It’s always a happy day when some of your hard work gets a little recognition. Ross Dawson over at ReadWriteWeb had compile an interesting list of the Top 60 Web 2.0 Apps in Australia.

3eep managed to make a Top 20 spot (coming in at number 19). Congratulations to Nick and Rob. A little recognition for all the hard work never goes astray.

We’ve been working steadily improving 3eep since its launch, adding lots of great features and improving user experience. It’s really only the beginning though. We are looking forward to helping push 3eep to greater heights in the coming months with lots of exciting things to be added.

For those with an eagle eye, you’ll probably notice we didn’t make the top 60. We don’t have any of our own syndeo::media branded Australian web2.0 apps, something we are planning on rectifying. While we don’t have anything to announce today, stay tuned for some interesting local apps coming soon.

3eep, social media, top 60 web2.0

This weekend kicked off a successful BarCamp in Sydney. A first for Australia. For the first one it had a good turn out with a number of interesting discussions. A few heated debates, a few talks about the startup life and one talk that cruised pretty well over my head. Congrats to Russ and everyone for putting it together. I’m looking forward to the next one.

For those who came (or those interested) I have uploaded the presentation I had put together on Identity 2.0 and OpenID. It’s brief and only intended as an introduction so I was happy to see a good debate around it. There seems like a lot of sceptics although certainly not surprising being so important to the online experience. Download the PDF (3.55Mb)

barcamp, barcamp sydney, identity 2.0 openid

Web2.0 Asia writes:

Uberme, a Myspace-like blogging/social networking service from Samsung Mobile, has launched. Featurewise, it’s got the whole pakcage; videos, photos, blogs, groups, etc. But the key differentiator of Uberme might be its focus on mobile: Uberme aims to provide as good an user experience on mobile phones as on the online.

And interestingly:

All in all, the service looks similar to Myspace and Bebo. But then, none of the big name social network services of the US have established a very strong foothold in the Asian market, perhaps except for Windows Live Spaces. This gives Uberme a chance to become a big player in Asia.

There’s a reason why Myspace and Bebo aren’t big in Asia, and it’s certainly not for the lack of trying. IMHO, it’s because there’s no way to provide a generic social-networking service for such a heterogenous region. Much love to Samsung and all, but when your audience is fragmented into at least 5 major language groups (Chinese, Japanese, Indian, Korean and English) it’s unlikely they will all ever be able to interact. And to do language-based segregation (ala Wikipedia.org) is only solving part of the problem. The main issue, in my mind, is that you can’t ever just do a direct translation if you really want to connect with your audience. There are too many language nuances that you have to eschew in favor of portability, and you lose the distinctive local flavor that you would have otherwise achieved had you focused on a smaller target.

Granted, services like Friendster have done reasonably well in Asia (at least, in the Philippines) although I believe that that was more due to the fact that there were no compelling alternatives out there at the time. Of course, when enough Filipinos had jumped onto Friendster, there was no turning back—it was standard Tipping-Point-type stuff.

Fast forward to now, and Samsung has a tough journey ahead of them. They have to somehow reconcile the multi-cultural tastes of a vast Asian market and still provide an experience that is Myspace-but-better. Perhaps using a Germanic word as the name of this Asian Myspace-killer wasn’t the best idea though, I don’t know.

Its good to see web2.0 starting to become popular here in Australia. Last night I headed out to the emerging technology/networking event – STIRR put on by the guys at Tangler.

It offered a few things over the usual business card swap and was definitely a fun night. First off was a little game called half-baked, that broke the attendees into groups and got them to come up with an idea for startup. Each group had to pick two words from a list of random and often strange words that everyone had contributed. Those chosen two words became the name for the company and from that a logo, elevator pitch, marketing plan and revenue model all that to be created in 10 minutes. Once the time was up, each group had to present to the rest. Our offering “ShoeWave” with the tagline “The Sock Market” managed to win the vote with an ingenious social network for odd sock trading. If anyone is in need of such an offering we have a solid albeit light on detail business model

A congrats should go out to the guys from Remember the Milk who came away with the most amount of virtual VC money from their pitch. There was some strong competition from BluePulse and Quotify. Having used Remember the Milk myself, it is a great site and certainly got my vote.

