sammi needham : cogitate

Hopefully this will break the cycle and i can actually starting posting again. It’s been over 6 months! There’s so much to talk about.

On Friday night J-Cookie and i headed in to the Desktop Create Awards and accepted the award for best website in 2010 for Jay Jays Dance Off 3D.

The 2010 Qantm Desktop CREATE:Awards celebrates Australia’s world-class creative industry, awarding exceptional talent over a vast array of creative fields.

Congratulations to everyone that worked on Jay Jays Dance Off 3D, it’s another significant nod to a great team effort. Now we’ve got our fingers crossed for the Mixx Awards in New York next week!

The evening’s host, Dave Callan, announced the project as “VisualJazzVaJayJays” which was quite funny.

A good night was had by all…. i think?

Ipad Light Painting is one of those ideas that I wish I had come up with myself, this is just brilliant i reckon. Very simple and clever technique, but beautifully executed.

Please read and comment on this article at the Visual Jazz Brew blog…

Facebook’s changes, announced today, signify a significant shift in the way that the web could work. The Open Graph (and it’s brethren) cranks information in and out of Facebook differently to Facebook Connect, it connects to every site and property that wants to be social with Facebook’s member base, and does it quickly and easily. On the surface sites will start adding ‘like’ buttons, beneath the surface i think it’s Facebook’s big play to own all users, communication, emotion and connections on the web.

Mark Zuckerberg today said that there will be over one billion “Likes” in the first 24 hours, and i’m not surprised.

It looks like Facebook’s soft, blue walls are coming down. You’ll soon see the ‘Like’ button on every site from bands, to celebs, to your bank and your babysitter. There’s will be so much data flooding in and out of Facebook it’s hard to even comprehend. In fact it’s downright scary that one service could own so much information about the Internets’ activity. Once thought to be Google’s domain, the knowledge monopoly looks squarely to shift into Facebooks databanks if this system is embraced the way they hope it will. I’m presuming if i play ball in these new Social Graphs that Facebook will know almost everything about me. Imagine the advertising power that will generate.

Hold onto your hats, this town’s a changing.

The Open Graph protocol enables you to integrate your web pages into the social graph. It is currently designed for web pages representing profiles of real-world things — things like movies, sports teams, celebrities, and restaurants. Once your pages become objects in the graph, users can establish connections to your pages as they do with Facebook Pages. Based on the structured data you provide via the Open Graph protocol, your pages show up richly across Facebook: in user profiles, within search results and in News Feed.
‘Open Graph protocol’ on facebook’s developer site

It’s going to be easier to log in and grant publishing rights to and from FB. It’s going to be easier to integrate your own brand site with your Facebook ‘friends’. It’s going to be easier to be a lot more social without having to build the infrastructure yourself. But I’m a bit nervous, and i would think that Google may be too. With these changes, Facebook is basically re-cataloguing the web. Like Google once did and continues to do as our first port of call when we open our browsers. Facebook may become our new default, with a more relevant catalogue of sites for me, connected to all the other things that i need to access.

It feels a little bit like the 2.0 version of the AltaVista from the 90s. Remember the early days of search, when we used to manually submit our sites to search engines before they would index us? The Open Social movement has shades of this, as sites integrate themselves with Facebook they are ultimately submitting their site to a long, long index of websites that will play nice with Facebook. Let’s think about this list, it will be a catalogue of sites that are more likely to be current, savvy, popular and up-to-date. Basically everything on the web that you would ever frequent, trust and re-use. Sounds like a list of all of the new, premium sites on the web, without the backlog of forums, guestbooks, out-of-date info and Geocities (RIP) sites that are slowly fading to the back of search results. To me it sounds like a more efficient, better list of everything that anyone cares about, that is fast to search without the crud.

It’s pretty interesting from a search perspective, but from an advertisers perspective, i feel a bit like Facebook is trying to tease my brand’s customer relationships from their cold dead fingers and into it’s growing lair. This, all done under the guise of better, quicker, cheaper, easier social interactions and monitoring services. This could mean that FB may *own* the ultimate relationship with my customers, and if i want to know anything about that relationship, i’ll be politely asking FB to provide that for me…please? I can’t see that being free or unbiased for very long.

For my money, this goes against the wild-west freeness and choice that makes the web fun. Sure, it makes things easier to manage all in one place, but then trust becomes the issue. “Facebank”, can i really trust you with my entire internet life?

