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.

How to Elevate Your Website Design Process and Results - Very smart and thorough tutorial on how to streamline creating a design for a website using Photoshop.

Usability Bytes #1: Visual prominence – First screencast of Usability Bytes presented by Robert Hoekman, Jr of Miskeeto.

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.

In an article Joe Fletcher wrote for Johnny Holland, he talks about the limitations and misconceptions of using popular social sites for social computing. I agree that with many of the online collaborative tools available, not many do a proper job supporting true collaboration. However, how he describes Facebook and Twitter as a social computing environment is inaccurate due to the nature of the interactions that occur there. It can be argued that some of the Facebook application available extend its service to support social computing, but Facebook’s core purpose is to establish relationships.

In my mind, there is a clear difference between working with someone remotely in order to prepare for an important business meeting and sharing pictures of your dog stuck in a box. Concepts like ‘Driver’ and ‘Turn-taking’ just don’t fit into the context that of many social networking offer,  and the need for true synchronous interactions rarely enters the picture. Clearly defining the difference between social computing and social networking is important, and should not get lost just because in a server room somewhere zeros and ones are being passed through a processor.

Do you see a difference between these two concepts? Or should all social networks one day be expected to support ‘social computing’?

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. The result is a piece of digital ‘art’ rather than a designed website that highlights the agencies capabilities and work. This is a classic mistake of sites that go heavy on the Flash.

The use of Flash on the web has been debated for years, and best practices are well documented. Rather than rehash what is already out there I will just highlight a couple things to keep in mind when incorporating Flash into a design.

1. Use as an accessory – Don’t let Flash become the be all end all. The use of Flash, or any other RIA platform, should be a small portion of the design of a site. This allows for the content of your site to be more accessible and SEO friendly.
2. Degrade Gracefully – Using a full Flash site doesn’t inherently mean it will convey a bad user experience. Steps can be taken to offer a fully standard compliant XHTML alternative, and a style that support mobile browsers.
3. Website, not Art – Don’t get all ‘Flashy’ (pun intended) just to show off your skills. Showing off your business and portfolio should not be buried in a piece of art.

Using an RIA platform as part of your site can do wonders to impress your users. The old adage holds true though, content is king. If a site is too rich or too interactive, you can distract or mislead a user. Using these new and exciting interactive platforms  responsibly can offer users a much deeper and richer experience.

Some links to what others have said on this topic:

• 65 Excellent Flash Designs
• UIE RIA Archives
• What is “rich”? Why do “rich”?

If you have other links please post them in the comments and I will add to this list.

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.

His tool takes just two inputs, a username and a hashtag(s). Using these inputs, it pulls out any tweets that user has made that contain the hashtag(s) and cuts the hashtag(s) out of the results. Some additional features include reversing the order, exporting as an excel spreadsheet, or exporting as html. The excel format wasn’t very helpful for me, but I image others find it very useful. I prefer the html export, this allows me to just copy and paste between two windows.

Bottom line anyone that uses twitter to keep notes or provide live coverage of an event for people should us this tool. Here is the link to the Tweet to Blog tool, and several twitter based tools: http://twitter.infinityplusone.com/

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:

http://thisisindexed.com/ Takes complex problems and talks about them in simple lines

It is bullshit to say that you can’t change the world if no one knows your name.

“Your voice and your name can be decoupled — that one CAN make a diff behind the scenes” – @KathySierra

Unless you practice your talents and share your knowledge you will never be a rockstar.

Can you explain why you are important in a single sentence? If not than that is something you need to work on.

Know what your strengths are and your weaknesses are. Accept your weaknesses and build on your strengths.

Having a blog is about sharing your expertise, it doesn’t help keeping that knowledge to yourself.

USE TWITTER – that is all D

Share your ideas and opinions, find people that inspire you, communicate with them. Find your voice.

Don’t be a lurker on twitter, you need to engage and bring value to the group

Google is your resume, your online presence is out there and people will find it.

You are a representative of the community, if you make yourself look bad you make us all look bad.

You don’t have to be an extrovert to network, some of the best connectors are introverts.

Connect with everyone on LinkedIn if you meet them personally they deserve to be on there.

There is no reason to be private on any social network, make yourself public.

Use twitter to network, use your real name, fill out the one-liner, link to your blog.There is no reason to protect your tweets

Think hard about what you say and what that says about you.

No matter what social network you use link back to your blog, use the same email address, and use the same usernames.

Seek out events, no matter where you live there is a community there. You just have to find it.

How to overcome shyness? Have a goal that you want to accomplish before meeting people.

The best thing to do is just walk up to someone and say ‘Hi’, if you do this you are networking

Always have a card to give someone, even if you just meet them in passing.

Follow up with everyone that you meet and solidify the relationship that you started.

Find out what people are working on, learn about their work. You are able to reach out to them for help in the future

In the end we are each other’s resources, we can’t be everything and we need to know who to go to for help.

Exude Confidence – “If you think you can or think you can’t, you are right” Henry Ford.

3 types of confidence – about yourself, making others feel confident in you, and helping others find their own confidence.

Which of these three are you good at? Identify that, but try to build up the other two.

Act ‘as if’ you are worthy. Doing that will eventually make you worthy.

Be willing to walk away if you find yourself surrounded by negativity. Remember that not all feedback is negative.

Admit your mistakes, learn from them and move on.

“God gave us two ears and one mouth to use in proportion” – unknown.

How to become a leader? Organize events, mentor others, give feedback and recognition, connect the dots.

Call Mentorship going out for coffee if it makes you feel better.

All this is about communicating hope, optimism, and enthusiasm. Take that in and share it.

We are helping each other get to a better place. So in the end don’t feed the trolls. Ignore the haters.

There are no rules, she is just making all this up anyway , but you need to follow your gut.

Go forth unafraid @whitneyhess

‘I think a lot of people want to be modest” – @whitneyhess

“You can put better stuff out there on your blog than my mom.” – Whitney Hess

Following the advise that Whitney puts forth, anyone should be able to become a vocal advocate in their field. She shows how tools like blogging, Twitter, and LinkedIn can be used to get yourself out there and how best to use them. If Whitney wasn’t able to get someone to go out and starting blogging, twittering, and connecting with like minded folks I don’t know what would.

Evangelizing Yourself

View more presentations from Whitney Hess.

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.

This begs the question of what are the other tipping points? Are they tied to your number of followers? Does getting followed by a high profile twitterer boost your profile simply by association? How does your exposure on Twitter change once you start to get involved in local Tweet Ups?

What do you think?

Graph of my user history from 10-14-2008 to present via Twitter Grader:

Thanks to Ulu Marketing for helping me brainstorm this blog post.

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:

@barrykirk – Barry Kirk

@nathanverrill – Nathan Verrill

Obviously, this post has been inspired by Barry’s tweet. It does raise the question though, does crowd-sourcing my blog posts out to twitter make me lazy?

Personally, I don’t think so. If there is one thing I am good at, it is having a conversation with someone no matter what the topic is. I don’t want my blog to be just another brain dumb of my views and ideas, I want it to be an on going conversation with my readers. By crowd-sourcing the topics on my blog, this just a way for me to starting a conversation with the community. I have devoted this blog to posts about Interaction Design, Web 2.0 Stuff, and Fatherhood (going to be a dad in about 4 months.) All of these topics have deep and extensive communities, with tons of content already in existence.

My method of interjecting myself into the overall conversations is to see what my peers want to hear about, or maybe what my response would be to something they have written. If successful, I see this as a great way to keep myself involved both in my blog and the community of Interaction Designers, Web Guru’s, and other dads out there.

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.