Unless you are in a band.

Go ahead and google a band or musician that you like. Changes are that if they don’t have their own website (and even if they do), that their myspace page will be at the top of the results. A while back Myspace made a conscious effort to rebrand itself as a platform for musicians to get exposure. And it worked. If you have a band or are a musician it’s now really easy to share your songs, add tour dates, share your status and converse with your fans.

As Myspace declined in popularity as a personal social site, it grew in popularity with musicians trying to reach their fans. That all could change with Ping, the new social network recently announced by Apple. Ping allows fans to follow artists, get updates about their events and to also see what their friends (and friends of friends) are listening to.

Personally, I tend not to visit Myspace pages of bands I like. I can almost always find the information I need on their twitter account or other sites and not have to wade through the confusing UI and spam bots that overrun Myspace. While I’m still finding my way around Ping, I see it as a serious contender and eventual replacement of Myspace for that reason alone

But where Ping really differs from Myspace is their integrated shopping. Ping is connecting the artist, the fan, and the store all together in a seamless experience.
You can’t buy music directly from myspace, clicking on a ‘buy’ link will take you to another site, such as Amazon. And with such a large distribution platform it’s a no brainer that artists would want to be here.

(On an unrelated, does anyone else think that the Ping logo looks like the Gist logo?)

The Social Bicycle System from Ryan Rzepecki on Vimeo.

Lately I’ve been riding my bike to work. While NYC has already done a lot in the short time I’ve been riding to make the city more bicycle friendly, it still certainly has a long way to go. One sure-fire way to make the city more bike friendly is to increase the numbers of cyclists on the streets and to increase awareness about city cycling.

The Social Bicycle System (SoBi) is a public bike share system that uses GPS, mobile communications, and a secure lock that can attach to almost any bicycle and lock to any regular bike rack.

SoBi takes its inspiration from the bicycle shares that have grown in popularity in Europe. What makes SoBi unique is the technology involved. Each SoBi bicycle is equipped with a built-in bicycle lock, a GPS tracking device, and is synced with a server that users can checkin in via their smart phones.

The system does not require separate infrastructure and can be deployed at approximately one-third the cost of existing systems. Administrators will be given powerful tools to manage demand and map patterns of use. Users will enjoy door-to-door transportation and an interactive cycling experience that can track miles traveled, calories burned, CO2 emissions offset, and connections to other Social Cyclists.

They will be doing a trail launch in New York City this fall.

Vote for them in the Pepsi Good Idea Challenge

I was among the first of my friends to hop on the Foursquare wagon. I battled with coworkers to win the office mayorship, I created locations for my favorite falafel cart, my favorite dive bars and cool spots in the park. I was an active and eager participant. But then it just got old. Once you get the mayorship of a place, so what? Has anyone ever really used foursquare tro find out where their friends are and join them?

Wanting something new I switched to Gowalla and went through the same motions – create new spots, check in, collect items, and that too grew old. Neither of these systems have good enough game design to make them addictive (SCVNGR seems to be doing some fun stuff) and the promise of a free cup of coffee, or whatever, isn’t worth the level of effort required to obtain it.

Checking in becomes a chore. I have to stop whatever it is I’m doing, load up my app and hope that it finds the correct location. It becomes counter productive when people are stopping mid conversation to check into a social application. To really make geolocation platforms work they way they are intended the checkin process needs to be automated.

JESS3 makes a good case for why location based checkins should be automated in his slideshow, and it seems that the demand is already here.

The primary argument against passive checkins is privacy. What are the repercussions of automatically alerting other to my exact whereabouts? Sites like Please Rob Me and this Daily Beast article illustrate the real-world consequences of oversharing.

I think, in general, the concept of passive checkins is the best solutiopn for geolocation platforms, but it needs boundaries. Different levels of sharing for different groups of contacts, one for friends another for colleagues, etc.. I dont quite think that the age of privacy is over, but I think that the demand for location sharing is there but that the current implementation is flawed.

Recently I read a great article about how entertainment brands were seeing a surge in popularity on Facebook.

The bar was lowered in terms of commitment for people, Facebook thought they’d get a better conversion, while believing people would be more in favor of following a page if it was simply a ‘like thing’ rather than a ‘fan thing.’ And they were totally right.

Reading this article reminded me of the concept of temporary ties, as written about by Paul Adams here.

Temporary ties have always existed, but the web is bringing them to the fore. Think about some people you’ve only interacted with once. You don’t actually know who they are. A store assistant, a call center employee, the person you bought from on eBay. These are examples of your temporary ties. Temporary ties are much more common online than offline.

I think that the recent changes in Facebook have only added to the momentum of temporary ties’ popularity. We may not realize it but we use these temporary ties to influence our behavior constantly – I buy product that have highest reviews, I watch videos that have lots of “likes’, I look at similar items that others have also viewed, I read stories that have lots of votes, etc…

In almost every case I do not know the other people, but they have helped influence my actions. Because of the low level of commitment required, often just a click (a vote, a rating, a like, etc..) users are not cautious about engagement. I think in the future we will start to see many more site designers and architects bubble up these temporary ties and more users taking advantage of the benefits.

If you are interested, here are some great articles on the subject:

http://www.clickz.com/3640706
http://boxesandarrows.com/view/designing-for-social
http://www.slideshare.net/padday/bridging-the-gap-between-our-online-and-offline-social-network

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As technology advances, the amount of information that we all have to sort though will only increase and as this amount of information increases, our existing sorting mechanisms fall short and often become unusable. I don’t think that Pivot is quite there yet, but it seems like am interesting step in the right direction.

