.oO Tailwind

Yay! I remembered to share some more links with you this week. This could become a Friday habit (okay, technically it’s Thursday evening here) but I’m promising nothing. You hear me? Nothing!

Award winning Honda TV advert ripped off and applied to a website. I think I actually HATE this.

Playing football with binoculars on. Funny. Want to play.

Ever wondered how much space in our transport network is lost through choice of vehicle..? No..? Are you kidding me? Well check this image showing the amount of space required to transport the same amount of people by bus, bike or car.

Some haunting images from the day before. This is why I love photography and why I hate post production photo-engineering. I’ll argue with anyone that photography is about capture (though ‘capture’ may be interpreted).

This is what I hate about manipulated photography. It should be on the bedroom wall of a stoner student.

More photography, but this one feels personal, old and from a bygone era.

Need some new business cards, don’t be lame and print on card, try some of these. I wish we had, ours are rubbish. The divorce one is quite sweet and I like the one with a seed embedded within it.

I’m sure you’ve seen this transparent screen trick, I still like it. the effort people go to is amazing.

Move your mouse about and feel sick and disorientated. Wicked.

What’s your favourite keyboard shortcut? I wish I could ‘Apple-Z’ sometimes in life.

Amazon’s new eBook device the ‘Kindle’ was released this week.

I find this an interesting one.

It was very well covered yesterday on lots and lots of blogs with pretty much everyone saying it’s rubbish. The 400 or so reviews on the Amazon page are largely negative too, this is an interesting point in itself for Amazon.

Here is a video of the out-of-box experience as captured by Robert Scobble:

The packaging looks okay, quite cute for it to come in a ‘book’.

Here is a video of using it and experiencing some issues

I was watching the Amazon demo thinking things like ‘Wouldn’t it be good if you could look-up words as you read. Oh, it does’, ‘Wouldn’t it be good if it wasn’t based on wi-fi hotspots. Oh, it isn’t.’ And so on…

Featurewise, it’s quite nice. It ticks a few boxes and for this reason Amazon will shift a few I’m sure.

Then I thought about the product design and decided that it’s a lame dog. It has some weird, flimsy, asymmetrical form that looks a little like James Bond’s underwater Lotus Esprit.. A little 80s.

Kindle

Lotus Esprit

The interaction looks far too complicated and it smacks of ‘get it to market quick’. It could have been soooooo much better, so much more desirable, so much easier to use. Also it seems that the interaction itself is awkward, scrolling up and down aligning a little cursor with menu commands rather than selecting them.

However I am a fan of the electronic paper screen, it’s just a shame it couldn’t be tough screen, but then that would defeat the point right?

But this isn’t the problem I se with this device.

My main reasons this won’t be the ‘next big thing’

• People love books. A bookshelf says a million things about its owner and people love the tactility of paper, the romance of curling up under a reading lamp in a comfy chair and losing themselves.

  The books we read represent us in some way, they have ‘self-expressive benefits’ to quote ‘Aaker’. To have read, own and display works by Shakespeare, Brontë and Dickens says something about the individual. The collection of books one has says something about the owner. Why else would we all have bookshelves? Okay, so they are practical, but they could easily be hidden.

  The same goes for newspapers. It brands an individual to be seen reading the FT, The Independent, The Guardian, The Sun, The Daily Mirror.

• It has DRM and apparently spies on you . Has Amazon learned nothing? You can’t ‘lend’ books. PEOPLE LOVE LENDING BOOKS!
• The product design sucks and the interaction is a little fussy. Before iPod, listening to music, changing track, albums and artists etc was a little less-than-slick. iPod made it slick. The Kindle flashes as you do things. HOW ANNOYING! This is not slick. It’s slow.

  You have to pay for blogs if you download them but can browse them in the web browser for free. Weird.

• People don’t consume books like they do music. With music you flit between things. The Kindle can’t ‘do an iPod’ which changed the way we listened to music. It broke the CD model. The Kindle has nothing to break, no stranglehold to release.
• People don’t want another device in their bag. “Keys check, wallet check, phone check, blackberry check, laptop check, kindle…? Sod it I have my phone/blackberry/laptop”

The name Kindle is rubbish.

It’s exciting because:

• It’s a very cheap mobile bookshop
• The screen is a great step forward
• It has the potential to change the way [some] people read

Sure some will fly of the shelves, but at $400 it’s simply too much for £50 man. People will offset the amount of books they read and think it’s not worth it.

It appeal to the niche. The tech geeks, the academics but it won’t light the fire for my younger brother. As one reviewers says:

“If you travel a lot, or require rapid and accurate access to references (as I do), the Kindle is definitely soon to be a necessity. I am a medical student, and I loaded an entire medical library onto the one I’ve been beta testing”

Having said all this, I might get one… For research purposes of course.

