Posted here for posterity:
Design kickoff meetings are like first dates that prepare you for an exciting relationship with a person who doesn’t exist.
Category: twitter
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Two Kinds of People
THERE ARE two kinds of people: those who hold the door open for others, and those who walk through without thanking me. #
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Usability Testing
USABILITY TESTING doesn’t reveal problems in your product so much as it uncovers arrogance in your thinking. #
THERE IS ALWAYS more to the story than what we are told. I am not omniscient. It is better to light a single candle than to join a lynch mob. Other people’s behavior is not my business. Truth is hard, epigrams are easy. Anything worth saying takes more than 140 characters. Blogging’s not dead. F____ the 140 character morality police.
FROM MY TWITTER STREAM of late:
- The Heads-Up Grid is an overlay grid for use during in-browser website development, built with HTML + CSS + JavaScript. http://t.co/EcgTkcD #
- Golden Grid System – a folding grid for responsive design. h/t @malarkey http://j.mp/mZnVJi #
- Nice responsive redesign! Well done, Meltmedia! http://t.co/tQQGW8J #
- RT @jasonsantamaria: I’m writing a book about typography for @abookapart! Lucky number 7: http://t.co/7CkSz0l #
- I love how everything Apple does, even slipping on a banana peel, is perceived as strategic. #
- Paul draws a napkin map of London. http://t.co/p4co2ZM #
Okay, that last one isn’t a web design link and the Apple comment could go either way, but that’s how I roll. Follow me on Twitter for more snarkeractive funucation!
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Questions, Please: Jeffrey Zeldman’s Awesome Internet Design Panel today at SXSW Interactive
HEY, YOU WITH THE STARS in your eyes. Yes, you, the all too necessary SXSW Interactive attendee. Got questions about the present and future of web design and publishing for me or the illustrious panelists on Jeffrey Zeldman’s Awesome Internet Design Panel at SXSW Interactive 2011? You do? Bravo! Post them on Twitter using hashtag #jzsxsw and we’ll answer the good ones at 5:00 PM in Big Ballroom D of the Austin Convention Center.
Topics include platform wars (native, web, and hybrid, or welcome back to 1999), web fonts, mobile is the new widescreen, how to succeed in the new publishing, responsive design, HTML5, Flash, East Coast West Coast beefs, whatever happened to…?, and many, many more.
Comments are off here so you’ll post your questions on Twitter.
The panel will be live sketched and live recorded for later partial or full broadcast via sxsw.com. In-person attendees, arrive early for best seats. Don’t eat the brown acid.
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The Twitters of Southby
20110312-NodeXL-Twitter-sxsw by Marc Smith.
From: www.connectedaction.net.
Connections among the Twitter users who recently mentioned sxsw when queried on March 12, 2011 scaled by numbers of followers.
A larger version (zoom for details) is available here: www.flickr.com/photos/marc_smith/5521097041/sizes/o/.
“Goodreads.com is social cataloging service for books. In this post you will see how they’ve used the friend spam dark pattern, but how they’ve also failed to make it go viral. This makes it interesting to carry out a post mortem and work out what they should have done.”
—Anatomy of the Goodreads.com Friend Spam Dark Pattern
(Hat tip: Andrew Travers.)
ATTENTION, web design geeks, contest fans, standards freaks, HTML5ophiles, CSSistas, grammarians, bookworms, UXers, designers, developers, and budding Haikuists. Can you do this?
Do not tell me I
Am source of your browser woes.
Template validates.
Write a web standards haiku (like that one), and post it on Twitter with the hashtag #bbd4 between now and November 30th—which happens to be the fourth international Blue Beanie Day in support of Web Standards.
Winning haikus will receive free books from Peachpit/New Riders (“Voices That Matter”) and A Book Apart.
Ethan Marcotte, co-author of Designing With Web Standards 3rd Edition and I will determine the winners.
Enter as many haikus as you like. Sorry, only one winning entry per person. Now get out there and haiku your heart out!
See you on Blue Beanie Day.
P.S. An ePub version of Designing With Web Standards 3rd Edition is coming soon to a virtual bookstore near you. Watch this space.
IN THE TRADITION of “People who bought ‘Assmasters’ also bought ‘Assmasters II,'” Twitter has chosen four of my Twitter friends and is presenting them to me as being “Similar to You.” Pray what does this odd-in-this-context phrase, with its “Related Products” vibe, mean? Does it mean if I like myself, I would also like these people? Surely not, for I already know that, as demonstrated by the fact that I follow them. Were they chosen for discussing similar subjects (e.g. design, web design, CSS, semantic markup)? Unlikely, as that would imply Google-like keyword data mining and analysis bordering on artificial intelligence.
Then, what? It can’t mean people whose tweets resemble mine, as the Twitter writing style and frequency of the listed friends is purely their own. People with whom I have followers in common? That seems most likely, but it’s just a guess.
I’m curious to know what Twitter and its new CEO (hi, Dick!) mean by this. What is the marketing purpose of this feature? Am I to view Twitter as an informal “personal brand analysis” service? That could be cool for me and for the four people who are “Similar” to me. But surely most users would be uninterested in such a service, unless, unbeknownst to me, nearly everyone who uses Twitter is a marketer who views it primarily as a channel. And most companies don’t spend money developing long-tail features, of interest only to a tiny fraction of their users.
I love Twitter. I wish I’d invented it, and not primarily because if I’d invented it I’d be taking the Japanese women’s gymnastics team on a round-the-world cruise. I wish I’d invented it because it is something really new on the internet, like the web, and filled with potential, like the web. As a designer, I pay attention to Twitter same as I do Apple, Google, Flickr, and Facebook. The new feature intrigues me precisely because its language feels “off” and its purpose eludes me.
Also of interest, although less so: what data is being used, and how is it being analyzed?
What’s your theory?
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Thanks for sharing
i’m UNfollowing you on twitter — here’s why
LOVE your stuff!!!
however, your twitter posts have taken over my twitter stream: a good 30% of my stream is YOUR stuff. so i’ve decided to UNfollow you, sorry.
thought: you could write a script of some sort to set up a Zeldman LITE twitter account, with (only) 1-4 posts/day. or you could post em yourself, manually.
or not.
i’ll keep reading your site, regardless. thanks for reading.
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Twitter Top 140
“Here it is, our next Web Trend Map. No Metro lines, no URLS. This time, it’s the 140 most influential people on twitter, sorted by #name #handle #category #influence #activity. Plus: When they started tweeting and what they first said. …”
Where does the data come from?
“We analyzed the data in our Web Trend Engine (30gigs), got a sneak peek into the top 100 list from the Max Planck Institute PDF Twitter research team (200KB), we talked to Twitter directly, and we asked our audience to make sure that we get international tweeters in there as well.”
As promised, a super-hot update to A Feed Apart, the official feed aggregator for An Event Apart, is up and running for your web design conference pleasure. You can now tweet from inside the application, and can even arrange meet-ups and make other social connections there.
Must-read: Designer Ali M. Ali talks about the interface design.
Steve Losh did back-end programming.
Nick Sergeant and Pete Karl created the original A Feed Apart and led the redesign effort.
If you can’t attend the sold-out show, which begins Monday, May 24, you can follow the live Tweetage from the comfort of your cubicle.
Enjoy An Event Apart Boston 2010 on A Feed Apart.