.oO Tailwind

By Warren Hutchinson

Hot on the heels of my posting about Multimap being honored at the Webby Awards in the Service category comes some great news that a new feature-set has been implmented.

Those that have watched closely would have been expecting this due to the recent acquisition of Multimap by Microsoft.

But ah-ha, it’s not all MS integration stuff.

First up, Improved mapping functionality with Microsoft’s ‘Birds-Eye View’. While I wasn’t a great fan of Microsoft’s mapping solution, I did quite like the idea of the Birds-Eye view, a 3/4 isometric view from above.

It definitely taps into that ‘thing’ that makes looking at maps quite addictive and for me is a nice step ahead of Google Earth in terms of flying about. GE is slightly limited (unless you use the 3D buildings) at providing a decent non-distorted angled view.

Also note the Wikipedia view, overlaying information from Wikipedia that has a geospatial reference.

I find this sort of view really useful when it comes to looking at directions to a place that I have never visited. Mostly as a way on envisioning the route before I drive it. Overhead view is useful for orientation and proximity purposes, but it doesn’t really look like the real thing. Only the other day I sat down with my father to ‘fly’ him through some directions on GE.

I’d like to see Bird-Eye View fly-thoughs added to Multimap Directions at some time. I think Map24 has some sort of solution for this. Yes you can switch on Birds-Eye when in View Map mode of the Directions service. But it’s not a prime feature.

I should quickly add that Multimap’s Birds-Eye Vie isn’t available for all locations, just “major cities”. Although my town is covered and I live out in the proverbial ’sticks’.

In this new release they have also improved the directions functionality with better, more coherent step representation for journeys. When I played with it yesterday, the map view wasn’t quite working as the site was obviously rolling out across the servers. But it looks promising indeed.

And lastly, exacerbating the blur between location based services and directory services, Multimap now has Business Listings. The Multimap communications said:

Now you can use our maps to find businesses in your area - or your destination. We’ve got details of everyone from accountants to woodworkers in the UK, US, Canada, France and Italy - with other countries coming soon.

For those ardent lovers and web 1.0 stalwarts, the old site has finally gone. but don’t fret. If interactive maps really aren’t your thing or you are on dial-up or have an old system then you’ll be happy with the introduction of ‘Basic Site’ functionality. Essentially a rasterised map offering with some new features, but optimised for more basic delivery.

I like the way Multimap have retained this as important. When we at LBi first engaged with them, Sean (Founder), Eric (CTO) and Jeff (CEO) were all fairly adamant from the get-go that ALL users were important.

Anyway, there you go. Have a play and switch your favourite mapping service over to Multimap.

BTW - I do have integrity and this isn’t a shameless plug for LBi work. I firmly think that this is the better browser based mapping solution out there at the moment.

Nearly 2 years ago here at LBi, we started working with Multimap to redesign their public .com web property.

It was time for their loved, but ageing raster-map offering to be dragged inline with, then new and innovative, Google’s ’slippy’ Maps.

With a raft of new features including drag, zoom, pan, hybrid view,all stuff we take for granted now, we set about defining a sharpened mapping proposition that worked for both Multimap users and advertisers.

It was a brilliant project, great fun, hard work and really quite challenging. The guys at Multimap (which sold to Microsoft in December last year) were all smart cookies and pleasure to work with. Personally I see it as one of the triumphs of the team I work in here at LBi. Not only was it great solution, it was a great learning experience and those two things make for great projects. Certainly satisfactory ones.

Stephen Barber was, and still is, ace on this project. Will Bloor was his usual unremitting creative self, Peter Jupp smashed the design and Mike McIntyre and Gavin Edwards aced some complex interaction and James Norton provided some wonderful interface development. It was also a pleasure to see Lorenzo in action, which doesn’t happen nearly enough for some of us here at LBi.

Well, enough spouting from me. Multimap.com has just been named as an Honoree in the Service category at this years Webby awards.

This is no mean feat as only the best 15% of submissions attain the accolade and this from a pot of nearly 10,000 entries received from all 50 US states and over 60 countries.

Multimap is now owned by Microsoft, so expect to start using it a lot more as it integrates into all their properties. Exciting stuff indeed.

The guys I worked with on this project were:

• Stephen Barber
• Will Bloor
• Peter Jupp
• Mike Mcintyre
• Dave Dunlop
• Lorenzo Wood
• Darren Gerry
• Gavin Edwards
• Phil WHitehouse
• James Norton
• Marcus Alexander
• Suzanne Chapman
• Claire Freund

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.

I just received an email from PayPal telling me that “We’ve made PayPal easier to use – just our way of saying thanks for choosing us.”

Thanks for that.

Couldn’t you put more effort into your shockingly bad password retrieval process. It sucks and I always have to use it when I’m in the throws of a closing eBay auction.

We’ve known about Shozu for a while now and have been using it to publish photos directly onto Flickr albeit not knowing how much it costs each time due to lack of transparency on the part of the networks. either way, we still keep playing because we love it.

I think that I was so enthralled that I could just get photos from my phone directly to Flickr (or whatever) that I didn’t really dive in to the other things that it can do. This post is a reminder, Shozu rocks on many fronts.

Shozu can upload images or video from your phone to any appropriate web service via API. It collects and remembers all your relevant user IDs for you and will act as a conduit between your phone and whatever service you like including Flickr, WordPress, Typepad, Blogger, Vox, LiveJournal, You Tube and a whole bunch more besides. Best if all it is free.