So, topping it off with some meet and greet, it was a good night. I’m looking forward to the next one, whoever puts it on.

emerging technology, networking, stirr, stirr sydney tangler

Joshua Porter over at Bokardo has been writing some excellent posts lately. A common thread seems to be surfacing that the current method for designing sites is now not suiting the needs for a social web. Social interface design (which I covered previously) is becoming crucial.

Information Architecture now needs to adapt to also suit the changing environment.

Joshua’s recent post on Thoughts on the Impending Death of Information Architecture has some interesting thoughts coming from some of the big names in IA. These names realising the changes that are coming and the need to react to them (although not liking the change).

With the growth of things like folksonomies and search, the structured (preplanned) web is becoming less important. Things like the perpetual beta and understanding desire lines are changing the way that sites are developed. Developing a completely resolved site that is locked in, unchanging from day one does not work. Only through adapting, fine tuning and understanding the desires of the users of a site, that a site can be constantly relevant.

I think the “death” of IA is a little too strong. Like the sites that we are now building, it too has to understand and adapt to the changing environment.

information architecture, relationship architecture, social interface design, social media social software

Social interface design is becoming very important in the current development of the web. We are really only now discovering that our old assumptions are not always correct. As the web matures we start seeing that we have to look at our users differently. Its not just an individual but a whole ecosystem around that individual that needs to be considered.

Bokardo has a great post with gives a very clear idea of the changing landscape…

Gone are the days of traditional usability testing. Almost all testing assumes that 1) people want to use your software and 2) people use your software alone. Each of these things is becoming less true every day. There’s so much software! A much bigger problem, at this point in time, is how to get people and the social groups of which they are a part interested and keep them interested in your software.

You’re not convincing just one person, you’re convincing one person and all their friends.

design, new media, social interface design, Social Networks, usability web2.0

November 14th is World Usability Day, Luis and I will be speaking at De La Salle.

Details below.

Manila Events:
De La Salle University (940am-12nn)
Venue: Y407-409, DLSU Manila

• Hans Koch & Luis Buenaventura – Web 2.0 and Usability


• Dr. Lloyd Espiritu – Usability Engineering

What will we talk about?

Web2.0 and Usability
Increasing awareness of the importance of usability and user-centered design.

1. Usability (Hans A. Koch)

a. Desire lines
b. Heat map
c. Keyword usability
d. User at the center

2. Real-world Application: mobiuslive.net (Luis Buenaventura II)

a. Context and Purpose
b. Designing for a specific demographic
c. Responding to User Feedback

de la salle, nov.14, usability, usability day web2.0

Some interesting thinking on web2.0. Are we moving on from the age of Web enlightenment into the post modern web? Are the clichéd terms like Web 2.0 just the start of the transition?

Enlightenment thinking was clear and organized. There were disagreements amongst the thinkers of the Era, but the Era itself was definable. Post-modernism cannot be defined except by saying what it is not. It is not modern; it is what came after the Enlightenment. “Web 2.0” suffers from the same malaise. People across the globe are publishing countless articles and books to try to define Web 2.0, but like its underpinning philosophy, it is not easily defined. In fact, to put it into a box would be to contradict its very nature.

Nice to see a some different thought on the present and future of this medium.

enlightenment, internet, new media, philosophy, post modernism web2.0

I’m a little late in posting this but I thought I would follow up from my post about the Canon competition. Earlier this month, Nikon for the launch of their new D80 decided to try something a little more visionary. While not a competition, they gave camera to a select number members of flickr and told them to shoot with the new camera. The results were then posted as a demonstration of the capabilities of the camera at the Stunning Nikon site.

A smart move. Nikon got a great example of the use of the camera. The photographers got a new camera. The community on flickr got the benefit of the visibility and the blogs got to spread the viral message.

The use of flickr was certainly a good move. It was very easy to identify the photographers who would be suitable both from the images they produce, the friends they have and the micro communities that they belong to on the site. While the Nikon campaign site uses flash (simply and effectively), it does manage to embrace flickr by providing links back to the photographers profiles. The whole current web 2.0 meme of remixing sites, although not used to its full extent is integrated.