From the site: When we use the Web today we treat the most fundamental scenarios as separate activities. Search takes us from many things to one, browsing moves us from one thing to another, and recommendations expose affinities that enable us to explore related topics. Can we do better by combining these scenarios into a more unified experience?

Pivot focuses on this intersection, enabling us to learn key lessons while attempting to broadly apply this philosophy to the Web. We hope that Pivot will inspire and fuel transformative experiences across the Web.

http://www.getpivot.com/

ENVISION : Step into the sensory box from SUPERBIEN on Vimeo.

There seems to be quite a bit of speculation as to how exactly it was done. But, by any method, the outcome is absolutely stunning.

http://vimeo.com/10692284

On Sunday May 2nd, 2010 at exactly 15:00 U.T.C the New York Times asked their LENS readers to take a photo, wherever they were located and doing whatever they were doing, and submit it to their site.

The result is a 3D globe with images stacked accordingly to their geographic vacation. Although the locations and subject matter changes, the time does not.

It’s a really cool experience browsing around the world and checking out the mix of pro and amateur shots, and as the article implies, an enormous time vacuum.

You can read the article here, and view the results here

Co-viewing is simply a term for sharing in the experience of watching TV. At it’s core, it’s just a more modern version of talking on the phone to a friend while both of you watch the same TV show.

Talking on the phone while watching TV seems like a horrible idea to me, and I’ve never tried it. But I do often talk about movies and TV shows with my friends and coworkers the day after I watch something. Sometimes, if I find a show or movie particularly engaging, I’ll go online and read IMDB or other message boards to get more information.

I think that co-viewing is a step in the right direction. It isn’t as up-front as talking on the phone and it is a great way to get real-time commentary and supplemental information about whatever I am watching.

That is great from a viewer’s perspective, but co-viewing is also great from the networks perspective. It will become much easier to deliver personalized programming to consumers. Imagine having a choose your own adventure TV show or commercials customized to products you actually like. Networks would be able to get real-time feedback on their content and user could participate in more live contests (just think about what that means for ‘reality’ TV).

It’s also not that far off, MIT’s Technology Review has placed it on their top annual top 10 emerging technologies. MTV, among other networks, are already developing a social TV iPad application. As both the technology and the devices become commonplace I think out everyday TV experience will change.

For more information, check out these links:
http://www.allbusiness.com/technology/software-services-applications-internet/12387917-1.html
http://nicofell.wordpress.com/2010/03/09/social-media-meets-tv/
http://www.technologyreview.com/communications/25084/

Although I didn’t get to attend this year’s Game Developer Conference in San Francisco my coworker (thank you Zander!) went and brought back lots of great stories and notes. After trying to play catch-up as best of could via twitter and blog posts, it seems that I missed a pretty relevant and exciting conference.

In particular, I’ve been reading follow-ups to Kristian Segerstrale’s (Playfish) keynote, The Relentless March Towards Free…and What it Means to the Games Industry.

In the past two years Playfish has released 12 games, two of which have a bigger reach than World of War-craft. He talks about the switch from products to services. There is a transition from the old way of making games to the new way of making games. It used to be that games had to be written to a DVD, put in a box and then on a shelf. Once it is written to a DVD, it’s written in stone – the game is finished being developed.

Products now are no longer physical, but now products are digital. The minute a product is fully digital then one is able to change it instantaneously. This also means that the game is never “finished” and is in perpetual beta.

Along with this switch from product to service, Sergerstrale discusses how in the future “social gaming” will just become “gaming”. He states that the problem currently with Xbox is that it limits the types of friends a user can have access to. Because of the barrier to entry, the only friends you see online on Xbox are your friends who own Xbox. What Facebook does well is allows users to interact with their friends inside and outside the game at the same time.

It’s now important to think about how to create interest and excitement outside the game in order to drive actions back towards the game. With approximately 1.8 billion users (and growing) on the internet, the barrier to entry for Xbox and the barrier to entry for computer based games becomes very apparent.

The idea of extending gameplay from outside the console – to desktop, smartphones and other devices is something that is inevitable. Gamemakers, like any other industry, need to go to where the users are in order to be successful. As content consumption habits change the content delivery channels must change as well.

Overall it seems like I missed a great talk and a great conference. Hope to make it next time around!

The author states that: [Wireframes] provide guidance for the rest of the design process …for the designer. They can, however, be problematic or useless for the client and in some cases they’re simply a waste of time…..Put another way, many designers generate and present wireframes to clients not because they know it’s a good idea in a specific case, but because they’ve seen or heard of others doing so and they therefore think they’re supposed to as well.

In my professional experience wireframes should not be treated as blueprints for designs. Project managers or project leads that treat wireframes like this will get uninspired, over engineered designs.

Wireframes are a granular way for developers to see the functionality and interactions that need to be developed. If they have any questions, they should be able to refer to an annotated wire frame to get their answer. Wireframes are crucial to designers, to educate us to what needs to be on the page but even more crucial to the developers that are building the page.

From a visual standpoint, wireframes are just a guide. As I design a site I ask myself questions, “Does this have to be a traditional tab or could it be a pill-slider? Could this text be represented by an icon? ”

The wireframes serve my purpose as a list of what has to be on the page and give me contextual hierarchy. The interpretation of what is on the page is (usually) left open to the designer. When it comes time to go through a review process, I try to show an early take on the design next to the related wireframe. This educates the client to that fact that there is still a design process remaining after the wireframes are finished. They can see, and approve, a wireframe and then see the evolution of that wire into design. They realize that wireframes are not visual design.

Educating your client about the process is cricual to getting successful results and a happy client. The article is interesting mostly because of the conversations that it sparked within the user comments: http://www.uxmag.com/design/where-wireframes-are-concerned.