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Posts Tagged ‘Uncategorized’

How a Blogging Duo Is Changing Fashion Photography With Animated Cinemagraphs

05 Oct



A cinemagraph created during New York Fashion Week last month.

Jamie Beck and Kevin Burg comprise the rising star duo behind the wildly popular Tumblr From Me To You.

(One might argue, given recent campaigns with Ralph Lauren and Juicy Couture, a photo editorial in The New York Times and an appearance in Lucky Magazine, that their stars have already risen, but we firmly believe the best is yet to come.)

Beck, 28, and Burg, 30, combine an unusual set of talents that have attracted not only the notice of the Tumblr community, but also of a growing roster of brands and editors.

Beck is the photographer and the blog’s primary model and stylist. She leverages her pinup figure, makeup and hair-styling skills, and a wardrobe of vintage finds to create spreads that connote the glamor of American icons such as Audrey Hepburn and Grace Kelly.

Burg is the more technical of the two, leading the blog’s design and the creation of their signature (and trademark-pending) cinemagraphs — animated GIF images that look like moving photos. He also — from what I observed in meetings with one of their clients and their manager, Karen Robinovitz of DBA — heads up business relations, jotting down notes on clients’ expectations and deadlines for deliverables.

The two met in 2006 through mutual friends, and are now engaged. Before they began working together at the beginning of this year, Beck — who says that from the age of 13, photography is “all [she's] ever done, and all [she's] ever wanted to do” — was still shooting in film. Burg encouraged her to purchase her first digital camera with which to begin blogging and tweeting, and more recently, to begin uploading her iPhone snapshots to Instagram. (“I’m obsessed,” she discloses.) He also designed her Tumblr.

Burg had, for some time, been taking frames from Saturday Night Live clips and turning elements into looping animations on a still background. These became the prototypes for the their first cinemagraph “Les Tendrils,” which was published on Feb. 13, 2011.


Beck and Burg’s first cinemagraph, “Les Tendrils,” published on February 13, 2011.

After they published their first cinemagraphs, Beck recalls that no one wanted to book her for photographs anymore. They wanted her to create “that moving thing you do” — which is when they decided to coin the term “cinemagraph.” The two felt they needed the term because what they created was unlike an animated GIF.

“There’s a cinematic quality to it … like a living photograph. It’s always a photograph first and foremost,” says Beck.


How They Create Cinemagraphs






Jamie Beck.





Model Coca Rocha wearing Oscar de la Renta.





A rainy evening in Savannah, Georgia.





A cappuccino.





Fashion designer Oscar de la Renta.





Inside the Brooklyn apartment of a couple who designs jewelery.





A row of swaying lights.





A swinging necklace.





A summer concert.





A cinemagraph for Juicy Couture.





A cinemagraph for designer Katie Ermilio's lookbook.





A handbag swings on a Manhattan rooftop.





Backstage at Prabal Gurung.





Backstage at Prabal Gurung.





Photographers Scott Schuman and Garance Dore at Burberry's S/S 2012 collection show.

Beck and Burg never know for sure if a cinemagraph is going to work out, which makes it difficult when brands hire the pair. “We can be 90% sure,” Beck discloses. “When we shoot from the street or at [New York] Fashion Week, and I can’t control the environment, it’s never a guarantee.”

To create a cinemagraph, Burg and Beck focus on animating one object: a swinging chain, for instance, or a spoon moving around the rim of a coffee cup. In a studio setting, the pair will employ pinpoint light to create sparkle, and fans to tousle hair and garments. Beck directs the camera, a Canon D5 Mark II, while Burg controls the props that produce the animation.

Beck and Burg will then import and edit the files in Adobe Photoshop and After Effects. The number of frames they use depends on the medium. For Gilt Taste‘s website, they were able to create much longer loops and embed their work on the site using HTML5 video layers. A cinemagraph that appears on their Tumblr will end up being between 25 and 100 frames; a banner ad is even more constrained.

Shooting a cinemagraph doesn’t take any more time than shooting a photo, roughly speaking, but the editing process generally takes a day, says Burg.

Both Beck and Burg expressed frustrations with the limitations of connections speeds and file sizes, which necessitate the use of GIF files, and consequently reduce the quality. Beck expects that in a year they will able to distribute cinemagraphs that look so lifelike that you could touch them.


At a test shoot for Juicy Couture in August.


