Alison Head writes detailed article on how personas help in staying in touch with the user. Personas prevent “feature bloat”, which satisfies few users. Update: More on personas here. Personas reduce the complexity in the design process by concentrating on a few personas which satisfy most of the nessasary tasks.
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Adam Curry declares, “Email is Dead” and proposes a solution. It works like this… I send an email to my mom with a link to a pub/sub outlook plugin and the feed that I publish privately for her. After recieving the email, my mom downloads and clicks on the plugin, which creates her own blog on a server with private pages/feeds for each of her friends. It also automatically subscribes her to her private feed that I publish and creates a folder in outlook. When she sends a mail to one of her friends, it gets sent through smtp and also to her blog. The mail sent through smtp includes the link to plugin and the friends private feed, so it is viral in nature. Other problems like encription and finding new personal feeds can also be solved.
Adam writes, “I like this model best because it requires both sides of a conversation to commit to the relationship and simultaneously allows for either side to break it off if desired.” If this pub/sub model becomes successful, most of the data will reside on the servers. Central can be of help with the client interface because there is very little local data to be stored.
Sarah Allen has a short summary of the long Clay Chirky’s article, A Group is its Own Worst Enemy. Also here is a post by Jeremy Allaire on different Metaphors for Social Computing.
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Aaron Swartz writes how the open wiki for Echo/Atom turned out, when it was used for conflict resolution. The bottom line, use loosely connected task specific tools.
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Winsupersite has the latest screenshots of the ultra secret “Aero” release of Longhorn. WinXP got the navigation right with the task pane, Longhorn is trying to get the task-oriented pages right. You can also see a dashboard which keeps track of your latest alerts similar to centrals’ console in one of the images.
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Brad DeLong has a public wiki with interesting math calculations. How many years will it take for the total mass of all the humans to be equal to the mass of the earth? Ans=1750 🙂
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Founder Emeritus at Macromedia, Jeremy Allaire shows 10 trends that point to Internet 2.0. Also, John Robb lists some ways to build Web 2.0 apps. He also describes what web 2.0 is here.
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Dave Winer writes about two schools of Aggregator UI’s. “One says that they should work like a mail reader, the other that it should work like a weblog.” It boils down to, scrolling to the next post or clicking to the next post. Which one do you like to read your subscriptions in? Radio and manilas’ aggregators along with most webbased aggregators like feed-me follow the weblog school. Also, Dan Gillmore wants blog ranking to be considered while displaying the posts. Marc Canter says, “We are trying to achieve rankings for blogs based on topics with K-collector.” I like my “blogging school” aggregator and I’d like my own rankings for it based on how many times I click on each post.
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After the blackout, there were ads appearing on google for “blackout” almost immediatly. TShirt business, MSBlast virus, Battery lights, real life stories site… If you can link your business to any news story, you can get cheap click throughs immediatly on Google. Also, when searching for “Remote Procedure Call Shutdown”, a symptom for MSBlast during the initial stages of the attack gave a few ads for viruses when there were no relevent results. Googles crawl is pretty fast, but not fast enough to get results related to current news. Google ads are a gold mine for advertisers who can attract lots users looking for information at rockbottom prices. For ideas on what users are searching for, look at “In the News” feature at Google news.
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“DENG is a small (60k) Modular XML Browser, capable of rendering XForms, SVG, XHTML, arbitrary XML with CSS (e.g. RSS), XFrames and any other custom XML namespace in the flash plugin.” They have a demo of Googel, in XHTML and XForms with CSS3. Via EnterFrame.
IE takes around 4-5 years to get a substantial user base for a new version, flash takes 1.5 years, google takes 0. The faster feedback-design loop and faster new developments can be taken to the user by keeping the code small or putting it on a server. Deng takes new standards compliant code to users by keeping the code small.
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