Home / readwriteweb.com rss archive / October-03-2007


Spread to Enlarge - Designing for iPhone, Wii and Other New Web Devices
Read/WriteTalk has an interesting podcast interview with Dan Saffer, Experience Design Director at Adaptive Path. In the podcast, R/WT host Sean Ammirati and Dan discussed the process of designing for new types of Web-enabled devices - such as Nintendo's Wii, Apples iPhone and the new touch iPod. The background is that Safer wrote a blog post a month ago, calling for a set of standards for "gesteral interactions". He also launched a wiki for collecting gestural patterns.Also note that a few days ago Apple released a brand new guidelines doc called iPhone Human Interface Guidelines. So it is an important time for the design community, as they grapple with new forms of Web devices and interfaces. Apple itself says (in the Guidelines intro) that the iPhone presents "a revolutionary user interface and interaction model."As Dan Saffer says in the podcast, this new "gesteral" form of web design is in big demand already: "...b...

Storms in the Web 2.0 Petri Dish
The Web 2.0 world is looking increasingly like a giant petri dish. There are so many experiments, so much innovation and, as yet, relatively little real revenue. Within this petri dish are a few ideas that will turn into billions of dollars, at which point we will all say “why didn't I think of that”? There are also lots of “what on earth were we all thinking” ideas out there. Numerically of course, there will be much more of the latter - but in $ terms the few big winners will mean it'll all make some kind of sense in the end.The few places where we are seeing real revenue, such as at MySpace and Facebook, are enough encouragement to everybody else to keep experimenting. Henry Blodget, a man who knows a thing or two about the valuation of disruptive innovation, said something very insightful when commenting on the Facebook/Microsoft story:“But the mistake analysts have made consistently, since the beginning of Internet time,...

Microsoft Open Sourcing .NET
Microsoft announced this morning that the source code for its .NET framework libraries, allowing outside developers to see inside the .NET code when developing their own software.It's hard to say what the incentive was for this move, it could be that .NET adoption in the developer community has been so small that a drastic step was needed or this could be a strategy to prepare for a big push of SilverLight, Microsoft's new runtime for Rich Internet Applications. The .NET framework is also at the center of Vista, which so far no one has wanted to use at length.We're still chewing on the significance of this announcement; hopefully some .NET developers can chime in in comments.

Slifeshare Aims at Social Attention Space, Misses
The best explanation of Twitter that I've heard yet is as a tool for "continuous social intelligence." If you like Twitter then you'll see a lot of potential in a service launching today called Slifeshare. Unfortunately, potential is just about all the service has at launch.Slifeshare captures your Attention Data; it records what applications you use, what web pages you view and for how long. You can post messages and share media. It's supposed to be a social experience and it's got limited value before you build a network. Steps need to be taken to deal with that problem. Think of Slife like a combination of Twitter, the Facebook wall and del.icio.us all wrapped up into one service. This is a complicated enough proposition that lots of little touches are needed - clear communication, tool tips, friendlist prepopulation of some sort- Slideshare doesn't have any of that.I don't understand the awkward sounding name of the product, the site and application navigation is...

Layer Tennis - Amazing Designers Butt Heads
Layer Tennis is a fun Friday-afternoon diversion and just may be the most intriguing sport of the computer age (take that competitive video gaming!). This past Friday (Sept. 28) marked the start of the Layer Tennis season, kicking off the first of 12 weekly matches and pitted noted designer Shaun Inman, of Mint fame, against seasoned illustrator, Kevin Cornell.Originally called "Photoshop Tennis," Layer Tennis is the brainchild of Chicago's Coudal Partners. They changed the name this season because with the arrival of Adobe's Creative Suite 3, it's about a lot more than just Photoshop.The rules of the game are simple: 2 designers go head-to-head lobbing designs back and forth and modifying each other's work. Each designer has 15 minutes to complete his or her "volley," and a third party provides commentary on the match (for Inman vs. Cornell it was blogger John Gruber). At the end of the match, which lasts 10 rounds, a winner is declared -- though not always instantly.Designers...

Zoho DB Launched - Beats Google, Microsoft to Online Database
Web Office suite vendor Zoho is continuing its rapid pace of new product releases, with an online database and reports app called Zoho DB. Zoho is making a habit of one-upping their competition, because as of now none of Google, Microsoft Office Live, or ThinkFree offer a comparable online database product. The closest competitor to Zoho DB is the startup DabbleDB, which is an impressive "part spreadsheet, part database, part collaboration app" that I reviewed when it launched in June 2006 (see also my May '06 post).Some of the main features in Zoho DB are: Converts spreadsheets into online databases (with CSV and TSV imports) Create reports, charts and pivot tables with drag-n-drop functionality Pivot Table Support Allows you to run SQL (select) Queries on the data. You can run any select query in any SQL format (they support Oracle, SQL Server, DB2, Sybase, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Informix and ANSI SQL dialects).Zoho DBThe screencast below, created by Demo...

Netvibes Launches Corporate Startpages - Will Companies Go For It?
Netvibes, the French startpage near the top of the startpage market, is launching a new service this morning called Netvibes Premium Universes. The service allows companies to offer Netvibes functionality (reading feeds, posting widgets) on their own website with their own branding and domain. It's essentially a Netvibes page in an iframe on your website.It's a great idea in theory, but I don't know how many companies will go for it. At launch the flagship customers include spam-factory Tagged.com and "the toolbar and content division of digital media company MIVA Inc." - they sell ads, including those despicable double-underline link ads. Fortunately two leading French newspapers, Les Echos and Le Figaro are part of the launch - without them you'd have to wonder why the product couldn't be sold to any legitimate businesses. I love Netvibes; I use their basic service and their new mobile display all day long. Give me the feed for items I've tagged "toread" in Del.icio.us...