• Why the Secret London Facebook group is so successful

    Tim recently pointed me in the direction of a Facebook group called Secret London. It currently has 188k members. This isn’t entirely surprising until you realise that it was only created 2 weeks ago. The grou is for “… Londoners to inspire Londoners by sharing the secrets of the city”. There’s a very nice London-for-Londoners feel to it. Of course there’s a load of spam but the group’s creator Tiffany Philippou is working hard to keep it clean. Tiffany is now crowdsourcing the development and design of a new site from a temporary blog.

    I’ve been thinking about why it has become so successful so quickly, especially considering the enormous glut of travel-related sites that exist. For me there are four things that make it work.

    The proposition

    Secrets want to be shared, by virtue of the fact that they are not supposed to be. People love to share secrets. We all love to tell others about a great pub with a huge log fire and the best Toad in the Hole in London, the best ice-cream, the best spot in Greenwich park for a drunken lazy Sunday. And even more, we love to share things that say something about who we are.

    The convenience of Facebook

    People are spending more and more time simply staying within Facebook. And it’s just too easy to share and join groups. It’s becoming a little world of content, like a vortex.

    Inspiration

    At first thought you assume that Facebook isn’t the ideal platform for Secret London. It would be difficult to archive the secrets and you have to scroll through a lot of crap to find the good stuff. But perhaps that is its charm. When you scroll through the comments and the responses, there’s is a lot of dross but you do come across stuff that inspires you. Most travel sites assume that you have the first clue what you want to do. You have to initiate your discovery by clicking on a primary navigation item or think of a search terms to enter. It’s a tiny but onerous little chore and you don’t know how the site is going to react, it might disappoint. But with a stream of random secrets, it’s like poring through an vintage shop and finding a little gem that you love, but nobody else cares about.

    Simply put, it’s not about discovery, it’s about inspiration.

    Shared ownership

    Finally, Tiffany is crowdsourcing the design and development of a new site as well as a logo. She is also releasing the content under a Creative Commons license. It feels as close as we can currently get to a shared ownership of something.

    I’d be fascinated to see what else you think might have contributed to the success of Secret London.

  • Time for a reassessment of the human-computer interface

    A great blog post by Lukas Mathis has been floating around Twitter for a few days now. In it he talks about the removal of features in software development. Specifically:

    If you don’t pay attention, what started out as an elegant, simple application that perfectly solves a single problem, can quickly turn into a huge behemoth of an application that solves a ton of problems, but solves all of them poorly.

    This, and some other tweet comments, got me thinking about the iPad (who isn’t?) and how I believe it’s a glimpse of the future for how we interact with personal computers.

    In the 35 years since the arrival of the personal computer we’ve been on a continuous upward trajectory of feature enhancement and specification bloat. It’s not just the software, it’s infecting the very machines that we run the bloated software on.

    Read full post

  • Apple Needs a Good Syncing Story Quickly (Or: How We Need that Syncing Feeling)

    Now that the dust has settled from the latest application of the Reality Distortion Field and we are all salivating at the chance to get our hands on the iPad, it’s time to think about how all of these devices will work in our day to day lives.

    I’m a fully paid up member of the Apple devices fanboy club. I carry an iPhone and a 5th generation iPod with me wherever I go (even the largest capacity iPhone is nowhere near enough to store even a third of my music collection), I have a MacBook Air for holidays and overseas trips, a 17″ MacBook Pro for work and a huge cheese grater Mac Pro at home for media storage and its raw computing horsepower.

    I love all of these devices for different reasons, but one thing I don’t love is the difficulty of keeping them all up to date with the latest versions of my data.

    Read full post

  • SXSW’ward, ho!

    Austin

    Big news, little doggies…

    Flights have been booked, passports renewed, and Tim’s brought his ten-gallon out of mothballs. Yes, that’s right — Made by Many, the entire company, is going to South by Southwest! Read full post

  • A transatlantic breakfast summit

    This morning I took part in a transatlantic blogger meet-up in the Martini Lounge (alas, not a one in sight, though it was 9am) at the new Arch Hotel.

