- The Medium – Facebook Exodus – NYTimes.com
Quote: Is Facebook doomed to someday become an online ghost town, run by zombie users who never update their pages and packs of marketers picking at the corpses of social circles they once hoped to exploit? Sad, if so. Though maybe fated, like the demise of a college clique.
(categories: facebook twitter socialmedia )
Monthly Archives: August 2009
Links: 8-28-2009
- Looks Good Works Well: Renting an Idiomatic Experience
Fun read about idiomatic interfaces (… and instinctive and intuitive interfaces as a sidelight).
(categories: interface design usability ui ux idiomatic ) - The Temptation of the Mobile Web – Acts of Volition
Quote: If you haven’t had a real Internet phone before, and you’re a wired kind of person, there are social stresses. If you can always glance at your email or Gtalk or Twitstream, the temptation to fill any otherwise-blank moment by doing so is considerable. Your mind may find itself classifying a lull in conversation with your spouse as an “otherwise-blank moment” which turns out almost always to be inappropriate.
(categories: mobile attention life realtime psychology )
Links: 8-26-2009
- Stop Using the Word ‘We’ – Ted Dziuba
Quote: The best part about working at a startup is that I’m free to suggest that yes, you fucked this up. Yes, it’s your fault, and yes, you need to fix it. Delegate! Don’t waste time listing out action items, spend time telling people what to do. Everyone you work with should be a grown up, and can handle it. The other side of that is owning up to your mistakes. Instead of "There is memory leak in the code, we should prioritize it over other defects", say, "I introduced a memory leak in the code. I am going to fix it as soon as possible."Anyway, I’m going to keep this up until somebody openly calls me an asshole. You should try it too. You don’t have to be a prick about it, just be assertive. Your co-workers will be impressed at your new found confidence. It might even get you laid.
Well, probably not, but you won’t be wondering when a meeting is going to end if you grab it by the balls.
(categories: programming management collaboration humor bugs )
Links: 8-25-2009
- Best Buy in 3D
Best Buy continues to push the envelope. Useless but cool.
(categories: shopping ecommerce cool augmented-reality bestbuy ) - YouTube – Social Media Revolution
*Awesome* video about social media and how it affects your brand.
(categories: socialmedia video youtube social facebook twitter statistics ) - Netflix Culture
Nine behaviors and skills that they value: judgment, communication, impact, curiosity, innovation, courage, passion, honesty, selflessness. Great deck.
(categories: culture business management netflix leadership hiring ) - Bill de hÓra: Process and individuality are not exclusive
Interesting pop up of "product design" and a short discussion on the Chief Engineer role at Toyota.
(categories: design product-design industrial-design agile management ) - .: Fail Fast, Debugging and Systems that Never Stop
Quote: There are two advantages to failing fast. First, easier debugging and analysis. …Second, ability to build "systems that never stop".
(categories: concurrency design distributed programming software ) - tldr – Interfaces for Large-Scale Online Discussion Spaces
tldr is an application for navigating through large-scale online discussions. The application visualizes structures and patterns within ongoing conversations to let the user browse to content of most interest. In addition to visual overviews, it also incorporates features such as thread summarization, non-linear navigation, multi-dimensional filtering, and various other features that improve the experience of participating in large-discussions.
(categories: visualization comments interface forums discussion infoviz ui-scalability ) - Who’s Winning the Smartphone Wars? – O’Reilly Radar
An update from Raven on the mobile landscape, check the comments for a short discussion wrt who installs applications on their smartphone, would be awesome to see some statistics on # of applications installed for BlackBerry / iPhone / Symbian / Android users. I bet iPhone is 5x better than anyone else.
(categories: mobile statistics stats android iphone )
Links: 8-15-2009
- Designing for Social Traction (slide deck) – Bokardo
*Awesome* slide deck.
(categories: design usability social ux socialsoftware )
Links: 8-14-2009
- CONTEST – What’s Your One Idea to Use Social Media to Improve Gov’t Operations. – GovLoop – Social Network for Government 2.0
Transparency, wikis, blogs, microblogging, lots of ideas here. Note the multiple pages of comments.