London Waterloo Says Goodbye to Le TrainOriginally uploaded by Snowbadger

I blogged this a while back, March this year in-fact, but it’s finally happened.It shut after 13 years and 81 million travellers.Blimey! Is it really 13 years since it opened? I remember it happening when I was just starting University.Waterloo has given it’s International train route over to St Pancras with the promise of 186 mph speeds.Imagine doing 186 mph through Kent en-route to the Chunnel. That must be amazing, I can’t wait to have a go.I’ve travelled via Eurostar a helluvalot over the last 2-3 years as I’ve been working with the lovely people at Orange and France Telecom, and I have to say I am a big fan.It’s so much less stressful than flying. You leave the centre of London and arrive in the centre of Paris.No queuing, no security, no fuss.Anyway, here’s a picture of the now closed Waterloo terminal.Why do they insist on calling the place you depart and arrive a terminal? It’s not nice, particularly if flying, people are already edgy.

My friend Fosta does his weekly ‘Webwatch‘ which is always nice to peruse should you happen to find yourself 15 minutes free.

I myself stray upon lot of nice things, but always forget to log them for you, so here’s this weeks batch and I’ll see if I can be a regular and dedicated as Nick.

Get some money, make some shapes, prefeably animals. hey presto! Moneygami.

One of those images that you just stop and stare at for a while.

Sometimes companies ‘update’ their identities and it can be quite subtle, sometimes good, sometimes bad.

Also check out this video about the wonderful AT&T identity crisis. It made me chuckle.

Apparently, the only clock you’ll ever need. Except I finish at 6 p.m. so it’s just pure torture for me.

Some quite nice photographs of neglected architecture. I photographic project I’d considered starting myself.

I’m a sucker for lists of things. Love ‘em. Here is a list of top 100 Apple applications. How many do you have?

Bored of Microsoft Office? Want a web solution? Try Zoho and work online. Write docs, spreadsheets, presentations, plan meetings, notes, reports, project manage, chat wiki, mail your heart away.

In American high-schools, they love a good drum solo. When people are good with instruments it always makes me feel a little lame. Same with languages really.

DAMN YOU IMEEM.

DAMN YOU.

YOU TRICKED ME!

I recently set-up an account on Imeem for exploratory and research purposes and the process arrived at that ‘enter you Gmail address and we’ll see if there are any of your contact already n this site’ moments.

Except it wasn’t.

It was one of those ‘We’re being very sneaky and are going to send an invite to each and every one of your 400+ contacts, many of whom are clients that you haven’t spoken to for a while’ moments.

ARGGGHHHHHHH!

If you received an invite to Imeem on my behalf, I apologise.

I’ll review Imeem later, but they are not in my good books.

This is fun, done by Poke for Orange.

I think it was Poke. So I’m told.

Orange’s never ending web page.

Orange have been one of my clients for a few years and when something like this goes live it reminds me why, as a brand I love it.

Good stuff Pokesters. This is fun.

Technorati Tags:
orange, telco

Whilst eating some toast this morning I caught a report on BBC 1 suggesting that we’re not hugging enough. We’re not extending human contact in the form of hugging kissing and touching and we are failing to receive our RDHI (Recommended Daily Hugging Intake).

(Sorry I can’t find a story to link to on the BBC website).

Psychologists behind the report suggest that we are relying far too heavily on non-human-touch methods of communication such as texting, email and ‘pokes’. Hugging makes you happy.

I’ve been arguing for a while that humans require real, genuine and tangible value when it comes to their relationships with other humans and that social networks as they currently stand, fail to satisfy our long-term human needs because they are limited to facilitate only synthetic relationships.

Look at your Facebook account. How many ‘friends’ do you have?

Are you one of those people who accepts every invitation through fear of offence? Or are you one that only accepts invitations from people they actually, really and still know?

Do you consider tenuous links with colleagues you are simply ‘aware’ of? Or do you keep it focussed down into people you actually know? People you are actually friends with?

Social networks tap into out latent need to belong, to be part of a community and to be recognised. They provide us with recognition and allow us to say “I am here and I belong”.

It’s a Maslow thing.

But over a long period of time social networks will fail to deliver real value in the form of tangible, off-line and physical benefit unless they evolve into real space. Doing something, actually being there together, in real terms.

A search on the BBC website reveals this:

A hug is, first of all, a form of non-verbal communication. It brings people together in a feeling of mutual love, comfort and safety. Research suggests that everyone needs physical contact to survive, especially infants. Hugging is an act of giving and receiving support, moral and physical, and love

BBC - Guide to Hugging

Loving the ‘Huggers’, ‘Huger’ and ‘Hugee’ references there.

Great digital ’start-ups’ such as Facebook, MySpace and Last.FM could just be limited by their lack of real physical space and I wonder if this is something they’ll need to evolve in order to survive?

