Andy Wibbels

Creativity: Pixar vs Dreamworks

from http://www.slashfilm.com/2009/04/02/lol-pixar-vs-dreamworks/

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Aza Raskin on Usability and Interface

From Google TechTalks YouTube channel:

Good quotes:

"To the user, the interface is the product."

"If you notice the interface, that means you're thinking about the interface and not the thing you're trying to do."

"The perfect interface for a shovel is a hole that you can put wherever you want it."

"The seduction of interaction: The trap of making things go whiz-bang-pop. The desire to make things look fancy."

"As interaction goes up, content and attention goes down."

"Every time you make the user make a decision they don't care about, you have failed as a designer."

"Whenever you see a [web] form, that's generally lazy design."

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Buzz Marketing in 1953 Iran

A lot has been written in the past few days about how social media and technology has been at the center of the developments in Iran. But I'd like to go a few decades back.

Something rather startling happened during Obama's trip to the Middle East a few weeks ago.

For the first time a President acknowledge the US role in the 1953 overthrow of the Iranian government. Obama was talking about the prickly relations between the US and Iran:

In the middle of the Cold War, the United States played a role in the overthrow of a democratically-elected Iranian government.

Never before had a US President admitted what was already well known to everyone in Iran.

But how do you overthrow a government?

As you can probably guess, it was about oil.

The Ultimate Product Launch

Anatomy of a Domain Name

Had this half-completed on my hard drive. Sitting here waiting for the dance show to come on and finished it:

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Reminder to Athletes: Always Think of the Sponsor

Dexia reminds the athletes they sponsor the correct way to celebrate victory:

http://www.wikimaniacs.com/think-of-your-sponsor/

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What is an API?

An API is a way for website or service to talk to another website or service. APIs let you mix information and media from other services into your own site or application.

API stands for 'application programming interface' but it is best explained by looking at an example:

The folks at Yelp let their users review and rate a city's services, restaurants, massage therapists, doctors... just about anything. They've taken all these reviews and mapped them to a map of that city. In the example above, San Francisco.

Now, Yelp could have created their own set of maps and optimized a server to serve those maps quickly and easily. But they realized that the eggheads at Google had already done that with the Google Maps service. Since Google Maps has an API, the folks at Yelp are able to take their data and layer it on top of a Google Map.

The Google Maps API allows Yelp to grab the maps and serve them up and mix in the information without Google having to worry about the security of their servers or systems. The APIs limit what can be done, what can be requested and who can see what.

Let's take another example:

Twitter had massive success early on because they launched the service with a detailed and open API. This meant anybody could build applications or sites that allowed them to send messages into the Twitter ecosystem. They kept their site and service super-simple and super-slim: a white box and a submit button. Then a small army of developers started building dozens of applications that sit on top of the Twitter API to do things like send photos, make videos, manage groups and just about anything else you could think of. So when you TweetDeck or Twitterific or TwitPic, these apps are connecting to Twitter through its API.

The big benefit of APIs is that anybody can create applications built on top of these sites and services. They can mix, match and mash-up these different services into new applications that are beyond the original intent of the service providers. Often, APIs are 'language independent' so no matter what programming language a developer is using, they can still connect through the API. I wish I was skilled enough to take a look at this massive list of APIs and mix them into applications like these.

The drawbacks to APIs are that you are dependent on the API service provider. If Twitter disappeared, all those applications wouldn't be able to connect through the API and would cease to be useful. Also, if you're Twitter, you've got a city of developers who might be money on your service - and you can charge for access to the API (Google and Amazon do) but you might lose your developer community. Also if you're the provider of the API you have to have the staff and data centers to handle your normal customers along with those coming in via the API (along with staff spending time documenting and creating APIs for customers that may not be your core audience).

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Adding Social Sharing Buttons to Your Newsletter or Ezine

MarketingSherpa has a case study on a newsletter publisher that used social media sharing buttons in their newsletter. Here' a few nuggets:

They asked their subscribers which networks they used.
They checked inbound traffic to see where content was already being poseted.
They used the social buttons for each article (or piece of content) in the newsletter - instead of having people have to share the whole thing.
Sharing links went to the publisher's summary of the story - not the original source link.
They asked their customer test groups if they recognized teh buttons.
They used clicktracking to check sharing habits as well as did their own shortened URL for Twitter friendly items.

Read the full study.

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When Your Favorite Show Gets Cancelled

Yes it is heart-breaking when your favorite TV show gets cancelled - but imagine the agony when you are the executive producer. Josh Friedman, the creative brain behind the recently-canceled Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles lets us inside his disappointment:

Losing your show is more like a surprise divorce where you get served papers in the morning and your (ex)wife is fucking [comic book superhero] Human Target by three in the afternoon using the same time slot your child was conceived in and also where she did that one thing that one time on your birthday.

One of the hardest parts of having your show cancelled is the part BEFORE it's cancelled, when it's "on the bubble". The absolute hardest part of that, besides the phrase "on the bubble," is everyone gets it in their head that you actually know what's happening with your show and you're just not telling them. No one believes the show's fate is in the air, they believe the fate's been decided, you know the fate, but you're just not sharing it with anybody. Now understand this: at any one time on a show there are over TWO HUNDRED people working on a show. OVER TWO HUNDRED FAMILIES DERIVING THEIR INCOME FROM YOUR LITTLE CREATIVE ENDEAVOR.

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How Twitter Kills Communities

I don't completely agree with this angle but a thread on Metafilter offers some insights into Twitter and its effect on online communities:

It's for people who want to post innocuous, witty, generally self-promoting, usually uninformative things about themselves. ... Basically, there are a whole lot of little groups that are otherwise ignored, but which add a whole lot of community and content that is *VERY* relevant to a lot of people's individual quirks on the Internet... and Twitter tends to co-opt them.

Well, after doing a bit of basic research, I can say pretty authoritatively that when people use Twitter instead of other services, niche blogs, etc., it tends to hurt those communities' overall online presence. It's basically destructive to the kind of community and level of discussion that existed before, which is increasingly displaced by content that is less meaningful and less relevant to its audience. And if someone does post about such a thing, the odds are good that whatever they posted is locked to you.... and if that's not a good definition of killing community, I don't know what is.

To me, it's not a model for a multibillion dollar company... it's a problem looking for a solution.

And in the same thread - a good counterpoint:

Online communities that are falling apart because their users are migrating to Twitter or FaceBook might need to reconsider what their communities have to offer and why they're failing their users. Getting on Twitter hasn't reduced my MeFi time at all, for instance (in fact, I steal links from one to post on the other!). But it has reduced the time I spent trudging through mostly-mediocre forums in my field that weren't quite making it, but were the only place for discussion.

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