Polite, pertinent and pretty: a talk at Web2.0expo SF, April 2008
To which you could add ‘tardy’: a shameful two months after the event
the slides and notes from the talk are now up online here. Sorry to everyone who asked for them – and thanks for your patience!
It was a presentation by Tom Coates and myself on an area that fascinates us both – the coming age of practical ubicomp/spimes/everyware.
Although hopefully grounded in some of the design ideas explored in our respective current projects, it was a whistlestop tour around the ideas and conversations of many.
The title slide shows Timo Arnall’s everyware symbols and obviously, Adam Greenfield’s and Bruce Sterling’s books loom large, as well as the work of Dan Hill, Matthew Chalmers, Anne Galloway, Schulze and Webb, Christian Nold and many others who I’ve been fortunate to meet, mail or read around this subject.
There’s certainly some scenius going on. As if to underline this, Nicholas Nova’s posted his slides from what sounds like a fascinating talk today: “Digital Yet Invisible: Making Ambient Informatics More Explicit to People”.
Looking forward to a summer of more digital/physical brainfood…
My talk at Adaptive Path’s MX conference: Battle For The Planet Of The Apes
I’m finally getting around to put some of the talks I gave last month in San Francisco online – the first of which being a talk I gave at
Adaptive Path’s MX conference entitled:
Battle For The Planet Of The Apes. Unfortuntely, slideshare seems to have eaten a few images, but I’ll try and correct that in coming days.
Brandon and Henning of AP had asked me to give a perspective on social networks and some of the design decision’s we’d taken on
Dopplr – it ended up a bit more of a tongue-in-cheek critique of some of the prevailing idioms in the current
YASNS boom and an appeal to step back to a broader view of social software…
Thanks to AP for the invite, and for the attendees of MX for their attention!
Hulu-buloo! Lower lights!!!
Lots of
hullabaloo about Hulu today, but the thing that intrigued me about the design – apart from the wonderful lack of feature-creep and the cleanliness that seems to bring it – was a single button, marked “Lower lights”.
I’m imagining it’s not an
X10 controller interface, but rather does something marvellous in order to further focus your attention on the video – removing extraneous buttons or UI features, dimming the ‘computer’ to amp up the ‘telly’.
In other words, a wonderful, evocative rebranding of something very simple, standard and known:
“full-screen mode”.
Well, what do you think it does?
An idle thought for making work for idle hands
After reading
Jane’s post about using time people spend fiddling with Facebook for solving problems with other (gaming) networks, I wondered whether there were other things you could do with all those idle hands.
What about Folding@home or Mechanical Turk tasks, as shown rather sketchily above.
Back in May, referring to Sony’s announcment that the folding@home client would be installed on the PS3, Alice wrote about “Games that do good”
“Are there games or game mechanics that could be used to fund-raise or awareness-raise?”
My quick mock up is not all that enticing or interesting, though touches like sparklines, league-tables and scoring could rapidly turn such things into more of a playful and engaging activity, turning all those idle hands to good causes.
Know of anything like this going on?
Imaginary buttons for real web-services
I’ve been using last.fm for a long time, and I’m a fan.
However, there’s one thing I find annoying, which is sometimes it seems to ‘fixate’ on a particular track by a particular artist and heavily-rotate it until it drives me crazy.
While I probably like the artist, and originally liked the track before I got sick of it – I have one option – to ban it.
Instead, I’d like to propose a ‘Snooze’ button for last.fm radio streams, that allows me to ‘rest’ the track or artist for an appropriate amount of time. (Illustration below with sincere apologies to the excellent last.fm design team)
Perhaps the amount of time the track ‘rests’ for based on my usage stats – but that could be presumptuous and annoying.
Better then to use a pattern that’s pretty well understood – a quick pop-up showing a few different ‘snooze’ options exactly like you get in PIM and calendaring software.
It wouldn’t negatively impact my rating of that artist necessarily, just give me a chance to come to the track with fresh appreciative ears a little (or a lot) later.
While I’m on the subject… And I’ve got photoshop open… Perhaps there’s room for an extra feature in upcoming.org too…
Continuous-Partial-Apology
I switched off everyone outside London at the beginning of the month, in what I now know to be the mistaken belief that the value I was deriving from Twitter was geographically-bounded.
I thought what was near me was signal, as often you could act on it. Y’know: “I’m in town and wondering if anyone wants coffee”
It turns out that nearly no-one I know is in town or wants coffee. It turns out – as so often through the twelve or so years of having a digitally-mediated social life – the noise is the signal.