The Added Value of an Audience



A cinemagraph commissioned by Juicy Couture.

It’s not just Beck’s and Burg’s photography and cinemagraphs that make them appealing to brands. The two have also amassed a large built-in audience — a series of six cinemagraphs they did featuring model Coca Rocha in Oscar de la Renta gowns merited around 55,000 notes and more than 2,000,000 impressions, Tumblr fashion director Rich Tong revealed at a conference in Paris earlier this month. That exposure makes the duo a valuable distribution force.

Take a recent campaign Beck and Burg did for fashion brand Juicy Couture. They were commissioned to create a series of cinemagraphs using Juicy Couture products, some of which appeared as banner ads across a range of fashion sites, and some of which — like the one above — appeared solely on their own Tumblr, racking upwards of 15,000 notes (reblogs and likes) apiece.

“The great thing about Jamie and Kevin is that they’re not just artists, but they also have a distribution portal,” says Robinovitz. “Why would you just hire a photographer when you can hire a photographer who has a place to share photos… [and] a hungry audience?”

Robinovitz’s question was rhetorical, of course, but also a good one to pose.

In a recent interview, Scott Schuman, the photographer behind street style blog The Sartorialist, says that he earns somewhere between a quarter of a million and half a million dollars per year running ads on his blog, in addition to the assignments it has earned him. Will photographers who don’t blog and market themselves online stand as much of a chance? And will blog coverage be written into assignment contracts?

Beck says that while she has not negotiated blog coverage into any of her contracts directly, it is discussed with brands during an assignment — namely, she says, to figure out timing and what she’s allowed to post. Brands don’t control what goes on Tumblr, and she is careful to only accept assignments true to her aesthetic.

“If I am going to work with somebody, it has to be part of my life, something I want to share,” Beck explains. “I can be hired to make banner ads, but I want people to see the whole 360, and hopefully my readers will be amused or inspired.”

More About: coca rocha, fashion, features, jamie beck, juicy couture, kevin burg, trending, tumblr

For more Dev & Design coverage:


 
 

How a Blogging Duo Is Changing Fashion Photography With Animated Cinemagraphs

05 Oct



A cinemagraph created during New York Fashion Week last month.

Jamie Beck and Kevin Burg comprise the rising star duo behind the wildly popular Tumblr From Me To You.

(One might argue, given recent campaigns with Ralph Lauren and Juicy Couture, a photo editorial in The New York Times and an appearance in Lucky Magazine, that their stars have already risen, but we firmly believe the best is yet to come.)

Beck, 28, and Burg, 30, combine an unusual set of talents that have attracted not only the notice of the Tumblr community, but also of a growing roster of brands and editors.

Beck is the photographer and the blog’s primary model and stylist. She leverages her pinup figure, makeup and hair-styling skills, and a wardrobe of vintage finds to create spreads that connote the glamor of American icons such as Audrey Hepburn and Grace Kelly.

Burg is the more technical of the two, leading the blog’s design and the creation of their signature (and trademark-pending) cinemagraphs — animated GIF images that look like moving photos. He also — from what I observed in meetings with one of their clients and their manager, Karen Robinovitz of DBA — heads up business relations, jotting down notes on clients’ expectations and deadlines for deliverables.

The two met in 2006 through mutual friends, and are now engaged. Before they began working together at the beginning of this year, Beck — who says that from the age of 13, photography is “all [she's] ever done, and all [she's] ever wanted to do” — was still shooting in film. Burg encouraged her to purchase her first digital camera with which to begin blogging and tweeting, and more recently, to begin uploading her iPhone snapshots to Instagram. (“I’m obsessed,” she discloses.) He also designed her Tumblr.

Burg had, for some time, been taking frames from Saturday Night Live clips and turning elements into looping animations on a still background. These became the prototypes for the their first cinemagraph “Les Tendrils,” which was published on Feb. 13, 2011.


Beck and Burg’s first cinemagraph, “Les Tendrils,” published on February 13, 2011.

After they published their first cinemagraphs, Beck recalls that no one wanted to book her for photographs anymore. They wanted her to create “that moving thing you do” — which is when they decided to coin the term “cinemagraph.” The two felt they needed the term because what they created was unlike an animated GIF.

“There’s a cinematic quality to it … like a living photograph. It’s always a photograph first and foremost,” says Beck.


How They Create Cinemagraphs






Jamie Beck.





