kev/null

Who Wants a Job?

The Bay Area is hopping lately and people keep asking if I know anyone I can recommend.

“Know any designers?”

“Know any good Flash people?”

“Know any good web developers?”

I wish there was an easy way on LinkedIn to automatically link these people together. I equally get people from the other side looking for work. Oftentimes, I’ve managed to connect these people together (I believe strongly that having a network is worthless unless I share it) but lately I’ve found I’ll sometimes forget who’s looking for what.

What I’d like to see is an auto-match from my network of people who are looking for a skill set and people who are looking for certain types of jobs based on keywords. Then I can simply elect to forward these introductions or not (without either party knowing if I chose not to).

C’mon, LinkedIn. Help me help my friends.

Secretary

It seems I’m on a kick of off-beat movies lately. Maggie Gyllenhaal and James Spader (whom I last saw in the less known Crash) are brilliant in their portrayal of their respective power dynamics and keeping a tension between them throughout without overdoing it. On a pseudo related note, I totally agree with this guy that Maggie Gyllenhaal would make a great “makeover” actress role. She’s deceptively attractive. [imdb link]

Batoru Rowaiaru (Battle Royale)

I initially thought this movie was a Takashi Miike film but it’s not, which is probably why despite the premise of putting high school kids on an island ot kill each other, it was still relatively tame for its genre (emphasis on relative). Crossbows, grenades, teenage mayhem, cliques, and explosive collars. What more could one ask for? [imdb link]

Supa Hiro

My roommate Min Jung claims that she was deprived as a child and is making up for lost time. That’s why she has the TV on all the time as background noise even if it’s just … noise. I call bull because I lived through my formative years in a place that only have 4 channels of TV, two of which were bad Cantonese soaps and the other two were sorry excuses for English channels and I do just fine without a TV.

Yet I’ve been sucked into more and more shows lately. I’ve always followed the standard fare like 24 and Lost (both of which jumped the shark) through uh cough DVD but now I’m actually sucked into shows every week. The most significant of which is, of course, Heroes.

Gee, that’s a shock, eh? Kevin he guy who tours around talking about comics is into the new TV series on people with superpowers. Shock! Horror! Well, yeah, it’s not actually surprising. Plus, it’s a show with Ali Larter. I still wish Hiro actually said to his dad (George Takei), “You are not my father! Mr. Sulu is!”

Hey by the way, I’m trying to do a workshop on Comics and Design at the IA Summit. Everyone seemed to like the short presentations last year but so far, not a lot of people have signed up for the workshop. If you don’t get to it soon, I don’t think we’re gonna bother so … if you’re thinking about it, stop thinking and start registering … please?

The Pipes Team Shout Out

I tagged a bunch of people in my last post but I wanted to do a proper shout out because the talent is really phenomenal and worth talking about in more detail. The Pipes team started in September with four people:

• Pasha Sadri: the man with the idea, who also came up with Yahoo! Trip Planner is a brilliant thinker and draws great caricatures to boot.
• Edward Ho: all round ninja doing both front end and back end as well as the top of Mario Kart DS
• Jonathan Trevor: Whom I’ve told numerous people is the guy who codes faster than I can design (he’s responsible for the editor)
• Daniel Raffel: The guy who gets all the things out of the way and fills in every crack and deals with the multitude of minute details we would otherwise forget.

I joined in late November and had the opportunity to overhaul the visuals and a fair amount of the interaction on the site in a short time although this past week my eyes have been bleeding from css and php much more than Photoshop. On the home stretch, we got crucial helping hands from Maciej Ceglowski and Paul Hammond.

Everyone’s pimping our sponsors, and really for good reason because they made it possible to do a project like this in the unique environment that we had as fast as we did. So cheers to Caterina and Bradley!

Finally, some more mentions now from Jeremy, TechCrunch, GigaOm (thanks Jackson!) and hell, just look at Leonard’s Pipe for Pipes Buzz.

Oh, and I’ve got my Player News for NHL Player Pipe set up (good for fantasy sports).

Rewire the Web

The project I’ve been deep into for the past few months, Pipes, has finally launched! I worked with an awesome group of people to put this out and we did it in an amazingly short time. I only joined the team in November and they started work on it in September. I do think of this, especially the editor, as one of the best design pieces I’ve done in a long long time so I’m really glad that it’s out there.

