engine by eye d
Another presentation that has been around for a while but I have only just discovered (thanks to Dave Briggs) is Putting the Fun in Functional by Amy Jo Kim which I have found really interesting and useful.
I’m not a gamer in any shape or form, never really liked them, although I did enjoy elements of the Wii and have fond memories of Paperboy from way back when. That said I recognize the human behavior outlined in the ‘Game Mechanics’ of the presentation; 1) Collecting 2) Points and Levels 3) Feedback 4) Exchanges and 5) Customization. In fact I’m pretty guilty of all of them – especially Collecting for my sins (and my bank balances pain).
It has been an interesting experiment going back to look at the features of both Specializein and HTH in light of the concepts here and see how we have done. We do a pretty good job on embedding both the ideas of Points/Levels and Exchanges into the apps. In fact its not hard to argue that those elements are the foundation of what we have built. We are also building in some elements of Feedback as it seems to be defined within this presentation. This isn’t fully developed yet and could certainly do with a little more thought and evolution over time but it is not a bad start. Collecting and Customization have no parallels within either application at the moment nor in the product roadmap. Does this matter I find myself wondering. I’m loathe to add anymore features at the moment and while I can see a way of adding an element of Customization it isn’t really a road I want to travel down so I’m going to assume 3 out of 5 ain’t bad (in fact it is almost as good as Meatloaf!)
[photo is Creative Commons and was my favorite result for 'mechanics' from Compfight.com in case you were wondering]
new blog post: Four quick links – http://bit.ly/j8Vei
This presentation is over a year old but I have just discovered it via a link on the 4iP blog so Ewan has my sincere thanks as this is a great presentation. One of the things I do at Jiva (at least in theory) is write the copy for the apps. I struggle with this quite a bit as while I don’t have much trouble writing relatively coherently on my various blogs I do find it difficult to find the right tone for copy on applications and even more difficult to be consistent throughout them. For the most part I stick pretty closely to her guidelines just due to the fact I tend to look for inspiration at sites she recommends (and maybe worked on!) and I am particularly keen on one quote;
We aren’t writing, we are speaking in text
Enjoy the presentation;
[Nat Torkington on the O'Reilly blog regularly posts 'Four Quick Links' - a format that I have always liked - particularly as it would allow me to post a bit more often and share the many things I add to my shared items in Google Reader. Hopefully Nat won't mind me pinching his format!]
Flickr CC Attribution Helper Greasemonkey Script
http://cogdogblog.com/2009/05/17/flickr-cc-attribution-helper/
Alan Levine works for the New Media Consortium in the US (publishers of the Horizon Report amongst other interesting stuff). He has built a hugely useful tool for those of us who use the combination of Flickr and Creative Commons to brighten up our blogs but have to fiddle with sorting out the attribution details. Equally useful (for me anyway) is that he has given me a format for my attributions! I wonder if I could make this work for using in my Keynote/Powerpoint presentations?
On Aardvark Research
http://blog.vark.com/?p=74
Here at Jiva we are pretty interested in the work Aardvark are doing and have enjoyed having a play with it since we got our invites. This blog post is a really interesting insight into the process they have been through as far as using different research techniques in the development of their app. I’m not sure we ever think of it in such a formal manner but our research work broadly falls into the same three categories.
On Semantic Web: What it is, and what it will never be
http://mashable.com/2009/05/14/semantic-web/
A post on Mashable from Stan Schroeder that actually has little to do with the wider semantic web but does nicely articulate some of the problems with Wolfram Alpha and why its much vaunted ability for users to ask natural language queries means very little when you can get better results with simple queries in Google.
Jump into the stream
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/05/17/jump-into-the-stream/
Post from Eric Schonfeld on Techcruch (for what its worth I only really read Schonfeld now on Techcrunch, well apart from when Arrington kicks up some kind of furore!) This post is essentially a justification for the investment and hype around the concept of realtime streams. Its interesting stuff and their does certainly seem to have been a shift towards this concept in recent months. More and more sites seem to resemble a Twitter/Friendfeed/Facebook hybrid and it’ll be interesting to see if this continues.