Adam DuVander – Page 44

Tax time brings a new mini-project

February 1, 2007 by Adam DuVander

Back in early December at a Portland Web Innovators meeting, Ryan and I talked about finding a connection between his net worth tracking site and my income tax filing site.

Refund choices - head to head

What we came up with was a little head-to-head tool that lets people drill down to determine the best use for their tax refund, assuming they’ll be getting one. We casually built it, spending a few minutes here and there on evenings and weekends. Ryan and I were completely virtual. I haven’t seen him since December, because he’s way off in the suburbs, a whole seventeen miles away.

Today, we release the project to find out what you think. What’s the best use for your income tax refund? Find out here.

Here’s mine (I’m wild!):

Social design: the look and feel of people

January 28, 2007 by Adam DuVander

There are so many aspects to designing for the web, and few of them have to do with pretty colors or flashy graphics. Even though I’m not a designer, even code-pushers have to consider the many areas of design these days.

In addition to graphic design (look and feel) and interaction design (interface and usability), there’s often social design. This summer at Webvisions, Rashmi Sinha said to let people feel the presence of others.

Luke Wroblewski has some notes from a talk at Web App Summit about Learning from social Web Applications. Something that really jumped out at me:

Sites with good social design model the social lives, goals, and interactions of their users.

In other words, you have to emulate real life. There’s a breakdown of the many elements of social design:

motivation, identity, control, independence, privacy, authority, gaming, community, and emergence.

Read the whole thing to find out the details of each element.

I’ve got an itch at G6

January 26, 2007 by Adam DuVander

Earlier this week I was having dinner at a friend’s house when I spotted a book of Unuseless Japanese Inventions. Some of them, like tiny shoe umbrellas, are… not exactly as the title suggests. Others are truly brilliant.

Back scratch shirt

The ones I like the most are very simple and solved actual problems. You can browse the book on Amazon to get a feel for some of the other inventions, both useless and unuseless.

Fast still matters

January 22, 2007 by Adam DuVander

I don’t have many problems with online advertising. It supports creators and makes services free. When ads start limiting my experience, as with Portland MetroFi’s free service, I feel differently. Because fast matters.

Broadband is widely available, but that’s no excuse to run bloated ads. Like I’ve said before, I don’t mind most online advertising, but that doesn’t mean I want to wait for it to load. Fast still matters.

Useful social networks emulate real life

January 21, 2007 by Adam DuVander

It’s been almost a year since my Three Rules for Social Websites and many of my feelings are the same. I’ve found the ones that I really like are those that emulate real life. They make it easy to take my real world communication online.

That’s what I’ve liked about del.icio.us. Tagging something “for” a friend has replaced the emails with links I used to send out.

del.icio.us for links

Recently LinkedIn added questions and answers. This allows me to ask questions and provide answers to not only my friends, but my friends-of-friends. This is networking with a purpose, and it’s emulating, and improving upon, real life.

I’ve also played with Facebook and found it a very pleasant tool. If this was around while I was in college, I think I’d have found it indispensable. It does a good job of emulating groups of friends and supplementing offline communication.

Social networks need to find innovative ways to emulate real life. The market for social sites that do something beyond connect people is virtually unlimited.