Jared Spool, of User Interface Engineering, reported on research in progress. His company’s mission is to long term, improve quality of lives by elminiating frustrations of technology.
Describes Web 2.0 as…
- designing with total user experience
- combining users and content
- moves beyond traditional interface
- development/design teams shrinking (because teams are able to do more with less staff by adding onto the work of others)
A recent 37Signals survey asked users what Web 2.0 meant to them. The answer: AJAX, interactive, Rails.
Design tends to focus on three stages, or mutations:
- Talking horse stage, where people are building stuff with a technology focus.
- Adding features stage. Ex: Amazon adding features like blogging.
- Designing for experience stage; Web 2.0. Described as a backlash against too many features. Ex: Craigslist, where individual user experience trumps classic views of design
Components of Web 2.0
1. APIs
2. rss feeds
3. folksonomies/tagging
4. social networks
Web 2.0 is not user-created content. That has always been there. Web 2.0 is leveraging that user-created content.
Ex: Flickr
- Incidentally, flickr is #5 in popularity for photo sharing. Photobucket is top.
- Flickr uses a personalized homepage. Most users never see the generic, non-user home page after signing up.
- Flickr has a programming interface to create stuff (i.e. APIs)
- The Geotagging and printing tools were adopted after someone else (non-Flickr employee) did the development using the APIs.
1. APIs have their challenges. They make everyone a designer.
They can also create seamless experience with code from multiple sources.
- Example of mashup between Twitter and Google maps
- Took Twitter streams and mapped it with Google maps
- The result is randome overheard conversations from the streets of New York. Here's an example from today (4/26/07):
Old lady: This is a full sandwich. I said half sandwich.
Waiter: What's the big deal? I won't charge you for the whole thing -- just eat half.
Old lady: No, no, you don't understand -- I am claustrophobic.
- Yahoo providing the tools to create mashups with RSS feeds.
- Then, users offer those mashups to the public.
- Ex: UST Campus/Library/Community Flickr Associations, which finds Flickr images based on a University of St. Thomas news source, the same university's news blog, and a local news blog.
2. RSS feeds
Challenges include
- explaining them to users. When do things come and go? Is it refreshing for corrections? How do users subscribe?
- How do users deal with the number of feeds they track? (Google reader caps at 100 posts before it starts deleting)
3. Folksonomies
Challenges include
- How tagging is being used. For instance, are tags for “me” and “hi_you_what’s_up?" useful to anyone else?
- Difficulty in figuring out logic behind someone else’s tag
- Are you tagging for yourself or for others?
- Do we monitor? Who? How?
4. Social networking
Ex: Netflix
- Ratings from friends are separate from everyone else
- Compare your ratings with your friends
- Games based on ratings
Challenges arise when more than one person is involved:
- How do we prevent systems from being “gamed” (scoring/ranking people)
- How do we encourage behavior; allowing for good behavior to propagate; not anti-social behavior
Challenge of the "long tail" of the Zipf curve
- only a handful of CDs become really popular;
- some that become sort of;
- many that only a few folks like
- get more sales from those unique—long tail—titles (only sell a couple of copies but there are many of them)
- 98% of the Microsoft.com users are using 2% of the content; what do you do for the rest of the content?
New IA Challenges with Web 2.0
- Most of IA has been dealing with known authors and static content.
- New problem: dynamic content (same known authors)
- Even newer problem: dynamic content; unknown authors
Ex: LinkedIn.com - tracks contacts
- can input resume content and output new resume but users don't tend ot put content in correctly.
Possible Application for L&ET:
- What applications in L&ET would lend themselves to APIs?
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