Archive of thenextweb.com
Have you noticed the small attention grabber on the bottom of your Flickr homepage? No? Well, it’s the first sign of Flickr’s upcoming home improvement. The Yahoo-owned photo site wanted to create a new homepage that “surfaces much more of the action going on around you on Flickr”, social technologist Matthew Rothenberg wrote on the corporate blog.
They’ve done that by showing more pictures from your contacts, introducing the latest pics from your groups, and pushing the blog plus your personal stats to the front. But while Flickr has added more content the page, it actually looks cleaner. Once again it’s a fine example of almost perfect and original 2.0 design, like our guest editor Sjors Timmer earlier noted.
For now, users can have a sneak peak via the “Psssssst! Want a sneak peak at your new homepage?” button. With the feedback of the thousands of member photographers, the Flickr designers will then finalize the redesign. There are already 509 replies in the dedicated forum thread, so I guess they won’t be done soon.
If I had to come up with a piece of advice, I’d suggest to remove the side bar, as it’s of no use to me. But I guess that will make Flickr go bankrupt, so never mind.
By the way, even if you’re not interested you should click the button, as you don’t want to miss out on the Flickr balloons and a MIDI version of Sinatra’s Strangers in the Night which appear during the transition. It’s all about user experience folks.
World’s largest and most influential technology blog TechCrunch finally got the design its content deserved. When I was introduced in the world of tech last year, I was surprised by the amateurish looks of the top blogs. The only one who did it for me was ReadWriteWeb, with its clean, red, and well-thought over lay-out.
But now that has changed. With the redesign, the ads have been tamed – orderly structured at the right and top -, the network links better highlighted, and – most importantly, TechCrunch has adopted the magazine style. No more endless texts, but short excerpts on the frontpage. By choosing this approach, TechCrunch’s design becomes more accessible for less web-savvy people who aren’t used to the overabundance of text. Maybe we should consider that at The Next Web as well.
(I’m not the only thinking this, I guess after RWW and TechCrunch adopting the magazine lay-out, more blogs will follow)
Here’s a short overview of Techcrunch’s design during the years:
TechCrunch’s first logo dates from 2005
The design on the left lasted till May 2006, its succeeder wasn’t really never popular. Although it was the design which served TechCrunch during its big break-through.
I wonder what Mike Arrington has to say about the new lay-out (this is what he said about the green move).
The iPhone App store is one of the many great features of the Apple iPhone. Hundreds (thousands?) of developers are tinkering away on apps that when launched are sure to bring riches and fame to its inventors. All you have to do is browse the ‘Whats New’ section on your iPhone or iPod Touch on a daily basis and you will be able to choose from a wide variety of innovative new apps. Some useful and some funny.
But there is more. A lot of ‘would-be’ developers are posting their ideas for the perfect app to their blogs and posting mock-ups of next generation interfaces to Flickr. These apps are nothing more than ideas waiting to be implemented and sometimes ideas mainly waiting to be ignored. Either way, here is a selection of inspiring ideas that I found on Flickr:
1. Fancy GPS app
Ricky Romero presents a screenshot, with a big proud smile, of his upcoming GPS app. What will it offer? We can only guess:
2. Parmesan cheese grater
This app is an example of some of the more frivolous designs. From the comments: “In my quest to find the best iPhone apps out there, I submit a Parmesan grater application for your approval. Steve Jobs has not returned my calls, but I think this is a pretty cutting edge idea. Pecorino plug-in sold separately.”
3. Horizontal keyboard outside Safari
A really simple concept for a horizontal keyboard. Of course, this one is already implemented by Apple but only used in Safari when you tilt the iPhone. Wonder when it becomes available for Mail and other apps that use text input.
4. Keep an eye on electricity in your house
A very cool concept which helps you manage energy consumption for your house: “Current State is a real-time energy use monitoring system and timer for powered devices combined into one. The Current State system is made up of two parts, a mobile application for you cell phone, which allows you to control and monitor electricity use from anywhere, and a series of Plug-Ends that give you control over the products around your house.”
5. Scan offices for certain rooms?
I have no idea what this is supposed to be and how it would work. But hey, it looks cool!
6. DJ on the move
This one shouldn’t be that hard to build for someone with Xcode experience. Right?
7. Take presentations to another level
One of the first Apps I bought was Stage Hand. It turns your iPhone into a remote control for Keynote. You can see a preview of your slide and highlight stuff on the screen or read your notes, all on the little screen in your hand. This concept takes it even further and it also look better:
8. Virtual ruler
This one might be one of the most interesting concepts I have seen so far just because it makes me wonder if it could actually work. What do YOU think? “Would be nice to display a virtual ruler over the camera picture to roughly measure distances. Certainly doable as we know the characteristics of the iphone lens. It could use the accelerometers to adjust the perspective (tilt, etc).”
