Android is Google's super-open mobile operating system that hasn't moved the needle yet, but is great for discussions like this and could end up much bigger than the iPhone. Activity Streams are the rivers of updates on what you and your friends are doing across different social networks. Most of the major social networking vendors are working hard to figure out what kind of standards could allow these activity streams to flow freely from one site to another. Here's one vision of what that could look like on your phone.

There are a number of things that stand out to us in this illustration. First, the message at the top of the page that tells you if and how many new updates you've got is useful. It's easier said than done, though, to determine what's new and what's old. It's a must-have part of the interface none the less.

Second, we really like the big faces of users. One of the advantages of standards in this sphere would be standardized user avatars like this, whether your data is coming in from Twitter or LinkedIn.

Further, we really like that the service from which the update originated is highlighted in a particular color. It's nice to scan down them and we presume that such an interface would allow you to click on any of those and see just that same update type.

The truncated messages expandable for full viewing with a click are really nice. That's a good way to handle "long" 140 character plus messages in a very small space.

When we wrote last week about Marc Canter's proposed "DiSO Dashboard" and its outline construction, the dashboard format was taken for granted. Ronin, the designer of the mock-up above, argued against that presumption in comments, at least when it comes to mobile use. He said that a mobile interface needed to be much more lightweight than a desktop style dashboard, and thus his proposed solution above.

This vision comes with its own problems, as well, however.

Concerns

We like the option of calling a user in response to their full message, but we'd think that multiple ways to respond to these messages would be good. Then the interface gets a little more complicated.

One thing you may have noticed if you're a heavy user of multiple social networking systems is that some of them really overwhelm others. New cross posting services like Ping.fm or Pixelpipe will require de-duplication in an interface like this. Put these two factors together and you've got a real situation. (My friend Baratunde Thurston, for example, is driving me crazy with Twitter-like updates flooding my LinkedIn network updates feed, crowding out job changes I'd like to know about.)

Finally, it's hard to imagine using this kind of interface instead of the iPhone view of FriendFeed, which is simply awesome.

The future may be all about open and Android, though, not about the expensive, closed iPhone, as impressive as it may be to many of us today. On the approximately 12 million iPhones sold to date, as "father of the cell phone" Marty Cooper said recently - "I don't know how you put a yawn down on a piece of paper." Cooper says that far, far more people will use feature rich phones all around the world when the carriers open up and embrace Android.

No matter what kind of phone you use - is this the kind of interface you'd like to see Activity Streams displayed in on it? Speak up now, these interfaces are being built as we speak and this is your chance to have your two cents counted.

But there is one problem. Basecamp is browser native. I want mobile native. And ReadWriteWeb's VP of Content Dev Marshall Kirkpatrick tweeted today that he wants a Basecamp AIR app. Either way, it's clear that browser-only doesn't cut it anymore for Basecamp.

Let's focus on the mobile issue in this post. Like many people, I don't live at my desk. I am up and about, meeting people. I like it that way. So I rely on my Blackberry to stay in touch. But here is the problem. I get an email notification of a post within Basecamp. I can read it fine, no problem. But when I want to reply, I have to use the Blackberry browser to log into Basecamp. That is kludgy to say the least. So I open an email thread, annoying everybody else on the team.

Sure I could switch to an iPhone with a better browser. But that still relies on good connectivity all the time and I don't want to be forced to make that switch. I want something like Twitterberry, a native Blackberry interface to Basecamp.

But when you look at the world through mobile eyes, you see that this is not an incremental change. It is as fundamental as moving from Client Server to browser-native. Browsers on small mobile screens are talking heads on early TV.

This Is a Hard Problem to Solve

Some problems are totally easy to define, such as a cure for cancer, longer lasting batteries or really cheap solar energy - but much, much, much harder to implement. So I am going to do the easy bit - define the problem - and hope that somebody comes up with the solution.