In fact, the cross-time-zone river of mundanity is much missed in the new gig, where it feels a little wierd to be surrounded by mainly brits after such a long time in a multinational group of designers.
As much as I was convinced otherwise – and against previous experience of lists, forums and other digital communities – it’s as much the psychographic as the geographic, for me at least, with Twitter.
I guess the difference of these presence networks is that they can have the geographic so powerfully nestled at their core. It’s both/and not either/or.
So, I will go grovelling back to those I so swiftly removed a month ago and see if they will take me back…
Here begins the continuous partial apology…
Design is seedy
From the Seedcamp about pages:
“There will be a diverse mentor network of serial entrepreneurs, corporates, venture capitalists, recruiters, marketing specialists, lawyers and accountants that will help the selected teams put together the foundations of a viable business.”
How about designers?
Technology plays alone are starting to lose their distinctiveness in many of the more-crowded areas of the marketplace.
Great service and interaction design are on the rise as strategic differentiators for products as diverse as the iPhone and Facebook.
Bruce Nussbaum in BusinessWeek:
“Innovation is no longer just about new technology per se. It is about new models of organization. Design is no longer just about form anymore but is a method of thinking that can let you to see around corners. And the high tech breakthroughs that do count today are not about speed and performance but about collaboration, conversation and co-creation. Thatâs what Web 2.0 is all about.”
The article that’s taken from is entitled: “CEOs Must Be Designers, Not Just Hire Them”.
Not sure I agree about CEOs breaking out OmniGraffle, but what about entrepreneurs?
I wonder how many Seedcamp teams will have a interaction designer on board, as part of the core – or even a designer as the lead entrepreneur?
Are they going to bake great design in from the get-go, or put lipstick on their baby gorillas?
I think it will be the former.
If there’s one Brit caricature of the entrepreneur, it’s the inventor – the engineer/designer/impressario: Baylis, Dyson, Roope!
Nussbaum’s article, in bulk is a speech he gave at the RCA, which traditionally has grown quite a few of those designer/engineer/inventor/entrepreneurs in the world of atoms.
Prof Tom Barker’s crew springs to mind, as do some of the graduates of the Design Interactions course.
The line between hackers and interaction designers is blurring as they start small businesses that are starting to make waves in the big business press.
As I mentioned, my experience of HackDay Europe was that
“It really does seem that the hacker crowd in London/Europe at least is crossing over more and more with the interaction design crowd, and a new school of developers is coming through who are starting to become excellent interaction designers – who really know their medium and have empathy with users.”
So I have high-hopes.
I’m also glad to say that the Seedcamp team are going to have user-researchers, usability experts and interaction designers in their mentor network, including me for some reason…
Looking forward to it.
Design for mobile services: nice, little details matter
I’ve started playing with Radar.net from Tiny Pictures.
Nothing much to report yet, but there is one little design detail that I’ll be stashing away for my own stuff (as long as Mr. Poisson et al don’t mind) which is not only going for a URL that is t9/predictive-text friendly, but also issuing identity elements (an auto-generated unique posting address to MMS pictures to, in this case) that are t9-compliant.
This makes it far, far easier and more pleasurable to set-up the service and integrate it with your mobile, which with these sorts of things is 75% of the battle won. Makes the thing feel very polished and considered from the start, which gives me the confidence to trust radar.net with a little bit more of my digital life perhaps.
My feeling is that despite all the hoo-haa about uglydesign/undesign’s success in Web2.0, it just won’t carry in the Mobile Web 2.0 world.
Are Friends Electric?
Mike Sugarbaker makes comparisons between Last.fm and Pandora, finding pros and cons in each, and ends up asking why we can’t gene-splice the two together:
“We shouldnât have to choose between bottom-up and top-down, between cathedral and bazaar – thatâs the other thing, that Pandoraâs categories were made by experts and presumably applied by professionals, whereas last.fm basically is just the product of what people do anyway, via the site and its associated Audioscrobbler tool.
People say that the top-down, made-by-those-who-know-whatâs-good-for-you approach is now outmoded, but in this case it seems to have what folksonomy will never get us: the element of surprise.”