    The event was organised by our friend Jeremy at Transatlanticism, a New York-based organisation we’ve gotten to know through our work on Metrotwin.

    Metrotwin is about creating connections, through people and places, between New York and London. This morning’s chat delivered hugely on that premise, so much so that I thought I would introduce some new additions to my transatlantic universe.

    Urban Junkies — met the very stylish Taryn; love the site… both the London and Barcelona versions.

    Hint Magazine — Lee Carter’s baby is one of the original online fashion magazines.

    Gadling is one of AOL’s travel sites and is stacked with great content about New York, London and beyond. Contributor Annie was on hand this morning.

    The Brooklyn Nomad — author Andrew is a lifelong New Yorker and seems to encounter his share of unruly characters. Entertaining.

    Matador Network is a motive-driven travel site that has me thinking more about why I travel; author Sarah, just in from Mexico, has me thinking I need some sun.

    Refinery29 — met Associate Editor Connie; cruised through the fashion/lifestyle site ‘just for a minute’; am now hopelessly addicted.

  • The Nike+ for … sleeping

    There’s a pretty cool iPhone app that I’ve been trying out for a few days nights which seems to capture the imagination of everyone I talk/Twitter/Facebook to.

    It’s called Sleep Cycle and it purports to analyse and track your sleep patterns and then wake you at the optimum time in the morning (ie at the lightest sleep phase. You can check it out here (or purchase directly from iTunes for £0.59).

    You set it up by placing your iPhone on the mattress (next to the pillow but not covered by it), and then the app uses the accelerometer to measure tiny movements in the mattress as you toss, turn and generally shift around.

    Here’s my sleep snapshot from 3 nights ago:

    sleepgraph2425

    I woke up feeling pretty awful, certain that it had been a bad night’s sleep, and Read full post

  • Wizards and haptic gestures

    One response among designers and UX folk to Apple’s new iPad has been to criticise the effort required of users to command the haptic interface. Microsoft’s Surface had the same response, as did the interface that Tom Cruise used in Mission Impossible.

    surface

    ‘Ergonomically speaking, it’s just too much hard work’ is the usual response. There’s a lot of supposition and conjecture there though, mostly based on the received wisdom that less work is better. It seems obvious that they require more work to control, but I’m not aware of any long-term study into the ergonomic effects of haptic interfaces in everyday use or indeed that they are even hard work to use on a daily basis. I’m certainly one of those people that look at this kind of interface and thinks “It just looks like a lot of hard work”.

    endwarminorityreportesque

    In recent years, the coal-face of sedentary computer terminal work has been reduced to mere mouse clicks scattered with a few little rapid tapperings on a keyboard. Our heads don’t move, only our eyes dart from pixel to pixel. Lots of typing and lots of clicking. Maybe even a little bit of dribble. I can imagine one day that our muscles might atrophy completely and leave us existing in a jellied heap still clicking our only STRONG FINGER, eyeballs recessed, still darting.

    Read full post

  • Delightful punctuation

    As an erstwhile pedant and ex-employee of a major dictionary publisher, I have had my fair share of run-ins with punctuation. So I chuckled to see this brilliantly illustrated explanation of how to use the semicolon.

    The Oatmeal - How to use a semicolon

    Hairy Knuckles

    Bears have pause

    By the way, if you’re looking for something to delight you on any given day, head over to Maria Popova’s site of wonder Brain Pickings (or follow her on twitter), which is where I stumbled across this little gem.

  • New Year resolutions? How are they going?

    It used to be fags and booze that people gave up as a New Year resolution. 2010 was the first year I heard lots of people claiming they wanted to give up social networking. Fragile idiots.

    Between Christmas and New Year I saw quite a few tweets from people quietly waving goodbye for a while (the correct social media terminology here is a “Twitter hiatus“).

