ReadWriteWeb

After a period of dramatic tension, social networking giant Facebook has joined forces with the OpenID community working for a distributed system of standards-based, non-proprietary user identity. It's a move we think bodes well for the web and yesterday the first big collaborative event was held since the union was announced. Facebook hosted an OpenID User Experience Summit at its headquarters in downtown Palo Alto.

Much like last month's summit on Activity Stream standards, we believe that yesterday's meeting was of historic proportion.

The ways young people use the internet everyday are transforming learning in ways that adults often fail to understand but represent major new opportunities that need to be taken advantage of by supportive educators. That's the conclusion of a major new study by 28 researchers over three years released today by the University of California at Berkley and the MacArthur Foundation.

Titled "Living and Learning With New Media," the study articulates the value of social networking, text messaging and other forms of new media use better than anything we've seen yet. It's a major contribution to our understanding of the new web and the way it impacts the world at large.

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. Below are some of our favorite resources for companies that want to smarten-up quickly about User Experience.

People who in the next few years solve big problems in Information Overload are going to be very important, and some of them are going to be UI and UX (user experience) designers.

German ISP T-Online demonstrated a big multi-touch screen right out of Minority Report at the CeBIT conference in Hannover this week (see this and other videos below). Many other designers are working on variations on that theme. Other designers still are aiming to bring game-like interfaces to other data-centric experiences. What would you like to see in interface design?