Technology has a role in society of making life better, and while it does this it’s still an inconveinence to use. A whole set structure of systems and languages need to be adopted for someone to begin to use the technology. As a child my camera was point and click, now I’ve got a multitude of buttons and settings I need to navigate to take a photo. Technology is suppose to link the user with the required result as efficiently as possible, but we can never escape the fact that …

So Foursquare has been in Edinburgh for a little over 7 months now (since mid November 2009), and since then if I had to sum up the user experience I’ve had with it I’d say that overall i’m actually a little disappointed. The only thing stopping me packing it in is that I believe in it’s potential, and I want to run it out and be there for it when it finds what it’s meant to be, but after just over half a year of use, I can’t keep on …

As part of the development work for the same RSA competition mentioned in this post, I wanted to reach users at their most vulnerable point. View a close-up of the print ad here.
The need for a quick and immediate method of donation led me to consider premium rate phone numbers, and on to mobile phone ringtone and wallpaper advertisements found in the back of newspapers and magazines associated with the younger and more downmarket audience. With their saturation of b-list celebrities, TV catchphrases and sexualised images, they’re an accumulation of …

This is a great video about Web 3.0 (aka “The Internet of Things”) from IBM. I think it’s going to be one of the most interesting points in history, and I really feel like this revolution is going to be remembered as even greater than the Industrial Revolution.
There’s a lot of fear regarding these tracking developments, and it’s clear from the comments here that it includes users of Readwriteweb. There’s a fear of machines having an insight into too many parts of someone’s life, or a question as to whether …

For the communications on Twitter to flow freely, there has to be a minimum amount of obstruction, and from a user perspective this means the interface. There seems to be a great level of ignorance or at least naivety surrounding the masses of tools there are available to make accessing Twitter as streamlined as possible.
My all time absolute favourite method is the Firefox plugin TweetLine. Updated tweets from your Following list rotate just under the address bar like a news ticker, and a one click drop-down box appears at the …

Not always to my benefit, I’m quite an ignorant and demanding consumer. I tend to deliberately ignore brands or products which I know are relevant and rely on their advertising to cut-through and shake me by the shoulders to let me know they’re what I’m looking for. There’s no way to evaluate every potential avenue on the market, so I intentionally use the volume of buzz and clarity of message as a filter.
This is how I’ve treated HTC for a while. I was initially interested when they brought out Android, …

I unfortunately feel a little ashamed that I never cottoned on sooner as to WHY Google Buzz existed. I was quick to recognise the Nexus One as merely a funnel for user data aggregation, with the eventual goal somewhere along the line of creating a more semantic web. Perhaps the anti-Google community’s doubt that’s beginning to spread through the blogosphere as the giant struggles under it’s own weight is turning me a little ignorant, but Fast Company has laid out the fruit of Google’s plans for Buzz here, and it’s …