Apparently you can also hook it up to the BBC or CNN if you happen to be (un)fortunate enough to find yourself in a spot for some citizen journalism. Of course this requires foresight on the part of the user, but still very cool all the same.

Shozu Using Captcha

Originally uploaded by Snowbadger.

The only downside is that while networks continue to avoid allowing customers a flat fee per month, data charges lack transparency and are expensive and sending your 3 minute video clip to You Tube might cost you a few quid. Also, I’m not sure how you apply Creative Commons to these artifacts as you pass them to the likes of the BBC or CNN…?

Getting Shozu onto your phone is a little bit of a bind as I need the website to do so. It’s a shame that they didn’t make it easy to download via wap in my opinion but hey ho.

I’m currently sporting a Sony Ericsson w810i which is connected to the Orange network here in the UK so I have to go to Shozu’s website tell them my details and have the application delivered to my handset via wap-push. Of course, there is once again a leap of faith on your part, not knowing how much the download is going too cost. But in the interests of science, you’ll just plough on wondering what 267kb actually costs.

Still, all this is very nice but from a UX point of view it’s all a bit clunky. Any pictures I upload still require tagging, sorting, possibly even geotagging if I’m so inclined and the best place to do that is on the web.

Well, the new GPS enabled Nokias, see the N95, allow you to deal with one of those things as it’s now possible to autotag assets with geodata accurate to within 10m.

Yay, that’s meaningful to my Gran.

Apparently you have to run an app to unlock the functionality but the new version of Shozu will have a set-up function to do this for you. Aren’t they nice?

Anyway. This was just a reminder, I’m now off to start blindly sending images and video via Shozu to WordPress, Vox and You Tube.

I wonder how much it will all cost?

I was just re-downloading Shozu to my phone so that I can send images directly to Flickr, video to You Tube and other stuff to my blog on WordPress when I was presented with the following madness:

Shozu Using Captcha

Originally uploaded by Snowbadger.

Captcha is not the most accessible of form validation, bot-destroying nonsense in any form, but this use of hieroglyphics astounded me. I have the feeling that anyone with dyslexia would be sent into a tailspin. It certainly made me think.

The best solution I ever heard of was the use of a field that users wouldn’t see and bots would, bots would fill it in and thus render the form submission invalid – I can’t remember where I saw this though.

Have you seen the new AOL homepage? It look svery similar to the Yahoo! one.

One wonders how they can get away with this sort of thing. i mean there are design patterns and there is 100% rip-off. It even looks as if the grids are pixel perfect.

Wow.

10 things to ring my bell this week.

1. See how much of a cliché you are
2. Cool panoramic of Paris by night.
3. New easy to read wine labels from Wine That Loves…
4. Bruce Mau’s ‘Incomplete Manifesto for Change’ - A list to make you ‘do’ differently not just ‘think’ differently (Via Brand Autopsy)
5. Sing n search, you sing it, it will find it (provided you have a decent mic built in that is)
6. Record last.fm and other stations if you have a PC
7. Gmail keyboard shortcuts Improve productivity with Gmail, some secret delete shortcuts in here.

Twitterlinks:

1. Twitthis Tell people via Twitter about a blog or posting.
2. Twitterbuzz See what ‘Twits’ are linking to.
3. Celebrity Twitter Follow the lives of your fav celbs on Twitter. Yaaaawn.

Continue reading ‘Tailwind Lazy Links 2′

I saw this post charting the growth of Twitter. Will it stay? Will it go? I don’t know, but it’s interesting nonetheless.

The same post also has link to an interesting article on why Twitter isn’t so good.

More stuff to read.

Blogged with Flock

CPC has been the mainstay of ad revenue for some time now. Ads are displayed alongside relevant content be-it a search results page or something else and the advertiser pays a fee every time someone clicks their ad.

Simple, but cheatable.

It’s open to mistreatment, largely by an advertisers competitor. Because they can click the ads and cost the competitor advertiser for ghost queries or click fraud as it’s been called.

Pay-Per-Action is a clever evolution of this that should prevent click fraud as it’s not so easy to spoof. It will only cost the advertiser if the user visits their site and they carry out another action. This action needs to be the completion of a key goal such as buying something, registering for something or downloading something as to avoid further click fraud.

It’s nice, it’s simple to understand but will require some complex understanding of what advertisers want users to do. It’ll also help the smaller companies track ROI and may even get them to think about ‘goal based’ design for their own websites.

PPA and CPC will live together for sometime and due to there being a new link style for PPA, the two methods should be decipherable.

But, I spotted some slightly worrying news that Google are introducing a new format for these ads. Check out the FAQs. The new format allows advertisers to display up to 90 characters inline with page editorial so that they don’t look like ads at all, they look like hyperlinks. They will only reveal themselves as ads when rolled over and will be mixed in with the page content.

From the Google AdWords site:

“Text links are hyperlinked brief text descriptions that take on the characteristics of a publisher’s page. Publishers can place them in line with other text to better blend the ad and promote your product.”

Hmmm. I wonder what this will do to the integrity of link language…?

At the moment, despite the fact that others have been using this in-line link-ad approach before, the hyperlink is a trustworthy little device for users. I can see some clever copy-writing being used to suck people into sites that they don’t want to visit. As the PPA model works on further actions or goals being completed, I think we’ll see some frustrating uses of this.

I guess I need to see one before I can work tis one out.