I really want a white G1…

but I still love my black one. :3 I don’t think I can live without Google Maps + GPS anymore… I can finally walk anywhere without ever getting lost!

Week 5: Reading Response

Digg is a perfect example of the kind of social filtering Shirky has talked about in the book, Here Comes Everybody. Traditionally it’s always the publisher, or the TV Channel that decides what to print or air to the mass public, what kind of news should the public have access to. The success of Digg is rooted in the fact that it lets users decide what they want to read, what they view as front-page-worthy news. Amateur publishing on the web is now as easy as 1-2-3, anyone who has anything to talk about can say it all to the world. The line between one-to-one, one-to-broadcast, and many-to-many is blurred as accessibility on the web becomes a norm. I remember a year back when a fat girl’s blog was posted on Digg, generating her massive unwanted attention. When this girl wrote about how she ate her way to insane obesity, so fat that she can’t stand up or shower, and how her mom is around her 24-7 to help her do everything including go to the washroom, she only wanted to converse with a certain audience, her friends and those who apparantly only wanted to support her. However when her blog entries hit front-page on Digg, her audience jumped sky-high into people who she never intended to talk to. Due to the way she published her stories on the world wide web, anyone who has the time can now engage in her conversation regardless of her intentions. She ended up being bombarded with hateful and degrading comments, so much she closed up her entire journal to private. She told Digg to leave her alone because it’s her own life and choices, but things no longer work this way because the way people interact has changed on the web.

Regardless of what kind of response they expect from the web, millions of users are how filling blogs, twits, facebook profiles with their own thoughts and messages. The many-to-many open communication has open doors and invoke enthusiasm in many. People write about their lives because they feel it’s worthy, and because they can. Users submit to Wikipedia because it’s there, free and open, and anyone can make a difference. People want to feel needed, to have a presence in the world, and do something worthy; open web communication made this easy, and thus motivating people to be a part of it.

Week 4: Reading Response

Flickr, as Shirky mentioned, is a perfect example of how today’s ease of publishing has changed the way people respond to social changes and situations in their lives. With readily available technology like Google, Flickr, Wikipedia, Amazon, Epinions, many people cease to trust published well-known authorities, but gives more credit to the power of community. With this, they expect their own opinions to be heard loud and clear as well, and with something as easy as blogging or twittering, this can’t be easier. Information from anybody from anywhere is being published on the internet at any given time, and all is brought together and made accessible by tags, communities, and search engines.

User-generated content is a key to success when given the right tools to gather them. World, cheap and expandable, many businesses are now benefiting from cooperating with its users. For example, the online t-shirt company, Threadless, would not be as nearly as successful if it wasn’t built on the unique idea that anyone can submit a t-shirt design or graphic. The design is filtered by letting the community, and that being potential buyers, vote on each design and the the top designs gets chosen to be printed and sold. This system gives the company a huge selection of talented illustrators, designers, and creative minds at no cost of hiring such, and at the same time only having to manufacture the t-shirts buyers voted to be most interested in purchasing. The ease of submitting a graphic to the internet enables budding talents to show and sell their works to a big demographic they can’t otherwise gather for themselves. Like Flickr, Threadless provides curious designers the perfect platform to easily sell their designs while enjoying participating in an active online community sharing the same interests.

While on the subject of ease of publishing and accessing anyone’s thoughts… Sometimes you just gain too much insight.

Week 3: Reading Response

This week’s reading talked about the benefits of releasing APIs and collaborative platforms in general. Facebook is a great and familiar example of use of API. Before Facebook enabled outside apps, it was a social place supported by its users. This may soon become tiring. By letting 3rd parties write content for Facebook, it’s become a platform for many fun, albeit in my opinion extremely annoying little quizzes, personality displays, graffitis, gifts, etc. Luckily with the newer site design, all that 3rd party goodness is hidden before the “boxes” tab. Facebook gains valuable content while being sponsored by 3rd party companies, and those companies in turn benefit from the large userbase of Facebook. Google Maps’s API works in similar ways. The ability to embbed Google Maps to one’s own website gives everyone the familiar and easy-to-use Google Maps information and interface. APIs ultimately allow one website to collborate and expand along with many, many other sites, thus connecting more and more users and their ideas. Many social networking sites benefit from APIs, including the ever-so-popular social news site, Digg.

