You probably have seen many visuals that help map out the social networks and various newish businesses. Things like Social Media Landscape, Social Network Hype, or even just the logos.

What the Conversation Prism attempts to do is to categories the type of conversation that is happening on these products/services/sites.

Brian Solis is the creator of this (visual by Jesse Thomas) and he describes it in his blog post as “a living, breathing representation of Social Media and will evolve as services and conversation channels emerge, fuse, and dissipate.”

The nice thing about this illustration is how it captures the changing business model of these services and how they fit against the rest of the color wheel of online discussion and chatter.
Here is a few Q&A on ZDNet.

Originally posted at http://www.platypusfarm.com/?p=525

A little while ago,  ESPN  put out a beta advertisement on their site and shortly there after the refresh replaced the old layout. The new look is less cluttered and uses larger elements, from selected headlines to graphical treatments. But overall it’s not all that shocking at first.
There was the sponsorship by Ford F-150 in the initial days, but it’s not unusual to have custom ads/sponsorships on high traffic site like this. And this size was much more effective without being as obtrusive as the regular leaderboards. Off course the sponsorship included overlays and those are always annoying.

Reading their own  feature list, you can see that the ‘Main Engagement and Carousel’ is designed to transform the look from the heavy editorial and stats look to something more along the broadcast genre.

They’re pushing the 16:9 HD format: no surprise there. Along with dynamic leads allowing for more secondary features to be highlighted in the same real-estate.

The familiar score board is still there; thank god!

The navigation seems to be the most significant improvement over the old site. Moving from one sport to another, the color palette and stylistic treatments change. But the navigation stays where it is as it should be. Gone are the days of silos and their own unique navigational structure. If they had done nothing else, this alone would have been a welcomed change.

Off course they still seem to have some internal bureaucracies to deal with apparently. Or at least the phased refresh hasn’t expanded to ESPNsoccernet and the like, which is still sporting the old navigation system.

The recent refreshes in the portal or publication world seems to follow the same trend: wider, bigger, cleaner, more legible with bigger photos/video and more modular approach. But I’ve seen more inspiring redesigns then this. The Time.com’s redesign took a lot of influence from the print magazine and demonstrated a whole new way of organizing content for that web site. There is a great  interview with Sean Villafranca and Shivani York  on  spd.org  about those changes.

There are small issues too with ESPN, the width of the grid changing from one area to the next for example. But the biggest complaint from the fans seems to be the shift away from the newspaper like layout with occasional video content, to large format video and live coverage environment. Unless you count the countless comments saying ‘why did you change my site!’ Anyway, the inmates are not happy.  Read for yourself.
It’s really tough reading ruthless comments from your users about the redesign they don’t welcome or appreciate. The improvement is definitely there, but the content is not in the same exact location or many relationships (i.e. content paring) are changed from before. The fans are complaining about not finding things, which really means ‘you moved something i had developed mussel memory for, and now I’m pissed!’

And then there are those bugs and usability oversights that happen with a new site launch.

There are some folks that are gradually getting used to the new layout. But that’s a minority at the time I wrote this. It just goes to show that people really have a hard time with change. Perhaps it would have been wise to leave the site in public beta for a much longer period. Or maybe the changes needed to be phased in more, even though this is not a major redesign. I feel for the designers and architects of this project. There is no easy way to change something that has been getting cluttered more and more over the years. People have established their own maps of paths to retrieve content. Even if they agree that this new layout is simpler, they’ll claim its convoluted because the stats they used to find in 4 click with out looking where they clicked, is now 2 clicks away in a spot they have to learn about.
Designing for high frequency, repeat visit, is indeed very tough.

Originally posted at http://www.platypusfarm.com/?p=499

NY Times has a feature that enables search in an article based on the user’s highlighting of the area. Not sure how long this has been in effect, but I just noticed. This is yet another innovative feature that seems very useful while reading an article. Much better then actually hyper-linking within the article. Rather then having too many items linked, few links that are very relevant to story can be linked, giving the user the option to search for more details on the items that they need more information on. Also, links driven from advertising deals that aim to drive up page views are not very effective and confuse the content. Search engine advertising on the other hand could do the same and you could enable more of them. This seems to be what they have done.

The functionality is very simple: you highlight any group of text and a ‘?’ bubble appears; click on the ‘?’ mark and a pop-up window shows you the results for those set of words.
Simple.

I tried this quickly on a bunch of articles and got no results, leading me to believe this was an experimental feature—helped my ego for not knowing about it! I tried very basic items in the news that should have rendered some results. But nothing.

Then I saw the sponsorship and the drop-down menu. The default choice is not any of NY Times’ own engines or google, but Answers.com. I don’t know much about their service, but they couldn’t pull anything for me in my few tries, while nearly all the other options gave a descent set of results.

