Get on board Ark.com

My friend Patrick is launching a new site called Ark. It's a social causes website that lets you convert your regular web surfing behaviour to actual dollars (USD) for your own cause.

Some of the causes currently listed are:

• Disabled Veterans
  
• One Laptop Per Child
  
• Poverty
• Homelessness

Take a look at www.ark.com and join on Facebook or Twitter.

Facebook co-opting twitter?

Woah, facebook is now using a @ notation that Twitter is using. Maybe they've been doing this for a while, but it's the first that I've seen it so far.

So now how does this work, does it let me link my Twitter account and my friends' twitter accounts to their Facebook or can I use @ and it will still get to them.

I suppose I should look up how this works, a shame that their UI doesn't give me a link to learn more.

Although an interesting point, if it is actually linked up to Twitter, how come it's giving me this note, my Twitter account and Facebook accounts are separate unless ... Data Mining?

Oopsie, you can crash the Wave

Whoops, looks like Wave can't handle 3 gadgets, typing in multiple levels of threads and adding someone at the same time.
Frankly I'm surprised it didn't crash earlier.

Initial impressions of Google Wave

Like one of the many hundreds of thousands of people that are using Google Wave, I'm sure I'm not the first to be saying ... WHAT?!?

Now, I have gone through a few of the YouTube videos explaining what Google Wave is and understand that it's a communications platform that includes some of Google's product offerings. I'll break it down to how I see it in my own set of paradigms.
(NB - yeah I know it's kludgy but it's the way I think)

Wave as an email client
- Well ok, this is a poor email client since email you'll be messaging a large number of people who may not be a "Google contact" and who you may not really care what they look like with their user photo
- Still has nice message threading UI

Wave as an IM client
- Works well to see you contacts close and all the message history
- It looks like the best asynchronous IM viewers that I've seen. Other clients like Adium or Trillian are pretty poor for looking at past conversations
- It's still limited for me 'cause I don't have that many friends on Google Wave

Wave as a wiki
- I haven't tested this out yet since again, I don't have many friends on Wave
- Looks to be the most promising of features as an agile work Team-room

Wave as a communications platform
- Well I suppose this is the future, when the hackathons and Google Wave app store drive more functionality, we may have this as
> gaming
> document sharing and group editing
> recording and playback of google chat (voice & video)
> possibly even the random conversations that ICQ had back in the day

So these paradigms are how I see Google Wave evolving over time, as part of my usage. I'm sure there are people (re: Google employees) that are all over that spectrum. The challenge going forward is how to satisfy all these different user behaviours without creating a mess of a UI.

Good Luck Google!

iSkin manufacturer error

Kinda weird, the Enter key and Backslash are joined together.

The product is still useful though, I feel much more comfortable with potato chips near my laptop.

If you're interested this is the one I got.

The counter to Rolling Stone's article on Goldman Sachs

I just read a very witty response to the Rolling Stone article on Goldman by Michael Lewis (via Bloomberg).

There was one quote that I found particularly interesting:
"The bozos at Merrill Lynch, the dimwits at Citigroup, the nimrods at Lehman Brothers, the louts at Bear Stearns, even that momentarily useful lunatic Joe Cassano at AIG -- all of these people took risks that no non-Goldman person should ever take"

Now probably Michael Lewis is right. Maybe Goldman Sachs is just much better than all of its competition and they should be richly rewarded for their performance. In fact, they're probably so good that I'd be willing to award them victory. It's time that they're crowned king of their industry and now we'll break them up and let competition flourish again. It's time for all those idiots who are running the other companies to fail & die and let the smart folk over at GS run everything, but at separate companies. Thus letting the capitalist enterprise work by having competition create the efficiencies.

Obviously this is an impossibility in this world, but something amusing to speculate. We thrive on an ideal that the free market creates the best value and most efficiencies; but we fail to recognize that in a competitive arena, companies will drive towards one victor and to that victor, they are awarded the coveted Monopoly status. Which effectively ends our free market.

So go take your spoils and your monopolistic position over your idiot enemies. I'm not going to stop you, and really, no one will.

A note on Waterloo and a response to Brand New

I apologize to the people of Brand New for having to comment about this on my blog, but the way their site is structured, I can't really tell who this Armin person is who posted about the logo of my school (U of Waterloo) nor am I going to give in any sign in information to a site that has no about page. But I will give attribution to the link here so you can trackback.

If you hate the logo join the Facebook group.

I take offense in the general tone of the article but mostly at this particular part of the authors blog post:
"But somehow, a crest, like thousands of other crests — who the majority of people don’t know what they stand for anyway — does. Unfortunately this is antiquated thinking. Universities can not get by with traditional crests in today’s über branded environment and, if you look around, most large universities operate with a “marketing” logo and use a traditional seal for boring things like diplomas or the back covers of their catalogues"

1. Majority of people don't know what the crest stands for
- One of the benefits of having a crest, even among thousands, is that it is part of our visual vocabulary that denotes a University. While the new "W" logo is plain hideous (to which he also agrees) an non-crest is not automatically the answer.
- While Armin is certainly correct that "a majority of people" don't know Waterloo's crest. I would also guess that presenting a random internet sampling of people with a red crest with the word "VERITAS" on it wouldn't get instant recognition of Harvard University either.

2. Most large universities operate with a “marketing” logo and use a traditional seal
- I'm not sure where the author is claiming that most large universities operate with 2 sets of logos. In a quick scan, U of T, Queens, McGill, UBC do not use a separate logo.
- The exception I found was Western, but that has a specific use for the Western Mustangs, the sporting logo.
- It seems that American universities tend to do so in order to create a specific and separate brand around the sporting and alumni aspect of the university separate from the academics. At Waterloo (and in other Canadian universities), we do not support athletics in the same manner and really Waterloo's alumni efforts concentrate around how it is an excellent academic institution.
- If there is a comparison to Californian schools, like my own UC Berkeley, you have the Cal logo and the crest logo. Where it is also an excellent academic university, however, it is a University of California school, so all of the UCs (LA, Irvine, Berkeley, etc) all have the same crest, so a second logo is necessary for such differentiation.

3. Universities cannot get by with with a traditional crest in an über branded environment
- One of the thngs about brand is that it generally takes a while to be recognized. Waterloo is a fairly young university and probably does a better job with recognition compared to other instituions that are 50 years old.
- Waterloo has already invested over 20 years in the crest (wikipedia link) with the primary growth happening in recent times with graduates successes at RIM, OpenText, and various companies throughout the Silicon Valley.
- Brands take time and effort to cultivate. In the über branded marketing world, there's often millions of dollars that are put into launching or re-launching a new brand. Waterloo as a public university will unlikely have such an ability to put a new brand front and centre so it will try to rely on word of mouth to push this new logo. Which given the Facebook group and other conversations informally here in California, it will alienate the alumni.

If I could go back in time to talk to President Johnston, I would keep the word of mouth going and invest more time in alumni to promote the brand and the existing logo which most alums are accustomed to. All that time in committee could instead be put into really building the community and reputation of Waterloo rather than drawing up the next big "W".

[If you're coming here randomly, I have not worked in a branding focused agency. I'm a designer formerly in the advertising world and I've done branding at the Haas Graduate School of Business at UC Berkeley]