: RT @augmentreality: Augmented Reality Coming to Video Conferencing http://goo.gl/ygL6 #
Business Social Networks
It’s been a while since I was first involved in the business social networks stuff; I think it was late 2004 when I subscribed to this new service named Linkedin which aim was to store and improve your network of people.
It was love at first sight and helped me finding some of the best programmers I’ve ever worked with. It was also a chance for my first appearance on a national magazine (it was Class Magazine, if I remember well) in an article on the usage in business environments of this new thing named “social networks”.
I then helped BJ Fogg with my contributions to the designing of the user interfaces and of the interactions of a different type of (then) business social network (centred on the voice interaction between users of the same community) named YackPack.
And then came Twitter, Flickr, Facebook and all the rest of the family; and today – if you live in Italy or can read Italian – the book written by my dear friend Roberto Marmo “Promuoversi con i business social network” (Promote yourself using business social networks) with all the how-to’s, the do’s and don’ts for the main social networks here around.
Roberto asked me to write a little paper on my BSN usage strategies that you can find in the book and that I summarize here below:
- the number of your contacts doesn’t makes any difference. It’s the quality of your relationships that matters;
- be methodic: every new relationship has to become a new contact in your network;
- don’t be shy: ask to your contacts for help if you need it in your business;
- be unprejudiced: I’ve dropped some magic in the first email I used to contact Keith Ferrazzi, the guru of social networking. And he replied! (note to self: need to create a dedicated post on this anytime soon)
Frontiers of Interaction conference on the 4th of June
(note: as you can read in the About section I’m one of the two co-founders of this conference)
Today we unveiled the official date of the 6th edition of the Frontiers of Interaction conference, that’s going to be held in Rome (Italy) on the 4th of July 2010.
“Frontiers of Interaction was founded in 2005 to explore topics and ideas in the field of Interaction Design. In a very short time, it has become known as the leading Innovation conference in Italy. The unusual format creates an immersive experience featuring music, interactive and artistic installations, demo sites and keynotes, and makes it an ideal venue for thinkers and doers, innovators and academics, early adopters and long-term geeks.
Frontiers of Interaction is a hybrid show that attracts inspiring international speakers and Italian talents, creating a bridge between Europe and Silicon Valley (digital cultural “hot spots” around the world).”
Label alignment in forms
Once in a while an article author writes his silver bullet and receives fame, money, power and girls from it… well… sort of 
My most read creation is without a doubt the 2006 article, appeared on the US web magazine UXmatters, Label placement in forms: I prepared an experimental set-up to test different types of forms using eye-tracking technology and reported my findings in the article.
Well, not only it’s the most read article ever on UXmatters; it attracted more than 100 comments and it’s a top referenced article when speaking about form designs: the findings were largerly included in the 2007 book “Web form Design” by Yahoo Chief Design Architect, Luke Wroblesky.
Recently the nice people at UXmatters have been so kind to prepare an article for their column “Ask UXmatters” were my findings were hilighted again with contributes by highly experienced UX people such as Michael Griffith—User Experience Director at Hewlett-Packard or Whitney Quesenbery-Past-President, Usability Professionals’ Association (UPA).
Some of them do agree with me, some others don’t. But that’s not the point (I’m always happy when people disagree with me, because that is the point were the discussion starts). The fact is that I’m really re-energized to work at a brand new article on form design tested using eyetracking technology and something new might come out in the forthcoming months.
