Posted in:
Design on
Jul 10
I like FriendFeed. It's simple and useful, and it brings the utilitarian-but-well-engineered feel of Gmail to social media (several prominent Google/Gmail alums developed FriendFeed).
FriendFeed has one great and, I think, unique feature called "Create an imaginary friend." It lets you track people from other social media sites who haven't yet signed up for FriendFeed.
This is a smart and useful way of dealing with problems like cold-start and social network migration. Your friends don't need to move to FriendFeed for you to get value from it (and them).
But--honestly--the real reason I'm writing this post is because this button just makes he happy. It's an unexpected reminder of a time when I didn't need to keep track of the people I knew, when my relationships weren't a measure of my value, and when I used to hang out with Evel Knievel all day long, jumping Snake Canyon.
But I know all of this will be spoiled once I click the button. So I don't.
Australia bound (Jul 8)
Next week I'm headed to Australia to do some speaking, have lunch with some dignitaries and take a short holiday. I start off in the south and head north where it's warm: July 18 - 23 - Melbourne for KM...
Book Excerpt: Seven Business Benefits of Tagging (Jul 2)
I posted a link to this on our company blog a few days ago but thought I should share it here as well: Peachpit.com has a short excerpt from my book called Return on Investment: Seven Business Benefits of Tagging...
I'm shuttering Tweeterboard (Jun 30, with comments by drcrazy4, Susan Reynolds, )
Last fall I built a site called Tweeterboard. Tweeterboard was an experiment in using conversation (specifically @username messages) to measure influence within Twitter. But this week I realized that I no longer have the time, energy, interest or technical...
Nashville! (Jun 19)
Last week I was in Nashville, Tennessee speaking at Voices That Matter, a fine web design conference hosted by the folks at Peachpit. The conference was great, of course. Some amazing people worked on (and around) my book and I...
links for 2008-06-19 (Jun 19)
What's in a Word - ip.Blog Nice, short review of my book. (tags: tagging book reviews)...
Debunking the Atheist's Nightmare (Jun 17)
If you haven't seen "The Atheist's Nightmare," it's a short video where Ron Comfort and former TV star Kirk Cameron use a banana to prove the existence of God. It's that ridiculous, but I'm posting it here since no one...
Explaining the Flip video camera (Jun 13)
Charles Wyke-Smith explains the appeal of the Flip video camera: Charles is the author of Stylin' with CSS. We were hanging out at VTM in Nashville. And I took the video with the engraved Flip camera that I got for...
The Boston Celtics on strategy vs. opportunity (Jun 5)
My Webvisions Slides (May 27)
Brand Tags: the really effective tag cloud (May 14)
Back to Melonville (May 10)
Upcoming Appearances: WebVisions, VTM, ESS and more (May 8)
How to get a mouse in a beer bottle (Apr 26)
Power struggle (Apr 24, 4 comments)
links for 2008-04-21 (Apr 21)
links for 2008-04-18 (Apr 18)
links for 2008-04-17 (Apr 17)
By day Gene Smith is a principal with nForm, one of Canada's leading user experience consulting firms. By night he writes about information architecture, interaction design, community, the web and other such topics. 
