I’ve been thinking about this for a couple of days now and what we really need is a Twitter affiliate ad network like service. I often post tweets about products I like or things that I find interesting. In most cases that is valuable to those companies. I’ve done some small tests with my twitter account @futileboy and found that my click through is very high for each post about 7% of my followers click my links. Which is a much higher number then online ads get. Of course that’s because my links are not always trying to sell something. On twitter if you stop being genuine the people see that and stop following you.
Aside from all that, it would be great if there was service for users of twitter to make a little money off of their recommendations. What I would like to see is a service that’s sort of like Google Adsense, but instead of suggested ads, a user would type in the product they are about to promote and then if available receive a URL with their code and the clients in it. along with a short URL version that’s easy to post to Twitter.
Companies could go one step further with this, on demand adverting, and even offer discounts to top influencer’s followers. Which in turn would give the tweeter more street cred. Just imagine a tweet from someone you follow pointing out a product you’re interested in and a discount if you click the link now. This may be just enough to push someone in to purchasing.
Would this service get abused? OF course it will. However the natural filtering process of over advertising will ultimately make authentic influencers stand out.
Sure it’s a little evil, but if someone is willing to pay for it and someone is willing to take that money in the offer then the service should exist.
Initial research around the application, service. Interviews of stakeholders and customers. Reviewing competition.
Outlines
Gathering information in outline form can be an extremely helpful way to quickly collect short bits of information like product names and then group and sort them under different headings. I almost always start my projects here. It really helps me see the logical connections between the information and helps me ask questions about the classification and naming systems that are already in place.
UI Flow Diagrams
User interface flow diagrams are created to model the interactions that a user has with a product or service. The diagram primarily will reflect the behavioral view of a single use case along with some optional pathways.
Paper Prototypes
Paper prototyping is a variation of usability testing where representative users perform realistic tasks by interacting with a paper version of the interface that is manipulated by a person ‘playing computer,’ who doesn’t explain how the interface is intended to work.
Wireframes
A wireframe is a basic visual guide used in interface design to suggest the structure of an interface and relationships between its pages. Typically, wireframes are completed before any artwork is developed.
Functional Requirements document
This documentation describes the behavior of a system. The documentation typically describes what is needed by the user as well as requested properties of inputs and outputs.
Usability studies
It is a technique used to evaluate a product by actually testing it on users. This can be seen as an irreplaceable usability practice, since it gives direct input on how real users use the system. This is in contrast with usability inspection methods where experts use different methods to evaluate a user interface without involving users.
Use cases
Use cases describe “who” can do “what” within the system being designed. The use case technique is used to capture a system’s behavioral requirements by detailing scenario-driven threads through the functional requirements.
User Studies
Observing how people interact with products, services and experiences in order to come up with new solutions. User studies can help reframe a problem in a new way. They can also help see things that have gone unnoticed before.
Content Strategy
Details how content is/should be used on a site, how to increase value
Content Audit
Records type/location of site content, recommends action for each item
Content Schedule
Plans how content should be re-purposed/created for a site, who should do it, etc.
Search Strategy
Outlines how search should work for a site, what technologies can be used, how it integrates with other sites
Search Interface Design
Plans how the search system will ingest queries and produce a Search Engine Results Page, plus the interface design for that page
Taxonomy Strategy
Outline how to design a taxonomy(ies) for a site, and how they will work
Meta Data Schema
Detailed model of the taxonomy(ies) using customer data
Enterprise Content Management Strategy
Overall plan for how an ECM can be used on a customer’s site
Content Modeling
Plan that details content types and content elements within a content management system
Content Publishing Workflows
Details the entire lifecycle of content for a site, from creation to archive
This piece looks for tweets containing the phrases ‘just landed in…’ or ‘just arrived in…’. Locations from these tweets are located using MetaCarta’s Location Finder API. The home location for the traveling users are scraped from their Twitter pages. The system then plots these voyages over time.
This was made using Processing, which I’m a huge fan of.
