wake up!

Just noticed there’s a conference coming up in a few weeks here in the valley that seems extremely narrowcast to me: Graphing Social Patterns: The Business & Technology of Facebook.

A lot of the usual suspects of social network bloviating are speaking (I count two women out of 20 named speakers), including representatives from Facebook, LinkedIn, O’Reilly (Tim himself), Forrester Research, TechCrunch, and of course Scoble, and others.

The conference describes itself as

for developers and marketers on how to build and distribute apps for the Facebook Platform. This event is for both business executives & technical developers who want to learn more about the Facebook environment, and how to reach online communities using social networking platforms and applications.The conference will be held in San Jose, CA from October 7th-9th. Main conference sessions are Monday 10/8 and Tuesday 10/9; an optional pre-conference workshop is Sunday, 10/7.

If you’re interested, you can register at EventBrite.

They’ve certainly populated the conference title well with buzzwords. The term social graph, popularized by facebookistas (and annoying to those who consider it an obscure jargon synonym for social network - oh, and don’t get jonas luster started on how social network software is not the same thing as a social network) seems to be everywhere these days, and of course people love to talk about recognizing and capturing (or detecting, heh) patterns.

For a counter view of the importance of Facebook’s social graph as a platform for application development, check out the truth about facebook apps: most people ignore them:

Once installed, most widgets are ignored.

Slide’s “Top Friends” boasts the most active users: 2.7 million people, or 20% of its user base, use it every day. The app with the highest engagement percentage: “WarBook,” a medieval fantasy game, is played by 18,000 people a day, or 42% of its install base. The “iLike” app, oft-cited as a Facebook success story, may be less popular than we thought: 646,000 people, or 9% of its install base, use it daily.

(via cwodtke’s tweets, who recently noted that she and I seem to be on some sort of convergence path)

Thanks, iTunes!
Originally uploaded by xian.

Not really sure how to respond to this.

Well, actually, I do know how to respond. I had to click Yes.

Maybe everyone else in the blogosphere knows this already but I just read that Dave Sifry is stepping down as CEO of Technorati: Technorati Weblog: A Change In Seasons

Looks like Tantek’s timing was impeccable.

I first met Dave during the dotcom bust when blogging was booming (again) on the backs of a lot of underemployed folks, myself included. I was working hard, updating Radio Free Blogistan three to seven times a day, hanging out on the #joiito channel on irc, and going to various blogger dinners and shmoozes here in the Bay Area.

I met a lot of folks with interesting startup ideas or who were looking at various ways of turning their passion for blogging and or social networking into businesses or publications or both. Dave’s idea was simple to explain and easy to understand, so I wasn’t surprised to see it get funded and take off.

I’ve got other friends working there now - some of whom I introduced to the Technorati people. I guess I consider myself a friend of the company, if that’s even a possible thing to be, and I’ve hesitated to complain or criticize too much when I’ve found the service sluggish or otherwise frustrating.

I applauded their recent redesign and I still visit the site when I am in the mood for some egosurfing (usually disappointing) or to see who’s been blogging about the Yahoo! Pattern Library recently.

It sounds like Technorati is having a tough time right now. Valleywag reported something like eight layoffs in addition to the CEO vacancy, and people don’t seem to talk about how Google or Yahoo! should buy Technorati so much anymore.

(Disclosure: I work at Yahoo but I have absolutely no knowledge regarding acquisition plans or lack of them for any startup out there.)

I’m sure the next thing Dave does will be interesting and I wish him the best.

Most of the time when I post a tweet using Twitterific (which I mostly love), I get this strange window popping up:

Why does Twitterific want to talk to Skype anyway? Bueller?

Here are my slides from my presentation, Mobile Information Architecture: Designing Experiences for the Mobile Web:

(I may update them with a 2.0 version based on some new learnings from subsequent conversations, and a different idea of how to pace the imagery.)