There are a lot more impressive designs for imaginary iPhones, iMacs and iPhone Apps here.
What would your imaginary iPhone app do? Make coffee? Get you hot dates? Yeah, all that. But what else? Let us know…
For months now Delicious has promised to launch their new website with some updated features, a brand new design and improved security. Another big change will be the new domain name. Although it has been active for a while now the main domain was still http://del.icio.us once they will switch to the new design the official domain name will be http://delicious.com.
Interestingly enough the switch will not go unnoticed by most users. As Delicious writes on its blog:
After months of work, the new Delicious is almost ready to come out of the oven. When we release it, you’ll be automatically logged out of your account and will have to log in again, due to some changes we’re making behind the scenes.
They have some helpful instructions for people who are currently logged in but might not know what their password is and for people who might not remember which emailaddress they used to register for Delicious. If you have an account there and plan to use it after the switch I recommend reading that blogpost now and following the instructions to make sure you can still login later.
My guess is that a large part of its users won’t return after the switch and will turn out to be ’sleeping’ users. But since Delicious doesn’t openly disclose its traffic and numbers we won’t ever know what the real effect will be of their update.
After six months of happy blogging and welcoming you and 3499 other RSS readers, we think it’s about time to professionalize the design of The Next Web Blog. We can’t do that alone though, as we need your opinion. To be exact: we need you to inspire us, as you’re the ones we’re blogging for.
That’s why we came up with this challenge: we would like to ask you to use our logo to create something that will inspire us while designing the new lay-out. There are virtually no limits, as long as the file extension is .jpg, .png or .gif. It doesn’t even have to be static. It can be a drawing, wallpaper, or icon set.
The designer who manages to take our breath away – or something close to it – will receive the Adobe Creative Suite 3 Design Standard. Yes, you read that right. Adobe is a really generous company and we’re delighted that they wanted to sponsor this competition. So thanks to these guys, the winner will receive programs like InDesign, Photoshop, Illustrator, Acrobat 9 Professional, and more.
Put your Next Web Blog creation on Flickr or another image hosting service and link to it in the comments of this post. Take your time, as the design competition is closing on August 1st 2008.
The jury consist of The Next Web Blog co-founder Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten, Adobe Marketing Project Manager Bert Hagendoorn, and undersigned. Our judgments will be based on originality – we want an out-of-the-box spirit – and the link with the actual subject of our blog: European start-up news and the future of the web.
We will send the winning design to our web designers, who will give it a prominent spot on their mood boards. So you can actually influence the new lay-out of your source for European tech news.
No, this has nothing to do with tasty fish, the name of this service refers to the process of fine tuning a design. Irish design agency Spoiltchild Design came up with a handy tool that helps you and your colleagues to address every detail in an image, without bothering to describe the spot you’re talking about. You just put a note on the desired spot and email the image to a colleague, who can also easily edit the picture as well.
This can come in particularly handy when discussing a site design. I know from my own experience that instead of sending a 3-page email, you just paste some notes on the design. One minor thing though, this experience comes from using Fleck. This Amsterdam-based service offers you the possibility to note specific places on any web page with a bookmarklet or fancy flash browser tool. A disclosure is in order here, as Fleck sponsors this blog. I think though, that for tech-savvy users, Fleck is the better tool. Yet for people who just want to add some text to an image, Finetuna is a good alternative since it’s really simple.
A bit too simple maybe, as Finetuna could use some extra features like an embed option and Twitter integration. Speaking of which, I’ve praised web development companies in the past who make Twitter mash-ups to promote their services. These companies add something to the web, while working on their PR. It’s probably the same story with Spoiltchild Design, as there are no advertisements on Finetuna, nor do visitors have to register. The consultants of Spoiltchild just needed a tool like this and then decided to make it publicly available. And before you know it, some blogger mentions their company name three times.
A few days ago Ernst-Jan wrote about the updated Google Favicon at this blog. It looked kind of lame and I remember thinking ‘I could do better than that’. Maybe I wasn’t the only one who thought that as Google has now challenged its audience to come up with a better Favicon.
You can ‘Submit your Google favicon idea‘ to Google until June 20, 2008. There are also some technical requirements:
resolution: 16 pixel x 16 pixel image
format: .png, .gif, or .ico
size: 5 KB
transparency: 32 bit alpha transparency
And here are a few examples that Google played with before they chose their current boring blue ‘g’:
And a few more tips & requirements from Google:
Make the shape and profile visible. We’ve found that semi-transparent graphics, specifically 32-bit alpha transparency, work best.
Incorporate some or all of the letters in “Google.”
Utilize the primary colors that are used in the Google logo. We’ve found that monochromatic designs tend to work best with blue; yellow is too light and doesn’t provide enough contrast, and red looks like an error.
Avoid being product specific. The favicon should apply well to many different Google products and devices (e.g., mobile, PC).