Collaboration platforms has also become ubiquitous on the web and crucial to how people now work together and share ideas. Wikipedia is no doubt one of the most successful platforms for collaboration. One thing I’m very excited about is the upcoming collaboration platform from Google, called Wave. Google announced it a few days ago at the I/O Developer’s conference (along with giving out thousands of free HTC phones equipped with the latest Android!) and so far it’s still in unreleased test phase.

Google Wave is a product that helps users communicate and collaborate on the web. A “wave” is equal parts conversation and document, where users can almost instantly communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more. Google Wave is also a platform with a rich set of open APIs that allow developers to embed waves in other web services and to build extensions that work inside waves.

Online collaboration with the Wave is pretty much real-time. The idea is something that does more than Skype, instant messaging, wikis, and more combined. For example, instead of seeing “user is typing,” you’ll see what’s currently being typed. Unlike using pbwiki for a project where every page is static, the collaboration is now on dynamic, moving, grounds. HTML5 was also a big part of Google’s I/O conference, with new tags that will handle multimedia objects with much ease than the current common solution of embedding Flash. Google continues to step forward to bring end-users a truely rich web experience. I sometimes fancy the idea that one day local desktops will be an old-aged idea, and everything will be web-based with user-restricted access. Any computer can be “your computer.” Yes that sounds a bit scary, people tend to not trust the web, but who knows?

Week 2: Reading Response

This week’s reading goes more deeply into the history of open-source software, and the roles of modern consumers in today’s product market. IBM’s success with Linux is truly an inspiring story, and it has pushed many of its competitors into the open-source field. For example, SUN Microsystems is a major supporter and provider of most of the base code for the open-source office suite, OpenOffice. With the help of other software companies and the active developer community, OpenOffice has grown from a painfully difficult-to-use software into a full-featured office suite that can well replace hundred-dollar products such as Microsoft Office Suite.

As far as pro-consumers go, Apple’s Ipod is a pretty depressing case. The hardware of the Ipod can support so many possibilities, but Apple refuse to let it be so. The popularity of Ipod gives it the edge to easily create a vibrant, open, and free music community, but instead it has became a somewhat frustrating battle with DRM, copy-protection, closed-formats, etc. Apple’s Iphone utilize the creativity of pro-consumers in a much better way. The ability to develop apps for the Iphone gave the phone a wide spectrum of possibilities, plus a huge market for app developers. The downside is again, Apple is doing its business way to closed-off, which caused quite a stir when a few days back, when an app called Eucalyptus was rejected by Apple for the Apps store due to “inappropriate sexual content.” Apple’s reasoning? Eucalyptus is an app that allows users to access and download thousands of free e-books from the well-known Project Gutenburg, and because this gives users access to the book Karma Sutra, the app is deemed inappropriate. This slightly-absurd story quickly climbed up its way to Digg’s front page. I mean, why not tell people they can’t have a phone because that gives them the ability to call 18+ hot lines? Two days later, Apple was pretty much pushed by big user demand to rethink its poor decision and finally, accept Eucalyptus into its App store.

For a leap into some open-source project goodness, Andy Rubin, the man behind the Android mobile movement, had an interview with CNET a while back. His views for open-source projects are optimistic and sincere, I found his words for Android and the community inspiring. He doesn’t want to create just one phone:

I mean, it’s funny, if you build one phone…I’d much rather be the guy that does a platform that’s capable of running on multiple companies’ phones than just focusing on a single product.

A single product is going to have, eventually, limitations. Even if that was two products that’s going to have limitations. But if it’s a hundred products, now we’re getting somewhere, to the scale at which Google thinks people want to access information.