And here are my slides from the panel I moderated, Lessons From Failure: Or How IAs Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bombs:

These slides are only minutely useful as they are nearly all images without any notes or bullet points. When the podcast comes out I will work on synchronizing my remarks with the slides.

I’ll be posting Ted Nadeau’s slides next. His were much more content rich.

Update: Here are Ted’s slides:

Via the IxDA list I noticed this item on the Jensen Harris’ An Office User Interface Blog explaining how application developers can license and implement the new Microsoft Office 2007 interface, “including the Ribbon, galleries, [and] the Mini Toolbar.”

Here are more details on the licensing process and the place where you actually go to download a license.

There is one fairly reasonable exception:

There’s only one limitation: if you are building a program which directly competes with Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, or Access (the Microsoft applications with the new UI), you can’t obtain the royalty-free license.

Engadget posted a video showing a complete interface walkthrough for Zune, demonstrating its UI and wireless sharing feature (via Edwin Booth, who posted the link to the IxDA list, saying, “If you’ve used Windows Media Center, it’s very similar”).

Gmail works pretty well on mobile devices already, but Google just announced a Java client application for mobile (Official Google Blog: Gmail mobile client is live) that runs on hundreds of devices. I visited the download page on my phone and it automatically detected that I was connecting via an HTC 2125 and supplied me with the correct Java “midlet” for my device.

It seems to work great, once I turned off the itsy-bitsy text-size option, although I’m not sure I really need it, since - as I said - the regular Gmail website already adapts itself pretty well to my device. Cool wow factor, though.

According to Jacco Niewland, swipr is “a toolset for Visio that allows the integration of sitemaps/screenflows and wireframes into one fully interactive HTML deliverable.”

Swipr is released under the GNU Open Source license, and is completely free. It “allows for one screenflow/sitemap document and multiple wireframe documents to be exported into one integrated HTML set, viewable by any browser; it also has the option of creating a simple prototype from all your wireframes.” It’s suited for collaboration by teams of multiple IAs and it doesn’t require any special plugins to view the HTML prototype output.

Niewland suggests that the prototypes created by swipr are suitable for early usability testing, and that the documents print well from Visio.

At swipr.com you can download the software (still in beta), see examples, and contribute to a forum.

Thanks, Jacco!

Rich Internet Application (RIA) formats, such as Ajax, Flex, OpenLazslo, XAML, and so on, are all the rage on the Web these days, but sometimes the tradeoff involved in moving from a clunky-feeling page-at-a-time forms-driven web interface model to the more snappy thick-client feel of RIAs is a loss in accessibility (as well as issues like breaking the back button and, as we saw with frames back in the day, the difficulty of bookmarking specific states in the middle of an interaction).

Now it looks like the W3C is taking the bull by the horns: W3C Announces Roadmap for Accessible Rich Internet Applications (WAI-ARIA). Here’s an excerpt from the announcement:

Dynamic Web Content Currently Excludes Many Users: Assistive technologies, including screen readers, speech dictation software, and on-screen keyboards help make the Web accessible to people with disabilities. To accomplish this, these tools require information about the semantics of specific portions of a document in order to present those portions in an accessible form. For example, to provide reliable access to a form element, a tool must also be able to recognize the state of that element (for example, whether it is checked, disabled, focused, collapsed, or hidden). Web sites are increasingly delivering applications with capabilities comparable to locally-installed software. These rich Internet applications make heavy use of scripting, and developers often improvise hybrids of existing technologies, including AJAX, DHTML, JavaScript, and SVG. These applications do not always provide the semantics needed to support these technologies. People with disabilities are therefore at risk of being left out of this new world of information.

Todd Warfel reports that the inevitable bakeoff inside the Adobe-Macromedia merger has resulted in the winding down of FreeHand (in favor of Illustrator) and GoLive (in favor of Dreamweaver).

(btw, I know this was in May - so I’m slow on the uptake - so sue me!)

From the oldie-but-goodie file, here’s Painless Functional Specifications from Joel on Software.