Model Coca Rocha wearing Oscar de la Renta.





A rainy evening in Savannah, Georgia.





A cappuccino.





Fashion designer Oscar de la Renta.





Inside the Brooklyn apartment of a couple who designs jewelery.





A row of swaying lights.





A swinging necklace.





A summer concert.





A cinemagraph for Juicy Couture.





A cinemagraph for designer Katie Ermilio's lookbook.





A handbag swings on a Manhattan rooftop.





Backstage at Prabal Gurung.





Backstage at Prabal Gurung.





Photographers Scott Schuman and Garance Dore at Burberry's S/S 2012 collection show.

Beck and Burg never know for sure if a cinemagraph is going to work out, which makes it difficult when brands hire the pair. “We can be 90% sure,” Beck discloses. “When we shoot from the street or at [New York] Fashion Week, and I can’t control the environment, it’s never a guarantee.”

To create a cinemagraph, Burg and Beck focus on animating one object: a swinging chain, for instance, or a spoon moving around the rim of a coffee cup. In a studio setting, the pair will employ pinpoint light to create sparkle, and fans to tousle hair and garments. Beck directs the camera, a Canon D5 Mark II, while Burg controls the props that produce the animation.

Beck and Burg will then import and edit the files in Adobe Photoshop and After Effects. The number of frames they use depends on the medium. For Gilt Taste‘s website, they were able to create much longer loops and embed their work on the site using HTML5 video layers. A cinemagraph that appears on their Tumblr will end up being between 25 and 100 frames; a banner ad is even more constrained.

Shooting a cinemagraph doesn’t take any more time than shooting a photo, roughly speaking, but the editing process generally takes a day, says Burg.

Both Beck and Burg expressed frustrations with the limitations of connections speeds and file sizes, which necessitate the use of GIF files, and consequently reduce the quality. Beck expects that in a year they will able to distribute cinemagraphs that look so lifelike that you could touch them.


At a test shoot for Juicy Couture in August.


The Added Value of an Audience



A cinemagraph commissioned by Juicy Couture.

It’s not just Beck’s and Burg’s photography and cinemagraphs that make them appealing to brands. The two have also amassed a large built-in audience — a series of six cinemagraphs they did featuring model Coca Rocha in Oscar de la Renta gowns merited around 55,000 notes and more than 2,000,000 impressions, Tumblr fashion director Rich Tong revealed at a conference in Paris earlier this month. That exposure makes the duo a valuable distribution force.

Take a recent campaign Beck and Burg did for fashion brand Juicy Couture. They were commissioned to create a series of cinemagraphs using Juicy Couture products, some of which appeared as banner ads across a range of fashion sites, and some of which — like the one above — appeared solely on their own Tumblr, racking upwards of 15,000 notes (reblogs and likes) apiece.

“The great thing about Jamie and Kevin is that they’re not just artists, but they also have a distribution portal,” says Robinovitz. “Why would you just hire a photographer when you can hire a photographer who has a place to share photos… [and] a hungry audience?”

Robinovitz’s question was rhetorical, of course, but also a good one to pose.

In a recent interview, Scott Schuman, the photographer behind street style blog The Sartorialist, says that he earns somewhere between a quarter of a million and half a million dollars per year running ads on his blog, in addition to the assignments it has earned him. Will photographers who don’t blog and market themselves online stand as much of a chance? And will blog coverage be written into assignment contracts?

Beck says that while she has not negotiated blog coverage into any of her contracts directly, it is discussed with brands during an assignment — namely, she says, to figure out timing and what she’s allowed to post. Brands don’t control what goes on Tumblr, and she is careful to only accept assignments true to her aesthetic.

“If I am going to work with somebody, it has to be part of my life, something I want to share,” Beck explains. “I can be hired to make banner ads, but I want people to see the whole 360, and hopefully my readers will be amused or inspired.”

More About: coca rocha, fashion, features, jamie beck, juicy couture, kevin burg, trending, tumblr

For more Dev & Design coverage:


 
 

Wednesday Aircraft Porn: The Ekranoplan

27 Sep

Happy Wednesday (evening), I thought I’d post these awesome pictures of the Soviet Union’s Lun-class Ekranoplan rotting in a shipyard in the Russian town of Kaspisk on the Caspian Sea. Seeing the vessel laid up like this feels like I’m looking at some some sci-fi tale documenting the remains of what was once a technologically advanced empire…oh wait.

