Navimation

The Record seminar also introduced a new concept: Navimation. Navimation is formed by the two words "navigation" and "animation" and is describing the activity of navigation combined with the visual technique of animation. Examples presented by Jan Olav Eikenes from AHO were leoburnett.com, seen.by and matthewmahon.com. The concept is used to discuss challenges when viewing enormous amount of content. Jan Olav Eikenes showed his own project for "NRK Urørt" and a 3d navimation for easier viewing all music sent in to the site. The project was a map with straws for each band, placed in the map. Where you also could interact with the straws and get recommendations from other users based on this methodology. You got to see it to understand I guess... unfortunately this a confidential project.

Social problems?

One challenge to come in the waterfall of social services is the problem with having an overload of social networks to maintain. How to stay updated and how to stay focused on the communities you like? The Friendfeed service wants to do something about that. And its getting more and more attention. Today Techcrunch comment on the new feature personilize recommendations and it allows users to view the items posted by your friends based on how interesting the network thinks each item is. So now you can let communities decide if things your friends are doing are interesting or not. And of course avoid friends with a boring life...

Record - personal or popular?

A friend invited me to the "Record - personal or popular?" seminar at Forskningsparken in Oslo. The main attraction was Matt Jones, designer at Dopplr. Dopplr is a service that lets you share your future travel plans privately with friends and colleagues. The service then highlights coincidence, for example, telling you that three people you know will be in Paris when you will be there too. One interesting thing was the way Matt Jones and his team developed and worked with new services in Dopplr. By tagging each functionality and then allowing functionality to be assigned to specific users, they could pinpoint alpha versions of separate ideas to dedicated and interested users. And they got early, valuable and dedicated feedback from the Dopplr community. They recently launched a new functionality using this approach which monitored and reported CO2 emissions based on the travels registered in Dopplr.

Another interesting perspective was the thoughts Matt Jones had on users’ anonymity and willingness to share information. In Doppler you only connect and share with the ones you trust; only allowing information to be transferred to people approved by you. And a community service must always keep the users integrity. But at the other hand the information needs to be searchable and anonymously shared within the community to allow the fundamental integration of information. As community developers we must consider this aspect and discuss it with our customers in an early phase of the project.

See his presentation here.