Voice

The Thinking Mechanism is a series of weekly posts, published on Fridays, covering the ideas The Mechanism is thinking and talking about with our peers and clients.

Right before we all have a holiday weekend to spend time face to face with our circle of friends Google makes several announcements concerning the social web:

• Google+, their next foray into social networking after Orkut and Buzz, has a distinctly micro-social approach and user-friendly privacy settings. The fact that you can easily download any content you input into it and can easily delete your account with one click, if you chose to do so, proves that Google intends to compete with Facebook by providing ease of use. Click here to see the introductory videos. Click here to read a comprehensive look at the launch by Steven Levy of Wired Magazine.

• Google Analytics now features Social Interaction Tracking. Update your Analytics code and get full activity reports on all your social media buttons, including +1, Like, Tweet.

• Google Takeout allows you to download a copy of your data stored within Google products.

• Google Swiffy is not directly related to social networking, instead it lets you upload a swf file and convert it to HTML5. More HTML5 sites means access to the web in more mobile devices and more content to share on Google+.

• Let’s not forget about Google search, they’ve also announced a collaboration with the Getty Museum to allow visual searches of artworks.

• What Do You Love? A new page that shows you the results of your search across all Google products in one location.

• On the other side of the social spectrum, Facebook is quietly testing their first major redesign in over a year. The new design, which some of us are already experiencing live, feature an additional “What’s Happening Now” Twitter-like stream besides the News Feed and will have navigation and advertising elements remain static on the page as you scroll down.

• And lastly, in honor of the Fourth of July: how fireworks and sparklers are made.

The Thinking Mechanism is a series of weekly posts, published on Fridays, covering the ideas The Mechanism is thinking and talking about with our peers and clients.

This week members of our London team have been working out of the New York office leading to many interesting conversations about technology, development and the future of creative digital work. Mostly because during this week, and next, a lot of industry changing announcements are taking place. This week the D9 Conference is happening and next week is Apple’s World Wide Developers Conference.

Here are some of the things we’ve learned so far:

• In a rare and unexpected break from their absolute secrecy Apple pre-announced the content of their WWDC keynote. We now know Steve Jobs will be back for the presentation. There will be no new hardware, certainly no new iPhone announcement. The keynote will focus on software, specifically Mac OS X Lion, iOS 5, and will introduce iCloud, a potential replacement for MobileMe and music locker. They also released iPhone versions of the iWork suite of apps ahead of the conference. They have certainly gone out of their way to manage expectations. If all the rumors floating about are to be believed Apple is up to something big.

• Microsoft demoed Windows 8 (video) which introduces a new tile-based interface based on the Windows Phone.

• Twitter introduced the Follow button, which allows one click follows without having to leave the page you are in. It also introduced photo and video sharing within Twitter (video,) a full of potential extension to the service that transforms hashtags beyond keywords and trends into galleries. Twitter may even be baked into iOS 5.

• Google releases the +1 button to the web. One more button to add to pages, to blogs, to the online ecosystem. Although it comes late to the social media party the +1 button has the advantage of actually influencing the Google search algorithm, possibly leading to improved SEO. For that reason alone it may be embraced.

• Former Google CEO and current Board member Eric Schmidt introduced the phrase “The Gang of Four,” or how he refers to Google, Apple, Amazon, and Facebook. This cabal of frenemies has highly successful partnerships in some areas and aggressively competitive pursuits in others. And together they are inventing the future. Notably absent from Schmidt’s “Gang” – is Microsoft…

• If you were in Jonathan Kaplan’s shoes and experienced Cisco buying your Flip line of consumer cameras only to abruptly discontinue them, what would you do? He is going into high-tech grilled cheeses.

• And speaking of dairy products, is White Power Milk a joke, performance art, political satire, a student project, a viral for Yakult? Only Nate Hill knows for sure.

