Apple And Google Just Tag Teamed The U.S. Carriers (TechCrunch Article)

Google’s event today was supposed to be about one device, the Nexus One. Instead, we heard a lot of: “more devices,” more manufacturers,” “more carriers,” “this is just the beginning.” Today was not about one device, it was about Google’s first step in helping to reshape the mobile landscape in the U.S. And thanks to the groundwork laid by Apple, it just might work.

Read entire article...

Chrome OS - The Picture is Getting Clear... and the "Desktop" Should be Worried

For those following Chrome OS, Google unveiled The Chromium OS open source project and some more details about the upcoming Chrome OS (scheduled to launch next year). A great and not so subtle article on Mashable titled "With Chrome OS, Google Intends to Destroy the Desktop and Microsoft" speculates the thinking behind the upcoming Chrome OS and it's hard to argue the logic. The Google Chrome Blog offers info on Chromium and a demo from the Chrome OS announcement event.

Below is a great video from Epipheo that explains Chrome OS:

Coolest Thing Ever... 10/GUI

10/GUI from C. Miller on Vimeo.

The Difference Between Art and Design

Web Designer Depot has a great post about art vs. design that is intended to be a conversation springboard into what separates art and design. The images used as part of the post can also be downloaded as wallpaper.

From the article:

Artists and designers both create visual compositions using a shared knowledge base, but their reasons for doing so are entirely different.

Some designers consider themselves artists, but few artists consider themselves designers.

So what exactly is the difference between art and design? In this post, we’ll examine and compare some of the core principles of each craft.

Introducing Sociability: Usability for the Social Web

Great and quick read on Mashable today about social usability and personas. Here's the meat of the article:

In social media, many individual users, each different from the next, combine to form a social experience. Those users will have all manner of motives and interests that don’t necessarily overlap. The degree to which your social media efforts capitalize on these user habits results in sociability, and this starts with taking a user-centric perspective. In fact, you need to take multiple perspectives.

For the purpose of developing these different user perspectives, it is helpful to create user personas to describe the different types of social behavior. I like to group users into self-oriented, other-oriented, and relationally-oriented types.

• Self-oriented users are those who extend their presence online, building audiences and posting content. Experts, pundits, and those sometimes called “creators” are self-oriented users.
• Other-oriented users are those who start with the conversations and contributions of others. Where the self-oriented user talks about him or herself (expresses him or herself), the other-oriented user responds, replies, or comments. What he or she reads and finds interesting provides a springboard for conversation.
• Relationally-oriented users gets involved in social activities. They see what’s going on between other users, and may be drawn to these more social interactions. Involvement puts these users in relation to other users, with all the dramatic and nuanced activity this can result in.

These are extremely oversimplified descriptions, of course, but they’re not meant to describe real individuals. Rather, they’re a heuristic model intended to expand your thinking about your users.

Corporate Twitter Toolbox: Twitter Tools for the Enterprise (on Mashable)

Mashable is featuring a great article on top corporate Twitter tools to manage your social media engagement with your customers. From the article:

Twitter is a great listening post for companies to monitor conversations related to their brand and engage with customers; and there are a variety of tools available to help groups and corporations tweet, collaborate, and generally manage their Twitter (Twitter) workflows... Finding the right Twitter applications is a challenge for social media managers, though, because new apps seem to spring up each day and they often have overlapping feature sets.

The article covers the market leaders in each category, like Hootsuite...

Christine Jean Chambers, Interactive Producer and Online Media Planner for BET, uses Hootsuite to track which content is resonating with their audience. “For example, during the BET Awards ’09 in June, we took over the entire top 10 trending topics on Twitter, which is pretty extraordinary,” she said. “We monitored this flux of activity using Hootsuite and were able to gauge the success of the delivery of our content on Twitter precisely because of trackable links Hootsuite provides.”

Enjoy the entire article...

20 Tips on How to Write for the Web

Web Designer Depot has a great list of 20 mistakes writers on the web make today. I've been guilty of a few myself. :)

From amateur bloggers to pro writers in leading publications and blogs, I've seen many of these mistakes littered across what I have read. My OCD (obscure acronym use is #16) never handles it well and encourages you to read this article. :)