Brain Dump 001
Here is some stuff thats been kicking around in my head that don't have time to write a whole post about but need to get down. I know other people do this, so I thought I would give it a try. The hope is a few of you would prod in the comments or tell me whats what next time I see you.
- Complex social objects - I want to see more sites based on complex social objects with collector/hobbiest audiences. Bikes, cars, boats etc. Stuff that can be broken down into smaller parts (ontologies) and passed around virtually and physically. I've been eager to work on a project like that for years now. Primarily because there is untapped potential for unique interaction/interface/behaviour contained in those complex social objects. There is only soo much you can do with events, photos and videos.
- Exclusivity - Bruce Sterling gave a rousing talk at SXSW this year. He really had the gain turned all the way up. Amongst his forecasting/heckling (forkling) he talked a lot about his infamous parties and how he had to stop doing them because of the sheer amount of people showing up. Its hard to throw an infamous party these days without it spreading like wild fire over the web. This makes me think a lot about exclusivity and small groups. We are firing things off into the either for everyone to see these days (tweet tweet). What about a return to the opposite? I have been experimenting with web based music sharing in a small group for over a year now and I got to say its far more fruitful than any other social music site I am on. I would love to see some badass exclusivity apps crop up. This past weekend a record label here in SF called DirtyBird threw one of their infamous Golden Gate Park parties. One of the dudes at the label tweeted "this party is word of mouth only, byob. please don't repost just come over." The irony of that being posted to twitter was gold.
- Dear site maps - What are you really good at besides communicating information structure for the simplest of sites? When you get complicated clients don't know what they are looking at. Why do you always show up as the first deliverable of the IA phase of a project when you are always wrong or just a guess at that point? Your cousin the content model describes relationships between objects in a system, and helps you do your job, but I am growing weary of him too. Interactive wireframes (prototypes) that take the audience through the experience (non-linearly) have stolen my heart.
- Episodic video games - How come this hasnt taken off? I can't finish whole games anymore. If I knew I could "finish" something in say, an hour (in the evenning) I would shell out money to whomever lets me download them in my living room. Is really going to be years longer? Ungh.
- What happened to band/artist sites? - Remember when they were all flash, immersive and had serious graphic design chops thrown at them for 20k a pop? Remember when they were just a Myspace page? Now they are just kind of varying shades of pathetic (with some exceptions of course). I am speaking mainly of popular, successful, heavily backed artists. Although there is definitely a slow trend towards more content-centric, almost media property style artist sites... which is encouraging.
- Awesome(72) - When websites list categories sometimes they put a little parentheses after the category name with the amount of "things" in that category. For example Printers(34) or probiotics(14). This crops up in all sorts of different contexts. Today when talking to one of my fellow Barbarians I realized why I like this little pattern soo much. It makes the information space Im moving through seem finite. Sometimes on big sites that don't do this, there is a sense of unknown depth. Providing those little (numbers) allows me to shape the depth of the information. Thats (3) characters working VERY hard at helping me make my next navigational/filtration decision.
