Smashing Magazine comes though again with a brilliantly in-depth article about the user interface design of social networking sites and what makes them good user experiences.
They’ve chunked them down to 9 key points:
1. Simple Interface Is The Key
2. Prominent and Functional Search
3. Prominent Call-To-Action-Buttons
4. Calm Separation of Elements
5. Treat text as User Interface
6. Simple and Usable Forms
7. Real-Time Updates
8. Word-Of-Mouth-Advertising and Personalization
9. User-Centric User Interface
The article is a must read for any web designers or social media gurus, its very in-depth and definitely one to bookmark and pass on.
First there was Modernista, then that Skittlesfiascodebacle thing, not to mention the Snkrz! kerfuffle. Now BooneOakley (a creative agency in Charlotte, North Carolina who do work for clients like HBO and MTV) has gone and replaced their website with a YouTube channel.
The execution is clever — homespun, unapologetic illustrations that seem to be the zeigeist of late — and they’ve gained a respectable 18K+ views in four days on their “home page” video. The male voiceover is a cross between soothing and sexy, which is something I personally find both problematic and highly attractive.
At first I was struggling to see the longevity in such a move. I was definitely enraptured for a solid ten minutes, clicking around and getting lost in the McDreamyness of the commentary and the Billy/homicide storyline. Plus, it’ll be an offbeat, obscure reference I can bring up in conversation to make me look smart (at least, for a few days anyhow). I like things that make me look smart.
I know that, if i wanted to engage with them, there’s the option to comment on the videos, and the relevant contact information is there. In that sense, it ticks all the boxes and says to me “Hey, we do cool s— and think outside of the box. Let’s have a chat.” In that sense, I’m a huge fan. the fact that I can subscribe to their videos, in a channel I use for both work and play, on a more than daily basis? That’s pretty dang smart.
Energize, a Dutch marketing agency is taking a bold (pronounced odd) step in recruiting applicants for positions within their business. They’ve created an application page that looks just like a twitter page and expect applicant to submit themselves for a job within 140 characters or less. Apparently their looking for candidates who actively use social media such as twitter, but I can’t help thinking its a little bit silly, gimmicky and unprofessional.
I guess though, that they’re trying to get more candidates, and put themselves in front of more eyes and well, I’m blogging this aren’t I??
Think you’re capable of getting a job in 140 characters? Apply Now
It was bound to happen I guess. With all the jokes and ‘stories’ about people finding dates on twitter, a company – Radaroo – have finally decided its time to devote way too much time to making it happen.
Users sign up by sending a tweet to @radaroo, specifying their gender, the gender(s) they’re interested in, and which activities they’d like to participate in on a first date. See below:
I don’t know about you but I love mystery in a woman, and in 140 characters or less… could be just a little too much mystery for me.
Yesterday morning whilst eating my breakfast I heard the Sunrise team ask the question…is the internet runing out of room? well, I was obviously bemused by this interview
Original Lynx Effect website (which won a Webby in 2008 created by Amnesia Razorfish) is now in it’s archived glory state in our portfolio. Clean the “Dirty Girls”, tattoo your name on some unmentionable body part – the list goes on.
The move has been explained by MD Tim Brooks as a ploy to “invite the developer community in”, to keep inline with the Guardian being a “value-driven and not a profits-driven” company and to build an ecosystem around its brand.
Detailed information about the release of Open Platform can be found on the Guardian’s website. They’ve even explained how you can use the Data Store for you, should you be interested in such information.
This news comes just after the New York Times unveiled Times Extra, which features integration of related news and blog feeds alongside their online news coverage.
Expect to see more of these moves by old media who are, by all accounts, struggling to fit into a world being progressively dominated by the digital medium.
Gmail users will have noticed a bit of a change to Gmail in the last couple of days as Google rolls out the latest version of its hugely popular webmail client. The delicate blue border has been replaced with a brighter version, but that’s just the start. Just into your settings and you’re greeted with an extra tab for selecting visual themes.
There’s a lot to pick from but, really, they’re mostly a bit tacky. Standard themes with oceans, trees and clouds are predictably in abundance. The cartoony style of ‘Bus Stop’ and ‘Tea House’ are a bit cute and if you’re a nostalgic geek and/or no longer wish to have functioning retinas, check out ‘Terminal’ for some eye-searing ascii art goodness.
There’s a ninja theme, but it’s a cartoony ninja theme – not a silent-dealer-of-death-ninja theme, which is a bit disappointing. It’s understandable though, because as we all know, real ninjas are invisible.
Perspctv is a web service that shows and compares online coverage of up to five issues across twitter, news and the blogosphere.
Currently the site is automatically tracking coverage of the US Election going on right now, but users can make their own dashboards by clicking on the link at the top of the page.
That’s the first one I made, comparing "android”, “blackberry” and “iphone”. Coincidentally, that’s the first one that TechCrunch tried.
Amazon have launched the beta of their new Window Shop, where users can browse a selection of new/promoted store items such as books, movies and games using just their keyboard or mouse. Once an item is selected, a high-quality sample or video trailer is played and you can throw an item in your cart with a click.
It’s an interesting idea from Amazon with the user having no control over the selection of items on display. Essentially the opposite to Amazon’s site search and categories, I found more than a few things I wouldn’t have found on the regular site. It looks nice, too!
The content of the Window Shop is updated every Tuesday.
www.scrapblog.com : I’ve seen a lot of browser based flash ‘applications’ over the years – you know trying to emulate the desktop experience inside a web page… but few have cut the mustard. They tend to be slow, clunky, buggy and miss out on the detail such as keyboard shortcuts. Scrapblog (which you use to put photo albums together) is an exception to the norm and is really quite outstanding. Even CTRL-Z (undo) worked. Go play. Then you can order a 20 page hardback version for about US$35. Pretty good deal we thought.