This is a great feature that I accidentally discovered. I wonder how many other people would accidentally discover it AND give it enough time (more then 30 seconds) to understand other search options are available. The sponsorship doesn’t bother me, they need to do that. But Answers.com has results that did not show up in this view. This is not only bad for them, but it makes the feature appear broken. Hopefully this is a glitch that will be fixed. Because I like the usability of this type of search.

Originally posted at: http://www.platypusfarm.com/?p=440

This is a post about pictures that you have likely seen already and few that you may not have. I’m sure there is a million ways to get to the best of 2008 pics. But if for no other reason to have them bookmarked with some context… well, here we go:

Getty Images: The year in review is on Yahoo. Some quality photo journalism is showcased on, where else, NY Times. Ah, but the list so long:

• National Geographic: TOP TEN SPACE PHOTOS
• National Geographic: 2008 International Photography Contest
• The images of 2008, from CNN
• The year 2008 in photographs, from Boston.com
• The Year in News Pictures, from MSNBC

Most days I hate Facebook, specially the whole status thing (insert another post here!). I learned about AOL’s PIXCETERA from my news feed there and it’s a very large collection. And I have to say, it may be the best presentation among the ones I’ve seen so far.

Originally posted at: http://www.platypusfarm.com/?p=496

I'm not a book worm. But I do need to read more, specially related to my field. It's always been difficult to find the time and it seems like having an external pressure, like a book club or friends with similar interests, would go a long way to help.

I joined 2 websites recently, shelfari.com and booksprouts.com, with the intention of encouraging the rest of my team at work to go along. Initially, I thought booksprout would be the right thing since their whole pitch is to create virtual and real life book clubs. This would help facilitate the process for us. We already had a list running on our internal wiki for a few months, but no movement by any of us. The voting option, the interface and the overall simplicity of the site is perfect for this task.

Shelfari on the other hand offers much more in terms of features and has a more graphic interface. It offers groups and discussions much like any other social network, but it does not have a voting feature. So the option is clear, right? Well, the amount of activity and number of profiles on shelfari seem to be  much higher. This could be due to the fact that they're owned by <a href="http://www.amazon.com" rel="nofollow" onclick="externalLink('externalLinkOverlay', '"http://www.amazon.com"'); return false;" >Amazon</a> and perhaps enjoy better marketing/exposure as a result.

At any, hard to make choice against a site with a much larger user-base. Makes you question: how important is the user experience and the way it fits the needs of those users vs. the interaction among the audience and with the site. We could do what we want with a simple wiki list, we could do alot more with a community based website. But is it worth going to the smaller community whose features fit our needs more accurately?
Logically, yes.

Time will tell if the power of interacting with perfect strangers is a bigger motivator to get us readying more, then the simpler but more accurate features which aims to facilitate the process.

Btw, we're giving booksprouts.com a try, for now.

originally posted at: http://www.platypusfarm.com/?p=461

A good start this morning at the <a href="http://www.futureofwebapps.com/" rel="nofollow" onclick="externalLink('externalLinkOverlay', '"http://www.futureofwebapps.com/"'); return false;" >Future of Web Apps Conference</a>. It began with Kathy Sierra talking about creating passionate users. The speakers ranged from Kevin Rose of digg, Matt Mullenweg of Wordpress, Cal Henderson of Flickr, to Kevin Marks of Google who mostly spoke of opensocial and microformats among other things. And the event closed with a very motivational bit by <a href="http://www.aarp.org/community/faz/video/Gary_Vaynerchuk/56342" rel="nofollow" onclick="externalLink('externalLinkOverlay', '"http://www.aarp.org/community/faz/video/Gary_Vaynerchuk/56342"'); return false;" > Gary Vaynerchuk.</a>

Most of the speakers can be heard on <a href="http://futureofwebapps.com/2008/miami/pastevents.php" rel="nofollow" onclick="externalLink('externalLinkOverlay', '"http://futureofwebapps.com/2008/miami/pastevents.php"'); return false;" >FOWA Miami site</a>.

Fowamiami08 will get you most of the relavent content out there.

Here are a few direct links:
<a href="http://www.slideshare.net/tag/fowamiami08" rel="nofollow" onclick="externalLink('externalLinkOverlay', '"http://www.slideshare.net/tag/fowamiami08"'); return false;" >SlideShare</a>
<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/fowamiami08/" rel="nofollow" onclick="externalLink('externalLinkOverlay', '"http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/fowamiami08/"'); return false;" >flickr</a>
<a href="http://www.vimeo.com/752145" rel="nofollow" onclick="externalLink('externalLinkOverlay', '"http://www.vimeo.com/752145"'); return false;" >... and if you must see a video filler.</a>

More content from the event will be posted since they didnt’ actually deliver the conference kit. I’ll update this post later with the full info. 