Bonus: The Joel Test: 12 Steps to Better Code

This article in the Guardian UK, Dump your iPod, the mobile’s taking over suggests that mobile devices are going to supplant dedicated MP3 players as the pocket music player of choice.

I do think the idea of carrying a PDA, an MP3 player, a phone, and a text messaging device (crackberry) is unsustainable. Only the nerdiest of ubergeeks are willing to sling so many pocket devices from their belt clips.

The downside of convergence is that you can end up with a device that is optimized for no use case and is only adequate for all of them, but these problems are being solved. For example, there’s no way I would carry a PDA and a phone now. My HTC smartphone is great for both and even my dad uses a Palm Treo now.

It’s an interesting market to keep an eye on.

Looks like the Internet Explorer 7 team has been working hard addressing css bugs from the previous beta release (IEBlog : Details on our CSS changes for IE7, via Todd).

I was going to post a link to this press release Socialtext Releases First Commercial Open Source Wiki | Socialtext Enterprise Wiki, when Dan pointed me to this CNet round-up of business-wiki related news. Looks like the idea is getting some traction in the business world. (One of our clients just pre-launched a wiki in stealth mode so its end-users can share tips on using their products. We’ll link to it when the time is right.)

Here’s an interesting tidbit from the Socialtext press release:

Socialtext also shared its Public Roadmap to help guide the developer community for the next three months. The roadmap includes a source code repository, Debian, Red Hat, SOAP and REST APIs, usability enhancements, and additional DBMS management beyond Postgres, starting with MySQL. The release at the end of this period, code-named Palladium, will mark the open availability of the first enterprise grade, corporate backed, Wiki to enthusiasts and commercial users alike.

Full disclosure: I’m friendly with a couple of the principals of SocialText.

Seen in PCWorld.com:

The Web has long needed a universal checkout process. eBay’s PayPal and other online payment services rely on the various “shopping cart” applications of the Web sites they serve. While browser add-ons such as Siber Systems’ RoboForm can complete much of the order-processing information that different sites require, they exhibit little consistency in the type and quantity of data they collect. Also, as you place your personal information on more Web servers, your security risk grows. Last but not least, the Web forms themselves are often poorly designed: How many times have you had to reenter all the information in an order form because a single field was skipped or included invalid data? … Google Checkout stores your credit card number, mailing address, and other ordering information. You can view all of the orders you place through the service on a single page, and Google limits how much of your information it shares with its vendor partners.

The article does note a potential security risk:

While having a single repository for all your orders makes makes online purchases much faster and simpler (and potentially more secure), Gmail users and other people already registered with a free Google service may have to beef up their security—one log-in name and password opens them all. Until I signed up for Google Checkout, I didn’t worry much about someone gaining access to my Gmail inbox, because it contains no sensitive data. The first thing I did after adding the Google Checkout information was to change my Google password, and I’ll continue to do so regularly as long as I’m using the service.

Dan noticed this article in which CNET says big business is embracing Web 2.0, which in this context seems to refer to the two-way web (or, as one author put it, the Living Web):

Though it lacks a precise definition, Web 2.0 generally refers to Web services that let people collaborate and share information online. In contrast to the first generation of Web offerings, Web 2.0 applications are more interactive, giving people an experience more akin to a native desktop application as opposed to a static Web page.

It’s amazing that Opera’s still around. Some say it’s the most standards-compliant browser, and Opera Mini is supposedly a great browser for handheld devices. On the IAI list they’re talking about how they’re using personas for marketing (though it’s just an assumption that these same personas were part of their process for tweaking the browser’s user experience). One of the personas looks a bit like the Columbine killers and another seems like the TV version of danah boyd.