The needs are in 3 "buckets":

1. Mobile Native user interface
2. User centric, not project centric
3. Collaborative list building

Start With Mobile

My short-hand description is "like Basecamp but mobile native". That is easy to say, but tough to implement for 4 reasons:

1. Mobile native user interface. Ideally 90% of my actions are on a mobile device with a tiny screen and keyboard. I will do the more complex configuration and housekeeping type work on a browser in the 10% of my time when I am working on a fully fledged laptop/desktop. Most developers spend 90% of their time creating on a laptop/desktop and only 10% communicating in the "real world". For most of us, that ratio is different.

2. Offline syncing. Much of the time my mobile device is "off air". Those are opportunities to catch up on To Do Lists, Objectives, Milestones and the other planning type activities. You can do these sitting on an airplane, train or waiting in line at Starbucks. Syncing your personal planning to your group communication tool (Basecamp or whatever) is an annoying extra step that is a time sink.

3. Any mobile device. I use a Blackberry. I like it, but I may get seduced by the iPhone or may have something totally different in the future. More to the point, I cannot possibly predict what devices my collaborators will have and the vast majority of mobile devices are neither Blackberry nor iPhone. Communication has to work at the lowest common denominator but the user interface has to be native. As a Blackberry user, I don't care a hoot about the compromises the developer faces having to design for Blackberry, iPhone, Nokia, etc. The same is true for people with other devices, iPhone users being the most vehement about native user interfaces.

The SMS Lowest Common Denominator?

SMS without the interrupt or cost issues. "Lowest common denominator for communication" makes one think of SMS. But SMS has major costs - both time and money. Services that generate lots of email messages are bad enough, but lots of SMS messages are way worse.

Individual Centric, Not Project Centric

This may be even hard to solve than mobile native, but the issues are linked.

Like many people I multi-task across multiple projects, working with different teams in different companies. This is an increasingly common experience for many people, even if multiple projects/teams within one company is still more common. "Dipping in and out of" multiple Basecamp projects is a pain. My To Do List may be tagged by Project, but I want only one To Do List, that syncs with individual Projects To Do Lists.

Collaborative List Building

Many people use Excel for building lists - marketing lists, to do lists, feature lists and so on. It may be a hammer to crack a nut, not what it was designed for, but people do this. As list building requires collaboration we start using "web office" type spreadsheets such as Google Apps or Zoho. This is classic "hammer to crack a nut". Excel is still better than any web office competitor for heavy duty spreadsheet work, such as building a financial model for a venture, but relatively weak on collaboration. List building needs very simple features but needs to be very collaboration intensive. A slightly more sophisticated version of Tasks on a Blackberry that is collaborative might be close.

The Solution: a User Interface Maestro!

This may come as an extension to Basecamp or a totally different service that can use services such as Basecamp. Or even an alternative to Basecamp, much as I love them.

These problems cannot be solved at the technical level only. I am sure the architecture issues are important, but this is primarily a user interface challenge. This requires inspiration, a real user interface maestro.

Using Twitterberry shows some of the issues. It is a lot better than using SMS and the browser directly, but it is still sorely lacking (as 4 days of TweetPorting from Web 2.0 Expo made very clear). And Twittering is one simple task/feature. Doing this for the richness of tasks in Basecamp is an order of magnitude harder.

A short term fix for me could be a native Blackberry interface to Basecamp. If 37 Signals offered this I would be happier and if they also did iPhone and Symbian for Nokia and others they could crack the "mobile native" issue. but I suspect it would not solve my "individual centric, not project centric" issue.

Also Basecamp was "born on" the browser. I suspect that something "born on" the mobile phone could be the next generation.

Does this need resonate with you and have you seen anything like this in the wild? Or in Beta? Finally, is Basecamp really the best project management solution now in this increasingly mobile-based work world? We'd love to hear your suggestions for alternatives.

Apple Introduces iTunes 8 and New iPods

At Apple's "Let's Rock" special event this week, Steve Jobs introduced a new version of iTunes, the availability of HD TV shows for the American market, a new design for the iPod Nano and iPod touch, as well as a major update for the iPhone/iPod touch firmware. According to Jobs, Apple has sold 160 million iPods worldwide and now holds 73.4% of the market in the US. Check our post for more data points.

