It took me a while to understand why I didn’t like it and then I realised it’s quite a simple reason. Google Buzz, like Twitter or Facebook are for entertainment while Gmail is mostly work.
When I want to concentrate I usually shut down anything distracting and focus on what I may be doing whereas it’s sketching, designing, writing emails, proposals, etc. I usually have a break every 10-15 minutes. Something short, just to check my planetaki, twitter and perhaps facebook (that happens less often). Everything is on separate tabs so work and distractions don’t get messed.
And then came Buzz with this bold number of “buzzs” right next to the number of messages in my inbox so every time I checked if there was eny new email I’d see that there was some fun going on at the Buzz Cantina and I couldn’t concentrate. I couldn’t have my Continuous Partial Attention the way it was supposed to be, in moderate intervals.
And friends, that is why I am shutting down buzz. Not because I don’t like it (in fact I really hate facebook for what it has and Buzz lacks) but because it’s too invasive, just like my friends throwing a party at our studio at office hours.
I read at infograficaymas that the CNN used this inphographic video to explain how the Mexican drug cartels operate in the US:
It makes me think about the convergence between video and data in new storytelling formats. These narratives jump from analytical (narrative details ordered in a lineal fashion) to synthetic (big picture view, more visual) communication styles back and forth, which kind of maps how people learn.
It’s interesting to see that this new format, which is kinda popular for explaining new internet products and services, jumps to the mas media and merges with old style things such as the anchor’s voice.
Do you think it’s just another import made by the old media from the internet (just as when they use Google Earth) or we are in front of somehting bigger? What’s your take?
Lasers are awesome, we all know that. But what happens when Daito Manabe puts some AI and some interactive capabilities into one? It gets überawesome. Check it out:
Now pray for this to be sold in stores before Xmass.
Two weeks ago Google launched Favorite Places: famous people from several cities around the world share their favorite spots on Google Maps. Check this video to see what’s all about:
We, Vostok, were hired by Google to help them design the interface that allows you to browse betweeen cities, celebrities and their favorite places:
Minube, a Spanish and French online website where travellers share info about travel destinations, just released their printable traveller guides, which are basically travel guides with user comments, pictures and maps from the place you chose based on your selected categories, tags, etc.
We, Vostok, helped minube designing the creation and personalisation process which you can see on this post at the Minube blog (Spanish).
We all agree at the office: Bing does awesome at video search, especially for porn. Go check it and then move the cursor over the thumbnails, change the prefered length of the videos, screen resolution…
We proudly introduce you thecosmonaut.org and its Spanish counterpart elcosmonauta.es: the website for the movie The Cosmonaut which we mentioned some time ago.
Check it out! It has a cool store where you can buy merchandise and become a producer of the movie. The Cosmonaut is special for several reasons:
The plot is awesome
The movie is crowdfunded (anybody can be a producer)
Everything will be released under Creative Commons license, free of cost
The list of people who support the idea is amazing (in quantity and quality)
We, Vostok, designed and developed the website (in three weeks!!) falling in love with the project and becoming producers too, so expect a little friendly spam every now and then ;)
Alexandre Girard, the technical mind behind Feevy, is a what I would call a *real* hacker. He is now into building a Power Meter for household usage. That is a device that measures the amount of electricity that you spend at home, so you can have a greener usage.
I wonder how many different things you can do if you use the capabilities of an arduino board to do such measurements: all that information in digital format asking to be designed and displayed in many ways.
The social bookmarking service Ma.gnolia reports that all of its user data was irretrievably lost in the Jan. 30 database crash that knocked the service offline. That means that users who were unable to recover their bookmarks through publicly available tools (including other social media sites and the Google cache) have lost all their data.
This makes me think about bad luck, I mean REAL bad luck. There is another paragraph that left me thinking:
It turns out that Ma.gnolia was pretty much a one-man operation, running on two Mac OS X servers and four Mac minis. A clear lesson for users is not to assume that online services have lots of staff, lots of servers and professional backups, and to keep your own copies of your data, especially on free services.
I think it’s great that such a small team and infrastructure could manage a service like Magnolia. What don’t get is the lack of backups. Any hosting service would give you that for just a few bucks a month. I hope everything is back to normal soon. They deserve it.
These days everybody seems to be crazy about building iPhone apps, but what if I told you that you could do widgets and small apps for Sony Bravia TV sets. It’s true. Apparently recent models fo these TV sets come with a small OS that can handle small apps (1,3 Mb max.) such as widgets for weather, time, RSS and even webbrowisng if connected to the internet through its ethernet port.
Sony Japan has released a Bravia App SDK for those developer interested in bringing interaction to the TV. Most of the info seems to be in Japanese, though. I wish they opened it to the rest of the world so we could build a light TV version of Planetaki :)
It left me thinking about its application to an online service of say… dating. Most of todays online dating websites are based on browsing or searching. In fact it’s a combination of the two, since it’s some sort of filtering (gender, age, location, etc.). But no one, or at least no one that I know, has implemented an online dating system based on recommendations: “Javier, I know you so much I bet this girl is definitely a good match for you”.
I am sooo thinking about it these days.
This will be Vostok’s next project.
Yeah!
Sam couldn’t stand it and made a Ubiquity command for Planetaki, so it’s easier to add websites to a planet from the website itself. Plain simple, just type
Youtube’s ActiveSharing seems to me like a failed attempt (another one!) to kick the social and sharing side of their website. This is how they explain it:
Are you a video trendsetter, an expert at finding the cool stuff on YouTube? Now you can share what you find immediately by Active Sharing with other YouTube users.
Click the “Start Active Sharing” button, then go watch some videos. Your username will show up on the page of the videos as you watch them, and a list of the latest ones you’ve seen will appear in your profile.
I don’t think that such a small feature deserves so much explanation, activation and even a name (ActiveSharing). It could be because Youtube guys want to feature something that will be surrounded by a bunch of other confusing features. I think that removing some functionality would be a better strategy than adding more stuff to the mess.
My suggestion if you want to share videos with your friends is to use Unvlog, especially now that it has an English version. Way clearer, simpler, smarter, nicer and to the point.
This is Orange-Cosmo (technical name: UniPo, Cosmo Knots-Series 3), one brave traveler ready to cruise the universe in the quest for adventure and beauty. It is now part of the crew at the Vostok Spaceship:
Orange-Cosmo comes from Smupf, a beautiful store of vinyl toys where there sure is something cute for your next gift, something that will stand on the owner’s table and say “hey” every morning.
Silverback is already out. What is special about it? Well, it’s basically a software to merge the captured interaction of a user on the screen with the recording of his face, all in one screen for easier test usability documentation.
On the typical usability test set-up you have the usual screen pointing to users’ face and also some camtasia-like software for recording what goes on the screen. Then you dream of merging it together to create a killer DVD for your client but actually never do so because of the time it would take to review both tapes, digitalise and do the necessary video edition.
I am a big fan of contextualised user testing: doing the testing as close to the real user environment as possible. This really makes it easier. Taking advantage of the Mac computer which usually has an embeded webcam, makes the test way less intimidating for the user.
The solution is so clever I wonder why nobody did it before. Congrats to the guys at Clearleft. I may use it soon.
