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Written on 3rd April 2009
11 COMMENTS 
Zee, Editor in Chief at The Next Web, Principal at WeDoCreative.
Earlier this week Friendfeed, the social aggregator and discussion platform, announced a press conference of sorts at their offices on Friday. Robert “The Scobleizer” Scoble stepped into their offices just a few moments ago and was able to share news (via Friendfeed) of an upcoming redesign, to supposedly go live on Monday on their beta site http://beta.friendfeed.com.
Friendfeed founders Paul Buchheit and Bret Taylor are choosing not to release details of the update until then – presumably to ensure Facebook don’t duplicate the features before hand (sorry, I’m bitter..).
Further details to be posted here as we hear it.
Written on 16th October 2008
2 COMMENTS
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Five weeks ago I wrote about the home improvement going on at Flickr HQ. The Yahoo-owned photo service presented the design in a sneak peak fashion. After clicking on a button on the homepage, going through the Flickr balloons and a MIDI version of Sinatra’s Strangers in the Night, the new homepage appeared.
Those of the 31 million Flickr members who could resist the temptation of clicking on the “Psssssst! Want a sneak peak at your new homepage?” will now see the new homepage as well.
Flickr wanted to show its users more of the social interaction of the service, hence the homepage now consists of all kinds of “check out these things in your social circle” elements. The page shows more pictures from your contacts, introduces the latest pics from your groups, and pushes the blog plus your personal stats to the front.
Check out the announcement on Flickr and don’t forget to watch the fancy screencast.
Written on 11th September 2008
3 COMMENTS
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
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.
Written on 18th July 2008
5 COMMENTS
Joop Dorresteijn, East Asia correspondent
That the Twitter service is choking up every now and then is nothing new. The Twitter team had made numerous attempts to improve the continuity of the service, as they reduced features such as the reply tab, capping pagination and blocking instant messaging from time to time. It seems that all these efforts have not reduced their down-time at all.
Louis Gray mentions that the list of reduced features can be extended once again, as Twitter is tweaking their authenticated API hits again. It seems that Twitter capped API requests down to 100 hits per hour, unannounced. This causes a lot of frustration by many users, but especially with the people behind the many applications that are making use and rely on Twitter for their data. If I was working my ass off to create something valuable for the Twitter community, only to find that Twitter keeps limiting the access to their service, I would be very demotivated to continue Twitter development. It makes me wonder if Twitter realizes the viral effect that third party applications can have.
In other Twitter news, it seems that the homepage showed some new changes to their design for a short while this morning, with the biggest change being that the Twitter tabs have moved to the right of the screen.
It seems that Twitter prioritized their functionality and design over the API and reliability for now. As they made another drastic change on the backend to avoid their service choking up and a sudden change in their layout earlier this morning. Sure, integrating search is a great idea, but many question the priorities that the short message service is taking recently. Or maybe we have to wait until someone takes the job as Operations engineer on their job site to enjoy 24-hour Twitter bliss in our lives.
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