Interesting Reading: 2/10
Steven Levy on the Burden of Twitter
http://www.wired.com/techbiz/people/magazine/17-02/st_levy
"Guilty. I feel guilty that I have a blog and haven't contributed to it
for seven months. Guilty that all my pals on Facebook post cool pictures,
while the last shots I uploaded were of Fourth of July fireworks- from
2007. Guilty that I haven't Dugg anything since, well, ever.
It's not that I don't like social networking - I adore it. I love the way it
transforms my ragged circle of contacts and acquaintances into something
approaching a community. Every site becomes a personalized small town
where strangers don't stay that way for long. I'm fascinated by the quirks
and preferences my "friends" reveal through comments, status reports, and
alerts.
...The latest source of my dilemma is Twitter, which lets you spit out
real-time reports about what you're thinking and doing. It's fun to track
the digital ejaculations of selected Twitterati. But a couple thousand
people signed up unsolicited to follow my tweets. And I feel guilty when
not serving this hungry crowd - remorseful when I am."
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Jon Stewart on the Bizarro World of Wall Street
http://www.oculture.com/2009/02/john_stewart_on_the_bizarro_world_of_wall_street.html
"As usual, Stewart cuts to the chase and says what has to be said. And
gets a good laugh along the way
"
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Calendar and Contact syncing for iPhone and Windows Mobile Devices
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/02/calendar-and-contact-syncing-for-iphone.html
"One advantage of storing information online is being able to access it
from anywhere, on any device. Last year we released a tool for Blackberry
devices to sync Google Calendar and Gmail contacts with the pre-installed
calendar and contacts applications. Today, we're offering more people easy
access to their information on the go with two-way calendar and contacts
sync for iPhones and Windows Mobile devices, and two-way contacts sync for
mobile devices that support SyncML. This will be a particularly handy
improvement for people who regularly use Google tools, like corporate
employees, university students, and busy families.
For iPhone and Windows Mobile devices, Google Sync allows you to get your
Gmail contacts and Google Calendar events onto your phone. Sync uses push
technology, which means that any changes you make to your calendar or
contacts from the browser or phone will be reflected on your device within
minutes. For phones that support SyncML, the tool will allow you to get
your Gmail contacts onto your phone. For all of these devices,
synchronization happens automatically over the air, without having to
manually sync your phone. The connection is always on, which means your
information is always up-to-date, no matter where you are or what you're
doing."
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Trackle Feeds You Personalized RSS
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/02/10/trackle-feeds-you-personalized-rss/
"Silicon Valley start-up Trackle.com is launching the public beta of its
personalized Google Alerts to track pretty much everything in an internet
user's life. Trackle's technology and interface is innovative and
disarmingly comprehensive. It provides real-time personalized RSS feeds of
the latest crime in a user's neighborhood, fluctuating airline ticket
prices, how much a user's house value is down this week, updated job
listings, sports scores and much more.
The breadth and specificity of Trackle's information is what
differentiates itself from other RSS tracking applications like Google
Alerts, Yotify and Notify.me. Trackle doesn't just search for keywords, it
incorporates change into the keywords and provides up-to-date, highly
customized information about ever-fluctuating internet content. For
example, if a user is eyeing a camera on sale at Amazon.com but only wants
to spend $200, Trackle will monitor the sale and provide you updates of
when the camera price reaches $200. Trackle keeps all of this information
on the user's personalized site but the user can also choose to receive
the real-time alerts via SMS and e-mail. Imagine if a user is bidding on
an Ebay item; Trackle claims to give real-time price updates on an
auctioned item. For free."
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Descry
http://www.visitmix.com/Lab/Descry
" Ever wonder what goes into building an effective visualization? Look no
further. We decided to roll up our sleeves and explore the topic. We're
calling it Project Descry.
Project Descry demonstrates the power of data and information
visualization as a communication tool. As a part of Descry, we are
releasing a set of open source, web-based visualizations and an article
written by the Jon Udell that serves as a broad introduction to the
topic."
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Thomson Reuters Releases Reuters Messaging Interchange
http://www.econtentmag.com/Articles/ArticleReader.aspx?ArticleID=52500
"Thomson Reuters announced the launch of Reuters Messaging (RM)
Interchange, which allows Enterprise Instant Messaging (EIM) users to
connect and communicate with colleagues and counterparts by using one
link. RM Interchange connects Thomson Reuters RM with other EIM systems -
Cisco's Jabber XCP, IBM Lotus' Sametime, and Microsoft's LCS/OCS. Users
of these systems can now connect with over 5,000 external organizations
and add their business contacts to a global external community. RM
Interchange offers carrier-grade connectivity for IM across the corporate
community. Customers connecting to RM Interchange are also automatically
connected to the Reuters Messaging community including over 130,000
end-users in 5,000 firms worldwide."
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Microsoft's New Mobile Strategy
http://www.businessweek.com/the_thread/techbeat/archives/2009/02/for_the_past_fe.html?campaign_id=rss_innovate
"For the past few years, Microsoft has been losing share in PCs to Apple.
It's been losing huge money on the Web. And it's been badly shown up in
mobile phones, where Apple and Research In Motion have far more momentum
and even Palm seems to have more mindshare. But now, the company is
preparing plans to do what no other company is as well-positionedat least
on paper - to do: tie the PC, Web and phone together.
On Feb. 16 at the Mobile World Congress, CEO Steve Ballmer will announce
the outlines of the plan. He'll unveil a service called My Phone, that
allows anyone with a Windows Mobile phone to automatically have their
photos, contacts, calendar items, favorite websites and other data
backed-up on a web-site hosted by Microsoft. The service, which will be a
beta version, will be free to anyone that has a phone running a version of
Windows Mobile 6."
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Apple's Flatland Aesthetic, Part 1: The Mac
http://www.asktog.com/columns/075AppleFlatlandPart1.html
"Appleland is becoming progressively flatter and, at the same time, less
usable.
Apple has released a series of revolutionary products over the last
several years, from System X to the iPhone. All represent Herculean
software efforts. With such marked changes, one can expect that early
releases will tend toward the primitive. Over time, users can expect
missing functionality to fill in. For the most part, this has occurred and
will continue to do so, with even highly-sophisticated features appearing,
such as copy and paste.
Filling in obvious features, however, is only one aspect of software
evolution. Equally important is keeping up with the users. The beginner
today will be the expert of tomorrow. The user with 200 photos today will
be the user with 2000 a year from now. The user with 10 songs today will
be the user with 100 songs six months from now. The user with one or two
extra apps on the iPhone will be the user with 100 apps three months from
now"
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Writing Usability Requirements and Metrics
http://www.uxmatters.com/mt/archives/2009/02/writing-usability-requirements-and-metrics.php
"In this installment of Ask UXmatters, our experts discuss how to write
effective usability requirements and metrics for the redesign of a legacy
public sector system."
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