There's some interesting php code on this forum that creates a dynamic image to show connection speed. I'm working a solution to have a page work best based on a users speed.
I find that I can’t clean my own home without my ipod or something playing from iTunes. It’s not always music either, I’m listing to podcasts, audiobooks and downloadable versions of radio shows. Because the technology has made is so easy, I’m consuming more media more often. Most of all I’m consuming it at times when I’m doing other less enjoyable things. Things like cleaning, mowing, or even just sitting in traffic.
Let’s step in to my time machine here and visit my ghosts of crappy jobs past. One of the worst jobs I had was cleaning a grocery store at night. First the bakery and then the butcher area. The bakery wasn’t so bad, but it was hours of scrubbing the same large cooking sheet over and over again, in lots of nasty chemicals. The butcher room, was like cleaning up after the most violent first person shooter you’ve ever played. Meaty carnage was always everywhere. The belt saw had a tendency to throw little tiny pieces of meat all over the place and coat the walls and floor. Okay, maybe that’s too much detail here. The point is that I would have killed myself if I didn’t have tapes of Jimi Hendrix on my Sony Sport Walkman. It was the big yellow one with the airtight seal. I had that thing for ages and it traveled all over the place with me.
Sure, audio cassette tape was just about the worst medium there has been for music, but it was the best I had at the time. I had boxes of homemade mix tapes and purchased tapes. It was an art form to make the mix tape back then, I had one of those boom boxes with the dual cassette bays. I would search around the source tape for the song and then un-pause the carefully paused to record blank tape. Mistakes would happen all the time and you would have to rewind or fast forward to get to the right spot. With some of my favorite tapes of the time, like Synchronicity by the Police, I was able to visual find any song by how much tape was on either side of the spool. You could look in there and next to the markers in the little window, find just the right spot quickly. The worst thing that could happen was when the tape would run out when you knew that last song would have been just an amazing way to end the tape side. It was tedious at times, but I always put my heart in to it. Getting it just right meant so much. There was an art form to filling that amount of time per side just right.
It wasn’t about the tape cassette or the process of making my mix tapes, it was always about the music. I made those tapes to have the music with me, for those bus rides, long family road trips, train rides, reading or giving away to friends.
Getting back to my original point, today it’s so much easier to bring a vast library of content with you in your pocket. Gone are the days of having to worry about how much time I have to fill. Side A and Side B don’t exist anymore. In my opinion this is a good thing, because it removes the limits of the medium.
The dishwashers, janitors, and butcher room cleaners can escape from the mediocracy of their jobs and bring their own enjoyment. They can listen to the Audible version of Pride and Prejudice and catching up on the classics. Instead they could be listening to the Science Friday podcast and learning about the weeks latest news in science. Maybe, they just want to listen to Slayer, because that’s what they need then. It doesn’t matter, the point is that inside most everyones pocket these days is a device that can do this. MP3 players are cheaper and cheaper ever day. Most cell phones support audio playback.
I’ve just been looking at one aspect of all of this too, just the audio side. It goes to reason that being more closely connected to your friends and family through devices like the iphone, or any cell phone for that matter, makes the hard difficult times easier to get through. Nothing is better then getting a text message from a friend, while slogging through some gutter cleaning. It’s so much easier to stay connected. You can tweet out a quick message without a boss noticing and organize a meet up with your friends in much less time.
Eventually, I hope we all have robots to do the work that people don’t want to. That way, we can all just go back to enjoying life and having more leisure time. Of course that’s another story for another time.
Pardon me, I’m just going to slip these headphones on for moment while I go take care of that dirty floor.
I find that I can’t clean my own home without my ipod or something playing from iTunes. It’s not always music either, I’m listing to podcasts, audiobooks and downloadable versions of radio shows. Because the technology has made is so easy, I’m consuming more media more often. Most of all I’m consuming it at times when I’m doing other less enjoyable things. Things like cleaning, mowing, or even just sitting in traffic.
