'Community is no longer for geeks and early adopters, and has probably been mass market for quite a long time.' Complete Tosh
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A winning message
One of OptaDesign's clients ShoZu has just won Best Mobile Messaging Service at the GSM Association Awards 2006 in Barcelona. Congratulations to all involved. I know how hard everyone at Cognima (the proud parents) have been working to make this happen ;o)
Shozu: what's that then?
ShoZu or 'show's you' is a friendly application that you can download to your favourite lifestyle accessory – the mobile phone (or 'cell' phone if you're from the good old US of A). It makes for a quick and easy way to upload your stories (be it text, video or images) to social network websites such as Flickr, Webshots, Buzznet.
Caveat lector: you need a newish cameraphone to use the free service – so being a bit of a laggard phone wise, I'm not out there with the early adopters using ShoZu just yet. There are however, plenty of people who are though. Being at the end of resaonable broadband connection in Cambridge UK and a white-hot one in Prague CZ, I'm more of a VoIP man myself using Skype for voice, file transfer and Instant Messaging (IM).*
Show me the plan – getting the message across
Talking of IM, the Mobile Network Operators (MNO's) PR efforts at the above Barcelona shindig have concentrated on pushing Instant Messaging as a compliment to SMS (text messaging) – albeit when they have finally broken out of their own walled-garden idea of keeping users in one place. They will might do well to negociate flexible pricing plans such as those for web applications. Basecamp, I'm looking in your direction.
Bill Gates and his crew are in on the act. Let's just hope the interface designers can make Mobile IM (MIM), or Wireless IM (WIM) an intuitive, easy-to-use experience on a really small screen. Good design really can be good business, so it would help adoption if someone smart was on the case. Talking of good design . . .
Hyperlinks subvert hierachies
On a converging section of single-track, Jeff Veen recently found treading an Adaptive Path, has announced he's been tempted to don Google lycra, as Measure Map has been snapped up by the big 'G'. Hopefully Jeff will be back posting on design and social software matters very soon. Hopefully there will some cycling tales up to Mountain View to boot . . .
*Think link: interesting thread on 'pipes' and the incumbent phone companies in the States.
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- When the work – or the conversation or any other human activity – is going well, then you forget what time it is and whatever else you should be doing. There is some quality in artifacts that is like this process. It’s not that the thing is transparent. On the contrary, it presents itself to you in a very immediate and unavoidable way. It seems inevitable. It isn’t expressive except of its own content. Robin Kinross
