farlington

A bunch of big brands have them already, like http://www.facebook.com/nike and http://www.facebook.com/cocacola.

They do have a lower information density, but I think the old page design was cluttered. The new pages look better.

In my opinion the big downside to the new pages is how getting to almost every bit of content requires some kind of XLR, so interactions feel laggy.

This is real pretty. I love the stacked paper visual analogy of the 'focused' view in a project, it's so instantly visually apparent what's going on.

I wonder how many trends this UI/UX is going start.

No, and thank you, that's totally cool. It kind of illustrates the value of having an extension that does this with omnibox queries. Without the 'blind test' aspect, obviously.

It's really tough to switch search engines when Google's results are so good the majority of the time. The crux of the problem is that you have to choose. It's more arduous to navigate to a different search engine than it is to repeatedly tweak your query until you get the results you want.

You really shouldn't have to choose search engines though. It'd be great to have the option of seeing results from multiple search engines on the same query, maybe in like split frames, it'd save so much time. I should get started on writing a Chrome extension.

Wolfram Alpha's is pretty too: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%09sqrt%28cos%28x%29%29...

I like timelapses like these, because often, finished work can appear obvious to people who aren't designers. They can't imagine that it would take several hours to complete something seemingly simple or minimal. But watching a designer work reveals interesting parts of the thought process and the myriad decisions involved.

Oh, absolutely, in the present and for the immediate future. But the not so distant future, like five or ten years out? Do you think the lead in terms of design and marketing is less surmountable than the hardware design and manufacturing?

I admit to not really knowing much about the Chinese market. But a low-cost home grown tablet brand competing against a foreign competitor, running Baidu Yi or whatever else emerges, is going to have certain undeniable advantages—just like Baidu, Renren, et al have advantages and have in many ways caught up to their western equivalents.

It's hard to look at stuff like this and think that western companies have much of a future in China.

I think that's an overly reductive assessment to say 'mobile phones and banner ads.' Mobile computers are extremely sophisticated communication tools and platforms—stuff that used to be science fiction—the social, cultural, scientific benefits of which are immeasurable.

Uxbekistan and—in the South Pacific—R'Iyeh, fictional city in Lovecraft where Cthulhu is held prisoner.

For many people, high intensity/high contrast also causes eyestrain. There's nothing wrong or unreadable about medium contrast text, despite what the somewhat triumphalist contrastrebellion would have you believe.

> For all I know, my Motorola may have been made there as well.

Yes, Foxconn makes Motorola phones too. Farley admits the obvious: that making it about Jobs and Apple sells more tickets and makes a more interesting story, and that it's really a rant against the entire electronics industry. And given the very ugly history of industrialization in the West, I can't help thinking there's a certain naiveté behind the moral outrage.

I don't know if I can answer your question, but I could maybe clarify what I think are a few misconceptions.

The first misconception is that artists are generally opposed to new revenue models. Artists, designers, craftspeople have absolutely embraced new revenue models, and the number of artists, graphic designers, fashion designers, video artists, industrial designers, et al. using sites like kickstarter and etsy, or selling digital work like templates or themes, is staggering. And many of these don't involve the 'typical exchange of work for money,' but are on one level or another creatively or professionally fulfilling.

The second is about the 'no spec' argument. There are huge differences between new revenue models—they're not all equal, and they're not all fair. Design professionals find spec work exploitative because they're exchanging their services to a client without any guarantee of payment. Most people in most industries find this unfair. Programmers are no exception. Nobody likes to do a lot of work for someone else to only earn a chance of getting paid.

Working for spec is fundamentally different from working for free for yourself—to design and manufacture a product, for example.

And as a sidenote, while few designers are comfortable with the proliferation of spec-driven websites, most designers I know don't feel particularly threatened by them anymore. At their best, they provide an outlet for students, unemployed, and self-taught designers to build their portfolios. But the work that comes out of them isn't generally great, and the clients that use them are generally the kind of clients nobody wants: fussy, demanding, unimaginative and cheap. Clients who probably wouldn't be paying for design services otherwise. It still costs money to get good work. That's what it's really about: protecting the value of the work you do professionally.

