This effort of MMDC’s stood out from the scores of ‘transparent’ screen tromp l’oeil pictures created in the latest Flickr flap.

Why? The transparent terminal window floating in mid-air, mid-screen. Beautifully done.

Made me think of laptops from a possible augmented-reality future, where a vestigal frame of the screen is kept by industrial designers as a social cue, to be flipped up as an interruptions shield… even though the reality you are interacting with is just light scattered directly on your retina.

The faceted, messy world of folk/tag/free/ethnoclassification seems to be a natural fit for zoomable user-interfaces, or ZUIs… or Zooeys*.

The latest in Flash-to-Flickr interfaces for Tag browsing by Felix Turner does a particularly nice job of using mouse-gesture, zooming layers and just good, tasteful visual design.

Here’s a grab for the tag "London" for instance:

* Zeitgeistfully, in the new film of HHG2TG, Trillian is played by a Zooey

More ding-dong on the authority of Wikipedia recently, with much of the debate swirling around Many-2-Many.

Clay Shirky posted something that caught my eye there today, which is to side-step the argument with information design.

He proposes a ‘dashboard’ for each entry, allowing the browser to make his or her own mind up to the veracity of the information by making transparent the contributions and changes to that entry over time.

This, to me, was precisely what Martin Wattenburg was exploring with his History Flow project for IBM, but using visualisations to allow one to assess the ‘shape’ of the entry’s evolution quickly.

Teaming this up with Edward Tufte’s Sparklines concept i.e. visualisations of supplementary information inline to the main text led me to mock-up something that gives the user Clay’s “trust profile per item” married with Martin’s visualisation effect to give a quick idea to the user of the entry’s history.: Historyflow sparklines.

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Organizr launches today, which builds on the Flickr API to give photo-management tools approaching those you’d get on a desktop app. It’s very nice indeed, with some lovely info/interaction design touches, although I don’t have enough “in” Flickr to make it worthwhile just yet.

One niggling thing I’d suggest is that the “sets” that you build get a larger ‘stack’ icon, the more images you place in them.

This isn’t that important as a cue (you’d go click on the set entitled “my best naked pictures of celebrities ever” regardless of the size of the icon, if you pardon the double-entendre) but it would be a nice-to-have nonetheless, fitting in with a UI-style that it big on visual cues, humour and ease-of-use.

One of the best touches are the size-bars that are shown under the dates on the timeline interface of Organizr, indicating the number of pictures uploaded that day.

Of course, Organizr is built on the Flickr API, so if I had a ounce of talent I could do it myself, but alas it’s not the case.

Anyway, hearty congratulations to the Ludicorp crew – now go lie down somewhere and relax for a while!

Nice to see a few people excited by the “airtexting” feature of the active-cover enhancement to the new Nokia 3220. It seems though that they’ve missed* what, for me, is the feature with the most potential: the motion-detecting accelerometer.

Aside for how much fun it is to play games using your body as an interface, it could open up possibilities of gestural interfaces and tangible interaction to a mass audience.

In the near-future, combined with geolocation and touch interactions, starts to create a platform for situated, contextual interfaces to digital services, and some awesome opportunites for mixed-reality games.

Be Mario in Manchester, leaping Le-Parkour-style for the power-ups that only your phone tells you are there; or get on the bus and be Solid Snake in Salford, sneaking around the specialist pasta aisle of the Safeway, avoiding the tracking lasers coming from the old lady’s hats.

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UPDATE: Tom Hume gets it. “Backwards-Tron”. Brilliant.
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FURTHER UPDATE: Jens got there first…

Edward Tufte descibes a form of word-sized, inline infoburst he calls a “sparkline”:

A hyperlinked Sparkline would make webpages like superdense, fractal, layered, zoomable resources, and make the top-level of each topic look vital and organic like a terrarium of squirming data.

The next step would be to see Sparklines in the street, not just delivering data, but harvesting it – being it.

Crawling up lamposts as electricity consumption spikes during the ad-break of Coronation Street. Or infesting the wounds of a pigeon flattened by a delivery truck, updating the national epidemiological database and the air pollution record for that borough based upon trace metal readings in the carcass.

Tufte’s aiming to create bumps in the visual texture of the page that we can run our eyes over and just know. Lowering the load on our understanding not in reductive manner of many usability methodologies but trying to transform ways in which information is transferred to create a richer substrate for understanding.

» Ask E.T.: Sparklines [via Scoble]

Via John Battelle’s SearchBlog, the chief of Amazon’s A9 search engine Udi Manber declares:

“Think about how the Web has changed your life in the last 10 years. Now, try to extrapolate 10 years forward and you should feel dizzy. We’re still in day one of developing and innovating in search. There’s still a lot of exciting discoveries to be made,”

In his keynote to the WWW Conference in NYC, he goes on to say:

“For most users, they expect it to be as simple as possible and that’s a barrier. If music was invented 20 years ago, we’d all be playing one-string instruments,”

which struck me at first as a statement that would make a crowd of developers chuckle, but otherwise isn’t particularly helpful.

First up: if music was invented 20 years ago then there wouldn’t be much differentiation in expertise between players and the listeners. They would probably be very happy with the one-stringed instruments, grinning like loons, thinking that this new ‘music’ stuff was where it was at.

Secondly: complaining that your ‘users’ are holding you back is not a argument most users have a lot of sympathy with, cf. Boo.

However, if one interprets it as a comment on the medium – on the difficulty in communicating with computers and through digital interfaces – then perhaps it makes sense.

If A9 and Amazon commit their resources to understanding how to play a few more strings and still get their audience humming along with them, then the search engine wars won’t be over till the fat lady sings.

Or something.