So, the latest version of Nokia/Symbian Series 60 has been previewed. There’s even a swanky video for it:

I’m still thinking about a lot of it. It’s clearly aiming at a slightly different market to the one Apple’s gunning for. There’s an interesting separation between “stuff that needs a stylus” and “stuff you can do with fingers/thumbs”. In reality, I think people veer towards thumbs if possible. Does that mean they’ll ignore the UI elements that are so small they need a stylus? Not sure. I haven’t given that enough thought, as I said.

The best bit of the video, though, is nothing to do with touch. It’s the bit where the model silences the phone ringing on the coffee table simply by physically flipping the phone over.

As an interaction, that presumes a lot. It presumes you leave your phone out, and if you do, you leave it face up. Many people leave their phones out (so they can see them skitter across the table when a call/SMS comes in) but face down, so the screen doesn’t annoy them. (Blackberries, with their persistent flashing light, are a prime candidate for face-downing). At the same time, it embraces that behaviour: when the screen lights up, you hide the screen and the phone silences. I like that.

Of course, you could do that on any old phone with a cheap accelerometer inside it. I wish it wasn’t part of some “premium” touch interface, but part of a lowest-common-denominator combination of hardware and software. Oh well.

The other night, Matt was showing me his newly unlocked iPod Touch. I was playing with the shell application – just poking around, running top, etc – and rotated the iPod onto its side, just to see if the screen-rotation stuff worked in the third-party application.

After a while, Matt picked up what I was doing – as I poked around, when I found an app that felt like it should have a horizontal view, I would tip the iPod over, wait a second, and then tip it back.

It reminds me of a running joke my parents had with me ever since I was little. I used to pick up Christmas presents and shake them, and if they rattled, I’d assume that they were Lego (Lego, at the time, being the only kind of present I got that rattled). Ever since, we’ve always joked that rattling presents are Lego. And just like I rattled presents to see if they had the potential to be Lego, so you “rattle” the iPod to see if an application has the potential to be rotated.

You don’t necessarily need a visual signpost (an icon or alert) that such functionality is available; you just rotate the device, wait a second, and then flip it back. As a user, you’re interrogating the user to see if that particular interaction is possible. Is that good design? In some kinds of interaction, I don’t think so; you don’t want to poke every button or crawl through every menu just to find out what is or isn’t possible.

With the iPod/iPhone, though, we’re not crawling menus; we’re just interrogating the device to see if it supports a single kind of interaction. We only want a true or false back from it. Couple that boolean response with the simplicity of the accelerometer interface, and these “rattling” interactions come at a much lower cost.

I like rattling as a metaphor for this kind of interaction; it’s the equivalent of responds_to? in Ruby, I guess. What are other good examples of rattling-type interactions I’m missing? And how good are the implementations of it in software or on the web?

So, if you occasionally drop by the website, you might notice there’s a new lick of paint around the place. Nothing too drastic on the surface – under the hood was more drastic.

infovore.org is now running on WordPress 2.3, after a long hiatus on 2.0.x (due to the way the site worked). I’m now relying way less on hacks and custom plugins, and way more on the core codebase. Tagging, for starters, is now native. That’s nice.

I’m also using categories a bit more effectively – you’ll notice some main ones on the right, there, and I’m looking to focus my writing around these topics, I think. It’s a long job to go back and recategorise four years of posts… but I’m going to do it, somehow! In the meantime, if you fancy re-orientating yourself around the site, the new-look archives might hint at what’s going on better.

There’s been all manner of WordPress jigerring, too – mainly around the way the breadcrumb-header works, and how each category colour-codes a lot of its posts.

I’m pleased with the new look. I’m afraid I’ve not tested it in IE6/7, yet, and I’m sure there will be a few rough edges around the place. Let me know if you find any. I think the only one I found was, in my tag migration, everything got tagged as “holiday”. Oops.

(This is a post I wrote on an internal blog at work, and I wanted to reproduce it outside the firewall because, well, I find the issue so fascinating. Given more time, I’d rewrite it for Infovore, with a slightly less preachy tone. But for now, here it is, warts and all…)

This Flickr support thread is a must-read if you’re interested in online communities, and in particular, how they change as they grow.

Flickr’s always been a playful place to hang out; after all, it grew out of Game Neverending. The staff are known for injecting their sense of humour into the product. And so, when that silliest of invented-on-the-Internet-festivals, International Talk Like A Pirate Day rolled around, they decided to have some fun.

What they did was really very trivial, namely:

• They overlaid a pirate flag onto the Flickr photo
• They altered the explore page algorithm to display only pirate-related pictures
• As a bonus, they added an extra option to their langauge-selector at the bottom to every page, to translate text into “Pirate”

All of which was only online for a single day. Sounds fairly harmless, right?

