DiSo project: Taking a page from Facebook
Uno as Facebook Friday's, Ideas, Products, Social Networks, Web2.0
Feb|28|2008
If you take a look at the structure of Facebook you can see 2 main navigation sections (disregarding the rest of the site).
- Profile data at the top (Profile, Friends, Networks, Inbox)
- You have apps and other things on the left.
The way we’ve been thinking about the way Facebook works in terms of architecture and find it incredibly interesting, from an innovation perspective and also because the products we’re building rely on similar kind of systems.
We follow the standards or thoughts in the DiSo project, as well as the concepts in the Social Network Portability (really the same thing), so we’re trying to look at how your profile can be more portable, and follow you around the web.
In Facebook, your top profile is the one that really counts, it’s the one that follows you through all the apps you’ve installed, and brings you back to your data, the one on the left is basically all the different “sites” you’re on. It’s like FriendFeed or Plaxo or whatever, but the relationship between data-owner and application is much more skewed.
This post is pretty half-arsed and pretty obvious, but sometimes you need to state the obvious!
Opera mobile released: Boring.
Feb|8|2008
The Opera Mobile browser launched a short while back. But it fails to deliver on the one thing that I really wanted. And what is really important.
While Opera packs a great set of features:
- Speed Increase
- Flash-Ready
- ZoomT
- Offline Browsing
- Productivity Tools
- Tabbed Browsing
- Opera Widgets
It fails to deliver on what we really want from a mobile device.
Location Based Services
That’s it. If Opera had included only that ONE single feature it would have been miles ahead of any competition. But instead they’ve decided to focus on incremental product innovation, not fundamental game-changing innovation.
Think of the possibilities. At the moment websites require you to input your location data through the site. If you could have the browser automatically send the site your GPS settings you’d be saved so much hassle. What if you don’t know where you are? Any wap site could be able to read the GPS data and play with that in a number of ways.
Recently Google launched the My Location feature on their Google Maps mobile product. So you load up the Google Maps Java application and then it starts pinging all the systems it needs to etc etc. You then press “0″ on your phone and it locates you on the map. That’s fantastic, but now you only know where you are, but can you use that feature on MyMileMarker.com to pin point the petrol station that you just filled up at? Unfortunately not. Wouldn’t it be great if the browser sends MyMileMarker the GPS coordinates?
It seems as if Opera is treating their product like a web-browser, for mobile. It’s not. It’s much more than that. You can’t try and mimic a desktop experience on a mobile. It’s a totally different feature set. I love the way that they’ve translated some of the user experience to mobile. Zooming in, double tabs, dragging the screen etc etc. Those are brilliant examples of accomplishing a transfer of desktop to mobile experience. But the one fundamental thing that sets mobile apart from desktop is that you are MOBILE. And I don’t think Opera has taken full advantage of that.
All that being said, the demo of Opera looks great. I love the new features. I use Opera Mini now and I’ll probably switch to this new release when it comes out. I love that you can now view flash and ajax and all the other web2.0 bits. Now give us LBS!!