- How to Prototype and Influence People (Aza Raskin) — I’m fascinated lately by prototypes, mockups, tangible artifacts, and other design tools for conveying the essence and promise of something without having to build it all. This talk nails it.
- paper2ebook — Utility to re-structure research papers published in US Letter or A4 format PDF files to remove the 2 columns layout to make it suitable for viewing in an ebook reader. (via Olivier Grisel on Twitter)
- The Real Life Social Network (Slideshare) — presentation from a Google ux designer starts with a typical “social networking makes you lump everyone as a friend but people don’t think that way” set of slides, but by slide 70 it’s talking about research into how people think of their friends. I’d love to see a UI for a social network that got this right. (via Matt Zimmerman on Twitter)
- uquery — simple search engine for the iPhone/iPad app store. (via Marco Arment on Twitter)
"social networking" entries
Demoting Halder: A wild look at social tracking and sentiment analysis
You no longer have control over where a first impression occurs.
My short story, "Demoting Halder," was supposed to lay out an alternative reality where social tracking and sentiment analysis had taken over society. As the story evolved, I wondered if the reality in the story is something we're living right now.
HealthTap explores how big a community you need to crowdsource health information
How a company addresses the challenges of trust, motivation, outreach, and accuracy while creating doctor/patient connections.
Open Media Boston forum examines revolution and Internet use in Middle East
I came away convinced that Internet sites — Facebook in
particular — were crucial to the spread of the revolutions.
Media old and new are mobilized for effective causes
Sasha Costanza-Chock on why old and new media will continue to co-exist.
Sasha Costanza-Chock explains why both conventional media and social networks are critical resources, and why social causes have just as much trouble as corporations using the latter effectively.
Active Facebook users by region: November, 2010
With Facebook unveiling an integrated messaging system for its more than 500 million users, I decided to update a few charts that breakdown its users by region.
Four short links: 9 November 2010
A Prototyping HowTo, Decolumning PDFs, Real World Social Networks, and App Search
Which social gaming companies are hiring
Disney's announced purchase of Mountain View gaming startup Playdom, follows on the heels of EA's purchase of London-based Playfish last November. Based on active users, Zynga remains by far the biggest online social gaming company. But what other independent companies are growing? To see which companies are expanding, I used our data warehouse of online job postings to detect recent hiring.
Where Facebook's half a billion users reside
Facebook announced that they now reach 500 million active users (just five and half years after launching). But where do these half a billion users reside? Refreshing my post from February, the share of users from Asia continues to rise and now stands at 17% of all Facebook users. Over the past 12 weeks, Facebook added over a million active users in fourteen countries, including 5 in Asia and all three members of NAFTA.
The State of the Internet Operating System
Ask yourself for a moment, what is the operating system of a Google or Bing search? What is the operating system of a mobile phone call? What is the operating system of maps and directions on your phone? What is the operating system of a tweet? I’ve been talking for years about “the internet operating system“, but I realized I’ve never written an extended post to define what I think it is, where it is going, and the choices we face. This is that missing post.
1 in 4 Facebook Users Come From Asia or the Middle East
Asia’s share of the more than 400 million active Facebook users recently surged past 15%. With a market penetration of 1.7% in Asia and Africa, the company has barely scratched the surface in both regions. While the company continued to add users in Southeast Asia, there were an additional 2.3 million users from South Asia over the past 12 weeks. In fact according to Alexa, Facebook has already overtaken Orkut in India.