Friday Fun

Via ffffound!

BrumTwestival video mini site

Thanks to the excellent team of guys at Full Range we received a load of lovely video footage from February’s BrumTwestival this week. On the night, people were suggesting who else in the room the film crew should speak to so we decided to build a fun little mini-site where the navigation follows the users suggestions. You can view the mini site here.

It’s a bit Javascript intensive, so if it runs slow then you can click on the ‘lite’ version (top left) to jump straight to Vimeo.

Thanks again to everyone who attended and agreed to be filmed – here’s a full list of ‘who was there‘.

Tap is the new click

Microsoft Surface technology has been around for a little while now and there’s some really nice applications starting to emerge. Razorfish have been lucky enough to land a fair bit of kit and have released the videos below showing what’s been achieved so far.

The ultimate business card?…..

Amnesia Razorfish – Staff Directory on Surface from Razorfish – Emerging Experiences on Vimeo.

This would make doing the accounts a lot more fun…

Microsoft Surface Financial Services Application – Razorfish Demo from Razorfish – Emerging Experiences on Vimeo.

A great example of the type of physics engine and interactions that can be achieved. Or, a great example of really expensive game of Pong…

DaVinci (Microsoft Surface Physics Illustrator) from Razorfish – Emerging Experiences on Vimeo.

Tweelove – Anonymous twitter greetings

Today sees the launch of a little project we’ve been working on called ‘Tweelove‘. Tweelove is an anonymous twitter messaging service with the aim of spreading a bit of positivity around twitter.

For 383 the site has mainly been an exercise in getting an idea (provided by @Bostinbloke) designed and built quickly. Seeing as it’s coming up to Valentines we figured it could be a bit of fun to design and build this and it also gave us an excuse to be a bit more indulgent than we might otherwise be with our daytime work.

The design came together pretty quickly, and after hammering out a few different ways of creating the interface we settled on a simple ‘pick a word’ and ‘add a message’ format. As well as ensuring the messages have some level of consistency in their tone, ‘picking’ a word at the beginning helps remind people the service is meant to be positive. You can follow the account to see who’s recieving the kudos by following @tweelove, or visit the site yourself to send a few messages.

The development side of the project has itself been a bit of fun, so for those that are interested, you can read about the process here:

The geeky bit

Once the design was handed over, we coded it up and then made a start on the functional parts of the site.

First, to minimise spam from bots and user error we made sure that when someone builds a Tweet the site will check whether the Twitter user who the message is directed @ exists. If they do, the TweeLove account will auto-follow the recipient. If they don’t, then the user will be prompted with an error message to try again. If the service gets used a lot we’ll knock the auto-follow on the head if it’s getting near 400 a day to ensure twitter don’t think there’s any spamming going on!

To minimise abuse the site will also check the body copy of the message for any un-niceities in the text. This checking has been built into a buffer so Tweets don’t just get sent straight to Twitter as the user submits them. The buffer currently submits every two minutes so messages you send will have a slight delay before getting pulled in to the main feed.

Lastly, we used the twitter search RSS feed to catch any messages people might hashtag with #tweelove or @tweelove. This way, people can tweet messages from their own accounts if anonymity isn’t a concern.

Introducing Ideas Buffet!

Here at 383 we’ve been working on a new project and we’re really excited to finally be able to bring you a few of the details. The project is called “Ideas Buffet” and was first inspired by the apparent lack of web sites providing an easily accessible platform for discussing ideas. Branding Ideas Buffet as “a collaborative thought engine” we hope to provide a new tool for community brain storming that’s easy to use and provides groups and individuals with a simple way to collaborate.

We’ve taken our inspiration from a variety of popular web applications including message boards, Twitter, Google Analytics and web polls. We believe the result is a very elegant application that will serve as a useful tool.

Its almost ready, and we expect it to be available to the public within a couple of weeks. But before we can do that we need to make sure everything’s in working order. There’s an awful lot going on behind the scenes in this app and it all needs fine tuning. The only way we can do this is by asking a few of our friends to join us for beta testing.

We’re looking for a variety of people; everyone from creatives to paper-pushers and web gurus to complete novices. You’ll be given a sneak peak at the application before it goes live, have a chance to give your feed back and gain an insight in to how real websites are developed. You can have as little or as much input as you have time for.

So if you’re interested just drop a comment on to this post or you can send us an email from the contact form at the bottom of the page. We’ll be in touch with you just before we’re ready for testing to find a little more about you and your experience, and to see how involved you’d like to be.