So I liked the fact that she has used Animoto to show us her digital year in pictures:

‘Highlights from 2009 in pictures’.

Nice way of presenting a summary with some good things to look out for towards the end for 2010.

I’ve used Animoto to easily spice up presentations and to help people visualise things better internally whilst creating Digital Creative Services at Mindshare, Australia. Have a look at one of the videos here:

http://www.storybridge.co.uk/index.php/2010/01/14/animoto-photoshoot/

In the meantime, nice one Orli.

So I produced this process overview to help introduce a particular staged approach to designing and building online media. It’s nothing new of course and widely used by most creative and digital agencies, albeit with different stage names and sometimes a stage or two more. My process her was originally formulated by us at Object1 way back at the turn of the century (and that feels quite strange to write!) and has of course evolved somewhat, but essentially works to keep everyone within a structured approach. yes, there are other methodologies and processes that could suit you better. Agile for one. but I thought I’d share this to help those who’d like to know how things generally work, those in need of a process and clients who could do with some more knowledge about what’s going on.

I have included example outputs for each stage, responsibilities and some key things to be aware of. it doesn’t purport to cover everything but I hope you find it of some use and happy to hear your thoughts and suggestions.

So this is a great idea indeed from Volkswagon called Pianotrappan. They wanted to encourage people to change their habits and take the stairs instead of the escalator. How do you do this? easy. Make the stairs into a working piano so that people can have fun making music when going up and down! Ok, so not great music but fun nonetheless.

All part of a hopefully growing website dedicated to helping people to change by making them happy. Nice idea. The website, rolighetsteorin.se, is in Swedish but here is the English tranlation from Google.

http://www.oxy.com.au

The Oxy Academy is all about helping young males to realise their full potential in life, starting with sport as the immediate area of interest, and expanding into other areas such as music as The Oxy Academy grows.

The Oxy Academy pre-launch website

Amazing sponsorship and content deals have been created to help make this an engaging website to visit, with an exciting competition to win exclusive training sessions and lots of uniquesports content at a national level to come. More to follow when the full website goes live soon.

http://www.sexysubaru.ca

The user takes the role of a photographer to shoot images of a rather large sumo wrestler and the Subaru car. It’s all done with a video of the shoot showing the wrestler getting himself into lots of different poses and you can snap and capture a photograph at any time. These can then be viewed, retouched and saved to the website as part of a competition.

Using the TV advert and an online user focused competition in this way is very engaging and the website is wonderfully designed and produced.

I wish I’d thought of this idea! Nice work indeed.

The publication in question is ‘Digital Media‘, tagged as ‘Australia’s journal of the New Media revolution’. It is similar in content to the NMA but does have less of a focus on industry news and more on quality articles. This is a great mag for me in order to find out more about what’s happening over here and how people in the industry think. There’s a great bunch of articles in this fortnights magazine, including pieces on the Australian companies breaking break overseas markets, an article on some new social media websites that I had not come across as yet, and some useful tips on optimising your campaigns for social media.

So this is a bit of an advert for the mag but I did find it a bit hard to find and so thought I’d spread the word. they have a good article / blog based website at http://www.digital-media.net.au/ and you can also scan the magazine itself at http://www.imagin8.com/dev/digitalmedia/#/page/0/.

Being able to skim through the mag online is great, although I’d use the arrow buttons to turn the page as turning the page via your mouse in the top corner is a tad infuriating. A nice old school use of Flash there (DNA used to have a website like that a long time ago) but it’s too fiddly and not user friendly. The arrow keys do the job.

And I’ve had a nice email exchange with the editor so all the more reason to write this post. We don’t want to see good industry publications close due to lack of readership, as happened with ‘Create Online’ back at home.

Overload, spamming and the lack of information on function, use and privacy of applications are turning users away from Facebook and interrupting its originally site enhancing functions and user journeys.

Application Overload. There is a lot of it about!

Application overload then? I think so. Pub conversations and online discussions have turned from the usefulness of Facebook and how we can add value to users and to clients (which is still possible I hasten to add), to now being more about the conversation participants own personal annoyance with Facebook itself. And of course this adds to the awareness that apps aren’t always a good thing for a clients promotional needs and brand. Yes, we have all known this for a long time but the wonders of long term collective user experience backs this up to the hilt.

So what’s gone wrong? Overload as we said earlier without a doubt. Users will always vary of course. Some people are aware of the security implications of Facebook apps, others don’t want to clutter their experience, and of course their are those who think anything and everything will be fun whatever so let’s install! The tide has turned though and these apps are now annoying. The easiest example is one of the earlier ‘fun’ apps the pirate one. I didn’t want to be a pirate when someone else asked me to be one 6 months ago and I have not wanted to be one the next 10 times that I have been asked since. Apps can be blocked now of course but not everyone knows this.

Too many apps then and many users feel like ignoring the whole lot of them. Which means that certain worthwhile ones (like charities) or ones the user would enjoy if they had more information on what was on offer get discarded with the rest of the junk.