(categories: government government2.0 socialsoftware ) - Facebook | A New Look at the Path to Popularity
From our work so far, it appears that the most explosively popular Pages catch on as closely connected groups of like-minded people contact one another. Individual influencers aren’t nearly as crucial to a Page’s success: Pages grow if people are easily engaged by the content, not because of the actions of a couple trendsetters.
(categories: facebook popularity research socialsoftware marketing social ) - Recruitment – 5 tips from Aussie software house Atlassian – The Atlassian Blog
Good stuff on hiring.
(categories: atlassian jobs interview hiring )
Links: 8-13-2009
- Managing UI Complexity | Brandon Walkin
Great illustrative examples.
(categories: ui design usability interface ux gui complexity interaction ) - Secrets of the Amazon best-seller list – U.S. business- msnbc.com
"I’m not sure the exact number," Kessler says of the weightings, "but my guess is 40 percent hour, 30 percent day, 20 percent week, and 10 percent month. So if you have a huge spike in sales, you don’t completely dislodge books that have been in the top 10 or top 100 for months and months. Though you might pass them for a very fun hour."
(categories: books popularity amazon algorithms ) - la petite url | Extra Future
WordPress plugin that does URL shortening if you don’t (and you shouldn’t) trust another site to do it for you.
(categories: wordpress url plugins tinyurl shortener ) - ManTech to support ‘social network’ for DIA analysts — Washington Technology
More good news about Jive and the DIA.
(categories: dia government jive dni aspace ) - The Baseball Analysts: Regression and Pineiro
The amount of data available about MLB floors me. Who determines that a guy is throwing a 4 seam vs. a 2 seam?
(categories: baseball infoviz statistics graphing value ) - User centered design map – serious about camo
Design as a map.
(categories: infoviz design maps )
Links: 8-11-2009
- abi | blog » Introducing Silent Diving Seagulls: An XMPP Interface for Desktop Notifications
Get immediate notifications via XMPP in your browser.
(categories: xmpp notification firefox desktop messaging )
Links: 8-9-2009
- 40 to 7: How We Sped Up Confluence’s Build by a Factor of 5 – Atlassian Developer Blog
Seems like something we’d benefit from.
(categories: testing development atlassian optimization ) - Nick Bradbury: If You Want to Write Useful Software, You Have to Do Tech Support
Quote: If you really want to write useful software, stop spending all your time keeping up with technology. Don’t worry if your resume isn’t filled with the latest buzzwords. Instead, invest your time in talking with your customers. They don’t care what programming language you use – they only care whether your software meets their needs, and the best way to ensure that is by breaking out of your cone of silence and opening the lines of communication.
(categories: business development support customerservice software ) - scottberkun.com » The Lefferts law of management
The Lefferts law of management: It is your fault. There are a dozen reasonable excuses in any situation for why things are not going well: don’t use them. If you need more help, it’s your job to ask for it. If someone let you down, it’s your job to plan better next time or find a way to recover. If you are the bottleneck, it’s your fault for not delegating more. Whatever the thing is that isn’t going well, you are the primary person to do something about it. If you’re not sure what to do, it’s your job to ask others for advice. If you have the title ‘manager’ in your name, step up. Practice the habit of absorbing blame for what is going on, while distributing the rewards. When all else fails, be the fall guy. If people see you take enough bullets for them, soon they’ll be taking some for you.
(categories: business management scottberkun failure ) - scottberkun.com » The Netflix Inc. guide to culture (Analysis)
Scott’s quick review of the Netflix culture slides.
(categories: management business culture netflix process productivity ) - Official Google Reader Blog: PubSubHubbub support for Reader shared items
Google rolls out pubsubhubbub support for Reader.
(categories: pubsubhubbub googlereader feed pubsub rss atom google ) - apophenia: I want my cyborg life
Had multiple conversations about iPhones / laptops in meetings last week. Agree that it’s helpful to be connected during a meeting / presentation, but I wonder sometimes if we could cut meeting time in half if everyone was paying attention for the entire thing. Half of the onus is on the presenters IMHO: get better at presentations.
(categories: attention learning socialmedia twitter conferences backchannel ) - Suddenly stopped receiving emails – microsoft.public.mac.office.entourage | Google Groups
Quote: If you see this in just one or a handful of folders then right-click or Control-click that folder, select Folder Properties and click the Empty button to empty the cache. You can also select the account itself and empty the cache for all of your folders.
