Archive for March, 2010

File Under: Events, Location, Mobile
Mar
30
2010

Location Isn’t Just a Feature Anymore, It’s a Platform

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The O'Reilly Where 2.0 Conference runs through Thursday in San Jose, California.

The O'Reilly Where 2.0 Conference runs through Thursday in San Jose, California.

Just when you thought the swell of popularity around location-based services has hit the high water mark, the tide keeps rising.

All of the major web search engines are location-aware. Twitter has its own geocoder and Facebook is including location data in status updates. The big photo-sharing services like Flickr and Picasa support geotagging. Social location apps from Foursquare and Yelp are all the rage, and augmented reality is being touted as the next big thing. The emerging HTML5 specification has its own geolocation controls that let webapps find a user’s location through the browser.

We’ve reached the point where the addition of location data inside an application isn’t a special “bells-and-whistles” add-on, an experimental feature or a layer that’s only useful to some users.

It’s a standard feature now, and it’s crept into every product we care about.

“Location is something that people are just going to expect from now on,” says Brady Forrest, program chair for the O’Reilly Where 2.0 conference, the three-day event about all things location-based taking place in San Jose, California this week.

The location revolution was fueled by the proliferation of geo-enabled devices, Forrest says. Since most of us are carrying GPS devices in our pockets (every iPhone and Android phone has one, and most notebooks, too), it’s created a whole new application platform on which companies from different sectors — search, mapping, gaming, social networking, location-sharing — can compete.

“The platform is here,” he says. “Now, people are finding new ways to exploit it.”

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File Under: Location, Mobile
Mar
30
2010

Kickball Plots Foursquare Domination With Better Maps

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The Kickball slogan.

The Kickball slogan.

A new iPhone app makes messing around on Foursquare a more-visual experience than ever before.

The app is called Kickball, and it more tightly incorporates maps into the Foursquare experience. It has many of the same features as the official Foursquare app, like check-ins, history, badges, tips and shouts, and the list view that shows all your friends’ statuses.

But Kickball (App Store link) ups the ante by letting you plot all of the current Foursquare activity within your network on a map. You can see where your friends are, zooming in and panning around to different neighborhoods. Also, at any time, you can pop up a map that shows you the 15 venues in the Foursquare system that are closest to your current location. Kickball uses Mixer Labs’ GeoAPI, which is now owned by Twitter, for location data.

This discovery feature is especially handy if you’re in a city or a neighborhood you don’t know that well. Even in a place I know all too well (the Wired office), I was able to see all the places within about 100 yards where I can go fight for mayorships. Oh, it’s ON.

kickball_wide

While you’re browsing one of these maps, and you zoom in on a friend or on a venue, you get a button that says, “I’m here too,” making it easy to check in with one click. Equally as accessible within the app is the “Off the grid” choice. There’s also the ability to view details about a place, view relevant tweets and add photos (something else missing from Foursquare).

I’ve been using both Kickball and Foursquare’s official iPhone apps side by side for a couple of days, and the map experience in Kickball is far better than the map experience in Foursquare. The user interface in Kickball is also a little less chaotic than Foursquare. Both have their ups and downs, but if you’ve been wanting a stronger, more elegant integration of maps, Kickball is your answer.

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File Under: Databases, Visual Design
Mar
29
2010

Sunlight Labs Offering $5K for Best Government Data Mashups

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designforamerica

Artists, web developers and data visualization geniuses, here’s a chance to strut your stuff, serve your country and win some serious money in the process.

Sunlight Foundation, a non-profit organization that provides tools to make government data more transparent, has announced a new contest called Design for America. Billed as a “design and data visualization extravaganza,” Sunlight is encouraging the public to create and publish data visualizations that help make complex government data easier for people to digest and interact with.

There are several different categories open for submission, including: visualizations of Recovery.gov data that shows how the stimulus money is being spent, visualizations showing how a bill becomes a law, a redesign of a .gov website, and a redesign of any government form. Top prize in each category is a cool $5,000.

