All,

This blog’s had a great run. Awesome, actually, thanks to those of you who submitted, commented, and otherwise participated in its growth.

But times are changin and I’ve got new passions and projects to pursue. As I write this, we’re making plans to shift the focus of this here Tiny G and make a new company. So thanks a billion for reading my ramblings, and stay tuned for the next phase.

Yours in internet awesomeness,

Josh Kamler

So you’ve got 500, 000 followers on Twitter. And marketers are approaching you to pay for ads in your tweets. That’s awesome for you, but a new study shows that the number of followers you have does not correlate to your ability to influence behavior. Here’s a little taste:

…follower count is not sufficient to capture the influence of a user (i.e., the ability of an user to sway the opinions of her followers). It only shows how popular the user is (i.e., the size of her audience). But, as we showed in our paper, retweets and mentions, which measure the audience responsiveness to a user’s tweets, do not correlate strongly with number of followers.

Read the whole article here.

Nice little post by Adaptive Path on where retail on the internet seems to be headed. Here’s a taste:

The future of physical retail emphasizes conversations and demonstrations.

We’re starting to see this. An Apple Store has remarkably little stuff on display. But what it does have, you can play with, and there are many associates available to help you figure out what makes the most sense for you. Some stores have the Apple Theater, with live demonstrations of new products. Umpqua Bank is bringing a coffeehouse feel to their branches, a lower-key environment that encourages discussion and engagement with bank staff about financial matters. Even USAA, which until recently had all service delivered through phone or online, is experimenting with financial centers to help members manage their financial lives.

The rest is here.

At first, I thought this was super cheesy. But then around the midway point, it got quite beautiful.

It all starts with a wireframe. However you make them—with a sharpie or Omnigraffle—wireframes help you create products, applications, and experiences that aren’t just user friendly but are also truly engaging.

At Language in Common, when we’re designing websites, applications, user experiences and the like, we always begin with the wireframe. We start here because it’s a super quick way to imagine, conceptualize and design a holistic user experience that not only benefits future interface design challenges but also begins—at the concept level—to create a final product that people actually want to use. We happen to be big fans of doing it (heh) with a sharpie because it makes the prototyping process faster, more iterative, and more collaborative—always good things when it comes to designing for usability.

Here are some resources to help you get the most from wireframing:

Wireframes Magazine: Covers a variety of topics related to wireframes and template tools, with respective sections for wireframe samples, UI tools, templates, and reader sharing.

Get Wireframing: The All-In-One Guide by Designer Grace Smith: Comprehensive list of techniques, tools, articles, etc.

20 Steps to Better Wireframing: Helpful step-by-step guide that breaks down a basic wireframing process.

Sketchy Wireframes: A look at computer-based sketchy wireframes.

The 7 Wonders Of Wireframes: A quick look at the benefits of hand-drawn (vs HTML) wireframing.

Thanks to Katharine N. for the post and tips!

Give this a moment to get started. It’s super awesome.

Um, what? So, yeah, Photoshop CS5 can now invent realities.

Our good friend, illustrator, artist, and all-around extraordinaire, Shawn Feeney makes awesome awesome shit. His Musical Anatomy series will make you feel all kinds of funny and he just made some sweet stickers that you should totally buy. Above is the amazing cover art he just finished for Jascha vs. Jascha’s debut album.

Super interesting photo series of international bureaucrats and their office spaces by Jan Banning. From the looks of it, the word “bureaucrat” is pretty loosely defined.

Watch this brilliant talk by Jesse Schell on using game psychology to trigger behavior change. A little long, but completely and totally worth it.

You could actually fly to Cuba with this! Or puddle jump between the Hawaiian Islands! Can one of you buy me one please? More here.

Wow. This video is made almost entirely of logos. And it was nominated for best short animated film.

This super clever little video was created by Maya Rota Klein and Diego Lorenzo Zanitti. Seems foodies and design geeks have more in common than we thought. Enjoy.

I’m a huge Google fan, but it seems like Google’s been falling down a little bit lately. Granted, they’re richer than god, and damn smart too, but as far as I can tell, no one really adopted the much-buzzed Google Wave, and now there’s a bunch of back-lash against their entry into the social network marketplace, Google Buzz. As always, Umair Haque has the right things to say about it. Here’s a taste:

Next-gen products and services are built to fail, fast and cheap — instead of just offering tons of features. The flip side of bundling features together is that room to fail gracefully disappears, because interdependencies between them spiral out of control. It’s why Microsoft always made sucky stuff: bundling Windows, Office, and sundry other apps into one giant monolith increased improvement costs radically. Once upon a time, Google laid down the law: we’ll never bundle stuff the way Microsoft does — because that’s evil. But Buzz is bundled with Gmail so tightly, it’s the first thing you see beneath your inbox. Buzz makes it more costly to improve Gmail, and vice versa. Better that each was an independent service.

Read the whole thing here.

So last night, I went to see Dave Chappelle at a small club in Oakland. It started off funny, but not amazing-belly-laugh funny. And I think it’s because the first part of his act was scripted. But after half an hour, he just started riffing on things happening in the club: some dude’s forced laughter, questions from the audience, a girl who shouted out that she wanted to sleep with him. And once we all got comfortable with eachother, things got really fucking funny.

In other words the experience got way better because Chappelle was both aware of his surroundings and how he felt about them. And he was able to articulate it clearly. In our industry, this is called user-centered design: You become hyper-observant of your everyday experience. You become hyper-aware of how you are affected by it. You articulate it in a way that makes sense. And then you use that understanding to make things work better.

I am a skeptic. I don’t believe in the widespread adoption of the iPad (probably wrong about that), didn’t think the Macbook Air would take off (was right about that one) and lately have not been convinced that Augmented Reality is going to make it into the mainstream. Then I saw this:

Now, as cool as this is, does this mean that I now have to spend time out of my already busy day to aim my iphone camera at my stack of AR imprinted business cards to see what kind of shit people are trying to sell me? Seems like a broken user experience to me.

More on this here.

I should have posted this long ago. Umair Haque’s ridiculously smart take on old-school thinking vs. new school thinking.

Here’s a taste:

Dear Old People Who Run the World,
My generation would like to break up with you.

Everyday, I see a widening gap in how you and we understand the world — and what we want from it. I think we have irreconcilable differences.

You wanted big, fat, lazy “business.”
We want small, responsive, micro-scale commerce.

You turned politics into a dirty word.
We want authentic, deep democracy — everywhere.

Get the whole thing here:

Now I don’t usually predict things because predicting things is a dangerous business. But this morning, with 60mph winds and driving rain, I’m feeling like taking some risk. So:

1. All the voice-activated software that’s getting so much buzz these days will not be adopted by mainstream. How long has voice-dial been available on your cell phone? Do you use it regularly. Me neither.

2. Apple’s much much much buzzed about iTablet thingy (the iPad, maybe?) will not be nearly as popular as the iPhone. It’s nothing more than a netbook without a hardware keyboard. And those already exist for medium-sized and omy semi-enthusiastic audience. Besides that, it’ll require a man-purse to lug the thing around with you. I think it’ll work as a niche product, like the Mac Air, but it will never live up to the hype.

So, apparently, if ever there was a solid UX opportunity, the typical airline boarding pass has got to be high on the list. Tyler Thompson got inspired by Dustin Curtis to take stab at it. And then got other people involved. This is a beautiful example of 1) crowd-sourced, collaborative, experience design that actually works and 2) a broad kind of activism that’s simply focused on making people’s daily lives just a little bit better. Awesome.