The president at the start-up I’m working for, Lorenz, has been ranting and raving about how awesome Facebook is…so much that we’re starting to wonder if he is secretly working for them. Though I still don’t quite understand what the buzz is all about yet, he recently found and used their polling feature that I find amazing.

For as little as $6, you can poll Facebook’s 30 million users to get insight on questions you may need answers to without going through all the trouble of usability testing or traditional (and expensive) polling methods.

We tried a few questions and got several hundred responses very quickly. Overall I find it extremely useful and will definitely be using it a lot to assist in some of those difficult design decisions.

UPDATE:

Ok now that I’ve been using Facebook for the past couple of weeks, I can see the light now. From the time I registered to now, I’ve added about 5 friends on my own, but other friends and friends of friends have quickly found me and added me to their friends list. I was quite amazed at how quickly and easily they help you and your friends connect (via your IM, email contacts, etc…). Once you have a decent amount of friends you’re connected to, Facebook gets really awesome.

Facebook is one million times better than myspace. Granted I’m not a popularity-starved teenager who wants to pimp out my profile beyond the point of legibility, but the usability and thought they’ve put into every detail in order to enable a great social network is really impressive.

One of the biggest usability problems you encounter in a fully Ajaxified site (i.e., a completely dynamic site that functions with little to no page refreshes)…is the fact that anything you load dynamically on the page without a refresh is blind to the browser’s buttons, as well as bookmarking.

Kailash however has discovered a slick way around this problem in this post. He mentions that by making use of the ‘url fragment identifier’ or whatever that comes after the # in a url, you can use javascript to dynamically update the url in the browser’s address bar:

Javascript can update the fragment identifier dynamically with a simple

On page load, something like RegEx could be used to parse the query

So if page numbers or required variables are set as the fragment identifiers, it is possible to efficiently make Javascript process it (nearly) and make Ajax act normal with page urls.

On another note, Smugmug has released a new version of their site that is proof positive that this technique can sucessfully be done. Well done! I’m really excited to start using this technique on our projects over at Blue Lava.

I updated my copy of Adium instant messenger today, and after it installs, it presents me with this message:

After reading it, i had no idea what to do. The question starts out “Do you want to allow access…” and the action buttons are “change/dont change”. I knew that one button would probably grant the new version access to my IM account passwords, while the other would deny it. I ended up picking a random option and it happened to be the right one (no whammys!)

But for a good reason. I have accepted a full time position as Director of User Experience for a social-based web 2.0 startup in Honolulu, HI. The company is called Blue Lava Technologies, and we’ll be developing some break-through technology that will change the way you interact with your photos.

I have been working on the sister website, Kindfish.com for the past few months, and we’re about to roll-out some awesome new features as well as some social aspects that will make it a lot of fun to use.

With that said, I’ve decided to focus my future blog topics around social/web 2.0 user experience so that i can blog my thoughts and learnings as I go.

Today Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google announced that they will be releasing the much speculated powerpoint version of their free online apps for small businesses. This is very exciting news for those of us who have been fully enjoying Gmail, Docs, and Spreadsheets…and more importantly those of us who use Visio.

It has been said in the past that Power Point can be a great tool for creating wireframes and other types of bare-bones visualization methods. Though I’ve always used Visio in the past, I could see this new online tool being extremely useful for throwing together some quick diagrams.

Over the past year I’ve dived head first into starting my own business, doing my own accounting, and the most recently frustrating, doing my own taxes.

The IRS has done a great job of making it as complicated as possible to figure out taxes on your own so that tax professionals can exist and in turn generate more tax money for the government. (That’s my interpretation anyways

I am lucky enough to have a close relative who is a CPA and has helped me though this painful process, but without them I would be forced to hire one…and that is lame.

Taxes are not as complicated as the IRS makes them and it doesn’t have to feel like your going to the dentist to get teeth pulled!

There is a better way.

It is clear to me that if the IRS hired a rock-star team of information architects and designers to come in and organize the tax worksheets, publications, and god forbid make them smart working online applications, there would be no need for anyone to hire a tax professional.

Imagine that after receiving a reminder email, you log-in to your user-kind IRS website, it tells you which documents need to be filed (and when), you input some numbers into some form fields, which instantly does some math and auto-populates other related fields for you, then…woops, theres an error with some data you entered, not to worry, the application is smart enough to diagnose the problem and help you fix it with ease. You type in your name at the bottom, enter your CC# or bank routing info, and hit submit.

Ahhh, now wasn’t that easy?

Maybe next year ae? (in government time that is 10 years BTW)

Altia has released a photoshop plugin called PhotoProto that allows you to turn your photoshop documents into working prototypes. It is a script that you run that takes advantage of layers and layer comps, turning them on and off as you click around your mockup. The demo makes it look like it’s very easy to use. You can even make changes to your photoshop document without affecting the prototype.

Check out the demo video for more info.

Today I was working in Dreamweaver and got this delightful error message:

Thanks for the insightful error message, Dreamweaver.

Just as the internet allows users to create and share their own media, it is also enabling them to organize digital material their own way, rather than relying on pre-existing formats of classifying information. A December 2006 survey by the Pew Internet & American Life Project has found that 28% of internet users have tagged or categorized content online such as photos, news stories or blog posts. On a typical day online, 7% of internet users say they tag or categorize online content.

Here are the results of the survey…

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Demographics of Taggers
28% of online Americans say they have tagged content like a photo, a news story
or a blog post

Proportion of all Americans in the group who are taggers

• Men 29%
• Women 27%

Race/ethnicity

• White, non-Hispanic 26%
• Black, non-Hispanic 36%

English-speaking
Hispanic* 33%

Age

• 18-29 32%
• 30-49 31%
• 50-64 23%
• 65+ 18%

Educational attainment

• High school diploma 24%
• Some college 28%
• College degree + 31%

Household income

• <$30K 28%
• $30K-$49,999 28%
• $50K-$74,999 27%
• $75,000+ 36%

Internet connection at home

• Dial up 23%
• Broadband 38%

Source: Pew Internet & American Life Project December 2006 tracking survey. (N for internet users=1,623. Margin of error is ±3%).

—————————————–

Tagging is done somewhat differently at different websites. Here are some links that illustrate more fully how the tagging process is done:

• At Flickr – a photo sharing site
• At Del.icio.us – a browser bookmarking site
• At Technorati – a blog search engine
• At Furl – a browser tool that allows content to be archived and labeled
• At Yahoo – how tags work in Yahoo’s MyWeb browser feature
• At YouTube – a video-sharing site
• A Wikipedia entry on tagging

I just saw a video that blew my mind. At NYU they’ve developed a touch screen similar to the one featured on the iPhone…only much larger. Jeff Han demonstrates it’s possibilities in this video.

Interfaces like this will be a huge leap forward in how we interact with computers.

Jeff Han is a research scientist for New York University’s Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences. Here, he demonstrates—for the first time publicly—his intuitive, “interface-free,” touch-driven computer screen, which can be manipulated intuitively with the fingertips, and responds to varying levels of pressure.