Oh no. Check out the thread. A lot of users – who weren’t aware of the jokey “holiday” were shocked and angry. Many assume the site – or worse, their computer, had been hacked, explaining that they saw the pirate flag as a “universal signal for hackers”. Several pointed out that it’s only funny if you know about it, and complained of Flickr’s bias towards all things American. One person pointed out that many users, for whom English is not a first language, are “already making a great effort” to communicate, and the last thing they need is confusing jokes. With a lot of people, it didn’t go down so well. The mangling of the “explore” page went down even worse – some users complaining that all they want to do is make “beautiful pictures” and share what they deem “art”, but instead the Flickr staff have to engage in “childish” behaviour. (Needless to say, many people complaining about their pictures not making explore were, to be frank, making pictures that had little hope of making explore anyhow).

At the same time, fans of the site fought back a little in the thread, pointing out it’s nice to be part of a community that hasn’t sold its fun-loving soul to the corporates, or that they appreciated the joke. For them, it was exactly the kind of thing they expected from the site – probably because they’d all been users for much longer and appreciate the history. For many of the newer users, less versed in the lore of the community, it was more jarring.

What impresses me is how the staff reacted: they didn’t break frame once. They turned up in the thread, answered the odd question here and there, made the users feel like they were being listened to – and at the same time carried on talking like pirates. They were gently deflating the group ego, and being amusing in the process. But more importantly: they were reinforcing the community values, and also the conceit of the day’s joke. They were making it quite clear: this is a place where we have fun. Not forever, not maliciously, but we like the gags, and they’re staying.

Ultmiately, though the thread has over 400 posts from nearly as many users, that’s still a vastly small fraction of the users of the site – which, remember, has about 1.3bn photographs on it as of now. The thing about a vocal minority is that it’s still a minority. The majority were not vocal enough to complain, or presumably care. That, too, speaks volumes.

It’s a good reminder that, whilst it’s healthy to have a sense of perspective when dealing with user requests and, no matter how community-driven your site is, it’s still perfectly reasonable gentle control over the community’s values. At the same time, it clearly demonstrates the way that communities, by necessity, become more conservative as they grow, and become more conservative as they have to represent a greater spread of languages, cultures, and values. It is, perhaps, a necessary evil of internationalisation. Balancing the focus of the community with the demands of an ever-broadening spread of users is difficult, and the whole thread makes for a great illustration of this difficulty. Do read it if you get a chance. By turns, it’s both amusing and informative.

(And, of course, it’s a reminder that some jokes just don’t translate.)

I bought an Airport Express this week. They’ve been around for a while now, and I’m sure they’re probably going to end up being refreshed in the near future, but I couldn’t hold off any longer. For various reasons, it made no sense to put it off any longer.

So far, I’ve been really impressed with it. Not so much what it does; it does exactly what I ask of it, which is exactly what the site said it will do. What’s impressive is the way it does it. The experience of owning it, of using it, has been excellent.

Wireless networking is complicated. It’s not designed to be user friendly. It’s not too hard to get a router/modem up and running and sharing around a nice, public, stealable connection, but fine-tuning and configuring it is a total pain for most users. The terminology is complex and unintuitive.

To make matters worse, almost every router (wireless or otherwise) has a miniature webserver in it running an administration interface. This sounds like a good idea for most users: the controls and interactions are familiar, and no special software is required. But in practice, it’s a disaster.

“[objects should be design in their] next largest context – a chair in a room, a room in a house, a house in an environment, environment in a city plan.”

This quotation has emerged several times in the past few weeks. Every time it feels more and more pertinent. Read it; remember it; it is important.

My notes from Reboot 9 are now online. Forgot to mention this when I did it last week, so am now making up for lost time.

When I say “notes”, I mean my notes on other people’s talks (as opposed to the notes on my own talk, which have been much requested and which are still in the pipeline).

Anyhow, do check them out if you’re curious as to what went on. They’re vaguely useful if you weren’t there; most things in [square brackets] are me extemporising, rather than anything the speaker said.

The slides from my Reboot talk are now up:

The Uncanny Valet (4mb PDF).

Do download! I’ve been asked to put the slides up several times, so have duly obliged. They won’t make much sense if you weren’t at the conference (yet); at some point int he future I’m going to reconstruct what I said from my notes (and those of others), and will put something fuller online. In the meantime, I hope this will do.

Update: and now we’re on Slideshare.

Recent radio silence has mainly been down to last ditch preparation for Reboot. And this post itself is a bit of a placeholder – I’m about to leap on trains to take me to planes, so there’s little time to write.

I’ll be in Copenhagen from this afternoon until the weekend. Can’t wait for the conference – last year’s was awesome. I’ll also be speaking at the conference, about modern manners for the digital world. I think it could be interesting, but I’m quite nervous about it.

I’m on email and Twitter as ever. If you’re Rebooting: do say hello.

Update: Will be late to CPH; the flight is delayed. Boo, hiss. Hopefully I’ll make the pre-boot party, but it’ll be tight…

One of the things that’s been making me happiest recently has been the fact that Jodrell Bank’s telescopes have been Twittering. These big machines, peering into the cosmos, chattering to themselves about where they’re currently pointed – and that chatter is overheard and reproduced on the web. Obligatory screengrab, in case Twitter is down:

It’s cute, and adds to the growing number of non-humans burbling away on Twitter. As I thought about this, it became clear that Twitter isn’t just “the status message turned into communication” (as I usually describe it), but a human-readable messaging bus.