<embed src=’http://assets.aarp.org/aarp.org_/flash/community/flvshell_v3.swf’ FlashVars=’memberVideo=http://content.share.aarp.org/uploads1/video/streams/5/3/53/movie/1204815745251.mov.flv’ id=’video_play_500’ name=’video_play_500’ quality=’high’ bgcolor=’#ffffff’ width=’480’ height=’420’ allowFullScreen=true /><br/>Get <a href=’http://www.aarp.org/community/’ rel="nofollow" onclick="externalLink('externalLinkOverlay', '’http://www.aarp.org/community/’'); return false;" >video codes</a> at <a style=’font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:12px;color:#0066CC’ href=’http://www.aarp.org/community’>AARP.org</a>.

Things are still pretty rough around here, around this text in fact. But this web site is going to kick some serious butt, by the time we are done with it!

As someone once said: "Design is the art of gradually applying constraints until only one solution remains." There are lots of constrains when building an application. Both social networking application and the content management system are still clunky and hard to control. We’re finding that some of these limitations are helping us zero in on the design faster. What remains are the details. To quote Charles Eames : "The details are not the details. They make the design." And that’s where we are now.

This site’s usability is still improving on many levels; from better flow of content to clear navigation. We need to address many inconsistencies. The toughest part of all this is the gradual, iterative nature of this process. It’s hard enough to execute a design vision, but try keeping to the task at hand while the target design keeps moving. No doubt, this is much more frustrating to the developers then to the design team. But its also the exciting part of this approach. It’s not too often we get chance to work with an evolutionary product which will have much higher impact then the usual deliver-and-walk-away method that is so typical in the agency world.

What will hopefully keep the team going is both the negative (yet constructive) feedback on what we’re doing wrong and the support of those in the community who have been waiting for improvements like the ones we are making. Here is bigtoe6565 <a href="http://community.aarp.org/n/pfx/forum.aspx?tsn=6&nav=messages&webtag=rp-computers&tid=11329" rel="nofollow" onclick="externalLink('externalLinkOverlay', '"http://community.aarp.org/n/pfx/forum.aspx?tsn=6&nav=messages&webtag=rp-computers&tid=11329"'); return false;" >sharing the love</a>.

And that’s today’s rant, onto another meeting...

Let me create an aura of greatness by talking about my self in third person...

Faz was born. Then he grew up rather fast. In fact, he often wishes he was 5 again and could say dumb things which adults would pass up as cute and mildly funny.

At the ripe age of 12ish, he switched countries and language and a few other things including his shorts. Because puberty alone is not enough of a culture shock, he took on the name Faz — his real name being Farzad, which you shouldn’t try with out a pronunciation guide. Neither did his 7th grade classmates who enjoyed watching re-runs of Happy Days after school. Slightly shorter then the Fonz at the time, it seemed fitting to subtract a letter and call him Faz... and so it was.

A few milestones later, Faz found himself in college where he learned he was not really interested in mechanical engineering after all. With much consideration, and against his initial distaste for trendy black-rimmed eye-wear, he joined the creative class and got himself a degree in graphic/advertising design. The slash advertising part remains somewhat of a mystery to this day.

He began his career in less-then-common design arrangements. Working in newspaper production, preparing research presentations or designing something called the Wallboard™. He eventually gave in to the black t-shirt wearing crowd and worked for a more traditional design shop. — the attempt at humor in this write up is beginning to get a little less funny... but stay with me...

After starting his career designing for print, Faz began designing for the function driven online medium. Today, he enjoys the challenge of blending form and function to build an engaging experience and designing user interfaces. Throughout his design career he has worked for AOL, US Airways, Terrapin Systems, USWeb/CKS, Low + Associates Inc., Snyder Communication Inc. and Maryland Media Inc. Although he has returned to his roots, away from the design clichés, he still does drop names here and there.

Always keepin’ it real, he stays in touch with the current trends through vigilant observation of what everybody else is doing. This is almost a freakish obsession with him. Hearing him geek-out about the interaction of some random gadget is not uncommon.

To keep up with the youths, he instructs classes about subjects others seem to think he knows something about. Although the validity of this has not yet been fully proven.

Faz’s journey thru life takes him beyond the confines of the District. From diving out of a perfectly functional airplane (which happened), to a Futaleufu River whitewater adventure (not yet happened), to drunken political conversations with the locals in Galway (happened) or a 6 month tour of the pacific rim (only in his dreams!) ... adventures seem easy to find when he finally pulls away from the computer. Faz hopes to find himself on exotic trips, and away from the screen, more often.

Above was inspired by true events. No animals were injured during the testing of the humor. This however does not guarantee your satisfaction. And for that, we apologize.