The Robotification of Usability Design

Posted on August 13, 2007 by Thomas Purves

1998-2000 Human to web interaction, Web Usability, Human factors. The great bubble of Web-enabling networked databases and applications – like Online Banking, Amazon.com, lets sell pet food online etc. (eBay never heard of usability)

2001-2005 Website to robot interaction design, the golden age of Search Engine Optimization

2004-2006 Human to Human and social web interaction, funny how no one thought of this sooner. Web 2.0 and all that.

2007- Robot to Robot web interaction, Microformats, CAPCHA’s and RSS the carrots, sticks and duct tape of mashups. APIs and widget sandboxes of Facebook, Salesforce and google/yahoo/OSX desktops where our applets do our browsing for us and play -maybe- nice with each other. RSS made interacting with websites redundant, now robots will read our RSS for us too, sometimes with the aide of the ‘community’ acting as the proxy of intelligence.

In this scheme we’re somewhere between users and used. Human-mediated robot interaction etc. Which part of Artificial Artificial Inteligence (google it) becomes an oxymoron? It’s not necessarily a bad thing. Welcome to Web3.0.

Posted in apps, Archive, design, enterprise2.0, facebook, intelligence, media, memes, robots, socialmedia, socialplatforms | 2 Comments

FaceBookCamp is going to be massive

Posted on August 2, 2007 by Thomas Purves

260 people signed up on the wiki already and still a week to go. Significant amount of media and corporate engagement as well. This will make an interesting “camp”. It’s no joke that Toronto is crazy for Facebook.

Are you signed up yet?

I’m on the list but it also falls on my vacation time at the cottage -arg. This may be worth coming down from the dock for. Should I bring my beaver?

UPDATE Michele and I won’t be at FacebookCamp though we’ll be sad to miss it (don’t worry too much for us we’ll be out sailing in Muskoka). This is a major development in the evolution of the (TorCamp) community in Toronto. have fun all. Note Alan sez:

“Just a quick reminder about FacebookCampToronto tonight and some of the logistics.

The maximum capacity of the MaRS main auditorium is 350 so if/when we reach maximum capacity MaRS is going to setup a 2nd Room with an additional 70 person capacity and an audio/video feed.

The main room should be available @ 6pm and it will be first come, first serve until capacity.

We’re looking for some volunteers to help with directing people and some of the logistics. If your interested and available at 5:30pm today contact me directly via Facebook or at csmillie [at] gmail.com.

Thank you and we’re looking forward to seeing everyone tonight”

Posted in Archive, Uncategorized | 2 Comments

Has Facebook killed blogging?

Posted on July 31, 2007 by Thomas Purves

Have you noticed the blogosphere growing quiet? The pros and the a-listers and the corporate blogs are still at it as strong as ever. But tumbleweeds blow through the empty feed folders of personal friends. Flickr too is fading away. Maybe it’s just summer and we’re all outdoors, as we should be, instead.

But I think it’s Facebook, first twitter, but now much more powerfully Facebook is sucking all that personal stuff, all that social presence and ambient intimacy behaviour and desires (usecases for you techies) out of the blogosphere and in to it’s fearsomely purpose-designed boxy blue and white world.

There’s a flavourshift in the blogosphere. The olde flavour of blogging is leaving us.

When you think of it, (personal) blogs never really caught on anyway.

Compare this one data point, my blogroll: 21 my FB Friendlist: 249

Blogs as dead media. At least as we once (hardly) knew ye.

Blogs are for pros, facebook is for friends

blogs dead. long live blogs.

Posted in Archive, blogs, Business, dead media, facebook, media, socialmedia, socialplatforms | 14 Comments