And people get sick of these requests constantly arriving and feel that the joys of Facebook, such as photo-sharing and the odd surprising reconnection with an old acquaintance for instance, are no longer worth the effort when we feel like we are using a program that is spamming us religiously.

This then is helping to level off the user base. There are some interesting recent stats on ‘TechCrunch‘ with comments worth scanning through, and the media is generally reporting a down turn in visitor stats. Facebook is being slowly tortured into popularity suicide by application overload. Or at least facing a user mini-revolution via the medium of the more savvy users turning their back on it.

But their is of course something more sinister affecting peoples use and perception that is directly related to the applications. The incessant need to have to invite your friends before using and the fact that none of these apps really tell you what you’ll get from them.

Pray tell me why I have to invite my friends to your application?

And this is of course the requirement that should get the proverbial goat of all users. So you have actually spotted an application that you would like to check out and see what it is all about. Maybe you have been enticed by your friend apparently voting you as the most sexy / wittiest / stupid amongst his or her friends. Here we go then, let us install the application. Oops no. You have to invite all, or at least twenty odd, of your friends first before you can use it.

Why? Quite simply of course so that there is a never ending snowball effect of users having to sign up. It is good marketing. The app provider is forcibly extending the reach of the application and thus its message and brand. But is this really good marketing? Isn’t this akin to spam chainmail emails for instance? Of course it is. I wonder how many users get as far as this stage and stop. ‘Why should I spam my friends with this when I just wanted to have a look at it and see what it was all about?’ More and more people are shunning the apps that make you spam your friends. And more and more of users friends are actively telling others to cease and desist from asking them to be a pirate or whatever!

A quick search on Facebook for the term ’stop sending me requests’ just turned up 283 groups in existence telling people to stop sending them app requests! The biggest group has around 3,500 members and I am sure I could find a far larger group with a different search term.

Well at least tell me what your application is all about in the first place!

You know the scenario, you decide to actually check out an application, probably as part of your digital research and not for fun of course. And there is a brief very rubbish summary of what this life changing application is all about. But they never really explain actually what it does and how it benefits you. What about some screenshots or a link to a demo video? Let me decide if this app will be useful and / or fun by actually telling me all about it.

And you need to access ‘all’ my data?

My final key element associated with the Facebook apps that is turning off users then is of course the fact that each app has a requirement to access your information. Obviously there are pieces of info it will need to be able to operate but the apps never tell you actually what information they need. And it certainly won’t be everything on your profile but it can access more than it needs. And what then does it do with this information after? Are your details now stored forever on some other server to be used as and when they wish? Our privacy rights and what we are signing away is not explained and users really shouldn’t be giving away access to their data and who their friends are just to have a look at what an app does. But they do.

Is Facebook being killed by its applications then?

It is certainly being severely diminished. Application overload, the spamming of friends when signing up for applications, and the lack of information about what these applications actually are before signing up and what they do with our data that they access is really turning a lot of users off of Facebook. This is certainly the experience amongst my friends and colleagues who are either leaving the site altogether or pay it perfunctory notice, to say hi to someone or to check out a set of photographs recently posted. Both of which are of course standard Facebook functions.

So change the way applications are built and presented or get rid of them altogether! Some applications can be very useful and fun but the vast majority are pointless and intrusive, And I have gone on for long enough so I won’t get into the sheer annoyance that is the so-called ‘Fun Wall’ application and its predilection for spamming all you know…

I’ll let the man himself introduce you to the wonders of Web Innovation UK:

“We’re providing an open discussion forum for professionals who want to push the boundaries of what’s possible on the web, whether for their own online presence or those of their clients. Forums allow you to ask general questions, you can send messages to individuals, or you can just listen in.

Clients get to ask questions, suppliers get to show how clever they are. I don’t want to constrain what gets discussed: it can be commercial-driven, design-led, technological, whatever you like as long as it’s relevant and no one else complains.”

Come and join us at Web Innovation UK and help us grow the network as a spot on resource and place to go for assistance. It is very early days yet so you will get to be a pioneer!

By the way, Philippe set this up using Ning and you can read more about this on one of my previous posts,’Create your own social network with Ning.com‘.

The templates aren’t exactly pretty but you can customise the designs and utilise your own domain name. So users coming to your social network will think you’ve done a fine job of setting something up for them and won’t know it’s running from the ning platform.

It could be used for all sorts of things of course. For instance, we were thinking of using it as a social ‘intranet’ for the agency I’ve just been working with. Might get people off of Facebook for five minutes!

Or maybe I should set up ‘BruceSpace’ for all the Bruce’s out there. Might not make my millions on that one….

We had a few solutions along the way as to how we were going to enable users to upload their own videos and so forth. Attempting to use YouTube wasn’t as straightforward as expected and so another route needed to be found. The guys at Bionic Media were kind enough to tell us about Limelight Networks and their UGC framework which does all the upload, storage and delivery you could possibly need if delivering videos to your users.

It’s new and is only just being utilised for it’s first few projects just now but is based on their usual global structure that a lot of the big media firms hire Limelight Networks for. Worth checking out.