One of the main new features of the revamped LinkedIn is the global navigation bar at the top of the page which links to all the site's features including profile, contacts, groups, jobs, your inbox, and more. Click on any of these items and a drop-down menu will appear providing you with further options. This gives the most important navigational aspect to the site a more modern look than it had before when each section was displayed in clickable tabs of different shades of blue.

The company also touts how the new look and feel also makes room for more page content with less scrolling needed in order to see everything on the page. This is also true to some extent. However, on your homepage where network updates and group updates are featured, the amount of scrolling depends on the size of your network and how active the network members are. For example, under the "group updates" section, updates for the past seven days were posted followed by a section that included updates from the prior week. That actually led to quite a bit of scrolling to see them all. It's not necessarily a bad feature, though. After all, LinkedIn isn't the sort of site we're logging into on a daily basis so it's nice to be able to catch up when we're there... even if that means the homepage screen extends downward forever.

Also new on the homepage are moveable, collapsible sidebar modules which can display things like who's been viewing your profile, events, job listings, applications you've added, and more.

Cleaner Look Highlights Ads

One downside of the site's "cleaner" look is how much more noticeable the ads are now. Of course, to LinkedIn this may be an upside. Although the ad placements are no different than before, the new look makes them really stand out. Since everything is now black or blue text on a white background, the full-colored ad at the top of the screen is the first thing to draw your eye upon login. There's also a text link ad directly below the global navigation that demands your attention. It's in the exact place where a company message would normally appear and the font used is a darker, bolder blue than anything else on the site. Both of these elements are somewhat distracting, but we suppose there's nothing that you can really do about ads. Still, we wish that the network had taken a page from Facebook's book when it came to ad placement - when you log into Facebook, the first thing you notice is the content and the updates, not the ads.

LinkedIn says the updated design was based on years of data from usability research but what you're seeing now isn't necessarily the final product. They're still iterating and, based on user feedback about the new look, they may make some additional changes in this and other areas.

Still Needs Improvement: the LinkedIn Inbox

One thing that still hasn't improved, sadly, is the LinkedIn inbox. Although the homepage view of the inbox provides a handy "take action" button which lets you quickly accept, reject, or archive requests, the full inbox view still forces you to click each message to accept or reject requests - there are no bulk actions you can take from the inbox screen besides archiving or marking messages as read or unread. Even worse, after accepting or rejecting a request, the message remains in your inbox until you manually archive it, necessitating quite a bit of additional work if you've let those invites pile up.

What Do You Think?

Are you impressed with the new look for LinkedIn? Or did you prefer the old tabbed interface better? LinkedIn obviously hopes that by simplifying the navigation and site elements which help to better engage users that they will spend more time exploring and interacting with the various site elements. Do you think that will be the case? Or do the underlying features of LinkedIn need improvement as well?

Mark Up Design and Code

Using the app couldn't be much easier. In the visual part of the app, you can add callouts to any part of the page. Once these are saved to Notable's web service, other team members can see these callouts, add their own, or discuss the design in a comments section underneath the screenshot. The code editor, which is somewhat reminiscent of a simpler version of Firebug, also allows you to quickly annotate any part of a website's HTML, CSS, or JavaScript code.

Once a screenshot is saved and uploaded to the site, it can be shared by email, through a private or public URL, and embedded into any other web page. Users can also download a PDF version of the screenshot and annotations. Of course, users can also continue to add more annotations after the screenshot has been uploaded.

While the Firefox plugin represents the easiest and fastest way to use Notable, you can also simply upload any image (a design mock-up, for example) to the service or use a bookmarklet which also works in IE7 and Safari.

iPhone

The iPhone version of Notable is limited to uploading screenshots to Notable, but while it doesn't do much more than that, it makes for a good companion piece to the web service and should come in useful for designers of iPhone apps and mobile websites.

Pricing

The free version of Notable allows users to create one workspace and collaborate with up to three users and store up to 3GB of data. For $24/month, Notable users can work with up to 5 users and create an unlimited number of workspaces. The service also offers accounts for groups with up to 10, 25 or 50 users. The paid accounts also come with additional security features.