Well, the gene-splice has happened it seems: with PandoraFM (http://pandorafm.real-ity.com/)
I missed this when it made LifeHacker late last month, but this seems like an excellent idea (although there’s still no link through to Bleep. Hummph) – injecting the element of robotic, clinical input into the organic social network. Going to try it for a little while…
What other social networks could benefit by the addition of non-humans?
What put the “architecture” into “information architecture”?
From Peterme’s closing plenary at the IASummit:
“...I think that web 2.0 puts the “architecture” in information architecture. Think of an architect. They design the space. People flow through it, meet in it, contribute to it.! With that model, the bulk of information architecture currently on the web isn’t really architecture—it’s some form of hyperdimensional document organizing. We’re not creating a space that people move through, and engage with. We’re classifying material to be retrieved. But with web 2.0, we are providing an architecture—a space, a platform through which and upon which people move, contribute, and change…
...If information is a substrate running through an increasing amount of our “real-world” lives, and we believe that these web 2.0 principles are important for the future of information architecture, how do we merge the two?”
And
“as digital networked media pervades more and more of our lives, the idea of a discreet region called “cyberspace” starts to feel like an anachronism. Who here has a mobile phone on them? One that can send photos by email, for example? Well, you’re all carrying “cyberspace” in your pocket. And once that happens, distinguishing that from the “real world” becomes impossible.”
Yubnub, Skype and Vodafone web access
Foe wrote a simple yubnub command on the weekend, and suggested it might be quite neat when accessed from a mobile, in order to see whether the other person was available to call (over cellular, not Skype…)
Tried it this evening, to find that mystatus.skype.com was treated as a ‘restricted access’ site by Vodafone’s web gateway.
This is the bar put in place by default by Vodafone in order to stop kiddywinks downloading ‘premium adult content’ (surely they’re all busily making their own with camphones and uploading it to youtube?) – which after ages of wandering around Voda’s Heathrow-Airport of a website and two registrations (one of which involved entering a creditcard number to which I got charged £1 to prove my age, and reimbursed £2.50
?
) I finally managed to get removed.
I switched the phone on and off (!) and then tried the yubnub.org ‘Skype’ command again. It worked fine.
I tried it again with a different friend’s Skype handle, and I got bounced back to the “Restricted Access” page
One can’t help but wonder what Vodafone is doing classing Skype in with porn, and making it as difficult as possible to get to their site online on your phone, it’s not as if Skype have even got a cellular product live yet.
Cockup… or conspiracy?
Flickr impacts consumer-culture: “It’s Playtime”
Above is a still from Canon
EOS350D advert:
“It’s Playtime”
I’ll wager it is both directly inspired
by, and deliberately targetted
at ludic Flickr users and the visual culture they have built.
Here’s the quicktime of the ad on Canon’s site.
Please…
everyone.
Please.
Please.
Please, stop using the word “mashup”.
Thanks in advance, and happy new year.
LazyWeb: tag to print spooler
If you are anything like me, (a) how are you finding it? and (b) you probably have a lot of entries in del.icio.us tagged “toread” or “to_read” etc. etc. which you have not got round to actually, y’know, reading.
Yesterday I made the effort to actually print out some of the things I had tagged to read, and – read them!
What I’d like, LazyWeb, therefore – is a site/script/widget/thing that would
- grab the URLs of what I have tagged “to_read” (or an arbitrary tag, of course)
- goes and gets the text found at those URLs (this doesn’t have to be pretty)
- then smooshes them together into a file I can then print or save for later printing.
How about it?
Almost guaranteed fame on lifehacker/43folders would be yours, as well as my undying gratitude.
UPDATE:
Matt Biddulph contributes this:
OK, you need lynx installed to get a nice dump of html to text file.
For a mac, http://www.osxgnu.org/software/pkgdetail.html?
project_id=226&cat_id=211 might have what you need.
Paste this in a terminal window on any mac or unix machine:
for a in `curl http://del.icio.us/rss/blackbeltjones/toread | grep
'<link>' | cut -d> -f 2 | cut -d< -f 1 | grep -v http://del.icio.us
` ; do lynx -dump $a ; done > toread.txt
and it’ll make reading.txt with a html2text concatenation of all your
toread links.
Excellent – will try this on the weekend and report back…
Cheers,
Matt.
BBC News video in RSS!
Just found this in the BBC News site’s video player... You can now subscribe to the video via RSS.