Tom Coates of Plastic Bag (and now Yahoo!) has long been reliable for his occasional thoughtful long-form essays about the nature of the web as a medium. Back in February he posted one called Native to a web of data. Then a few weeks ago Christina Wodtke posted about it to the IAI list, summing up the points thusly:

1. Look to add value to the Aggregate Web of data
2. Build for normal users, developers and machines
3. Start designing with data, not with pages
4. Identify your first order objects and make them addressable
5. Use readable, reliable and hackable URLs
6. Correlate with external identifier schemes
7. Build list views and batch manipulation interfaces
8. Create parallel data services using standards
9. Make your data as discoverable as possible

Tom and I worked together at the BBC on the project that brought our thoughts together on this. We created PIPs (Programme Information Pages) that has now been rolled out to create pages on Radio 3 and Radio 4. As a quite technical information architect form a data perspective, I enjoyed myself immensely, looking at the XML, identifying how to break source data to make it human readable/ sensible and the “highlight” getting 5 new fields into a BBC-wide database. But I also did user testing and research and worked with a fabulous designer on creating the pages. What struck me, since I moved into a more traditional UX/IA role in an agency, is that there are very few of us who enjoy the level and granularity of data into interface or applications. My team look aghast at the thought that they would look at XML and identify how to create applications out of it. I think this is the growth area of IA especially in the world of mash ups, but it does require a love of detail and the vision to see how it can be grown, merged and manipulated. It is the ultimate in collision between Big and Little IA.

Michal Migurski is annoyed with javascript delays and other “Ajax abuse” slowing down sites and points to a Safari plug-in that enables him to selectively turn of javascript at specific sites.

A month or so ago Dan sent me a link to Gliffy.com, an Ajax-y OpenLazslo-driven browser-based collaborative diagramming tool that could conceivably give Visio a run for its money (someday). Even with its limited initial feature set it makes fairly crisp looking diagrams with an intuitive, easy-to-use interface.

Knowledging Across Life’s Curriculum has a brief review of Gliffy, and (of course?) Gliffy has a blog as well.

One thing I have to say is that I hate the product’s logo and its web page looks a bit clunky too. The whole brand presentation would benefit from a makeover by a good designer.

On their blog, the Zimbra folks explain a technique they called ALE (for Ajax Linking and Embedding). I saw Zimbra demo’d at South by Southwest. It looks like a pretty cool next-generation groupware application, a potential Outlook killer, with easy drag and drop from numerous external applications into a calendar, address book, phone dialer, and so on.

New York Times dot com designer Khoi Vinh discusses the 37 Signals manifesto, Get Real (Subtraction: C’mon Feel the Signalz) and the ensuing discussion in his blog’s comments illuminate the controversy Fried and company’s increasingly strident calls-to-arms have stirred up. Vinh tends to admire where the 37s gang is coming from:

[I]t’s hard to deny “Getting Real” as, at least, important documentation of this particular point in the evolution of design and development for the Web. You could say that historically, it’s not to be missed, and that would be true; if you want to have a first hand look at how this industry’s working methods are changing, this is the book to read. But if you’re resigned to being passively buoyed by shifting trends, then you can skip it: before too long, anything of consequence to be found between its digital covers will be fully dispersed in standard practices. It’s Jason Fried’s world, after all. We just develop in it.

---

Having met Rashmi Sinha at SXSW and again at the IA Summit I’ve been interested in understanding what she’s working on. She’s brilliant so her work product must be equally compelling. Sure enough, her company Uzanto makes a product called MindCanvas that’s used to conduct user research in a game-like way (check out the testimonials on the linked page) and then present them in various compelling interactive formats.

Something to keep in mind when you want to understand what your users expect or care about.

I have to admit I’m almost relieved to learn that everything Jason Fried et al. touch does not automatically turn to gold. People love, love, love 37 Signals’ hosted Basecamp project management service (we’ve considered adopting it here at Extractable), but IA guru Christina Wodtke recentply posted her Top Six Pet Peeves with Basecamp.

I use Mindjet’s MindManager program for brainstorming and notetaking, and for building sitemaps. Up to now it’s been a Windows-only application. Now, it appears that Mindjet is about to start beta testing a version for the Mac.