Verdict

Like many of the best apps we have recently seen, Notable was developed internally because none of the available apps really fulfilled the requirements the ZURB team had. The service works without any hiccups, is easy to use, and clearly focused on giving a specific set of users the right tools to get the job done without being encumbered by lots of extra bells and whistles.

Senior Wired Magazine editor Robert Capps penned an article titled "The Good Enough Revolution" for Wired's September 2009 edition. The print edition included the daring (and perhaps intentionally provocative) subtitle "Why lo-fi tech will rule the world."

This rings of an absolutism, and such rings set off our antennae.

The best example, the Flip video, "nail(s) all three of those... traits." But not every product does. Take the computer market. Sure, netbooks sell like hotcakes while most of the rest of the market takes a beating. But there's a fly in the ointment: Apple.

Apple hasn't lowered its prices or jumped on the netbook bandwagon... yet (we'll keep our ears open for any announcements on that). Yet the company's fortunes continue to soar in the face of deplorable market conditions, which Capps asserts should make lo-fi tech spread faster.

New York Times columnist David Pogue gave a convincing talk on this subject, which he called "Simplicity Sells," and between rousing musical numbers he returned several times to the things Apple does right.

Pogue also mentioned a discussion he had with a "tap counter" while visiting a Palm facility in the 1990s. According to Pogue, this person counted taps for each feature that Palm put into its PDA. If a process took more than three taps, it had to be redesigned.

On this point, Pogue and Capps largely agree. Pogue, however, wisely sidesteps the land mines of "lo-fi," "price," and any other down-market connotation.

That's because "good enough" in technology means "accessible" and "easy to use." "Cheaper" is a nice bonus, but millions of people continue to prove that they will pay a higher initial cost to make sure that what they get is good enough. Capps stumbled only in neglecting this price-elasticity counter-argument.

Read his excellent article anyway (and check out David Pogue at TED) and get inspired. In any case, whatever you offer:

• Make it easy to use,
• Make it accessible,
• And above all, make sure it satisfies the needs of your clientele.

Do all of this, and higher prices might not bother potential customers as much as you fear.

Does this logic apply to your business? Let us know. We'd love to hear your opinion.

From mobile computing to multi-touch, user interfaces continue to evolve, becoming part of our daily lives. As a Web host, it's with great interest that we're also following the "10-foot user experience," an idea that emerged a few years ago and has been much talked about since. But technology now seems to be catching up to this exciting concept, thanks to innovators like Frog Design and the MIT Media Lab's Fluid Interfaces group.

Some amazing developments are underway in digital media convergence, what some call the ongoing migration from "old TV" to "new TV." TiVo, AppleTV, and "over-the-top" Web video on PS3, Xbox, and other peripherals all offer at least a glimpse of what's emerging. So does the gesture control of Nintendo's Wii, the expanding capabilities of IPTV, and the introduction of IMS-enabled TV (IP multimedia sub-system). All of this points to more choice, more relevance, and more personalized content for consumers: the individual TV experience.

Yet what's most fascinating to us as a Web hosting provider is the convergence of design for TV and the Web into UIs that have never been seen -- or even needed -- before: the creation of rich, dynamic, animated entertainment experiences, whether for your living room, your home theater, or public spaces. It is a new way to interact with media, something David Merkoski of Frog Design called "the televisual experience" in his presentation titled "The Future of Television: Super-Modality" (MP3 file) at SXSW 2006.

To give this more perspective, what does this mean for TV, video, the Web, and the new user interfaces for all three? Like the 10-foot experience itself, design for it is still emerging. UIs in development, for applications such as OpenTV and Windows Media Center, offer useful examples. The key is to design for distance (think of billboards, posters, even theater marquees): keep it large and simple. Most conventional Web design doesn't view well from a distance.

Here are some additional design guidelines to consider:

• Display: Design elements should be clean, with UI elements that are able to be seen easily from 10 feet.
• Navigation: Keep it very simple (up, down, right, left), and limit tabs and scrolling.
• Fonts and text: To increase readability, use anti-aliased serif fonts. Make them larger than 16 points, and limit the number of sizes.
• Graphics and icons: Avoid fine detail, single-pixel horizontal lines, and static UI elements that would flicker on NTSC.
• User input: Ensure that designs can support a standard remote control, so that users can easily navigate menus, zoom, etc.

