SociaLens

Forget First Class! Find out who's sitting next you on your next flight. Remember the days when you sat at your airport gate wondering and worrying who might be sitting next to you? Those days are over now for travelers who can't get enough social networking on the ground. Airline travelers no longer have to be nameless and unknown. In fact, with 'social seating' now available on a number of airlines, you can find out all kinds of things about your fellow travelers. Welcome to the new "mile high" media club.

A UX strategy has four primary components: Where are you now? Define the value you're delivering to your users today, identify known issues, and explore ways your product can realize what the business hopes to achieve. Where do you want to be? Specify the purpose of what you're building and what needs it will address. Identify opportunities to enhance your product and the guiding principles that will inform product design decisions. Explore all phases of a user's interaction with your product to identify how all product components will fit together. How will you get there? Plan the development of your product to accommodate continual enhancements while maintaining cohesion across the experience. Translate your plan into tangible requirements. How will you measure success? Define what success looks like for your product and what methods will be used to validate your product's success.

Nelson Mandela's health scares send Twitter into overdrive, but South African officials made savvier use of social media to keep the world informed on the global icon's latest medical woe.

Aguinis noted that the power-law approach has applications in groups of all types and sizes, including governments, nonprofits, education systems and corporations. However, changing theory and practice will be challenging, due partly to deeply entrenched notions of fairness and equality in society and business. Further, it could pose difficult ethical dilemmas, because it requires taking care of the "superstars" first in the context of treating everyone fairly.

The label "User experience design" emerged in order to combat the small-mindedness of design for technology that was prevalent in the early 90s. During the technological boom of the last 20 years, with the emergence of the Web, prevalence of computers in all aspects of our lives, and the increasing complexity of the things we are building, "user experience" has been a helpful term in that it continually reminded us to think beyond whatever narrow thing we're considering at the time, and to consider the entire user's experience. And now, in 2012, with Apple, Inc. having the largest market capitalization of any company in the world, and an endless stream of CEOs and pundits talking about the importance of user experience, I suspect the phrase "user experience design" is no longer necessary, and could even be harmful. Harmful because it suggests that the only folks who need to worry about user experience are the designers, when in fact companies need to treat user experience no different than they treat profitability, or corporate culture, or innovation, or anything else that's essential for it's ongoing success. The companies that succeed best in delivering great experience are those that have it as an organization-wide mindset.

Timeline of Super Bowl events and Twitter usage for SB 46, by Colle + McVoy

It is a constant complaint: We're choking on information. The flood of data on the Web has reached mind boggling proportions, and it shows no signs of stopping. But wait, says Harvard professor Ann Blair - this is not a new condition. It's been part of the human experience for centuries.

The White House loves Twitter, and Twitter loves the White House. How much? Last year, they grew their audience by over one-third, adding another 650,000+ followers to their 2M+ base.

What's the difference between a CTO and a vice-president of engineering (VPoE)? According to Jason Hoffman and Bryan Cantrill of Joyent, the lines are blurry. At the Monki Gras conference in London on February 1st, Hoffman (CTO) and Cantrill (VPoE), shared the stage and talked about the differences in their roles. In keeping with the generally boisterous nature of Monki Gras, the conversation with Hoffman and Cantrill was a bit more bare-knuckle than your average conference presentation. Perhaps it's a result of their joint suffering under the "Somali warlord style of management" (as Hoffman put it) of Sun Microsystems.