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If you didn't make it to London for Monki Gras, the follow on conference to Monktoberfest, you missed out on quite a lot of great content and beer.

The conference is organized by RedMonk, an unusual analyst firm. Their conferences, reflecting the analysts at RedMonk, are unusual as well. The Portland, Maine event was primarily organized by RedMonk co-founder Stephen O'Grady, who resides in Maine. This time around, the event was primarily organized by RedMonk co-founder James Governor.

If you've used the mobile social network Path recently, it's likely that you enjoyed the experience. Path has a sophisticated design, yet it's easy to use. It sports an attractive red color scheme and the navigation is smooth as silk. It's a social app and finding friends is easy thanks to Path's suggestions and its connection to Facebook.

In short, Path has a great user experience. That isn't the deciding factor on whether a tech product takes off. Ultimately it comes down to how many people use it and that's particularly important for a social app like Path. Indeed it's where Path may yet fail, but the point is they have given themselves a chance by creating a great user experience. In this post, we outline 5 signs that the tech product or app you're using has a great UX - and therefore has a shot at being the Next Big Thing.

Richard MacManus explores the shift from watching tv to experiencing it. This and more in today's Daily Wrap.

Sometimes it's difficult to catch every story that hits tech media in a day, so we wrap up some of the most talked about stories. We give you a daily recap of what you missed in the ReadWriteWeb Community, including a link to some of the most popular discussions in our offsite communities on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Google+ as well.

When it comes to UI design, Apple's iOS evolves pretty slowly. They rolled out one of the biggest enhancements to its mobile operating system this year with the launch of iOS 5. A radically redesigned notification system was the biggest visual overhaul and prior to that, there was the addition of folders in iOS 4.

Whenever the next big upgrade to iOS's look and feel may be, a few hints about what might be included can be found in one of Apple's latest hires. Jan-Michael Cart, a mass media arts student in Athens, Georgia announced that he was hired by the company as a design intern.

Facebook recently instituted a new program that makes it easy for 3rd party websites and services to automatically post links about your activity elsewhere back into Facebook and the newsfeeds of your friends. It's called Seamless Sharing (a.k.a. frictionless sharing) and there's a big backlash growing about it, reminiscent of the best-known time Facebook tried to do something like this with a program called Beacon. The company has done things like this time and time again.

Critics say that Seamless Sharing is causing over-sharing, violations of privacy, self-censorship with regard to what people read, dilution of value in the Facebook experience and more. CNet's Molly Wood says it is ruining sharing. I think there's something more fundamental going on than this - I think this is a violation of the relationship between the web and its users. Facebook is acting like malware.

Bill Gross is the man who made the technology behind the first keyword advertising systems online and has long been rumored to be aiming to challenge Twitter.

Today Gross launched a big, ambitious new social network called Chime.in. The service aims to offer the best of all the other social networks, plus a better experience for users and an advertising revenue split based on user interests. Unfortunately, the site is not good so far. UX is particularly important if Chime.In is going to create a thriving network with a revenue split. We talked to three different User Experience professionals who took a look at Chime.in and said it needs a drastic overhaul if it's going to be a contender. I think it's occasion to remember just how important and non-trivial the interface work on successful social networks has been.

In a world awash with an ever-expanding number of location-aware sets of data, what's a person to do who wants to make a great map? Spanish conservation-centric User Experience design shop Vizzuality today launched a simple, attractive, free and open source tool for curating and publishing geospatial data called CartoSet.

"It's great to see the team releasing a complete geo-data website-in-a-box," leading data hacker Pete Warden said about the release. "Traditionally it has required a lot of specialized knowledge to create something like this, so open-sourcing a turnkey solution that's approachable by ordinary Ruby developers is a big step in democratizing geo technology."

Are you ready to get buzzed by Tweets? Twitter confirmed last week that it is experimenting with and will soon roll out push notifications through its official iPhone app.

What does that mean? It depends on how exactly the company lets users manage and receive their notifications, but it's not too early to start thinking about how push could change the Twitter experience. We asked a number of experts in the field of User Experience design what they thought about Twitter push notifications and several of them predicted it will be a game-changer for mainstream users.

For most startups in the early-stages of development, much of the building process includes repetitions of prototyping, testing, receiving feedback and iterating the product several times over. The toughest part of this process isn't building or making changes, it's getting that valuable feedback on where your product could be improved. Concept Feedback, a simply named online service, wants to help your startup with constructive criticism from its quickly growing community of over 5,000 designers, developers, marketers and entrepreneurs.

Facebook is about to become a quieter, less annoying place for users. The company just announced that it has deprecated "application notifications" and will require apps to use other, less intrusive methods of sending news to users. It's a big step in the ongoing anti-MySpace-ification of Facebook. Though to be fair, MySpace recently instituted something similar. Now your "notifications" section on Facebook will just be for things like comments left on your posts.

It's a good move that puts the interests of users ahead of short-term benefits for app developers and monetization.