Links: 12-30-2009

  • Paul Buchheit: So I finally tried Wave…
    Excerpt: "They could use MIME multi-part to send both a non-Wave, HTML version of the message, and the Wave version. Wave-enabled mail readers would display the live Wave, while older mailers would show the static version along with a link to the live Wave." Nice little nugget there. Curious: has anyone done anything interesting with MIME multipart and email?
    (categories: googlewave wave gmail collaboration innovation mime email )

Links: 12-27-2009

Links: 12-24-2009

  • neighborhoods and subcultures in social design
    Excerpt: "… Once you have a stake in the ground around your social object, you need to think about the kinds of activities that would revolve around that activity. What are people already doing? What kinds of activities naturally want to happen? Let the answers to these questions help define the features that you implement. Keep in mind too, that the social object and the kinds of activities that you support will help define the subculture that will emerge on your site. Different activities are going to draw different kinds of people depending on the level of participation required to be involved.
    (categories: socialsoftware design ux navigation patterns )

  • 5 Steps to Building Social Experiences – Boxes and Arrows: The design behind the design
    Designing social interfaces is more than just slapping on Twitter-like or Facebook-like features onto your site. Not all features are created equal and sometimes a little bit can go a long way. It’s important to consider your audience, your product—what your users will be rallying around and why they would want to become engaged with it and each other, and that you can approach this in a systematic way, a little bit at a time.
    (categories: ux social socialsoftware experience socialdesign )

Links: 12-23-2009

Links: 12-22-2009

Links: 12-21-2009

Links: 12-19-2009

Links: 12-12-2009

  • speedtracer – Project Hosting on Google Code
    Speed Tracer is a tool to help you identify and fix performance problems in your web applications. It visualizes metrics that are taken from low level instrumentation points inside of the browser and analyzes them as your application runs. Speed Tracer is available as a Chrome extension and works on all platforms where extensions are currently supported (Windows and Linux).
    (categories: performance javascript google opensource )

  • Mozilla to open – gasp! – Firefox add-on store • The Register
    Everyone and their mom is going to have an app store soon.
    (categories: firefox appstore )

  • YouTube Blog: Inside User Research at YouTube
    We still have a lot left to learn about how people use YouTube, but some things have become clear. One of the most important findings has to do with the difference between the large group of users who are on YouTube simply to watch videos and a smaller, but very important, group of more engaged users — often uploaders. The latter group will, unsurprisingly, care about details like how to make communication with their audience easier and more effective, how to grow their audience, and even how to make money on YouTube. The former, on the other hand, want as simple of an interface as possible: "Just let me watch the video, please!"
    (categories: youtube usability research ux testing design ui )

  • Facebook | Facebook Data Team: Distributed Data Analysis at Facebook
    Today, Facebook counts 29% of its employees (and growing!) as Hive users. More than half (51%) of those users are outside of Engineering. They come from distinct groups like User Operations, Sales, Human Resources, and Finance. Many of them had never used a database before working here. Thanks to Hive, they are now all data ninjas who are able to move fast and make great decisions with data.
    (categories: facebook hadoop analytics hive data bigdata )

  • FT.com / Reportage – The rise and fall of MySpace
    The two sides differ profoundly over where responsibility lies for the site’s decline. Former MySpace executives say News Corp dragged its feet over implementing Ajax, a program that allows users to send a message, an e-mail or to post a comment on their friends’ pages without having to open a new browser window. Facebook was quick to embrace Ajax but MySpace did not follow suit, partly because to do so would have reduced the number of page views the site generated and therefore its advertising revenue. “It would take five steps to post a comment or send a message, so five different pages would open,” explains another former executive. “There would be ads on each of those pages, so we were making money. We went to News Corp and said: ‘We want to change this but in the short term our revenues will drop.’ It became a long back and forth. [They] were pushing back – they wanted to make sure we weren’t going to drop our revenue numbers.”
    (categories: myspace business facebook socialmedia management produ )

Links: 12-11-2009

  • rc3.org – Performance reviews for developers
    Quote: "… the most important part of a performance review is to help the person getting the review get better at their job. It’s a chance for people to get feedback that will help them figure out which skills they need to improve and determine where they may be lacking in terms of professionalism. The second most important part of a performance review is to help the manager get as much value out of the employee as possible. Does this person work better undisturbed most of the time or regularly collaborating with others? Is this person happiest grinding away at hard problems that discourage most people? Do they like or dislike refactoring old code that could use improvement?"
    (categories: management engineering motivation )