    Stephen Fry announced he was having a rest – in order to get some real work done. And then there was the Web 2.0 suicide machine. Oh – and a rash of articles and blog posts about social media being various shades of addictive, boring and deadly (some of which we’ve talked about here). At times it looked like the long-awaited backlash might finally break… the dwindling skeptical rump of luddites *soooo* want this to happenbut it hasn’t. A similar thing happened last year, and probably the year before that.

    On the other hand – I noticed that lots of other people resolved to look after their blog, or tweet, more/better rather than less in 2010.

    I guess you know something has really arrived when people start giving it up because they’re enjoying it too much.

    I also predict that they’ll be back – just like the smokers and boozers – with their tails between their legs. Losers.

  • Buzzing around Made by Many: January 2010

    This post is a sort of modified version of my ‘Stuff that’s floating around the office’ posts that I used to do earlier. With our increased use of Twitter, I realised that all of us at Made by Many were tweeting interesting links individually rather than sending them around the office. So I’ve turned to Twitter to aggregate some of the best links as fodder for this refreshed series of posts. They’ll probably reveal what a diverse bunch we are – and we like to think our diversity is reflected in our work!

    1. Star Wars Action Figures Doing What They Do Best: At Made by Many, some of us have a bit of an obsession with Star Wars, and that includes someone like me who isn’t a great fan of the movie series but is immensely amused by the entertainment that comes from objects based on them, like the Lego Death Star (only £274.99) and this website.

    2. Unhappy Hipsters: Why do people look so sad in Dwell magazines? This is one of the most creative things I’ve seen lately! So much for picture-perfect homes. We live in the REAL world, people!

    3. This is the title of a typical incendiary blog post: You know what they’re like – they end with sentences that do this:

    Excerpt:

    This sentence invites readers to respond freely and without constraint as long as those responses fall within certain parameters. This sentence consists of an Internet in-joke that doesn’t quite fit the topic.

    4. MagCloud: Publish your own printed magazine. Can this help to revive the dying art of print journalism?

    5. LG Unveils Flexible Electronic Newspaper: It’s a newspaper. It’s electronic. And it bends!

    6. Simply Noise: Some people NEED noise. For reasons like enhancing privacy, going to sleep, blocking distractions, masking tinnitus, configuring audio equipment, and soothing migraines, among others. No, I didn’t make those up myself.

    7. Where Does My Money Go?: You’re a taxpayer. (If you aren’t, kindly proceed to the next item in this list as this will not be of use to you). Don’t you want to know where your money goes, in an understandable way? For the layman (i.e anyone who isn’t a chartered accountant who wants to entertain himself by digging into the details where they are likely to find worms), this data visualization is a rather useful glance at what’s happening to their hard-earned bits-of-paper-with-Queen-Elizabeth’s-head-printed-on-them.

    8. Inbox Zero: Merlin Mann is writing a book about ‘how to reclaim your email, your attention, and your life’, and these photos are related to that. I think.

    9. The Nerd Venn Diagram: Are you a geek, dork or dweeb? (via Laughing Squid). I always liked Venn diagrams in school.

    nerd-venn-diagram

    10. Microsoft Office, Version Bland.0: A designer re-imagines the Microsoft Office logos. Worth a quick look, for some design entertainment.

    11. Next Nature: Because this is a beautiful-looking blog that has an ambitious task. What exactly does it mean, I hear you ask:

    Next nature is the nature caused by human culture. That may sound like a contradiction, but really, it isn’t. Our technological world has become so intricate and uncontrollable that it has become a nature of its own. This means we have to re-investigate our notion of nature.

    12. Sleep Talkin’ Man: Because it is HILARIOUS. And we like laughing here at Made by Many. It increases our life span.

    13. Amanda Wachob Tattoo: If you’re considering a tattoo, you may want to look at her work. (We’re a bit rad like that).

    14. The Feltron Annual Report: Most of you have probably seen this already, but for those who haven’t, I’m sure you’ll find the intricate details of Nicholas Feltron’s life interesting. OK I’m kidding – it’s visualized in a very detailed way as well.

    15. Slam Ball: Words cannot describe this new sport that seems to have been created by combining basketball with the trampoline.

    That’s all for now, folks!

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