6 posts
So this isn't an actual Smiths lyric, but this bastardised version has been rattling around in my head while thinking about the whole Instagram + Facebook thing over the last week. In trying to figure out how I feel about it I keep returning to a couple of ideas.
We've been looking at using barcodes for a small research project. I've haven't been too interested in the whole qr codes that open a web page on your phone thing, as it seems a lot of effort for low value result. But this service proposition from Tesco (in it's South Korean guise) is quite awe inspiring. Say hello to advertising as a service platform.
A quick search for 'Apple should buy Instagram' on Google shows that the general thinking of the inter-brain is Apple should / will / can kill Instagram with it's own social photo sharing service. Over and above the fact that Apple are famously useless at anything social ('Dad, what's Ping?'), the reason for Apple being rubbish at social sharing is that their entire culture is built on secrecy. Not sharing is their business model. It also extends into their service model. You must live your life inside the iTerms and Conditions, sorry I mean - iTunes. Your apps must pass the App store quality control and even your iAds are vetted. In this context, I am not sure Apple are capable of allowing grubby little people to share stuff in the context of their brand.
The Hanging Gardens of Babylon
I am liking the idea of 'Meta-products'. What is a meta-product? The best examples are Nike+, the fabulously daft Nabaztag and, more recently, Alertme. Generally speaking they're physical objects, rooted in networked technology that are driven by mobile and web services. There is nothing new about this idea, it's roots are well established in many sci-fi and computer science paradigms like ubiquitous computing, pervasive computing or more broadly the Internet of Things.
Reading with interest an unfolding flameup at Design for Service caused by Jeff Howard’s post entitled UX Rockstars need not apply. The gist of the conversation is a few folk getting all hot under the collar about disciplines and domains. Especially the emerging challenges in the US by this new fangled idea of ‘Service Design‘ and it seems to be freaking people out. Which is a good thing in my book. The argument was instigated by sweeping statement from an interview with Jesse James Garret of Adaptive Path, that went like this..
JJG: I think any distinction that you could draw between service design and user experience is purely academic. In practical terms, the overlap in the problems being solved, the methods applied to solving them, and the philosophy of practice is so huge that anything you could say was purely a service design issue or purely a user experience design issue would be an extreme edge-case. They may persist as separate areas of intellectual inquiry, but as fields of practice I think they’ll inevitably converge. So in that sense, SD vs. UX is the new IA vs. IxD.
I’ve worked in SD for a while now and some things have always interested me:
At SXSWi, I was expecting to be sold the shiny digital future, but what I found was something stranger and unsettling, somewhere fragmented, confused. Is the web getting a bit existential?
After its angry adolescence, the web is growing up and beginning to realise that its parents possibly aren’t total bellends. To bludgeon the metaphor, you could say that after totaling the car, smashing up the house and pissing in the pool, the web and its pilgrims are expressing a growing After its angry adolescence, the web is growing up and beginning to realise that its parents possibly aren’t total bellends. To bludgeon the metaphor, you could say that after totaling the car, smashing up the house and pissing in the pool, the web and its pilgrims are expressing a growing awareness fear of the consequences of all this youthful abandon. fear of the consequences of all this youthful abandon.
