Twitter’s Most Moronic Change: Removing @ Reply Settings – Twitter community outrage on recent change to their @ Reply system.
About Challenges and Authentic Experiences: An Interview with Bill DeRouchey – Great interview looking at the history of Interaction Design, and where the profession is going. At the end of the interview is a nice piece of advice for young UX Designers.
Do you consider your interactions on sites like Facebook and Twitter to be computing? Are you working with someone in tandem in order to accomplish a task ? Or are you just chatting about last weekends BBQ and how burnt the hot dogs were? These interactions have very different contexts, which fundamentally mean different things to people.
A month ago I was asked to write on how heavy usage of Flash effects the User Experience of a website, specifically for Interactive Agencies by Brain Schartz (twitter).
In the example that Brain gives in his tweet, it is clear whoever made this site was trying to show off their abilities using the Flash platform.
While I was at the IA Summit I sent out ALOT of tweets. The final tally was somewhere around 360, and I only lost ~10 followers with all that activity. The challenge when I returned home was getting all my tweets organized and in a digestible format. Luckily, Yoni (twitter) has built an amazing tool that helps for people that take their tweets and turn them into blog posts.
The final track that I attended was given by Whitney Hess (twitter), and was by far one of the most inspiring and influtential tracks of the IA Summit. Her message was simple, to be a success and be part of a community you have to get involved. The following are my tweets from her session:
I created my account on Twitter last August on a whim to see what all the hype was about. Last month I hit the 100 followers mark after more than 2000 updates. I know there are many twitter users that have less updates and more followers, but that doesn’t bother me. The drive for high numbers is not my reason for tweeting, but hopefully a by product of the content of my tweets.
A strange thing has occured in the 3 weeks since I have hit the magicial 100 followers mark though, I gained ~45 new friends/followers (not including the spam bots that are plaguing the twitter community recently). The influx of new friends makes me feel like I have reached one of the many tipping points that exist on Twitter.
One of the biggest challenges I have had getting started with blogging is coming up with topics that haven’t rehashed over and over again. I have tons of ideas that pop up in my head, and thanks to Google Tasks I have been able to keep up a decent number of posts in the hopper. Every now and then, I still struggle to come up with meaningful content to post out there for the world.
A solution I have been trying, and have had some success with, is see what my twitter network wants to hear about. Here are the tweets I got last week when I opened myself up to all my twitter friends:
My good friend Nathan Verrill made an interesting tweet last night.
I have been of the opinion for a long time that the method which TV stations track their ratings is broken. Online video streaming has been around for years, and within the last year popular shows have become freely availabe via services like Hulu and Boxee, they still use the same old method from the 80’s to monitor ratings. The networks consult their market demographics and ask a representative group to attach a special device to their televisions in order to monitor the viewers favorite shows.
This method fails because it is relying on a small sample to correctly predict the general populations favorite shows. What the networks should be doing is collect analytics of what people are watching via their DVR’s, online video streaming services, and seasons that are bought/rented when released on DVD. Using this method it would give them a better representation of what people are watching and when they are watching their favorite shows.
This touches on the recent decisions of Hulu to suspend access of their service to Boxee users. On Hulu’s blog they cite the content providers as being the reason for restricting their contents access. This gives us a view of the mentality of the people in charge of the big networks. Restricting their content is the last thing they should want to do, as they are limiting the amount of viewers they can reach with their programs. The networks should strive to create a strong partnership with Boxee and tap into the information that Boxee could collect on what people are viewing to give a proper and real representation of the programs people like and an accurate representation of their viewership demographics. Hopefully one day they will learn the lesson, else they will get sweep aside and the new kids on the block will grow up and replace them.
