, a playground for recombinant network toys.’

    More literally, playsh is a command-line interface that uses MUD and text adventure conventions to navigate and manipulate the web. Features include:

    • looking for patterns in source code.
    • navigating URLs geographically through ‘rooms’ or as a deck of cards in your hand (!)
    • opening feed items as ‘doors’.

    Superficially, playsh appears to be a command-line interface for the web, though lacking the intuitive nature of YubNub, though Yubnub does lack the ability to pipe data from one silo into another. Though Webb’s motivations for exploring recombinant interfaces and playful metaphors are appropriate and valuable, playsh itself doesn’t seem to address these motivations.

    Maybe I’m missing something, but it’s difficult to see the value here…

  • The Future Of Interfaces Is Multi-Touch

    I read about Jeff Han’s work on multi-touch screens just a few days ago, but seeing the technology demonstrated live indicates that a transformative paradigm in UI experiences may be unfolding.

    The multi-touch screen is essentially a touch screen that responds to simultaneous touches at multiple points on its surface, This enables users to form more intuitive, expressive and sophisticated gestures as well as providing an inherently multi-user interface, as different parts of a screen can be used by each user. The touch surface itself is based on the total internal reflection properties of the glass above the screen itself.

    Han indicates that the social, intuitive nature of the multi-touch screen, takes computing away from the historic WIMP direction of interfaces and opens computing culture to children and older users. Certainly, the playful, unintimidating nature of the technology appears to lower the usual barriers of complexity that those unfamiliar with computing environments face.

    Han’s demonstrations included:

    • Navigation of a 3D globe using gestures for panning and zooming.
    • TV channels displayed as individual scalable ’tiles’ and windows.
    • A scalable, translucent, virtual keyboard.
    • A sock puppet, animaed through gesture, created by a drawing simple strokes on the screen.
    • Puzzle games with users using different parts of the screen to solve their puzzles in a time-trial.

    Han’s technology seems eminently useful for highly interactive, manipulable visualisations of complex data, but it’s not difficult to imagine versions of Photoshop, fabrication control interfaces, 3D design and sculpting applications being crafted from the same technology.