ITunes 8: The Genius in the Box

Music discovery services are definitely a hot topic right now, with Pandora, Last.fm, imeem, and others vying for users. This week, Apple joined the fray when it released iTunes 8 and its 'Genius' recommendation engine. After examining your iTunes library, iTunes uploads data about your library to Apple's servers and returns back a set of information about how the songs in your library correlate to each other. Based on this, iTunes can now build playlists of similar songs and display shopping recommendations.

AOL May Try to Bring RSS and Lifestreaming Mainstream

RSS and centralized integration of activity data from multiple social networks are the kinds of technologies that only early adopters are interested in, right? AOL has the exact opposite kind of audience, does it not? Those assumptions appear to be facing serious challenge, because AOL is planning to put an RSS reader and a window for participating in multiple 3rd party social networks right onto its front page. This could change the lives of millions of people, so check out our analysis.

Also this week Yahoo! told the press that its home page will soon be home to far more content from outside the Yahoo! network than ever before. Could the era of the walled garden is over? See our post for more details.

DEMOfall 08 Coverage

Not too long ago, there were some grumblings about the state of the tech blogosphere and the industry in general. By spending so much time reading Techmeme, Twitter, FriendFeed, and the like it's easy to get the impression that some of the most influential people in our industry today were less interested in the technology they were reviewing than they were in making a name for themselves as some sort of navel-gazing superstar. Not only that, the apps that people were fawning over were often not the kind of apps that had mainstream appeal or were solving real problems. It was as if the whole crowd was shouting at each other, trying to be heard over the noise and patting each other on the back for being so hip with all our shiny, social media-flavored toys.

Was this what the tech industry had come to, we wondered? No, that was just what the tech blogosphere had come to. This year's DEMO conference proved to our reporter Sarah Perez that technology innovation is still alive and well.

Here is our full coverage from DEMO:

• Giftag: Social Wishlists Using Open Standards
• SpinSpotter, A New Browser Plugin To Help Spot Media Bias
• Have The News Come To You With Alerts.com
• FFWD: A Remote Control For Internet Video
• iKnow! Launches Adaptive Learning System
• SkyData Integrates Everything, Puts It On Your Smartphone
• HeyCosmo: Automate Your Life Via Your Mobile
• Invision.tv: Like A TV Guide For Internet Video
• Web 1.0 Job Sites Have New Competition: PaidInterviews
• Better Photo Management for Mac? iLovePhotos Hopes So
• Talk To Your iPhone With New Voice-Recognition App, Say Where
• Qtask: Web-Based Team Collaboration

SEE MORE WEB PRODUCTS COVERAGE IN OUR PRODUCTS CATEGORY

Web Trends

User Experience: Learning from the Pros

There are more startup tech companies launching this week than almost anyone can keep track of, but any time a new service launches - one thing is key to its survival. The initial User Experience has to be compelling or any new application is going to be passed up in favor of whatever shiny object is next in line.

What's a company to do? Luckily, there are people who specialize in the field of User Experience (UX) and many of them share their best practices freely. We see applications all the time that are based on a great idea but are poorly designed in a way that leaves us frustrated and unlikely to return as users. In this post are some of our favorite resources for companies that want to smarten-up quickly about User Experience.

RWW Live: Chrome & Its Impact on The Browser Market

The latest episode of RWW Live, our live podcast show, was on the topic of Google's new open source browser Chrome and its potential impact in the browser market. We had 3 very special guests on the show to discuss this: Aaron Boodman from Google, a Software Engineer on the Chrome team; Chris Messina from Vidoop (formally of Firefox and Flock); and Alex Russell from The Dojo Toolkit.

Download MP3

RWW Predictions: Browser Wars 2.0

This week we ran a prediction challenge, on the topic of browsers. Google's new browser, Chrome (our coverage), is sure to take market share from the existing players. So we asked: which of the following browsers will lose the most share (in percentage terms) between August 2008 and December 2008? Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, or a tie or other? The results are on RWW Predictions and IE was most peoples pick to suffer, although many voted for Firefox too:

SEE MORE WEB TRENDS COVERAGE IN OUR TRENDS CATEGORY

RWW Enterprise Channel

What do CIOs Think About Social Media?