The 240-foot long Lun-class vessels were designed to skim just over the surface of the sea at up to 340-miles per-hour while carrying six, P-270 Moskit guided missiles meant to take out NATO ships.  Rumor has it that Russia may try to put the aircraft back into production.

These pics have been out there for a while but a friend reminded me of them today and they’re still fun.

Click below for some of the best images and a link to the collection.

For more, go here.

 
 

9 Essential Resources for User Interface Designers

16 Sep


The Web Design Usability Series is supported by join.me, an easy way to instantly share your screen with anyone. join.me lets you collaborate on-the-fly, put your heads together super-fast and even just show off.

Designing a great user interface can be a challenge, even for the most seasoned designer. Countless factors need to be taken into consideration and the difference between a good UI and a great one often boils down to paying close attention to the smallest details.

SEE ALSO: 7 Best Practices for Improving Your Website’s Usability

When undertaking such an important and often complex task, it’s helpful to have some handy resources for both education and inspiration. We’ve put together a list of some of our favorites below. Since we can only scratch the surface of the wide variety of UI design resources available, we invite you to share yours in the comments.


Design Inspiration


Let’s start off by taking a look at three great galleries for UI design inspiration.


1. MephoBox


MephoBox is a design showcase that catalogs sites with beautiful interfaces and also collections of common site elements, such as login forms, headers, pagination, and so on. If you’re looking for ideas or approaches to designing specific page elements, MephoBox collections can be a great source of inspiration.


2. UI Patterns


UI Patterns showcases user interface design patterns – com-only recurring trends and best practices in UI design for a variety of elements. Providing more detail than a basic gallery, UI Patterns showcases design patterns, discusses their usage, and the problems each pattern aims to solve, and in what way.


3. Pattern Tap


Pattern Tap is one of the more well-known UI design showcases and is similar to MephoBox in its design pattern collections. Unlike MephoBox, though, the collections are a bit more varied (the site currently baosts 45 collection catagories to MephoBox’s 16), including a showcase of elements like modal windows, slideshows, comments, adevertising design and placement, and more.


Reading up on UI Design


Sometimes it’s not enough to simply look at a design showcase. Often, you’ll want to read about a particular design pattern or approaches to a problem, as well. So here are three great educational resources for boning up on UI design.


4. Inspire UX


Inspire UX is a user experience design blog that features articles, quotes, case studies and explorations into the world of user experience and interface design. A great resource, Inspire UX articles cover a broad range of topics from book reviews to helpful tips and well-thought explorations into existing design patterns and implementations.


5. UX Magazine


UX Magazine is a user experience and design publication dedicated to “elevating user experience, one article at a time.” With plenty of original content as well as technical and inspirational design roundups from around the web, UX Magazine explores the details that make a great user experience. If you’re looking for information on best practices, creative problem solving resources or a better understanding of those problems, UX Magazine is chock full of great articles to assist you.


6. UI Scraps


This blog by designer Jason Robb showcases interesting and insightful user interfaces. The great thing about UI Scraps is that the site isn’t simply a showcase of great work. Robb brings you the bad along with the good, making it a great resource for learning what not to do. The tone of the blog is conversational and casual, but Mr. Robb’s remarks are spot-on and UI scraps is a fun, interesting resource for UI design practices.


Down the Rabbit Hole


Still what more? Looking for something a little more technical? UI design isn’t just about making a pretty picture. There’s a lot of science behind the methodologies and patterns we use every day. Here are a few sites that delve even further into the technical and scientific aspects of UI design.


7. Web Design Practices


If statistics are what you’re after, Web Design Practices is the place to be. The site showcases and describes several common web design elements, practices, and patterns and discusses frequency of use and effectiveness of each. Many examples are also provided and, wherever possible, links are provided to relevant research data, so you can take a first-hand look at the study yourself.


8. User Interface Engineering


UIE is a professional organization for user interface designers and UI experts. UIE provides education and training to its members and the public at large through conferences, articles, virtual siminars, and other publications. On the UIE site, you’ll find a plethora of great articles covering a variety of UI and UX design topics, many of which have plenty of scientific and research data to back them up.


9. Boxes and Arrows


Boxes and Arrows is another great online publication dedicated to exploring the art and science of UI design. It has articles and research materials on best practices, techniques, and user behavior and expectations. There are also a number of case studies, interviews and product reviews, as well as a podcats. If you want to truly understand UI design, Boxes and Arrows is an invaluable resource.