A quick bit of copying and pasting from the little orange buttons gives this list of A/V feeds:
- http://newsrss.bbc.co.uk/rss/newsplayer_uk_edition/front_page/rss.xml
- http://newsrss.bbc.co.uk/rss/newsplayer_uk_edition/uk/rss.xml
- http://newsrss.bbc.co.uk/rss/newsplayer_uk_edition/world/rss.xml
- http://newsrss.bbc.co.uk/rss/newsplayer_uk_edition/business/rss.xml
- http://newsrss.bbc.co.uk/rss/newsplayer_uk_edition/sci-tech/rss.xml
- http://newsrss.bbc.co.uk/rss/newsplayer_uk_edition/health/rss.xml
- http://newsrss.bbc.co.uk/rss/newsplayer_uk_edition/entertainment/rss.xml
- http://newsrss.bbc.co.uk/rss/newsplayer_world_edition/front_page/rss.xml
- http://newsrss.bbc.co.uk/rss/newsplayer_world_edition/uk/rss.xml
- http://newsrss.bbc.co.uk/rss/newsplayer_world_edition/world/rss.xml
- http://newsrss.bbc.co.uk/rss/newsplayer_world_edition/business/rss.xml
- http://newsrss.bbc.co.uk/rss/newsplayer_world_edition/sci-tech/rss.xml
- http://newsrss.bbc.co.uk/rss/newsplayer_world_edition/health/rss.xml
- http://newsrss.bbc.co.uk/rss/newsplayer_world_edition/entertainment/rss.xml
Just subscribed to the Sci/Tech feed to check it out, and it works nicely in Bloglines: clicking a headline pops you to an individual pagelet for the video – which is another subtle advance, IMHO.
One thing they could do is add the duration of the clip to the headline or description so it shows up in your RSS viewer.
Very nice stuff – I imagine this will mean a few interesting ‘mashups’ and alternative interfaces might be showing up on http://backstage.bbc.co.uk in the near future. Look forward to that…
Now, if only they were Quicktimes… or PSP formatted…
Wikipedia: we really haute to know better
Evidence is building that Nicholas Carr’s argument against peer-production of knowledge by amateurs is dead-on.
Today’s Guardian rounds up a panel of experts to score the wikipedia entries against their deep domain knowledge in their somewhat-pointedly-titled “Can you trust Wikipedia”
It’s broadly good news for the free, open and amateur with scores in the 6’s and 7’s out of 10, with one 5 for the article on ‘encyclopedias’ as judged by an ex-editor of the Encyclopedia Brittanica.
Could the harnessing of “collective intelligence” not just be the wishful thinking of venerable west-coast technohippies, but something that could help humankind out of the beginnings of what may turn out to be it’s most difficult century, a.k.a. The Grim Meathook Future?
Maybe, maybe…
Until – we get to a 0 out of 10.
It’s from Alexandra Shulman, editor of Vogue:
“Broadly speaking, it’s inaccurate and unclear. It talks about haute couture and then lists a large number of ready-to-wear designers. As a very, very broad-sweep description there are a few correct facts included, but every value judgment it makes is wrong.”
We’re so HOSED
Casual Services: The ambiguity of work
Thursday October 13th 2005, 1:30 pm
Filed under:
web 2.0In a post rich with ideas from Russell Beattie, this one stood out for me:
“Casual Services – I wonder if thereâs a way to apply the lessons of the success of Casual Games to Web 2.0 type services? I think this is what the 37 Signals guys are really doing with their suite of apps, no? Backpack, Ta-Da and Writely are all easy to pick up and start using, easy to share, and yet are compelling in their own functional way. Yes, there are more advanced, all-encompassing services out there like Salesforce.com, but though theyâre the same thing in a way, they meet completely different needs. I need to think about this more, but I think thereâs more analogies to be made along these lines.”
Absolutely.
I think this adds to Janice and JJG’s thought of ‘feature-stingy apps’ from their interview with David Weinberger at Supernova this year as it accentuates the positive about an app being mr. in-between…
Sorry. That was terrible.
I’m sorry Dave, I can’t let you build that.
Via Dav/AkuAku, this from the Bunchball website:
“You have an idea for a multi-user networked application. Maybe it’s a game, maybe it’s a new way to share music or photos, maybe it’s something nobody’s ever thought of. A beautiful little jewel of an application, you know that you can make something fantastic. But then you realize that in order to build your application, you need to figure out user signup, and group creation, and invitations, and permissions, and chat, and presence, and how to save changes in the application, and how to figure out who to send those changes to, and the list goes on. And oh yeah, don’t forget that you need to setup a server, write server-side code, deal with a database somewhere, worry about uptime and bandwidth and online file storage, and that list goes on as well. All of a sudden you realize that your beautiful little jewel is just the tip of a very large iceberg. You’re going to spend 90% of your time implementing what’s below the water, out of the user’s sight, and 10% of your time building a great application.
