Apple Design and the iPhone

With the attention on the iPhone, it's a good time to look back at the evolution of the Apple form factors since 1976, shared by designer Edwin Tofslie. Thanks to Guy Kawasaki for this pointer. The 2007 Apple Design Award winners included Papers 1.0 for organizing scientists' research libraries and access to PubMed.

Entrepreneurs already have iPhone related products available online. 37 Signals has the Ta-da List for the iPhone up, with a dedicated version for iPhone use. These pieces are nicely paired with Jason's comments on Ben Frankin's The Way to Wealth. The web-based phone service, Jajah has tailored their site to the iPhone, claiming a 90% reduction in international phone rates for iPhone users. The iPhone2die4 site aggregates iPhone news from more than 300 web sources. Here is the iPhone news blog, for the recent history and new accessories. Finally, two videos of happy new iPhone owners in Virginia from Uncut Video.

The Social Side of Design

Joshua Porter of Bokardo has an interesting piece, You Can't Be Social By Yourself on designing the user experience and social design. He points to Connecting Through Technology, not With It, Crysta Metcalf's recent piece on social design. Gong Szeto commented that perhaps technology enabled communication is neither synchronous nor asynchronous, but in-between, more like bas-relief.

Earlier, Porter initiated a lively discussion about design and art. Here's the original article, 5 Principles to Design By, an update focused on the relationship between art and design, and his summary of the most interesting quotes.

Building Social Web Applications

Joshua Porter of Bokardo has a new short series on building social web applications. He notes a common pitfall:

...there is no way to design a perfect social web site that doesn’t need ongoing management. Yet, some social start-ups fail to recognize this and launch their app without a designated caretaker. The result is a slow failure…the worst kind of failure because it’s not immediately apparent that it’s happening.

He also points to the importance of archived how-to information, such as Evoca's knowledgebank.

People have the same problems over and over again and the community manager spends more and more time answering the same questions.

Mike Haughey, founder of Metafilter, has seven tips for running a successful online community on Fortuitous. They include

Moderation is a full-time job, and use metrics to spread out the work, such as the user flags used by Craigslist.
Give people more than a generic, often anonymous, comment form for real contributions and participation from others.