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Twitter Feed"Look Ma, It's Me": Interface Design & The Joys of Real Time
Submitted by Zoey Kroll on May 22, 2008 - 12:43am
I just tried to log-in to Edible Office, my urban farm blog, but ran up against the usual roadblocks caused by a combination of multiple virtual identities, internet mergers, and my reverse-reverse-psychology password protection program.
Staring forlornly at the empty password box on the right of Blogger's screen, I mentally retraced my Google login history for the day (Blogger and Google share my secrets). A moving interface element drew my eye to the left side of the screen to a ticker featuring the names of blogs updated as of one minute ago: "Couch Potato Revolution," "The People's Pundit", "Idle Thoughts", money-making scheme blogs, blogs with Chinese characters, blogs with Russian characters.... The names keep scrolling, even as we speak. While I usually hate moving parts on the screen (try reading under a strobe light), the Blogger ticker worked for me (a la Twitter or YouTube: the seductive promise of instant gratification).
Here's my thought-tracking usability study as I watch the scrolling list of blog names:
- Something is happening here!
- People just like me blog! People nothing like me blog! Everyone is blogging!
- I can blog too!
I want to see the name of my blog on the list, dancing in shimmering neon lights across the blogosphere! (Now if only I could log in...) We all want to feel like we're part of something. Web applications and online campaigns inspire us when they help us feel connected and whole. We want reminders that we exist, that our opinions matter. In other words, we want to see that when we put something into the machine, something comes out. And when it comes out, we want to be able to show it off: "Look ma, I'm a blogger!"
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Have you seen http://play.blogger.com? Same idea, with pictures. And if you like something but it's scrolled by, it's not gone; you can scroll back and "show info" to find the blog.
Does anyone know if there's a compelling reason not to leave something like Blogger Play going in the background, 24 hours a day, on an occasional Energy Star machine? Servers do compete for energy, but is the carbon footprint from your use of Blogger Play significant?
If bandwidth is scarce, is its shortage a real problem -- or a planned shortage to lobby against net neutrality and the resulting opportunities for corporate abuse of power? In the latter case there's no reason to conserve bandwidth to prevent scarcity of a scarce public resource, since an administered shortage will be more or less the same whether people conserve or not. Yet conservation for carbon footprint still makes as much sense either way.
And does the much greater public access to bandwidth in countries such as Japan or Korea relate to this?
Any opinions or informed opinions on these matters?
--
John S James
www.smart-accounts.org
I don't know what the compelling reason to leave play.blogger on for 24 hours would be, if you weren't watching it. Certainly a desk top machine is not as efficient, even if it is energy star, as most laptops are. The energy star rating usually has something to do with the sleep and hibernate power draw of the machine. You also have the energy usage of the monitor/display to account for.
There are quite a number of aps out there do interesting things with images. I've seen flickr mashups that are pretty cool, but again, nothing worth keeping running for 24/7.... maybe at a party or event... but really the images displayed are so ephemeral, they only matter if you see them, so unless you plan on propping your glazzy-lids open and staring into the box, I think you can just tune in when you want to see it.
The idea is to have a room full of creative things, like interesting papers, pictures, small collections, and odd objects; someone just walking by might notice a blog that changes their life. But having a button to turn on the computer would work for this purpose almost as well. Or maybe electronics to detect a person in the room. After no person for half an hour or so, a timer would turn the computer off.
--
John S James
www.smart-accounts.org
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