The power of Facebook

There is a project, started a few years ago, where everything is about smiles: parents get professional photos of their kids, shopping malls get new visitors – and the website of the project gets lots of attention. After we integrated Facebook this year, it got five times more.


Image from MosolyOlimpia.hu

SmileOlympics is a one week event in shopping malls, where children and their families are photographed in the old-fashioned way. The picture taken is a gift for the parents, and there is a smile-wall set up in the venue where visitors can browse through the whole gallery.

After the event there’s an online competition, where users can vote and the photo with the most votes receives a prize. The website was designed in 2006, and not much happened since then: users could register, log in and vote for any pictures they liked. Of course, on an event like this, the customer support had loads of work – people registered with fake e-mail addresses faster than the moderators could delete them, and most of the mothers wanted to know how the other ones kid can have ten times more votes.

As this year the project will become a road show rather than a once-a-year event, we had the resources to improve some bits – and we integrated Facebook in order to prevent multiple registrations. Dumping all the user data we had (well, not quite… but you get the point), we decided to go with Facebook login, and we replaced the voting system with Like buttons. To make sure that users can’t vote before or after the one week competition, we created a database that is synced with Facebook only in that period.

At this point we were afraid of losing users: since it was possible to vote on Facebook without even seeing the website, some users had no reason to do so – to get around this, we had two things in mind. First, we created a Facebook page to reach more users, and provided information and the customer service there as well. Second, we made another competition running: whoever liked at least five photos on the website, could also win a prize.

The results were astonishing: on the first day of the competition, we registered five times more users than in the previous years, 90 precent of whom came from Facebook (compared to about 10 percent in 2011). From Monday to Friday evening Google Analytics registered 30K unique visitors, and after the first two weeks, at this moment there are 2450 likes on the Facebook page. All this without changing anything else on a 6 years old website.

That’s another smile here.

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Levitated interactions

The way we interact with the world is in constant change – for us, users, the best to do here is to adapt as fast as we can. No matter what the current technical development brings to our homes, we will push those buttons, twist the wheels and touch some screens.

Of course, sci-fi is always a step ahead: we have seen touch screens and something very similar to the iPad in futuristic movies from 30 years ago. But when it gets real and possible, it is a different thing. Or did you blink since you’ve seen the video above?

MIT created a very interesting user interface from levitating orbs. Placing balls in an empty place does indeed look amazing, and the rendered 3D video is crazy as hell – but the real power of this thing is in what user interaction designers think we could use it for.

I just can’t wait to see the first buttonless home stereos and washing machines – operated by levitating some orbs.

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Addiction

Berlin is famous of being kind to drug addicts: regardless of what you take it’s easy to get it, will be relatively cheep, and in case of an overdose the doctors know exactly how to get you back to life. For a long time I kept clean – but the city sucked me in, and I developed an addiction.

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The Saturday market at Boxhagener Platz is a vibrant place to get fresh food of all sorts: vegetables, spices, meat can be found here as well as beautiful cakes and cottage cheese ice cream – and of course, since Germany has a seaside, fresh fish is all over the market. The goods are coming from the farmers themselves, and the shopping experience lacks the pharmacy feel you get in Bio Company shops. Another point why food markets are great.

For the hungry who looks for something different than thai takeaways or döner kebab, this place is the best to be in a Saturday luchtime. The smell of grilled meat and sausages are coming from the direction of the caravans, which is also the place where I discovered the object of my addiction: the smoked mackerel.

These fish dishes are coming with horse radish and algae salad, and you can choose between a filet sandwich and a whole fish. The price is between 3.5 and 5.5 euros (after 4pm its usual to get discounts). Regardless of the format, the taste is heaven, and we could have it every day – but since the food market is only once a week, we are safe. Until we find another sugarman.

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Magazine view

For keeping track with hundreds of blogs, RSS readers are the best tools; my personal favorite is Google Reader which is free, easy to use and available for all devices. For most of the blogs it’s perfect, but with Flipboard you’ve got something different: a magazine experience.


image from flipboard.com

Google Reader is brilliant to collect blogs and consume information: the followed web pages can be grouped by interests – you know which of those lists to read carefully, and which ones don’t need a very close attention. I usually read all the posts of friends’ blogs, but with the 200-300 incoming posts a day with the label ‘inspirating-graphics’, I could sit at the computer and push the next button for the whole day.

These labels therefore need some special treatment, and that’s where Flipboard has no competition. It’s a great way to read information you don’t really mind missing out: you can scan through all your feeds just as if it was a magazine. Big pictures, headlines with nice typography and page layouts – it really is amazing how all the different kind of blogs and web portals turn into something beautiful and consistent. And it does more than just RSS: Twitter, Facebook posts and all sorts of social networks can be plugged into Flipboard – and become magazines on your device.