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, violetkaipa


Series Supported by join.me

The Web Design Usability Series is supported by join.me, an easy way to instantly share your screen with anyone. join.me lets you collaborate on-the-fly, put your heads together super-fast and even just show off. The possibilities are endless. How will you use join.me? Try it today.

More About: features, UI Design, web design, Web Design Usability Series, Web Development

 
 

How Airlines Have Taken Flight With Social Media [INFOGRAPHIC]

16 Sep


The Social Media Infographics Series is supported by Vocus‘ Social Media Strategy Tool, a free, six-step online tool that lets you build a custom social media framework tailored to your organization’s goals.

Thousands of flights each and every day transport millions of passengers all over the world. As we all know, traveling can make one irritable, and delays or lost baggage prompt many consumers to complain. Before social media, these complaints might dissipate in the ether or be left on hold for 30 minutes. Fortunately, the airline industry has taken note of the social web as a customer service tool, fielding complaints, inquiries and yes, even compliments, on Twitter and Facebook. Never has the airline industry been so responsive, helpful, compassionate and human.

But aside from customer service, airlines use the social web to build their brand and grow a fan base, whether that’s via YouTube webisodes, special Twitter-only fares or offering free entry to a terminal lounge for an airport’s Foursquare mayor — the mark of a frequent traveler.

Check out the infographic below to see what some of the most social airlines are doing to reach new heights with social media.


Series supported by Vocus

This series is supported by Vocus‘ Social Media Strategy Tool, a free online tool which lets you build your own custom social media framework in six easy steps. It helps you determine your organization’s goals, explore the latest MarketingSherpa research data, and create your own workbook packed with the strategies, tactics and resources you need. Try it today!

Infographic design by Lorena Guerra

More About: Airlines, features, infographics, Mashable Infographics, Social Media, Social Media Infographics Series

For more Social Media coverage:

 
 

How much should you pay developers?

13 Jul

We’re at that time of year where we go through everybody’s salary and makes sure it’s reasonable. We’re up to about a dozen in-house software developers, and we’d been paying them based on a compensation system developed by our cousins at Fog Creek, which is different enough from Stack Exchange that there was some chafing.

So we sat down and thought out developer compensation from basic principles, and came up with what we feel is a pretty robust way to pay great people. Here were the core principles on which the system is built:

The development team at Stack Exchange is an amazing group of programmers who live up to our motto of “smart and get things done” every day.

We want to offer them compensation that is fair, easily understood, transparent, and competitive.

Fair means no games. Our compensation is not based on how well you negotiate or how often you ask for raises—it’s based on a repeatable predictable system. There’s no forced ranking, so other people don’t have to do badly for you to do well. We don’t have a range of possible salaries for every level, we have a single salary, so everything about the system is algorithmic.

Easily understood means that any developer can figure out what their salary should be according to this system. They can see what they need to do to move up in their career. And different managers can figure out how to pay their team members and get consistent and fair results.

Transparent reflects Stack Exchange’s core beliefs about running our business in the open, without secrets. It means that if a list of everyone’s salary suddenly appeared on Wikileaks, nobody would be surprised enough to be upset. Transparency is essential to insure fairness.

Competitive means that you’re earning at least as much at Stack Exchange as you would earn elsewhere. It’s critical to being able to attract and retain the kind of developers we want working for us. If our compensation system isn’t competitive, we won’t be able to hire the people we want without giving them an “exceptional” salary, and exceptions defeat fairness.

One important principle of Stack Exchange is that we do as much as we can publicly, and we try to leave public artifacts of all the work we do. In that spirit I’ve uploaded a complete copy of the current compensation plan so you can see what goes into compensation decisions at Stack Exchange. The only thing that is not public is the actual, final computation that determines each individual’s paycheck, because we have to balance our own philosophy of openness against the individual developer’s right to personal privacy.

Stack Exchange Developer Compensation (PDF)

 
 

Of Twitter and infographics

09 Jul
If the Twitter community was 100 people. by mkandlez, on Flickr
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 2.0 Generic License  by  mkandlez 

I love this infographic because it condenses the original report into a bite-sized nugget that is easy to understand. Its creator probably had to take some creative and interpretive liberties, but he was entitled to.