Although live, we are nowhere near done. The number of ideas we have for taking this forward are countless but we want to get the ideas from everyone else, too. Don’t be shy about using the feedback link. We do read that stuff. I’ll hopefully write more about what I think is cool about it as it can take some explaining but in the mean time, some other people have been giving us some mighty high praise.

• Tim O’Reilly
• Anil Dash
• Nick Bradbury
• Niall Kennedy

Time to make my Fantasy Hockey Roster News pipe now …

Flickr Old Skoolers Having a Fit: A Response From a Yahoo

Disclaimer: I work at Yahoo!, but not on Flickr. These are simply opinions of mine.

Three things happened in quick succession this past week:

• Flickr limited number of tags to 75 and number of contacts to 3,000
• They also announced a date when the users who aren’t using Yahoo! accounts would have to merge their accounts with a Yahoo! ID
• Yahoo! launched a branded Wii site which includes a Flickr stream of all photos tagged Wii.

And what a reaction there was. People in an uproar over so many things it’s hard to enumerate. But as someone who is an old skooler and am inside Yahoo!, I really gotta say a few things to the whiners:

• Flickr has the best interest of the users in mind but it can’t make every last individual happy. Seriously, I know a lot of the people in there and they give a shit. You on the other hand, don’t seem to care enough to give the benefit of the doubt any time something doesn’t go EXACTLY your way.
• Get a grip. There is no conspiracy. You guys have talked about the doom and gloom and how Flickr was going to suck since the acquisition TWO YEARS AGO and guess what? It just kept getting better. Geo-tagging, guest passes, machine tags, printing of photos, half priced subscription … what the heck do you need as proof that Flickr is doing fine while in Yahoo!?
• Grow up. Tag bombing the Wii site by putting up “Yahoo! is Poo” images? Yahoo!, and many many many other sites, have been using tag streams of Flickr photos well before the Wii branded site. Sorry you were too clueless to notice that and it’s not because of Yahoo!’s Terms of Service vs. Flickr’s. Remember that whole Web 2.0 thing you guys love to be a part of? This is what it’s about. They’re public photos with creative commons license.
• There’s no point in lying about technological challenges. Flickr has some really smart people working on that plumbing and hey, when you build for millions of users and more photos than just about every other photo site out there, with real time ties in relationships, THEN say, “unlimited contacts should be easy.” Scalability is a hard problem. I don’t presume to know how you do your job.
• Does anyone actually know/remember 19,000 people? That’s not social networking. That’s playing MySpace Pokemon.
• Have they actually given you a reason to distrust them? Aside from “well I hate all things Yahoo!” which is completely irrational and devoid of logic, I mean. Yes, few of us are blind to the fact that Yahoo! has done some pretty crappy things with Geocities and numerous other things and we all know there’s a reputation issue but there aren’t many people around now that were around 5+ years ago. Leaving without even seeing it through seems kind of premature.
• Flickr has an API for you to go elsewhere. If that’s not a sign of caring about your data, I don’t know what is.
• Yahoo!’s sign in sucks. The namespace is polluted and it’s hard to get a good ID. The registration sucks. We know these things. We’re working on it. Having said that, the Yahoo! ID you use isn’t exposed on Flickr so having an unpretty name is actually not that relevant.
• Oh and, Thomas Hawk. Love your photos. Hate the way you continually troll Flickr forums while running a clone with a bad name (were two o’s and no e taken?) and an interface so similar it took me awhile to realize I wasn’t in Flickr.

There’s no question that there are problems with Yahoo! and a lot of the products. Flickr is not one of them and that hasn’t changed just because your sign-in is different. If you old skoolers find something better, let me know. I’m gonna bet you don’t.

Communicating Concepts Through Comics

Updated again with IA Summit 2007 Workshop. I’ll be posting about the other presentation I did with Tom Wailes, and the slides, shortly.

For those who’ve attended the session or workshops previously, thanks! Hope you enjoyed it and as always, we’d love to hear how it was applied and whether it was useful. More importantly, we’d like to know how it could be improved.

