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

A big thanks to Plaxo's John McCrea for taking the photos below, giving them with a permissive Creative Commons license and for live blogging the meeting so extensively. All the photos below are his, with the exception of the photo of McCrea himself, which was taken by Will Norris. McCrea has covered the meeting in far more detail than we have - we just thought the event was striking enough that we wanted to post some pictures and make brief introductions to a handful of the players present. These are some of the folks most instrumental in building the web of the future, right now.

Brian Ellin, of JanRain, went through the history of OpenID user interfaces. He shared some of the things people currently type into the OpenID field of existing interfaces, like "elderly," "I HATE YOU LADY GAGA," "Hotmail," and their email addresses.

Vidoop's Chris Messina discussed the differences between identification, as in for blog comments, and authentication, as a method of gaining verified access to user data. That's something that people are increasingly looking to OAuth to accomplish, or an OAuth/OpenID hybrid.

Google's Breno de Medeiros said there needs to be a neutral 3rd party method of figuring out who users' identity providers are without asking them explicitly, something like how the DNS system works.

MySpace's Max Engel, the 8bitkid, says that MySpace users were generally comfortable with sharing data between AOL and MySpace but showed some confusion about which direction the data was flowing. He also said that "OAuth is the condom of the Open Web," and noted that "Facebook has free beef jerky!"

Facebook front end designer Julie Zhuo said she believes that 3rd party authentication implementations should keep the first screen really simple and delay things like extended permissions to later flows, in context.

Plaxo's John McCrea spells out what it's all about - free love between social networks. HeHis co-worker Joseph Smarr also presented the most impressive data of the day, a 92% success rate in user completion of Plaxo's new OpenID login process. That process packed more into a short space than Zhuo seemed to argue was ideal, but in this case it worked. Does Plaxo's new solution put too much emphasis on established big players like Google? It might, but it might very well be able to use some kind of neutral 3rd party cookie sniffing method like the Google team brought up yesterday to solve that problem.

There are lots of questions unanswered but things are progressing quickly. We expect the web to be a very different, and hopefully more exciting, place in the next few years. The people above are some of those we'll have to thank if these dreams for the future come true.

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

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?

Video via a post at the wonderful design blog FreshCreation, the inspiration for this post.

The expectation that something like this will be the interface of the future is pretty widespread, but let's look at some alternatives.

Shadow Play

While that touchscreen looks very cool, it's got its issues too. The video below is from the University of British Columbia and points out some of those issues. I'm not sure if the shadow pointing option is going to work in very many circumstances outside of a classroom.

Via one of the researchers' comments at FreshCreation. See also this version at a home computer.

Just Like Your Real Life Mess

That last video might seem a bit dorky but at least you can imagine some good uses of such an approach. The other end of the spectrum, stunning but a challenge to imagine really using, is BumpTop - a prelaunched, much hyped 3D desktop thing.

Via Metafluence on Twitter

Thought Control

The keyboard and mouse may end up looking like sad relics from a time in history when only a fraction of human capacity to manipulate information was leveraged. Hopefully that won't mean internet brain implants, but for some people it probably will. The following video goes in the "no thanks" column for me. It's called Brainloop and it's from Austria.

Via FreshCreation again.

How About Something More Familiar

One of the reasons we're excited about the launch of Adobe's AIR platform and in Rich Internet Applications in general is their potential for powerful, beautiful new interfaces. It's a lot more accessible for larger numbers of developers than any of the above ever will be. Innovation on AIR in new Twitter clients alone is a fun field to watch.

AIR, Flex and the forthcoming Thermo join Photoshop to make up the newest suite of Adobe tools for interface design. Check out the following video demonstration of the AIR and Flex at work on a Sony Ericsson website. The demo is from Raghunath Rao of Adobe in Bangalore, India.

Throw that onto a touchscreen interface, make it all bigger, and then we're really talking.

2D/3D Gaming

You know what I really want? I want a web experience like the soon-to-launch game Fez. Check out this video, it gets particularly interesting at :30.

Via gaming megablog Kotaku

I want my RSS reader to work like that. Combine some hand motion/touchscreen with some AIR/Flex/Thermo action with some 2D/3D viewing of related documents and I'm going to be in heaven. Make that song in the Fez demo play all the time, too.

Conclusion

Always-on access, the proliferation of publishers, content syndication and an inevitable shift in advertising dollars are all forces contributing to a growing demand for better interfaces. The iPhone's multi-touch interface is also moving things heavily in that direction, which may or may not be good for the web at large.

Other efforts to tackle the same problems include better filtering systems or recommendation engines. Those will make some sense in some cases but day in and day out, we need new interfaces to deal with the explosion of information underway. How do you want to interact with a world drowning in data?

(Maybe all of this is silly and the image below is all we need to know!)

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