And it looks like I fall in the blue 5%. I don’t tweet enough to be in that purple group!


Tagged: infographic, twitter
 
 

Why Google+ won’t hurt Facebook, but Skype will hate it

28 Jun

Google launched its much awaited and highly anticipated social networking platform today to a limited number of users. Dubbed Google+ (Plus), the service may take its cue from social networking giant Facebook, but in the end it is about the harsh reality of Google saving and enhancing its core franchise — Google Search. It is search (and, by extension, advertising) that made Google a company that has run afoul of the Federal Trade Commission because of its huge size and influence.

At the time of Google’s founding, search was broadly defined as a sifting through a directory of websites. As the web grew, search became all about pages. Google, with its PageRank, came to dominate that evolution of search.

Today, search is not just about pages, but also about people and the relevance of information to them.

Google’s senior executives — long dismissive of the idea of importance of social to search — were contrite during their briefing earlier this week. “It is about time we have come to the realization,” said Bradley Horowitz, vice president of product with Google, “If you don’t know people, then you can’t organize the information for people.”

Google’s realization — however late – that it needs to use social, location and other signals to enhance its core search platform is welcome. “Google needs to understand these relationships and basically use those to make search better,” said Vic Gundotra, Google’s senior vice president for Social in an hour-long briefing earlier this week.

Why? Because the the internet (and information) are expanding with such rapidity that there is no room for assumptions, and as such our systems need to adapt to this world of no (or alternatively infinite) assumptions. Google needs to adapt, and getting social and location signals is important for the company. Search is now search relevant to you in the context of your world — and that is where Google+ comes in.

What is Google Plus?

Is Google+ a destination like Facebook.com? Is it a social network? Is this an identity play? The answer to those questions is yes and no. Google’s Gundotra said that this is the first step by the company in its long social journey, which is going to evolve.

Today, you can get to Google Plus by visiting a website – Google.com/+. But it also travels with you across different Google web properties, thanks to a Google Toolbar. The toolbar is personal to you and allows you to share and send photos, videos, links or just simple messages. A notification icon informs you if others have shared stuff with you.

Google, Gundotra says, has leveraged its infrastructure to offer an array of services, and at the same time the company is attacking Facebook’s noticeable shortcoming — granular privacy that average folks can understand. More importantly it is trying hard to not be compared with Facebook.

Some of Google + Features:

In order to use Google +, you need to have a Google account, though it doesn’t necessarily mean you need to have a Google Mail account. Once you set-up your Google account, you can use your address book to invite people to your network and use that as a starting point.

Circles: Google has come up with the concept of circles — you can create a circle of contacts that are family, friends, work friends, former co-workers and so on. With these groups or circles you can define who gets to see what kind of updates. Facebook currently doesn’t offer the ability to control who sees what goes in our life that we share online.

Hangout: This just might be the killer feature of Google + effort. It is essentially group video chat done right. You click on the Hangout button and invite members of a certain group by sending them a notification. If there is no one around, all I could do is hang about without much drain on the system waiting for someone to show up. So theoretically I could invite all members of team GigaOM circle and have a quick video chat. In the demo at least, Hangout felt intuitive and easy to use (Google uses its own video codec and not Adobe Flash for this feature).

Huddle: This is a mobile group-chat service that is very much like Beluga, the fast-growing service that was snapped up by Facebook weeks after it was launched and is now said to be part of a major new communications push by Facebook. I think this is a great little feature and frankly, if Google was smart they should be rolling this out to all Google Apps for the Enterprise customers.

Instant Uploads: It has also come up with a new approach to mobile photos & videos. Google calls it Instant Uploads. Take a photo and it uploads to your Picasa or YouTube account and then you can share those videos via Google+  to specific “circles.”

Sparks: It is a new feature that allows you to create topics of interest and use them as source of information and then share it with various different groups. For instance, I could share results of Top Gear with my “petrol head” friends. These “interest” or “topic” packs offer a lot of content and not surprisingly YouTube videos. Circles, Hangout and Huddle are about personal sharing and personal communications. Sparks on the other hand is devoid of that connection and stands out as a sore thumb.

Google Plus + Chrome + Android

A few months ago, I wrote about how Google could beat Facebook, pointing out that it was not going to be on the web, and instead on the mobile.