Interested in learning more about designing for the 10-foot experience? Try these: "The Digital Home: Designing for the Ten-Foot User Interface" and "Introduction to the 10-Foot Experience for Windows Game Developers."

Please comment! We'd love to hear your thoughts on what promises to be a new frontier in entertainment.

Perhaps the secret to AccuTerra is that Intermap's key business is not iPhone applications at all, but rather, aerial mapping. In the past, Magellan GPS and the US government have partnered with the company to utilize their 3D map data. And mapping in this world is no easy feat. To collect more than 3 million square miles of high-resolution 3D map data, the company didn't ping a satellite. Their work involved developing new mapping technology and deploying more than 2,530 aircraft over U.S. airspace for more than 10,000 hours of airtime. Imagine that paperwork. Still, the company believes your safety is well worth the effort.

Even in a storm far from a wireless connection, hikers can use AccuTerra to see their distance from warming huts and roads, routes around river beds, and most importantly, the terrain. While the app's ability to create and share annotated hiking tours with geo-tagged photos is interesting, it's the offline maps that make this application a solid survival tool. AccuTerra plans to sell state park maps at $1.99 each and national park maps at $2.99 each in the app store; however, for WWDC attendees, Intermap released free maps of Yosemite National Park and the SF Bay Area including Muir Woods and Mt. Tamalpais. If you're in the Bay, download the maps and geocache us some beer.

But none of them are as drop-dead good-looking - or as customizable - as AmpliFeeder, a free, open-source distributed social activity aggregator. The only major drawback: It's the kind of web app that needs to be installed on a server. But a hosted version is in the works, and the screen shots prove it's so worth the effort.

Perhaps best of all, it'll automagically import any of the services you link to through FriendFeed, making your new site setup time about 30 seconds:

Creator Jon Paul Davies has uploaded several other interesting and useful videos on using AmpliFeeder.

Certainly, the best features of the product for the end user are its slew of gorgeous interfaces. The themes differ not just in color/fonts/ridiculous design doodads; they mix up the information design itself.

For example, if the user prefers straight-up streams of data, there are several sexy options such as this:

For those who like their data with a little more segregation between services, there are themes such as these:

And then, a couple themes go all-out on the visualization:

Best of all, there's a custom CSS function that graphic designer-type users can use to style themes to their hearts' content.

Anyone can comment on posted content as comments "live" on the AmpliFeeder site. Items can be hidden or deleted. On the back end, a graph report shows what percentage of content comes from which services. AmpliFeeder also has its own microblog function; posts appear on the AmpliFeeder page and are pushed to the linked services. And AmpliFeeder can also generate a nice, data-portable XML file for users to backup all their social stream's data; XML files can also be used to restore data.

Burton Group analyst Mike Gotta wrote back in the mists of time (May 2007), "The term [lifestream] actually goes back to at least 1997, when Eric Freeman and David Gelernter saw it "as a network-centric replacement for the desktop metaphor. As their project page (last updated in 2000) at Yale put it: 'A lifestream is a time-ordered stream of documents that functions as a diary of your electronic life; every document you create and every document other people send you is stored in your lifestream.'"

Since then, lifestreaming has become the must-have method for communicating with one's public. Look at Modernista; look at Skittles. Better yet, look at what independent designers and other creatives are doing with the medium. And all this time, aside from complicated and costly proprietary solutions, most lifestreaming sites have displayed unbearably ugly UIs.

Kudos to Davies for making a functional lifestream aggregator that looks like a real website. In fact, we imagine that since the current state of the web has given rise to more and more personal and enterprise/corporate sites of the lifestreaming persuasion, Davies' creation comes at a perfect time for designers and webmasters alike.

UPDATE: For our super-smart commenters, here's what we wrote last year about Sweetcron. Yup, I'm new here.

The subject of Herigstad's presentation today was new forms of User Interfaces for Web, TV and other media. Examples of the interfaces he discussed were touch screen and "distance gestures" - the latter being what Cruise was doing in Minority Report. Herigstad showed some real world examples of distance gestures, mostly from the TV/movie industry.

