Bros Before Blogs

Busyness

Haven't updated in a while. Mostly been heads down at work on a big project and traveling a lot. SXSW was a blast. Eventually I will post something about that and the awesome panels. Other than work/travel I have finally started regularly updating my podcast again. There are a few new mixes over there. Including an 80min one (Subprime Summer Meltdown) that I am relatively excited about. Mixes are mostly what I have been doing in my free time. On the tech side Aide RSS's google reader add-on has me really excited. Trying to make some domain specific info dashboards with netvibes, pipes and AideRss. For the silicon valley news it is working out. For niche mp3-blogs it is failing. AideRSS is definitely a good barometer for attention and buzz, but does nothing for taste. Ultimately the more you trust the audience of a feed the more apt AideRSS is to be of some help. Last interesting mention is Spokeo. I have been playing around with a product idea in this space for a while now. The gist is the app tells you things about your friends from various social-networks you may not have known. Spokeo's UX has a WAYS to go, but it is the closest thing I have seen to the product I want to make.

My brand is a round peg and Facebook is a square hole

The one thing I have come across in the past 6 months of watching brands try to fit themselves into the Facebook mega-trend is that - if you can, make a game, do it, do it, do it. Everyone likes a fun game. If you look at the top apps on FB they are all about screwing around and having fun. The top 24 (active users) consist of social fluff, games, and a few cool apps (iLike). If games are not appropriate remind your marketing hanchos that for the vast majority of brands out there, making a Facebook app is an exercise in positioning more than anything else. When your app has 134 active users people might wonder why you spent thousands of dollars making it :) That is all.

New Blood

I am excited for these artists to make some moves in 08. I think all 3 have the potential to appeal to a broad audience. It will be interesting to see how they choose to go forward given the current state of the music industry. All three of these artists were at SXSW last year and as I head back to Austin next month for this years festival I thought it would be interesting to see how 2007 treated them. If you are reading this via RSS the iMeem playlists I embedded aren't showing up. To hear some tracks click through.

Cool Kids

Man bmx bikes, pagers, tight pants, good remixes... nice. These guys are putting out an 8 track mini album sometime in 08 that contains mostly stuff that have been floating around the blogs for a year. Since I saw them at SXSW 2007 and they have put in that hard work and blown up quite a bit. Really interested to see what the audience is going to be for this kind of hip hop. They are also on a track called Gettin' it with Lil Wayne... I would love to know the relationship between the two. my Cool kids playlist on iMeem.

Santogold

I found Santogold crawling around myspace one day last year. Actually it was a year ago this month. Feb 2007. I did my first post on Bigstereo.net during my short stint as a writer there. (love those Bigstereo guys). Since then she generated about as much press and blog coverage as one can on the circuit she is in.... so now its time for the album in 08. Switch and Sinden are a good start I would say. Everyone's first reaction is "sounds like an MIA copycat" but you gotta go deeper. She is unique. my Santagold playlist on iMeem

Kid Sister

Saw Kid Sister for the first time at SXSW and she ended her set with a "new" one called Control. That tune turned out to my club anthem of the year. Now she and her chi-town crew are on all the major's radars. Like everyone else on this post she comes across so down to earth it is almost to her detriment. But Kid Sister runs in a good circle. Her brother is one of the guys in Flosstradamus... they roll with A-Track, who's brother is in Chromeo. A-track DJs for Kanye and Kid Sister... and everything is rolled up with Nick Catchdubs'  Fool's Gold record label. Serious taste makers. my Kid Sister playlist on iMeem.

Favorite albums of 2007

Most people rush to post their yearly top tens before the ball drops. I decided to let the year sit for a while before I passed judgment and immortalized my chart in the blogosphere for all 12 of my readers to "mark as read" :-) It was a great year for music. Here are my favorite albums in no particular order...

Burial - Untrue
For someone who grew up on drum&bass / jungle / 2step / UK garage this album resonated beyond its universal appeal. Its a beautiful, haunting, cold piece of music that reminds me of the pre-millennial drum and bass (Neuro Funk) I consider to be timeless.

Liars - Liars
A co-worker introduced me to these guys around 2002 and I have loved them ever since.  They are tremendously unique and completely strange at points. I recently saw them live for the first time and they put on a such a good live show it felt like I had forgotten what it was like to enjoy shows.

