Born On The Web

I wanted to post this a while ago, but never came to it. During the world cup this year we held a small competition at Pickdee. Gary from Pickdee mailed me last week with a nice new feature he implemented:

Gary from Pickdee here, hope you’re enjoying the football.

I just came across your post on pickdee [ after having being introduced to your blog from the pickdee post ] — I also thought the facebook API opening up was an interesting event. It’s definitely of a different nature than most of the other web API’s.

It let me build this:

http://www.pickdee.com/facebook/

in pretty short order, it lets any facebook user use their login there to authenticate with pickdee and play one of the two new American Football games…

Funny seeing your two posts together.

A lot of mashup kids like Gary (from Pickdee) and me (sometimes) clearly see the advantage of building further upon existing services. He plugs his system into facebook, he doesn’t have to make a registration page, although he already made one now. The value of a facebook account goes up because you can use it in Pickdee.

The web is evolving to a nice ecosystem, where every platform has its specific task and focuses on doing that specific task very good.

It’s been a while since we made some changes to flapi viewer (our open-source flickr viewer), but flickr changed their web service a bit, this made it impossible to load your flickr images into flapi viewer. Now it’s all fixed thanks to co-developer and co-blogger over here Frits.

http://flapi.f4l.be/

In the meantime there are a lot of alternatives to flapi, but most of them don’t provide the source code of the player. Maybe we can optimize it a bit or even add some features in the near future.

If you like flapi viewer and know your way around Flash, we’re still looking for some developers to help us out with our small open-source project. Just download the source code from the site and start coding! For feature request or bug reports just contact us.

Macromedia (or Adobe) Flash has turned 10.
To celebrate this The Favourite Website Awards teamed up with Adobe to have a poll to see what the most influential Flash sites of each year have been.
Starting with sites from 1998 there are polls that last 2 days. ‘96 and ‘97 are presented by one site on a wild card. In the end you can vote for the most influential site of the decade.

Right now we can vote for the most inspiring site of 2004.
The nominees are:
- Vodaphone future vision
- Powszechny dom kredytowy
- Billy Harvey Music (!!!)
- .. and Carl De Keyzer Photography, from Belgium’s Group94 .. go Belgium!
They’re all pretty amazing sites, each within its own style. When Billy Harvey music launched I was stunned by what Sofake pulled again. The site has a great concept, it navigates soo smooth and I really love the typical gritty Sofake style.

The winner of 1998 is NRG.be, also a Belgian site. It was one of the first Flash sites that made a very big impression on me. The animations they pull were unseen at that time. I checked the NRG sites again a lot during the past years but noting seemed to change. I guess they’ve been too busy doing stuff for clients. A few months ago when they launched their new site? It’s very basic, bus still smooth as can be.

The FWA best of Flash poll

Yipikajee!

The written part of my final thesis is finally finished. Just like Jesse I spent the past four years studying Communication & Multimedia Design in Genk, Belgium.

I’m heavily interested in rich media user experiences and decided that it was a research subject I wanted to explore further. The thesis examines the role of interface metaphor in rich media web experiences.
Much research has already been conducted on interface metaphor in the light of usability. I tried to broaden these views and place interface metaphor in the domain of experience design.
download thesis (pdf, 1 MB)

The presentations of the final thesisses are September 4th and 5th in the Media & Design Academy in Genk. Feel free to join us.

The new soulwax site.

Via aaiboek.

I blogged about this on my employers’ blog, i-wisdom. You can find the post right HERE. If you want more IPTV example be sure to check out my IPTV category.

Everytime I see a site opening up their API for the public I feel my programming fingers tingling. It just gives a simple developer so much really cool data to play with. Most of the time I can’t wait to make something cool with it or at least test it out. Facebook (the second biggest social network in the US) just opened its API and even I’m not a member of Facebook and I don’t know anyone who has a Facebook account, but I can’t wait to test it out. The value of personal data is very interesting to experiment with.

From the moment a web platform decides to open up it’s API it decides to add value to the network its located on: The internet. Every API added to the web, gives every developers with internet access an extra ready made tool to use. It fits perfectly in the ecosystem of the web: Companies use the internet as network to reach their customers/members, they give something back to the network in the form of opening its data source to the public.

There is however a downside of the story. Most public web services are only for non-commercial use and they don’t provide any guarantee of access to the service. If you want to use a public service in your own tool, it is a bit sensitive because you are partly dependent of the provider of the web service you use. I think this slows down a lot of new innovations on the web. Web service providers need to provide a paid plan without restrictions, which gives other companies the possibility to commercially use their data. This can guarantee access to the service and will diminish the fear of using external data in your own platform. Of course the paid plan is only to ensure access, if you want fast innovation you also need a open free web service for your developers to play with. A very good example of this, is the use of Amazon’s Simple Storage Service.

