58 Facebook dropping “is” and taking on Twitter?

Looks like Facebook is dropping its mandatory “is” in its status updates sometime in the near future. While hardly newsworthy (yet it’s the top story on Techmeme), it’s definitely interesting. I have always thought that Facebook status updates were the perfect evolution of crafty IM away messages. And with the rise of Twitter and the whole micro-blogging phenomenon, I think Facebook might be realizing what a real gem they have.

56 Jeffrey Zeldman: King of Web Standards

Business  Week article on Zeldman - It’s hard to remember what the Web was like in 1995, when Jeffrey Zeldman designed his first site. But suffice it to say that in those days “WWW” might as well have stood for the Wild West Web—there were no rules and no best practices. In a way, it was a time of great experimentation. But Zeldman soon came to see the flip side: The chaos was leading to user frustration and spiraling development and maintenance costs that threatened healthy development of the Web.

At the time, Zeldman was working as an art director at an advertising agency, and a client wanted a Web site. That project launched a new career that now includes the 11-person New York design consultancy Happy Cog; the Webzine A List Apart; the traveling conference An Event Apart; and a new book imprint—all dedicated to Web design. Perhaps most important, Zeldman helped to pioneer the movement known as standards-based design—a yawn-inducing term that basically ensures that a Web site can be used by someone using any browser and any Web-enabled device. More here.
 

55 Email Inbox Visualization :-)

This is interesting - a dynamic visualization of an email inbox, based on the metaphor of microbes. all emails are categorized in 6 person groups: family and friends, school, job, e-commerce, unclassified, & spam.

an animal conveys the condition of an email message: the age of an email is shown by the size & opacity of the animal. the status of an email (i.e. unread, read, responded) is shown by the number of hair/feet & velocity. users can select messages & group them by different attributes, such as sender, status or time. Link

54 Bloomberg information design

Different design proposals by well-established design firms for Bloomberg’s complex, information-rich online interface. “web design shop” thehappycorp uses social interaction, personalization & different forms of lava lamp inspired or Newsmap-like data visualizations. it includes a cyborg-like wearable sensor to monitor the health of the worker, a Wii golf game with a handicap depending on on your actual market performance (& somehow an old-style telephone wired to the keyboard).

Design firm IDEO presents on a more natural way of navigation. the left screen shows general information, while on the right, drilled-down detail data dynamically pops-up. several wearable display devices can be attached to the screens, post-it style. a form of “tactile scrolling” on a touch panel allows users to cascade between the different information panes.

Finally, Ziba Design focuses on a restrained use of color, & a wide range of data visualizations, from simple bar charts to complex 3-D data representations that make use of animation & motion. they also envision some sort of “space-saving” holographic displays & a blown-up version of the iPod wheel for navigation & interaction.

53 Search popularity hot map

An online, interactive map that shows where people have looked at when using Microsoft’s Live Search Maps. the darker a point, the more times a specific part of the map has been downloaded.

In hotmap, each colored square represents 1 unit of imagery, or a “tile”. tiles are shown from a resolution of 74 meters-per-pixel (zoom level 11) to 0.3 meters-per-pixel (zoom level 19).

52 WikiYou is Twitter Plus Wikipedia

WikiYou is a recently launched wiki that’s devoted to the creation of an online biography for every person in the world.

With WikiYou, anyone has the ability to create and edit a biography of someone. In many regards, WikiYou is like a Wikipedia that is only concerned with information about people. So it also serves as a people search engine, slightly similar to Wink. Each addition and revision is tracked and accounted for (to some extent) so it is possible to continually update anyone’s biography. The actual “stories” about a person show up in speech bubbles that resemble the updates you’ll see on Twitter, and tend to be rather short. You can include links, images and flash embeddable media into a “story” as well.

51 iPhone Does Not Support Adobe Flash

WWDC are reporting that, for now, there is officially no Flash support on the iPhone. Apparently, in the State of the Media address yesterday, the announcement was made that: “There will be no Flash support at the moment on the iPhone.” Developers are being told not to serve video via Flash, as there simply isn’t a player built for the phone yet.

50 New IKEA Ecommerce Website Launches In Over 20 Countries Worldwide

IKEA announces a new website design, currently rolling out in 24 countries worldwide. The new website features an increased focus on the sharing of IKEA furnishing knowledge with consumers. Where other retailers are delivering basic data on products, prices, and promotions, IKEA is dedicated to granting the customer full access to its celebrated home furnishing knowledge.

Room images on the new site are fully interactive- users can engage with the images and see tips and ideas for a variety of products and everyday situations. “The trick was to develop a user interface that balances efficiency and discovery,” say Gene Liebel, Partner and Director of User Experience at HUGE. “Research shows that IKEA customers have very high expectations for the IKEA website- they expect an experience that is about much more than just the presentation of basic product information. They want to learn how to improve their lives at home, and they want everything integrated into a single, usable workflow, organized by the rooms of their house.”

The new site architecture is based on the rooms of the house: Bedroom, Children’s Room, Dining Room, Kitchen, Living Room, Workspace, Basement, Garage, Attic, Hallway & Entrance, Laundry Room, and Youth Room. Another change is an expanded role and more prominent position for “Ask Anna”, the automated customer service chat character driven by artificial intelligence. Anna has proven to be very effective in providing 24/7 support and advice to millions of IKEA customers worldwide, reducing support costs.

49 YouTube Mobile Site Launches

Although previously displaying a “coming soon” message, it appears that the m.youtube.com site has now gone live, providing more convenient access to YouTube from mobile devices. It carries a warning, too: “YouTube Mobile is a data intensive application. We highly recommend that you upgrade to an unlimited data plan with your mobile service provider to avoid additional charges.”

47 Picli, the Digg for Photos, Gets a Whole New Look

Mashable reports - Picli has just had a redesign, and it also got some new features. The redesign is subtle - the icons have changed a bit, and the site now seems a tiny bit cleaner and tidier than the first time we saw it.

As far as new features go, the one that strikes out is the translation of the entire site to French. Also, the site now offers both Atom and RSS feeds, an inbuilt search engine, and a favorites gallery, where you can store the images you like for later viewing. The light box, which contains the larger image and opens when you click on a thumbnail, is now improved - you can read the comments or vote directly through it.

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