A-Trak - Dirty South Dance
2007 was the year of the re-edit, re-touch, re-work scene...  The post-mashup era powered by blogs and communities such as  maddecent, discobelle, fluokids, bigstereo, and the hollerboard. Places like this where overflowing with edit mp3s of everything you could imagine. Bedroom producers tweaking and editing songs, splicing them together in more precise and interesting ways than we had seen with mashups. My favorite output of this culture last year was the combination of "sound of the moment" french  electro-house and American pop hip hop. This can be a really terrible combination... but A-Trak managed  to put out a whole mix cd of his own edits that are still barely matched in terms of creativity and quality. There are a million fly by night bedroom editors out there. 95% of the edits are garbage... so this cd was a solid and welcome offering. I brought it back from SXSW2007 and my girlfriend and I burned it out within a few months. We can barely even listen to it anymore. So while it isn't timeless... it is a nice snapshot of the movement.

M.I.A. - Kala
I love her music, I love her style. I am really glad she didn't cave into the pressure of putting out anything too watered down or too accessible.

Les Savy Fav - Lets stay friends
Just a rock solid indie album. I hear these guys are amazing live and can't wait to catch them next time they are in San Francisco.

Yeasayer - All Hour Cymbals
This one went right passed me. I completely slept on it until I saw it popping up in a lot of top tens. Its a hard album to explain. It could be my number one for 2007, I just wish I had started listening to it when it came out.

Dungen - Tio Bitar
Psychedelic rockin swedes. This was on repeat during the drive to and from Cupertino while I played out my last months at Apple.

Klaxons - Myths Of The Near Future
What an odd development that whole neu-rave thing was in 2007, eh? While it got uncool before anyone could even blink I don't think it went away. I chalk it up to being a big pent-up release of something that had been bubbling for a while... the shining icon being the Kanye/Daftpunk combo. Everyone kinda wanted to rave and listen to hip hop at the same time. Timbaland's Way I Are is another good example. The boundaries between "sounds" and cultures are finally starting to really go away. Its cool to see kids who grew up on rave culture, metal, and hip hop doing there thing. And its cool to see a culture that has its roots in something (Detroit Techno) that was once dissed by people like Jeru being embraced by contemporary hip hop artists.

My Sister Klaus - Chateau Rouge
Bluesy, psychedelic, industrial, indie rock produced by my favorite man in electronic music... Joakim. And released on one of my favorite record labels Tigersushi. This is one bad-ass underrated album.

The Rakes - Ten New Messages
I am a sucker for a good pop tune and these guys wrote a bunch of good ones for this album. Definitely my favorite popy brit indie rock album of 2007.

Band of Horses - Cease to begin
I don't care if they had a song in a big tv commercial. This is a beautiful album. I loved their first one and I love this one too.

TomBoy - Serious
Disco-electro-funk from the guy who runs Gomma records and is one half of WhoMadeWho.

Alex Gopher - Alex Gopher
God this album is good. Where was this guy for the past 6 years? Obviously busy DJing, doing side projects and making 12"s.  Its like a really well crafted indie rock album by someone who has been absolutely marinating in European electronic music culture for decades... wait it's not like that, it IS that.

Chromatics - Night Drive
I love "disco noir" ... Gina X.. all that  weird European new wave and italo stuff from the late 70s and early 80s. That sound is definitely being channeled by a lot of people right now. Some overtly, like Glass Candy, and some a little more subtly... like this album from the Chromatics.

Deadbeat - Journeyman's Annual
The minimal/glitch thing burned bright for a short period of time.... Deadbeat is one of my favorite artist that emerged from the genre (amongst other people like Vladislav Delay). Deadbeat I enjoy particularly for his Dub influence.

The Field - From here we go sublime
I love minimal techno. But there have been times over the past 5 years where I have loved it much more than I do now. Lately i have had trouble connecting with it. Especially in album form. So when my non-techno friend Dan started telling my about this "Field" album that everyone was yapping about on their end of the year top tens I was kinda skeptical. I finally got around to listening to it and couldn't believe I had missed it. Especially since it was on one of my favorite labels, Kompakt. Another huge sleeper for me that I ended up loving.

Issuu

Having been messing with Issuu for a bit now. It is a web based PDF viewer with a really nice interface. And like all good apps these days I can embed the PDFs anywhere. For those people reading in RSS and unable to see the flash embed here is a link. Be sure to hit the "open publication" button on the widget and check out the browsing UI. Try out the grid mode too.

I am going to play around with using issue for magazines and PDF based manuals. Hell, maybe even presenting story boards and wireframes.

