Twitter’s Ecosystem
Loukide: Restricting developers undermines the ecology that made Twitter valuable; http://eicker.at/TwittersEcosystem
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Gerrit Eicker
Facebook: Our Singular Login?
Has Facebook already won the digital identity war? And, how portable are our digital identities? http://eicker.at/SingularLogin
Gerrit Eicker
Feed Usability
NN/g (free PDF): Design guidelines for streams sent through social networks, RSS; http://eicker.at/FeedUsability (via @mseibert)
Gerrit Eicker
Kindle Goes Web
Amazon launches Kindle for the Web soon: eBooks within browsers, books samples, sharing, embedding; http://eicker.at/KindleWeb
Gerrit Eicker
Beyond the Classical Blog Scheme
Gawker moves beyond the classical blog scheme: scoop, aggregation, personality, visualisation; http://eicker.at/MagStyle
Gerrit Eicker
iPad Communications
iPad opportunities for communications: capacity, payment, tolerance, intimacy, accessibility, connectivity; http://eicker.at/1a
Gerrit Eicker
Wikia 2.0
Wales: The idea of Wikia 2.0 is to attract new people who thought wikis would be too complicated to use; http://eicker.at/Wikia
Gerrit Eicker
Real Artists Ship
Mullenweg: 1.0 is the loneliest number. Usage is like oxygen for ideas. Jobs (1983): Real artists ship; http://eicker.at/10
Gerrit Eicker
Google Instant Previews
Google goes Instant Previews: graphic overviews of search results, highlighting relevant sections; http://eicker.at/Previews
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Gerrit Eicker
Google: “Instant Previews provides a graphic overview of a search result and highlights the most relevant sections, making finding the right page as quick and easy as flipping through a magazine. To use it, click once on the magnifying glass next to the title of any search result and a visual overview of the page will appear on the right. From there, hover your cursor over any other result to see a preview. For those of you who’ve recently stopped using your mouse to search, now you can navigate to a result, hit the right arrow key to see the preview, and hit the down arrow key to keep browsing. … Quickly compare results … Pinpoint relevant content … Interact with the results page”
NYT: “Even though most people think searching on Google is fast, Google is obsessed with shaving more milliseconds off the time it takes people to search. … ‘We’re trying to avoid the case where you click on a result and you discover pretty much instantly that it’s not what you were looking for and you click back and click on a different result,’ said Raj Krishnan, a Google product manager who worked on Instant Previews. ‘That’s a bad experience.’”
SEL: “The new feature seems promising, another way to save time in the searching process, because there’s less need for people to ‘pogostick’ with their search results. … Google’s system seeks to marry the two: an image of the page as well as extracting text. Rather than a small thumbnail image, it shows a much larger picture of what the page looks like. The larger image, and one that’s not in a standard square shape, especially helped with people finding the previews useful in testing, Google told me. … The images previews cover up Google’s ads, when they appear. Is this a problem for advertisers? Google says largely no. … Ads, by the way, will also get an Instant Preview feature in the future, Google told me. There’s no set timeline for this, however. … The preview begin rolling out today worldwide and should be in place by tomorrow for everyone.”
pC: “It’s worth noting, however, that Microsoft’s Bing has had a similar preview feature since its debut in spring 2009. On Bing, users can click on an arrow adjacent to the results in order to see a pop-up that includes a preview of some text on that page to see if it’s a promising result.”
VB: “It’s impressive how much Google’s search results have changed in just the last couple of months, especially since there was a period a few years ago when search barely seemed to be changing at all. The Instant Previews feature seems particularly noteworthy since Google has been notoriously protective about its search results and has resisted adding anything that might clutter up the page. Whenever you ask about competition, company executives like to say that they’re more focused on improving their own products in response to user needs, but it’s probably no coincidence that Google’s making big improvements as it feels pressure from Microsoft’s Bing.”
Gerrit Eicker
Facebook Apps
Updated Facebook iPhone/Android apps include: Facebook Groups, Facebook Deals, photo check-ins; http://eicker.at/FacebookApps
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Gerrit Eicker
IF: “Version 3.3.1 of Facebook for iPhone brings Groups, Deals, and enhanced Places functionality to the most popular Facebook mobile app. Released today, the app allows users to post to Groups and read Group feeds, add photos and tag additional friends to an existing check-in, and discover rewards Deals offered at local Places. – Facebook last made a major update to its iPhone app when it launched Places, and fixed a few bugs with a release in September. When Groups was launched last month, the only mobile way to access the feature was through m.facebook.com, which has now changed. Details about the new Deals feature leaked a few days ago, but today Facebook walked members of the press through how it businesses can use it to incentivize check-ins. … The new version of Facebook for iPhone is fast, easy-to-use, and offers both unique mobile functionality and new replications of web interface features. Instead of answering user demands for minor features like the ability to add photos to albums, or remove friends, Facebook is giving users new ways to take advantage of the iPhone’s GPS and camera. While Facebook for Android also received an update today, Facebook apps for Palm, Blackberry, Windows, and others which still don’t have Places functionality will now look even more antiquated.”
RWW: “Today’s updated version of the Android app adds Places and Groups, as well as improves the Notifications from within the app. The Android app still lacks the Chat feature, something iPhone users can still gloat about. But today’s release brings the Android app closer to parity with the iPhone. … The iPhone now gets the Groups feature too. But in addition, there’s a new look to the News Feed, which now makes it easier to add photos and check-ins, not merely status updates. Within the new Groups feature, similarly, buttons urge users to add photos and/or posts.”
Guardian: “Where Wikipedia is encyclopaedia-like, neutral (despite the regular flame wars between disputing editors) factual information, Wikia is for fan communities and more expressive. Rolling out an overhauled version in the past few weeks, Wales claims the new Wikia is far more social with better sharing features, a simpler ‘WYSIWYG’ editing interface, theme designer and improved navigation. – ‘The idea is to move into new markets, attract new people – people who traditionally thought wikis would be too complicated to use,’ Wales told the Guardian. ‘Wikia 2.0 marries the traditional wiki tools that have been so successful with newer social and editing features.‘ – Behind all these improvements is the ambition of making Wikia stickier, encouraging people to keep nurturing their wiki after the initial burst of excitement. … ‘Wikipedia is a cultural institution – and still the number five site on the internet,’ said Wales. Given that Wikia was founded in 2004, and Wikipedia in 2001, Wales’s empire doesn’t seem ready to buckle just yet. ‘I should’ve started sooner. All the tech components needed to start these projects existed several years earlier – there was no reason I couldn’t have started Wikipedia in 1996.‘”
RWW: “The company said it has a number of features in store for its users: Integration of social tools to let users share their edits and contributions with friends. Highlighting of top editors so readers can see who created the content and learn more about them. Surfacing photos and videos more broadly on content pages and including images in search results. Radically improved content editing via a new, easy to use, visual editor. Fan activity modules such as real-time streams, polls, top 10 lists, and achievement badges. New opportunities for brands to get involved in the conversation with their fans.”
TNW: “However if his software could be licensed and used to build company intranets, extranets, and platforms for writing rich documentation, websites and collaboration tools – that would be something cool to see.”