Creations can be in any form — a website, a game, a poster, a sculpture, whatever — though we suspect most of the entries will be either posters or interactive Flash graphics.

The contest is being run by Sunlight Labs, the skunkworks wing of the larger Sunlight Foundation. The Sunlight group spends most of its energy collecting government data, organizing it into publicly accessible databases, then creating tools that make it easier for ordinary people to access that data. The non-profit works with organizations like OpenCongress, MapLight, FollowTheMoney and USASpending.gov. Sunlight also maintains a list of APIs developers can use to access the data.

The Design for America contest encourages participants to sift through the vast datasets available from all of these organizations, as well as the datasets maintained by Sunlight Foundation and any raw government data that’s available. As the Sunlight Labs blog says, the goal of the contest is to “tell interesting stories” that go beyond what can be an overwhelming amount of unfiltered data.

Visualizations can be in any medium, not just the web, so if you’re a video or infographic specialist, you can still enter the contest. The main criteria for judging are the visual quality of the artwork and how well the underlying information is conveyed.

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File Under: Social, Web Apps, Web Services
Mar
26
2010

Making Contact With Mr. Gmail

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Google's Todd Jackson, product manager for Gmail and Google Buzz

Google’s Todd Jackson carries the weight of the web on his shoulders. As the product manager for Gmail, it’s his responsibility to make sure your inbox experience is fast, secure and always available. Jackson is also the product manager for Buzz, Google’s real-time social sharing system that launched in February and was promptly criticized over privacy issues and its “noise” problem. Talk about a tough gig.

We got the chance to ask Jackson about the inner workings of the Gmail team, what’s ahead for Buzz as far as user controls, and what it feels like to bear the collective rage of Gmail’s 140-million-plus users when the system takes a dive.

Webmonkey: Do you think we’re going to see the death of the desktop e-mail client anytime soon?

Todd Jackson: We don’t like to think of it that way (laughs). No comment! Seriously, though, we think deploying an app in the browser is something that easily makes sense to users now. They can log in on any computer, all their stuff is in the cloud. It’s just easier. And for us, we can push frequent updates and improve the product iteratively.

At Google, we run our own business on Gmail — we call this “eating our own dog food.”

Webmonkey: So do you suffer the same service outages as the general public?

Jackson: We do. When Gmail goes down, it goes down for us. That’s one of our first alerts.

Webmonkey: What happens in your office at Google when Gmail goes down?

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File Under: Frameworks, JavaScript, Visual Design
Mar
26
2010

Beautiful Websites: Former Apple Designer’s Amazing Photo Gallery

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matasblog

Slick photo gallery plug-ins for JQuery, Dojo and other JavaScript libraries mean that the days of the boring thumbnail grids are well behind us. But the same ease-of-use means that slick slideshows are everywhere — it’s hard to stand out.

Unless you’re Mike Matas. The former Apple designer and co-founder of Delicious Monster recently unveiled a new photo blog that has perhaps the slickest, yet simplest, gallery script we’ve ever seen.

Perhaps more impressive than the clever slide navigation and the blurred background photos, what’s really amazing about the site is how simple the interface is — Matas manages to pack in everything from embedded maps to comments without overwhelming the photos.

The only caveat is that the site requires a modern web browser with support for emerging standards. Internet Explorer users; nothing to see here. Also note that performance lags a bit in Firefox 3.6 compared to WebKit browsers like Safari and Chrome.

We’d hate to see a million ripoffs of this design, but if you want to do something similar, the site’s developers, Chi Wai Lau and Nefaur Khandker, say that it was built using the MooTools JavaScript framework.

Check out our three-part MooTools tutorial on Webmonkey if you want to learn more about using the free UI framework.

One very nice touch we like on the site is that scrolling changes the URL so there’s no back-button breakage. Unfortunately, if you turn off JavaScript entirely you notice that the site doesn’t function at all, which is worth remembering should you consider doing something similar.

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