The Thinking Mechanism is a series of weekly posts, published on Fridays, covering the ideas The Mechanism is thinking and talking about with our peers and clients.

In the U.S. this weekend is Memorial Day weekend, the official start of summer. Many people travel to visit family and friends or just to take their first trip to the beach. In the spirit of the holiday weekend we are going to do something different. Instead of sharing the items we’ve been talking about we are going to introduce you to two services we love and share items that you could enjoy while commuting to your destination or while taking some deserved time off.

Once you discover Instapaper you wonder how did you manage without it. Created by Marco Arment, co-founder of Tumblr and coffee aficionado, Instapaper is a simple tool to save web pages to read later. The text is stripped out of any web page and becomes available, via apps on most mobile devices, for you to read when you have the time. It is also available online through the Instapaper website. Instapaper is time-shifting for text, TiVo for words.

Longreads is the perfect compliment to Instapaper. Founded by Mark Armstrong, Longreads posts links to new stories every day — they include long-form journalism, magazine stories from your favorite publications (The New Yorker, Esquire, The Atlantic), short stories, interview transcripts, and even historical documents. The site has a brilliant search feature that allows you to filter articles based on length, so you can find the perfect article to read in the amount of time you have available.

In the age of Twitter and Facebook status updates, these two services encourage long-form reading. Here are some of the articles we’ll be reading this weekend, as discovered through Longreads:

Error Message: Google Research Director Peter Norvig on Being Wrong
(Kathryn Schulz, Slate, Aug. 3, 2010)
Time to read: 16 minutes (4,050 words)
Norvig explains what happens when a company (in this case Google) takes an engineering-centric approach to its products and business. First, it means that errors are actually a good thing.

Apple & Design: The Man Who Makes Your iPhone
(Frederik Balfour and Tim Culpan, Businessweek, Sept. 9, 2010)
Time to read: 21 minutes (5,204 words)
Foxconn founder Terry Gou might be regarded as Henry Ford reincarnated if only a dozen of his workers hadn’t killed themselves. An exclusive look inside a postmodern industrial empire.

Later: What Does Procrastination Tell Us About Ourselves?
(James Surowiecki, The New Yorker, Oct. 11, 2010)
Time to read: 14 minutes (3,574 words)
Take comfort in this exploration of the “basic human impulse” of putting work off.

Master of Play: Shigeru Miyamoto, Nintendo’s Man Behind Mario
(Nick Paumgarten, The New Yorker, Dec. 13, 2010)
Time to read: 37 minutes (9366 words)
Jamin Brophy-Warren, who publishes a video-game arts and culture magazine called Kill Screen, told me that there is something in the amplitude and dynamic of Mario’s jumps—just enough supernatural lift yet also just enough gravitational resistance—that makes the act of performing that jump, over and over, deeply satisfying. He also cited the archetypal quality of Mario’s task, that vague feeling of longing and disappointment which undergirds his desperate and recurring quest for the girl. “It’s a story of desire,” Brophy-Warren said.

Twitter Was Act One
(David Kirkpatrick, Vanity Fair, March 3, 2011)
Time to read: 18 minutes (4,543 words)
“The Facebook Effect” author David Kirkpatrick on another Silicon Valley superstar—Twitter and Square founder Jack Dorsey. In submitting to his first in-depth profile, we learn about the events the led to him stepping down as CEO [since then he has returned to Twitter as CEO], his long-term goal (to become mayor of New York City), and his earliest career experiences.

Cranking
(Merlin Mann, 43 Folders, April 22, 2011)
Time to read: 12 minutes (3,068 words)
A disappearing dad with a looming book deadline examines his priorities, and promises changes.

A List Apart's third annual survey:

For the third year in a row, good citizens of the web, we ask that you take a few minutes to tell us about your professional skills, educational background, career prospects, job benefits, and more.

Inspired by Molly Holzschlag at Standards.Next, I created a simple hue reference chart for working with HSLA.