Be timeless. The favicon shouldn’t date itself or be time-specific. Send us a design that you think will last.
Let us know if you plan to design a Favicon too and post a link to it so we can show it here too.
Every month, The Next Web Blog picks three relevant books for you to read. The teasers are short, the pro’s why to read are relevant. This month we’re discussing Groundswell by Charlene Li, Web 2.0: A Strategy Guide by Amy Shuen, and Designing for the Social Web by Joshua Porter.
Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies
It’s a great time for people who want to read social media and web strategy in general. Many books are released each month and to find the books that are worth your time gets harder and harder. Groundswell, a book written by Forrester Analist Charlene Li, seems to be such a book. As we know from Forrester, the book is full of hard analytic data to back up your social media strategy building thingy. The book provides many case studies (also ones we haven’t heard of yet), strategy roadmap development and a profile tool to map your (potential) customers with three general criteria on six overlapping levels of participation to find how to best interact with them.
Web 2.0: A Strategy Guide: Business thinking and strategies behind successful Web 2.0 implementations.
Let’s face it: while we all can’t stop raving about the beauty of social media and Web 2.0, we are still not very good in monetizing this trend other than by selling ads or making a smashing IPO. Web 2.0: A strategy Guide, written by Amy Shuen (she’s publishing parts of her book on her weblog), tries to help us with this part by talking about Web 2.0 from a strategy perspective, the major Web 2.0 concepts and it’s effects (not technologies) and real life cases as Flickr, Google and Amazon. This book tries to bridge the gap between the yet relatively limited knowledge of business people on Web 2.0 so perhaps it’s not a book for early adopters as we might all be. But when you are in business, looking for a strategy book on Web 2.0 this might be the one you are looking for.
Designing for the Social Web
I’ve read an interesting review of Designing for the Social Web, written by Joshua Porter, on the blog of Web Worker Daily. They put it nicely: this book is about designing social sites from a higher level view of the process, which makes it more relevant than perhaps yet another book about building rails applications. We all know that the social web requires a different perspective on principles like designing for conversations for example and Porter outlines this nicely in this book. He talks about the usage lifecycle, users intrinsic motivations for participating on your site, getting users on your site, analytics and more. Definitely a must read for all social designers among us.
Take a look at your desk, chances are high you’ll see a huge stack of business cards. All collected at conferences, meet-ups, and Open Coffee’s. It’s actually a bit absurd: while we’re digitalizing our lives, we still use paper to create the foundation for a new contact. Project E is one of the first initiatives that strives to change this contradiction. They’ll allow you to get connected in seconds with a newly developed portable device.
Renato Valdés Olmos at the Next Web
E is a small, slick-looking, curvy white device. It’s just a matter of pressing two of these devices against each other to get connected on services like LinkedIn. Sync it to a PC or mobile device once you’re done with a conference or meeting, and all of your social networks are up to date with new contacts you’ve made.
Three Dutch designers came up with their idea during their graduate master year at the academy for art and media technology in Hilversum. I’ve talked to one of these innovative guys, director Renato Valdés Olmos. He explains the thoughts behind this new approach to social networking: “What we, and everybody else for that matter basically observed is that the Internet has made our world very small. We can connect with anyone, at anytime, anywhere. This has changed our world thoroughly. Especially at a social level. Quantity of contact has taken over quality of contact. So we figured, ‘Hey, can’t we get the benefits of all these great online services and communities to real-life situations?’ ‘How can we translate these benefits and getting people closer together in physical reality at the same time?’ We still believe in face-to-face contact.”
The next step for Renato and his two partners was thinking about how to do this: “We researched connectivity between cellphones and smart phones. We came to the conclusion that there must be a faster way to exchange information.” Renato wanted to get people connected with “a device operated by a single gesture. “Exchanging contact info and social networking info with E takes as long as a formal handshake.” (more…)
A few years ago it was fashionable to make fancy Flash sites that had high impact upon visiting them, fancy graphics, cartoonish displays with an arty feel. But personally speaking I don’t go back to see these sites ever again, do you?
I’m the same with movies, once I’ve seen one, I generally won’t watch it again until I have forgotten it’s plot. Thankfully that fashion seems to have passed, albeit for a few corporates who haven’t quite caught up yet.
Today we have Web 2.0 fashion. Most of us upstarts competing in this arena have aspirations for either a sellout or to grow viral traffic into the millions so that advertising can fuel growth. This time around the fashion is very sleek and polished offerings, plenty of Ajax, lovely curvy corners, with as much javascript thrown in as possible.
For all the classy styles with the fancy drop-downs, the clean looks, Ajax signup pages, there is a distant lack of ‘retention content’, but that is not the point.
The point I want to make is about proving a concept before wasting thousands on classy designs that in many cases will never be seen by more than a handful of beta testers or the developers themselves.
(more…)
