In celebrating the merits of free software and the excitement over this radical networked production method, an important truth is left unspoken. Networked collaboration shines in the low levels of network protocols, server software and memory allocation, but user interface has consistently been a point of failure. How come the networked collaboration that transformed code production and encyclopedia-writing fails to translate to graphic and interface design? Check out this investigation into the difficulties of extending the open-source collaboration model from coding to its next logical step.

It’s free and comes with a slew of touch interface bells and whistles built right in. The app is intended to allow for seamless navigation between tweets, photos, web pages, videos and other media and updates. It’s also usable even for those who don’t have Twitter accounts. Twitter for iPad [iTunes link] has a few new UI touches that you haven’t seen elsewhere.

Alexis Ohanian, founder of Reddit, gives a great 3-minute rundown on the power of social media. Check it out at TED here.

An article by Warren Berger, in his words: For the last two years, I’ve been doing to designers what they usually do unto others. Which is to say, I’ve been observing and studying them, asking a lot of questions and trying to discern patterns. Here are a few things I’ve learned along the way.

1. Designers question

2. Designers connect

3. Designers commit

4. Designers care

Read article »

(from CNN) Ever wonder what information Google knows about you? With a click or two, now you can find out. Google released a feature Thursday that lets users see and control data that the Web giant has collected about them. Called Google Dashboard, the service provides an online summary of a user's Google files -- Gmail, Google Docs, Picasa photos and so on -- by collecting pre-existing privacy controls in one place. More »

(From the Wall Street Journal) - At the D&G runway show in Milan last week, the chief executives of Saks Fifth Avenue, Neiman Marcus and Bergdorf Goodman were relegated to second-row and third-row seats. In front of them, sitting primly in the first row, was Federico Marchetti, chief executive of online retailer Yoox.com . The moment—coming as the super-sexy women's styles for next spring pranced down Milan's runways—marked a shake-up in an ultra-hierarchical world. The privileged treatment of a digital-media figure showed that luxury fashion is ready to introduce styles to the public in new ways—new, at least, to this old-fashioned industry. More »

Last week the Altimeter Group and Wetpaint released a study that analyzed the 100 most valuable brands (according to BusinessWeek/Interbrand) and how they engage across 11 different online social-media venues. The result of the study was published as  "engagement database" that critiqued the brands on not only their breadth of engagement across these channels, but also their depth, such as whether they reply to comments made on blog posts. Each brand was given a numerical score. The top 10 ENGAGEMENTdb brands with their scores are:

1. Starbucks (127)
2. Dell (123)
3. eBay (115)
4. Google (105)
5. Microsoft (103)
6. Thomson Reuters (101)
7. Nike (100)
8. Amazon (88)
9. SAP (86)
10. Tie - Yahoo!/Intel (85)

The full report is available at http://bit.ly/KRGNt. Personally, it's questionable to assume that  a company's social engagement can be correlated with its financial performance.   But, in Steve Rubel's words "good use of social media could be seen as a proxy for an innovative culture, eagerness to engage with consumers and take risks, a net positive for any business." Much more interesting then this is however to take a look at what the social media strategy of those brands have in common: All top brands weren't afraid of innovation, did so early, often (also after set-backs) and incrementally:

• Starbucks and Dell were early to leverage their fans for corporate crowd-sourcing.
• With Nikeplus.com, Nike was early in the game to use an innovative technology in order to connect its worldwide fan base in early 2006.
• Quite a few of the top 10 brands embraced Twitter early and in innovative ways. Amazon started offering deals on Twitter back in 2007 and EBay started to live-tweet earnings in 2008.
• Microsoft encouraged their employees to blog as early as in the late 1990. Yahoo and Google started and actively promoted their corporate and product blogs in 2004
• Other top brands were building out communities to connect customers and employees early on. Microsoft, for example, launched its inventive Channel 9 platform for developers back in 2004

Last month a social media analytics provider called Sysomos published a in-depth report on Twitter usage. Here are the 10 conclusions that might help a brand to  better understand the potential uses of Twitter:

• 72.5% of all users joining during the first five months of 2009.
• 85.3% of all Twitter users post less than one update/day
• 21% of users have never posted a Tweet
• 93.6% of users have less than 100 followers, while 92.4% follow less than 100 people.
• 5% of Twitter users account for 75% of all activity
• New York has the most Twitters users, followed by Los Angeles, Toronto, San Francisco and Boston; while Detroit was the fast-growing city over the first five months of 2009
• More than 50% of all updates are published using tools, mobile and Web-based, other than Twitter.com. TweetDeck is the most popular non-Twitter.com tool with 19.7% market share.
• There are more women on Twitter (53%) than men (47%)
• Of the people who identify themselves as marketers, 15% follow more than 2,000 people. This compares with 0.29% of overall Twitter users who follow more than 2,000 people.