(categories: lame entourage ) - IDEA 2009: An Interview with Leisa Reichelt – Boxes and Arrows: The design behind the design
Drupal 7 getting a heavy social makeover by a UI / UX person.
(categories: ux ia design drupal ) - The Content Conundrum – Boxes and Arrows: The design behind the design
Quote: Whether it’s visual comps, or a prototype, it’s important that whomever is responsible for creating and approving the content is actually involved with the visual designer and prototyper as they ‘package’ that deliverable. It’s impossible to fully evaluate the effectiveness of a web experience without having the content represented and under the same microscope as the design. Brand, product, and even training teams all have their own perspectives about what the content must communicate and are contributing to its development and we don’t want our design to fall apart once this ’collaborative’ writing process starts. Assign accountability to content upfront and place content professionals under the same creative deadlines you’re marching to.
(categories: design ia ux usability process ) - Hidden Secrets of the Amazon Shopping Cart | FutureNow’s GrokDotCom / Marketing Optimization Blog
Graphical evolution of the ‘buy now’ button.
(categories: amazon usability ui optimization abtesting a/b testing design ) - Designing Social Interfaces: Main Page – Social Patterns
Wiki for the Designing Social Interfaces book coming from Oreilly.
(categories: design usability socialmedia social community socialsoftware ux patterns ) - The Information Architecture of Social Experience Design: Five Principles, Five Anti-Patterns and 96 Patterns (in Three Buckets)
"Patterns" for social software. Awesome. Book coming from Oreilly in September.
(categories: design usability socialmedia social community socialsoftware ux patterns ) - Room: tinychat.com/jive | Topic: jive software
Handy little video chat room with some nice integrations (sign in with twitter, tweet the room, etc..)
(categories: video chat tinychat ) - How to do A/B Testing with WordPress on Vimeo
Would be awesome to work this into the supportal development.
(categories: wordpress optimization a/b testing abtesting ) - Defragmenting the Stimulus: 5 easy steps to take Recovery.gov to the next level | Analysis & Commentary | Rhiza Labs
Bunch o’ suggestions on how to make recovery.gov awesome, mostly around freeing up data.
(categories: economy socialmedia transparency government government2.0 ) - Military Open Source Software
Couple interesting companies we should hit that are attending: Redhat, Accenture, Alfresco. Interesting to note that we could have participated / attended under the guise of Openfire.
(categories: opensource military conferences events ) - 6 Steps to Kill Your Community — Matt Mullenweg
Somewhat blog specific but general enough for most types of communities.
(categories: community wordpress socialmedia blogging communities web2.0 ) - The Longest Way 1.0 – one year walk/beard grow time lapse on Vimeo
Now if I can only find a job where I can take a year off.
(categories: video adventure inspiration china travel ) - Flickr Photo Download: The largest hot-air balloon gathering in the world, Chambley, France
Great picture.
(categories: photos photography flickr wallpaper ) - YouTube – High Speed Robotic Hands
Want.
(categories: robots video speed ) - Blog Joyent | What I would want a “cloud” to do for me: a functional view
Quote: "As a consumer, I fundamentally want the entire technology stack for an application to: 1. Just work 2. Just scale 3. Just tell me everything." Good summary of what we should be aiming for.
(categories: cloud scaling ondemand )
Links: 8-7-2009
- inessential.com: Anatomy of a feature
Similar to Steve Yegge’s "shit’s easy syndrome" blog post.
(categories: programming design software architecture shits-easy-syndrome ) - iPhone Application UI Design Patterns — Flyosity: Mac & iPhone Interface Design
Concise discussion on the various ways you can present the list of available features in an iPhone application.
(categories: iphone design ui patterns interface mobile ) - Talking with Cathy Marshall about tags, digital archiving, and lifestreams « Jon Udell
Two interesting phrases / quotes: a) the use of "intentional tagging" and b) "…For psychological reasons, people will want to think in terms of monolithic containers that keep stuff in one place, and monolithic services that do everything related to that stuff. For architectural reasons, though, we’ll want to federate storage, and also decouple classes of service — so that storage, for example, is orthogonal to access control and authorization, which is orthogonal to social interaction."
(categories: collaboration computing tagging socialsoftware information )