Yesterday I attended The Guardian Mobile Business Summit in London. As a few hundred mobile marketing and business people from a wide variety of large and small companies sat and listened to talks on the future of mobile, mobile wallets and the mobile ecosystem.
Some of the talks were very interesting in the huge number of stats that they poured out: conversion rates, sales figures, profit figures, all pointing to the decline of Nokia and the rise of Samsung (a principle sponsor who gave the most monotone speech of the day). For me, the most interesting talk was on LinkedIn’s mobile redesign, focusing on the IA of the site rather than aesthetics or profit figures.
I particularly enjoyed the talk by Mozilla’s r&d director who talked about the Firefox OS, a contender to grab hold of the low end smartphone market by replacing the native APIs with standardised HTML and JavaScript.
I’ve done sketchnotes for most of the sessions except the panel sessions where absolutely nothing new was said or discussed, the mobile future panel being particularly grumpy about their own subject as if they’d said it a thousand times before (and they had).
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Anthony Sullivan – The Guardian Mobile
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Federico Casalengo – MIT Mobile Lab
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Joff Redfern – LinkedIn Mobile
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Will Perrin – Talking About Local
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Alina Vandenberg – Always Learning
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Andreas Gal – Firefox OS
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Horade Dediu – Asymco
Overall it was an enjoyable day, but lacking in any revolutionary sound bites or theories, though I’m sure that the crowd got what they wanted out of each of the sessions. My thanks to Chris at he guardian for inviting me along.
This month was a very special meetup for London Web Standards – it’s 5th birthday celebrations! Yes, it’s hard to believe that 5 years ago in October three guys met up in a North London pub to talk about the web. To celebrate this momentous occasion, Imogen Levy baked us a massive 7-layer London Web Standards Cake (British Bake-off contender next year 2013 for sure). Imogen, thank you so much (from all of the LWS Organisers)!
It was also a big LWS for me personally, as I took the stage to talk about a pet topic of mine: Less, Sass and CSS Pre-processors. Gotta say, I had a lot of fun and got some really great questions and comments from the audience. I’ll definitely do it again.
So, the sketchnotes service is at half capacity today, it being quite hard to do sketchnotes of my own talk. The notes this month are of Peter Gasston’s talk on The CSS of Tomorrow, covering future specs that will bring some of the features from Less/Sass to CSS, and hugely improve the way we layout websites (finally!).
My Sketchnotes from Peter’s Talk
The CSS of Tomorrow – Peter Gasston
Thanks again to everyone involved, we truly celebrated LWS’s birthday in style.
September’s London Web Standards Meetup featured UX designers and developers bringing print to life with their tales of making web apps for the FT (Matt Andrews) and an iPad app for The Week (Harry Brignall). Sketchnotes are below.
Sorry it’s not much of a write-up (and a month late) but better late than never.
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From Print to iPad – UX of The Week – Harry Brignall
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HTML5 From Apps to Everywhere – Matt Andrews
Last night, Twitter blogged about upcoming changes to its API in version 1.1. It’s not the most communicative of posts, goes on for quite a bit and has incensed quite a lot of developers.
The fury is all about this diagram and paragraph:
In the upper right-hand quadrant are services that enable users to interact with Tweets, like the Tweet curation service Storify or the Tweet discovery site Favstar.fm.
That upper-right quadrant also includes, of course, “traditional” Twitter clients like Tweetbot andEchofon. Nearly eighteen months ago, we gave developers guidance that they should not build client apps that mimic or reproduce the mainstream Twitter consumer client experience.” And to reiterate what I wrote in my last post, that guidance continues to apply today.
So, apps like Tweetbot, Echofon and Tweetdeck are no longer wanted. But why would they do this, and what are the alternatives?
Why?
Because Twitter is changing, and it’s going to change rapidly. Twitter’s 1.0 API has been around for 6 years, which is an eternity in API terms. They need to move on and they want their applications to come with them in the same way that Apple wants to control their app ecosystem and user experience. The problem is that these rules haven’t existed before and the way it’s all been phrased is pretty hideous and very negative.
Alternatives
Well, they could have phrased it better. Anil Dash does a great job of re-writing the post and making the world seem right again.
Joe Stump makes some great suggestions as to how to control third party clients:
Why not run API like the App Store? 1. Require they use Twitter ads 2. Require they follow design rules 3. Require all clients be approved
I really like those ideas, and they seem implementable, but it will require a lot of effort on Twitter’s side to set up this ecosystem and encourage third party apps again.
But, from the blog post, it seems Twitter doesn’t want to encourage third party apps.
What next?
There’ll still be 6 months between v1.1 being turned on and 1.0 being turned off, which is plenty of time for developers to bring themselves into line with the new rules. Twitter will be listening to this discussion, and will probably respond in time. Hopefully this will clear up the confusion, and I hope they work directly with the developers that are affected by this, instead of just dictating the rules. We can always hope!
Just remember, it’s still a great service (via Jason Snell)
As the Twitter angst burns bright, let me say this: I think Twitter is the single best thing ever made on the Internet. Seriously.