The internal IT department, headed by the CIO, no longer acts as the gatekeeper for all new technology coming into the enterprise. IT may stand at the gate to the castle, but SaaS and social media startups are swimming across the moat. Internal IT can still set fire to the moat and otherwise make life difficult. But how do you make this a win/win relationship, so that they welcome your entry? Start by understanding how IT is thinking about social media.

Email us if you're interested in writing for ReadWriteWeb's Enterprise Channel.

SEE MORE ENTERPRISE COVERAGE IN OUR ENTERPRISE CHANNEL

That's a wrap for another week! Enjoy your weekend everyone.

What's a company to do? Luckily, there are people who specialize in the field of User Experience (UX) and many of them share their best practices freely. We see applications all the time that are based on a great idea but are poorly designed in a way that leaves us frustrated and unlikely to return as users. Below are some of our favorite resources for companies that want to smarten-up quickly about User Experience.

Joshua Porter's three-part series from last summer is the best overview of UX design focused on social websites that we've seen. It's framed in terms of things not to do, but there's great advice here like don't focus on too many different features, don't overfocus on the social value without delivering direct personal value (what Porter calls the "Del.icio.us Lesson" - personal value precedes network value) and don't fail to archive knowledge for re-use so your community manager doesn't have to spend all their time answering the same elementary questions from every new user.

This series is a great place to start and it alone should give any company a lot to think about and implement.

Trevor van Gorp, Boxes and Arrows
Design for Emotion and Flow

Trevor van Gorp wrote an article in this month's issue of Boxes and Arrows about "flow." We're most familiar with this concept from Kathy Sierra's discussion of it.

Van Gorp defines flow as an experience characterized by users feeling:
* Total concentration and focused attention
* A sense of control over interactions
* Openness to new things
* Increased exploratory behavior
* Increased learning
* Positive feelings

That's what we want from the apps we use! That kind of experience will keep us engaged for long enough to invest time and other resources that we'll want to come back to and it will give us the emotional incentive to do so, as well.

How can you help your users get into such a mode? Check out van Gorp's post and the conversation in comments.

Steve Psomas, UXMatters
The Five Competencies of User Experience Design

The above tips and perspectives are a great start, but if you can swing it it's a good idea to hire someone who specializes in UX work. Whether you're interested in evaluating prospects for that hire more intelligently or looking for more information about the field for yourself, Steve Psomas's article on UX competencies really helps the reader understand the details of the field. Read this one and you'll be much better informed about the world of UX.

Also worth reading for anyone is Luke Wroblewski's October post on UXMatters titled Scalable Design, where you can find tips on planning your product and site design today to enable easier growth and change in the future. Who wouldn't want to do that?

Next Steps

Case studies are a great way to learn about anything. After an initial exposure to the resources above, we recommend checking out the following:

• Garret Dimon's in-depth analysis of the excellent design at GetSatisfaction.com. Satisfaction is a model service and Dimon articulates the thinking behind it and its impact on users beautifully. This is one of our favorite case studies, but you can keep find a running list of others in places like http://delicious.com/tag/ux+casestudy.
• Ready to make yourself a case study? SilverBack is a new Mac app that systematizes usability testing. The service records your testing users' reactions to various parts of your service. Dimon again, from above, provides a really deep walk-through of the service in his latest post. SilverBack is getting good reviews, but we'd love to know what you think of it, too.

Conclusion: UX Matters

The above are some of our favorite UX resources and we can't emphasize enough how important this kind of thing is for new startups. You can have the most wonderful idea in the world and if your site suffers usability or user experience problems then your odds of survival are not good. We want you, friends with startups, to survive and thrive.

Let us know about your favorite User Experience resources in comments below.

Image: "Forever Flowing" Creative Commons licensed by Lisa Ruokis