Designing for Distance

Herigstad said that the audience nowadays is everywhere: watching TV, using Facebook on their iPhone or computer. Whatever screen wherever - this is where the audience is going. What Schematic is doing in a lot of its design work is considering the distance between a user and the screen, in various contexts. He noted some instances of this analysis:

• Personal media is 1-2 foot navigation - computer, iPhone, etc. Personal devices are where the audience is really close and can actually touch the screen.
• The traditional TV experience is 10 foot navigation; includes friends and family.
• Public media is screens that the audience doesn't own. People can walk up and interact with them. This type of screen can be anywhere from 2-200 foot navigation, and could also include layered navigation (somebody close, somebody far).

Example of DVD content augmented with added interactive media, which could be downloaded from the Web.

Cutting Edge Media Design Concepts

Herigstad drew a big line between distance gesture (TV and public media) and touch gesture (personal media). He explored some of his firm's current interface design concepts. With thanks again to Kaila Colbin's real-time notes, here is a summary:

• Using perspective. Think football game graphics that zoom in and out on your TV screen (see screenshot to the right).
• Products as experiences. They're less about a product (computer, phone, etc) and more about what the user is doing.
• "Your interface is your brand".
• Time: now and next. A lot of projects they're doing are looking at designing concurrently something for now (current reality) and something visionary (your brand in the future when some of these limitations go away). He later discussed the following time chain: archive --> recent --> now --> next --> promo.
• Utilize z-space - dive in, pull back out. Flash is being used a lot now on set-top boxes.
• Hand gesture as input. With his work on Minority Report, his job was to figure out what it will be like to interface with the computer in the future. He noted that one of the inspirations was sign language.
• Pure gestural navigation for TV. They're working with Prime Sense, based in Israel. He showed a brief video of controlling volume using a hand gesture. He loves the purity of not having a remote device. But it's not just for entertainment industry, Herigstad said that it has other implementations - for example doctors in surgery. The overall concept he explained as "training a machine to respond to the language of your hands."
• Brainwaves as inputs they want to get data coming out of your head! (hopefully Marshall doesn't read that bit)
• Screens as wallpaper. Video will not be "furniture" anymore, but part of the background. For example watching a movie across a wall.
• Dynamic Assemblage. Instead of watching online media piecemeal - e.g. YouTube videos found through Google or Digg - Schematic is exploring "advanced metadata" that will assemble your viewing experience automatically. He noted that currently when we watch television, there's a careful production process that happens behind the scenes to craft the branding, promotions, credits, the show itself, etc. He sees that in the future the system will understand these parts, the crafting and user preferences so it will be able to assemble media for you. So 'dynamic assemblage' means that online experiences could look like television in the near future, but assembled automatically.

Minority Report UIs - Not That Far Off?

Herigstad finished by talking about what it means to design for cross media. From a television standpoint, it's very common to have a list of things on the left and some more detail on the right. So some of the interaction concepts they're working on can utilize this. For example with touch gestures, you can touch an item on the left and it would open on the right. With hand gestures, you could gesture at an item on the left and flick it over to the right.

Unfortunately Herigstad couldn't show us some of the things he's working on that use the above concepts, as he's under NDA for a lot of the implementations. But the concepts he discussed today are very thought provoking and give us a glimpse of what media (particularly television and movies) will look like in the future. Because almost all types of media will be on a Web platform in the future, it follows that these concepts will also be very important in the development of Web technology.

FriendFeed has regularly made changes to its UI, but this new design is clearly the biggest change yet.

If you follow a lot of users on FriendFeed, the first impression of the new interface will most likely be negative. The new design emphasizes a real-time stream of all of your activity, in what can probably best be described as a mashup of the old UI with FriendFeed's old real-time stream, but with the addition that complete posts now bubble up to the top, instead of just individual comments and likes.

The new sidebar now includes links to direct messages that have been addressed to you, as well as links to your filters and groups. Most importantly, it also includes a link to a feed with all the posts you actively participated in - which makes the often chaotic feel of the main stream more manageable.

Direct Messages

One of the most important features on the new FriendFeed is the addition of direct messages. Unless you choose to publish your messages to the 'main feed,' they will stay private. Direct messages can be addressed to multiple users, which will make them quite useful for impromptu group discussions. Of course, this also makes FriendFeed a bit more like Twitter.

