birdie&chick

I’m working on a redesign of B&C, so please be patient with me while I push the pixels from A to B.

I just wish a bike like this could make it up the hills in SF!

Posted via email from Julie’s posterous

Posted via web from Julie’s posterous

via thevaderproject.com

Posted via web from Julie’s posterous

The Tangerine POP Browser Circa 2000:

It’s a tough argument, because I know that most users (including my current ones on the site that I work for) absolutely love having themes, and want every rope and pulley be available to customize. The problem is, once you open that door, it’s all downstream from there (at least as far as I can tell).

So – how can you possibly retain design control of your product or site when your users have customized and themed it beyond the point of no return? Should we offer themes or the ability to design your own theme at all?

Posted via web from Julie’s posterous

After getting yet another reminder from Microsoft how they’ve “listened to your feedback” and “improved your Hotmail experience”, I was inspired to do the following 10 second Photoshop hack.

Before

After

I seriously can’t believe how Microsoft has managed to take a user experience that was already years behind most web based email clients, and somehow make it worse.

Last week, I was sorting through the increasing amount of random friend requests on Facebook, and I started thinking about how adoption rates seem to be changing.

Overall, it really does appear that the types of people who joined Facebook earlier versus the types of people who adopted MySpace or even Friendster are quite different. This may have something to do with how Facebook was originally marketed, but I’m not sure. For example, someone from my high school was on Facebook quite early on, but was never on Friendster or MySpace.

Conversely, a good chunk of the (forgive me) scenester/elitist/early adopter crowd I know from either my Boston or NYC networks have not joined yet. Network fatigue? Perhaps. But perhaps not, and I have a hunch.

For awhile, I wondered where the hubs would float to, given Gen X / Gen Y ’s high aversion to blatant advertising and the continuing aesthetic (and functional) decline of MySpace into AdSpace. I thought Virb was a clear winner, at least for the music sub-culture types, but it failed to stick.
And now, there are thousands of social networks (if not millions) but few grabbed the core hubs of early adopters in the way that a few message boards and Friendster did a few years ago.
So where are we going next? Nowhere, actually. The past year has seen the rise of “micro-blogging” and the birth of the personal feed, like Twitter, FriendFeed, and even the site I work for, Widgetbox, which lets people create content or take a part of the web and place it anywhere they want. The New York Times Magazine wrote an article this past Sunday which introduced the term “ambient intimacy” to describe this constant stream of personal data that we now absorb on a daily basis. (Indeed, we refer to our users’ experience on Widgetbox as “ambient findability”) It’s a great article, but it mostly follows the rise of Facebook’s Newsfeed from a teen’s perspective, and doesn’t offer much in the way of predictions, except a somewhat hokey quote about kindergartners being on social networks someday soon and how scary it was that they might stay connected digitally to everyone they meet in their lifetime.

So what’s happening now is that we (the web enabled) are in the process of defining our personal data streams. That, combined with microformats like XFN will change the way we interact with larger networks. No longer will you sign up to a site and create a profile, you will instead simply link your feed to that community, and interact with it in a much more targeted manner. It will become harder and harder to be “anyone you want” on the internet, as your feed will need to be your true identity as compared to what others may create regarding you. And as Veronica Belmont and others have pointed out, it will become increasingly difficult to maintain “long-format” blogging. And in time, I imagine these feeds will start to have hubs, based on core groups of five or six people, and in some cases, one very highly linked person. How these hubs will be displayed visually is yet to be determined – it may build off our existing blogging platforms, or it may become something totally different. We’re not quite there yet, (give it another year) but my hope is that the web stays a beautiful place to be.

I was informed today, via a very polite letter from Blue Shield, that my monthly rate for my insurance is going up.

“This person’s next birthday will move them into a new age category, resulting in a different rate. This type of increase is standard for health coverage, because medical risks generally rise with age.”

Ouch. Well, “new age category”, here I come. Hope it’s ok I still wear ratty converse and glitter eyeshadow.

—

I’m feeling a bit better today, even though it still feels like I was in some type of bike accident. Sore muscles, a headache, and feeling strangely both dizzy and tired at the same time.

Also, we have finished all five seasons of the Wire. As many of you have told me, it feels like there should be *more* still – the story is still going on, and I’ve got all these characters swimming around my head. It really felt like the closest thing to “watching” a book I’ve ever seen.

Now what? I think it’s on to revisting the Brat Pack, Parker Posey, and a few fifties musicals.
I’m in the mood for lipstick, like on Judy Garland, not on a pig.

This weekend yet another one of my East Coast gals will be staying with us for the weekend. She’s got a car (driving up from LA) and we’re planning on hitting the beaches and Muir Woods – I can’t wait.

Ok.. so it’s only for two months – BUT he gets to work for at a non-profit and it’s with animals!

Yeah!

Crossing my fingers and my toes that this leads to bigger and brighter things for Mr. Gross.

I have to be honest, this week has been kinda stinky.
I spent the last two days battling a nasty virus – and then yesterday was just bad news bears.

Our apartment was broken into (while we weren’t home, thankfully) and stuff (including Chris’s MacBook) was stolen.
So we’ve placed a police report and talked to our neighbors – turns out this is the fourth robbery in about six months on our corner.
So much for thinking Duboce Triangle (or the Castro) was safer than the Mission.

 We’ve gone through and changed account info, passwords, and setup an credit alert on our accounts.
Google however, will not let Chris disable his Gmail account since he no longer has the password. 

 If anyone has any tips for dealing with this stuff, I’d definitely appreciate it. I’ve never been robbed before.
Also, if anyone has a gently used Mac they’d like to sell, I guess we’re in the market.
How am supposed to sleep at night now?
I think we need a big dog, or at least a recording of one.