Scrapblog has a very well executed Flash interface.
Telstra BigPond recently launched its new “support channel” to find and assist BigPond customers through the popular micro-blogging application, Twitter.
The BigPond email support team is watching for conversations about its services, jumping in to assist when necessary.
Since launching nearly a month ago, Telstra’s approach has been widely criticised for being too “robotic” and it appears the criticism has been noted, with a noticable change in tone of the @BigPondTeam in the following weeks.
Though not the first aussie Telco to jump onto Twitter – Internode have been publishing news items since May – they’re the first to be directly interacting with customers. Not surprisingly, Internode have started to directly communicate in the last week. iiNet have also come to the party, but with very few updates.
Optus, interestingly, don’t appear to be interesting in Twitter. @Optus has no updates and is probably just acting as a placeholder.
BigPond are probably taking a leaf from Comcast’s book, here. Six months ago when TechCrunch’s Mike Arrington was having trouble with his broadband connection he tweeted this (warning: NSFW language) but, Comcast were watching.
Apparantly when the iPhone launched, Mr Jobs wasn’t happy with the performance on the iPhone’s ARM11 processors. Neither was he happy with the feature set of Flash Lite. What he wanted was “something in the middle”.
Adobe listened and this week at the Flash On The Beach conference, Adobe confirmed that an iPhone version of the Flash player is in development.
It’s not known when or even if the application will see the the light of day as Apple most likely in control of the release.
Hopefully Steve will like what he sees and we’ll see something soon.
Many of us here use TweetDeck (install it here) as our desktop Twitter client. One of the interesting features is the live cloudview of twitter tags (you can also see this (here) at TwitScoop.com). Just a few minutes ago there was a small 3.0 earthquake in the centre of Los Angeles and it immediately lit up inside tweetdeck.
This is live news much faster than it will ever appear on syndicated publications. Another great reason to dive into twitter!
Ooyala. Not the first time we’ve seen a new technology stamped with “built by ex-Google people”, (recently Cuil) but hey we’ll look at anything new when it comes to online video. OK let’s start with the worst bit: What’s with that name? Did they not teach URL strategy at Google? I’ve already forgotten it three times and keep having to look at the top of the page to remind myself. Say it with me… OO YAAAA LA or something like that. Spelling it after a couple of hours at the pub could be very tricky.
Is an adaptive bitrate the golden bullet?
Rant over, is it any good? Now there’s a stack of features on Oothingy’s site to benefit businesses and advertisers. It works with multiple serving platforms and has great analytics. Yes, that will keep a few people pretty happy as we all like more numbers to crunch, but in the recommendation age, the consumer holds a lot more power over the growth of technology platforms.
Let’s face it… every single successful web empire (eg: Facebook, Google, MySpace, YouTube, Flickr) made it there by putting the consumer first. Yes I get that this is more of a B2B offering, but remember that YouTube really killed it by allowing some groundbreaking comsumer features such as easy affiliation which made it the defacto video player for millions. Does Oojimaflip have anything that will significantly benefit the end user or content creator? OK, yes, there is one thing I did really like: the benefit of adaptive bitrate (meaning the video will fine tune itself to the users internet connection) but this is not something average users will notice if they already have a decent connection. The watermarking feature is handy for those wanting to stop their vids being shamelessly ripped. Bottom line, OOjamadoodah’s video player, appears to be a more bandwidth efficient video player with a rather nice analytics engine, but lacking in advanced social media capabilities. Let’s hope they’ll come up with some more front end features soon because the market is probably ready for someone to take the video player experience to another level.
“Help – can someone read what the banner says underneath us? We keep forgetting our own name.”
Ooyala means cradle in Telugu, a Southern Indian language. We like the name because it demonstrates what we are doing — cradling a new form of innovation.
Australia has become the third country in the world to be scanned by Google’s fleet of “Googlemobiles” for the Google Street View project.
Literally thousands of kilometres of road have been scanned in order to create thousands street-level panoramas of almost anywhere in the country there’s a road.
As you can see from the blue areas above, the coverage is staggering. If you had the time (and inclination) you could travel from one end of the country to the other.
As staggering as it is, however, Google apparantly don’t deem Hargrave St important enough to cover. Maybe the one-way street put it in the too-hard-basket. You’ll just have to wave at us as you head down Liverpool St.
With so many images in the system, more than are few are going to be “interesting”. For example, Gizmodo were sent the following location on Denigan St in the ACT, where it appears the Googlemobile driver decided to make a pitstop at the Erindale shopping centre.
Expect some kind of Media Watch-style outcry about the invasion of peoples privacy, but this is information anyone can get by driving down the street. Google have taken the time to blur the faces of anyone captured in the images.
What remains to be seen is the first real commercial application of this technology that will raise it above being just a (very) cool toy.
ABC have launched a beta of their in-browser video platform, allowing users to watch full episodes of shows such as Doctor Who, The Gruen Transfer and Echo Beach.
Built using Flash, iView appears to stream extremely well, even on a slow connection with only one streaming stutter in ten minutes of viewing.
Let’s hope the other networks get into the act as well! While we’re waiting, do yourself a favour and check out the episodes of Moving Wallpaper and its ‘companion’ show, Echo Beach.
Posted by JeremyS 
Posted by Heather Ann Snodgrass 
Posted by JeremyS 
