All the social networks I’m on. The list was getting too long to keep it on a sidebar anymore, so it’s getting its own dedicated page.
[Link deprecated – http://www.iconbuffet.com/] Me on Icon Buffet
[Link deprecated – http://www.facebook.com] Me on Facebook
[Link deprecated – http://www.myspace.com/] Me on MySpace
[Link deprecated – http://www.youtube.com/] Me on YouTube
[Link deprecated – http://twitter.com/] Me on Twitter
Shorter review: Simple, and seemingly frivolous web communication tool. But I can see it really working as a fun, handy IM/mobile texting tool for my friends, if I can only herd all of them onto it.
What Twitter is: It’s a really simple, public blog. You post short (less than 140 characters) messages about what you’re doing right now. The messages display on the site, and get sent to your friends, via the web, IM and text messages – whichever they’ve set up. You can send messages to twitter from you mobile phone or IM.
Anil Dash put it much better back in February:
Twitter is a simple service that lets you send simple status update messages to your friends via SMS, IM, or a very basic web interface. Those messages are then sent to everyone who follows your updates, using any of the communications methods available. Simply put, it’s a buddy list or reply-to-all form of group communication for media which didn’t really have them. And Twitter lowers the threshold of participation to being just a straightforward prompted text area.
I discovered Twitter about 3 months ago, and even had a little twitter blurb on my site for a while. Since SXSW I’ve been on frequently and have a number of people I keep up with on the service. Twitter was a huge deal at SXSW – they had giant screens set up in the hallways and people would post little messages about what they were doing/thinking in the panels they attended, where they were going for lunch, etc.
That was pretty frivolous. It’s the mobile aspect that I really find intriguing. I want to be able to text my friends quickly and easily, all at once, to let them know what I’m up to. It would be great for spontaneous weekend activities – “we’re going to go to the zoo this afternoon – join us at 2:00!”
Friends I’d like to get set up on Twitter:
Stephanie (of course)
Dan
Douglas
Amy (although that could be dangerous; she’d twitter all day long)
JonwithTyres
MJ
My sister – how could I forget her on this list? I miss her a lot.
Cate
Anyway, here is me on Twitter.
Design Aesthetic of the Indie Developer
Moderator: Michael Lopp, Sr Engineering Mgr – Apple
Nick Bradbury, Architect of Client Prods – NewsGator Technologies Inc
John Gruber, Raconteur – Daring Fireball
Shaun Inman, Designer/Dev – haveamint.com
Michael Lopp, Sr Engineering Mgr – Apple
Rough Notes:
The panel ended up being more about how independent designer/developers work, rather than their design aesthetic – interesting, but not really terribly applicable to me…
indie developers are where the bleeding edge happens. What developer means – changied over time – blurring relationship between designers and developers.
The death of the startup – no longer interested in the IPO – not the driving philosophy. Level playing field for mind share and distribution.
It’s a small world – very easy to find what you need –
pxg site – recruiting tool
Defining design –
– great design speaks to you; it has something to say – the ipod giggle.
– hard to do great design – throwing away 80% of ideas
What are the lessons/rules we can learn from indie developers
Indie – what does it mean?
– not necessarily small; people who are designing for the user rather than the company
– building for themselves
Products are a personal obsession
Inman – Results of a conversation either with people who want the product or people using after it’s built.
Gruber design process starts on paper – new notebook.
Inman – starts with research and learning.
Bradbury – build things twice – write some code, throw it away after learning about it, then start from the beginning.
when he gets stuck – he blogs about the project, and gets feedback that helps him work it out.
Gruber – looks at IM buddy list for help.
Inman – group of friends that give him good feedback and aren’t afraid to tell him when something doesn’t work.
Inman & Gruber – no experience working for a big corp. Bradbury – consultant, which made him want to be independent. because of the filter between himself and the user.
Listen to more fans or haters? – the haters.
Example bands that play live – immediate feedback.
lots of discussion of running an independent shop.
One of the first things I plan to do is take a closer look at Microformats and see where I can mark up my site appropriately. While I was sitting in the panel, I downloaded the firefox operator extension, and I’ve been playing with it.
I also want to get OpenID set up on this site so I can use this as the basis for my authentication elsewhere. There are movable type plug ins I need to install. I want to do some research on some of the other identity websites mentioned in the identity panel.
I need to do some basic layout exercises for this site using Grids – I haven’t quite got that right, and I need to work on it. I also need to set up a grids layout template for sites I’m designing at work.
The second thing I want to do is look more closely at design pattern libraries. We’ve been looking at Yahoo’s Pattern Libraries and using them at work, but I want to understand more about some of the others from that presentation.
I also want to get look more closely at Brendan Dawes work, and start my own version of the book or Dawes’ hard drive. I certainly have projects and ideas like those hanging around, and I hope putting them all in the same place and looking them over will spark some creative ideas.
I want to take a look at some of the techniques that other designers use to get inspired, and see if they help me.
I want to take a close look at some of the sites from the online magazines panel and see if they can inspire me for our redesign of indyscribe.
I want to plan and work on a fictional blogging project, and take a look at some of the sites that panel discussed as part of the planning.
Twitter is a strange little social network application that lets you give short bulletins of what you’re doing right now. You can update via text message or Instant Messenger, as well as online. You can link to your friends to see what they’re doing, and you can use the built in RSS feeds to keep up with everyone. That’s all it does. For some reason, it’s a hot new thing to do for several of the big name bloggers, though, who’ve written articles about it, so I was intrigued.
So here’s my profile. If you’re already on, let me know. If you get on, let me know. I just want to see what all the buzz is about.
I now have 16,9903 people in my personal network. I’m sure this has something to do with the fact that Willy Wonka added me to his friends. Everyone is friends with Willy, because as Sammy says, he makes a groovy lemon pie.
2019 update: Ah, those halcyon days when social media was a toy we could play with and not a tool that would destroy democracy.