I’m traveling to Milan this afternoon to participate in the Microsoft ENVISION conference. (a special thanks to ‘Canoas‘ who got me in! And of course, to Microsoft for the nice Invitation and sponsoring).
Microsoft Envision is a set of presentations covering subjects around information, communication, minimal user interfaces, adaptive interfaces, emotional design and the dynamics between information and the way that we present it.
I’ll try to blog a bit about the overall event and the different presentations as soon as possible.
Anyone in Milan up for a coffee or drink?
UPDATE:
You can find my short (non-edited) notes here.
BTW, the venue for this Envision event is simply astonishing:
I just got back to Portugal, and thankfully with it also go back to the old good connectivity, I’ve managed to upload the presentation from Web2expo in Berlin into SlideShare, not without some trouble, it seems that their size limit (30Mb) was a bit lower than the one I had so I just managed to cut down the presentation into a 2 part presentation:
Conversational Design - Part 1
Conversational Design - Part 2
I’ll write down my notes from the presentation (as soon as I get some sleep) since some interesting topics that didn’t make their way into it because of the time, and others were just the result of the nice feedback I got at the end of the presentation.
Hope you enjoy it, and most of all take some key ideas from it to your projects!
Well, SHiFT isn’t happening this year… and yeah, believe me no one’s more sad about it than myself, well may two other crazy guys! But we couldn’t stand still so we’re helping SAPO in an astonishing event:
and trust me, we’re all aiming high, as high as we’re allowed to get all the Portuguese developers an amazing event, party and mash-ups contest!
The event is obviously inspired in the Yahoo Hackday which totally contagious us back in May in London when some of us managed to attend it. Since not all Portuguese can afford traveling as far, SAPO decided to recreate it!
We’re trying to include everyone that wishes to go, but since the seats are limited, I urge everyone who praises for his/her geekiness without shame to register at:
Took them some time, but the first images of the online social network for Sony’s Playstation 3 kind of seem in the right direction. You can see the video on directly on YouTube, or watch it here:
According to this proposition for a bill of rights, every Social Network and/or Application should guarantee 3 fundamental USER rights
Ownership of their own personal information: own profile data, the list of people they are connected to and the the activity stream of content they create;
Control of whether and how such personal information is shared with others; and
Freedom to grant persistent access to their personal information to trusted external sites.
which in practice means that this services should display the following features:
Allow their users to syndicate their own profile data, their friends list, and the data that’s shared with them via the service, using a persistent URL or API token and open data formats;
Allow their users to syndicate their own stream of activity outside the site;
Allow their users to link from their profile pages to external identifiers in a public way; and
Allow their users to discover who else they know is also on their site, using the same external identifiers made available for lookup within the service.
The Web2Expo Berlin Tracks have been unleashed. Just by looking at the tracks, I can already guess that’s going to be a very special and unique conference in terms of tech conferences around Europe. Web2Expo will cover five different tracks:
The tracks session list is so large and covers so many interesting subjects, that the hard job is going to be choosing which ones to attend to. A special note for which I’m really glad is that we’ve managed to get some portuguese representations in there: Fred (WeBreakStuff) is going to moderate the panel “Moving from 1.0 to 2.0: Philosophies and Structures for Change” and I’ll be presenting “Conversational Design“:
Once we progress from the User Centered Design to Community Centered Design we’ll need to identify and gather a similar set of best practices regarding it’s Community design. This presentation collects more or less the key features and interactions that a successful Community should display in order to empower their users and facilitate conversation between its members.
This presentation aims to be a bridge between Usability Best Practices and Community Centered Design, a practice that can maximize the networking and crowd effect under online user communities.
Web2Expo will also include a Foo/BarCamp style event that’s being organized by Nicole Simon entitled Web2open which will blend pre-scheduled content with an open grid where the attendees can fill in sessions they either want to discuss or present themselves. It certainly going to be a unique space to connect with other attendees, learn more about elements of Web 2.0, and share their knowledge and experiences.
So if not before, see you in Berlin, next November!
My inner geek rejoices with the fact that Microformats have finally got a little more buzz lately! One particular Microformat I’ve been using is XFN (Xhtml Friends Network), aka the Relationships Microformats. This particular Microformat allows me to easily state the sort of relation I have with other people and for instance the blogs I link to.
Yesterday I was discussing with a colleague about whether she should or shouldn’t use them on her upcoming service and although to me the question had a dead simple question, convincing her and others wasn’t as simple as I expected!
People expect us to always have some sort of golden rules, some well defined goals or at least some clear advantages for spending development time/effort in implementing something we’re suggesting. I confess in this case we don’t have them, for for the sake of innovation I really recommend on jump into the unknown sometimes, just for the fun of it.