At O’Reilly’s ETech conference, groupware guru Ray Ozzie (of Lotus and Groove and now Microsoft) demonstrated a proof of concept of a “smart” cut-and-paste feature for the web (using RSS as the transport mechanism).

According to Scott Rosenberg, he demonstrated the clipboard using Firefox.

He also posted links to live screencasts and a web-based demo.

It looks like the user interface people on the Firefox team have some interesting ideas about prospective changes to the browser chrome. (The newsgroup post linked here is more or less illegible in a proportional font. I copied it to a text file and viewed it with a monospace font and then all was hunky-dory. Still, it is an odd way to document and communicate about a graphical user interface!)

First of all, Web 2.0 is definitely hype. It’s a marketing concept whose meaning varies depending on who you are talking to. For some it means web-as-application-platform, for others it means social web (or living web), and for others still it means a new round of VC investment and rags-to-riches tales.

So let’s get that part straight: Web 2.0 is hype. But Is Web 2.0 Just Hype? Is web 2.0 just hype? That is the question:

It’s interesting to me that while the Web has been around for 10 years, we’ve only gotten to version 2.0 in the last year or so. I mean, with the advent of the Internet, it seemed like most software was getting a new version every couple months, not once a decade. And yet, Web 2.0 is on a lot of lips these days. But what is Web 2.0? According to Wikipedia, Web 2.0 is “what some people see as a second phase of development of the World Wide Web, including its architecture and its applications.” It is often defined by the technology that is used to create the applications that are considered Web 2.0 - such as AJAX and SOAP. In fact, the word application is often what defines a site as a Web 2.0 site. It is not just a static repository of information, but rather an application that customers use to get more information, make more information, or interact with existing information in new ways.

This is it. The Firefox Extension I’ve been looking for. As a site developer I spend a great deal of time switching between IE and Firefox to test browser support. This extension completely removes that need and brings it all home. I haven’t tested it extensively however one of my other gripes has been the slow response time for Yahoo! Mail in Firefox. Loading Yahoo! Mail in an IE Tab using Firefox is the solution. MMmm… the best of both worlds!

IE Tab - Firefox Extension

This stuff’s all over my head, but it seems to be talking about tricks to get the performance of Ajax applications in the browser without trading off the standard browser experience your users (and Jakob Nielson) have come to expect (Developing Ajax Applications That Preserve Standard Browser Functionality):

To provide the traditional Web usability features, the Ajax application therefore needs to handle URIs client side in much the same way as the server does in traditional Web applications. The Ajax application needs to:

• Generate a URI and send it to the browser when a client-side state change occurs
• Recreate state when a new URI is requested by the browser

Anil Varma of Refinery makes some intuitive points regarding success factors for implementation of a Content Management System in this white paper (Four success factors for a Content Management System).

As I frequently work with Extractable’s clients during the early stages of Content Management System evaluation, I strongly believe that understanding the business and user requirements driving such a purchase are paramount. Once we have a good understanding of those requirements, Extractable provides an objective point of reference for our clients, helping them to navigate the yet-to-consolidate Content Management System vendor market to select a solution best paired with their needs.

Graham is right that Web 2.0 started off as a brand invented for an O’Reilly Conference. He says now it means something along the lines of “using the web as an application,” “Ajax,” or “doing things the way they should be done” on the web.

Here’s his take on Ajax:

One ingredient of its meaning is certainly Ajax, which I can still only just bear to use without scare quotes. Basically, what “Ajax” means is “Javascript now works.” And that in turn means that web-based applications can now be made to work much more like desktop ones.As you read this, a whole new generation of software is being written to take advantage of Ajax. There hasn’t been such a wave of new applications since microcomputers first appeared. Even Microsoft sees it, but it’s too late for them to do anything more than leak “internal” documents designed to give the impression they’re on top of this new trend.

Both this link and the previous one come from Semiologic.

Shimone just sent these around via mail:

• SF Bay Area Tech Companies
• Companies advertising on their rooftops for the benefit of Satellite Imagery