BMW: Checkmate, Audi.

Brilliant move by a local BMW dealer in responding to a national Audi ad. Audi’s 2009 A4 ad on the left side of the street says “Your move, BMW.” Santa Monica BMW comes back with an M3 ad across the street that says “Checkmate.” Now that’s advertising.

What do you do if you’re Audi?

Gotta Love it!

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The Future of Firefox: No Tabs, Built-In Ubiquity

Reichenstein argues that tabs were a good solution for an earlier age of the Internet, when users hardly ever had more than ten tabs open at any given time. Now, however, as browsers are slowly turning into operating systems, a new paradigm for organizing this information has become necessary.

The current generation of browsers does a decent job when it comes to keeping a current browser session organized, but Reichenstein wants to create a system that structures the browser more like a mutimedia file system. He proposes a new interface that looks more like iTunes than today's Firefox, with folders, libraries, and bookmarks in a sidebar.

Interesting Idea this. Also, dont forget to check out the Tree Tabs addon for firefox, I just installed it and loving it so far!

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2009 Lok Sabha Elections on Google - Be an Informed Voter!

http://www.google.co.in/intl/en/landing/loksabha2009/


Follow the elections with personalised map, news, quotes and more

Get the latest election news, MP profiles, constituency statistics, candidate quotes, polling booth locations and more, all personalised to your location. Just specify your city or town, and get election information relevant to you.

This is some really awesome information. A must see for every Indian, this kind of information is unprecedented.
 

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Segway's Project P.U.M.A. (Video)


 
 
Sent from my iPhone

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10 Most Common Misconceptions About User Experience Design

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Relationship Symmetry in Social Networks: Why Facebook will go Fully Asymmetric

In general, there are two ways to model human relationships in software. An “asymmetric” model is how Twitter currently works. You can “follow” someone else without them following you back. It’s a one-way relationship that may or may not be mutual.

Relationship Symmetry in the Facebook model

Facebook, on the other hand, has always used a “symmetric” model, where each time you add someone as a friend they have to add you as a friend as well. This is a two-way relationship, and it is required to have any relationship at all. So as a Facebook user there is always a 1-1 relationship among your friends. Everyone who you have claimed as a friend has also claimed you as a friend.

Andrew Chen recently described one advantage of the Twitter model. It allows 4 types of relationships, while Facebook only allows for two. The two relationships of Facebook are “friend and Not Friend”. The four relationships of Twitter are:

  1. People who follow you, but you don’t follow back
  2. People who don’t follow you, but you follow them
  3. You both follow each other (Friends!)
  4. Neither of you follow each other

Attention Inequality & the Power of Asymmetry

As Andrew points out, an asymmetric model allows for more types of relationships. I think the benefits go further than that. I think that the asymmetric model better mimics how real attention works…and how it has always worked. Any person using Twitter can have a larger number of followers than followees, effectively giving them more attention than they give. This attention inequality is the foundation of the Twitter service…

Some very interesting observations on the fundamentals of the two most popular social networking software. The limitation that facebook currently has is that users of facebook cannot subscribe or to someone else feed without becoming a "friend" and in the process forcing the other person to subscribe to his feeds. Thats one of the friction points that I as a user have when accepting facebook friend requests. Im OK with letting people subscribe to my feeds, but I do not necessary want to know about them.

Maybe facebook can allow a way for users to subscribe to other peoples feeds without the obligation of becoming a "friend" and achieve Asymmetry which will enable them to grow as rapidly as twitter.

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Help Pick A Symbol for The Indian Rupee - Economic Times Survey

http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/rupeesurvey.cms

The Government of India wants your help. It has invited the public to suggest a symbol for the Rupee. Just as the Dollar is universally denoted by $‚ the government thinks the Rupee should also have its own unique symbol that captures a sense of India’s history and culture.Listed below are 19 suggestions from ET’s team of designers. Please vote for the one you find best. ET will present all these symbols ‚ along with the ET viewers’ preference‚ to the Ministry of Finance . And‚ if you don t like these and have a symbol of your own to offer, mail it to us at editoret@indiatimes.co.in So hone your design skills and choose the right symbol for the Rupee.

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Freedom to surf: workers more productive if allowed to use the internet for leisure

This recent study at University of Melbourne shows that Surfing the net at work for pleasure actually increases our concentration levels and helps us be more productive. I have observed this myself, it works!

“Firms spend millions on software to block their employees from watching videos on YouTube, using social networking sites like Facebook or shopping online under the pretense that it costs millions in lost productivity, however that’s not always the case.”

According to the study of 300 workers, 70% of people who use the Internet at work engage in WILB. Among the most popular WILB activities are searching for information about products, reading online news sites. Playing online games was the fifth most popular, while watching YouTube movies was seventh.

The attraction of WILB, according to Dr Coker, can be attributed to people’s imperfect concentration. “People need to zone out for a bit to get back their concentration. Think back to when you were in class listening to a lecture – after about 20 minutes your concentration probably went right down, yet after a break your concentration was restored.


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Twitter's new Photo Sharing App

Posterous, you've got competition!

Sent from my iPhone

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Getting Priority on Support Requests from Users

I came across this screen in the support section of my hosting company when I was trying to create a support request for a a small issue - I wanted my personal URL (mail.domainname.com) to work for my email as opposed to a partially branded url given by google (google.com/a/domainname/mail or something like that). nothing critical, nothing that i cant live without.. 


I like this approach of getting context on the priority of my request as opposed to just asking me directly, like: low, high, important, critical etc. i''m sure i would have picked important, if not critical or this simple issue. 

Options like the ones shown in the image made me think about how important this request is, and I actually picked the most appropriate options as compared to important. 

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