If we can evolve to a model for commercial use of APIs, we’ll see a boost of new mashup services. The way we look at building web platforms will fundamentally change. Fast innovation will not mean, fast development. Fast innovation will mean using the right web services and integrating them flawlessly in your own web platform.

Mashup kids like me can’t wait to see the web evolving in a faster innovating network. Rapid development, easy deployment.

Update:
Yesterday the facebook API opened up, today the Facebook Friend Mapper. This is what I call fast innovation.

Links:

• List of available apis
• Smugsmug: a photo sharing service completely build upon amazon S3

• Patches the Horse – Google Video
  Only possible in the USA ;) I love these absurd stories…
  (tags: horse car movie)

A 79 year old silver surfer is addicted to Youtube. He posts his first video blog asking for for some help and encouragement and tells us what he’ll mostly do on his blog is “bitch and grumble about life in general in the perspective of an old man”. Euhrm, fun. About a week later there are 178 video responses (!) by other youtube users and 6409 text responses.

I didn’t think of youtube yet as a video blogging and conversation platform. What I use it mostly for, and most people I guess, is to watch funny clips and old tv shows, but it seems that there’s a whole lot of videoblogging and conversations going on. I did a search to see if some other people had noticed this and the Technology Evangelist had a post up ‘Youtube Becoming a User Contributes Video Blogging Platform‘. They say that if all the copyrighted material should be deleted from youtube because of legal reasons, the site will still be a huge success because of the thriving videoblogging community. Youtube is an ideal latform for starting video dialogs because they host the video for you, provide easy schmeazy upload features and allready have a very active community.

Click the images for original size.

My great guest blogger Frits is finishing his master thesis, normally Frits would have finished his year together with me, but he decided getting drunk and scoring girls was more important at the moment. :-) So here he is working for school in summer time. He asked me to give some feedback on the project he’s working on. I’ll do it on the blog, so you guys can give your opinion too. Don’t hesitate to criticize him in the comments. For once it’s ok.

His project involved a research he did in the use of a metaphor in the design of a website. Now he is making a personal portfolio using a metaphor.

After the preloader this pretty huuge corkboard shows. People can move their mouse around to discover what the different sections are. If they mouse over a section you’ll see more info about it. (black boxes popping up)
People expect to be able to move the elements on a corkboard, therefore the project thumbnails are dragable.

I like the idea of using a cork board, it’s dead simple, everybody knows it and recognizes it. The link to an offline cork board is very tangent and for a portfolio a good match. So I think the metaphor is pretty well taught out. I’m only a bit worried about the usability. I’m not sure were to find the navigation, I guess it is the post it note in the right top corner. Maybe a clever animation can make this clear. People visiting the site should feel some structure, now it seems very chaotic.

Pictures straight from Flickr. You can browse through them on the site by clicking the left or right picture.

I love how he integrates his social profiles into his portfolio (del.icio.us, flickr). This can makes the relatively static portfolio more lively. I would however make the text on the board more “in your face”. Not only the design has to be compliant with the metaphor also the text on the board. I would try to give some attention to that part of the project. For example change the pretty boring “view on flickr” link to something like “Lickr my Flickr”. This makes exploring the cork board a bit more challenging, I know that’s in contrary with my usability remark. But I guess you should try to find a good balance between reasonable usability and fun in exploring the board.

Leave some dymo messages on the wall.

I’m not sure people got the idea of the dymo. A simple animation is enough to make this clear, again I would do this in a very direct way. For example an animation of the dymo typing a message: “This animation is specially made for all the stupid morons who can’t understand this is the button leave a message.” Maybe I’m going to far in this, but you get the idea.

When a project thumbnail is clicked the project details slide on the screen and the background becomes blurry. The project view contains a slideshow of screenshots of the site and production documents.

Frits has to realize the projects are the most important part of his site. Potential employers or customers are interested in seeing what you’re experience is, what your good at. If they like your projects, the next thing they will like to see is what kind of person you are. Are you on top of new technologies? proof: updated blog/del.icio.us feed. Are you a social person? proof: Flickr feed. What was your latest project? proof: a very good updated project section. If they all like that, the only thing they want is to find your contact information. Make it easy for your visitors to find your email address. Don’t use a web form, maybe the person visiting the site isn’t responsible for contacting you, but he can recommend you to someone else. Make your email copy/pastable. You’re going to have spam anyway so…

I like the overall idea and it looks pretty cool. Try to make the animations as smooth as possible so people can really experience your portfolio playground. Don’t forget the purpose of a good portfolio.

Carry on …