This post will serve as the place where I’ll keep the resources related to the presentation updated. If you do end up using this technique, please do let me know as I’d love to show some examples of other people using comics in design.

Upcoming Presentations / Workshops

• November 5-8: User Interface 12 Full Day Workshop in Cambridge, MA
• June 18-23: Joint Conference on Digital Libraries Full Day Workshop in Vancouver, BC

Presentations / Slides (updated Apr 03 2007)

Unfortunately, the slides use very few bullet points so it may be hard to follow without being there. Luke took some great notes that I recommend checking out.

• IASummit 2007 Workshop Slides (9MB pdf)
• IASummt / UXWeek 2006 slides (5MB pdf)
• CanUX Workshop slides (5MB pdf)
• SHiFT 2006 Slides (5MB pdf)
• AOL Mountain View’s post session interview is up.
  
• Livia Labate has a recording of the session.

Resources (updated Apr 03 2007)

• The Tarquin Engine a flash template for dynamic online comic navigation
• Will Eisner’s Comics & Sequential Art
• Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics
• Storyboard Artist
• Blambot Free Fonts and Balloons
• Comic Life
• Yahoo! Avatars
• Visual Thinking School (specifically the sketching module)
• Bubblr - add captions to Flickr or computer images
• ComicBook Creator for PC
• Wally Wood’s 22 Panels That Always Work
• Sun.com Design’s Comic Templates 1.0
• Sun.com Design’s Phone Convo Templates
• Balloonist Word Balloon Editor for Mac/Pc/Linux

If you have any feedback, pictures, links or suggestions, feel free to drop a comment.

Also check out all my MyWeb bookmarks that I save related to this topic.

Overheard on TV

Marge Simpson says, “I’ve never heard anything on the gossip news … or the blogosphere.”

Also, unrelated, I got a jury summons. Among the check boxes to choose from for reason not to go:

• not a US citizen (check)
• not 18
• convicted of a felony

Does this mean they’re incapable of telling the age, citizenship, and … criminal record of the people they send jury summons to?!

Why I’m Not Getting an iPhone nor ModBook

The iPhone was announced amidst much hoo-hah last week at MacWorld. Those who know me know that I’m a gadget person but have been surprised to find I’m still using a Nokia 6100 phone - the same phone I’ve had for three years. Make no mistake, I’ve been shopping for a good integrated phone for a long time, checking out the latest and greatest every time I am in Hong Kong to visit my family (which I failed to do this past Christmas due to circumstances).

What I found would inevitably be disappointing. Too big. Too clunky. Too ugly. Too expensive. Too little memory. Too unusable. I wanted a phone that had mp3 playback, at least a 2MP camera so I wouldn’t have to lug a compact camera, some level of web and/or email capability, and a decent product and interface design. Apparently, this was too much to ask. The only ones that were close were priced far higher than the value I perceived, and required the additional cost of memory cards to make them even close to useful for some of the functions I mentioned.

When I last looked, it was actually cheaper, smaller, more flexible, and better usability and design for me to buy an iPod Nano and velcro it to the Nokia I had of similar dimensions than to buy any of these bricks. So I bought a Nano.

The iPhone is exactly the kind of integration with almost the form factor I desired and a price tag that was comparable when you compared apples to apples. However, I probably won’t be getting one. Why?

First, Apple has a track record for releasing rather buggy first generation products. The iPod had battery issues, the Nano had scratching issues, the MacBooks had a number of problems reported, etc. So a brand new product line and new market seems ripe for bugs that need to be sorted out.

Second, Apple has a track record for quickly releasing a second generation product that’s not just an upgrade, but usually a complete annihilation of the previous generation. Look at the iPod Mini, which became a bit of a joke to own when the Nano was announced. Besides, there’s rumors that an iPhone Nano may be in the works.

Finally, there’s the deliberate crippling of the technology that seems to be going on. EDGE instead of 3G connectivity is almost certainly a deliberate oversight that will be fixed in the future. The MacWorld live demos showed just how long it took for any given webpage to load. In addition, there’s a noticeable absence of GPS capability in a device that’s begging for it.

So I won’t be getting an iPhone, at least not yet.

Drawing much less attention was Axio