He wants accessible information for all:

In that honest goal of not having consumers being blocked and allowing them to access information, it helps our competitors as well. What we don’t want to do is disadvantage anybody by being the only person; we don’t want to create any kind of separate structure where people can only access Google. And this is the definition of openness: it’s not just open source, it’s the freedom to get the information that you’re actually looking for.

He feels Android is more open and thus has more potential than Palm or Apple products because:

Controlling the whole device is great, (but) we’re talking about 4 billion handsets. When you control the whole device the ability to innovate rapidly is pretty limited when it’s coming from a single vendor.

You can have spurts of innovation. You can nail the enterprise, nail certain interface techniques, or you can nail the Web-in-the-handset business, but you can’t do everything. You’re always going to be in some niche.

What we’re talking about is getting out of a niche and giving people access to the Internet in the way they expect the Internet to be accessed. I don’t want to create some derivative of the Internet, I don’t want to just take a slice of the Internet, I don’t want to be in the corner somewhere with some dumbed-down version of the Internet, I want to be on the Internet.

Free, accessible, and transparent information is the base for every successful collaboration. Organizations like CreativeCommons make these growing collaborations so much easier for everyone. Of course you can always still find copyright-nazis trying to lock down web content as much as they can, but at least things seem to be shifting for the better.

Week 1: Reading Response

Tapscott and Williams’s Wikinomics provides a very easy-to-understand introduction to open-source and modern collaboration, something I’m very happy to read, especially as a book. I’ve always found it hard to get through to many people how powerful this new phenomenon has become, especially to people who doesn’t necessarily live on the Internet, like my mom. Most of my experience with open-collaboration comes from the internet. It’s inspiring to read that many companies (mining company, etc) that are not internet-based, are benefiting from this web phenomenon.

A more current example of how great open-source is, is Google’s Android mobile platform. T&W makes many example of how Apple utilize the web, and the success of iPhone is a remarkable achievement. As much as I am impressed by the iPhone, I’ve always felt it was too closed-proprietary. Android is Google’s open-source mobile platform that’s still under lots of development, and has just recently launched its 1.5 update. I got my hands on a T-Mobile G1 (first Android phone) as soon as it was released last year, and have literally watched Android grow and evolve. Any part of the software is interchangeable and replaceable, and any one can write apps for it. Mobiles phones are becoming one of the most intimate and irreplaceable personal gadgets, and Google is working with everyone to create a platform that has unlimited growing potentials. Alongside the support of more and more cellphone manufacturers, many computer manufacturers are already working on making Android Netbooks. I’m super exited to see where Android will go in the future.

As opening-sharing grows, there are always those trying to interfere, for reasons that may not even by beneficial to themselves in the long run. MPAA and RIAA are still fighting with The Pirate Bay, and the famous trial has yet to get the re-trial it deserves. Like Doctorow said in this article, no one wants to believe they only have “partial-control” of the material they have obtained. It’s just so frustrating to see the team at The Pirate Bay pushed to work so hard to deal with a trial, one that before it even began, it’s already behind its time.

Internet is no doubt having a huge impact on how society how funtions. The article on Cracked here gives some hilarious examples: 8 Awesome Cases of Internet Vigilantism. Oh and, moot from 4chan made Time’s 100 Most Influencial list, and like Time commented, the saddist part of that is everyone else on the list has a job.

Interactivity with HTML5

Flash has long been almost the sole thing associated with interactive content on the web. Things are slowly changing over the last few years with the sophistication of AJAX, CSS, Javascript, etc. Many multimedia and interactive content no longer relies on Flash or the more recently developed SilverLight.

HTML5 is a good example of the big step towards interactive, powerful web content. The idea HTML5 presents is web as a full platform for everything an user do on the computer, creating rich, flexible, and fully interactive media. This drastic shift in the very essence of web paves way for web designers today to develop and create change in more ways than ever before.

More from the article at webmonkey.

CSS Designs

Over the past few years CSS designs has gone a long way. When I first got into web design, many sites still had horribly nested table layouts completely unaware of web standards. When CSS designs came into the spotlight, I loved the simplicity and flexibility. Designs at showcase sites such as CSS Zen Garden and Design Shack looks almost good enough to eat.