Nur Ahmad Furlong

Tag: facebook

  • Web Trends Map 2009 – An Information Design Masterpiece

    Following a re-tweet about a post discussing web typography, sorry I forget who initially tweeted this one, I was confronted with a piece of information design work which had me absolutely speechless. I’ve seen previous versions of the Web Trends Map, but this latest installment is a real work of art.

    Information Design to make your mouth Water

    This is a masterpiece of information design
    This is a masterpiece of information design

    The Web Trend Map is a yearly publication by Information Architects Inc. (iA). It maps the 333 leading Web domains and the 111 most influential Internet people onto the Tokyo Metro map.

    I can’t wait for this to be finalized so I can get hold of a printed copy for my office.

    What the Map really means.

    According to the creator’s of this map of juicy web goodness, countless hours of research was undertaken to assess to most effective, profitable and traffic generating websites and web gurus to put together a resource which is filled with the web’s most influential spaces and faces.

    These web trends have been intelligently super-imposed over a map of the Tokyo Metro System, aligning those web venues which have similar characteristics to the actually Tokyo Metro spaces they virtually occupy. For example:

    Google is placed in the busiest, most highly trafficked train station in the world: Shinjuku.

    The width of an entities station represents it’s stability in the web space.

    Trend Lines/Genres

    Metro lines were established to group similar web entities. Upon investigation you’ll quickly realise what a mammoth task of information architecture this must have been. Further more, characteristics like the height of specific stations on the Virtual Map, represent the web entities success in terms of both traffic & revenue, which explains of course why Google towers above the rest. The use of various coloured lines and the position of certain stations at intersections of 1, 2 or 3 lines expresses which trend lines specific web entities actually cross or overlap.

    Just a quick glance across the Trend Map reveals a wealth of information and insight into the current shape of the web sphere. I can see this map being presented in thousands of boardrooms and strategic sessions world-wide. It’s got that buzz appeal which the Orielly Web 2.0 Tag Cloud held at the beginning of the entrance of Web 2.0 into the mainstream. The many so called “social media gurus” out there are gonna eat this one up for breakfast lunch & supper.

    This is very much still a work of art and feedback is being taken currently to make it as accurate, error free and apt as it can possibly be.

    I’ve spent only a few minutes glancing at this web wonder and have already foreseen endless hours of my future dissappear in the journey this one is about to open for me. I’ll stop myself from using the cliche’s of beautiful, stunning, elegant to describe this one, even though these and more over used adjectives definitely apply in this case.

  • Does Google Friend Connect deserve a beta test?

    google_friend_connect_diagramSo you might have noticed the box to the top right of this post with some friend avatars in it. I signed up to be whitelisted as a google friend connect beta tester and then as usual when signing up for these types of things forgot all about it. Google sent me a notification a few days ago that my request had been accepted so I went through the motions of checking out what they had to offer.

    To be honest I’m not very impressed although I suppose things are still in development, the features available are currently not very usable. For example the widget I used in this site, which allows friends to connect with me on my site and invite others to do so, only allows me to see one or 2 profile links and doesn’t really allow me much interaction with the person who signed up as my friend. Maybe someone needs to develop a wordpress-friendconnect plugin to integrate some of the functionality.

    I admit I haven’t spent an awful amount of time going through the limited documentation, but so far it seems very raw and nothing to write home about, though I do love getting some additional little functional elements to play around with and spice up my site with.

    We’ll see what the community comes up with once the serious developers start throwing their social dev weight at this thing. As a non-hardcore-developer I can only but wait for now and throw in my 2 cents worth. How about you register as a friend and tell me if you found the process easy or valuable at all.

    The promise of Open Social seems to be working it’s way towards something but I don’t think it’s fully arrived yet. Next I think we’ll try Facebook connect and see how it compares.

  • Allowing more customization would take facebook to the next level

    I’ve had a love hate relationship with facebook since I started using it. I deleted my facebook account twice due to being irritated by a few people sending application invitations and a few other random reasons. Each time I deleted my account, I realized what I was missing out on in terms of staying in touch with certain people and the endless networking and collaborative opportunities facebook offers, so I’m back once again.

    The news of the facebook developer’s garage which recently(30-10-07) took place in Cape Town has made me think a little further about the possibilities which lie in the facebook platform and community. All these plugins and extensions, linking up with other online applications and services and people developing any and every type of functionality imaginable, most of which I think is a bunch of nonsense though others seem to be making use of it from vampire bites to fluffy gifts etc.

    An area where I think facebook should allow more play and developers should be focusing their attention is customization. Now I know the blue bar at the top and the standard layout has become somewhat familiar and that’s fine for most, but I think it’s about time we were allowed to play a bit with our personal spaces, brand them, colour them, change layout a little more and give them a bit more of a stamp of individuality. It should make no difference to the owners of facebook, as long a their ad spaces are maintained in their places what the rest of the thing looks like.

    I’d go out there as saying that this could be one of the most significant changes that could be included into the platform. I mean, it’s about us, about the individuals, their uniqueness. If i had even half the development skills needed to get stuck in on this area I’d dive in, any takers?

    What do you guys think?

  • The South African new media scene is hotting up

    The last few weeks have been an amazing experience for me as a blogger, designer and new media strategist though it’s been one steep learning curve. It all started when I quit my day job a little short of 2 months ago. I had been blogging for a while experimentally and on more of a personal level just writing about my own stuff, anything that interested me really. I never paid any attention to visitors, to rankings, search engines, all of that stuff just made little difference to me.

    I think it started when I first installed the stats plugin in my wordpress and started noticing some activity based on my posting. It was all pretty tame and just a few trickles of curious onlookers. When I decided to become a true nomad and take the plunge into solo uncertainty I knew I had to start doing something more serious with my site and had to start getting serious about networking as well. That was just less than 2 months ago, so I started clicking & reading, adding plugins, modding my blog, adding facebook friends, signing up for linked in & my genius, started linking all my social networks to each other, subscribed to a whole batch of RSS Feeds, set up my own feed, wrote more content for my site, designed my new logo … Wow. I can’t actually believe I did all this stuff in such a short space of time.

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