"Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful." - William Morris
I had never realised that touch screens were limited to only a single point of contact at a time until I saw this. The video of the mocked up applications they have been looking at are incredible. Typing onscreen then resizing and placing the text, organising your photos and just creating beautiful organic patterns. Can’t wait to take one for a test drive. [From Metafilter]
The subject of del.icio.us came up, after it transpired one of my colleagues had met the VC who bought it off its original owner for half a million or so and the sold if for over ten times that to Yahoo. Nice. A lot of people seem to underestimate the relevance of tagging to this ‘Web 2.0’ revolution, they just don’t get what’s so compelling about it.
To me the impact of tagging is fascinating, people find information – either their own (photos) or other people’s (del.icio.us) and categorise this based on their perception of the content. A picture of a cat can be tagged anything from ‘my cat‘/’prudence‘ to ‘feline‘/’white‘/’brown‘/’animal‘ to ‘cuddly‘/’cute‘/’green eyes‘ and so on. There is no prescribed structure, just pure description based from a personal context. Obviously this has issues, as the tags in the last example clearly indicate – a search on ‘cat’ would not bring up any of those photos. Hmm. But we’re talking here about a single example, in the mass of information you are pretty likely to find what you seek, a lot of people will have tagged their photos ‘cat‘. Just by clicking on a few of these tagged links you can see how diverse a journey you go on, so the end impact of tags is fascinating and enjoyable. This is why flickr won out over dotPhoto in my mind (and I loved dotPhoto). So how did we get to this end result? A tipping point.
A tipping point is the time at which enough early adopters of a technology tell enough other people to join in (social networks) and suddenly everyone you know is on there and creating this amazing community of shared concepts. Where tagging is so fundamental to this is that it is just so easy. For me to upload a photo to flickr, and add a couple of quick words to my photos to describe them (eg, ‘black and white‘ or ‘cityscapes‘) takes a few seconds, no effort. Plus the added organisational ability I now have is often immediately useful, as I wander around my own photos looking at others I took recently to see how I’ve come along. This ease is where tagging creates a tipping point – or in this case what I see as ‘information gravity’, a few pieces of information do not attract us, but a mid heavy mass of related information (almost knowledge) for us to play around with is highly attractive and that brings more information in there and then more people and then usefulness.
Yes, tagging is not right in all situations. Our search on cat won’t find every photo out there with a cat in, detailed specific searches are often impacted, but since when have human interactions been that exact? Yahoo buying del.icio.us is just a sign that they have realised they’re old school, Internet 1.0 cataloging was the wrong way forward – intensive, flawed but useful for what it was. Now they’re trying to redress that balance as they follow Google’s slip stream.
Tagging is messy, human, fun and replete with it’s own implicit knowledge (why did that person tag their car as ‘home’). Tagging also offers whole new business models as people start to specialise in de-coding these new flows of information for profit. So embrace the tag and come play in the information highway…
Ps, For further background check out Clay Shirky‘s ‘Ontology is Over-rated‘ presentation. Great stuff.
A couple of pet peeves from my iPod, which I freely admit is not the latest whizz bang video version but a plain ol’ 4G; Firstly, when I’m in in shuffle mode sometimes a song will come up that makes me feel like listening to something else, either on the same album or by the same artist. To get to this song you have to go all the way out, into the music menu, select the correct artist or album and find the song. It would be a lot simpler to have menu options off each song to say ‘see rest on this: album/artist/genre’. Secondly there are times when a song is not ripped properly and you want to know to remove it when you’ve back at a computer, or you just hate the song, so it would be nice to mark songs for deletion that iTunes automatically acted upon. You can fake that by settings the star rating to one and filtering for that but it’s not a smooth interaction.
In Japanese society it is considered disrepectful to God to claim something is perfect, as only God can create perfection. This means that in all designs there is an introduced flaw, a sacrifice almost, that ensures the design is not perfect and God is satisfied.
I like to use the same excuse at times when I forget something {;)
The BBC had an article today about how we make decisions on whether or not to trust a website within a twentieth of a second. Studies seem to indicate that, whatever the real content and value of the site, most people trust their first instinct and go on to re-enforce that belief with a halo effect that makes the content on the site seem more valuable to us.
From an interaction design perspective this would seem to be simultaneously interesting and concerning. Designing a highly functional and usable site apparently means little unless people react well to it in an emotional manner when they first arrive. I feel this research is only true of sites where you have not already formed an emotional relationship through some manner, be it other channels that present the brand or information you have received, such as blog recommendations. Also the question is raised of what your target audience would react positively to.