Tuesday, July 08, 2008

The Rosetta Stone of Interface

I've written oftentimes about the exponential importance of social media and the exasperating experience of trying to maintain it all.

How are normal people supposed to deal with MySpace, Facebook, SocialThing, FriendFeed, Twitter, Britekite, their blog, their RSS reader, their personal data, Flickr, YouTube and the countless other software tools that make it "easy" for you to exist online?

The answer: they don't.

There's been a slow rumble about this online, particularly in the past year.

There is an increasing call for a new type of interface design, one that brings all of your media into one place, sitting on your desktop allowing you to seamlessly drag-and-drop media from one network to the next.

Of course, there's not an inherent business model in creating a single interface. At least not for the creator. After all, you're simply creating a conduit for people to access other accounts.

(Although the cable company is just an interface to television programming, they company also owns the cable that runs into your house.)

The OpenID movement t is one that is predicated on finding ways for social networks to interact with each other; however, getting Google, Facebook and the like to agree on a standard "sign in protocol" isn't necessarily an easy issue to fix.

We're rapidly reaching a point, though, when it's going to be necessary to control all of this information in one place…and the company that solves that issue the best is going to create a giant user base in very little time.

 

 

Posted By Brad at 04:19 PM
Permanent Link: The Rosetta Stone of Interface | Comments (3)

(3) Comments on The Rosetta Stone of Interface

Hi, thanks for the link to my article, not sure of the relevance to your article though. My discussion was around the concept of describing the concept of social interactions online. Eventually I found Adrian Chan's definition and think it does a good job of describing the process of design between social interactions online. That's different from describing the process of bringing all social interactions together in one place. That requires another term. Maybe the stone is it.

Comments by John Cass : Thursday, July 10, 2008 at 12:16 AM

Hey John:

You're piece just got me thinking -- actually, lots of people have been thinking about this for some time.

Since it was the jumping off point, I linked it :)

Comments by Brad King : Thursday, July 10, 2008 at 04:21 PM

I think one of the really interesting things that is going on right now is that big companies are banding together to support technologies like OpenID and OAuth. We're certainly not yet "there", but it is amazing to see so many people put aside their differences and rally behind the open web.

Comments by David Recordon : Sunday, July 20, 2008 at 12:21 AM

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