It sounds like i hate Facebook. I really don’t, i quite like it. I do think this could change everything and i’m very intrigued. I’ll certainly be championing ‘Like’ buttons on our client’s pages as of now.

The Apple Australia site says that iPads will be available in late April May. Well, it’s officially late April. Where’s my iPad!

*Update. iPad orders have been pushed back a month outside of the US. Makes the (potentially) over-priced eBay option look better than ever.*

Funnily enough (that’s a term my mum used to use, i’m not so sure it’s correct grammar “funnily”?) the site also mentions the unbelievable price. What is funny about that statement is that no one has any idea what that unbelievably new price is going to be. No one that can say, anyway.

It’s pretty amazing that there’s such hype in this country about a device that has no fixed release date, very few details about available models, and which nobody knows a thing about the 3G capability, not to mention the fact that all the ruminations about video iChat point to an updated release (no doubt within 6 months).

Still, i’ve got a deposit down and i’m in line for the top of the line model (whatever that happens to be).

I’ve spoken to a lot of people about this device, and i’ve been describing it as “the best computer for your mum”, ever. Of course if your mother is a 30 something technology writer for a National newspaper, that description doesn’t apply. Mine isn’t, and so for my 50 something mother, i think this machine is perfect. Here’s a few points that i’ve had on my mind as a rationale…

1. It’s pretty simple (and meant to be)
   It does one thing at a time. My mum can only manage about one thing at a time on her macbook pro. But the ability for her to be able to physically do more makes her run into trouble, and get confused watching anyone else use her machine. The lack of multi-tasking (actually there is multitasking in OS4 but it’s not real) is a perfect way for her to be more immersed in what she’s doing, while she’s doing it. Lack of multi-tasking is a feature for my mum.
2. Touch is intuitive (duh!)
   All you have to do is look at the way that it’s portrayed in walkthrough videos and ads, this device is super simple to use. Everyone has fingers (sorry to the fingerless?) and it’s easy to walk them around a screen and point at things that interest you. Sure there’s gestures and multi-finger functionality but that stuff is mainly optional, and as you get more comfortable with one finger touch, these things will make my mum feel like a power user. The popularity of the iPhone among a very wide demographic has shown that touch is a very natural way to interact.



3. It’s a bit fancy
   Although an internet luddite, my mum likes to show off a bit. When i set her up with Skype, she showed all of her friends like she invented it. The newness and flashiness of the iPad will make her want to use it around her friends, this meaning that mum and her buddies are online more. Sharing and surfing and watching and creating with friends of all ages can only mean better, more diverse user bases and more eyeballs
4. It’s “available at an unbelievable price”
   Who knows what this even means for us (Australians), but if it truly is a great price then i think the usual barrier to entry with Apple products could be close to eradicated. It’s a shame that you’ll need a computer to activate it, but any machine will do the trick, and then sit gathering dust while mum plays with her shiny new toy.
5. It’s a toaster!
   Well it’s not really a toaster is it, but it should be considered an ‘appliance’. It will sit in the lounge room or the kitchen (the bedroom?) not resigned to a special room for ‘corm-pyu-ting’. This is a good thing, with more digital integration in everyday lives, probably less television-time, and more looking at your son’s Flickr photos.
6. It makes content more fun
   I can see my parents buying newspaper and magazine subscriptions on their iPad, for sure. Dad will find it more compact to grasp an iPad on the toilet as he reads (or probably watches) the sport pages, mum will get richer media for her hollywood gossip, dad’s golf magus will include interviews (probably in higher res than his crappy SD foxtel) and it should all come down the pipe automatically in a way that is way more fun to consume and share not having a convoluted way to seek it out in the first place will be the key.
7. My parents might start to understand what my job is
   I’ve always been described as the son that “works with computers”. It’ll be nice for them to be a bit closer to integrating with things that i do for a living. They might just start to get it

I love this device even though i’ve not yet touched it i’ve only spent a short time with it (we’ve got one at work doing the rounds), but I really lament the lack of a front facing camera. I think being able to Skype is one of the things that my mum got most excited about when i set her up with her macbook. This, for me, is almost a deal-breaker. I’m sure it will come and iPhones are already being used as remote bluetooth cams, but the more abstracted that gets the less likely my mum is to do it. It’s a shame, but i’m sure we will see it in the next revision from the looks of all the “iChat” references in the 4.0 software.

I’m still waiting, and i’m waiting with baited breath, Mum doesn’t know it yet but i i’ll be swapping her laptop for an iPad when they’re arrive. I think she’s going to love it, i just hope she shares it with dad.