Filters

The new advanced filters that FriendFeed has introduced in this release make it a lot easier to create streams that only include updates with (or without) certain keywords, or which have a specific number of likes or comments. These searches can also be restricted to specific groups and friends. For power users, this might just turn into one of the most important new features on FriendFeed.

More Changes

A few more changes:

• by default, direct posts to FriendFeed are now automatically CC'd to Twitter
• the icons that used to announce where an item was coming from are now gone
• rooms are now 'filters'
• the search function auto-completes names of your friends
• in addition to subscribing to a users' feed, you can now also subscribe to their comments and likes
• date stamps are now permalinks

Mainstream?

While the new FriendFeed interface will probably be at least somewhat controversial, we especially wonder if this will help FriendFeed to grow beyond its current base of dedicated users. One complaint about the old FriendFeed interface was that it was overwhelming for new users. We are not sure that the constant stream of updates will make the service any more inviting.

It's Growing On Us

For most hardcore FriendFeed users who have friended a lot of other users, the default real-time stream is almost unmanageable, but the FriendFeed team has smartly added the 'My discussions' section. This section takes some of the craziness out of the main feed - but at the expense of missing out on new discussions.

Our first reaction to the new interface was quite negative - the stream is overwhelming and the new interface does take some getting used to (especially the odd color choices). It might take a few days of continuous usage before we can really give a final verdict, but over the last few hours, the new UI has definitely grown on us, and with a few more keyword searches and lists, we should be able to wrangle a semblance of normalcy out of the chaotic real-time stream.

By the way, if you don't like the colors of the new design, here is a Greasemonkey script from AJ Batac that brings together the colors of the old FriendFeed design and the new real-time UI.

Also, here are a few more interesting reactions to the new design:

Louis Gray: FriendFeed Reloads With Real-Time At Its Core

Hutch Carpenter: Taking Realtime Aim at Facebook

Robert Scoble: New Friendfeed: Twitter that Moves? Facebook filtering before Facebook?

Though Dreamweaver catches a lot of flack from cynics, many people still use it and the design software is said to be much improved in recent years. Zeldman's new tool is worth checking out.

You can read all about the software and wish Zeldman a happy birthday in his blog post from this morning.

Zeldman is the author of the internationally celebrated book Designing With Web Standards. We love standards based development and design here at ReadWriteWeb because increased machine readability creates a playing field more favorable for innovation.

We're big fans of web standards here at ReadWriteWeb and we'll tell you why.

This year's been a big one for web standards; the President Elect just enabled users to login to comment on his website using the standard authentication protocol OpenID, for example.

So get your blue beanie or similar hat on and make yourself a photo. Your friends will wonder why you and others are wearing them online today and when they ask either you or Google - they'll end up thinking about the importance of web standards as a result.

For more info, visit Jeffrey Zeldman's blog and see if there's a group relevant to you participating, like the South African Web Standards and Accessibility Group, by whom we were reminded of today's event.

That was a cute story, but now it's been just 5 months and today Peldi reports that he's just cleared $100,000 in sales of the four variations of his product. Talk about a simple tool coming along at just the right time! It's cool software, too.

Peldi says that while October was slower than September, and sales seemed to slow a bit when news of financial crisis was breaking out, so far November looks to be his biggest month yet.

He's got an active community of supporters cheering him on at his blog, too. He tracked the lead up to his launch, its aftermath and the product's early momentum right out in the open on his blog. He displays financial numbers throughout the blog. It's been a model of the paradigm of radical transparency and it's a whole lot of fun to watch.

What's next for Balsamiq? The tiny company has put together a remarkable board of advisors, Peldi has hired his wife Mariah to move from graphic design for the Balsamiq to a full time position, he's hired a few contractors and more projects are on the way soon.

We love stuff like this.

The first time you use this feature, you have to authenticate with each of the social networks. Once configured, links are published to your Facebook News Feed and to your Twitter stream. (Note: Facebook Connect only works on Firefox at present). An option to email items instead is also provided.

The individual articles found in RSS feeds also have a sharing option which is activated by clicking on a yellow star next to the word "share." This feature lets you save articles with an optional note for later reading . The saved articles are placed in your private activities section.