Building community, thoughts, patterns and best practices part 2

I recently came across a talk from the end of 2006 by Jyri Engstrom (the founder of Jaiku) about "Growing networks around social objects" (Bokardo with the tip off). I really like the language Jyri uses to talk about the social web.  His post about object centered sociality is wonderful. The following points and paraphrases are from a talk Jyri gave at Microsoft.

Growing Networks around social objects by Jyri Engstrom

1. Define your object

how can people act on the object

2. Define your verbs

peramalink objects
embeds/widgets to make users objects portable
share actual files

4. Turn invitations into gifts

paypal sign up a friend $10 bonus
skype sign up friend for free calls

5.  charge the publishers not the spectators

"freemium business model"

This post is part 2 of a series that collects peoples thoughts on designing and building communities on the social web. Part 1, Part 2. I collect the key concepts from the series in a mindmap on mindmesiter (Click and drag to move around).

The straight talk

Last night at dinner I rattled off a few sentences and after they came out of my mouth I felt like I had just spoke different language. Geek speak, tech talk, jargon, buzz words, whatever you want to call it. I realized that only a small percentage of people who have their noise (and feed readers) glued to the same blogs would have understood what the hell I was trying to say. Its not that what I was saying was over their heads, but that I had chosen words, phrases and references that only held meaning to certain people. Its great to specialize. But if your job involves talking to non-specialized people about your subject matter of expertise you need to be able to put it in plain speak. I don't mean dumbing it down, I don't mean glossing over important points, but rather finding ways to communicate the key concepts without relying on the lingual shortcuts your community has created to talk about the work you are soo passionate about. If you don't watch it, you may find yourself sounding like a Star Trek fanboy inserting the Klingon language into inside jokes about honor. That would not be good. I need to work on my straight talk.

EveryBlock. Hyper local data visualized with style

My friend Wilson and some of his cohorts launched a new local data service call EveryBlock. The app is beautifully designed and rather fun to play with. It visualizes the local data it collects in simple, interesting, and meaningful ways.  According to the home page it is "The easiest way to keep track of what’s happening on your block, in your neighborhood and all over your city." Currently it works in NYC, Chicago and San Francisco. The screen shot bellow shows all the recently collected data in my zipcod. Looks someone lost a pentax digital camera in the western addition. Good luck with that!

Other cool things every block can do....

• Recent crimes in San Francisco
• Restaurant inspections by score range (here are some ugly ones)
• Zoning agendas in my office's neighborhood

Congrats Wilson and team!

Using the product is the new sign-up process

We are all sick of signing up for new services on the web, and a lot of times we don't even end up using the services we sign-up for. For designers the sign-up process is something that needs to be constantly run through the gauntlet. Old patterns and practices need to be re-thought or tossed out. Pitching the service on the homepage in hopes that someone decides to sign up is outdated. When possible, registration needs to be one side effect of a positive experience with the service, not a pre-requisite for use. Picnik is an example of a service that gets everything right with it's sign up experience.

1. Barely a few clicks in Picnik exposes the user to the main verbs. You can upload, edit, share and save photos without even creating an account. The main push of the site when you first visit it is to get you playing with its features.
   
2. Picnik allows the user to play with their content before committing to creating an account. Watching demo videos or using stock content before signing up is like buying a car without driving it... you better be sure you want it. Allowing a user to bring their content to the table makes the experience more personal and meaningful.
   
3. When its time to register Picnik only asks for 3 things, an email, a user name and a password. The registration form overlayed in a small window and barely interrupts the process of using the app, totally fluid.
   

Registration should be the side effect of a positive user experience with a service.

The sum of these three points is proof of personal value. We have to prove to potential users that our service is going to work for them and with them... they don't want a layer of bullshit to sift through before they get to the core of the decision. Good services shouldn't need demonstration videos, or marketing pitches. Get the user in and playing with the product with as few barriers to entry as possible. Forcing users to sign up for your service will get your registered users up but you might find your user base with more dead accounts than you care for down the road. While you are playing with Picnik at any point you can elect to register and effectively save what you have created in front of you. The proof of personal value should be right in front of the users face, and they should have had a part in proving it.

If customer service is the new marketing, then using the service for the first time is the new sign-up process.

So the recipe is provide the user with the means to prove personal value by first exposing the key verbs, secondly allowing the them play with their own data/content, and third, enabling registration at any point in their experience with minimal interruption.

A friend's design project

My good bud Arlo from KNI finished his bike project recently and has finally put a photo of it on flickr. The paint job is totally custom and looks great. I love seeing people with design chops building up bikes. Love the component color scheme and cadence sticker. Its that kind of passion that makes for good conversations.