Tom Coates: Designing for a web of data

Tom Coates

Designing for a web of data

• Y! brickhouse – yahoo internal startup environment
• “Interesting” new sites are basically data repositories / platforms.
• The web is turning from a web of pages connected by links, to a web of data connected by APIs and services
• Sites don’t need to own the data themselves; users can own it
• Web pages are being designed in an increasingly data-centric way
• Your site is not your product. c.f.
  – twitter; the twitter.com site is only a very small proprortion (~10%) of twitter traffic.
  – Flickr: widgets, badges, cards, phone updaters, desktop clients…
  – Last.fm: many users almost never visit the site
• In the future; the network and compute devices become more pervasive and ubiquitous
• 3 kinds of things: data sources, data consumers, and data recombiners
• nabaztag, ambient orb, wattson – physical devices that consume and produce net data
• apple.tv – could interact in all sorts of interesting ways with online services
• Why open your data/services
  – drive people to your service
  – because people will pay for them
  – as advertising, or as positioning
  – to allow external developers to contribute and add value
• Network effects – every new service can build on top of other existing services
  – Every service that’s added has the potential to make everything else more powerful
• FireEagle – knows your location, and uses this information to geotag information that you put on line
• You can never have too much data
• building a datasource
  – open up a datasource you own
  – build one with your users
  – enhance one dataset with another
• Scale: flickr has 1.88 billion photos, growing by 500 million in the last 6 weeks
  – how can you make a number like that comprehensible?
  – use metadata:
  + data created during production
  + data derived or inferred from analysis of the thing concerned
  + data that you can crowd-source from user contributions
  + data you can capture from behavioural analysis
• Folksonomy vs. taxonomy. Don’t choose, expose both
• Hierarchies can’t take the weight
  – Amazon top bar – went from 2 to 6 to 16 tabs, then finally back to 1 with a web-like search
• Top navigation is just a jumping-off point.
• From a visual design perspective; use visual hierarchies to suggest paths
• “Perception of quality is in the edge cases”
• A final word on design practice: Stop! collaborate and listen!
• Organisations have dominant job roles; other roles orient themselves around the dominant roles.

Chris May : 06 Nov 2007 11:08 |  Tags: Web20Expoberlin |  Comments (0) |  Report a problem