Back to the Canon competition, the opportunity to use a mature site such as flickr that is open would have been better in so many ways. The users, the community, the CGM, the mature photo tools (tags, comments, notes, etc) and even a relationship with Yahoo/Flickr (cross promotion anyone?). As it is all API based, it could be pulled out into a site that is branded like the competition but has all the rich functionality provided by flickr. If done right it could have avoided some of the issues that I mentioned previously

To the credit of Nikon, they were ahead of the curve for the competition. As far as I am aware they are the first to do something like this. Smart, fresh thinking. I’m looking forward to seeing more ideas like this (and even more, building these sort of things at here)

Note: If you are feeling a strange sense of deja vue, this is an updated post from my personal blog

canon, competition, flickr, gallery, nikon, photo social network

Recently I witnessed what could be one of the most horrible launches of a site that I can recall in recent memory. Canon in Australia have been advertising offline and online the launch of their new EOS400d Digital SLR camera. For the launch they are running competition to win one every week for the next few weeks (plus a few minor things… like a huge holiday). I thought I’d join the fray and enter a few pics to see if I could win a camera.

On initial inspection, a reasonable looking site, with fair bit of gratuitous flash. The Australian firms Hyro and Leo Burnett managed to get their names snuck in the footer as developer and designer (If I was them I probably would be removing any association with the site).

My bemusement started when I registered an account. It errored half way through the process and still managed to get an email and an account but only having completed half my details. According to the Terms of Service many of the details I missed are required for winning the prize.

After finding the profile page and adding what was missing, I tried to upload a photo. While it worked reasonably, and even offered a progress meter for the upload, it looks as though someone was not doing any decent testing as the progress bar increased horizontally (which would be normal) but also vertically (which basically pushed the whole page downward).

The footer made me cringe… “Site optimised for Internet Explorer version 4 and above”. The html code didn’t do too much either to make me feel better, some bright spark still thinks tables are used for laying out content. What happened to web standards?

Yesterday was meant to be the launch for the viewing and voting on the submitted entries. That didn’t happen and come this morning the first indications that the gallery was about to be released started appearing… in the form of .NET application errors. Not exactly a great start but after the errors were fixed, what was left was a fairly average looking gallery without the ability to view the details of the submissions (and I would assume vote).

From looking at the number of photos it would appear that they have seen a good response (which could explain the downtime). Lots of pages of photos (roughly 2000 photos on a quick check) but no way to search properly. Yes, they have a search feature but for me did not return anything I searched for, so I had to browse through 250 odd pages to see if I could find my entry (I still haven’t found it yet!)

So a rather bumpy ride in trying to launch what appears to be a fairly simple web application. What amazes me is that they haven’t even considered making something that is engaging and that creates conversation.

What would be a perfect use for a blog to keep people updated is a missed opportunity. Presenting a personal face to keep everyone informed about the downtime or bugs would have worked to their benefit. We are all human (yes, even big multinational corporations and agencies) we make mistakes, admitting to it can work in postive ways.

The site is a very impersonal, part brouchure, part gallery with no real care for the user (I won’t even start on poor usability). Ironic, seeing that the users are the core of the site and also the purchasers of the cameras. I guess social web applications are slow to catch on over here in Australia (or perhaps a lack of vision in agency land). The benefits to brand experience in letting your members communicate is huge. Theres a handful of great photo sharing site out there that could have been used as a model, why not use what works with Flickr. Let the members be the experts, let them post the tips. Let them comment on how to use their great new Canon camera or even let the winners give feedback on their experience with the new camera. So many options for to engage in a conversation.

From the cluetrain:

Markets are conversations. Their members communicate in language that is natural, open, honest, direct, funny and often shocking. Whether explaining or complaining, joking or serious, the human voice is unmistakably genuine. It can’t be faked.

Most corporations, on the other hand, only know how to talk in the soothing, humorless monotone of the mission statement, marketing brochure, and your-call-is-important-to-us busy signal. Same old tone, same old lies. No wonder networked markets have no respect for companies unable or unwilling to speak as they do.

Can you tell I am a little bored of cookie cutter websites with no thought for the user or their voice? I’m certainly ranting over the poor launch and yes, We are little ahead of the curve in pushing the social internet but for a site that is carried by user generated content, it is virtually a ghost town for any real human communication. Come on Canon, do us a favour and start a conversation!

Note: If you are feeling a strange sense of deja vue, this is an updated post from my personal blog

agency, canon, cluetrain, competition, gallery, image photo