It’s time to get back In Yah and see what has been going on in the studio.
With the Olympics coming up we have been brainstorming ideas regarding the Olympic Torch Relay that is currently in progress. We developed a concept based on the symbol of the auspicious cloud (祥云), prevalent amongst the many symbols of the Beijing Olympics and the Torch Relay.
The tagline is as follows “把你的心愿标在祥云上” or “Tag your wish on the cloud.” The concept is based on Olympic themes of unity, hope, and dreams - Wishes are what unite the world. This website is an opportunity for the user to relay a wish to the world.
The main website consists of a world skyline of all of the torch relay spots. Users can zoom-in and zoom-out of the skyline to look at a specific city. They then have the option to send a wish to a certain city on the skyline by “tagging a wish.” For example you could “Wish Paris a green future” or “Wish Istanbul a starry night.”
Here is one of the images, with more to follow shortly.
Take a look at this short movie on the I Want You to Want Me installation at the Design and the Elastic Mind exhibition talked about in a previous post. It gives you a better idea about how the piece works and the concepts behind it.
Lifestreaming is the next step up for web 2.0. Most simply it is an aggregated view of your online and offline activities. You can track what you listen to, your blog entries, your links, twitter, what videos you are watching, what you are buying, what you are reading, your IM status as well as videocasts and podcasts.
One application that is getting a lot of buzz and has been called “The New Twitter” is FriendFeed. It allows two-way conversations via twitter as well as integration with Delicious, Flickr, Amazon, Google Talk, Google Reader, LastFM, YouTube, Netflix (a company that rents movies by mail and has a rich Web 2.0 interface.) as well as many others. FriendFeed has also created a Facebook application to embed into your profile and people can access your friend feed via RSS, email and through Facebook. You can take a look at my lifestream here.
Facebook is quickly jumping on the lifestream boat by adding auto-import feature from Flickr, Delicious and other applications into your mini-feed.
There are a number of other lifestreaming applications which you can read about here.
Facebook is now releasing statistics on words used on The Wall - a place where friends can leave public messages on your profile. Take a look at thier Lexicon application and read more on their blog.
