JetBlue didn’t have a great 2007. It all started when thousands of fliers were stranded in airplanes because of bad weather. At that point, JetBlue fell off its pedestal, and one of the victims of the crisis was its own founder and CEO David Neeleman.
After being demoted from JetBlue CEO, Neeleman left the company and started an airline in Brazil. What is really interesting is that he invited the general Brazilian public to pick the name of the airline through a contest. The two names most people voted for were “Azul” and “Samba”, and the company decided on “Azul”. It’s now officially called “Azul Linhas Aéreas Brasileiras“.
The first two people in the contest who voted for “Azul” and “Samba” won a lifetime air pass on the airline. And the first 2000 people who picked one of those two winning words won two tickets, which will be redeemable when the airline starts flying in 2009. As it turns out, I am one of those 2000 people who suggested the name “Azul” early enough in the competition to win the tickets. Need to plan a trip down to Brazil in 2009 and put those tickets to good use.
I found out today that the airline has chosen its logo:
It’s a colorful and pixelated map of Brazil. I like it.
Last summer, Flowing Data organized a contest around visualization of personal data. It invited readers to submit data “flowing” off of them, such as how much they spend on coffee, how much sleep they get, their iTunes listening history, etc. The catch was that the data had to be in some graphical representation. In their words:
“Send me your data in the form of a graph, a photo, a hand-drawing, or any other visualization you can think of. It can be interactive or static, simple or complex, serious or humorous, analytical or artistic, or all the above. It’s up to you.”
The submissions were quite interesting.
The problem of information overload has been widely discussed in the media and blogosphere. At Web 2.0 Expo in NY a couple of weeks ago, Clay Shirky, adjunct professor at NYU and renowned Internet thinker, suggested a new take on the issue.
In his view, it’s not that we have too much information – we’ve had lots of information for a long time. The real problem is that we simply don’t have good enough information filters.
It’s a good talk, but it will ‘cost’ you 20 minutes.
There are people who design things – sometimes they are called designers. And then there are great designers, people who live and breathe design, people who sweat every detail, to the nth degree. One of those people is Cabel Sasser, founder of Panic, an outstanding indie Mac developer.
Follow this link to Cabel’s blog and see how he put his sense of design to good use for his wedding day.
Last week I watched the vice-presidential debate on TV and followed the Twittosphere’s reaction live on election.twitter.com. This new site by Twitter works like a filter for all tweets coming through the system. It is nothing but a page with incoming tweets that refer to the election and the candidates.
Visiting election.twitter.com during the debate was entertaining, and also a distraction. But in my view, it represented a social media breakthrough. It was the first social space tied to a live broadcast event that felt compelling to me. The idea is not new by any means, but Twitter made it happen. In fact, Twitter lends itself perfectly to these sorts of social applications.
I expect Twitter to be doing more of this in future. If they don’t, they will be missing a great opportunity. And there’s no reason not to do it. Tweets by themselves can be very noisy, especially if you are following lots of people.
When you add a layer of categorization to the messages, tweets from anyone can be potentially interesting. With topical groups, which could be static (“Baseball”) or dynamic (“Red Sox vs. Angels Live”), Twitter would become more useful, focused and powerful.
Friendfeed recently added rooms and I am subscribing to a few feeds there even though I don’t have an account with the service.
Do it Twitter!
For many years now, there’s been tremendous industry push towards web-based applications. We’ve seen enterprise-level software move to the web and in the last 5 years or so, even applications that I would expect to stay put on the desktop a while longer have packed its bags and left. These are the “traditional” desktop applications – word processors, spreadsheets, contact managers and video editors. Today, you can enjoy all of these applications from the comfort of your favorite web browser.
Web-based software offers many advantages to developers and users, there’s no doubt. Developers have virtual universal reach with the browser and it’s possible to roll out improvements and fix bugs without requiring users to download a new version of the app. Users benefit too – they can access their apps and documents from anywhere and they don’t have to install any software in their computers. This is a dream-come-true scenario for companies and IT departments everywhere.
But there’s a problem with web-based software – the user experience suffers, and users notice. Despite the emergence of Ajax and other technologies that really improve the flow and responsiveness of web applications, they don’t make up for the difference completely. Back in the early days of the web, navigating pages and web sites as if they were pages of a magazine made sense. After all, most of the user experience was about consuming information. But in a two-way web world, with so much interconnectedness, services, APIs, mash-ups and community participation, the magazine navigation model fails to deliver.
So, what’s the role of desktop software in this increasingly web-based world? Functionally, I think that the line will become increasingly less distinct. Ajax will get better and new technologies will emerge, such as Flex and AIR, that will close the gap between the worlds of desktop software and the web. But the experience unification will only take place when the web browser frame completely disappears. Take a look at Mailplane and Fluid for examples of what happens when web apps shake hands with the desktop.
Over time, I think the prevailing user experience will borrow from both worlds, and will resemble the widgets we know today, except that they will be much more powerful. I like to call these new applications ‘wapps’. Wapps will be as responsive as desktop apps, in fact they will be desktop apps. But they will have the additional backing of a web service in order to offer personalization, social comparison, community, recommendation and much more. Maybe there would be an actual web service, accessible through the browser in addition to the wapp. That wouldn’t be a requirement, however, because all the service functionality would be provided from within the wapp itself.
Are there any wapps out there today? Here’s a small, simple example: Twitterrific. Personally, Twitter would be useless for me without Twitterrific or some other similar desktop client. I simply would not visit the site if I had to log in to type every message, to enter every tweet. In fact, if Twitterrific included all the functionality of the Twitter web site, I wouldn’t miss the site at all.
And in a sign of things to come, yesterday I found out about a new company called SignalApps whose business is to develop desktop clients for the popular 37Signals web apps.
Some more thoughts on the future of the desktop are here and here.
In my view, a desktop client experience makes all the difference in the world. Long live the client!
Finally, a brilliant use of the iPhone’s location tracking technology:
“iNap is a ‘next-generation’ travel alarm. Using the GPS in your iPhone it will determine where you are, and wake you when you are close to your destination!”
