Interesting video by Xianhang Zhang (founder of Bumblebee Labs) of a talk he gave at the Mozilla Foundation. The title of his talk was Designing for Social Interaction. On the accompanied post you can find out more.
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social media
Some days ago Google launched Google Reader Play which basically is an universal RSS-reader. No need to subscribe to individual RSS-feeds the content is just there. You browse and vote (like/dislike) through images, video’s and infographics. Although it has been receiving the usual critics (e.g. privacy) I think it may proof a point. Lets take a look a closer at some of the non-technical aspects of RSS.
First of all RSS hasn’t turned out to be so really simple to use for most users. The notion of content-syndication is not a concept so interesting to users. I guess most people prefer to receive a newsletter of something they are really interested. Furthermore RSS requires a dedicated reader and you need to subscribe to feeds. Nothing impossible I agree — but it doesn’t mean people need or use it.
What Reader Play offers is a instantly working RSS-reader. The user can do what he or she loves to do: look and browse through content. I’m not saying Reader Play is perfectly designed nor that is the best reader around. But it makes RSS a bit more usable and sexy for that matter to the consumer.
Read MoreWhile reading We-Think by Charles Leadbeater it is becoming clear to me he is addressing the right problem in his book. Most of the fuzz/buzz around the communities is true, a problem however remains the capitalisation of wealth:
[...] most people cannot get their groceries and children’s clothes from the gift economy.
After I have finished the book I will try to write a decent review on the book, but I already think it is recommendable. Anybody unsure of the transformative power of social media and value of communities ought to read this book.
Read MoreAfter yesterday’s goodbye from Spolsky I’ve read today that Alex Payne (engineer at Twitter) also quits blogging for the time being. His rationale:
Lately, I’ve found the cathartic returns from blog-format writing to be diminishing. The ideas I’m trying to express never really get put to rest in my head when I write, now. Instead, they spark whole conversations that I never intended to start in the first place, conversations that leech precious time and energy while contributing precious little back.
Even-though the reasons for Payne are distinctly different from Spolsky, it might be the start of more people second thinking blogging and its (im)balance between input and desired result. Since I personally have no idea where this mostly Paste-stuff-blog is going, there is also no need to stop it just yet. Unless people start asking me to stop.
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