It’s all very well having ‘friends’ on these sites and receiving witty pokes, funwall messages and music recommendations, but I can’t engage with them on a “so how are you doing?” basis. I can’t really and truly care.

I personally have noticed some of my more distant friendships relying on Facebook to stay in touch. We poke, message and send things to each other whereas before we’d phone.

That’s rubbish. I’m changing it. By using Facebook to message each other we’re saying that we don’t really care.

I’ve also observed some friends and family resolving sticky issues via email, text or by writing a message to someone’s Facebook inbox. How sad is that? Complete avoidance of true, emotional disscusion.

What is that doing to society?

I guess in the old days we used to write letters but I don’t consider that the same thing. Letters unlike email/text etc, take time. They take effort and flow from the end of your pen in an emotional, stream of consciousness kind of way.

Email is synthetic, easy and impersonal.

We all know that teenagers don’t use it.

Emoticons were invented to try and bridge this emotionless communication. ] :p :s =|

(My blog tool has probably ‘emoticonned’ some of those).

I remember back in 1996, when I started using IRC (internet Relay Chat) in the form of Foothills and Resort, we communicated using a telnet window using text only using the ‘emote’ command to show emotion.

Warren> Emote is happy.

‘Warren is happy.’

Fundamentally, even though the technology has evolved the need hasn’t changed and the need hasn’t be fulfilled.

When we are born and as babies we learn primitive methods of communication such as touch and hugging. But as we progress to our teenage years the level of non-family touch drops away considerably.

I don’t know about you but on a personal level I’m getting bored of social networks. On a professional level I’m still enjoying the challenges of seeding a community and designing tools for them, but I have to say, I’m not really seeing any great value.

I could talk about Twitter here, but that’s for another day. this post is already too long, if you got this far, well done and thanks.

As I write this post I can’t help but laugh at the fact that next to me on the train into London, there is a couple smooching, kissing ad making lip-smaking noises, cooing and warbling together like teenagers.

They are in their late thirties and it’s irritating the hell out of me!
xx

Image credits: Dina_Mehta

Technorati Tags:
social networks, community, backlash, behaviours, emotion

I always laugh at those people who walk round with bluetooth earpieces in.

Seriously, what do they think they look like? They look like they are either on the brink of a major ‘Orange Juice for Pork Bellies‘ deal like some ‘in-the-know’ city trader or like a special service sercurity operative.

If you do this, can I ask you to just stop.

By all means use handsfree, jut don’t walk around with it hanging off of your head. You won’t miss a call.

Which brings me to look at my own behaviour and FOMO (fear of missing out) syndrome.

On my desktop I currently have my chat client open (MSN, GTalk, Yahoo, ICQ), Skype, Mac Mail, Entourage, Twitteriffic an my browser. My browser always seems to have Facebook, Last.fm and Flickr open.

In my bag I carry my Mac, iPod, mobile phone, Blackberry, latest edition of Monocle magazine, some Design Council magazines and two books (currently Sketching User Experiences by Bill Buxton and Zag by Marty Nuemeier).

I realised the other day that I find it impossible to be doing nothing. Sat on a train without a laptop cause me to turn to my blackberry to read my blogs. If my iPod battery runs out (which it shouldn’t do now since I replaced it), I have music on my phone.

I realised I’m constantly in a state of alt+tab, fast switching between states, modes and channels. So much so that when I find my self without any of my ‘kit’ I feel exposed. I look for a paper. I can’t just sit there and look out of the window.

However, all this said, when I go away from London I find it really easy to switch off. But I just find it interesting that I associate the corridor of activity between my home and work with being busy, doing something.

Must go…

I need to Twitter. People neeeeeed to know that I’m on the train.

Rock legends, The Who are the latest artist to jump on the new music model bandwagon asking fans to exchange for $50 of their hard earned cashola in exchange for access to streaming video, music, messages etc.

I’m sure that there is more to it than this as I’m sure any die-hard Who fan already has much of the back catalogue and wil therefore be sniffing around for unseen exclusives. I’d expect there to be a range of previously unreleased, cutting room floor type content available.

Also, Starbucks’ record label Hear Music have signed their first new artist and will be selling the wares of Hilary McRae alongide crooners such as Paul McCartney, Joni Mitchel and James Taylor. For me, this line-up is starting to say omething about their coffee and I wonder jut how much affect, long-term, this is going to ave of coffee punters.

Imagine they were signing a load of heavy metal artists, surely if you knew that you’d be going elsewhere for your caffeine fix?

Incidentlly, I’m off the coffee for the whole of November. It’s amazing how just after 1 day of cuttig out the black stuff, I started feeling really sluggish and had mild headaches.

Though I didn’t stop purely because I can’t stan te sight of Macca McCartney’s face beaming up at me from the counter in Starbucks.