For Android users, Flipboard was always something to miss, but now it seems like the app is coming sooner than we think. For those of us who couldn’t wait, there already is a leaked APK on the internet. (And it works like a charm.)

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Hacker shine

Updated

Programming used to be a hacker thing: men in black sitting on the floor, bending over a laptop that has some key parts missing (or even wires coming out), and the only source in the dark room at 3 am in the morning is the dim light from the monitor. Nowadays though, programmers get some shine.

Codea is a touch-based programming app for the iPad, that lets developers create games and simulations. Of course, it’s more a toy than a heavy weight development environment (and since the current kit doesn’t support any kind of publishing, the final games will never leave the iPad itself – I was awfully wrong! See below). Not like it’s a big deal, no one will cry over missing out those “amazing things” created with Codea.

So the time is not now, yes, but the damage has been made: as more and more development tools will come out, eventually, programmers will be changing their black bricks into shiny toys – just like journalist did some time ago.

Whoha-hoo.

Update: as @TwoLivesLeft said on Twitter, there is a solution to turn apps made with Codea into native iOS apps, and the code for this is already on Github. One example app in the App Store is Cargo Bot, available for free for iPad.

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Berry dreams

RIM debuted the BlackBerry 10 platform today, which has been a long awaited move, and which might be a game changing event. After the first look at the specs, game changing it might be – but only for the company.

It’s hard to write down a manufacturer that has the amount of cash Research In Motion does, but sooner or later they should actually produce something exciting. For that, they might want to find a focus first – which they apparently didn’t manage in the last year or so.

If you remember BlackBerry’s leaked future vision from 2011, their idea was to amuse the corporate world; they tried to reach that with devices and software that already has been invented, but nevertheless, the goal was clear. (The Youtube video disappeared in the meantime, but here’s an article on Gizmodo to get the picture)

It wasn’t the best vision to have at all, but the fact that the new BlackBerry announcement ignored it completely shows some more fundamental problems with the company: if you don’t have a focus, you can only produce mediocre products. So they did: the interface is a bad rip-off of Microsoft’s (otherwise brilliant) Metro UI, and instead of matching the enterprise’s needs, they introduced secondary features for everyday customers.

The announcement today had some promising news though: the new development kit will support HTML5 – something, that BlackBerry needed for a long time: I remember spending two days to install the old, badly supported and very buggy SDK under OSX with virtual machines and hacked ports for the simulator. With HTML5 and a strong developer community, BlackBerry could have the chance to provide something for phone owners they want. Well, for the Playbook it wasn’t enough, but again: RIM has still loads of customers and resources, and a good example how to break out the declining curve — at the end of the day, Nokia already was pretty much in the same situation.

By the time RIM finally finds out what to do, the current BlackBerry users have at least one hope: IT department buyers may consider getting different handsets for them.

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Festive

Since the winter is over and the warm weather started to kick in, Berlin is on the way to become an amazing place to live. It’s a great turn of events.

A few months ago when I moved here, my first experiences in the city were nothing what I had in mind before. I was walking in the -15 Celsius cold, among the soviet buildings of Karl Marx Allee on the completely empty and dark street, looking for a room to rent, and could not figure out how I could think that this city is a friendly, open and civilized place – or even, a place to live at.

But who is the stupid, moving to a north European city in January.

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Since the end of February the days got longer, cycling started to actually feel good, and the discovery became better with every day. For the last few days the sun is out and there are no serious looking rainclouds on the sky – that, in Berlin, means: party.

Smoke is above all public parks, people are out with barbecues, and random open air gigs are being held: some bring dj sets and play fairly loud music, while everyone around starts to dance. Probably the world’s coolest but cheapest party: no entry fee, the beer is about one euro from the nearby spätis. A perfect match for the ‘arm aber sexy’ (poor but sexy) berliner.

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Start

I started my first publicly available and almost-popular blog exactly ten years ago. That blog was perfect for me: users could and did comment, I posted on a really regular basis, and with a bunch of friends doing the same thing at the same time, it was more than just a blog: a creative network with reactions, debates, opinions with a well connected community.

We were still in high school, wrote all the necessary Perl scripts after the afternoon classes – still had to wait a few years until WordPress appeared -, and the discovery of the web and the new technologies got us together. Now, ten years, a bunch of blog projects and a few years of silence later, I can’t wait to start it again: write a personal blog. Here it begins.

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