Written on 18th February 2009
5 COMMENTS Srikanth AD, Web Designer, Search Engine Optimizer and Google Devotee
What would it be like if screencasts were made of paper?
The screencast below explains one of the basic features in Google Maps: how to mark or annotate any place in the world. The most intriguing part of it is that, the entire screencast was made only using paper and scissors.
If you enjoyed it, do watch this Gmail screencast from Russia that was also created on paper.
As we’ve reported recently here at The Next Web, Twitter has been gaining traction with an increasingly mainstream adoption. However, I have always felt is interface and ‘how to get started’ mitigated against its adoption as a mainstream toll – people just did not get it.
But I started to see steps that it was improving over time (I’ve been using Twitter since March 2007), and have seen two things that suggest that it is about to evolve, in a small but very important way, to become a clearer proposition and to allow casual users to see its power and become engaged right from the moment they hit the site.
Clue One:
A few weeks ago, I noted a question tucked away in an interview with Biz Stone, one of the founders of Twitter, which suggested that Twitter Search would soon be integrated into the main web interface. I can’t actually locate that interview – it was buried, but I made a mental note. (I may have tweeted it – but hey, it’s Sunday, and I’m due to leave for a swim with my family. Google it, dear readers, or Yahoo it..) UPDATE: Here is that interview – on page 2 of this article. (It’s a newspaper’s site, they like pages.)
Clue Two:
I addition, last week, Twitter changed the size of its logo, which changed the layout of every Twitter user’s profile page.
So, I think we’re going to see a change soon in the web interface at Twitter which will include search. Be ready to see more people ‘getting’ twitter as the understand the power of the search facility within a few minutes of their first experience. Another big article appeared this weekend in the UK in the Telegraph Newspaper penned by Lucy Atkins.
As Robert Scoble memorably stated (I remember, he was wearing my URL in a QR-Code T-shirt) on his keynote at The Next Web 2008 in April, sites like Twitter and MySpace and Facebook really suck when you first use them, because you have no friends there. And with no friends in any environment, offline or online, the experience is “crappy”.
Why search inside Twitter is important
Integrating search into the Twitter web page puts more of what needs to be there to get the most from twitter within a click – which makes the experience less crappy. It’s like the Google search interface pulling cursor focus from the URL input line in a browser straight to the input area when you hit the page. When this first appeared, around 1998, it was a simple, but crucially important element that contributed to its success. Nobody else actually had thought of that jaw-droppingly simple, obviously useful one-line piece of javascript.
By the way, you may also want to think about updating your twitter background as this change has already taken visual effect with the logo resizing – I already have noticed many carefully designed, pixel-perfect backgrounds which fitted the old dimensions, but are out of alignment with the new twitter layout, and look pig-ugly as a result.
DISCLOSURE: I design twitter backgrounds as part of My Profile Makeover service, and until Thursday this week, I am doing these for half pricefree (limit of 4 per day Monday-Thursday ONLY) and donating $30$60 from my fee to @twestival to raise funds for charity:water
Twitter can be useful for almost anything. Leaking great tech stories, asking your geeky fiancée to marry you, staying in touch with your voters, or finding the right person for the job… Well, for almost all of these purposes expect the latter.
Biz Stone and Evan Williams are looking for a “Founder Associate”, or, as most people call it, a secretary. Yet this guy or gal has to be ambitious, more specifically, “the ideal candidate is a future entrepreneur or executive who is willing to work hard and do a wide variety of non-glamorous tasks for a year or two in order to get their foot in the door, learn, and make connections.”
You might think this job vacancy would be the perfect opportunity for an interesting Twitter experiment. A first round of job applications of only 140 characters. But no, instead of that, Evan and Biz post a regular announcement on Jobscore. Williams does mention it on his Twitter page, but more like he doesn’t expect his future assistant to be active on the service yet:
In fact, he or she might be. A Twitter Search for “Founder Associate” gives some interesting examples.
Oh well, maybe next time. This little post at least proves that something like a vacancy buzz does exist on Twitter. Why not benefit from that?
While Ernst-Jan took a flight to New York to cover the Web 2.0 Expo, today, I will cover an event that is much closer to the Next Web HQ. The whole day, Eday is offering 1500 seats to all the attendees who are interested in listening to some interesting speakers including Jeff Howe from Wired and Stanford Law School professor Lawrence Lessig. Brian Palmos, the Fake Steve Jobs and many others will do keynotes until the lights go out and the party starts at after-event, Enight.
Jeff Howe (Wired)
Crowd sourcing, a term first coined by Jeff Howe in a June 2006 article of Wired, has gotten a lot of interest ever since. Business authors, trend watchers and journalists are often referring to the therm when talking about the mass elaboration of the web since the 2.0 era. Both the term and its underlying business models have attracted controversy and criticism, about two years later Jeff Howe is kicking off Eday with a presentation about, guess what? Crowd Sourcing. After finally receiving some kind of intertube signal, here goes.
Introduced as the man who ‘lives up to his book’, Jeff Howe starts with an intro about how MySpace and other social media were the futile ground for Crowd Sourcing. Howe realized that it was more than just kids making funny videos — something more fundamental was at work here. One month later he published his article about the phenomena and came up with a new word for it. Diversity, open and subversive are the keywords for this new development he called Crowd Sourcing.
Howe does not really add anything new to his speech he has been doing for the last few years, I’d suggest you check out an earlier article written here on The Next Web blog. Howe ended his talk with a quote from the X-files:’The answers are out there’. With Crowd Sourcing thriving like today, Howe concludes: ‘Together we can solve problems that otherwise seemed impossible to solve’. I hope Howe will be writing a new book soon, living up to his book and living from his book is hopefully not the same thing…
Brian Kalma (Zappos)
Zappos, an online shoe company, has had a very fast growth in the last few years. A revenue of 1 billion dollars from shoes with 1600 employees proves that their approach to business works – the customer is king. Brian Kalma, who functions as a Creative Director, talks about Zappos and their unique way to serve their customers where retaining customers plays the most important role. Not ‘unlike many others’, as Kalma puts it, selling to the masses. As an online company, you want to add value to a product to make a customer come back to you. Kalma says customer touch points are the magic words for creating a succesfull online brand. Note that when you order something at Zappos, the product is shipped for free. You can even send your product back without any costs. (more…)
Written on 18th February 2009
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The Next Web Blog is closely associated with The Next Web Conference which is held annually in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. At this event speakers from all over the world come together to talk about, and show off, the future of the Web. (More info 
