Like it or not, Twitter is becoming Infrastructure

As usual, there were a large number of posts about Twitter this week. I am sure you already realized that I am going to add to this number as well. I have talked about Twitter as infrastructure before. I think it was fairly obvious with so many early adopters enamored with Twitter that it was going to be bigger than a normal startup. The important thing is that it sounds like Twitter itself feels the same way. In a quote from CNET, Jack Dorsey alluded to this: “I think Twitter’s a success for us when people stop talking about it, when we stop doing these panels and people just use it as a utility, use it like electricity,” said Dorsey, who was

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Ideo Redesigns the Icebreaker

One of my least favorite activities of all time is the icebreaker. You know how it goes: Throw together a bunch of people--six, eight, more than two is too many--and force them to tell each other something silly, secret, anything that will publicly humiliate in front of total strangers. Cue nervous laughter and clammy palms. But barely has the Skoll World Forum for Social Entrepreneurship begun and Ideo is already telling us: We have a better way. We're going to use design.

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How the Right RSS Viewer Can Keep You Productive

As a savvy productivity driven small business Internet marketer, there are certain tips that will help you easily get to information that will help you in your online marketing. Today’s tip has to do with an a neat RSS Viewer. RSS Explained for the Novice Small Business Internet Marketer Before we get into the nitty gritty, RSS, which is the acronym for Really Simple Syndication, is a web format used to publish frequently updated online content, such as on a blog (blog posts/entries), audio and video in a standardized format. An RSS document is called a feed (or web feed), which includes data that summarizes the publishing information and allows you to see full or summarized versions of text, audio or video on a blog.

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The Future of the Social Web: In Five Eras

Expect the Groundswell to continue, in which people connect to each other –rather than institutions. Consumer adoption of social networks is increasing a rapid pace,brands are adopting even during a recession,so expect the space to rapidly innovate to match this trend. Clients can access this report, but to summarize what we found, in the executive summary we state: Today’s social experience is disjointed because consumers have separate identities in each social network they visit. A simple set of technologies that enable a portable identity will soon empower consumers to bring their identities with them — transforming marketing, eCommerce, CRM, and advertising. IDs are just the beginning of this transformation, in which the Web will evolve step by step from separate social sites into a shared social experience. Consumers will rely on their peers as they make online decisions, whether or not brands choose to participate. Socially connected consumers will strengthen communities and shift power away from brands and CRM systems; eventually this will result in empowered communities defining the next generation of products.

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Is Information Visualisation the Next Frontier for Design?

As design work shifts to infrastructure and problem solving, sexy infographics are part of the new skill set. You've seen them. Those tag clouds in the right-hand column of Web sites with jumbled type of varying weight and size indicating the relative usage of words. Tag clouds may be the most common example of an emerging field known as "information visualization," an offshoot of graphic design devoted to the clear display of complex information. Executive pay in relation to shareholder returns. Senate voting patterns. The geographic location of cell phones. Similarities among rock albums. Graphic designers are mapping over the known world and posting their graphic interpretations on sites like Visual Complexity.

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