Circles around del.icio.us
Ever since my interest in the interface design side of all digital things has been spiked through my school opening an interface devision I do look out for the next generation interfaces that might make the life of a information junky and digital lifeform easier and maybe even more understandable - so most interface designer out there seem to rather like science art then interface design and are presenting pretty pictures of lots of data to the world with claims about saving the world with them. One such example is the "del.ico.us.discover". Wrapped around the de.licio.us social bookmarking service owned by web 2.0 yahoo its supposed to be a commentary to social bookmarking from the view of the creator. While it produces some nice pictures - and I do like data visualization from an aesthetic standpoint - it falls flat to show me anything on the first look - and that is what such a project should be targeted at - giving you an overview of data that you understand at the first look - read Mr. Tufte on this subject - while creating beautiful pictures you get each and every of his presentation on first or mostly second look - the del.discover art is just pretty pictures that where generated with some formula - an exercise in Flash programming. Yes if you dig deep into it you can actually see what is meant by it but again the hype vs. utilization factor is still very much on the hype side. The graphs he shows before going all "cirlcly arty" are much more clear and are worth digging into - he should have made those a web application and accessible to others to put in their data instead of just his own - you know its web 2.0 time and all is about participation especially if you are commenting on social bookmarking that is about others more then yourself. But yeah pretty pics in pretty style.