Google recently launched their OpenSocial product, aiming to bring together APIs to build applications which are cross social network compatible. The idea seems great, I expected or hoped for the majority of social networks to follow suit, but Facebook have opened up their Platform Standards in competition. Perhaps Microsoft’s stake in the Platform has had some sway.

Bebo has welcomed the cross Web site application trend and has become the first to adopt the Facebook Platform Standards. They’re also planning to support OpenSocial in 2008. I really like their attitude, the idea of opening up APIs is semantically brilliant. The Semantic Web is about ‘common formats for integration and combination of data drawn from diverse sources’. Of course the facebook model and that of all social networking sites relies on advertising, advertising largely based on the valuable information gathered from each sites’ members, so the information becomes a commodity. Wherever there’s a potential commodity there will be competing forces trying to get their share of it.

Profit will always win over semantic interest, but, well done to Bebo for the move!

Looks like Yahoo! Mail have made the effort to support email standards 100%. This is excellent news, having one of the top mail clients prove their support to The Email Standards Project shows the weight this standard initiative has behind it.

I wrote about the importance of the Email Standards Project a while back. It’s great to see awareness and its popularity growing. Gmail has my emailing love at the moment, I can’t fault the service compared to its competitors, it’s fantastic! It will upset me, though, if they don’t sacrifice a little of their genius to implement the changes needed to bring them into compliance, or, at the very least give an explanation for not doing so.

HTML vs text email is a debate that has been happening for as long as most can remember.

I came across a post on the Brightspark Blog last week linking to The Email Standards Project, something I was thrilled to hear about.

The Email Standards Project is about working with email client developers and the design community to improve web standards support and accessibility in email.

A couple of months back this probably wouldn’t have meant much to me but a good mate of mine has recently had his heart broken and rebroken trying to get his client’s e-zine to render correctly in as many email clients as possible.

It’s one of the most frustrating things to develop for cross browser compatibility, it’s almost impossible to get you’re design to render 100% across all email clients, without sacrificing you’re beloved layout that is.

The email standards project has tested the dominant email clients and information on supported and non-supported CSS elements are all available from their Web site. It’s a valuable resource for designers and an initiative that will see us all emailing more happily into the future.

The Irl-DeAN’s Design for All event went brilliantly last week. IBM’s Extreme Blue students showcased two projects. One, demonstrating an age friendly way of merging web and multimedia technologies so as to remove the fear of unfamiliar devices and complexities and replace them with peripherals comfortable and known to elderly users in particular.

(more…)

When I was working in Belfast earlier this year, I picked up a copy of Jacob Nielson’s ‘Designing Web Usability’ for a pound in a small secondhand book shop. You can’t really go wrong for a quid. I vaguely remember lectures from a few years back discussing Nielson’s work, the main thing I remember though is what I considered to be his over simplistic approach.

(more…)

Microsoft held a web dev training seminar on the Expression Studio last week. The talk started with a run down on user experience and what great user experience means, namely reliability, usefulness, adaptability and desirability.

(more…)

I was fortunate enough to pop up to Derry last week for a couple of days with two of my team mates from zerO.One. We were invited to speak at the N’Ireland Creative Industries conference, on in the Millenium forum in Derry City, about our experience in Dare to be digital this year.

Apart from the slightly daunting size of the auditorium, our presentation was recieved well and the event was an excellent opportunity to showcase our game, Heaven2ocean. We had the chance to meet like minded people and those really moving things in the right direction up North.

Wayne Hemingway, Designer/ Founder of Hemingway Design & Red or Dead, was the keynote speaker and gave a really entertaining talk, not only discussing issues related directly to creativity in the arts but touching on areas such as housing design and playgrounds. Aside from his famed fashion label, the areas Wayne has tapped into are impressive to say the least. It was really cool to see ways people are being creative where it usually wouldn’t be expected and it’s going to be really interesting to see what’s produced in the next year!