Posts

Will we ever love advertisting?

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I'm not talking to you, dear Mr. Creative Director. You make a good living and you do not hold any grudge against ads as such. But I'm addressing the common net surfer, the guy, who bravely updates his adblocker every other month and still gets bombarded with ever-mutating pop-ups, pop-unders and other intrusive inhabitants of various ad servers. But even he has learned that the “culture of free” requires somebody to pay the bill – not in cash, this is why researchers came up with the term The Attention Economy.

Twitter begs to differ though and promises users “ads they love” – now that sounds like a bit of a stretch, but actually, metadata-infos might do the trick. But until the company get's their own “AdTweets” up and running, you'll just love ad.ly. Read more

Fluid Forms: New Design Interface

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When Walter Benjamin wrote his famous essay on technical reproduction of art pieces, he couldn't have anticipated a trend that is currently redefining the relationship between designer and consumer. Unique products, designed specifically to the users wishes, are going to replace ready-made products of everyday life. Sounds too theoretical? Just think of T-shirts: online-retailers like Spreadshirt made single unique prints available at a reasonable price and they became extremely popular in no time. Fluid Forms is taking the whole concept of unique design to a new level – this week, the company launched their new design interface.

There's an intro video on my German blog, but unfortunately it's only available in German yet. But luckily, the makers of fluid forms run an in-depth blog on unique and generative designs which is a must-read for everyone who wants to be up to date on the current transition from fixed to fluid design forms. I really like the usability of the new interface – check it out at fluidforms.com: to try the editor, just chose a product and then select “start”.

Fluid Forms on Makerbot

Guest post by Kim de Vries: Your Friend has just tackled you

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Kim de VriesBite, lick, or tackle them back, or click here to theorize about what this all means. I'm very happy to publish the first guest posting here on datadirt. Kim De Vries, who I met via Facebook, wrote a very interesting paper about the symbolic kind of communication we all know so well from social networks like Facebook. “He who never superpoked shall throw the first rock” – enjoy the reading! Dr. Kim De Vries is working at the California State University Stanislaus, you can reach her at kdevries [at] csustan.edu

Introduction

Though Facebook was initially the province of college students, it has become popular with a broad range of users since opening its door to anyone with an email address in September 2006. However, until very recently, most research on Facebook has focused on the student demographic rather than exploring how Facebook is growing into a massive online society that is inhabited by many different groups using Facebook in a variety of ways for a variety of reasons. The academics studying Facebook generally join it and use it in order to observe students; now that more faculty are using Facebook outside the classroom, to organize events and to socialize, turning the focus to our own use of Facebook reveals that our own communities are being affected as well.

As of August 2008, Facebook is one of the most rapidly growing social networks, boasting 100 million active users, translated into twelve European and a growing number of Asian and African languages. The extent to which groups of people connected on Facebook can be defined as communities is highly debatable and a useful alternative has been suggested by Rieder and Sch

Do you need a new coffee table?

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This one ain't exactly cheap, but it will definitely impress any visitor, from casual mobile-user to alpha-geek: Microsoft built the “Surface” Hardware, an innovative touchscreen (which actually isn't a touchscreen but uses five cameras to track visual input) that allows for a unique user interface experience. But hardware is pretty boring with proper applications, and that's what this video is all about:

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Twitter: cosmetic skin updates

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While US, Indian and Australian users are still able to fully use twitter's great SMS features, European twitter fans dearly miss the fastest and most direct way to receive updates, a proven system that even works with a 10 year old mobile. I was pretty shocked about the seemingly impossible mission to find a partner for the European market, as one would guess that players like T-Mobile should actually be pretty interested in hugging twitter closely. And I don't believe that a few cosmetic design touches will make up for missing SMS support. I hope that twitter finds a way to enable short message service usage in Europe again, but on the other hand that's the best market-entry point for competitors, as long as they are able to offer SMS integration.

There's no doubt I like the new design – no major surprises in here, just a few investments into the future:

The most significant change you'll notice on the logged-in homepage (/home) is that we've moved the tabs that were on the top of the timeline to the right sidebar. We did this for a couple reasons. For one thing, it makes them larger targets and easier to access. But more importantly, it was an investment in the future. We plan to have more tabs, and we'd run out of room putting them along the top. This was the driving factor for this redesign, but you won't see all the benefits until a future release (hopefully, very soon!).

The completely unnecessary archive tab has been removed (finally – it showed exactly the same tweets that are listed on the personal profile page), some more Ajax is supposed to speed up page loading and the customizable design editor has evolved, featuring a couple of standard templates. The “fave” and “archive” icons have not disappeared completely, but they only become visible now when the mouse pointer hovers a tweet.

Like most power tweeters, I don't care much about those things – I don't know a single heavy user who is actually using the web interface, so the look of the skin is not really a big topic here. There's a large number of clients (from iPhone to Linux) available, and brilliant little pieces of software like Twhirl make twittering a lot more fun. I'm really curious about the new features, and I'm pretty sure the next release will not just be cosmetic one.

btw: Friendfeed bought some new clothes as well.

Who’s gonna manage our digital identity?

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Scotty, get those phazers ready – the battle for digital identity management is about to begin. The Google Klingons have yet not been able to successfully launch their not-so-secret weapon OpenSocial, while the Federation's OpenId primarily seems to appeal to nerds.

But hey, behold: the times they are-a-changing: just a couple of days ago myspace announced the introduction of Data Availability, which is basically an interface allowing myspace users to share their profile data with third party websites like Twitter, Photobucket and the like.

Just two days after the information became public, Facebook started talking about Facebook Connect, a perfectly similar system – Techcrunch has more. Both interfaces will be publicly available for any interested partners in a couple of weeks and both will fight Google and OpenId for supremacy over digital id management – and the battle is set up to be very interesting to watch.