You can still do that if your news feed is set to show "Recent Stories" and not "Top Stories". The mini sidebar is mostly stuff that hasn't been in the news feed for years, like when your friends comment on or like other friends' posts.

> What is the usefulness of this information?

My guess is that it's there for the sizable population of facebook users who check it compulsively. For a lot of people, the appearance of constant activity is going to be a lot more interesting than the appearance that nothing is happening, even if for only fifteen or twenty minutes. I can see this increasing 'engagement' a lot, and it's easy enough to ignore for people who find it annoying.

And your optimal signal-to-noise ratio is still there in your news feed.

That's cool. I use many different means to communicate too, mostly for work.

But my friends and family members? For personal messages, like stuff that really matters, they send messages on facebook. My brothers, my sister, my mom, my dad—I can't remember the last time any of them emailed me anything. Maybe a travel itinerary. It could be that my experience, or the experience of my friends/family, is atypical, but I think there are a lot of people—tens or hundreds of millions—who use facebook that way, as their primary communication tool.

I think it's a great idea. Don't most people you know use facebook instead of email for personal correspondence?

It looks to me like it's going to improve the experience by making the experience more like facebook's messaging app. Most of my friends send messages via facebook rather than through email, because it's a better and more personal experience. Taking some of that experience to an email client is a killer idea.

Why do email clients have to take their cues from other email clients? They feel stuck in the 90s. Many people have replaced email with facebook for personal use—it only makes sense that email clients should go there.

Beautiful and functional. There are things to nitpick of course, but this is light years ahead of the old blogger. It's nice to see Google making a concerted effort to elevate the design of products across their portfolio. I used to think that visual design wasn't much of an institutional priority for G, but they've proven that wrong.

It's a brilliant strategy, and I'd be very surprised if it doesn't lead to some antitrust litigation.

I'll bet at least some of the difference in facebook search traffic is offset by the rise in popularity of mobile devices. Most people with mobile devices have an app to go to and would be less likely to search 'facebook'.

It's at around 50:20.

For the ability to watch them on demand, rather than via DVD through the mail. Netflix streaming is increasingly not available for popular new releases. This is like the Google equivalent of iTunes's movie and TV rental offerings.

Nice breakdown, but this is a pretty old article (2008). But it's interesting to cross reference with the description here: http://trac.webkit.org/wiki/WebKit2

I'm really curious if webkit2 is going to be widely adopted, and if so, if and how it'll fragment webkit development.

I think the Mac version is a 32/64 bit universal binary. That might be an explanation, anyway.

You should try it. http://www.facebook.com/download. It's basically a two-click process.

It gives you most of the data you'd be interested in as a user (photos, videos, messages, wall posts). Not so much the data that Google might want, like a easily importable graph. But for everyone else, it's really useful.

It's a one click download. OK, actually two clicks, but it's a very clean, unconfusing process. https://www.facebook.com/download/

Not to mention the graph api. They're very good about giving you all the information you as a user might want (photos, links, messages, wall posts) What it doesn't give you is the kind of data that a competitor might want.

Apple has open sourced a lot of their projects. Check it out: http://opensource.apple.com/ http://developer.apple.com/opensource/

You're absolutely right, I did conflate 'closed' and 'private'.

But what about my second point? You can download your facebook data. Or is it not 'strongly portable' enough, in your opinion?

What's the advantage of open information in the context of social applications? Excluding of course social networks built on mutual interest, like twitter or quora. With real-world friends, family, contacts, etc., the closed nature of facebook is what makes it attractive to me. And I think that's true for most users. It's probably why there's massive outrage every time they relax their privacy defaults.

Maybe data portability? But data on facebook is portable enough, and even if it weren't, what are you going to import it in? Some hypothetical future rival social network? I imagine for a majority of users, simply viewing a friend's profile to remember an email address, phone number, etc, is enough.