I’ve always maintained Google has to play to its strengths – that is, tap into its DNA of being an engineering-driven culture that can leverage its immense infrastructure. It also needs to leverage its existing assets even more, instead of chasing rainbows. In other words, it needs to look at Android and see if it can build a layer of services that get to the very essence of social experience: communication.

However, instead of getting bogged down by the old-fashioned notion of communication – phone calls, emails, instant messages and text messages – it needs to think about interactions. In other words, Google needs to think of a world beyond Google Talk, Google Chat and Google Voice.

To me, interactions are synchronous, are highly personal, are location-aware and allow the sharing of experiences, whether it’s photographs, video streams or simply smiley faces. Interactions are supposed to mimic the feeling of actually being there. Interactions are about enmeshing the virtual with the physical.

The ability to interact on an ongoing basis anywhere, any time and sharing everything, from moments to emotions – is what social is all about. From my vantage point, this is what Google should focus on.

I am glad to see Google is thinking along these lines and is building products with a mobile-first point of view, a concept that former CEO Eric Schmidt has often talked about.

While I was given a demo by the Google executives on a notebook computer, the heavy use of HTML5 makes Google Plus an experience that could easily work on Android tablets and Android phones. Instant Uploads, Circles, Huddle and Hangout can work on these mobile devices without much textual input, making them easy to use on the touch-centric mobile platforms. Google at the same is also making  Google Plus available as an app – for Android and the iPhone platform – ensuring that it is getting the experience right.

Facebook Has Nothing To Worry About

I don’t think Facebook has anything to worry about. However, there is a whole slew of other companies that should be on notice. Just as Apple put several app developers on notice with the announcement of its new iOS 5 and Mac OS X Lion, Google+ should give folks at companies such as Blekko, Skype and a gaggle of group messaging companies a pause. I personally think Skype Video can easily be brought to its knees by Google Plus’ Hangout. And even if Google+ fails, Google could easily make Hangout part of the Google office offering.

One of the reasons why I think Facebook is safe is because it cannot be beaten with this unified strategy. Theoretically speaking, the only way to beat Facebook is through a thousand cuts. Photo sharing services such as Instagram can move attention away from Facebook, much like other tiny companies who can bootstrap themselves based on Facebook social graph and then built alternative graphs to siphon away attention from Facebook. Google, could in theory go one step further – team up with alternative social graphs such as Instagram, Twitter and Tumblr and use those graphs to create an uber graph.

Build it, But Will They Come?

View This Poll
online surveysIn the past, I have been pretty skeptical of Google’s social ambitions, mostly because of company’s DNA. Based on a briefing and a demo, I am not yet ready to change my opinion.

Google needs this social effort to work — it needs to get a lot of people using the service to create an identity platform that can rival Facebook Connect. It needs the people to improve its search offering. Of course, the Google’s biggest challenge is to convince people to sign-up for yet another social platform, especially since more and more people are hooked into Facebook (750 million) and Twitter. I don’t feel quite compelled to switch from Facebook or Twitter to Google, just as I don’t feel too compelled to switch to Bing from Google for Search.

I can easily see services such as Hangout and Huddle get traction, but will that be enough to get traction with hundreds of millions of people? Doubtful, though I am happy to be proven wrong, for it would surely be nice to have a counterbalance to Facebook.

Related content from GigaOM Pro (subscription req’d):


 
 

Our Narrowing Food Tree

26 Jun

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WordPress.com Drops Support for IE6

19 May

WordPress Dashboard

As the Internet Explorer 6 Deathwatch continues, another web service — WordPress.com — has announced that it is ending support of the nearly decade-old web browser.

Citing “increasingly complex code trickery to make the WordPress dashboard work,” the company announced an end to IE6 support.

The dashboard will still load for IE6 users, it just won’t function very well. IE6 users will be alerted that their browser is outdated and given direct links to browser updates or to download an alternative browser via the Browse Happy website.

In addition to dropping IE6 support, WordPress.com has also rolled out some new features, including a revamped and redesigned dashboard and a new distraction-free writing mode.

These features — as well as the end-of-life for IE6 support — will make their way to self-hosted WordPress installs with WordPress 3.2. The beta version of WordPress 3.2 is available for download now and the final version is expected to land sometime in June.

WordPress.com, which hosts millions of websites, joins a long list of providers that have officially decided that enough is enough in regards to IE6. In March, Microsoft launched its own global campaign calling for the end of the browser.

More About: IE6, internet explorer, WordPress.com

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