Yesterday, Twitter launched a redesigned homepage, which shows a shift in focus towards search (rather than specific users, as the old homepage highlighted). It seems that this new homepage could be a recognition, on Twitter’s part, of how users have shaped the microblogging platform - it’s now the place where you can find up-to-the-minute information on what’s happening NOW (rather than depending on search engines that are increasingly appearing to post more dated content, dependant on the slower nature of crawling the web and indexing content). Just look at the trends to see what people are talking about right this second (um…M&Ms and William Shatner? Really?). So does this poise Twitter to take on the search behemoths of Google and bing? Only time will tell…

And now some great eye candy to go along with your daily stalking of Twitter: Visible Tweets. Just check out what it did to the 4C tweets: By the way, are you following the 4C team on Twitter? If not - you should! @4cornersdesign

This is such a cool project that has the goal of representing all 50 states through photography... the website for The 50 States Project says it best:

The 50 States Project has brought together 50 photographers from across the USA.

Each photographer lives in one of the 50 States and during the year long project each photographer will represent the State where they live. Every two months each photographer will be sent an assignment by e-mail, they then have two months to produce one image in response. The images must represent both their style and the State in which they live.

The first assignment, ("People"), was sent on 2nd January 2009. The second, ("Habitat"), was sent on 1st March 2009. The remaining 4 assignments will be announced on 1st May, 1st July, 1st September and 1st November 2009 respectively.

By the end of the project there will be 300 images which hopefully represent the talent of the photographers involved and have something to say about the USA today. Check out the photos from the first assignment ("People"), here.

Breathtaking full HD video. Sure, the Casio EX-F1 shoots great slow-mo footage for a consumer camera. But it can't touch the footage that the SprintCam V3 HD pumps out. Amazing.

From Danish photographer Peter Funch comes this incredible gallery of photos - where he has staked out NYC street corners for two weeks taking photos of passersby from the exact same spot. THEN, combing through the images, he photoshopped together same-ish pedestrians to create some pretty fantastic composite images. Check out the "Babel Tales" photo series here.

I love this modern design take on Little Red Riding Hood. Originally developed as a class project by Tomas Nilsson, a design student at Sweden’s Linköping University. Little Red Riding Hood

Here is the new logo for the President's economic recovery programs - what do you think?

Definitely a bit of a different feel from the recovery/economic logos of our nation's past:
The National Recovery Association

The WPA

I'm officially obsessed with Wordle. The concept is simple - paste in a bunch of text (the example above is the Gettysburg Address) and Wordle spits out a pretty word cloud with emphasis determined by the frequency of words in the text. Play around with the font, color, and layout, and turn your words into works of art.

While the title of his work ("We're All Gonna Die") might suggest otherwise, Danish photographer Simon Hoegsberg's 100-meter composite photograph is truly amazing. The 178 subjects were shot over a 20-day period in which Hoegsberg perched himself on a bridge in Berlin. Scroll through the entire image and try to pick out which subjects noticed the camera here.

Seeing as how the Obama campaign embraced technology so much on the trail, it only makes sense the the team would do the same for his Presidency. Enter the White House blog, along with a fresh redesign of the White House website. The redesign launched almost at the exact time as the President's swearing in - and the blog posts are already rolling in. Check out the blog here.

Ok - these photos totally blew my mind when I first saw them. Smashing Magazine has put together a phenomenal gallery of examples of tilt shift photography (a photography technique where real objects look like miniatures). A few of my favorites are below (especially the Grand Central one - my favorite building in NYC!).

CNN compiled a pretty awesome gallery of photos taken from the NASA Earth Observatory Library (like the one below of cloud streaks across the Caspian Sea). Check out the full gallery here.