From our conversation I managed to sort out some key ideas on why we should all start using XFN on every service that can use it:
CONTACTS AREN’T ALL BORN EQUAL!
As a user I clear understand that some people are more important to me than others, accept it, it seems to me and although I don’t call everyone friend, I call them all contacts, some of the are actually my friends and family, so some type of differentiation is necessary!
EARLY IS AN ADVANTAGE!
If you think that you might use Microformats like XFN on your service, start using them from day 1! That’s the only way to ensure that you start collecting that extra information from the very begging and your users will start using them on every relation that they define on your service.
This is actually a key factor, all social networks start with high rate of new profiles creation and with them a lot of social relations are created too, having XFN introduce later in this process means that your users will have to endure in a redefine process for every relation they already had on the system, and to me, quite few of your users will actually do it, leaving you with in a mix state of information, some of they have XFN info other don’t.
LESS ISN’T ALWAYS GOOD!
That’s the case with information, traditionally the more information you have, the better! With XFN in particular, the managers of that information will have a better understanding of the types of relationships that are sprouting on their services, allowing them to gather a clear typification of their user base, their interests and the type of relations they’re creating on the service: Who are they inviting, friends? Colleagues? Family? With little effort, this extra information, allow to envision new features where you should really invest some development time in!
To me is relatively simple, even if at the very beginning this extra information is pretty much useless, I really believe that sooner rather than later we’ll all greet ourselves by having it rather than not. As in so many other situations, when we collect information that by itself doesn’t represent or add any value, in the end we always seem to come up with new and interesting ways of using it.
GROUPS LACK CONVENTION!
One of the reasons presented during the conversation for not using XFN was that from the User point of view you could get the same experience by allowing them to create and use different user groups.
Well thats just WRONG!
Sure, groups allow you to separate your friends, but if you allow your users to create user-defined groups, you have no way of actually knowing what type of people he/she is collecting in a particular group. By sticking with the XFN closed attributes you know that the users that used them, although randomly they’ll use it in the same sense and situation!
Those were the main results from our quick conversation! Now that I’ve written them, they seem pretty common sense, but they really weren’t when we started.
We surely missed some other reasons for using XFN, does anyone has other “motivation” factors for using them?
A pedido de alguns dos presentes no TakeOff, aqui fica a apresentação que eu fiz nesse mesmo evento. Sendo que o TakeOff era um evento sobre empreendorismo e inovação, a ideia da apresentação foi fazer uma introdução à web social e em particular ao papel crucial que a uma comunidade pode ter no suporte e viabilidade de uma empresa. Espero que os que não conseguiram estar presentes possam achar de algum interesse.
O podcast deve ficar disponível dentro de alguns dias na própria página do TakeOff, entretanto e para os que não gostam do SlideShare fica aqui também o PDF.
A apresentação foi centrada num tema, que acabei por denominar por “Design Conversacional”, e seguia a ideia de partindo do conceito de desenvolvimento centrado nos utilizadores, construir um conjunto de boas práticas para o desenvolvimento centrado na própria Comunidade. Desenvolvimento esse, que não será mais do que formas de tornar as Comunidades Online mais “usáveis”! Em particular, a apresentação constitui uma tentativa de determinar qual o conjunto de características e interacções que devem estar disponíveis em todas as comunidade online de modo a facilitar a conversação entre os seus membros e a potenciar o seu papel enquanto plataforma social ao serviço dos seus membros.
Para os que não conseguiram estar presentes, deixo aqui a versão em PDF ou se preferirem é também possível ver a apresentação directamente aqui através do SlideShare:
Following an invitation from the Portuguese Usability Professionals Association, I’ve made presentation under the subject of Usability in User Generated Communities. While working on the presentation, I’ve ended up calling it only Conversational Design, since I once started working on the idea it really sounded more simple calling it that way.
Once We progress from the User Centered Design to Community Centered Design we’ll need to identify and gather a similar set of best practices regarding it’s community design. This presentation collects more or less the key features and interactions that a sucessfull Community should display in order to empower their users and facilitate conversation between its members.
For those who prefer, you can also download the presentation PDF file here.
as if Twitter wasn’t already smashing my attention span, i got the tip from a Scoble twit, and just found out TwitterVision, if the rate of the twits don’t impress you, the fact that isn’t even mentioned in google yet vs the number of people talking about it should:
Twittervision, is a twittermap 2.0: worldmap + twitters + geolocation + updated by the second.
First things that came to my mind were:
WOW!
this should be an interesting screensaver,
or converted to a TV channel (maybe when I receive my Joost invitation)!
I’m traveling to Milan this afternoon to participate in the Microsoft ENVISION conference. (a special thanks to ‘Canoas‘ who got me in! And of course, to Microsoft for the nice Invitation and sponsoring). 