It is this last feature that has Netvibes' users up in arms. Because the star and link reside on a separate line beneath the article headline and introductory text, it takes up valuable screen real estate which impacts the number of entries which can be displayed on a page. Out of 26 some comments (at time of writing) on the Netvibes blog, a surprising majority of them (25) were against the yellow star for this very reason. Everyone was requesting that this feature be optional, so they could shut it off.

Although 25 people aren't the entire Netvibes user base, they are a good representative of the most enthusiastic of Netvibes users - the ones who take the time to read and respond to the company blog entries. In this case, we think they may have a point. Hopefully Netvibes will take this into consideration and make some tweaks.

However, the user outrage issue shouldn't overshadow the big news of the day: a Facebook Connect sighting in the wild! We just love those. After Netvibes fixes the above issue, the new sharing features are likely to become popular ways to make the entire Netvibes experience more social and fun.

Third-Party Services, More Customization

Today's announcement is mostly geared towards developers, but judging from an earlier post on Yahoo's official blog in September, it is clear that Yahoo will provide its users with the ability to customize the home page to a far greater degree than is currently possible - perhaps in line with the 2007 goal to bring it closer to the functionality of My Yahoo!.

Yahoo's overall goal for the yahoo.com redesign is to give mainstream users a one-stop home page that allows for checking multiple email accounts and accessing personalized applications, while still keeping the look and feel of the old, familiar front page.

The new front page is clearly part of Yahoo's overall goal of opening up its services. At the same time, it also looks somewhat similar to AOL's latest redesign of its its portal. AOL's new front page also features a customizable sidebar and lets users access third-party services like Twitter, Gmail, and Facebook.

What About My.Yahoo.com?

Of course, with My Yahoo, Yahoo already has a highly customizable portal solution. It is not clear if the front page redesign will also be extended to My Yahoo, but the screenshots of the new home page we have seen so far do not feature a link to My Yahoo anymore. This leads us to believe that Yahoo might be slowly abandoning that service in favor of the redesigned front page.

Update: RWW editor Richard MacManus added some further detail to the post, based on our 2006-07 coverage.

Customization and Widgets for Social Networks

AOL users can now see updates from AIM, Facebook, and MySpace right on the homepage. Support for Bebo and Twitter is coming soon. This move comes just a few weeks after AOL also allowed its users to check mail from third-party email services right from the homepage.

The most interesting update is probably the inclusion of a prominent RSS reader widget at the bottom of the homepage.

The new AOL homepage also allows users to customize the main navigation bar with bookmarks, local news, and RSS feeds. AOL Mail has also been updated to match the look and feel of the new homepage.

AOL also announced that it will now give advertisers the option to offer customized wallpapers for the homepage and more rich media content through AOL's Platform A.

Is Traffic to AOL.com Growing?

According to AOL, year-over-years visits to AOL.com grew 15%, while total minutes were up 40%. It should be noted, however, that both Compete and Google Trends show a downwards trend over the last year.

While it might be hard to get excited about new features on AOL, it is good to see that the company is bringing more social networking and customization features to its user base.

Profile 2.0 is going to make a lot of MySpace users unhappy, but only if they're truly happy with their current profile. We think anyone that's been waiting for Myspace to do some serious spring cleaning on how users can customize their profiles is going to love Profile 2.0. To access Profile 2.0:

• Make sure you're not logged into MySpace
• Head to MySpace Canada
• Login to your MySpace account as you normally would

You should now see a small yellow box at the top of your MySpace homepage inviting you to try out the Alpha of Profile 2.0.

What MySpace Should've Looked Like in the Beginning

Profile 2.0 allows for users to customize a lot more of their profile than words. Users can now drag and drop modules, add and remove modules, change themes, privacy settings, profile layouts and more. The advance edit mode allows those with more advanced HTML knowledge to fill out their profile with custom CSS and offers more control over module styles. You are also presented with a visual preview of every change made.

Rearranging My Space

All in all, the new Profile 2.0 will be a great tool to use once it goes public. However those that are already using custom templates from the thousands of sites that offer free MySpace themes may be at a loss until web designers catch up. Profile 2.0 will break most of the custom MySpace themes available. If you choose to try out Profile 2.0 MySpace reserves your 1.0 profile just in case you don't like what you see in Profile 2.0. In any case, back up your current profile settings before trying out Profile 2.0.