World Beard and Moustache Championships

"Our primary goal is to promote the worldwide appreciation of beards and moustaches"

Web 2.0 ... The Machine is Us/ing Us

An Interview with Flickr's Eric Costello

What new features were driven by user demand?

Tags were not in the initial version of Flickr. Stewart Butterfield wanted to add them. He liked the way they worked on del.icio.us, the social bookmarking application. We added very simple tagging functionality, so you could tag your photos, and then look at all your photos with a particular tag, or any one person’s photos with a particular tag.

Soon thereafter, users started telling us that what was really interesting about tagging was not just how you’ve tagged your photos, but how the whole Flickr community has been tagging photos. So we started seeing a lot of requests from users to be able to see a global view of the tagscape.


I would have thought that people would be most interested in their own little world – themselves, their friends, their family. But what happened was that once they got hooked on the site on that small scale, people wanted to see that big picture. They wanted to feel like participants in this larger community.

Yeah, that was definitely a surprise to us. Flickr was really envisioned initially as an organizational tool for an individual who has this huge collection of photos. The social network was built in just so that you could restrict access to your photos. But what has really taken off with Flickr is that it’s turned out to be a great platform for sharing with the masses, and not just with your small collection of friends.

And people certainly use it in different ways. I primarily use it to share photos with my friends and family, and most of my photos are restricted so that only people I’ve said are my friends and family can view them. But we found that it took off when we got some excellent photographers who were interested in using Flickr as a new kind of photo blog, so that the world could see their pictures. And that, I think, is really the primary usage of Flickr now.


You mentioned del.icio.us earlier as the inspiration for Flickr’s use of tags. What are some of the other inspirations for the interface and the user experience of Flickr?

Netflix had this very innovative little interface where you could rate movies on their site that was all done client-side. You clicked on one of five stars to indicate your rating, and it talked back to the server without reloading the page. So it was natural as we started to build the Flickr site that we would take that a little bit further. I think one of the first things we did was make it so you could edit titles and descriptions on photo pages by just clicking on the text and, through the magic of Ajax, no page refresh, but your data has changed. So Netflix is an indirect influence.


What do you think the difference is between Flickr and older, more established photo-sharing sites?

People who come to Flickr want an audience. We’re all about facilitating sharing however you want, whereas the other sites are more about uploading your photos to a place where you can easily print them.

Full Interview on Adaptive Path

Zlango! -for people who love making spelling mistakes!!

Reminded me of KEN's course on typography for Information design students.....

It's an experiment with visual languauge mainly targeting the "oh so wow!! " teenagers.... very US based language... the expressions, visuals, words... meanings....


it's ZLANGO! the fun icon language for people who love making spelling mistakes!!

Mobile Phones: A different point of view

Is the conventional screen-keypad arrangement the best solution for hand held devices?

The article says:

The conventional mobile phone design has the keypad positioned below the LCD display screen. This orientation provides the user a clear view of the screen while a text message is being typed by using the thumb of the hand holding the mobile.

Typing text messages in this manner is awkward, as the mobile is merely held pinched between the middle finger and the palm, while most of the handset extends unstably beyond the user's palm. Furthermore, the thumb's range of movement is restricted by the lower orientation of the keypad.

This design for a mobile phone comprises a single housing where the operating face is configured with the buttons of the keypad positioned above the LCD screen. This layout ensures that most of the handset rests in the palm of the hand for improved support and control.

In addition to the improved grip, the thumb rests in a comfortable position directly above the buttons of the keypad. The improved angle for the thumb makes it unnecessary to shift the mobile phone around in the hand while typing text.

P.S. This is just a patent application, and not a real product.

Signage

Hi Guys
found this in Shanti Express (Indore-Gandhinagar Express) on my way from Ujjain..
Thought It was interesting to share..
:)

Its nice to know that this is a Night Journey train
Gandhinagar JN 6:25- INDORE JN BG 05:35
INDORE JN 22:00 -Gandhinagar JN 10:00

 

for all in love woth Music

Dear all,

Sending you a link that would reveal a lot about the History of Jazz and the aspect of race associated with it. The link has useful information on "Harlem Renaissance" .
I hope you guys would enjoy it.

New found love for gals: Online gaming -Economic Times

Here are some facts & figures excerpted from the above link.

While the male/female ratio for video games is 2:1, in online casual gaming women lead — they’re a whopping 64%,” says Sunil Buch, head, marketing, Reliance World.

Says Rohit Sharma, COO, Zapak Digital Entertainment, “About 12% of the gamers who get on to zapak.com are women...

“About 20% of our subscribers are women. There will be, a whole lot of new casual Bollywood games,” says Vinay Kumar, director, corporate and strategic alliances, Indiatimes.

The urge to log on to a gaming site seems to be more popular among working women and housewives. According to Vishal Gondal, CEO, Indiagames, there seems to be very few girls in their teens who spend their time gaming. Which is why Indiagames plans to reach out to them at college fests, starting next month, with special tourneys for them.

"We notice that about 40% of casual gamers are in fact, women - and they seem to go for games that require seeking or gathering, rather than the first person shooter types,” says Mr Gondal.

What Goes in Your Mind While Typing E-Mail ? -Amit Aggarwal

When you are typing an email, Fuzzmail records your writing style and can exactly replay that later. Every typing actions is captured including typo corrections, pauses and write overs.

You friend gets to read the message replayed in the way that you typed it. That might give him an insight into what was going in your mind while composing that message.
Cool stuff. Don't miss it, no registration, nothing required. Just visit http://www.fuzzmail.org, type in your mail and send it.

Goggles - The Google Maps Flight Sim

Checkout this cool & simple mashup which is a simple flight simulator that uses Google Earth to create backgrounds.

http://www.isoma.net/games/goggles.html

Commercial making fun of iPhone

Havn't you ever wondered how mobile phones these days can do everything but be phones? This advert may add some more questions!

Google Master Plan

...you surely won't hit the stop button midway.... don't miss the 3 minute movie.

History of the button

With the touch screens becoming popular in devices and interactions taking the path of natural human behavior.... less number of clicks and more drags and drops ;).........

it's important to know how we started to understand where we are moving now.... the history of buttons and their evolution.....

http://www.historyofthebutton.com/

Good Design or Pretty Design

I have been doing a lot of reading on Web 2.0 technologies and design traits because of my project. I have come across several sites, some pretty, some ordinary but very few well-designed. Also several times, people(even designers) mistake pretty for well-designed.
Take this site for example, looks great doesn't it? But the minute you click 'enter site', it opens a pop-up, you click, 'launch' it opens another pop-up. Three windows!! Its bad information architecture, navigation and extremely bad web design. If only the developer had spent as much time thinking about the user interface as much as to prettify the site! And this website was declared 'site of the day' by this one.
And plain sites do not fare any better. Check out this very famous source for whitepapers. Can you figure out how to log into this portal? I could not, the information design is atrocious. If I am going to pay for this site, I might as well be able to navigate!!
The internet is growing, but it is also getting to be full of trash.