Zelda’s got just the thing for you:
“ZeldaChat came about because information wants to be free…well actually because I was working for a company that made using instant messaging a sackable offence. This little chat app will work through firewalls, and doesn’t store your conversation…so no one’s any the wiser!”
Found this while wandering around the examples of using Amazon’s webservices APIs: graphical representation of relationships between items built on the fly from amazon’s familiar collaborative filtering, sales patterns and linkages data.
Loads of potential yet to realise here, but still inspires a “whoooo…”
You have to love it.
Got turned onto NetNewsWire by Coates and Webb (sounds like a firm that manufactures fine walking sticks for country squires). I’m now feeling positively pained by going to a webpage and having to decipher their design, grok the semiotics – instead of slidiing smoothly through RSS feeds of writing, info, and other good, good stuff…
One very natty thing NetNewsWire does is let you import and export your subscription lists to effect blogrolling on steroids. Moreover, it seems to ‘merge’ the subscriptions of others with your own. So you then in turn might maybe export your subscriptions list, to be merged, mutated and passed on…
Fabulous.
So, FWIW here is:
NetNewsWire is a another glimpse of the pageless, siteless, webflux of the near future. These glimpses are becoming more and more frequent. Recent, other timeslips into this possible future worldline of the WWW include AmazonLite and Paul Ford’s essay on Google and the Semantic Web.
So – these nodal points bring me back to an old favourite: whither web design as we know it?
Brother Jakob has been preachin’ this one for a while. We tried to look at it at the BOF session at O’Reilly ETCON, and only really scratched the very wide surface. Victor, Alex, Eric and Michael have been examining it to name but a few. I’ve been doing a lot of stuff at work which is about designing social networks and their topologies, and peterme seems similarly preoccupied.
I think those who have extended themselves from working on sites and pages into information architecture or the wider field of practice described as experience design will be in good shape to tackle this. I hope more do over time, and start experiementing and thinking in this new paradigm.
Ironically, Flash designers maybe adept at handling these ideas too, as they have been working without the page/site metaphor; and new generations of the app are linking into the important structural advantages of the web.
One last link – a great presentation by Doc Searls (apart from some appearances by dodgy looking characters with pieces of chalk), which urges businessmen and technologists to look at the ‘layers’ of civilisation and where they can work together within them. Lou has been thinking along these lines with his notions ‘Enterprise IA’, but with more reference to how organisations rather than civilisations behave.
Where can designers work to link fashion, commerce and richness of the deeper layers of infrastructure these technologies expose?
UPDATE: 12:49am
Dan Gillmor is on it…
Petafloptimism 