Bunchball gives you the iceberg. You just provide the tip. So now you can spend your time doing what you wanted to do in the first place, which is to create a great application.”
Along with Ning.com, Dav has termed these services (or ‘playgrounds’ as Ning would have it) as ‘Blank White Servers’, which are potentially game-changing things, beyond the bubble of hype around Web X.X.
The point the Bunchball site makes – that providing the common building blocks and infrastructure allows developers to concentrate on delivering extra value to the end-user -makes me wonder whether this will be the case.
Will developers, freed from the burden of recreating back-end systems, invest their energy into creating a great user-experience?
Possibly.
Certainly, Web X.X’s real successes so far have been built on great UI design (Flickr, Gmail) and paying attention to the details in the user-experience – hopefully this will serve as inspiration to those who follow.
In my experience at least, it takes a great deal of effort and will on the behalf of the developers to go the extra (several) miles to create a great user-experience on top of getting something to “just work” – especially if there is a pre-established framework or library of things that they are using to create a service or application.
Also, there is the problem of trying to reconcile the design choices you think necessary for the specific service, aplication, user or activity at hand with the design choices predetermined in the platform by those that came up with it.
This building block approach of Bunchball, et al, of course begs the same question of what design choices are encoded in the building blocks themselves?
The following ramble I will have to revisit once I’ve explored and understood Ning and Bunchball more fully from actually playing with them both, but…
Architecture is destiny*: someone elses playground, architecture, landscape, physics will inevitably shape the end design noticeably. What are the combinations it forces? What are the affordances that are built in, and what patterns are most favourable as a result?
As they are aimed at providing infra and building blocks for social applications, would perhaps some of the forced combinations, or affordances of the infrastructure be default-biased towards safety and privacy?
Productivity or (/and?) play?
As playful platforms made by smart people I’m sure that the possibility spaces they afford will sustain 99% of the self-centred or small-group-centred software that people will want to construct right now – which is just fantastic.
But…
Just what politics are encoded at the molecular level of these playgrounds?
As soon as I get my accounts I’m going to start playing and see.
- Who said this originally? I can’t seem to find the source.
Paul Smith = patron saint of Web X.X
A web of a different stripe, oddly reminiscent of a PS shirt. Here’s a gratuitous link to
an interview with Paul Smith from a couple of weekends ago.
Web 5.5
A long and interesting critique at Abstract Dynamics of the changing nature of privilege, control and access to the web that “web 2.0” seems to be creating.
What really separates the “Web 2.0” from the “web” is the professionalism, the striation between the insiders and the users. When the web first started any motivated individual with an internet connection could join in the building. HTML took an hour or two to learn, and anyone could build. In the Web 2.0 they don’t talk about anyone building sites, they talk about anyone publishing content. What’s left unsaid is that when doing so they’ll probably be using someone else’s software. Blogger, TypePad, or if they are bit more technical maybe WordPress or Movable Type. It might be getting easier to publish, but its getting harder and harder to build the publishing tools. What’s emerging is a power relationship, the insiders who build the technology and the outsiders who just use it.
He’s also tired of the Web2.0 monicker:
Are the internet hypelords getting a bit tired? There’s this funny whiff of déjà vu that comes along with the latest and greatest buzzword: Web 2.0. Web 2.0? Wasn’t that like 1995? Don’t they remember that Business 2.0 magazine? Or remember how all the big companies have stopped using version numbers for software and instead hired professional marketers to make even blander and more confusing names? I hear “Web 2.0” and immediately smell yet another hit off the dotcom crackpipe…
Personally, I’m now just going to be refering to Web5.5
It has a whiff of the crufty, featuritis midlife of mainstream applications (Quark, Wordperfect, etc) which renders it pleasingly mundane and irrevocably intertwined with the work-a-day world.
Web 5.5 comes with a couple of giant manuals in binders and a little plastic overlay to put abouve your function keys.
It’s been 10 years between Web1.0 and Web2.0 – so expect Web5.5 sometime around 2035.
Along with space elevators.
Update: a response to the AD essay by Michal Migurski
